Beacon Broadside

Marriage Equality Gets a Nod from Obama

In an interview with ABC News yesterday, President Barack Obama announced his support for marriage equality. Here are a few reactions from our authors:

A landmark day! A joy to tweet/His evolution is complete/Go forth & wed, all "I do's" equal/Don't-ask-don't-tell gets gutsy sequel

— Elinor Lipman (@ElinorLipman) May 10, 2012

Jay Michaelson calls Obama's announcement an "inspiring religious pronouncement":

First, because it came one day after one of the nastiest, meanest anti-gay votes in recent memory, North Carolina's "no families but mine" Amendment 1. It offers a studied contrast between humanity and dogmatism, inclusion and nastiness. Religious and non-religious people alike can now see two very different ways of approaching how we ought to live with one another, one welcoming and the other cruel, one open to the experience of others and the other with its hands over its ears, one focused on compassion and the other focused on exclusion. Who Would Jesus Discriminate against, anyway?

Second, Obama's statement is a model of religious reasoning. Jesus said in the Sermon of the Mount, "By your fruits, you shall know them" (Matthew 7:16). This, not some obscure lines in Leviticus or Corinthians, is the real religious message regarding gays and lesbians, and it is the way Obama made up his mind on this issue. Over time, he said, he has come to understand the truth of same-sex couples, that they are as capable of commitment, love, and sanctity as opposite-sex couples, and that it is an injustice to deny the benefits of marriage to gay people. (Read the rest at Huffington Post)

EJ Graff reflects back on a wedding she attended at the beginning of marriage equality in MA: 

In 2004, I sat in a Unitarian pew while my friends Hillary and Julie Goodridge said their vows. I was absolutely fine with all the lead-up—they'd been together as long as I had been with my beloved partner, and I'd known them before that. Then came the phrase "By the power vested in me by the commonwealth of Massachusetts"—and I was sobbing harder than I knew was possible. So were the hardbitten LGBT activists around me, even those who weren't especially happy about the pursuit of marriage. As we all managed to sit up and dry our eyes, a little embarrassed at how raw the emotion was, one of the latter said, "I guess being ready for something intellectually isn't the same as being ready emotionally." 

There's something very deep about having your government declare you a stranger to its laws, defining your love as outside all respectable recognition. For my president to stand up and say that I should belong fully to my nation, that my wife and I should be considered as fully married as my brother and his wife—well, it reopens and washes out some very deeply incised sense of exclusion, a scar inflicted when, at age 15, I first panicked at the realization that I might be queer. (Read the rest at the American Prospect)

 

Beyond Flowers and Cards: How to Really Appreciate Teachers

In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, Beacon Broadside is running a series of posts on educators and education.

Today's post is by William Ayers and Rick Ayers. William Ayers is is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired). He is the founder of the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society. Rick Ayers is a Professor in Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco. He has worked as a Master Teacher for KQED Education Department, on the Teacher Advisory Board for Youth Speaks, and as a core team member of the Berkeley High School Diversity Project. 

They have co-written two books: Teaching the Taboo and Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment, A Handbook for Parents, Students, Educators and Citizens. Separately, they have written numerous books on education, including Bill's Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom and A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court, and Rick's Great Books for High School Kids: A Teachers' Guide to Books That Can Change Teens' Lives (co-written with Amy Crawford) and Studs Terkel’s Working, a Teaching Guide.

Teaching involves engaging real students every day, nurturing and challenging the vast range of people who actually appear before us, solving problems, making connections, putting in 70 hour weeks and spending our own money on supplies; and it means listening to every two-bit politician, the bought media, and big money misrepresent what we do and attack us shamelessly every day.

Want to appreciate teachers?

Don't allow education to be defined as an endless Social Darwinist competition: nation against nations, state against state, school against school, classroom against classroom, and child against child. Education, like love, is one of the fundamentals--give it away generously and lose nothing--and school is where we work out the meaning and the texture of democracy-coming together to explore the creation of community, pursuing the hard and challenging questions, and imagining new ways to be in balance with the earth and in harmony with one another. Good teaching deals with the real--honor teachers for that.

Reframe the debate: We are insistently encouraged to think of education as a product like a car or a refrigerator, a box of bolts or a screwdriver-something bought and sold in the marketplace like any other commodity. The controlling metaphor for the schoolhouse is a business run by a CEO, with teachers as workers and students as the raw material bumping along the assembly line while information is incrementally stuffed into their little up-turned heads; it's rather easy to think within this model that "downsizing" the least productive units, "outsourcing" and privatizing a space that was once public is a natural event; that teaching toward a simple standardized metric, and relentlessly applying state-administered (but privately-developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the "outcomes," is a rational proxy for learning; that centrally controlled "standards" for curriculum and teaching are commonsensical; that "zero tolerance" for student misbehavior as a stand-in for child development or justice is sane; and that "accountability," that is, a range of sanctions on students, teachers, and schools-but never on law-makers, foundations, corporations, or high officials-is logical and level-headed. This is in fact what a range of wealthy "reformers," noisy politicians, and their chattering pundits in the bought media call "school reform."

Oppose the "reform" policies that will add up to the end of education in and for democracy: resist replacing the public schools with some sort of privately-controlled administration, sorting the winners relentlessly from the losers-test, test, TEST! (and then punish), and destroying teachers' ability to speak with any sustained and unified voice. The operative image for these moves has by now become quite familiar: education is an individual consumer good, not a public trust or a social good, and certainly not a fundamental human right. Management, inputs and outcomes, efficiency, cost controls, profit and loss-the dominant language of this kind of reform doesn't leave much room for doubt, or much space to breathe.

Note that good working conditions are good teaching conditions, and that good teaching conditions are good learning conditions, and that teachers independent and collective voice is essential in determining these conditions.

Fight for smaller class size, limited standardized tests, enhanced arts programs at all levels and in every area, equitable financing, and a strong teachers contract that encourages collegiality and collaboration.

Throw in a note or a flower if you like.

Teaching Students--and the Rest of Us--How to Be Appreciative

In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, Beacon Broadside is running a series of posts on educators and education.

Award-winning educator Linda F. Nathan founded the Boston Arts Academy in 1998. She consults and speaks on educational issues nationally and internationally, and teaches a graduate course at Harvard on building democratic schools. Nathan is the author of The Hardest Questions Aren't on the Test: Lessons from an Innovative Urban School.

Senior year is by far the most demanding at Boston Arts Academy. Students must truly demonstrate one of our shared values: passion with balance. Their final senior Humanities paper and group project is due. Opening nights for their final arts exhibitions and performances are just around the corner. Many must still scramble to pay for senior dues, prom, and yearbook.

These demands can feel like too much, and adolescents often forget to react to stress with grace. How many adults know how to do this? So today, in our assembly, I reminded our seniors about the importance of showing teachers their appreciation.

If each senior writes one note to one teacher, I would feel I had done my job. I want students to recognize the brilliance and selflessness of so many of their teachers. Sadly, the general public could benefit from this education as well.

I recalled in assembly how each of my staff has done something terrific with kids and with one another as colleagues. In my “Celebrating Another Year Together” presentation each year, I name remarkable things that our faculty has accomplished. I remind us of the various ways teachers took on extra responsibilities, implemented a new curriculum, succeeded with a particular project or simply were present daily for students. If I could, I would reimburse every teacher for the thousands of dollars they have collectively spent on student supplies, taking students to lunch, driving students home, etc...

And finally, if I could, I would put a huge stop sign at the door to prevent high-stakes testing from taking over the curriculum. I would let teachers know that I hold them accountable for high standards, that I trust them to do an excellent job, and that I will not tie their evaluations to test scores.

Alas, it is the letter and my own writing that I know I can deliver. The rest is up to the students I encourage, and to a behavior of appreciation that the community can model for them.

Confessions of a "Failing Teacher"

In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, Beacon Broadside is running a series of posts on educators and education. 

Today's post comes from educator David Chura, author of I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. He has worked with at-risk teenagers for the past 40 years. For 26 of those years, he taught English and creative writing in community based alternative schools and in a county penitentiary. His writings have appeared in the New York Times as well as other scholarly and literary journals. He blogs at http://kidsinthesystem.wordpress.com/. 

Like most teachers I’ve gotten some praise from my high school students over my 26 years of teaching—a lesson “wasn’t bad,” or a particular class was “sorta interesting.” I’ve even been told that I was a “pretty good teacher.” High praise coming from teenagers.

But the truth is I wasn’t a “good teacher.” I was a “failure,” at least according to America’s “education reformers”—that “odd coalition of corporate-friendly Democrats, right-wing Republicans, Tea Party governors, Wall Street executives, and major foundations” as Diane Ravitch aptly defines them—because the kids I taught consistently lagged behind their peers in every measure, performing well below grade level, failing state standardized tests.

Given the present state of teacher evaluations, with a significant portion allotted to student performance on mandated tests, I’d be in big trouble if I hadn’t left teaching recently. I certainly wouldn’t get any bonus pay. If it were up to the Obama Administration I might not even have a job since I would be one of those teachers who, as the President noted in his 2012 State of the Union address, “just aren’t helping kids.” And if I still taught in New York I’d be facing the prospect of having my name and ratings published in newspapers and on the internet if the Legislature gets its way in what the New York State Union of Teachers called the “name/shame/blame game.”

But I know that I wasn’t a “failure,” and more importantly, that the hundreds of kids I’ve taught weren’t either. My students were mostly young people of color, living in neighborhoods and families destroyed by poverty and substance abuse, racism and violence, physical and sexual abuse. Overall, life—shaped by their own mistakes and by conditions they couldn’t control—left them little time for, or interest in education. Frequently that lack of time and interest led to trouble which led to repeated suspensions, expulsions and in some cases, incarceration.  But sometimes trouble translated into being placed in a small community alternative high school or the jailhouse classroom in the county penitentiary, both places I taught in.

By the time they made it to me, my students were pretty damaged. They hated school. They could barely read or do basic math. And forget about writing. “You expect me to write?” more than one teen squawked in horror at me. But eventually they did. They read, piling up grade levels like some Americans pile up debt. They calculated. They even learned the magic of connecting sentences that made sense.

But by the state’s educational rubric, they didn’t cut it. As noteworthy as their successes were—both academically and behaviorally—they were still “failures” and I along with them: success was only validated by passing the standardized tests.

One of the hardest things I had to do was send kids into those tests who weren’t ready. I tried hard beforehand to get them out of it. I’d explain, downright argue at times, with the school administration that although my students had made solid progress it wasn’t enough to tackle the exam and so they should wait and take it next time. It never worked. “It’s the law,” I was told.

Every time I think about Tyler my palms sweat. He was a jailhouse student, lanky, 16, with an Afro picked out to an angel’s halo. But he was no angel, and he had the missing front teeth and two years at the county pen to prove it. When he first came to class he was reading on a second grade level. For some reason he was determined to improve this time round in school. He came every day, took work to his cell every night and returned it completed every morning. Slowly his reading level increased. He was pleased with himself. You could see it in the almost toothless smile he didn’t bother to hide anymore.

But he wasn’t close to test-ready. When I petitioned to delay Tyler’s exam the administrator refused but offered me her idea of comfort, “Look, it’s okay if he fails. Then he’ll be eligible for remediation.” I couldn’t help shooting back, “Sure, send the kid in so he can get shot down one more time.” I prepared Tyler for that test as best as I could. He worked harder than ever. He was psyched. “I’m gonna ace it, Mr. C.”

You know the end of the story. It’s the same for many damaged kids living in poverty and neglect, factors that the pundits say can be overcome by good, dedicated teachers. Once again Tyler “failed.” He never came back to class for remediation.

If Tyler and kids like him are “failures” then I—and all the other teachers who teach in tough places—are too. But I don’t think we should take the rap alone. As long as our educational policies let down students like Tyler in the name of “reform” and “the law,” continuing the “name/shame/blame game” instead of addressing the social conditions that cripple these kids’ lives and learning, then we as a country are failures as well, in need of some serious remediation. 

150 Years After Thoreau: Michael Lanza and Elizabeth Gehrman

May 6, 2012, marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Henry David Thoreau, the father of American nature writing. His influence on contemporary environmental writing is still very significant, and this weekend, we're highlighting that influence on our blog. Today, we hear from Michael Lanza and Elizabeth Gehrman.

Michael Lanza is the creator of TheBigOutside.com and author of Before They’re Gone: A Family’s Year-Long Quest to Explore America’s Most Endangered National Parks, which traces his journey to show his kids iconic national parks that could be altered forever by climate change. 

I would be less than honest to claim that, when I read Thoreau’s classic Walden; or, Life in the Woods, years ago, I couldn’t put it down. To me, it seemed like the book begged to be put down. By modern literary standards, it is not the most accessible read. It probably wasn’t back when it was first published in 1854, either.

I grew up not far from Walden Pond, where, beginning on July 4, 1845, Thoreau lived for two years, two months, and two days alone in a cabin “to front only the essential facts of life, and… suck out all the marrow of life.” That’s heady stuff. I’ve walked the trail around the pond—which can take an hour only if you dawdle—and visited the replica of his tiny cabin that stands there today. In reality, the second-growth forest (less dense than Thoreau’s prose) in which he dwelled just two miles from town probably felt little more isolated back then than it does today, within earshot of a busy highway.

But the degree of Thoreau’s isolation is not what matters; and in an era when so much entertainment delivers an intellectual experience akin to eating apple sauce—no chewing necessary—perhaps we should celebrate writing that requires some brain effort to interpret. Thoreau’s real importance was introducing ideas about returning to nature that were ahead of his time and helped inspire the conservation movement, among other social trends to which he contributed (transcendentalism, abolition, and civil disobedience, to name-drop a few noteworthy examples). His words ring particularly prescient now, when we lament the myriad, tragic consequences of so many children spending so little time outdoors. Certainly, all of us who today write about personal experiences in nature stand on Thoreau’s shoulders.

As no less an authority than the late John Updike once wrote: “A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible.”

Maybe Thoreau’s classic work should be required reading for all high-school students, or at least any who would aspire to join the long parade of writers walking rocky trails in his footsteps. Those who put in the time and effort might discover the meaning that has stirred so many people. And I doubt we’ll ever have an app for that.

 

Elizabeth Gehrman is a frequent contributor to the Boston Globe Magazine and has written for the New York Times, Archaeology, More, and This Old House. Her new book, Rare Birds: The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man Who Brought It Back from Extinction, will be published by Beacon in October.

Though I dutifully recorded and often revisited quotes from it — so many I could never choose just one to cite here — what I remember most from my high school English reading of Walden is that it was a bit of a slog. I was no philosopher, and though I grew up on an island, my playgrounds the Niagara River and acres of untamed forest, nature had never really flipped my introspection switch. Maybe, as an only child, I had enough solitude; I was content simply to explore the woods and water without feeling the need to examine myself in the bargain. It wasn’t until college, when I got around to Cape Cod, that I really discovered Thoreau.

Where Walden turns inward, Cape Cod turns outward. Often described as Thoreau’s “happy” book, it is not so much about nature as about people in nature. It tells of those who are drawn to the sea — the oystermen and lighthouse keepers and industrious old women who come to it because of work or circumstance or its inexorable pull on the soul. “Cape Cod is but another name for human culture,” Thoreau writes early on. His initial tale of a horrific shipwreck never strays far from his mind as he recounts the power of the “vast and wild” Atlantic over the lives cast upon its shores with an eye for detail that any journalist would envy.

And that, it seems to me, is more affecting than bean-planting any day.

150 Years After Thoreau: Christine Byl and Brad Tyer

May 6 marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Henry David Thoreau, the father of American nature writing. His influence on contemporary environmental writing is still very significant, and this weekend, we're highlighting that influence on our blog. Today, we hear from Christine Byl and Brad Tyer, two forthcoming Beacon authors. 

Christine Byl is the author of Dirt Work, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2013. She lives in a yurt outside of Healy, Alaska with her husband and retired sled dogs. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, The Sun, Glimmer Train,Broadsided Press, Lumberyard, and others. She worked on trail crews on public lands for 15 years; with her husband she now runs a family business doing trail design and construction.

I had not split firewood or hoed a row of beans when I first read Thoreau in high school English. I lived in urban Michigan, had no experience with subsistence tasks. Yet I loved Thoreau from the first page. Now I live in Interior Alaska, off-the-grid without running water, and daily chores take up much of my time (picking berries, hauling water, cutting wood). But the reasons I was drawn to Thoreau in high school remain consistent now: something about what centered him made sense to me—life connected to a place you lived, and what you did there. I liked how he was humble yet sure of himself. I liked that he admired squirrels.

As a writer, I've respected other things. His cultural critique feels germane 150 years out. He's a dialectical thinker, finding fertile ground between assumed dichotomies. He summons a childlike wonder at the world. He reminds me to laugh, to take words and ideas seriously, but myself less so. Simply put, Thoreau writes with mind, heart and body fully engaged. Among the many writers who've influenced me, Thoreau may best embody Henry James’ famous quote: "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost."

The conventional way to write off Thoreau is on his so-called inconsistencies (Walden wasn't wild, it was a mile from Concord!), but Thoreau's wisdom is that he never claimed a deliberate life had to happen in the middle of nowhere. An authentic life isn't an escape: it has less to do with location than attentiveness to it.

Despite the solitude he was best known for, I think Thoreau would make good company. (I feel so friendly toward him that I refer to him in my mind by the pet nickname, HDT.) I can imagine working in the woods with him, tossing 8-foot logs into the truckbed, making him blush at a bawdy joke. After, in the cool spring evening I'd pour us hot cocoa (mine with whiskey, his without.) I can see myself leaning on the axe near the splitting stump while HDT quotes himself from Walden, "Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection." Yep, HDT, and every woman, too.

 

Brad Tyer is the author of Opportunity Montana, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2013. He is a journalist whose work has appeared in Outside magazine, High Country News, the Texas Observer, and many other newspapers and magazines.

I grew up the child of a first-generation middle-class family for whom a motorboat and a weekend place on a lake defined the lap of suburban luxury. My parents were just a generation removed from fishing for food and rural isolation as facts of life; to transform those memories of need into leisure marked their triumph over circumstance. They’d escaped. To prove it, they bought a place to escape to.

I’d never heard of Thoreau, but it was our Walden. Like Henry’s cabin, adjusted for interstates and dams, it was just north of town (Houston) on a reservoir (Lake Conroe). Curb to gate, we could drive there from home on the other side of the city in about as long as it took HDT to walk into Concord and bum a beer from Emerson. We called our place Hard Times, with the reflexive self-deprecation of insecure East Texas arrivistes.

At the other end of Lake Conroe was the only Walden I knew of: a lakefront development of condos clustered around a marina full of boats at the western end of what had once been the San Jacinto River. Walden had a golf course and tennis courts. Walden had a shop on a pier selling gasoline and life jackets and bait and polo shirts embroidered with the resort logo. Walden was the rich end of the lake.

It was years before I read Thoreau’s Walden and understood the references and aspirations playing out at the rich end of the lake—and, acknowledged or not, at our end too.

What I remember of Walden is the occasional diamond clarity of its sentences, and Thoreau’s constitutional contrariness. I don’t remember his celebrations of nature so much as his condemnations of so-called civilization. 

To realize that developers were repackaging that contrary clarity as a hive of internal combustion, on a time-share basis no less, marked maybe my first real awareness, in retrospect, of the ways of the commercial world. They’d take a word that meant something—Walden—and turn it upside down. They’d try to fool you. They’d advertise one thing and sell you another. Your parents could do the same thing: Hard Times my ass...

Words can serve truth, or they can serve their speakers. That’s an awareness—call it a bias; fair enough—that I’ve carried through 20 years of journalism aimed, when I could see, at clarifying that which has been obfuscated. It’s a bias that informs Opportunity, Montana pretty deeply. As influences go, it’s indirect, but that’s the note Thoreau sings for me.

150 Years After Thoreau: How the Cabin at Walden Gave a 21st Century Father Cabin Fever

May 6, 2012 is the 150^th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau’s death. Thoreau is viewed by many as the father of American nature writing, and his significant influence continues. In the passage below Tom Montgomery Fate describes his own “cabin experience” in southwest Michigan and reflects on Thoreau’s continuing relevance.

You can listen to Tom Montgomery Fate on this weekend's episode of PRI's To the Best of Our Knowledge.

A More Deliberate Life

(excerpted from the Introduction to Cabin Fever)

One sunny afternoon a few years ago I drove to southwest Michigan to build a cabin in the woods. It was spring break and I had just reread Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s nineteenth century account of his life in the woods at Walden Pond. The famous hermit-philosopher had again inspired me, but it was different from the first time I read it. I was not an idealistic 19-year-old college freshman, but a harried and married 46 year-old father of three in suburban Chicago. Different things mattered. The book called me with more urgency––from my distracted middle-class, middle-aged life into the wild solitude it conjured.

That same morning, before leaving, I discussed the weekend with my wife, Carol, packed food and clothes, and then went to the garage to look for tools. When I pushed the remote, and the garage door hummed open, I abruptly recognized my life: a wild tangle of bicycles and strollers and grilling utensils and patio furniture and wet cardboard boxes full of moldy books and kids’ clothes. Amid the clutter I found an old spade, two saw horses, a metal tool box, and a post hole digger, all of which I tossed into the back of our minivan. On the two-hour drive to Michigan that day I recited Thoreau’s mantra–– Simplify, Simplify­­––as a kind of prayer, thinking it might offer me some guidance.

It didn’t. We finished the cabin in two years, or at least stopped working on it. Cobbled together with the help of family and friends, and with more patience than expertise, we built it on a fifty acre plot of woods and meadow that we own and share with six other families, friends from our old church. They bought the land cheap thirty years ago––a farm abandoned after a fire. It has since been slowly restored: the stone farmhouse rebuilt, thousands of pines and oaks planted, a large garden dug. And we maintain a network of walking trails that wind throughout the property.

Were he alive today, Thoreau might have little interest in our experiment in Michigan. But he might be a bit curious. He did, after all, anticipate those readers who would naively aspire to his ideals. In the first chapter of Walden he addresses the relevance of his stint in the woods for the interested novice: “I would not have anyone adopt my mode of living…but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursuehis own way.”[i]

Even when no one would buy his books, and long before there were Thoreau “wannabes,” he advised readers to listen for their own drummer, and find their own way through the forest. Walden’s continued appeal is partly due to a romantic longing to “get back to nature.” And while Henry himself is also deeply romanticized, his commitment to the environment, his material self-sufficiency, and his “less is more” economics could not be more relevant.

Such ideas resonate in a high tech, high speed culture, which excels at making waste and war. We have bi-focal contacts and laser eye surgery but still struggle to see in the way Thoreau imagined––to find the essential balance of the I and eye, of self and world. This is why despite the vast distances of time and culture, I can’t help but read Thoreau’s artful interrogation of his life at Walden Pond as both a critique of my own and as an invitation to a new kind of vision, to the joy of enough in a culture of more, to a deliberate life.

That’s what I’m seeking: a more deliberate life. But deliberate doesn’t just mean intentional or careful; it means balanced. The word is tied to libra––the two pan scale of justice—which is for weighing and balancing things—ideas, fears, love. Or maybe garlic: I saw such a scale once at a market in a tiny French village. The farmer put a 100 gram weight in one silver pan and a handful of garlic in the other. The standard, or known weight, was balanced against the unknown. In this case the garlic was too heavy so the pans didn’t level. But the vendor gave it to me anyway, balancing the scale with his generosity. Deliberation is a creative act, an art.

My 7-year-old son, Bennett, sometimes tries to balance himself on the creaky iron fulcrum of a wooden teeter totter at the playground. He jumps up on the heavy plank and puts one foot on each side of the center. Then he shifts his weight, pushing one end of the plank down, causing the other end to rise. He tries to stay balanced and level but can’t for more than a few seconds. One side always starts to teeter up or totter down. He doesn’t stay centered, but neither does he ever fall off. This struggle for balance, the rising and falling between the earth and sky, gives him great joy. And he gives that joy to me, if I’m paying attention.

To put it plainly, a deliberate life is a search for balance—in mind and body and spirit—amid our daily lives. And while some might like to do that searching all alone in the woods, few can. Other “natural” commitments conflict: children, a partner, a job or two. Most readers who admire Thoreau’s ideas don’t have the freedom or desire to live a solitary life in the woods. Still, what many of us do want, and what this book is about, is finding a deeper connection to Nature in our ordinary lives—by seeking relationship and refuge wherever we find ourselves––whether it be on a walk through a forest preserve, on a family camping trip, or catching grasshoppers in the backyard.

“I have traveled a great deal in Concord,” Thoreau famously wrote. For him travel writing was nature writing, and it was local. His search for the Wild was on home ground: an outward physical journey and inward spiritual journey conducted not in pristine isolation, but on the humble Concord woodlot available to him.[ii]

This is vital for those who seek a more deliberate life today. Because since Thoreau’s invention of the nature memoir 150 years ago, much of the natural environment itself has been destroyed. So the task is no longer to discover and record the rare, but to recover and nurture the ravaged—to try to restore some balance where we live. This is particularly true here, amid the Midwest’s decimated woodlands and farms and sprawling suburbs, where developers and nature often collide.

Everyday I see these collisions––the imbalance––between humanity and the other animals who live here. Herons nest on our E.coli choked river. Coyotes hunt on the runways of O’Hare Internatonal airport while roaring jets are trying to land. A Canada goose gets trapped in the entryway of my office building. Rabbits nest in wood chips beneath a metal slide on a suburban playground. A wild cougar is gunned down in an alley by a Chicago policeman. Who belongs where? Who will take care of whom on this shrinking planet? How will we find the balance we seek?

These are the kinds of questions that Thoreau is still opening for me, and that I continue to live in.

Watch the book trailer for Cabin Fever on YouTube

---

[i] Henry David Thoreau. Walden, A Fully Annotated Edition. Ed. Jeffrey Cramer. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. P.86

[ii] Ibid. p. 170. The land around Walden Pond was not “wilderness,” but a conventional woodlot when purchased by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau himself writes “The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale…”

Interfaith Work is the Antidote to Atheist Islamophobia

Today's post is from Chris Stedman, author of the forthcoming book Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious. He is the Interfaith and Community Service Fellow for the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University, the emeritus managing director of State of Formation at the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue, and the founder of the first blog dedicated to exploring atheist-interfaith engagement, NonProphet Status. Stedman writes for the Huffington Post, the Washington Post's On Faith blog, and Religion Dispatches.

Sam Harris--I know you're a busy man, but I'd like to ask you out. Will you go to mosque with me?

I'm not trying to convert you to Islam. Like you, I'm not a Muslim. Like you, I don't believe in any gods. I'm happily, openly atheist. A queer atheist, even. Like you, I have many significant concerns about Islamic beliefs and practices. But still, I want to visit a mosque with you.

We don't have to go alone--we could go with Mustafa Abdullah, a young community organizer in Winston-Salem, North Carolina who is currently campaigning against the state's proposed anti-gay Amendment One. We could attend with Najeeba Syeed-Miller, a teacher and activist who has dedicated her life to peacebuilding initiatives. Or we could go with Eboo Patel, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, who is committed to promoting pluralism and opposing bigotry, and who regularly speaks up for atheists as a religious minority in the United States.

Why am I inviting you to visit a mosque with me and my friends? Since I'm asking you publicly (I couldn't find your phone number anywhere and I'm pretty sure this MySpace page isn't really you), I should probably give some context.

A few weeks ago I saw you speak at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, Australia. Before I go on, I need to confess: your remarks blew me away. In a weekend full of incredible intellects, your frank, contemplative, eloquent speech on death, grief, and mindfulness was easily my favorite. So I was not prepared for the crushing disappointment I felt when, just a few weeks later, you published a piece called "In Defense of Profiling" in which you unequivocally stated: "We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it."

Never mind that your argument doesn't hold water--to quote my friend Hind Makki: "What does a Muslim look like? The 9/11 hijackers didn't have beards and 'dressed Western.' The shoe bomber wasn't Arab or South Asian. Sikhs wear turbans. The majority of American Muslim women don't wear hijab. The majority of Arab Americans are Christian--though they often share the same names as their Muslim counterparts. Perhaps Harris would support an initiative that required all Muslims to sew a crescent and star onto our clothes. It would make his airport security time a more pleasant experience. (Though, I suppose, it wouldn't have stopped McVeigh or Breivik.)" Though as a frequent traveler I share your frustrations with the TSA, profiling doesn't make sense as a solution to its problems.

Instead, while we're en route to mosque, I'd like to talk to you about something else. As I read your piece, which (along with the clarifying addendum you tacked on a few days later) failed to explain how you would determine who "looks... Muslim," I thought back to another moment at the Global Atheist Convention a few weeks ago. As you were speaking, rumors began to fly that a group of extremist Muslims would be protesting the convention. Sure enough, a group of less than a dozen appeared just a short while later, holding signs that said "Atheists go to hell" and shouting horrible things. But to my dismay, their hate was mirrored by hundreds of conference attendees, some of whom shouted things like "go back to the middle east, you pedophiles," tweeting "maybe the Muslim protesters [are] gay so [they] don't have wives? ... A lot are/were camel shaggers," and wearing shirts that said "Too stupid for science? Try religion." Watching the scene unfold, I was reminded of how much work there is to be done in combating prejudice between the religious and the nonreligious.

I'm not sure you share my concerns about this divide. In fact, last year you wrote this about the 2011 attacks orchestrated by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway that resulted in the deaths of over 70 people:

One can only hope that the horror and outrage provoked by Breivik's behavior will temper the growing enthusiasm for right-wing, racist nationalism in Europe. However, one now fears the swing of another pendulum: We are bound to hear a lot of deluded talk about the dangers of "Islamophobia" and about the need to address the threat of "terrorism" in purely generic terms.

In the wake of an atrocity of unimaginable proportions--one perpetrated by an anti-Muslim terrorist who was influenced by anti-Muslim writers--I could not believe that you decided to write a blog suggesting that the real problem is the fight against Islamophobia. 

Whether you think so or not, Sam, Islamophobia is quite real. The American Muslim community experiences disproportionately high rates of discrimination and violence, and Islamophobic rhetoric has a significant bearing on this. This from a detailed report on the network of Islamophobia in America: "According to former CIA officer and terrorism consultant Marc Sageman, just as religious extremism 'is the infrastructure from which Al Qaeda emerged,' the writings of these anti-Muslim misinformation experts are 'the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged.'"

As a society, we need to acknowledge the reality of the consequences of Islamophobia. As one Norwegian Muslim recently said:

"I think it is good and healthy that this comes out," he told AFP in a telephone interview, arguing that Breivik built his ideology largely on the basis of Islam-critical writings in the media and online and rumors he has heard about violent Muslims. "This should help show people that this kind of rhetoric can be very, very dangerous. It is a wake-up call, and I think many people will moderate the way they talk about these things."

We desperately need to discuss these things. An argument I frequently hear from atheists is that if moderate Muslims really exist, they need to speak out more. The problem is that Muslims are speaking out against extremists who cite Islam as their inspiration. Need some examples? There. Are. So. Many. That.I. Can't. Link. To. Them. All. (But those eleven are a good start.)

The real problem is the Islamophobic misinformation machine, supported by our conflict-driven media. Stories of Muslims engaging in peaceful faith-inspired endeavors don't sell nearly as well as stories of attempted Times Square bombings. Yet even coverage of violent stories is skewed against Muslims: for example, the mainstream media largely ignores violence against Muslims, such as when a mosque in Florida was bombed. (Just imagine the media frenzy if that had been a Muslim bombing a church.) The press also ignores stories of Muslim heroism, such as the fact that the man who stopped the Times Square bomber was himself a Muslim. Perhaps we perceive Islam as inherently violent, and imagine that an "Islam versus the West" clash of civilizations is inevitable, because our perspective is shaped by the warped way the media reports on Islam.

The feeling that we need to profile "Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim," as you wrote--that Muslim Americans are dangerous and should be viewed with suspicion--is an outgrowth of the Islamophobic misinformation that proliferates our culture. I'm proud to say that nontheist organizations like the Center for Inquiry, the American Humanist Association, and the Institute for Science and Human Values recognize this, which is why just last week they signed on to a letter (alongside many interfaith and religious organizations) decrying racial and religious profiling.

The idea that we should single out Muslims is a misguided and damaging one, and it has serious ramifications for the Muslim community. After the thwarted "Christmas tree" bombing by a young Muslim in Portland, OR, Eboo Patel wrote:

It would be perfectly understandable if, in this time of Muslim terrorism and Islamophobia, everyday Muslims tried to slink into the shadows, to hide in the mosque. But it would be a huge mistake. Now more than ever, we need Muslim community leaders to be loud and proud about Islam's glories, to inspire a new generation to follow in the footsteps of the Muslim heroes who bent the arc of the universe towards justice.

As Muslims become more and more marginalized, that will be increasingly difficult. When I posted a link to Patel's column on my Facebook page, a friend commented on the FBI's involvement in the Portland incident, and a subsequent arson attack on a Portland-area mosque: "I'm starting to wonder how any of this makes our country more secure or keeps our citizens safe. It certainly made things more dangerous for Muslims in Corvallis."

I look around and I see a country deeply divided over the place of Muslims in America's civic landscape--a nation roiling with fear and uncertainty, where hundreds of people will crowd outside of a benefit for a Muslim relief organization and scream things like "go home" and "terrorist" while waving American flags. That despicable display of anti-Muslim hate didn't really make the news either, by the way.

Profiling feeds this fear and paranoia, and it plays right into the notion held by the tiny percentage of Muslims who are extremists that all Muslims are under attack and need to be defended. It is truly dangerous territory, and not just for Muslims--the recent congressional "Muslim radicalization" hearings in the U.S. echo the anti-gay "lavender scare" and the explicitly anti-atheist undertones of the "red scare" in the 1950s. As a gay atheist, I recognize that it could just as easily be me who is targeted.

But I do have hope, Sam. I'm currently reading a wonderful book called The Young Atheist's Handbook by Alom Shaha--I could lend it to you after our mosque visit. In the book, Shaha writes about growing up Muslim and later becoming an atheist. In the fourth chapter of the book, he touches on the tragedy in Norway and delves into a lengthy, must-read exposition of the ugly reality of Islamophobia in the U.K., Australia, and the United States. In it, he points to the major role the media has played in guiding the narrative that says that Muslims are a monolithic, loathsome bloc--or as Shaha wrote, a perspective that "see[s] all Muslims as the same, and completely fail[s] to acknowledge the diversity and differences in values that are held by the millions of Muslims in the world." Shaha goes on to write:

You may wonder why, if I no longer identify as Muslim, I care so deeply about this... Although I am an atheist, I nevertheless find it distressing that people can be contemptuous of all Muslims based on their own prejudices about what it means to be Muslim. Some atheists are guilty of this ideological categorization, too, and it bothers me that some of those who really should know better feel that Muslims and non-Muslims cannot, by definition, get along. I suspect this is a point on which I differ from more-hardline atheists, but perhaps my own experience of being judged for my skin colour has made me acutely sensitive to such judgments being exercised upon others.

Shaha is definitely on to something. Over the last few years, I've watched with despair as an increasing, increasingly-less-subtle xenophobic anti-Muslim undercurrent has spread throughout the atheist movement, cloaked by intellectual arguments against Islam's metaphysical claims and practices and rallying cries in defense of free speech. Though it has been spreading throughout our broader culture, I'm especially disheartened to see it among my fellow atheists. At my first American Atheists conference, for example, I witnessed a crowd of people shout things like "show us some ankle" at three women wearing burkas for a satirical musical performance. It's one thing to critique Islam; but the glee I saw in some of their faces as people whistled and shouted "take it off" was something else. 

Writing about an incident where an American Atheists State Director posted an Islamophobic rant to their official Facebook page, atheist blogger Hemant Mehta said:

It's always a touchy subject when atheists go after Islam... because people have to be very careful that they don't stereotype all followers of Islam as if they're all extremists. Our society does a terrible job of this. Atheists, especially when they're 'leaders' among us, ought to know better than to fall into that trap.

You ought to know better, Sam. Your insistence that Islamophobia isn't a problem and your willingness to play into the irrational anxieties of those who fear Muslims is irresponsible and dangerous. With your great reach, you have the opportunity to build bridges of understanding--instead, you have chosen to make the dividing lines that keep our communities apart that much thicker.

My invitation to visit a mosque isn't an argument for "political correctness." Like you, I find efforts to wallpaper over our differences abhorrent; like you, I have considerable disagreements with many tenets of Islam. You may have visited a mosque before, but I invite you to join me for a different kind of conversation--to spend some time talking to Muslims about their experiences, and working alongside them in their efforts to promote pluralism and equality in their community and in ours.

In a 2010 New York Times article about the Park51 (or "Ground Zero Mosque") controversy, one man said of the growing protests at mosques around the United States: "they have fear because they don't know [Muslims]." As someone who grew up gay in a fundamentalist Christian community, and as an atheist in a largely religious culture, I know how it feels to be reviled by people who don't understand me and who see our differences as irreconcilable. This is why I promote interfaith work--because giving people the opportunity to get to know others who belong to different communities erodes distrust and suspicion and builds cooperation and respect.

Before I got to know some people who identify as Muslim, I was hugely suspicious of all Muslims. As a college student, I was an atheist and a religious studies major--I studied Islam in the classroom, but I knew very little about Muslims. It wasn't until I started to build relationships of trust and mutuality with members of the American Muslim community that I learned about their experiences and had a change of heart.

What should happen when a Muslim walks into an airport? Your answer is extremely troubling, Sam. So I return to my original question: What could happen if two atheists were to walk into a mosque? What could we learn from one another? In what ways could we work alongside Muslims to build a world that values pluralism and compassion, critical thinking and cooperation? Let me know if you want to find out.

A Queer and Pleasant Danger by Kate Bornstein

Illustration by Gabi Anderson.

Out now: A Queer and Pleasant Danger

The true story of a nice Jewish boy who joins the Church of Scientology and leaves twelve years later to become the lovely lady she is today

“I was born male and now I’ve got medical and government documents that say I’m female—but I don’t call myself a woman, and I know I’m not a man. . . .”

Scientologist, husband and father, tranny, sailor, slave, playwright, dyke, gender outlaw—these are just a few words which have defined Kate Bornstein during her extraordinary life. For the first time, it all comes together in A Queer and Pleasant Danger, Kate Bornstein’s stunningly original memoir that’s set to change lives and enrapture readers.

Wickedly funny and disarmingly honest, this is Bornstein’s most intimate book yet. With wisdom, wit, and an unwavering resolution to tell the truth (“I must not tell lies”), Bornstein shares her story: from a nice Jewish boy growing up in New Jersey to a strappingly handsome lieutenant of the Church of Scientology’s Sea flagship vessel, and later to 1990s Seattle, where she becomes a rising star in the lesbian community. In between there are wives and lovers, heartbreak and triumph, bridges mended and broken, and a journey of self-discovery that will mesmerize readers.

Read a 10 out of 10 review for A Queer and Plesant Danger at PopMatters

"A Queer and Pleasant Danger is a brave, funny, edgy, and enlightening new memoir. I loved it and learned from it. Kate Bornstein shares her fascinating journey—through gender, Scientology, and more—and it was a thrill to tag along on the ride. This book is unbelievably powerful and affecting. If Kate Bornstein didn't exist, we would have to invent her. But luckily for queers, straights, gender outlaws, and general readers, Bornstein is out and out there." —Dan Savage, author, columnist, and architect of the "It Gets Better Project" 

"To me, Kate Bornstein is like a mythological figure or a historical literary character such as Orlando or Candide who, by illustrating her struggles, shows the rest of us how to live. This book is destined to become a classic." —Mx Justin Vivian Bond, author of Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels 

"Kate Bornstein's journey from moon-eyed Scientologist to queer icon is harrowing, heartbreaking, and amazing. This narrative is surely not for the squeamish. And yet, in the story of a sea-dog named Al who became a trans goddess named Kate, we see the messy, unsettling, inspiring struggle of a lady trying—and at last succeeding—to let her own soul be known. Disturbing and wondrous." —Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She's Not There and I'm Looking Through You 

“I read A Queer and Pleasant Danger over four nights in a bathtub and bed and was totally transported to Kate Bornstein’s world. Kate boldly lets us look under the hood of her own transformations as Jew, Scientologist, boy, girl, Buddhist and parent, leaving us with a richer understanding of the true identity underneath: human. A Queer and Pleasant Danger is a page turner, making sweet love to the paradoxes we all face." —Amanda Palmer, musician and co-founder of The Dresden Dolls 

"Bornstein is hilarious, honest, acerbic, and fearless in her writing…QAPD is at least three books in one, each of which is a page-turner."—Religion Dispatches

"Breathless, passionate, and deeply honest, A Queer and Pleasant Danger is a wonderful book. Read it and learn."—Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgren

Monday Media Roundup: National Parks, Food Deserts and Swamps, M&Ms for Breakfast

Last week's Before They're Gone Blog Tour made for great reading about our National Parks. Here's a quick roundup:

Nature Moms Blog interviewed author Michael Lanza about signs of climate change in our National Parks and what motivated him to take his kids to see endangered places. 

I was making an off-trail traverse of the Bailey Range in Olympic National Park one September several years ago and ran into a family (parents with their grown kids in their late teens and early 20s) going in the other direction—the only people we saw out there. As it happened, the father was one of the authors of the Olympic Mountains climbers guide; he knew the mountains very well from decades of hiking and climbing. He pointed to a north-facing mountainside above the lake where we were camped, a slope that had just a few small patches of snow and mostly bare ground, and told me with a tone of disbelief, “I’ve never seen that slope not entirely covered with snow in summer.”

The Mother of All Trips gleaned some tips from Lanza on how to get your kids out in nature: 

[D]on’t be too wedded to an agenda. Whether you’re hiking with kids or on a serious mountain climb, I think people get into trouble most often because they focus too much on the destination, overlooking that it’s really about the journey.

In a guest post at Tales of a Mountain Family, Lanza contrasts the risks his children face in nature with what risks of staying indoors at home.

People sometimes ask me whether I ever worry about my children’s safety when we go on wilderness adventures. My answer is, yes, of course. Worrying too much is the unavoidable curse upon every parent. But I worry much more that they will not spend enough time outdoors. 

We’ve all heard and read about the growing epidemic of childhood obesity and statistics suggesting that the generation of children growing up today may be the first in U.S. history with a shorter life expectancy than their parents. The term “nature-deficit disorder,” coined by the writer Richard Louv in his seminal book Last Child In the Woods, has entered into our national lexicon. American children are suffering from inactivity and insufficient exposure to the outdoors, and if we let this trend continue, they and our society will be worse off for it.

Adventure Tykes reviewed the book and asked Lanza questions about climate change and preparing his kids for adventure:

Remember that kids look to their parents for a sense of how they should react to a potentially scary situation. Always show your kids that you are calm and in control. Show and tell them that you have faith in their ability to handle this challenge.

Family Wilds wrapped up the week by talking to Lanza about teachable moments on family trips:

During our trips, I would occasionally explain to my kids some climate-change nugget about the park we were in at that time—not often, though, because I didn’t want to force-feed them lessons. Sometimes they wouldn’t take the bait, and I’d drop it and wait for another opportunity. Sometimes they’d leap into a conversation about it with great interest. And sometimes they would bring up the topic of climate change unprompted by me, partly because they knew that was part of the inspiration for me wanting to bring them on all of these adventures.

So in short, I let them determine the best times to try to introduce a learning element to our travels. I found that they were very curious and willing to learn when they were ready and it occurred at their pace.

In other news... Are food deserts real? A recent NY Times story questions the extent of food deserts, but Mark Winne (Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas) asserts that lack of access to good food is still a problem. He also describes the problem of "food swamps":

A food swamp is this environment where it’s very easy to get every manner of fast food - high in fat, high in salt, high in sugar; convenience stores that offer mostly unhealthy foods and, you know, that I think is what the obesity story is at least in part about. It’s not so much about the loss of supermarkets, but the opposite, which is that we have very easy access to so much unhealthy food.

Compare an urban area to a higher end, affluent, suburban area; you will not find the same quantity and the same density of unhealthy food outlets, such as fast food places.

Listen to this weekend's Living on Earth for more on how access to good food, and the knowledge of how to make good choices, is a "justice and fairness" issue.

At Salon, Jeremy Adam Smith (editor of Are We Born Racist?) explains what happens to our brains when we are fed a consistently whitewashed cultural diet, and calls for positive changes:

The antidote to subconscious bias is not political correctness — shoehorning in a quirky, spunky black BFF for the girls will just annoy black viewers, instead of making the world a better place. Rather, the best cure for what ails shows like “Girls” is a dose of thoughtfulness, self-awareness and courageous originality. ("Your Brain on White People")

Are M&Ms an important part of a healthy breakfast? Timothy Caulfield's love for the treat that melts in your mouth, not in your hands, is well-known to anyone who has read The Cure for Everything, so Beacon Press sent him a bag as a publication day gift. He generously shared them with his kids and their cousins. We're sure that everyone did a few extra high intensity intervals later that day...  For more from Tim Caulfield, read his debunking of health myths on Huffington Post, or watch this interview.

 

Off Label: Bringing the World of Human Guinea Pigs to Film

A couple of years ago, Beacon Press published White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine, a book that Lauren Slater recommended as "required reading for anyone who has ever been a patient—in other words, for everyone." In WCBH, author Carl Elliott skewers drug-industry reps, exposes how Pharma companies ghost-write "scientific" research studies in support of their products, and introduces us to the world of human guinea pigging--a "career" path for those desperate enough to serve in drug study after drug study in exchange for mediocre pay and few benefits. 

Carl sent me an email this week to tell me he had just returned from the Tribeca Film Festival, where he had attended screenings of Off Label, a new film "for which my writing is given credit as the inspiration." He put me in touch with filmmakers Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher, and I spoke with them via Skype as they were getting ready to leave New York. If you're familiar with WCBH and Carl's other writing in The New Yorker, Mother Jones, The Chronicle's Brainstorm blog, and elsewhere (including Beacon Broadside), you will certainly recognize the themes and people in the film. If you haven't read the book yet, get to it! And keep an eye out for screenings of Off Label. --Jessie Bennett, Blog Editor

Jessie Bennett: What is Off Label about?

Michael Palmieri: It's a film that examines the medicated margins of American society, and it does that initially through human guinea pigs. But it's personal stories of these people, so we're interested in the personal ramifications of the pharmaceutical culture that we live in, and how we're all sort of implicated in that process. 

JB: How did you come to make a film about human guinea pigging?

MP: We were showing a rough cut of our first film, October Country, at a film festival in late 2008, and these two producers--Anish Savjani and Vincent Savino, who we ended up working with--they saw the film and they followed up with us and said, "Hey, would you guys be interested in making a film about human guinea pigs? " And we said, "Yeah, sure, maybe. It sounds interesting..."

Donal Mosher: And they said they had money.

MP: Yeah, they said they had money, and we said, "Okay, sure!" They actually did have a budget to make it, and it was an intriguing subject, but we didn't know if it could become a whole film. It seemed to us initially like a 60 Minutes-length, investigative reporting piece more than what we're interested in doing, which is a broader view of a subject or a viewing from sort of left field. But the first articles they showed us were Josh McHugh from Wired magazine ["Drug Test Cowboys: The Secret World of Pharmaceutical Trial Subjects"] as well as Carl's article called "Guinea-Pigging" [The New Yorker], which we really latched on to. We really liked the way he wrote the piece. So we ended up contacting him and discussing what we were doing, and he gave us more leads, more information. We eventually ended up meeting him. It kind of developed organically from there. "Guinea pigs" was the initial interest, but then we expanded the idea once we understood on a deeper level what was going on that was somewhat suspect in the guinea pigging world. If the testing is messed up, then what's messed up about the marketing? And what are the end results?

DM: We also began to see how the issue didn't just lie in the zone of the issue itself, but it was pervasive. Every time we'd have a conversation with someone, they had a relative or they themselves were on pharmaceuticals. And the stories were multiplying in a way that made us think this is an issue that pervades many layers of culture far beyond medicine or taking medicine itself. So we wanted to start working those ideas into the film. 

JB: Who were some of the subjects that you spoke with? I recognized a few of the characters from Carl's writing. 

DM: Originally we spoke with Bob Helms [of Guinea Pig Zero]. A lot of the well-known names in the human guinea pig scene, the people who are testing the drugs. And then from there, we moved on to Mary Weiss, who is also in Carl's writing. 

MP: Robert Helms was in the original article that Carl wrote for the New Yorker. So we contacted him and spent time with him, and while we were in Philadelphia, Donal had initiated contact with a writer who had written a book called Acres of Skin, which gave us Eddie Anthony's story. He was an inmate in a prison at Holmesburg when it was actually legal to conduct medical testing on prisoners. And it really screwed up his life because some rough tests occurred when he was in there. We had initiated contact with Paul Clough through his website [Just Another Lab Rat]. Paul is based in Austin, but he has a website very much like what Robert Helms has with his fan zine Guinea Pig Zero, set up for people in the guinea pigging community to speak with one another and share. "Oh, this test actually pays good money." "These people have terrible food." It's kind of amazing, because these people are doing this for a living. 

JB: This is the thing that really shocked me about White Coat, Black Hat. "There's a human guinea pigging community?"

MP: And beyond that, it's a community of people who have no... there's no health plan for them. They're doing this because they don't have any other option. But for us, we could clearly understand that the testing is somewhat dubious on certain levels. I mean, obviously we need tests, there's a lot of positive, real things that come out of that testing. But people are lying to get into studies, and it's not exactly as clean of a population study as you would think it is. So the results are going to be skewed. Once we saw, "Okay, skewed results," we started moving more towards marketing, and we were introduced to [former pharmaceutical representative] Michael Oldani, through Carl. Again. Which is why, in a certain sense... how did we say it now? Not dedicated...

DM: "Inspired by."

MP: The film is truly inspired by Carl's writing. It's not just the characters that he led us towards, of which I think he led us toward five of the eight characters. But it's the endless numbers of hours spent with him in Minneapolis. At a coffee shop, where we would meet to discuss something, and we'd look at our watches and eight hours had passed. It's the types of conversations you dream to have all the time. We just got to know each other really well, and his style of writing is so expansive, and it moves from one idea to the next idea. He's such a big brain on a stick, you know what I mean? We wanted to try to do something like that with this film, that followed a line of reasoning as opposed to a specific plot. As a means to take in all of the complications of the issue that we were examining. But rather than having it point a finger at pharma and say, "This is the bad guy, and this is the problem." Which is the "call to action" documentary. We wanted to make a film that was a call to reflection, which is what Carl's writing is like, or the feeling at least that we got from it. 

JB: Mary Weiss, the mother of the test subject who died in Minnesota, who Carl writes about in WCBH, is featured in the film. Can you tell us about her story?

DM: In short, she attempted to get her son into a mental hospital. And when she couldn't, she found him space at the University of Minnesota. At first, he was assessed that he couldn't make any rational judgment about his own medication--that he wasn't sane enough. And then, within twenty-four hours, that was reversed. The full details of the story are in an article that Carl wrote for Mother Jones, but essentially it was a doctor who placed his own psychiatric patient in a very lucrative testing study. Not a study testing the efficacy of the drug that was prescribed for this young man, but a comparison marketing study where the dosage was fluctuating. The result was an incredibly sad and grisly suicide. From that point on, his mother has been fighting to change Minnesota laws, and to make those changes nationally. 

MP: And to clarify, this happened at the University of Minnesota, where Carl works. And the study that Dan Markingson was entered into was not only a marketing study, but it was a study that was conducted by the same doctor who was his attending physician. So the conflict of interest was so obvious in this case, but it was still legal. So Mary Weiss has helped pass the law to make that illegal. 

JB: You just finished up at the Tribeca Film Festival. How did it go?

MP: It went great. We showed the film four times. We finished yesterday, and the screenings were all pretty full. Carl was there for the first two screenings, with a couple of other people from the film. We are kind of thrilled with the response. It's gotten some fantastic reviews as well. So we're really happy. 

JB: How was the audience reaction to the film in Tribeca?

MP: I usually read it from the perspective of, "How many people left during the credits who didn't want to stick around for the Q&A?" An overwhelming number of people stuck around, which was a good sign to begin with, but the questions, they kept coming until they had to kick us out of the theater. So people are, I think, really engaged with the film. Everyone seems to be invested, so we're really happy. And if it causes people to pause and think about what medicine is going inside their bodies, I think we have succeeded, at least on that level, and it makes us very happy.

JB: And where are you headed next? 

MP: We're headed to HotDocs in Toronto, where the film is premiering internationally. The Toronto documentary crowd is insanity. We've already sold out most of our screenings, and they're gigantic places. We're looking forward to that. And we're hoping that there's a lot of European interest in screening the film.

JB: Well, it's an international issue. 

MP: But it's a very American film, so we're curious to how Europe responds.

DM: We're really curious to see, when there's an international audience, what stories they give us about the situation in whatever country the film might land. 

JB: And you have a screening in San Francisco as well?

MP: Yes, at the San Francisco International Film Festival. And we'll be doing more screenings in Europe and the US later in the year.

Find out more about the film at OffLabelFilm.com, follow them on Twitter, or like them on Facebook. 

President Barack Obama Slow Jams on Student Loans

On Late Night With Jimmy Fallon last night, the President joined Fallon and the Roots to slow jam on the need to keep rates from doubling on Stafford Loans this summer. POTUS got his groove on and the audience--many of whom are probably dealing with their own crippling student loan debts--went wild. The "Barackness Monster" (who paid off his own student loans only eight years ago) and Fallon aren't alone in their advocacy on this issue: an editorial in the New York Times points out that, "At a time when many graduates are desperate for jobs, the interest rate increase would add an average of $1,000 a year to their debt." The Occupy Movement has taken on student loan debt as a signature cause this spring. And even Mitt Romney, "voiced support for keeping federal student loan interest rates from going up – a position that puts him at odds with Republicans in Congress." (Politico)

You've got to watch the Fallon video, and for further reading, see The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History—and How We Can Fight Back.

World Book Night Wrap Up: How to Give Away Free Books

It was lunch time, and several members of the Beacon Press staff headed out in a chilly April drizzle to Boston's Downtown Crossing--not for a tasty sandwich from Falafel King, but to take part in World Book Night. Each staffer had signed up to hand out twenty free books to perfect strangers walking by on a busy street corner. Director Helene Atwan summed it up by saying, "Lots of different people going in and out of the subway were puzzled, skeptical, and finally, curious and grateful. A wonderful way to spend the lunch hour. We're all already looking forward to World Book Night 2013."

We've loved hearing stories from other givers, and must admit that it gives us a particular thrill to hear about people giving away Kindred by Octavia Butler--Beacon's literary contribution to the project. 

At the Silver Spring Metro station, Politics and Prose floor manager Susan Skirboll had a pretty straightforward strategy for her giveaway approach: “I’ll try to look respectable and not like a total freak.”

Skirboll calls the story she selected — “Kindred,” by the late science-fiction writer Octavia Butler — a book “everyone should read.” Though it contains a little bit of science fiction and fantasy, “it’s done in a way that’s kind of believable,” Skirboll said. “It talks about the slavery experience in a way I had never read before.” --Washington Post

And on Twitter...

Have given out my 4th copy of Kindred by Octavia Butler for #wbnamerica & am excited that #4 is drinking her coffee and reading the book!!!! -- @misscecil

Learned during #wbnamerica: let them see what you're offering. know your book. saying "it's one of the best books i've ever read" helps. -- @corpuslibris

My best line for #wbnamerica? Here's a book to go with that pizza! Man carrying pie took! @wbnamerica @NYCHA @beaconpressbks -- @arleneschulman

Our favorite story, hands down, involves a very unconventional delivery vehicle. (Photos by Shmuel Thaler of the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Used by permission.)

Handing out free books to surfers while paddling out in waters off Cowell Beach doesn't seem logical.

But Hilary Bryant made it look easy, if not natural, Monday when the wet-suit clad vice mayor took several copies of the novel "Kindred" into the surf wrapped in Ziploc bags. Not green - she knows - but how else could she keep the books dry?

"They were very appreciative," Bryant said of the effort, which was part of the World Book Night celebration in the U.S. and Europe. "It was easier to start the conversation on the water than on the cliff. You have a captive audience." -- Santa Cruz Sentinel

And now onto our staff and their experiences at Downtown Crossing in Boston.

Tom Hallock: Associate Publisher and Director of Sales and Marketing

Pictured right: Helene Atwan, Director of Beacon Press, with Tom Hallock.

So how did World Book Night, or World Book Lunchtime, go for you?

It was great, just great. We went to Downtown Crossing, the historic heart of the Boston retail district. There were a lot of people there at lunch time. There used to be a lot of retail bookstores there: a Globe Corner Bookstore, a Lauriat’s, a Barnes and Noble and a Borders—none of them are there now. And we just thought it would be a place where we would find some people who are not exposed to books regularly, and we were right. 

We had support from the Boston Downtown Business Improvement District. We were also assisted by a fruit vendor who is quite an enthusiastic reader and supporter of World Book Night, and who sent a number of people our way. We gave away copies of Dave Eggers' Zeitoun, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.  

People would come up with wary looks on their faces. I think maybe they thought we were handing out religious tracts or political propaganda or something, and we would assure them that they were really good books, and people got really excited about it.

In a sense, you were espousing the religion of reading. 

Exactly, and I think we got a lot of converts.The best thing was seeing the expression on people's faces change as you got into the conversation, and you could see them open up  to the idea that a stranger was about to hand them a book that they would really enjoy reading.

How do you feel about Kindred by Octavia Butler being included in the giveaway? 

We were really proud of that and so glad that Carl Lennertz and the people at World Book Night made it possible for Kindred to be part of the program. It's a great book that can be read by all ages, and it‘s been wonderful to hear stories from around the country about people introducing it to new readers.

Marcy Barnes, Production Manager

Pictured right: Kate Noe, Will Myers, and Marcy Barnes.

There were a couple of really enthusiastic people who came up to us, and a lot of people were really grateful. To choose people to give books to, I basically just chose anyone who wasn't wearing headphones. I wasn't thinking, "Is that a reader or not a reader?" I felt that it was more a celebration of reading and saving books, and a lot of people were really appreciative of the concept.

Ryan Mita, Digital Marketing Assistant

Here’s what went through my mind, and what happened while I was giving away World Book Night Books: 

• I thought giving away books on a wet, windy day would be a difficult, but it wasn’t!
• I gave a jeweler something to occupy his interest on his lunch break. 
• I interested a groups of teenagers in picking up a book.
• I felt really good sharing a great book with strangers and supporting an activity I love to do.

Will Myers, Editorial Assistant

It was nice to see people light up when they were given a free book. We had the World Book Night lanyard, so I think people thought we were from Oxfam or something along those lines. But once they knew we weren't asking for an email address, they were less suspicious.

At the Lambert's outdoor fruit stand--they were big boosters of World Book Night, and they were cheering us on. They kept asking, "Do you have this book? Do you have this book?" That was cool. It was a great experience, and I would absolutely do it again. 

Kate Noe, Production Assistant

I got involved because my friend works for a counseling center for young mothers, and she was really excited for World Book Night because she was able to get free books for these young women who don't ever read. So she inspired me to reach out, too. 

I would definitely do it again, but it was frustrating being rejected. Going up to strangers and having them ignore you... But those moments when people were curious and wanted to learn more, that was cool. 

Crystal Paul, Assistant to the Director

Pictured right: Helene Atwan, Ryan Mita, and Crystal Paul.

I'm glad that we were handing out Junot Diaz and Zeitoun—multicultural literature that is applicable to everyone. I think it's great that there were such a wide variety of authors and types of books, because it encourages you to reach out to all kinds of people. And I was excited that Kindred was part of World Book Night. I love Octavia Butler. 

I've always said that books sort of raised me. I grew up in a house where there wasn't a strong parental figure, so I turned to books not because I just wanted stories or escapism. But, literally, because I was looking for how I'm supposed to live life, the things I'm supposed to do. A lot of young adult literature in particular is about these orphan children, and then I started reading Sci-Fi. Octavia Butler was one of the first authors I read-- Xenogenesis which is now called Lilith's Brood And it was about a black woman going out into the world and being abducted by aliens. Basically, just completely abandoned and on her own, and how she navigated this totally new world. 

The Cure for Everything: Untangling Twisted Messages About Health, Fitness, and Happiness

In this era of health-science research, rarely a day goes by without a public pronouncement of some exciting health-enhancing discovery: a new diet, a new fitness routine, a new drug or alternative therapy, the miracles achieved by genetic mapping. And we are told—by the media, health-care experts, even government—that we should use this information to live a healthier life. But what information can we trust? Are yoga and stretching the surefire path toward healthy aging? Can consuming enormous quantities of certain "natural" remedies ward off disease? Should we all eat nothing but carbs, or fats, or pineapples, and regularly cleanse our colons or have our meridians aligned? Should we all have our genome mapped to solve our health problems?

In The Cure for Everything, health policy expert and fitness enthusiast Timothy Caulfield wades through the tides of health crazes, misleading data, and well-meaning gurus in a quest to sort out real, reliable health advice. He takes us along as he navigates the maze of facts, findings, and fears associated with emerging health technologies, drugs, and disease-prevention strategies and presents an impressively researched, accessible take on the production and spread of information in the health sciences.

Seamlessly switching between his sweatsuit and his lab coat, Caulfield doesn't just pore over the research and interview the professionals; he gets his t-shirt sweaty and his meridians aligned, testing out the scientific validity of some of the health and fitness crazes of our day. Bravely using himself as a guinea pig, he goes on a strict diet, a rigorous exercise routine, swallows bottles of "natural" remedies, and has needles inserted all over his body. He illuminates some solid paths to better health, along with the dead-end detours.

Science is everywhere, but what passes through most people's field of vision is often wrong, hyped, or twisted by an ideological or commercial agenda. And without good scientific data, bad decisions are made--by doctors and governments, by you and me. Caulfield demonstrates, alas, that there are no quick fixes or simple steps to flat abs; that you will never be able to eat all you want; that no "natural" supplements will lead to better health; that knowing your genetic map will not save you from almost anything. The Cure for Everything ends with five simple, scientifically sound—and, yet, difficult—steps to take in order to lead a longer, healthier life.

As a researcher in health law and policy, Timothy Caulfield has spent almost two decades analyzing science issues and has been involved in science and health-policy decisions related to almost all the topics addressed in this book. He teaches biotechnology in the Faculty of Law and is the editor for the Health Law Journal and Health Law Review at the University of Alberta. He has published close to two hundred peer-reviewed articles in the world's top science journals, including Science, Cell, the Lancet, Nature, andBiotechnology, and in the popular press.

Listen to Tim Caulfield on Minnesota Public Radio's The Daily Circuit.

Read an interview with Tim Caulfield on Blisstree.com.

Watch Tim Caulfield talking about the most effective way to get fit: hard exercise.

National Park Week and the Before They're Gone Blog Tour

A longtime backpacker, climber, and skier, Michael Lanza knows our national parks like the back of his hand. As a father, he hopes to share these special places with his two young children. But he has seen firsthand the changes wrought by the warming climate and understands what lies ahead: a vastly changed landscape. So he and his wife take his nine-year-old son, Nate, and seven-year-old daughter, Alex, on an ambitious journey to see as many climate-threatened wild places as they can fit into a year: backpacking in the Grand Canyon, Glacier, the North Cascades, Mount Rainier, Rocky Mountain, and along the wild Olympic coast; sea kayaking in Alaska's Glacier Bay; hiking to Yosemite's waterfalls; rock climbing in Joshua Tree National Park; cross-country skiing in Yellowstone; and canoeing in the Everglades.

Who better to help us celebrate National Park Week than this ambitious dad? The Before They're Gone Blog Tour begins today with an interview at Nature Moms Blog. Follow Lanza's travels throughout the week to The Mother of All Trips, Tales of a Mountain Family, Adventure Tykes and Family Wilds. We'll wrap things up on our blog with a round up at the end of the week. 

Our closest National Park is of a more urban variety than the ones visited by Michael Lanza and his family. To look for a National Park near you, visit the National Parks website.

Before you get out and explore, you can get some ideas from these great Before They're Gone videos. 

Earth Day 2012: Blue Revolution

Cynthia Barnett is the author of Blue Revolution: Unmaking America's Water Crisis. In honor of Earth Day, we asked her "What is today's most pressing environmental issue?"  

I’m beginning to believe it’s the deep social/political/religious divides that have us too angry at one another to roll up our sleeves and work on relatively small problems, much less biggies such as climate change and freshwater scarcity.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I’m in the middle of writing the commencement address for Unity College. This is the wonderful environmental-themed college in Unity, Maine, where President Stephen Mulkey has elevated climate change as an ethical imperative for colleges and universities everywhere.

I’m telling the graduates: “As the global atmosphere warms, as the Arctic ice thins, as Americans sweat in the warmest spring in recorded history, our political, cultural and business leaders, and our government and private institutions, remain frozen stiff. My generation’s paralysis, which extends from the geo-political to the local, is the single-greatest barrier to solving the climate crisis...”

Part of the answer is that ethical imperative President Mulkey talks about. My latest book, Blue Revolution, is a call for a water ethic for America, in the same spirit that Aldo Leopold called for a land ethic sixty years ago. My favorite thing about the response so far is how the ethical framework transcends politics and other points of division. I am asked to speak at Vacation Bible Schools as well as universities, and make my way into the hook & bullet literature as well as the green.

This is the beauty of water. Literally a chemical bond, water is also one of the deepest bonds among people. The initial impacts of our changing climate all involve water–- changing rainfall and storm patterns, more-extreme flooding, more-severe drought. These are happenings people love to talk about, even people who don’t want to talk about climate change.

This is why I think water will be the issue around which the shouting match over climate change finally becomes a conversation. Ultimately, it will unite us.

 

 

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Watch Cynthia Barnett speaking at the Clinton School at the University of Arkansas

Earth Day 2012: Before They're Gone

Michael Lanza is the author of Before They're Gone: A Family's Year-Long Quest to Explore America's Most Endangered National Parks. In honor of Earth Day, we asked him "What is today's most pressing environmental issue?"  

It's hard to argue that there's anything more urgent and potentially catastrophic than climate change. In reading countless journal articles and conducting numerous interviews for my book, Before They're Gone—A Family's Year-Long Quest to Explore America's Most Endangered National Parks, it was hard to maintain optimism in the face of forecasts that the steady diminishing of mountain snows means that Yosemite’s famous waterfalls will peter out earlier in the year; that every glacier in Glacier National Park is doomed to melt away; that Joshua Tree National Park will one day no longer support its namesake tree, and much of the Everglades is fated to sink beneath the sea. The issue became powerfully immediate to me in realizing that much of this fallout will occur within the lifetimes of my children.

Many scientists now believe that a rise of 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in average temperatures worldwide is unavoidable in this century, which could erase 40 percent of all species on the planet. It was really disturbing to interview one leading scientist after another and hear every one of them express fear that we’re facing the greatest disaster in the history of human civilization.

It's frightening to contemplate what this will mean for people all over the world. Many scientists I interviewed echoed the comments of USGS research ecologist Nathan Stephenson, who told me, “Sometimes people say, ‘If this has happened in the past, why should we be worried?’ The simple answer is: you would not have wanted to be alive then. Civilizations have fallen on slight changes in climate.”

As I wrote in my book: Our conversation about climate has not achieved the degree of honesty we would use when talking with our own kids. We would not encourage them to make choices fraught with such a high degree of risk. Yet we as a people have embraced just that kind of choice time and again.

Still, I feel optimistic—partly because optimism offers the only hope for the world our kids will inherit. I think we’re at the brink of a tectonic shift in public perception and understanding of climate change, one that could, hopefully, drive public policy in the right direction. Record high temperatures are being constantly recorded all over the world. A recent poll showed a large majority of Americans believe that extreme weather events of recent years are connected to climate change. Major corporations are calculating the impacts of rising temperatures on their business. The Pentagon is preparing for a world growing more politically unstable as crop failures increase and societies grapple with simply feeding their people.

We have to hope—especially for our children and grandchildren—this positive shift in public awareness and action will happen fast enough and isn’t coming too late. We have no reasonable option but to do much better than we are now.

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Watch a YouTube playlist of videos from Michael Lanza's family trips to America's most endangered National Parks.

Earth Day 2012: Harvest the Wind

Philip Warburg is the author of Harvest the Wind: America's Journey to Jobs, Energy Independence, and Climate Stability. In honor of Earth Day, we asked him "What is today's most pressing environmental issue?" 

Curbing global warming is the overarching environmental challenge we face. Wind and solar power offer promising ways to wean ourselves off precarious and outmoded energy resources.  With the right “smart grid” investments, these two renewable energy resources could meet well over half of America’s power needs by mid-century. During the past half-decade, wind has supplied 35 percent of all new U.S. electric-generating capacity. Will this continue?  Not if we succumb to the allure of “fracked” natural gas as the new American panacea. Cheap it is – at least until stepped-up global market demand drives up its price. Environmentally sustainable it’s not. Leaving aside the under-studied hazards of fracking, even the best of gas-fired turbines produce nearly half as much CO₂ as conventional coal plants.

Denmark is determined to rid itself entirely of fossil fuels by 2050. The Danish Commission on Climate Change Policy expects that shedding fossil fuels will reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 85 percent, at the same time that Denmark’s GDP is projected to double.  What America needs is a vision of similar magnitude. We have the resources to make it happen, but we need to summon the political will to internalize the crippling costs of our reliance on fossil fuels.

Wind power is not only an effective way to address our reliance on fossil fuels, it holds promise as a way to revive the economies of America's small towns, a topic Warburg explores in Harvest the Wind.

Winds sweeping through the Great Plains once robbed the Farm Belt of its future, stripping away overworked topsoil and creating the dreaded Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Today, those winds are bringing new hope to the declining rural communities of the central United States. Nowhere is wind's promise more palpable than in Cloud County, Kansas, where the soaring turbines of the Meridian Way Wind Farm are boosting incomes and bringing green jobs to a community that has, for decades, watched its children drift away.

In Harvest the Wind, Philip Warburg brings readers face-to-face with the people behind the green economy-powered resurgence in Cloud County and communities like it across the United States. This corner of Kansas is the first stop on an odyssey that introduces readers to farmers, factory workers, biologists, and high-tech entrepreneurs-all players in a transformative industry that is taking hold across America and around the globe.

In this illuminating book, Warburg reveals both the remarkable growth of a breakthrough technology and the formidable challenges it faces. He visits epicenters of anti-wind opposition as well as communities that have embraced wind farms as neighbors. He guides readers through an Iowa turbine assembly plant that is struggling to compete in a global marketplace dominated by European and Chinese manufacturers. And he looks at the thousands of miles that wind-generated power will need to travel to reach American consumers.

Harvest the Wind is an earthly antidote to loftier treatises on global warming and green energy. By showing us how practical solutions are being implemented at the local level, Warburg offers an inspirational look at how we can all pursue a saner and more sustainable energy future-while at the same time investing in the nation's infrastructure and jumpstarting its economy.

Read an excerpt of Harvest the Wind on Scribd.

Philip Warburg was president of the Conservation Law Foundation, New England's leading environmental advocacy group, from 2003 to 2009. Earlier, he ran the Israel Union for Environmental Defense in Tel Aviv and was an attorney at the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, D.C. He has also worked with governments and citizen groups on anti-pollution initiatives in Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, and across Eastern Europe. Visit his website, PhilipWarburg.com.

Fenway at 100: Howard Bryant on the Red Sox and race

It is not a requirement that you be a Red Sox fan to work at Beacon Press, but it let's just say that it helps. There are many Fenway faithful around our offices, and we are fans who must live with the complicated, not always admirable, history of our favorite team. And, ten years ago, we published a great book that addressed the team's history of racism.

The author of Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston is Howard Bryant, a native Bostonian who has since gone on to become a senior writer at ESPN and correspondent for National Public Radio. Shut Out won Spitball Magazine's Casey Jones Award for best baseball book of 2002, and he has also written two other acclaimed books on baseball: Juicing the Game and The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron. When his book on Hank Aaron was released in 2010, we interviewed Bryant in the Beacon offices about his life as a baseball fan. We share that interview today in honor of Fenway Park's 100th birthday. 

Fenway seemed to be a pretty hostile place to non-white fans.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, the adults, the black adults in Dorchester, never went to Fenway Park. When we were kids, we never went to Fenway Park. And this was in the 1970s, when the Red Sox were really, really good. They were a great team--they went to the World Series in 1975. And yet, I'd never been to a baseball game.

And it wasn't until my family moved to Plymouth, fifty miles south of Boston, where you're in a predominantly white community, where the Red Sox were actually part of the family. Where you would go to games as part of your summer vacation. And I remember, when I got older, asking my aunts and uncles, why didn't they go to Fenway Park. And they told me--it was because it was a hostile place. And I remember one uncle, my Uncle Charles said to me one day, "Why would I go somewhere where I know I'm gonna get beaten up?" And that was quite a comment to me.

And today, under John Henry and Larry Lucchino and Tom Werner, I think they're cognizant of that. And I think today, when you go to a Red Sox game, that feeling of hostility is not there. I think that you have--you don't have great diversity because at very few sporting venues across the country are you going to have great diversity. But, at least when you walk in there as an African-American or as a woman or as any minority group, I don't think that you're going to go into a place where you don't feel comfortable. I think the Red Sox are trying very, very hard to make Boston baseball belong to everyone.

Do you want to talk about the fan bases about Red Sox vs. Yankees? How do you feel the Red Sox legacy affects the fan base? 

I'm sure it will be pretty embarrassing, and my friends probably not want to hear this, but they already know it because they lived it with me. When I was a kid, growing up in Boston and later in Plymouth on the South Shore, I was a Yankee fan. I will say it, it is true. And the reason was because, even today, as a journalist it's the same thing, I never rooted for teams as much as I rooted for players, and my favorite player was Dave Winfield. And the reason that I liked Dave Winfield was because as a young, African-American boy, I really was in need of role models. Of seeing someone confident, and Winfield was such a confident player. He looked like he never bowed his head to anybody. And he swung the bat with such confidence, he played in the field and he did so many things that you wanted to emulate.

And then, the black stars on the Red Sox always seemed so burdened. They always seemed as if they didn't feel so comfortable. They were always brooding in some ways. Oil Can Boyd had a very difficult time here. Jim Rice, naturally, had a difficult time in Boston. And Ellis Burks had a difficult time in Boston. And so, there were players that you really wanted to root for, and I rooted for all those guys, but they just never seemed happy. Winfield seemed happy, and I said, "That's my guy." So I ended up rooting for the Yankees.

I think that that is changing slightly, but not much, because the Red Sox haven't really developed African-American players since. So you don't have that evolution in terms of African-American players, but you have it with the Latino players. David Ortiz, for example, is as ebullient and fun-loving and wonderful a character as the city's ever had. Ditto for Pedro Martinez, and the same, in his own, wacky way for Manny Ramirez. So, you have that person of color who enjoys playing here, but it's been very specific to the African-American experience that the black player did not have as good, as comfortable an experience playing in Boston. So I'd like to say that that part of it is changing, but I haven't seen much evidence of it.

In Boston today, do you still see some of the racial issues that you talk about in Shut Out?

I think one of the amazing things about the city of Boston is its history, its evolution, and I think one of the things that I really enjoyed about doing that project was taking the time to look at the different issues in the city and see how they would play out over time. The book came out in 2002, and in the years since, so much has changed in Boston, both in the Red Sox and their ownership, and the fact that they've won two championships since then. And also, in the city itself. I think Boston has become much more of a money city. I'm not sure that this is all a good thing. I think on the one hand, as a native Bostonian, I liked the diversity of the city and I like the rough edges of the city even if, sometimes, those rough edges stung, they hurt. I think that today, because you have to earn so much money to make ends meet in Boston, that the city has lost a little bit of that ethnic flavor that made it so special. On the one hand, this is a good thing, because it's a much more tolerant city, it's a much more diverse city, it's got much better food. And I think that it makes for a more inclusive city. On the other hand, it can be bad because Boston is not the Boston that we knew before. Boston is not the same city that I remember growing up and that my dad remembers growing up. The neighborhoods have lost a little bit of that specialness that made the North End the North End, or South Boston... or Roxbury... but the one thing we do know is that the city is going to constantly be changing. Some of it's going to be for the better, and, on balance, I think it's a better place than it's ever been.

The Beacon Press Pulitzers

The Pulitzer board dropped the ball on the 2011 fiction prize, so our staff felt compelled to pick it up. Sure, there's no money and little prestige attached to our nominations, but we figured that we'd join the chorus of those protesting the lack of an award this year by championing our own favorites. 

From Director Helene Atwan:

This year's PEN Hemingway winner, Teju Cole for Open City.  But a tough choice, so many great books this year, and especially so many great first novels, including the Hemingway finalists, Amy Waldman's The Submission and We Are Taking Only What We Need by Stephanie Watts, and of course The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht.

 From Senior Publicist Caitlin Meyer:

All three finalists were great picks, but I’d have gone for Swamplandia! Karen Russell’s writing is a dream. Given that she’s just 30, and this was her first novel, and that she’s a woman, I would have liked to see her beat the odds and walk away with the prize.

Production Coordinator Beth Collins chafes against the Pulitzer's temporal and geographical constraints:

I don’t read a lot of fiction and I usually don’t read things when they first come out. I’m usually a few years behind. For example, my favorite work of fiction that I read in the past year was by A Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell which was published in 2010, but he’s not American so he’s not eligible.

Blog Editor Jessie Bennett would have pulled for PEN/Malamud and NBCC Award winner Edith Pearlman:

I thought it was fantastic for Binocular Vision, a short story collection, to receive high honors from so many. I've been reading it a story at a time over the last month, loving that I'm able to approach each piece individually, but it works as a collection as well. 

Brittany Weippert in Business Operations throws out the Pulitzer guidelines and throws in her recommendations for Chuck Palaniuk's Choke and How I Became Stupid by Martin Page. Add your own favorite reads in the comments!