It’s 13:59, and the intercity Bordeaux-Narbonne departs at 14:00. I have sixty seconds to decide whether or not to stay on the train. I reread the text I just received from my Airbnb host in Narbonne: “I can’t receive you today, my apologies.”

My son, who took me to the station, has already left in time to manage the afternoon shift at the Irish pub where he works. I’ve never been to Narbonne, the town in southern France where I’d hoped to spend my break. I’ll be forced to orient myself in an unfamiliar district and scramble—in 30°C heat—for a room in a pricey hotel.

I spiral into a panic, which grows in intensity even after I decide to stay on the train and begin planning for contingencies. I can’t find my password journal, which means I can’t message my Airbnb host, Rodolphe, via the app. I convince myself that I must have mislaid the journal while buying a pair of Reeboks earlier in the day, and perhaps someone is wiping my savings account while I agonize on the train.

Then I remember that I logged Rodolphe’s contact details on my phone. I text him. Within a minute he replies with bemused cordiality: “Mais non, madame, I will not be able to receive you in person as I have a doctor’s appointment, but the key will be in a security box on the door.”

I put my phone away and relax into my seat, thankful I stayed aboard. I end up finding my journal at the bottom of my suitcase.

Maybe I’m so anxious because I haven’t traveled for quite some time. The simple reason I’m headed to Narbonne is to see one of my favorite groups, Funambule, a French flute-saxophone-tuba trio that plays a mélange of different styles, including jazz. They’re performing tonight at Narbo Via, the town’s famed museum of Roman antiquities. But I’m also here because it’s important to keep moving, even if you’ve lost your sense of direction. Growing up in England and South Africa, I envisaged a career playing the flute. In 1988, I graduated from Anglia Ruskin University with an honors degree in music. But I married young and veered into publishing. Eventually, I began working as a freelance copy editor and proofreader. After I got divorced, I raised my children as a single parent.

Living in a kind of survival mode for so long, I tried my best to sustain my creativity by writing poetry and fiction and playing my flute when I could. But my energies were scattered. It was only when my grown children left home that I found I could focus on music again. A few years ago, I joined a local wind band. I began playing flute duets with a friend at charity and private events. We met a pianist, and our trio started performing regularly, gradually building a repertoire and a following. Along the way, I discovered a niche for musicians who have not taken the traditional career path from a conservatory to the professional music circuit.

Built on a raised foundation, the Narbo Via museum is striking for its soaring concrete beams and its pale-colored walls, which give the edifice a striped and stratified effect. The museum’s vestibule features a water installation—a shallow, rectangular pool—which I heedlessly stroll straight through on my way into the building. In my now-sodden Reeboks, I power through the revolving doors, praying nobody noticed my latest faux pas.

I find my way to the performance area, a hall dominated by a floor-to-ceiling mosaic of stone, metal girders, and diffused light. It’s rehearsal hour, and I spot the three musicians who’ve inspired me to take this trip. Two burly men—saxophonist Alain Angeli and tubist Laurent Guitton—are taking direction from Étienne Lecomte, the group’s frontman, a bearded flautist with his black hair tied in a bun. To date, they’ve been two-dimensional, their faces smiling on an album cover. Now I’m in their presence, and I find it surprisingly moving just to observe them handle their instruments confidently, knowing they have mastery over them.

After years of not playing the flute, I lost my embouchure, diaphragm control, and much of the rest of my technique. But everything is returning, and this outing is part of my effort to regain my level.

It was a chance encounter that brought me here. After my second child left home a few years ago, I felt disorientated. I joined the local Catholic community, looking for guidance and support. As I’m English and a flutist, the priest suggested I play at an English-language mass in Charente, which helped rekindle my passion for music. Later, the priest brought up how his brother, also a flutist, was active in Narbonne’s music scene. It caught my attention, and then I learned that Funambule would soon perform there.

The group’s name is French for “tightrope” or “tightrope walker,” an apt description for an ensemble whose music, as one critic put it, is “airy, suspended, and energetic.” In 2023, the group came out with an intriguing album, afrique, which they put together with the oud player Alaoua Idir under the band name Nomades. For me, a highlight of the album is its self-titled track, “Nomades,” where the tuba wends through a surprisingly delicate solo before the flute climbs and climbs, bringing to mind Tolkien’s Misty Mountains.

Tonight, Funambule is being accompanied by a local conservatory’s wind ensemble. Their music meanders across musical styles and cultures, at various points evoking Merseyside in northwestern England, Bulgaria, and traditions further east. There’s a subtlety to this unlikely triangulation of instruments, an elegant whole that at times opens space for the gravelly warmth of Guitton’s tuba and the amiable power of Angeli’s sax. Lecomte takes his flute to its limits, stroking and slapping the keys, bending and fluttering his notes, his body moving nimbly with the music.

As the performance ends, I hear claps of thunder. A storm is gathering momentum. Having finally dried out my sneakers, I’m not keen on getting soaked on a walk back into town. Luckily, I recognize in the audience a pianist from a recent Facebook post. Probably breaking an unwritten rule, I explain my predicament to her. Two more strangers who gave her a lift here, give me a lift there. It’s awkward, but I don’t care.

Back at the apartment, I lie on my host’s snug bed and listen to the rain pattering. I catch a one-sided phone conversation in the street below. “Je t’aime. Je t’aime.” A man pours out his heart. I surmise a split and hear him break down as lightning lights up the sky. I fall asleep.

The post Tightrope Walking in Narbonne appeared first on In The Fray.

What is life like in Gaza, more than a year since Israel began its military assault there? I spoke to Mariam Salah, a twenty-nine-year-old artist and teacher who lives there, for a personal perspective on the war. Salah has lost six family members and eight friends since Israeli forces swept into the Gaza Strip in response to a Hamas-led series of attacks on October 7, 2023. They are among the tens of thousands of Palestinians reported to have been killed during the ongoing conflict, which shows no sign of ending. An estimated 1.9 million out of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents have been displaced, while the fates of dozens of hostages taken by Hamas are still unknown.

When the Israeli military assault began, Salah was living in Gaza City. She and her family have been forced to flee their homes several times since then. Currently, they are camping out in Khan Yunis in the south—“seeking shelter amid the rubble we’re surrounded by,” as she puts it.

A painter and sculptor, Salah had her work exhibited in galleries throughout Palestine before the war. She designed costumes, masks, and puppets for a local company called Theater Days. Salah also worked with children as an art teacher and art facilitator at schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main U.N. aid group in Gaza. She graduated in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in art education from Palestine’s Al-Aqsa University—since flattened by Israeli strikes. “Every single place I used to study or work has been turned into rubble.”

Where exactly were you living in the Gaza Strip before Israel attacked?

I was living in northern Gaza—specifically, in the capital, Gaza City. There were eight refugee camps spread throughout the Gaza Strip, and I lived in the Beach Camp, which is very close to the Mediterranean Sea. It’s since been decimated—completely reduced to rubble.

Like so many people, my family and I didn’t want to leave our home at first. We took shelter in a nearby UNRWA school. We were confident we’d be protected, as we thought the institution’s role of preserving human rights would be upheld. We were under the impression the occupation forces wouldn’t have the audacity to blow it up with so many people crammed in and seeking shelter.

On one particularly harrowing day, the building began to shake from the force of the shelling. We couldn’t sleep. Early in the morning, a young man was killed at the front entrance of the school.

We decided to flee. We didn’t take any of our belongings, only the clothes we were wearing.

There was an impending sense of doom, and I was reminded of the movie War of the Worlds. We traveled several kilometers on foot to seek safety in the southern city of Rafah. Of course, it’s since been destroyed. We have been displaced four times since the military assault began.

I understand one of your nephews was killed.

His name was Bashar. He was eighteen years old and my eldest nephew. On July 22, a missile struck the home in which we had been seeking refuge, and he was martyred. My nephew, Hassan, who was ten months old, was seriously injured in the head, but thankfully, he survived. My two brothers-in-laws were also seriously injured, but they’ve also been making progress with their recovery.

Bashar was really dear to me. I considered him a son, as I’m still single. I’d describe him as being kind and compassionate. He never wanted to hurt anyone, and he always looked after everyone else’s needs. Following his death, it became apparent just how much he was loved.

We used to have a skincare ritual—it was something we’d do together periodically, just to lift our spirits a bit. He wanted me to help him look and feel better, as we’ve all been so weary. One week before he was killed, during our ritual, we had a conversation about the fragility of existence—how our lives hang in the balance between life and death. I held him close.

A missile would eventually destroy his face, shattering it into pieces. Now that he’s in heaven, my hope is that his face is even more beautiful than it was here on earth.

I thank God we buried him and that we actually know where exactly his grave is. The truth is, so many people have been buried, and their families have absolutely no idea where they are. My maternal grandmother is one example. She was killed on the day the despicable Israeli Army entered Khan Yunis. There was intense bombing and shelling.

She was buried, along with others, in a mass grave in the hospital’s courtyard. We neither have a designated place to mourn, nor to grieve. My mother was deprived of saying goodbye to her, and so were the rest of my aunts. I haven’t fully recovered from all of this.

How have you gotten food, water, and medical care?

During the first month of the military assault, almost everything was available. We’d buy and store canned food to eat. Once we were in Rafah, we found a lot of expired products in the markets. We’d only buy vegetables once a week, as they were very expensive.

Every two months, we receive a box of humanitarian aid that reaches schools or other distribution points. We used to buy food with the money we had saved prior to the military assault, but it’s simply not enough to cover the exorbitant cost of everything, thanks to the damned war merchants.

In a Facebook post, you discussed the challenges of cooking over a fire.

We have to light a fire every day, because there aren’t any alternatives. We’re all forced to search for paper, cartons, and wood to start a fire. It’s also difficult, because everyone else is trying desperately to find the necessary material. With children being out of school, their old notebooks have been used.

The mothers who are constantly cooking over fire have been experiencing respiratory problems. And to be honest, food cooked over a fire is hardly appetizing to me. But we all want to live, so we carry on.

You mentioned how your flip-flops came apart and how difficult it’s been to get a new pair.

The journey of my flip-flops may be comical, but since my fourth displacement, I’ve lost four pairs. I had to resort to fashioning a pair on my own. I used cardboard and the caulking that’s used to fill holes in windows and doors.

I also had a pair of shoes that were covered in dirt, so I painted them in an attempt to refurbish them. I wanted to give them a shine akin to the shine of a new pair, but they quickly became dirty due to the sewage, dirty water, sand, and rubble in our streets.

Please tell me a little about the artwork you’ve been able to create.

I’ve lost all my paintings, sketches, materials, and supplies, and all my books and research on art. I’ve managed to express myself in some way on paper, but I don’t consider what I’ve produced to be artwork. What I’ve drawn simply represents a release of myself. There’s no time for art. I’m now saving my life and the life of my family. My life is now more important than art.

Your artwork was exhibited at a gallery in Bethlehem a few years ago. Can you tell me about this exhibition?

To be honest with you, ever since the genocide started, I’ve had trouble remembering specific details about my past activities. I don’t recall what was displayed in Bethlehem. It might’ve been a painting about the right of women to live freely, or the right of children to live in dignity. I really don’t know. I just remember I had sent a few of my artistic works there.

In any case, it really doesn’t matter. The crux of the matter is the reality of our lives under a brutal, decades-long military occupation and apartheid.

What’s the role of art under the circumstances we’re currently enduring? It has neither allowed us to live, nor has it allowed for a ceasefire to come into effect. I’d like to say that art is of no use amidst mass displacement, starvation, and killing. The artist must come to acknowledge that neither the paper drawn on, nor the quill used for writing, can compare to the deadly power of a weapon on a battlefield. Unfortunately, I don’t have any military training, so I’m of no use, whether as a fighter or as an artist.

Do you have any wishes or dreams for the future?

I’d like to make a wish, but I know it won’t come true: I wish that all the people who were killed were alive. I wish that life could return to what it was like before. But it’s too late. Now, I only wish for the genocide to end. I also wish for Palestine to be liberated and rebuilt.

The Palestinian cause is inherited from one generation to another. The misery will not end until the aggression and injustice end. This will not end until those who support Israel wake up. And if they don’t wake up now, they may regret it in the afterlife.

Is there anything or anyone giving you strength or support to endure?

No, not at all. Everyone’s weak and exhausted. All of us have been deeply affected by this genocide. No one has been left untouched. To some extent, the strength within me is due to my faith in God. Right now, my goal is to support my family and to have them cling onto me amid a sea of blood.

It’s been impossible to heal. However, there’s something in my heart that reassures me that I’ll be reunited with Bashar in another world. I often look at the mobile phone charger he gave me and think it’s only a matter of time before I see him again.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

The post No One Has Been Left Untouched: A Conversation with Palestinian Artist Mariam Salah appeared first on In The Fray.

In the twentieth century, the factory stood at the center of American life. Entire towns sprouted around them. Thanks to union-won wages, factory workers and their families could attain middle-class security. When I was writing a book about autoworkers, I kept hearing nostalgic stories of the way things used to be: however down on your luck you were, there was always a job waiting for you at the factory.

After decades of companies offshoring manufacturing employment, the factory is no longer the institution it once was. The Amazon fulfillment center has taken its place. They’re everywhere where the online retailer ships its goods—which is everywhere in the world. A third of the country’s warehouse workers—700,000 people—work at Amazon facilities preparing the company’s goods for delivery. After her plant closes, Frances McDormand’s character in Nomadland does seasonal stints at Amazon warehouses while she roams the country by van. It’s become a cliché that Amazon is where you go if you want a job that pays more than the minimum, but that any able-bodied person can do.

That’s why it’s so troubling to read the research about how bad Amazon jobs have become. Take the findings of an academic survey released late last year, which drew from a nationally representative sample of Amazon warehouse workers. What comes across clearly is the true cost of getting your packages lightning fast. University of Illinois researchers found that four out of ten warehouse workers have been injured on the job. Half said they feel burnt out. And rather than lightening the load of its warehouse workforce, Amazon’s innovative use of technology appears to be at the root of these problems. Majorities of those reporting injuries or burnout said they felt a sense of pressure to work faster. Two-thirds said they had to take unpaid time off due to pain or exhaustion in the past month—which the study’s researchers link to the company’s algorithm-intensified pace on the floor.

Amazon, the country’s second-largest private employer, is known for paying better than Walmart, the largest, which sustains its low prices and low-wage workforce on a taxpayer-funded raft of tax credits, public health insurance, and food assistance. Because of this somewhat higher pay, Amazon’s warehouses continue to draw “nomads,” young people, and immigrants alike. Yet the frenetic pace of work on the floor breaks down Amazon’s workers physically and mentally, the research finds.

This bleak picture in the company’s warehouses illustrates just how much the livelihoods available to workers with less education have become bad—and not just in terms of poverty wages. Today, Americans are increasingly skeptical about the value of a college degree, pointing to high-paying skilled trades and other licensed occupations as alternatives. Yet the reality for most will look more like Amazon warehouse work: nasty, brutish, and short. That’s because of a decades-long decline in the quality of jobs available to those without college degrees, partly driven by the forms of automation and surveillance technologies that tech giants like Amazon have pioneered. This decline has been central to the cratering well-being of the country’s working class, who disproportionately suffer from the Amazon survey’s two headline findings—pain and burnout.

Over recent decades, the two-thirds of Americans 25 and older who lack bachelor’s degrees have seen their life chances veer away from those of the college-educated. Marriage rates have fallen. “Deaths of despair” caused by drugs, alcohol-related disease, and suicide have spiked. The estimated 100 million Americans in chronic pain largely hail from this group, whose suffering is now peaking in middle age rather than later in life—a trend not seen among the college-educated, or in other rich countries. Scholars have linked these outcomes to dwindling economic prospects. Importantly, the jobs to be had are not just lowly paid. As research has underscored, they have become bad across multiple dimensions—pay, benefits, advancement opportunities, and working conditions. 

Technology was supposed to set workers free. In an automated workplace, machines would do the literal heavy lifting, and the humans would pick up whatever tasks remained. Fewer workers would be needed, but individual workers would be saved from backbreaking labor and exhausting repetition. But that doesn’t seem to be happening in Amazon warehouses. Yes, much work has been automated: Roomba-like robots trundle pods of goods across the floor, while packages glide across a complex network of conveyor belts. But humans are still needed to pick and count the items for packaging, among other things. And here, Amazon’s use of technology isn’t about liberating workers, but disciplining them.

At the company’s fulfillment centers, workers scramble to prepare packages, walking “up to 13 miles a day” and lifting “a total of 20,000 pounds” during each shift, according to a company pamphlet. To keep them moving, Amazon tracks workers whenever they scan goods, penalizing them when they are not scanning. That frenzied pace appears to be taking a toll. In their national scientific sample of Amazon workers, researchers Beth Gutelius and Sanjay Pinto found that half had experienced moderate or severe pain in their leg, knee, or foot in the last three months. Half reported physical exhaustion. Amazon’s algorithmic Taylorism appears to be connected to these problems, with those raising concerns about keeping up and going without breaks more likely to report injuries. 

Christine Manno left a clerical job to work at STL8, an Amazon fulfillment center in the St. Louis area, because she was tired of sitting at a desk. But timed trips through the warehouse to pull dozens of items—each selected by algorithm—left her “exhausted all the time.” “Some of the symptoms are slower to show up,” said Manno, 56, a member of the STL8 Organizing Committee, a group of workers fighting for better pay and conditions and the right to form a union at the warehouse. After a 12-hour shift pulling printer-paper boxes and cat litter from 30-foot-high shelves, her hands would become numb. After two years, her wrists developed stabbing pains and ended up needing surgery.

Of injured Amazon workers, a third said on the survey they had not reported their injury—a quarter of them because of worries they would “face negative consequences.” Survey responses also suggest that the company’s first-aid clinics are delaying and refusing treatment and discouraging workers from seeking outside care, possibly pushing down the injury numbers—which are already much higher than those of other warehouse employers.

Factories, of course, were not particularly safe or enjoyable places to work even when they employed large segments of the working class, as protests over working conditions at auto plants famously highlighted in the 1970s. But that is the problem with today’s bad jobs: they no longer even make up for their misery. As tough as factory life was, workers stayed for the high pay and pensions, which offered realistic hopes for middle-class livelihoods and better prospects for their kids. Nowadays, Amazon has such extreme turnover that a leaked 2022 company memo warned it was running out of workers.

The widespread reports of pain at Amazon also bring to mind the country’s epidemic of chronic pain, which is concentrated among the working class and linked to a mix of socioeconomic factors. Generally speaking, U.S. workplaces have become safer for those with and without college degrees. That said, workers do not have to experience acute injuries to damage their bodies over the long term. Wear and tear now can lead to chronic pain and disability later. It is notable that many injuries disclosed on the Amazon survey were repetitive-motion injuries, which can be slower to emerge and harder to connect to the workplace. 

Of course, Amazon’s hard-driving culture ensures packages get delivered on time. And that’s the underlying reason that working-class jobs are so bad. Without unions or regulators pushing back, low-margin companies have incentives to push their workers—scientifically, algorithmically—to their breaking point. But if this is the work that the country’s largest employers are offering, no wonder so many in the working class are physically and mentally shut down. They just don’t make jobs like they used to.

The post Fear and Loathing in the Fulfillment Center appeared first on In The Fray.

In Riyadh for a business trip, I found myself with a couple of hours to kill. I decided to wander around Al Olaya, the Saudi capital’s commercial core and upscale shopping district. In a gleaming shopping mall surrounding my hotel, I saw familiar brand logos on either side, a glitzy array of high-end storefronts much like those you’d find in any major Western city—except for the stylized Arabic lettering. Eventually, I came across the garish window display of a Victoria’s Secret. There I stopped, amazed.

I had actually lived in Riyadh two decades earlier, having come to Saudi Arabia to work as a physician. At the time, there were no Victoria’s Secret stores to be found. The company’s website was even blocked by the religious authorities. Women could buy lingerie, but they had to do so in a general store—and all the shops back then were staffed exclusively by male attendants (women were not allowed to work in most public spaces). All these prohibitions had made shopping for intimate apparel a singularly humiliating experience.

So much had changed in Saudi Arabia, and it wasn’t just about the overt femininity of a lingerie store. I walked into another familiar Western store, a Louis Vuitton boutique. The fall collection was being displayed—luxury scarves, elegant handbags—much the same as it would be in New York City. The mannequins wore shorts and dresses with bare plastic legs. But what captured my attention were their heads—molded plastic, with detailed facial features. Two decades ago, that depiction of the female form was forbidden. The mannequins back then would have been headless.

I must have looked ever so slightly lunatic in that store, gawking at the mannequins. Soon enough, a store clerk approached me, and we began talking about my impressions of the new Saudi Arabia. A group of attendants—all of them, notably, women—began to gather, curious about my excited chatter. I explained to them that when I lived in Riyadh, the mall had a designated floor just for women, the only place in this mall where we were allowed to shop. Even having that women-only space had been an advance at the time; other malls would only let women shop during restricted hours when men would not be present.

As I told the women about their country’s recent past, I felt like a time traveler speaking of unimaginable sights. All the store clerks were young—not surprising in a country where two-thirds of the population is under thirty. While some of them wore headscarves, others did not. They seemed to find my enthusiasm infectious, and they asked many questions. We ended our impromptu chat with the conclusion that, yes, this was Islam: the freedom for a woman to choose how to observe, to choose how to be.

Since I’ve returned from my trip, I’ve thought often about how much Saudi Arabia has changed—and whether another Muslim country, Iran, might take a similar path. For several months beginning in September, Iran was paralyzed by massive protests unlike any the country had seen since the 1979 revolution. The spark of this explosive rage was the suspicious death of Mahsa Jina Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who had been detained by police for “improperly” wearing her hijab.

As protesters flooded the streets of Tehran and other major cities, social media greatly amplified their voices. RILA Global Consulting tracked Arabic- and English-language tweets in response to Amini’s death across hashtags like #IranRevolution, #IranUprisings, and #MahsaAmini. It counted more than 204 million tweets (a quarter of them in English), almost three times as much as for any other protest last year. In the last quarter of 2022, tweets about Amini accounted for almost half of all posts globally. This flurry of activity on social media went well beyond posts about the street protests, with some young Iranians finding creative ways to publicly express their anger at the theocracy, such as through viral video clips showing them running up to clerics and knocking off their turbans.

Iran promptly tried—and failed—to block access to the Internet during the height of the demonstrations. It was far more successful in quelling dissent on the streets, the brutality of its repression hinting at just how threatened the Iranian state was by the unprecedented uprising. At first, the regime pulled back the morality police from the streets of Tehran, which at the time some commentators reported as a possible concession to the protestors. But the bloodshed only ramped up from there. Ultimately, hundreds died (including dozens of children) and thousands were injured.

The regime has itself admitted to detaining “tens of thousands,” and it executed at least four protesters after what human rights groups described as sham trials. Majidreza Rahnavard, a man in his early twenties accused of fatally stabbing two state militia members, received just one court hearing; in the courtroom, his left arm was wrapped in a plaster cast, raising suspicions he had been tortured. He was later hanged from a crane.

The viciousness of the state’s crackdown was not surprising. The demonstrations drew immediate comparisons to the Arab Spring, the wave of uprisings across the Middle East that unfolded after the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit seller in 2010, ultimately leading to the dismantling of multiple governments. Through a combination of live ammunition, beatings, jailings, and executions, the Iranian regime stamped out the existential threat posed by the street protests.

Nevertheless, the public furor ignited by Amini’s death has raised serious questions about the future of Iran’s authoritarian regime. While there are no signs that the government will reverse any of its repressive policies anytime soon, there were no obvious signs either, back in 2001, that Saudi Arabia was on the path to major reforms in its treatment of women or in the dominance of its hardline religious establishment. But reform came. My recent travels to Saudi Arabia have made me wonder what lessons other Muslim societies anxious for change could draw from the kingdom’s progress over the years in expanding freedoms for its citizens—as much as that struggle still continues.

In 1999, I moved to Saudi Arabia somewhat impulsively. I had just finished my training in New York City as a critical-care physician, and my special immigration visa was about to expire. But I didn’t want to return to England, my country of birth, where I had grown up as the daughter of Muslim Pakistani immigrants. Working in the UK’s struggling National Health Service didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to relocate to a place in need of my skills as an American-trained physician specializing in a technologically advanced field of medicine.

With only three weeks left on my U.S. visa, I found a recruiter hiring for medical positions in the Middle East. I landed a job practicing intensive-care medicine at the Saudi Arabian National Guard Hospital in Riyadh. The paperwork went through quickly, and on Thanksgiving Day I found myself waking up in Riyadh.

The two years I spent in Saudi Arabia were filled with some of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. This is where I built the foundation of my later academic work and became an expert in “Hajj medicine,” developing clinical approaches to tend to the needs of the millions of people worshipping in Mecca during Islam’s annual pilgrimage. Yet my early life in Riyadh was dominated by tense encounters with fundamentalist Islam.

Being a Muslim woman myself, I had expected that the culture shock I would experience in an Islamic country like Saudi Arabia would be mild. At that time, though, the country was dominated by an ultraconservative Sunni Islamic movement that outsiders called Wahhabism, given its roots in the teachings of the eighteenth-century scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. As they are in Iran today, women and girls in the Saudi Arabia of that time were infantilized by the reactionary and puritanical clerics the state had chosen to empower. Wherever women went, however educated they were, they faced restrictions in movement, dress, and action. Most obviously, they were compelled to wear veils in public and denied the right to drive. Even as a non-Saudi, I had to cover my hair in public with a hijab and wear a floor-length abaya (a long black cloak) over my clothing to hide my form, and I too was forbidden to drive.

When I lived there, women and girls in Saudi Arabia could not obtain or renew their passport without the approval of a male guardian—a husband, father, brother, or son. They could go on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca only with a designated male relative, and they needed written permission from their male guardian to travel abroad. My female colleague, a surgeon-in-training, regularly had to obtain such permission from her father to travel overseas to professional meetings in Canada and elsewhere.

During my time in Saudi Arabia, I remember being regularly followed by pairs of religious police, the mutaween, who would admonish me whenever my headscarf inadvertently slipped down. The mutaween would also intercede whenever they saw people of the opposite gender interacting. Mixed gatherings, even in professional settings, were the target of raids. It was unlawful to sit with an unrelated person of the opposite gender in any public space—whether a mall, restaurant, or coffeeshop—and couples who did so might be asked to present their marriage licenses. The religious police took this persecution to a truly ludicrous extent. They once accosted my friend Atef, an Egyptian doctor, when his wife laughed out loud at one of his jokes. After forcing the couple to verify they were married to one another, the officers chastised my friend for causing an unseemly scene.

This infantilization of women extended to basic decisions about their lives. Women could not initiate a divorce (even though Islam permits this), and the law automatically awarded custody to fathers for any children older than seven. As a physician trained in the West, I was shocked to find out that women could not give consent for medical procedures; only their male relations could. At my hospital in Riyadh, I remember once tending to a Saudi woman in critical condition. I was unable to turn to her or any other adult—including older female relatives—for approval to move forward with her care. Instead, her young son—probably eleven or twelve years old—was the only one with the legal authority to make decisions on behalf of his deathly ill mother. I’ve forgotten her specific condition after all these years, but I’ve never forgotten the frightened expression on that small boy’s face as I explained the surgery his mother needed.

The Saudi state’s repression also extended to non-Muslims. I remember the lengths that my Christian colleagues had to go to observe Christmas. In Saudi Arabia then, foreigners could be deported for possessing symbols of other religions, which were forbidden upon entry into the kingdom. Nevertheless, residents of my expatriate compound secretly constructed nativity scenes inside their homes. In the medical center where I worked, some Christian nurses would hide their crucifixes under their clothes. A nurse from London had an exquisite gold crucifix that she had hired a Saudi jeweler to make—illegally—based on another crucifix the nurse had brought—illegally—into the country. I studied her gold cross one evening in the ICU as we worked on a patient together, thinking about how much trust was required to make that holy symbol in secrecy.

Many of my male colleagues—Saudi and non-Saudi—were enormously supportive of me, including my department chair and the hospital CEO, who were forward-thinking leaders and created numerous opportunities for women. But some colleagues were themselves ultraconservative fundamentalists and could not relate to a woman as a peer. Because of them, I felt invisible and silenced at work.

A British-born expatriate with a New Yorker’s brash personality, I quickly grew exasperated with the country’s gender apartheid and institutionalized male supremacy. I tried to tell myself that every new slight would someday make a good after-dinner story (and, indeed, at one point I had so many I wrote a book about it). But I was angry at the puritan overlords who were oppressing women—and, in doing so, often emasculating their menfolk. I was angry that this oppression was performed in the name of Islam, when Islam to me was a source of liberation, free-thinking, and autonomy, including for women and girls.

Two years into my work as a senior physician, I recognized there was no way forward for my career. In Saudi Arabia, I would remain stuck in the same role, however hard I worked. The novelty of being in the kingdom had worn off, and its gender restrictions were feeling increasingly punitive. I missed the diverse cultures of London and New York. I missed movies and books. I missed mixing with friends and colleagues.

I decided to resign. The same day I gave my notice, I came home and switched on the TV to see the World Trade Center on fire. I watched the first tower collapse and a second plane impale the other tower.

As for many people, the terrorist attacks of September 11 changed the course of my life. Within my personal and professional circles, I found myself continually asking myself the same two questions: What forces are driving Muslims to commit terror? And how can this cycle be broken? In the years ahead, I would become a fierce critic of Islamism, a form of political totalitarianism with twentieth-century roots in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood that masquerades as my religion of Islam. Six weeks after 9/11, I left Saudi Arabia with a new sense of purpose—believing in my heart that nothing would change in the country I was leaving, so set was it in its fundamentalist ways.

Around that time, the prominent British department store Harvey Nichols had just opened a branch in Riyadh. I remember visiting one evening very excited to look at the make-up section—an extraordinary offering in those days. But trying on lipstick in public was taboo. Considerately, Harvey Nichols had set up a private room where women could safely apply their make-up, without Saudi men—including the religious police—looking on.

Weeks into the Iranian protests, I visited Saudi Arabia in October as a guest of the Muslim World League to meet its secretary general, Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa. Headquartered in Mecca but not part of the Saudi government, the Muslim World League is a humanitarian NGO and the largest organizational humanitarian body representing the Muslim world, with representatives from every Muslim-majority nation and territory serving on its supreme council. Al-Issa had heard of my televised appearances challenging some of the Western criticism of the kingdom. Interested in what I had to say, the Muslim World League invited me to Riyadh for a conversation with its leader and a tour of the new Saudi Arabia.

This trip was the first time I’d been to the country since 2010. My first clue about all the changes that had occurred was the security personnel at the airport in Riyadh. I had never seen Saudi women serving as police officers and soldiers before. As the passengers in my line were searched, I could see both how different things were now—having women in such positions of authority had previously been unthinkable in the kingdom—and how much cultural conservatism remained—security guards exclusively searched people of the same gender.

In Riyadh, I was immediately struck by the greater visibility of women in public spaces. They moved freely on the city streets. While most of the women I saw were modestly dressed, I saw some in knee-length sundresses, their legs bare. Others wore skinny jeans, tank tops, and midriff-baring outfits. Many did not wear any head coverings, and those who did adopted diverse styles of veiling—from niqabs that concealed all but the eyes, to token scarves (like the one I wore during much of my visit) that were more accessories than anything else. What coverings I saw were often elaborately printed and brightly colored.

The scene on Riyadh’s streets was so much more vibrant than what I had experienced even a decade earlier. The ubiquitous black cloaks that had once enshrouded the city’s women were all but gone. Patrols of religious police—before a common sight—were nowhere to be seen. In stores, women workers served women shoppers. And astoundingly, women were driving cars—a basic right that had been denied until 2018. Women friends drove me around Riyadh unchaperoned. One of my male friends apologized for picking me up in his wife’s car—his was in the shop—and politely ignored my visible shock. Yes, Saudi women had long owned cars—to be driven by their male chauffeurs—but to have cars of their own that they actually drove on the city’s streets?

Curious, I asked my driver one day to let me take his car for a brief spin. It took him a while to understand that I was asking him to step out of the driver’s seat and into the passenger seat, and he seemed simultaneously entertained and anxious about my ability to handle the steering wheel. As for me, driving for the first time on streets I knew well was the most surreal moment of my trip. It felt like driving on the moon.

As part of my tour, I visited the Ministry of Defense’s Strategic Center for Intellectual Warfare, which seeks to study and combat extremism. There, I was struck by how the public relations team was comprised wholly of women, who delivered their presentations to gender-mixed audiences from a stage—some wearing niqabs, others in hijabs. Through my own initiative, I also arranged a visit to the newsroom of the Arab News, one of the Middle East’s most highly regarded English-language newspapers. Noor Nugali, a senior editor, met with me and ended up assigning a piece I pitched to the opinion editor, Lojien Ben Gassem Abdulfattah. Both women were not just accomplished Saudi journalists, but they were also helping drive public discourse in the kingdom and beyond.

Over the rest of my ten-day stay in Saudi Arabia, I moved freely across the country—this time, carrying my own passport. (Today, women in Saudi Arabia can travel without the permission of a male guardian, and they can travel alone on pilgrimages.) I spent a day in Mecca performing the umrah, the lesser, non-obligatory pilgrimage. Soon after dawn prayers, I set off for Medina, the second-holiest city in Islam, where I planned to worship at the Prophet’s Mosque. Back in 2010, I had made the same trip from Mecca to Medina by car, a grueling three-hundred-mile drive that had ended with a female guard at the mosque turning me away because I had lacquer on my nails. This time, the high-speed rail took me to Medina in barely two hours, and I entered the mosque—the location of the Prophet Muhammad’s tomb—without any comment on my (still manicured) nails.

As I prayed in the small, highly sacred enclave known as Rawdah Al Shareifah (the Garden of Eden), I noticed the women around me were Pakistani. They spoke in Punjabi and seemed to be from a rural part of the country, based on their dress and colloquialisms. I surmised that they were Shia Muslims, given how they sometimes prayed in the direction of the Tomb of the Prophet rather than toward Mecca. This was noteworthy. Saudi society had repressed the religious freedoms of Shia Muslims when I had lived in Saudi Arabia, in line with the exclusionary tendencies of ultraorthodox Sunni Wahhabism. Even native-born Shia Muslims had been forced to conceal their faith lest they face discrimination in the workplace or suspicions about their loyalty to Saudi Arabia. While the kingdom continues to restrict Shia practice—among other things, it still outlaws the building of Shia mosques except in one of the country’s thirteen provinces—it recently lifted restrictions on publishing and distributing Shia religious materials. Prominent Shia clerics like Sheikh Hassan al-Saffar now speak publicly in defense (and sometimes even self-criticism) of the country’s Shia minority, about 12 percent of the Saudi population. And there is fresh hope that sectarian strife will diminish further, given the agreement that Saudi Arabia and Iran reached in March to resume diplomatic ties—which were officially severed seven years earlier after the kingdom’s execution of a high-profile Shia cleric.

At restaurants, complete strangers—men and women—would learn that I was from America and come up to talk to me. They wanted to know what I thought of their country. They also asked me what was wrong with America. They noted that crime was rising there, and they also expressed concerns about pro-LBGTQ content on streaming services like Netflix, especially in programs geared toward young children.

That was one side of the new Saudi Arabia’s take on gender and sexuality. At the Riyadh Boulevard, a massive entertainment complex, I saw another. There, I spotted a teenage Saudi girl in combat pants and pigtails learning to skateboard by herself. She looked like any American teen, and I was struck by the confidence she exuded. Again and again, she fell, and again and again, she got back up on her board. After seeing her take several hard spills, an older Saudi boy politely asked if she wanted some tips. Agog, I watched the girl skate with the boy’s help as her mother and sister cheered her on.

What had changed in Saudi Arabia over the past few decades? A report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace describes how the reforms began with King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who ruled from 2005 to 2015. He and his successor King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud took measured steps to marginalize religious hardliners and roll back fundamentalist policies. Those efforts have expanded under the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (widely referred to as “MBS”), who succeeded his father as prime minister last year and is now considered the country’s de facto ruler. In 2021, MBS appeared to make a definitive break with the country’s puritanical past, publicly stating that Saudi Arabia was no longer “committed blindly” to any “certain school or scholar.”

For their part, the authors of the Carnegie report on Saudi Arabia are cautious about reading too much into these recent shifts in power away from the kingdom’s religious hardliners. “Because these alterations amount to reshufflings rather than redesigns, they may be reversible or may simply be the endgame in themselves,” scholars Yasmine Farouk and Nathan J. Brown write. “There have been some suggestions of marginalizing but no frontal assault on Wahhabi teachings; long-standing structures have survived, apparently immune and adapting to existential challenges, at least for now. Nothing is being wholly dismantled, but everything is being changed.”

My own view is that the changes are more deeply rooted. Long before 9/11, Saudi Arabia itself had been victimized by Islamist violence, including a 1995 car bombing at a national guard facility and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing—two of al Qaeda’s earliest acts of terror. Rocked by 9/11 and the key roles that Saudi nationals had played in the attacks, the kingdom took steps to strangle terror-related financing and root out violent Islamist operatives, even as domestic terrorism continued to rage (including a 2003 attack in Riyadh that killed thirty-five and injured hundreds, many of whom were treated by my former hospital colleagues). In more recent years, the government’s crackdown has extended to stamping out Islamist ideology, with the shutting down of madrassahs and other religious organizations with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood (itself designated as a terrorist organization in Saudi Arabia), the banning of Muslim Brotherhood educational materials and libraries, and the development of school curricula to combat such ideas.

The overreach of the religious police eventually prodded the government to act on this other form of domestic extremism as well. The tipping point was arguably a 2002 fire at a girls’ school in Makkah. Religious police on the scene forbade students in the burning building from leaving without their veils. That decision was blamed for the subsequent deaths of fifteen girls and triggered widespread horror and outrage. As public sentiment turned against the religious police, the administration of King Abdullah cracked down, greatly curtailing their power. In 2017, the religious police were finally disbanded.

The Carnegie report singles out Al-Issa, the Muslim World League’s secretary general, as one of the Saudi leaders most responsible for moderating the country’s approach to religion. Before the crown prince appointed him to that role as well as a spot on the Council of Senior Scholars, the kingdom’s governing religious body, Al-Issa had already distinguished himself as a progressive reformer, filling court benches with centrist Islamic jurists when he previously served as the country’s minister of justice. A trusted advisor of the crown prince, Al-Issa has led the regime’s efforts over the last several years to denounce the extremism of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations.

As an internationally recognized advocate for moderate Islamic perspectives, Al-Issa has become particularly known for his interfaith outreach. In 2020, the seventh-fifth anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, he became the most senior Muslim cleric to bring a delegation to the concentration camp. There, he led Islamic prayers, bowing and prostrating in supplication on the ground of Auschwitz and acknowledging the Holocaust as a crime against humanity.

Al-Issa has hosted Christian, Jewish, and Hindu religious leaders in Saudi Arabia and addressed major evangelical Christian gatherings in the United States. He has met with Pope Francis and signed a bilateral memorandum of understanding—the first such agreement between the Muslim World League and the Vatican. And last Christmas, he publicly stated that Muslims were not violating any tenet of Islam by wishing their Christian friends and acquaintances season’s greetings at Christmastime—a seemingly innocuous statement that drew a backlash from hardliners, but that Al-Issa robustly defended with reference to scripture.

Importantly, Al-Issa has also made a number of bold public statements rejecting the use of violence in the name of Islam—including inside Israel. For instance, during the Islamic Hajj pilgrimage last year, he delivered its key sermon, the address from Mount Arafat, in which he called for unity among Muslims and emphasized Islam’s humanitarian values. (The sermon prompted a firestorm of criticism, with Qatari social media even labeling him a “Zionist.”) As a sign of his organization’s commitment to nonviolence, last fall Al-Issa unveiled a replica of the Knotted Gun, the Swedish sculptor Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd’s iconic symbol of nonviolence, as the centerpiece of the Muslim World League’s gardens in Riyadh.

When I met with Al-Issa, I covered my hair during our meeting as a show of respect to his religious office, but no one told me to do so—as would have been mandatory in the Saudi Arabia I’d previously known. When we stood for a group photo, the organization’s photographers politely asked me to wear my hair as I typically appear in public.

The staff joining us were all women, and I learned that one of Al-Issa’s senior advisors, Haya Al Jadouah (who had been responsible for my invitation to visit with Al-Issa), had received all her education—including her doctorate in digital media communications—in Saudi Arabia. At the time I had lived there, there had been few medical schools or residency and fellowship programs, and what institutions of higher education existed had been dominated by religious studies. Most of the Saudi doctors I met then had studied internationally. It seemed that the secular educational system that had trained Al Jadouah had been assembled from scratch over the last two decades.

When we finally sat down to talk, I was struck by how candid Al-Issa was about his fears of a religious war between Ukraine and Russia. Holding his head in his hands, he despaired that two Christian nations—Russia and Ukraine—were so casually using the language of martyrdom and holy war to describe their conflict. After all, along with Pakistan and the United States, Saudi Arabia had been a patron of the mujahideen—the ultraorthodox Islamist fighters who had beaten back the Soviet Union in Afghanistan—and the kingdom later paid a bloody price for that support, as the mujahideen’s austere fundamentalism became the template for violent Islamist groups across the region and eventually the world. To me it seemed that Al-Issa—entirely Saudi in origin, education and practice—had internalized the lessons of that disastrous history of violence.

The prominence of moderate religious leaders like Al-Issa in today’s Saudi Arabia speaks to the discreet and pragmatic approach that Saudi rulers have taken in recent years to rein in the country’s fundamentalism. Rather than seeking to dismantle the religious machine outright, Crown Prince MBS (and before him, King Salman) empowered progressive Saudi theologians like Al-Issa and diversified the country’s schools of Islamic thought. They kept some of the older ultraconservatives but diluted their influence by consulting with them less often. As the Carnegie report concludes, MBS’s eventual public break with a “blind” commitment to Wahhabism in 2021 “fits with the Saudi monarchy’s practice of creating parallel institutions, religious interpretations, and (in this case) religious leaders to compete with and eventually replace the old ones, without explicitly discrediting their predecessors.”

Given this subtle approach, it is no wonder that many people in the West have been unaware of all the reforms that have transpired in Saudi Arabia over the past decade and a half. Saudi Arabia has maintained Islam at the center of the state, but its rulers have deftly weakened and delegitimized the extremist clerics who once wielded such total power over the Saudi people. For that reason, I am more hopeful than the Carnegie scholars are that the reforms launched by King Abdullah, continued by King Salman, and accelerated by Crown Prince MBS will be permanent. The fundamentalists have been defanged, and all the changes in Islamic jurisprudence and legal codes mean there is no turning back, even if pockets of hardline resistance and resentment remain.

This is not to say that Saudi Arabia has become a liberal state in the Western mold. The diplomatic tensions between the United States and Saudi Arabia over the assassination of the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi speaks to the gulf that still exists. (Western intelligence agencies allege the assassination was personally authorized by MBS, which he denies. Under Islamic law, a wrongful death must be legally compensated with damages, and the crown prince—who has acknowledged that the atrocity occurred “under his watch”—has rendered such payments to the family in Riyadh, who accepted them.) Wherever I went on my last year visit to Saudi Arabia, the Khashoggi incident would come up, along with concerns about how U.S. president Joe Biden had made Saudi Arabia a “pariah“ in response to the assassination.

It is important to recognize that Saudi culture is deeply defined by honor, and many Saudis sees the horrific butchering of Khashoggi—much like the shamefully homegrown origins of al-Qaeda—as permanent stains on that honor. At the same time, the liberal-minded Saudis I talked to were frustrated by how the West has sought to isolate the country following the assassination, even as Saudi Arabia has taken such bold steps in recent years to put forward a mature and moderate Islam and show openness not only to its citizens but also to the outside world. It comes across as hypocritical, too, for the West to talk about human-rights atrocities in Saudi Arabia when there has been no accountability for the costs of its colonial interventions throughout the Muslim world. Indeed, a recent Brown University report estimates that over 4.5 million people have died in the “post-9/11 war zones of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen”—some in combat, but many more due to infectious diseases, malnutrition, and toxins unfurled by war and worsened by the ruined public health infrastructures in each country.

Sadly, the West nowadays is exerting pressure on a country that has made determined efforts to reform—Saudi Arabia—while doing little where its influence could be more decisive—Iran. Months into the protests—after the killings of hundreds of protestors—the United States finally drafted a resolution to expel Iran from the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. In early December the U.S. and Canada announced the sanctioning of three Iranian officials said to be involved in the detention of protestors. Canada went further, banning about 10,000 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps from entering the country.

What accounts for the West’s tepid policy response in the wake of such a dramatic pro-democracy uprising by the Iranian people? Perhaps Western governments felt they had little ability to influence what was happening in Iran beyond sanctions and other measures already in place. A more cynical take—one that resonated inside Iran—was that countries that relied on oil from Iran, one of the world’s top petroleum producers even with existing sanctions, had no interest in confronting its repressive regime, especially when their economies were already facing inflationary pressures in the wake of the Covid pandemic and war in Ukraine. In any case, in comparison to the near-unanimous Western support for Ukraine after Russia invaded it, which included providing arms and ammunition to Ukrainian forces, the international response to Iran’s protests was largely symbolic.

Exhibitions in the European parliament honored protesters killed by Iranian authorities. Social media feeds featured celebrities cutting their hair in solidarity with Iranian women. In New York, where I live, a well-intentioned NGO worked with artists to put on “Eyes on Iran,” an exhibition of works by Iranian and Iranian American photographers. Reading about it reminded me of the emotions I felt when I saw an exhibition featuring the photography of Steve McCurry in Paris last summer. The centerpiece was McCurry’s iconic image of a green-eyed Afghani girl, Sharbat Gula, presented alongside a portrait of her two decades later, tragically weathered by the hardship of her life. As powerful as this sort of art can be, I also remember the self-revulsion I felt as I took the images in. The Taliban had just returned to power, and girls and women were once again living under fundamentalist oppression. Here I was, a privileged woman living in the West, standing in an impeccably lit exhibition hall and observing, glamorously, a community’s suffering from a distance. And now we were collectively doing the same thing with Iran: hosting exhibitions on Iranian anguish while tolerating their oppressors on the international stage.

It is also important to note that the situation in Iran is not merely a matter of civil strife, but has numerous geopolitical ramifications. For example, one underreported angle of the protests is how they were sparked by the death of a Kurdish Iranian woman. The Kurds are the world’s largest diaspora that has been denied nationhood. They fight for independence in Turkey. They carve out autonomous, but internationally unrecognized, enclaves in Syria. They share power in Iraq (where I have met frequently with Kurdish leaders) and have played a vital role in beating back the Islamic State. In Iran, however, Kurds remain a highly persecuted minority.

Their marginalized status was reflected in international news reports, which often reduced the Iranian protests to a simplistic struggle for freedom for Iran’s women and girls. The ethnic identity of Amini—who hailed from Saqquez, a Kurdish province in northwestern Iran—received little interest, even though for her Kurdish Iranian community, the uprising in her name was something much more: a fight for the right to their identity, language, and culture within a repressive Iranian Islamist theocracy. Meanwhile, the Farsi translation of “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi”—a Kurdish phrase coined by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) inside Turkey and widely used to show solidarity across the diaspora—became a rallying cry for a protest movement by ethnic Iranians on behalf of Iranian democracy, an “erasure” of its ties to the fight for Kurdish self-determination and statehood.

In spite of the many human rights arguments on behalf of regime change in Iran, international support was minimal during the protests. After two decades of using its military to pursue a fantasy of installing liberal democracies in its own image across the Middle East, the United States clearly had no stomach for further entanglements in the region. And even though it has poured tens of billions of dollars into assistance for the Ukrainian people in their struggle against Russia, it would not do the same to empower the Iranian people to achieve regime change themselves. “It is amazing that the lesson so many Americans have taken from the wrong actions of the past is to choose inaction,” the Iranian American poet Roya Hakakian said in a December interview. “History has shown us that inaction can be as damaging as wrong action, and a sin equally as great.” In their meetings with U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken and other Biden administration officials during the protests, Hakakian and other activists made the case that America could be providing useful assistance even short of arms. For instance, satellite phones and Internet service would help protesters coordinate with each other and mobilize on the streets in spite of the regime’s efforts to curb online access and shut down social-media platforms.

Nothing of the sort happened, however, and the protests died out, put down by the government’s ruthless crackdown. To pay tribute to the regime’s victims, the Iranian musician Shervin Hajipour wrote the song “Baraye” (“For the Sake of”), which became a global anthem for the protests. Those who died, Hajipour sings, merely wanted a “zendagi ma’mouli”—an ordinary life. The word “zendagi” carries the same meaning in Farsi and Urdu, my mother tongue. Months later, the song still makes me tear up.

Now that the protests seem to be over, what hope is there of an eventual overthrow of Iran’s hardline theocratic government? In my view, Saudi Arabia provides a roadmap for those who hope to escape fundamentalism and Islamist extremism. When I lived in the kingdom two decades ago, it seemed unimaginable that the status quo would ever change. But things did change, with time. The reforms came largely without bloodshed or major upheaval, and they appear to be deeply rooted, enjoying widespread public support and reaching far into the ranks of the country’s clerical leadership.

The Iranian protests have already shown how much the first condition of grassroots societal change—popular will—is already a reality. During the months of turmoil, Iranians from many regions of the country unified across lines of class, gender, and profession to express their outrage, their words and actions underscoring a shared nationhood and dignity and common culture and history. Even if the demonstrations have ended for now, the fact that Iran is potentially an economic powerhouse with a central position in the world’s petroleum economy—unlike other pariah nations like Afghanistan and North Korea—suggests that, like Saudi Arabia, it will not be able to keep its population repressed and infantilized for too much longer.

Yet it is hard to see how the country’s ruling theocrats will be shaken from power without some sort of intervention from the top. In Saudi Arabia’s case, the brave and daring dissidents who protested the kingdom’s fundamentalist policies over the decades created an urgency for reform and made people aware of the extent of the repression. Many Saudi dissidents remain imprisoned to this day, another sign of the limits of the monarchy’s policies of openness. But as I described earlier, marginalizing the country’s Islamist clerics required a movement from above as well as one from below—a political vise that eventually crushed the ultraconservative orthodoxy of the old guard.

As for pressure from the international community, it played a more minor role in kindling Saudi Arabia’s reforms than we overseas observers might like to think. In fact, I would argue that the impetus for change came less from outside hectoring about the kingdom’s human rights record and more from the country’s own shame and suffering about its role in nurturing the violent Islamist extremism that led to al-Qaeda and 9/11. Likewise, the most effective weapons employed against the kingdom’s religious hardliners were not arms supplied by foreign powers, but the potent ideological antidotes available within Islam itself.

Dissidents in Iran need to cultivate their own Al-Issas: liberal and pluralist-minded clerics waiting to be empowered and legitimized, who could dilute the repressive form of Islam that now holds sway. This is work that will span decades. And it will likely require more than street demonstrations, as hopeful, courageous, and inspiring as they are. As many of the protesters themselves recognize, they need international support to go any further, and that support will continue to be improbable under current geopolitical conditions.

The Iranian regime must realize the global clout it now wields amid jittery energy markets and persistent inflation. It has been nimble in managing international sanctions so far, and once the moribund Iran deal runs into its 2025 sunset provisions, Western nations in search of cheaper oil may not be willing to put up further resistance. Furthermore, Iran recently signed a twenty-five-year deal with Venezuela, home to the world’s largest oil reserves. Iran will share its refining technology, expertise, and distillate in exchange for Venezuelan crude. Not only are the Iranian regime’s economic prospects looking brighter, but it seems to have shored up some of its other vulnerabilities, too. For instance, in addition to the recent détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the long-running civil war in Yemen—widely seen as a proxy war between the two regional powers—appears to be ending. These developments will ease the external pressures being placed on Iran’s theocracy, allowing it to focus on suppressing its internal enemies.

In short, Iran’s geopolitical position seems sound, and internally, I still do not see the political and social conditions that would allow for major reforms in the treatment of women and the overturning of Islamist ideology. Indeed, while Saudi Arabia has slowly but steadily pulled itself out of extremism after 9/11, Iran’s fundamentalism and totalitarianism have only deepened.

Recently, I shared my thoughts about the parallels between Saudi Arabia and Iran with a Los Angeles-based Iranian activist I know. After listening to my hopeful scenarios of possible Saudi-like reforms in Iran, he sounded a cautionary note: “We had eighty years of liberal reforms in Iran, but the extremists were always there.… They had never gone away.” He urged me to read about Reza Shah Pahlavi, the first leader of the Imperial State of Iran, who was succeeded by his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah ousted in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Born Reza Khan, the first shah was an officer in Iran’s Cossack Brigade when he and his supporters seized power in 1921. Over the next two decades, he instituted ambitious infrastructure programs and sweeping educational, military, and economic reforms, building the foundation for the modern Iranian state. Much like Saudi Arabia’s recent rulers, Reza Shah sought to rouse the country’s national identity as a way of bridging its numerous tribal, ethnic, and provincial divisions. And like King Salman and MBS, he pursued policies of pluralism and openness. He reformed the judiciary along the lines of France’s multi-tiered secular system. He expanded schooling for both boys and girls. And he marginalized the reactionary clergy, surrounding himself instead with forward-thinking advisors—many trained at Western institutions.

However, Reza Shah’s reform agenda faltered as his rule became increasingly autocratic. His regime tightly controlled the press, maintaining a state monopoly on radio broadcasting to push its propaganda. It rigged elections for the shah’s favored candidates and imprisoned would-be challengers. During World War II, the Allied Powers grew impatient with Reza Shah’s corrupt and ineffectual regime and forced him to abdicate. His son succeeded him, but by then, a reactionary tide was forming. As the historian Shaul Bakhash writes in The Fall of Reza Shah, the first shah had not yet secured the “institutions, political practices, and habits of mind” that could have carried Iran toward a lasting democratic pluralism. Crucially, Reza Shah’s top-down approach in transforming Iranian society had meant that there was a lack of grassroots support for his reforms. The fundamentalists reemerged and rolled back decades of liberalization.

Could the same thing happen in Saudi Arabia? I’ve thought about that a great deal since learning more about the reversals of Iran’s own reforms. I can’t help but think, too, of the documentary images I’ve seen of a dazzling Kabul in the time before war and fundamentalist rule, or Latif Al Ani’s poignant photographs of a cosmopolitan Baghdad in the time before autocracy and anarchy. Cynics would say that the scenes I witnessed in Riyadh are just a brief interlude before another descent into puritanism. Perhaps Iran will be the model for Saudi Arabia rather than the reverse. Perhaps the “oil for security” bargain that has tied together the kingdom and the United States for eight decades will unravel, and without sufficient pressure not to be a “pariah,” Saudi Arabia will return to its theocratic past.

I do not share this view. The reforms are just too deeply woven into the social, political, legal, and economic fabric of the new Saudi Arabia. When it comes to the liberalization of recent years, the kingdom is all in. That said, I see how Saudi Arabia is adapting to new geopolitical realities. The United States is experiencing an unprecedented contraction in global influence, and Saudi Arabia is nimbly pivoting eastwards, with a nod to the emerging multipolar world order. China has avidly courted Saudi Arabia, recognizing it as a central player in the region, and Saudi Arabia, in turn, no longer views itself as dependent on the protection of a sole superpower. Meanwhile, a recent Gallup poll of 13 Muslim-majority nations found that Saudi Arabia’s leadership has a substantially higher approval rating than Iran’s (39 percent versus 14 percent). Much of the Muslim world apparently prefers governments that prioritize individual freedom and economic stability, both of which are necessary for self-actualization.

For all these reasons, I am hopeful about the staying power of Saudi Arabia’s reforms and the long-term prospects for democracy in Iran. And I am optimistic, too, about the future of Islam. Over these last two decades, I have made it my personal mission to understand violent extremism and learn how to combat it. My efforts have taken me across four continents to meet victims of genocide and talk to rehabilitated jihadists and the professionals who work with them. In New York, I continue to work with survivors of the September 11 terrorist attacks at my NYU Langone office, where we treat the long-term sleep disorders they have suffered ever since the horror of that day. Across my work in medicine and activism, my faith has always inspired me to reject extremism and violence and embrace freedom and compassion.

My belief is that this face of Islam—the true Islam—will eventually gain ground in countries like Iran, as it has in Saudi Arabia. The fanaticism that animates the Iranian theocrats who execute, maim, and silence their opposition needs to be pushed aside, and sooner or later leaders will rise up to do just that. Iran’s street protests may have been stifled for now, but sooner or later new voices will rise up to continue them. Let us hope that when they do, all the pieces will be in place to put an end to Iran’s fundamentalism, bloodlessly and decisively.

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To put it bluntly, the past few years have been exhausting. That’s been all the more true for the African American community, which has suffered not only a disproportionate number of Covid deaths, but also high-profile killings at the hands of police and White nationalists. Since the pandemic began in 2020, I’ve found myself particularly isolated because of an autoimmune illness, which has made leaving home especially risky and taken away my ability to travel internationally—an outlet I’d relied upon in the past whenever anti-Black racism had gotten to me.

When the lockdowns were at their worst, and Black death seemed everywhere, Hollywood didn’t offer much of a respite—shows and films like Lovecraft Country, Underground, and Antebellum still hit too close to home. Browsing on Netflix one night, I came across Chocolate, a Korean drama about a chef who falls in love with a neurosurgeon. As a child, the doctor dreamed of becoming a professional chef himself, and the two bond over their passion for cooking. At a time when Covid was raging unchecked across the country, this foreign-language tearjerker set in a hospice ward connected deeply with me, helping me to mourn the thousands dying every day. I was hooked. After that first taste, I dove deeply into the catalog of South Korean dramas now available on online streaming platforms. Since then, I’ve become a devoted fan.

In recent years, “K-dramas” have steadily gained a foothold among American audiences, riding a larger “Korean wave” of wildly popular K-pop musical groups like BTS and Blackpink and celebrated Korean filmmakers like Bong Joon-ho (director of the Academy Award-winning 2019 film Parasite). You can see this trend as yet another sign of globalization: the growing interconnectedness of the world’s markets and cultures. As singularly dominant as Hollywood has been over the past century, creators in other countries are increasingly able and eager to get their homegrown work shown widely in global media markets. The flow of blockbuster pop culture is no longer so one-way.

As someone tired of hearing the same stories from American shows and movies, I’ve found it refreshing to see Korean (and Nigerian and Brazilian) perspectives on TV. At the same time, the surging popularity of K-dramas has brought with it a host of concerns about representation and historical accuracy, as recent controversies underscore.

Kdramas have been a global phenomenon for years, with massive fanbases in societies as linguistically and culturally diverse as India, China, and the Philippines. A fledgling market for these shows finally emerged in the U.S. thanks to Dramafever, a popular streaming service that launched in 2009. After Dramafever shut down in 2018, Netflix helped popularize K-dramas among its increasingly global selection of titles. Then came Squid Game. The spectacular success of the 2021 survival drama—which became Netflix’s top-viewed program in 94 countries and remains its largest series launch—highlighted just how mainstream these Korean shows have become across cultures.

K-dramas tackle your typical genre fare—serial-killer crime procedurals, romantic comedies, soap operas, period dramas—usually across a sixteen-episode arc. However, the period dramas (sageuks) tend to focus on the Joseon era, the five centuries when Korea’s last dynasty ruled. And in the overly theatrical melodramas (makjangs), characters are inexplicably at risk of being hit in the face with fermented cabbage—as part of the trope known as the “kimchi-slap.” 

While clearly there’s a lot of cultural context that non-Korean viewers will miss in these shows, I’ve found the stories easy to relate to. Perhaps it helps that I was raised by Nigerian immigrants; as a U.S.-born ada, or eldest daughter in an Igbo family, I see many similarities in the ways that the Korean characters on screen understand age as a status marker and observe rites to honor their ancestors, yet also uphold patriarchy through a preference for sons. I know how hard it is to fulfill your personal needs and desires when you’re part of a community that prioritizes the collective over the individual. And I can understand the great lengths that the characters in K-dramas go to save face—like them, I come from a culture where you always represent not just yourself, but your entire family and ancestry line.

With all the recent debates over cultural appropriation and representation in American entertainment, it’s also been fascinating to hear—thankfully, as a detached outsider—about the controversies that have raged around hit K-dramas. Sometimes, the furor has had a geopolitical dimension. China has unofficially banned K-dramas (along with K-pop bands and other Korean media) since 2016, when Seoul agreed to deploy a U.S.-made missile defense system that Beijing opposed. In turn, Korean audiences have lashed out whenever their TV shows have appeared to side with China in a larger nationalist debate over whether aspects of Korean culture originated across the Yellow Sea. For example, the 2021 K-drama Joseon Exorcist was canceled after only a few episodes due to controversies over its use of Chinese props and alleged historical inaccuracies. Another recent show, Mr. Queen, faced a backlash when its origins in a Chinese novel and web drama came to light. The outrage has been particularly intense whenever Chinese brands have tried to hawk their versions of traditional Korean dishes like bibimbap through the product placements rampant in many K-dramas.

Not surprisingly, the focus of some K-drama storylines has been the fractured relationship between North and South Korea, divided after a bloody civil war where the U.S. and China sat on opposing sides. The 2019–20 series Crash Landing on You follows a wealthy South Korean socialite who accidentally paraglides across the demilitarized zone and meets a North Korean army captain who helps her hide; romance ensues. A hit in South Korea that was subsequently picked up by Netflix, the show drew both praise and criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of North Koreans. (For their part, North Korean state media savaged the show’s creators as “human rubbish.”)

Earlier this year, Disney released the K-drama Snowdrop on its streaming service. Another series with a contentious take on North–South relations, Snowdrop takes place in 1987, a pivotal year in South Korea’s slow transition from dictatorship to democracy. Even before its release, Snowdrop was criticized for depicting a romance between a South Korean college student (played by K-pop idol Jisoo of Blackpink, in her TV debut) and a North Korean spy disguised as a graduate student. Critics pointed out that during this period of authoritarian rule in South Korea—shortly after democratic elections and a student uprising triggered a violent government crackdown—democracy activists were routinely labeled as North Korean spies and tortured. The show also seemed to imply that the return to democracy involved a compromise with North Korea, which critics said downplayed the important role that student activists played in clamoring for change. Another issue was the name of Jisoo’s character, Young-cho, which happened to be the name of a prominent activist in the real-life student movement.

A Korean civic association sued to put a halt to Snowdrop, and a petition asking the country’s president to intervene garnered over 300,000 signatures—not bad for a country of fifty million. In response to the criticism, the show’s producers reshot several episodes and changed the name of Jisoo’s character. Ultimately, a Seoul court threw out the court case, and Snowdrop continued airing on Korean TV, ending on a high note. Nevertheless, the controversy prompted Disney to postpone the show’s October worldwide release on its streaming service by several months.

Even as Korean producers have become savvy—perhaps too savvy—about how China perceives their content, they still have a lot to learn about what Western viewers find offensive or troubling. Recently, I was watching Twenty-Five Twenty-One, a K-drama about a romantically entangled group of friends, one of whom goes off to work as a television reporter in New York. To make a lighthearted reference to the main character spotting her love interest on TV, the show inexplicably used on-the-ground and reenacted footage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, including disturbing images of people fleeing the area or lying injured in hospitals. A bubbly romantic comedy suddenly leapt off its tracks and veered into historical trauma, leaving me whiplashed and in tears.

As much as I find watching Korean TV to be an escape from the fraught race relations in my own country, at times these issues have crept into K-dramas, too. The 2020 show Backstreet Rookie (a recent addition to Netflix’s catalog) was heavily criticized not only for depicting a high school girl in a sexualized way, but also for peddling in Jamaican stereotypes—namely, through a character who did not bathe and pulled an insect out of his fake dreadlocks. In 2021, the K-drama Penthouse sparked an online firestorm when one of its characters appeared in blackface. That unnecessary plot point was especially cringeworthy given that several of the show’s stars had just appeared in the United Nations #livetogether social media campaign against racism.

If sometimes I can be disappointed by the occasional moments of anti-Blackness and nativism in Korean media, at other times I feel heartened by how many Black women and other women of color are vocal fans on social media. After I started watching K-dramas, I started looking around for other people who wanted to talk about them, which eventually led me to a podcast hosted by three Brown women based in the U.S., the UK, and India: Dramas over Flowers, a nod to the iconic K-drama Boys over Flowers. I immediately took a liking to the hosts’ way of mixing together fangirling and critical analysis—the latter based on their many years of watching and writing about K-dramas. (Recently, co-host Anisa Khalifa appeared on the NPR show 1A to talk about the growing popularity of these shows.)

It turns out that women of color play key roles in online communities devoted to Korean media. For instance, one of the largest K-drama fan clubs is run by a group of women in the United States and Canada—most of whom happen to be Black. With over 12,000 followers on Clubhouse (an audio-based social media app), the K-Dramatics Club has hosted watch parties for hit dramas, held Q&As with people in the Korean entertainment industry, and created game shows to quiz members on K-drama trivia. Last year, the K-Dramatics received a shoutout in a Teen Vogue piece (along with their “sister” club, the K-Pop Kickback) for creating fandom spaces where people were free not just to gush over their favorite K-drama but also to discuss anti-Black stereotyping and other problematic material in Korean media.

If the content first lured me down the K-drama rabbit hole, the community has kept me coming back. During the lockdowns, the K-Dramatics Club regularly organized chat rooms on Clubhouse. On an otherwise dreary Christmas in 2020, Dramas over Flowers hosted a special Zoom session for their listeners. These communal events helped ease my loneliness during the bleakest moments of the pandemic.

A good story is a good story, no matter where it comes from, and I’m glad that today’s audiences are more open than ever to cross cultural boundaries for their content. It may have taken longer than other forms of globalization, but it seems that a growing share of the things we watch—much like the things we buy—now come from creators abroad. Yet there is an important distinction to be made here. By design, a foreign-made toaster or T-shirt doesn’t usually bear conspicuous marks of that other culture. That’s not the case for entertainment. K-dramas are distinctively Korean, and part of their allure for foreign fans is the escape they provide from our own country’s perspectives and problems. However, I hope that this influence can run both ways, and that the growth of diverse and international fandoms for these shows and movies inspires their overseas creators to feel a real sense of responsibility for the accuracy and sensitivity of their content. After all, the whole world is watching.

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I had my first glimpse of the tsunami’s destruction three years ago, when I rode my bike along the northeastern coast of Japan’s main island. Below a snaking seawall was a wide swath of barren fields and muddy marshes. The raw landscape was punctuated by the gutted remains of a five-story residential building. On its side was a red line that marked the highest level reached by the tsunami’s floodwaters: 14.5 meters (48 feet).

Japan’s 2011 tsunami killed some 20,000 people and left thousands more to dig their way out of the mud. Triggered by one of the most powerful earthquakes recorded in modern times, the overpowering tidal wave devastated the country’s northeastern region of Tōhoku across three prefectures. It also caused the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, prompting the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of residents. Most of the deaths and damage occurred along the Sanriku Coast just to the north. When I first visited Rikuzentakata, one of Sanriku’s hardest-hit cities, I was shocked by how visible the scars still were.

At the end of last year, I returned to Rikuzentakata for the Tour de Sanriku, a bicycle ride along the Hirota peninsula that the city has put on since the summer of 2011. Japan has plenty of cycle routes that are more scenic and in much more accessible locations, but like so many others, I wanted to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the March 11, 2011 tsunami—commonly referred to as “3.11”—and see how the recovery was going.

Before 3.11, Rikuzentakata was a sleepy coastal city in the remote mountains of Iwate prefecture. Its downtown was centered on the harborfront along the Takata Matsubara sandbank, home to a lush, centuries-old forest of some 70,000 pine trees. That downtown and that forest were utterly wiped out by the tsunami, which also claimed the lives of some 1,500 residents.

I felt a surge of emotion when I arrived in Rikuzentakata for the second time. Two years later, it was surprising to see how little had changed. A tentative new city center was budding—relocated to higher ground—but the razed waterfront remained just as desolate. On one side of Route 45 was a new sports and recreation park with baseball fields and green spaces; on the other, construction machinery and signage stood conspicuously in marshlands inhabited by wild birds. Perpendicular to the shore, a wide, newly paved evacuation road led straight up into the mountains.

The ride began with one minute of silence. As every year, the mayor of Rikuzentakata, Futoshi Toba, presided over the ceremony. One month before the tsunami struck, Toba had been elected to his first term as mayor. At home on that day, his wife was swept away in the floods, as was their home; his two young sons, at school, survived.

The cyclists assembled in the sports park at the foot of the mountains. We wore numbered paper bibs with handwritten words of support for the local residents. Groups of riders set off in staggered starts, beginning with those who were making an extra loop around the mountain and passing by the neighboring town of Ofunato, also hit hard on 3.11. My course was 45 kilometers (28 miles), mostly along the scenic rolling coast of the Hirota peninsula.

Along the route, residents waved to us from their houses. They seemed to appreciate that cyclists had come from far-off Tokyo and elsewhere to be part of the commemoration. At rest stops, volunteers handed out generous snacks—homemade cookies stuffed with local fruit paste, juicy raw oysters fresh from the port.

Memorials for 3.11 dot Tōhoku’s eastern coastline, and a few were visible along our route. Over the past decade, the region has established a number of museums and parks to recognize the massive toll of the disaster, where volunteers from a number of local associations tell their personal stories of surviving the tsunami. These varied testaments to 3.11’s devastation are powerful, and yet equally affecting can be the signs of resilience—older trees and edifices that the tsunami left unharmed, inexplicably, to still stand on lone and level fields.

By midday, we cyclists rolled back along Route 45 to Hirota Bay, where we concluded the Tour de Sanriku with a pilgrimage walk through Takatamatsubara Memorial Park. The path took us past the Tsunami Memorial Museum and the roadside station, all the way down to the edge of the coast and the seawall lined with newly planted pine sprouts. Nearby was the wreckage of a youth hostel crumpled by the wave, and right in front of it, the preserved remains of the single pine tree that had survived the tsunami’s initial impact.

My attention was drawn to a peregrine falcon perched on one of the many uprooted stumps left preserved in the mud. When I looked back, I saw a woman high up on the seawall, laying a bouquet of flowers on a commemorative stone.

In the decade since the tsunami, communities all along the coast of Tōhoku have found their own ways to remember and recover. Further south in Ishinomaki, where almost 4,000 people died, a dedicated team of women is transforming shards of broken dishware and pottery into precious pieces of jewelry. The raging floodwaters destroyed more than two-thirds of the buildings in Onagawa, a town just to the east, but while most cities reacted to 3.11 by building longer, higher seawalls, Onagawa constructed a red-brick seafront promenade featuring artisanal shops and a new, entirely redesigned train station with an observation deck.

The day after the bike ride in Rikuzentakata, I went to the neighboring city of Kesennuma, nestled in a deep rias that had been thoroughly inundated in 2011. Arriving in the late afternoon, I cycled around the central harbor. The commercial area was newly rebuilt, with trendy pop-up shops and a sparkling multilevel community center. Prominently displayed in the center’s lobby was a meticulously crafted model of the neighborhood as it stood pre-March 11, 2011. Transparent flags bearing the family name of each household or shop indicated buildings that had been annihilated by the tsunami. I had seen models like this everywhere along the Sanriku Coast—simple markers of the region’s collective healing.

The next morning, I was excited to ride down the coastline to Kesennuma’s Sanriku Fukkō National Park, one of many parklands designated after 3.11 to promote the area’s recovery. But it turned out that Google Maps was out of date—the entire coastal route from central Kesennuma to Cape Iwai was blocked off, as it was still being rebuilt. Taking an inland detour through the hills, I biked along gravel roads and past forests, fields, and rural homes. At one point, I passed by a group of elementary school kids playing outside during recess; in another neighborhood, a public sign planted on the roadside read: “Don’t lose your temper, take a breath and relax.”

After an hour and a half, I finally rolled back down to the coast. A banner above an intersection announced that I was about to enter the national recovery park. As I rounded the corner and glimpsed the seaside, I stopped suddenly, in shock. Before me were the remnants of a four-story concrete school building, a huge hole ripped into its outer wall—as if Godzilla had taken a bite out of it.

This was Koyo High School, destroyed in the tsunami but left to stand, unrazed—preserved in its decrepitude as meticulously as Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome. Now part of the Great East Japan Earthquake Kesennuma City Memorial Museum, the ruins featured explanatory panels with context and testimonies about the disaster. The open fields around the school had been converted into a dog run, children’s playground, and miniature golf course. As I stood surveying the ruins, two young women walked by with a playful Shiba Inu, then disappeared into the nearby dunes in the mid-afternoon.

I followed a narrow road surrounded by fenced-off pine tree sprouts. Soon I came to a park on the edge of Kesennuma Bay. The seawall tapered off at the tip of Cape Iwai, ending at a small lawn with a walkway and benches. I sat down facing the craggy rocks at the cape’s end, watching as the waves battered them, flinging roaring jets of seawater into the air. Those rocks, I later learned, have been officially designated as a protected natural monument because of the Paleozoic fossils of coral and other ancient life they contain.

On the edge of the shore I spied the unmistakable silhouette of Kesennuma’s “dragon pine,” another hardy tree that survived the tsunami. Its leaves and branches had been violently stripped away, but its twisted trunk remained, looking uncannily like a whiskered dragon craning its neck to gaze at the ocean. Locals see it as a symbol of resilience.

Just as I stood up to leave, three older Japanese ladies approached the viewing bench, marveling at the waves crashing against the rocks. I smiled at them, as we all turned to face the ocean together.

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When the pandemic struck in 2020 and classes went virtual, students scrambled to adjust. A twenty-two-year-old Filipina American psychology major at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) from a working-class background told us about the difficulties she faced attending her classes and getting her homework done. Her apartment’s unstable internet connection often booted her out of class, and she was stymied by the fact that she didn’t even have a desk at home. Because desks were sold out at many stores at the start of the pandemic, she built a wobbly makeshift one out of shelves she bought at a hardware store.

A year later, the challenges continued because of the condition of the small apartment she shared with a roommate. Her bedroom ceiling leaked whenever it rained. Her bed was ruined after a storm, and her landlord had yet to fix the problem (the bucket she used to catch the ceiling drips was visible during our Zoom interview). Along with the “paper-thin” walls of her apartment, these various at-home distractions made it hard to concentrate on academics, she said.

What impact did the shift to virtual learning have on the millions of college and graduate students forced to study—either partly or wholly—at home? Through research conducted at VCU in Richmond, we found that class and race shaped the realities of online learning in 2020 and 2021 in deep, sometimes unexpected ways that largely revolved around the family resources available to students.

Affluent and white students drew upon financial and material sources of support from their parents, partners, and employers to help mitigate the hurdles to learning posed by the pandemic. Our interviews with less-advantaged students, by contrast, made clear just how much they typically rely on the physical infrastructure of the university: quiet places to study, fast and reliable internet connections, comfortable desks. In other words, the pandemic highlighted not only the wildly unequal resources available to students learning at home, but also just how much university campuses matter in reining in those inequalities—creating, through their shared spaces, a more level playing field for students of all backgrounds.

To understand how students were adjusting to socially distanced learning, Alice interviewed thirty undergraduate and graduate students at VCU. A state university, VCU enrolled 22,277 undergraduates and 5,554 graduate students in 2020–2021. About half of its undergraduates are people of color, and a third receive federal Pell Grant support—making it an ideal campus for observing how working-class students coped with the impact of the pandemic. When lockdowns began last year, VCU shut down its campus, but it stayed open the following school year through a mix of virtual and in-person classes, with about half of classes wholly or partially online in the fall of 2020.

Even before the pandemic, there was heated debate over whether the growing popularity of online learning would heighten or lessen higher education’s age-old inequalities. Advocates argued that virtual instruction would make it easier for some students—particularly working learners—to take classes. Critics worried about the so-called digital divide: high-speed internet access is costly (and, in some rural areas, nonexistent), meaning that students from more privileged families are better able to participate online and take advantage of the latest learning technologies.

Alice’s in-depth interviews with students illustrated just how much economic insecurity—and the absence of a familial financial backstop—makes it difficult to study virtually. One student Alice talked to was a twenty-nine-year-old Latina senior—a first-generation college student from a working-class background. Even before the pandemic, her need to pay her way through school meant she worked two part-time jobs, limiting the time she had to study. Once classes went online, she also started dealing with constant tech problems. Her older laptop couldn’t keep up with the demands of Zoom, and during class it would crash and fill with the dreaded blue Windows error screen.

“It’s been really stressful,” she said. “Everything’s done online, you know? I’ve been kicked out of my classes because my computer’s having issues.” To make matters worse, her internet service is painfully slow. Since she and her partner live in an apartment where internet is included as part of the rent, they can’t upgrade it on their own.

According to a national survey of undergraduates conducted in 2020 by the educational nonprofit Digital Promise, both students of color and students from low-income households were much more likely to experience computer issues that interfered with their course participation. For instance, 20 percent of students from households earning under $50,000 a year had internet connectivity problems often or very often, compared to 12 percent of those from households with incomes of $100,000 or more. Twice as many Hispanic students ran into such problems as their white peers (23 versus 12 percent), with black students falling between those groups at 17 percent. 

When policymakers raise concerns about online learning, they often highlight the digital divide between urban and rural areas. Yet the Digital Promise survey found that rural students experienced internet connectivity issues at about the same rate as their urban and suburban counterparts. Instead, the relevant divides were those of class and race, with lower-income students and students of color much less able to avoid computer problems, let alone find quiet places to study.

Ideally, universities narrow these preexisting divides among students. But as our interviews show, this equalizing effect stopped once classes went virtual. At the beginning of the pandemic, a twenty-one-year-old black mass communications major was living in a VCU dorm. When the administration told students to vacate, he had to move a couple of hours away to Chesapeake, Virginia, to live with his cousin, her husband, and her two kids, both around his age. The household was “very Wi-Fi heavy,” he said, because everyone was working or studying from home. “It was so bad. . . . It was a very slow connection, [the screen] was always pixelated.” The internet was so laggy that it caused him to be late logging into Zoom for his classes on multiple occasions. “It’ll just kick me out of meetings, and I’m like, ‘Okay, cool, done with the day.’”

None of our interviewees from well-off backgrounds had any major issues with accessing the internet, using their computers, or finding a quiet space to do their work while they were studying at home. And when minor problems did arise, students could deal with them easily by turning to parents for help. A twenty-one-year-old white psychology major from an upper-middle-class background, for example, told Alice that his parents stepped up to provide additional assistance once he started attending school virtually. “They definitely helped provide me with the internet, which I would say is crucial,” said the senior, who lives with his sister and another roommate in a house they rent in an upscale neighborhood near VCU. What’s more, because he is diabetic and they were concerned about his health, his parents (who make around $200,000 a year) took it upon themselves at the beginning of the pandemic to buy groceries for him, even wiping down the bags afterward. “They went a little bit above and beyond to make sure that I was able to attend my classes,” he said.

Political scientist Robert D. Putnam explains how affluent parents’ financial and professional resources act as “social air bags” for their children, shielding them and compensating for any occasional difficulties they might encounter in academics or other aspects of their lives. We could see this crisis-cushioning at work during the pandemic: more advantaged students were often able to study from their parents’ spacious homes, popping into their class Zooms from comfortable workstations equipped with fast and reliable internet connections. But the assistance gifted to these students did not come only from their parents. Alice talked to several working-class students (all of them white) whose middle-class partners’ incomes ensured that they, too, could work from well-maintained homes with fast internet.

Several middle-class students reported easily borrowing electronic devices like laptops and printers from their professional employers to use for their schoolwork after hours. Students from a working-class background tended to work low-wage service jobs at restaurants and retail stores; their employers were unable or unwilling to hand out free technology. Their precarious employment during the lockdown was itself a source of stress, and their parents were often unable to step in to provide financial assistance. Working-class students of color, in particular, had multiple hurdles piled onto them. The Filipina American psychology student worked as a hostess at a Chinese restaurant at the start of the pandemic but had to start walking a half hour there and back after her car was totaled in an accident. Her boss eventually stopped giving her hours but didn’t fire her, which she said discouraged her from filing for unemployment benefits (“someone had told me I might accidentally do something fraudulent”). The Latina student could not turn to her single mother or her sisters for help with her technology issues, given that they, too, were financially strapped. Eventually, she appealed to another purportedly equalizing institution—the federal government—for a CARES Act grant to buy a new laptop. Through that government assistance, parceled out through VCU, she was able to purchase one.

Students of color struggled during the pandemic for two other reasons, interviews showed: the racial reckoning that occurred during the early months of the pandemic, and the wave of anti-Asian violence sparked by the Chinese origins of the pandemic. These national news events tended to be a source of intense stress for African Americans and Asian Americans in particular—two communities that also tend to face mental health issues and treatment with more stigma attached to them, according to research. “Once the George Floyd thing happened . . . I started having a lot of panic attacks,” said a twenty-five-year-old black student. “It scared the hell out of me. I’d never experienced anything like that before in my entire life.”

A twenty-two-year-old student of Filipina and Chinese descent said that she and her other Asian friends were more concerned about “racist attacks” than they were about the coronavirus at the start of the pandemic. She has felt depressed during the pandemic (“corona sad,” as she put it), a feeling that the country’s grim racial outlook has only worsened.

Students of color—whose families tended to be more resistant to the idea of seeking out mental health treatment—also happened to be the hardest hit by the background stresses of the pandemic. “My parents are still kind of iffy about it, and they’re not really willing to give me the financial resources to seek help,” said a nineteen-year-old Indian American student who wanted to seek treatment for her anxiety.

From mental healthcare to internet access, the unequal experience of learning during the pandemic reminds us of the important role institutions like universities and governments can—and must—play in compensating for the stark divides in students’ home lives. By providing amenities like high-speed internet, quiet study spaces, and on-campus healthcare to all their students, universities ensure that household inequalities do not spill over into the presumably meritocratic competition of their academic life.

As more and more instruction goes online (a trend that long predates the pandemic), it will be crucial for virtual academies to cultivate online analogs to the huge investments universities have made in physical infrastructure in order to give students of varied backgrounds educations of comparable quality.

Higher education has been long billed as a great equalizer. But without dedicated efforts to address the nontraditional learning conditions imposed by the pandemic, universities may continue to reproduce the divides they are supposed to diminish.

This article was coauthored by Alice Quach and Victor Tan Chen and originally published in Dissent.

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Every so often I will drive by farmworkers toiling in the fields near my home in Davis, a town in rural Yolo County, California. Even in the middle of the summer, everyone will be covered from head to toe in long-sleeved shirts, khaki work pants or blue jeans, wide-brimmed hats, and work boots. It’s always a colorful scene. Cars of different shades, glinting in the sun, lined up along the dirt road running past the field. The faded reds, greens, blues, and browns of old work clothes. Rows of green crops, sunshine pouring down from a powdery blue sky, a line of rolling brown hills on the horizon.

When I saw several months ago that the Yolo Food Bank was looking for volunteers to do some harvesting, I signed up. I respected the work the food bank did, and I was curious about what went on in the fields of California’s Central Valley. In the back of my mind, too, were articles I’d read about how very few native-born Americans signed up to do farm work nowadays—and how those who did would quit right away. The articles would make shocking claims: Just a handful of the hundreds of Americans who apply for farm jobs in North Carolina last the season. A California grape farmer raised his average wage to $20 an hour, but his U.S.-born workers kept quitting: “We’ve never had one come back after lunch.” An Alabama tomato farmer said that in twenty-five years of farming, he could “count on my hand the number of Americans that stuck.” Was it true that migrant laborers were taking jobs that locals could be doing? Or was the work just too hard to attract Americans raised in relative privilege? I wanted to see for myself what harvesting was like.

From the outset, I knew that it’d be a stretch to compare what I’d be doing to what full-time agricultural workers do. It was true that the crops would be similar to what the Central Valley’s farmworkers regularly harvest. In April, we started with asparagus, beets, zucchini, butternut squash, broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower. We moved to melons, sweet and hot peppers, corn, eggplants, and apricots in the summer, and then finished with watermelons and pumpkins in the fall. Our methods were also pretty much like those of the professionals—hacking beets, cabbages, and cauliflower off their thick stems with big knives, twisting other crops off their thinner stems, plucking fruit off trees.

Yet the length and intensity of my workday were nothing like the real thing. From April until the end of the season, I did two-hour shifts once or twice a week. The average full-time fruit and vegetable harvester works forty-four hours a week, earning $13.25 an hour, according to a 2017–18 federal survey. I did my work early in the morning. The only time the California heat really bothered me was on a day the afternoon high was forecast for 105 degrees, with a thick dust that clung wet on my skin (Aliyah, our food bank supervisor, called off work early that day). Real farmworkers work through the heat: last summer, two crop workers died in the heat wave that struck Washington and Oregon, two states that are normally more temperate.

I found that vegetable harvesting itself was easy, a matter of just removing the vegetables from their stems. A few hacks with the knife or a twist of a stem did the trick. But the constant bending down and straightening up that the job requires takes a toll. And lifting and carrying the buckets and sacks of produce to the trucks—especially dense vegetables like beets, cabbage, cauliflower, and butternut squash—was another story. Those buckets were flat-out heavy, and I found myself slowing near the end of the two hours when the heat and humidity started to build. Harvesting apricots was surprisingly demanding as well, not just because it got tiring carrying around giant sacks full of apricots strapped to your chest, but because reaching up to pick the fruit with that sack dragging from your shoulders was literally a pain in the neck. Once, I tripped over a grassy furrow with a sack of apricots hanging from my chest, falling flat on my face.

I learned that the hardest fruits to harvest are watermelons and pumpkins. With cauliflower or cabbages, you can toss a head or two out of a bucket to lighten the load. With these larger fruits, you’ve got to pick up the whole thing and carry it to the truck. As one fellow worker growled to me when we started in on the watermelons, “Use your legs.” I’ve always done that, of course. But imagine lifting one of those monsters, getting its weight centered in the middle of your torso, and then stumbling through a tangle of ankle-grabbing vines to the truck.

One morning, I was twisting off watermelons for only a few minutes when I strained my lower back. I had to take two weeks off from volunteering while I recovered. The National Center for Farmworker Health notes that agricultural workers often experience musculoskeletal injuries because of the constant bending and twisting while carrying heavy items.

Wildfires in the mountains east and west of the Central Valley cast a pall of smoke over the valley almost every summer and fall now. One morning, I was driving to a harvest site outside Knights Landing, a rural farming community, when I noticed a layer of brownish smoke hanging above the horizon toward the coast. Toward the end of our shift, clouds of tiny white flies began drifting up from rotted eggplants. I started coughing and couldn’t stop. “Swallow some flies?” Aliyah asked.

“Could you get me a bottle of water?” I asked, choking.

After a few swigs of water, the coughing subsided. It wasn’t the flies. It was the dust—always present in the valley during the summer, but probably worse that morning because it was mixed with smoke. When I stopped to think about it later, I couldn’t help but obsess about whether I’d also gulped down a toxic mouthful of the pesticides that drift, like dust and smoke, across the valley’s fields—an unavoidable occupational hazard for many farmworkers.

The other volunteers I worked with were usually an equal mix of men and women, ranging in age from twentysomethings to retirees. They were almost always Anglo, sometimes with one or two Asian Americans. Yet the people who work full-time in the fields are mostly foreign-born: according to federal data, 67 percent of U.S. farmworkers were born in Mexico or Central America.

One prominent economist has argued that if farms would just pay more, U.S.-born workers would flock to the fields. “Believe me, if the wages were really, really high, you and I would be lining up,” George Borjas, a professor of economics and social policy at Harvard University, told the Los Angeles Times. (In the same article, Philip Martin, an economist at the University of California, Davis, predicted that farmers would start automating their labor “well before we got to $25” an hour in wages.) For their part, an expert panel appointed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reviewed the existing data and concluded in a 2017 report that there was “little evidence” that immigration reduces overall employment for native-born workers.

My volunteer experience was nothing compared to the work that genuine farmworkers do, but it was enough to help me understand why many U.S.-born workers don’t last long in the fields. I remember spotting a group of field laborers on my way to one of the food bank’s harvest sites. It was a little after 6:30 a.m., and a couple of them were standing together, talking, looking down at a furrow and sizing things up. Others were already bent over crops, hands at work, harvesting. And a few men were walking over to a battered white pickup truck. I noticed how the men walked slowly, with measured steps, as if pacing themselves for the day ahead. Now I know why.

The post High-Hanging Fruit appeared first on In The Fray.

Over the past several weeks, the United States evacuated more than 120,000 people from Afghanistan, officially ending its two decades-long military presence there on Aug. 31. Only about half of those airlifted out of the country were Afghans. That means that a “majority” of those Afghans who had worked for the U.S. military and applied for Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs) were left behind, according to a senior U.S. State Department official quoted by NBC News.

Many of these Afghans served as interpreters for U.S. forces. When I was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011, I taught an advanced English class for interpreters. I recorded the interview below with one of them, who has since become a friend. This Afghan man (who prefers not to use his real name, given the danger to his family) worked for the American, Dutch, and Australian militaries during their presence in the country. (The Dutch forces left Afghanistan in 2011, and the last of the Australian troops in 2013.) Fortunately, my friend was able to relocate to Australia after the Taliban seized control. But many of his fellow interpreters remain in Afghanistan and fear reprisals.

In this 2011 interview, my friend talks about the danger and distrust that interpreters regularly experienced on their patrols, and their worries about what would happen to them once foreign troops left. For their troubles, interpreters like him were paid 600 U.S. dollars a month—with the additional expectation that they would be taken care of in the event that the Taliban regained control of the country and sought to punish those who had assisted their adversaries.

This interview, which has been edited for clarity and length, was recorded at the Tarin Kot forward operating base in the Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan.

What’s the longest patrol or mission that you’ve been on?

The longest patrol was in Chorah [a rural district southwest of Kabul]. It was two months. We are staying in tents, near a small FOB [forward operating base], and we had a tent for everybody, for the coalition forces. Also, one tent was for the interpreters. There were three or four interpreters living over there.

You’ve actually had to sleep outside, too?

Yes. When we went sometimes, it was far away from the district, from the FOB. Then we stayed over there for three days, or outside for four days, and just in the desert…. In summer, there’s a lot of snakes and also scorpions.

What’s one of the scariest moments you’ve had during a mission?

In Chorah, down to the Green Zone [fortified area] from the top of the hill. I heard the sound of an insurgent. They were talking with each other, and he said, “They are so close to us, they’re fifteen hundred meters away. A thousand meters. Four hundred meters.” I translated that to the boss. At the time, I was with the Netherlands Army.

And then he [the insurgent] said that we were walking quite near him. He said we were so close—like three hundred meters. I translated that to my boss, a captain, and he gave the order to his own guys to stop. We stopped for a while, for three or four minutes, then we walked back.

We got ambushed out there. At that time, I was hiding myself, lying down in the stream. The weather was also cold, and then I was very scared out there.…

I know this, the local people, they don’t like the interpreters. And they also didn’t like the coalition forces.

In Chorah?

In everywhere. In Afghanistan.

If they have the possibility, I know that they kill the interpreter. [But] I think they’re afraid of the coalition forces. They said that—they’re thinking, “There will be a problem for us.” They will insult the interpreter first.

Some of the interpreters, when they are hired for the first time, they can’t understand the local people, what they are saying. And they are not completely understanding and doing complete interpretation.

One of the funny things which happened in the Chorah district . . . we did talk over there with one person, he was very elderly. He says, “Don’t talk with me, because if you go from here, the people will come, they will insult me. If you don’t talk with me, that will be better for me.”

And the boss said, “No, no, what’s your name? Just tell me.”

He said, “My name is … I forgot right now.”

My boss asked his tribe. He was from the Niazai tribe [a Pashtun ethnic group in Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan].

At the end, he said, “Can I ask you one question?” I told him, “Yes, okay,” because I did the interpretation. He said, “What is your tribe?” [I told him] I was also from the same tribe that he was, Niazai.

He was very angry at the time. He made me think a lot. He’s also Niazai, but he heard, “coalition forces,” and he hated [me].

How do you deal with that, when you have to tell people things that you know they don’t want to hear?

They just stop talking with us. They say, “Go away from us.” And sometimes, [when] we were going down to the villages, the people did not show themselves. When they saw coalition forces, they just—everybody is going to their own house.

Does that happen a lot?

Yes. They’re afraid of the Taliban. If they talk, the others will tell [the Taliban], “That’s the son of Mahmud. He did talk with them. He did talk before as well.”

Five percent of [the villages], they are willing to talk with the coalition forces … They would say, “We have these kinds of problems.… We don’t have water wells. No electricity.”

They [interpreters] were from Afghanistan, they would be local, and they [the Netherlands Army] didn’t trust them. The cellphone was not allowed. There was no internet. Sometimes, when they had a meeting, they didn’t let [the interpreters] join the meeting, and hear what they were saying. [The interpreters] didn’t have permission to stand over there and hear what their plans were.

With the Australian Army, I was outside for two months [with them]. The rules of the Australians are also very strict. Very difficult, more than the Dutch.

They were having a vehicle checkpoint, and the people who get out from their cars, they were searching. At that time, one of the elders, he said, “Just search me from my front, not from my back … We have emergency work. We are going to Kandahar. We are in a hurry.” He [the Australian soldier] said, “I don’t care. It’s our duty.”

[The elder] was very angry. But they didn’t take care of him. And he said, “If you can bring every soldier into every house, there still will not be security, because the people are angry.”

I have worked one year with [the U.S. Army]. When they’re going outside, they have briefings. They have the interpreter with them, to hear what they are saying. If there is some explosion outside, or casualty, he will understand what’s the plan. I think that’s a good idea.

What are you looking at doing in the long run?

I am worried about my future, what I’m gonna do. If the situation will be critical like now, then I don’t think we can work again. We can’t work like usually we did in Afghanistan.

It will be also very difficult, because in my village everybody knows who I am, and for whom I’m working. They will not leave us alone. And if this government is destroyed, we must go to another country. If we will stay here, life will be bitter for us.

In the future, I want to be a teacher, in the university. Some of my friends, they graduated the same year with me. They got jobs in the university because they are proficient [in English]. I also hope to be, in the future. I didn’t have a good score in the university exam. If a student gets a 75 percent total score, he’s allowed to get a job. But I didn’t get that. I had a 70.

Is it ever intimidating to work with the high-ranking coalition officials?

No, we’re happy to talk, to work with them, because they have a good position. They also have good respect. And they’re also speaking like, literately, not like a farmer.

Is there any advice that you would like to give to coalition forces?

I don’t know. We are just linguists. We don’t have any other advice for coalition forces, because they have a good mind, and a good concept, like what we have. The work that we do, we do it for the coalition forces. They should trust in us as the interpreters.

Also, we hope that when the coalition forces leave Afghanistan, they also take the interpreters to another country, to the United States. Because life will be very bad in the future, when they leave.

The post ‘Life Will Be Bitter for Us’: An Interview with an Afghan Interpreter appeared first on In The Fray.

It was decades ago, but I still remember the German guy. He could have ignored the pups, left them to die in the brush, but he didn’t. Instead, he biked into town and found the local police, but they just blew him off. So he went back. It was the compassionate thing to do, but it left him with an impossible choice: either let the pups die, or kill them.

My girlfriend Mardena and I had come to Cancún, Mexico, from a winter deep-freeze in the United States. We were staying in a little hotel on a downtown side street, a mile inland from the city’s glitzy beachfront hotel zone. Every morning I’d head out for an early run to beat the heat, but it never worked. Even at dawn, the heat and humidity were already draining. I remember one evening when Mardena and I were on the bus heading back to our hotel after a day on the beach. I looked out the window and saw the sun sinking into the horizon like a giant orange beach ball. It was the end of December, on one of the shortest days of winter, and it was still hot as blazes.

One morning we took a boat from the mainland over to Isla Mujeres, a skinny island a few miles east of Cancún. We planned to bicycle around the island and cool off in the turquoise waters at its north end. The day was heating up fast, so we stopped at the first bike shop we found, rented clunky one-speeders at two dollars apiece, and started out along a coastal road.

The road had hills that made peddling in that heat a chore. As usual, I’d underestimated how much drinking water we’d need; we’d drunk too much of what we had before we’d even gone a mile. Luckily, just past the outskirts of town, we came across a boy selling soda pop at a stand he’d set up beside the road. We bought Cokes, finished them quick, and started off again.

After about an hour, we reached the far end of the island. We stopped to explore a small Mayan temple perched on a jut of land and rested a while in its shadow. Then we climbed back on our bikes. By then, my clammy T-shirt felt pasted to my skin. We hadn’t seen a single bicycler or car on the road.

We started up the other side of the island. Here, the island faced open ocean, and the water was wilder, the breakers pummeling the rocky shore. To the right of the road, scrubby, ankle-high vegetation reached over to some cliffs that dropped off onto tumbles of craggy rocks.

Before long, Mardena and I had finished off our water and were grinding away, ignoring the ocean views, intent on just getting back to town. Halfway back, we came over a rise and saw up ahead a lanky figure standing alongside the road. His bike lay on the gravel beside him.

He waved us down, and we stopped to talk. He was a sandy-haired young man, probably in his mid-twenties, dressed in gym shorts, a graying white T-shirt, sneakers, and a baseball cap. He was from Germany, he said, but he spoke English with hardly any accent. He seemed distressed. He told us that while he’d been biking past this spot, he’d heard squealing off in the brush. When he’d walked over to investigate, he’d found a litter of newborn puppies huddled in the foliage, abandoned and dying in the heat. He’d biked into town, tracked down the local police, and told them what he’d found. They’d just blown him off, he said, so he’d come back.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. His voice was high-pitched, almost shrill. “They’re dying. I wonder would it be better to throw them off the cliff and kill them.”

We followed him into the vegetation. Tucked together in the tangle of plants were five tiny, practically hairless pups, so young their eyes hadn’t opened yet. They were putting up a chorus of squealing, their heads poking into the air.

There was no sign of their mother. In that merciless heat and sun, with no shade anywhere, they wouldn’t last long.

The young man was paralyzed with indecision. He seemed to want us to tell him what to do. But we didn’t know what to say. We didn’t have any way of carrying the dogs. He’d already tried the police, and there was no one else on the road. The pups were suffering in the extreme heat. Killing them outright might seem like the humane thing to do, but it wouldn’t be like taking a terminally ill pet to a veterinarian’s office and having the vet do the job. He would have to kill them himself. And if he threw the pups off the cliff, was there any guarantee that hitting the crags would kill them? It seemed possible that some might survive the impact and end up flailing around in the surf, bones broken, drowning slowly.

My memory is that we took off before long, leaving the young man to struggle there alone. When we got back to town, we returned our bikes, found a café, and drank a couple bottles of juice. Then we walked to the beach at the edge of town and cooled off in the water. I don’t remember that we ever talked about the incident.

A few things from that day have stuck with me through the years, though, and occasionally I’ll find myself returning to the memory. Maybe I’ll listen to “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” a song by Bob Dylan about a Mexican border town Dylan visited, and a few of its verses will bring to mind the young man pleading in vain with the Isla Mujeres police: “If you’re lookin’ to get silly / You better go back to from where you came / Because the cops don’t need you, and man, they expect the same.”

Sometimes I’ll think about why I felt so little urgency about the doomed pups. Was it because they weren’t people, they were “only” animals? Maybe, but more likely, I think, it was because the choice seemed so hopeless that I just wanted out of there. I couldn’t imagine leaving the pups to die in that beating sun, but I also couldn’t imagine throwing them off the cliff. So I left.

Mostly, I remember the German guy. Having found the abandoned litter, he had gone for help and failed to get it. Then he had made the conscious decision to come back, feeling a sense of responsibility for the pups. It was a testament to his decency, but it left him anguished.

He was hoping we’d help him decide, and we failed him in that regard. Yet he never tried to unload the burden of that decision onto us. “I don’t know what to do,” he told us. He knew it was up to him.

All these years later, I still wonder what he did.

The post Letting Dogs Lie appeared first on In The Fray.

With customers staying at home during the pandemic, large numbers of businesses have shuttered permanently, unable to cover their payroll and rent. Emergency governmental assistance has sustained some businesses during this period of economic uncertainty, but the crisis has also stoked interest in a private sector remedy: cooperatives.

In Baltimore, a pizzeria that shut when the pandemic hit reopened as a worker cooperative, its ownership shared equally among its fourteen original employees. In Albuquerque, N.M., small farms pivoted from supporting restaurants and farmers markets, pooling their produce to sell directly to households. In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a program to help struggling businesses reopen as employee-owned businesses.

As Congress deliberates how to safeguard the country from future crises, policymakers should consider recent research that shows how so-called alternative enterprises can make local economies more resilient. Sociologist Marc Schneiberg finds that counties with more cooperatives, credit unions, community banks, nonprofit organizations, and universities experienced fewer job losses during the Great Recession and greater job growth in its aftermath. This path-breaking finding suggests that such organizations are better able than their shareholder-owned counterparts to retain workforces when the economy falters—and more willing to invest in their communities when markets pick up again. 

A worker cooperative is a venture owned equally by its employees and democratically managed by them. Customers can also own a business via a consumer cooperative (think member-owned businesses like the outdoor outfitter REI or the Park Slope Food Coop), credit union, insurance mutual, or municipal utility. 

Across these alternative models of organizing—what the sociologist Joyce Rothschild calls “collectivist organizations”—members run their operations using democratic practices while pursuing goals beyond profit. And as we describe in our new book Organizational Imaginaries, B corporations, employee stock ownership plans, and other forms offer a middle ground between cooperatives and investor-owned firms, giving workers, consumers, and other stakeholders varying degrees of equity and control. 

While cooperatives are well-known in many European countries, Americans may not realize that this model of organizing also has deep roots here. Cooperatives undergirded the early stages of U.S. capitalism, with communities establishing electrical cooperatives, insurance mutuals, and dairy cooperatives as alternatives to government bureaucracies and conventional firms alike. America’s early unions founded hundreds of industrial cooperatives to protect workers’ rights and share the gains of industry more equitably.

Today, some view employee ownership as inefficient compared to manager-led corporations. However, research refutes this perception. Summarizing past studies, sociologist Jonathan Preminger writes, “Workers in employee-owned firms tend to be more cooperative and interested in the firm’s performance, and display a greater willingness to work hard, which generally leads to reduced employee turnover, improved productivity, better pay, and increased job security.”

Localities where alternative organizations prevail can adapt more nimbly and humanely to disasters and long-term challenges. When workers are included in decision-making, organizations benefit from their hands-on knowledge and ideas, as companies as distinct as the automaker Toyota and the game developer Valve have long appreciated. By their very nature, democratic organizations require processes that can’t be easily automated or outsourced, and their shared ownership and commitment to the public good make the work involved inherently meaningful to those who do it—who can feel that they’re key players in causes larger than themselves. 

As Congress takes up an infrastructure bill, policymakers should consider how they might foster what sociologists call “organizational infrastructure”—the local environment of resources and expertise that can nurture diverse forms of organizing. 

In other countries, policies incentivize employee ownership. In the United Kingdom, for example, 2014 legislation established tax advantages for owners who sell their business to employee ownership trusts, contributing to a surge in employee-owned businesses there. This sort of institutional buy-in paves the way for “solidarity economies,” where worker-owned businesses assemble a supportive ecosystem—such as Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, a city-supported campaign that knits together many cooperative enterprises.

As the pandemic has rattled the economy, even business leaders have recommended extending greater equity to workers. For example, the billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban stated in an interview last year that the pandemic had proven that U.S. capitalism needed a “reset,” and that workers living “paycheck to paycheck” should own more of the businesses that employ them. 

Promoting alternatives to shareholder-owned firms would spur more private sector creativity, enabling everyday entrepreneurs to rework today’s deeply unequal system and giving workers and consumers a greater stake and voice in their businesses. That would be one smart way to revitalize capitalism so that it works for everyone.

This article was coauthored by Katherine K. Chen and Victor Tan Chen. It originally appeared on Fortune.com and has been republished with permission.

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When people think of starting a new business or organization, they often choose from a very narrow set of options: a corporation with investors, a nonprofit with a board of directors, and so on. But there is a much wider range of possibilities to choose from, as CUNY sociologist Katherine K. Chen and I explore in our new book Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy, just released by Emerald Publishing.

At one extreme, there is the for-profit company owned by investors and run by managers in a top-down fashion. At the other extreme, there are what the sociologist Joyce Rothschild calls “collectivist-democratic organizations.” This latter category includes worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, and social movements built on democratic principles. What these groups share is some form of collective ownership, a commitment to democratic decision-making, a communal spirit, and a focus on values and goals other than just making a profit.

Between these two poles, in turn, is a vast array of other organizations—from firms partially owned by employees (such as under an employee stock ownership plan), to privately certified social enterprises (such as B corporations), to various government-regulated models (such as credit unions). These are all viable options for entrepreneurs and organizers who want to found ventures not so fixated on profit-making and not so constrained by top-down bureaucracies. While well-known in European countries, such alternative organizational forms have a long history in the United States. Cooperatives, for instance, were once widely promoted by anticorporate activists and labor unions as a way of giving ordinary people a greater voice in the economy, as we describe.

The peer-reviewed academic papers collected in this volume describe many of these approaches to organizing. The introduction that Katherine Chen (no relation) and I wrote provides a big-picture overview and puts forward a broader way of thinking about organizational diversity. We argue that collectivist organizing can help societies deal more effectively and humanely not only with pressing crises like the current pandemic and economic downturn, but also with long-term challenges like automation.

For more details, check out our book page, which includes a table of contents with links to all the chapter abstracts. Below is the abstract to our introduction.

“What If” and “If Only” Futures beyond Conventional Capitalism and Bureaucracy: Imagining Collectivist and Democratic Possibilities for Organizing

By Katherine K. Chen and Victor Tan Chen

This volume explores an expansive array of organizational imaginaries, or understandings of organizational possibilities, with a focus on how collectivist-democratic organizations offer alternatives to conventional for-profit managerial enterprises. These include worker and consumer cooperatives and other enterprises that, to varying degrees, (1) emphasize social values over profit; (2) are owned not by shareholders but by workers, consumers, or other stakeholders; (3) employ democratic forms of managing their operations; and (4) have social ties to the organization based on moral and emotional commitments. The contributors to this volume examine how these enterprises generate solidarity among members, network with other organizations and communities, contend with market pressures, and enhance their larger organizational ecosystems. In this introductory chapter, we put forward an inclusive organizational typology whose continuums account for four key sources of variation—values, ownership, management, and social relations—and argue that enterprises fall between these two poles of the collectivist-democratic organization and the for-profit managerial enterprise. Drawing from this volume’s empirical studies, we situate these market actors within fields of competition and contestation shaped not just by state action and legal frameworks, but also by the presence or absence of social movements, labor unions, and meta-organizations. This typology challenges conventional conceptualizations of for-profit managerial enterprises as ideals or norms, reconnects past models of organizing among marginalized communities with contemporary and future possibilities, and offers activists and entrepreneurs a sense of the wide range of possibilities for building enterprises that differ from dominant models.

The post My New Book, <em>Organizational Imaginaries,</em> Is Now Out appeared first on In The Fray.

I hate meetings. Yes, everyone says that, but I am on the extreme end of the relevant bell curve here: I am introverted to such a degree that some people have confessed that they were unsure I had the ability to speak until months after we met. Therefore, in late March 2020, when stay-at-home orders began to go into force, schools began closing, and my workplace switched to telecommuting, my reaction was more sanguine than most. After all, introverts draw strength from within! Forced social interaction is what tires us most! With fewer meetings scheduled, surely my unpublished novel, a new personal best for pushups, and that foreign language I’d been meaning to learn would all be within my grasp.

Or so I thought.

There was one thing I had not factored into my calculations: depression. While these spells have been with me for much of my life, they increased in frequency after the pandemic began. After just a few weeks of staying at home, I began to notice that I was having more extreme reactions to even mild criticisms from my wife, from my colleagues, even from strangers on the internet. With fewer social interactions to distract me, I heard “I think you misunderstood the nature of this assignment,” “You didn’t use enough soap when you washed the dishes,” and “You might want to rethink your evaluation of this polling data” and understood “Your failure to accomplish small tasks means you are a failure in life and that you should stare at the ceiling.”

Those unaccustomed to spells of depression may not understand what this means. For my part, I tend not to appreciate the need for friendly social interaction until an unexpected triggering event takes place. And they’re almost always unexpected: unanticipated criticism, unpredictable monetary shortfalls, or an unexpected bout with fatigue. When something like that happens, suddenly I lose the ability to take care of everything I want or need to do. Work, entertainment, or even matters of basic sustenance and hygiene become more than I can handle.

Thankfully, over the years I’ve come to see these spells as temporary. After a career setback in my early thirties, I remember lying in bed for a whole day and watching documentaries about former professional athletes struggling with addictions to painkillers. (Never underestimate the morbid curiosity of a depressed person.) Eventually, the depression lifted, but I realized then that it would keep coming, and when it did that I would have to feel it—until I didn’t. In the time since then, I have gone to great lengths to manage my depression—going to therapy, steeling myself for rejection after job interviews, scheduling potentially disappointing events so that they don’t happen before other important engagements like speeches or deadlines.

Under the pandemic, however, I’ve come to realize just how much a lack of human contact contributes to these spells of depression. Not only do the triggering events seem to be coming more frequently, but being stuck at home has complicated my efforts to reach out for help. And I don’t think I’ve been alone in this feeling. While the country has been under lockdown over the past year, conspiracy theories have grown more popular. Experts have warned of the increasing risks of suicide, mental health issues, and domestic violence. And political polarization in our country seems to have worsened. Not only are we reacting to things more stridently, we’re having even greater trouble relating to those who disagree with us. Perhaps not being able to see other people in person—including those we don’t agree with—is contributing to these problems.

I’ve tried a few things to cope with these new conditions of life. I’ve taken part in work socials and joined clubs that meet online. However, if it’s a challenge for introverts to mingle in person, doing so when you’re on Zoom is an even higher hurdle. In these meetings usually only one person can talk, so it’s not as though you can approach one other quiet guy who is also left out and bond over your mutual distrust of the talkative. It took years for my excessively introverted self to learn to function like a regular person in social settings, and now I feel I’m learning anew.

I’m sure that the isolation of the pandemic has been even harder on the extroverted, and yet I’d like to think that under lockdown they’ve come to appreciate some of the subtler joys of introversion. After all, the pandemic has been a fine time to hold detailed and vigorous conversations in one’s own head, a favorite pastime of us uber-introverts—not just because no one wants to talk to us, but also because no conversation in real life can measure up to the ones we have with ourselves. More importantly, there are advantages to a more introspective—and, for that matter, less cheery—attitude. The easily depressed tend to think more analytically and with greater focus, research finds. In general, introverts are less preoccupied with the whirligig of current events and more able to take a long view.

Personally, while I’m prone to occasional bouts of brutal self-evaluation, my assessments of others are much kinder, and I tend to be optimistic about overall trends. That’s why I’m not so anxious about our country’s current political unrest and the uncertain prospects for its post-pandemic economy. Indeed, there may be long-term benefits to the crises we’re going through, as traditionally ignored segments of our electorate have their voices heard, and as employers start to realize how much time and energy can be saved by cutting down on commuting, unnecessary meetings, and the micromanaging of employees.

The rapid rollout of vaccinations in recent months offers hope that we will soon be back to some semblance of normal socializing again. When that happens, introverts like myself will have a greater appreciation for face-to-face interactions. Yes, soon enough we’ll be back to hating meetings, interruptions, and the unjustifiable gregariousness of extroverts, but those first few days should be glorious.

The post The Unbearable Lightness of Being at Home appeared first on In The Fray.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred when I was nine years old. In the days afterward, I remember obsessively reading everything I could about the attacks in my dad’s ​Newsweek ​magazines. A few years later, I stumbled upon the film ​Loose Change​, which purported to uncover the truth behind 9/11. At first, I was skeptical. Of course, Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks—that’s what I’d read in ​Newsweek.​ But as I kept watching the film, I felt a growing sense of doubt. By the time the credits rolled, I was sure that 9/11 was an inside job, orchestrated to create a pretext for a war in Iraq and subsequent war profiteering. 

As I grew up and gained more in the way of critical-thinking skills,​ I eventually came to recognize that the theories being pushed by 9/11 skeptics were delusional. That earlier flirtation with conspiracy theories in my adolescence has made particularly sensitive to the rash of similar falsehoods that are being widely peddled today—most notably, the pervasive belief that the 2020​ election​ was stolen, which led directly to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. What motivates people to believe in these blatantly bogus conspiracy theories?

According to the social psychologist Karen Douglas at the University of Kent, social crises produce noticeable upticks in the prevalence of conspiracy theories.​ People engage in increased attempts to make sense of the crisis in​ order to bring meaning and purpose to an otherwise chaotic and fearful situation. “A conspiracy theory helps people to make sense of the world by specifying the causes of important events, which further helps them predict, and anticipate, the future,” write Douglas and her collaborator Jan-Willem van Prooijen, who describe how wildly different events like the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy and the fire that destroyed Rome in the first century generated similar outbreaks of conspiracy theorizing. Experiencing a crisis may cause feelings of powerlessness, and believing in a conspiracy theory allows the believer to feel some measure of control over the situation, the researchers note.

Beyond these crisis-specific surges, Douglas identifies three motivations that drive belief in conspiracy theories. ​Epistemic​ motivations are characterized by a desire for more information about a given phenomenon—such as a causal explanation of an event—especially when the existing knowledge is spotty or distrusted. When “events are especially large in scale or significant and leave people dissatisfied with mundane, small-scale explanations,” Douglas writes, people’s belief in conspiracy theories appears to intensify. Those who subscribe to these theories, in turn, feel that they know the real “truth” about an event, and their beliefs are particularly difficult to refute because anyone who challenges their beliefs is believed to be part of the conspiracy to withhold information. If epistemic motivations arise from uncertainty, ​existential​ motivations emerge from feelings of anxiety or powerlessness. Believing that they possess special or secret information can give people a superficial sense of control over whatever bewildering situation they find themselves in, Douglas argues.

We can see these two motivations at work in the conspiracy theories that have proliferated over the past year. As the coronavirus spread rapidly and the world went into lockdown in early 2020, there was little information ​about the virus​. People were frightened about both the dangers of Covid-19 and the potential economic fallout of the lockdowns. Predictably, there was a corresponding uptick in ​conspiracy theories​: ​Covid-19 was engineered by the Chinese government or caused by 5G cell towers, or it was a ploy to microchip the population via a new vaccine. In the short term, these​ conspiracy theories may have provided believers with a sense that they had control over their frightening new reality—even though social experiments have shown that exposure to conspiracy theories ultimately reduces feelings of autonomy and control.

A third motivation for believing in conspiracy theories is ​social​: people feel a sense of superiority when they believe that they have information that others don’t. A common rhetorical device used by groups that peddle conspiracy theories is the claim that other people are sheep, and that their group alone has access to the real truth. From this vantage point, members of the in-group are morally superior to everyone else, and any deviations from the predictions of the theory occur because of sabotage by outsiders. 

The virulent support for QAnon, a disproven conspiracy theory whose adherents have been identified as a domestic terrorism threat by the FBI, seems to fall in this latter category. QAnon supporters believe in an utterly convoluted and outlandish narrative: a global cabal of satanist pedophiles rules the world, and former U.S. president Donald Trump is fighting a secret war against this cabal—only pretending to be an inept leader to disguise his heroic machinations. The stories that QAnon supporters tell are rich with apocalyptic Christian tropes, describing how Trump and his followers will arrest the cabal’s members during a Rapture-like event, the “Storm,”​ which will ​usher​​ in a utopian new order.

Q​A​non members would have remained ignorant to these spectacular “truths” were it not for an anonymous individual known as “Q,” who made specific predictions online—stating at one point that the “Storm” would take place on November 3, 2017. After these predictions failed, Q began posting vague clues, which adherents call “Q drops” or “breadcrumbs.” Self-described “bakers” have sought to decipher these clues on their own. As noted earlier, the social motivation to believe in conspiracy theories draws upon people’s desires to feel superior to others. QAnon followers do not want to be told what to think​; they want to discover the truth in Q’s messages by themselves. By allowing the movement’s followers to take part in authoring the story, Q—whoever this person really is—has deepened their feelings of loyalty and commitment to the group. 

Support groups exist for those who have lost friends and family members to QAnon (on Reddit, r/QAnonCasualties is one such community), and some organizations​, like Parents for Peace, are attempting to “deprogram” people steeped in such conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, the research shows that once someone develops strong beliefs of these kinds, it is very hard to change them. The best approach is to inoculate people with factual information before they go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. (Not surprisingly, younger people and those with less education are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories.) To “pre-bunk” Covid-19 conspiracy theories, Cambridge University researchers have worked with developers to create online educational games like Go Viral! and Bad News. Go Viral! teaches players about the strategies being used to “spread false and misleading information” about the coronavirus. In Bad News, players build a fake news empire by using a variety of tactics to disseminate disinformation. The creators of these game hope to deter players from falling for conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation by helping them see how easily and maliciously these lies are created and spread.

The post Why Conspiracy Theories Captivate appeared first on In The Fray.

Last March, I was working in Montana as a ski instructor at the Big Sky Resort. When the pandemic reached the United States and stores started shutting down, I remember meeting up with friends for a potluck dinner. We drank Coronas and joked about the toilet paper shortage.

Three days later, the resort closed—an unprecedented six weeks early—and we were all out of jobs. My friends and I threw an impromptu end-of-season party at the local dive bar. There was an edge to that evening, though. It seemed that no one could sit still or hold a calm conversation.

A week after the resort closed, my boyfriend, who lived in Tennessee, called. There were rumors that states were going to shut their borders to keep the virus from spreading. “I don’t want you to be stuck in Montana away from me,” he said.

“What do you think I should do?” I asked.

“I want to come get you and move you back to Tennessee with me.”

I had intended to move in with my boyfriend after the ski season ended, but this would be two months earlier than planned. With some hesitation, I agreed. I didn’t want to leave my friends in Montana, but I didn’t want to have to deal with a pandemic on my own, either.

Once we got back to Tennessee, though, our plans began to unravel. That summer I was supposed to return to my seasonal job as a whitewater kayak instructor on the Ocoee River, but the state lockdown shut down that possibility. Instead, I sat by myself on the couch, day-drinking and watching Netflix. My boyfriend worked alone from morning till dark on various projects around his unfinished house.

At a certain point, I found myself surrounded by beer cans, watching American Hoggers, and realizing that I needed to get off the couch and out of my boyfriend’s house. When a friend called and said their mom needed help at the family store, I jumped at the opportunity—not thinking much about the fact that the “family store” was a head shop, a place that sells paraphernalia for using drugs. I’d worked as a line cook in plenty of restaurants and as a guide at rafting companies, I told myself. What could be so different about working at a head shop?

The store occupied a vast brick building, formerly home to an auto shop. The display cases held a hodgepodge of merchandise—from switchblades to bongs, dildos to vape pens—lit poorly by an equally bizarre assortment of lamps and fluorescent lights. Mannequins wearing lingerie and T-shirts covered in stylized marijuana leaves hung from the vaulted ceiling.

On my first day on the job, a group of twentysomethings walked into the shop. One of the guys—clearly the leader—was covered in tattoos, some of them done in the distinctive prison stick-and-poke style. He swaggered around the store, the tendons in his forearm standing out as he gripped the front of his oversized jeans to keep them from sliding off his wiry frame. A chubby girl with dyed blue hair hung off his other arm. The group clustered in the back corner by the tattoo-kit display.

I awkwardly shifted my weight from foot to foot behind the counter as I considered whether I should approach the group and ask them if they needed help. Except for a penchant for cheap beer and some experimentation in college, I am not a drug user. I had no idea what half of the merchandise in the store was for.

The group by the tattoo kits seemed to have reached a consensus. The leader approached me and asked for help. He called me “lady,” which made me feel, at twenty-seven years old, hopelessly uncool and even more out of place. I sold them an assortment of tattoo needles and ink. As I was finishing ringing up their purchases, the blue-haired girl pointed to something in the display case below the register: an oil burner. “We need one of those, too,” she said.

The head shop staff called them “oil burners,” which was our code word for meth pipes. As I wrapped one of them in a brown paper bag, I felt my attitude towards the group change. Instead of feeling intimidated by their swagger, I felt superior. After all, I wasn’t the one covered in crappy prison tattoos buying a meth pipe.

As I was driving home after closing up the shop, though, my mood darkened. Working a ten-hour shift behind the counter had been a welcome respite from my recent routine. At home, I struggled to find ways to pass the time. I was alone for much of the day while my boyfriend was preoccupied with his projects. I spent hours scrolling through social media, reading headline after anxiety-inducing headline. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I tried to read, but could only manage a few paragraphs before my thoughts would return to the empty shelves in the supermarket and the pictures of unmarked coffins filling a mass grave in New York City.

A mutual friend came to visit for a few days. When there was a tornado warning, we sheltered in the neighbor’s business—a dog daycare, shuttered by the pandemic—while my boyfriend stayed at the house. The power went out, so we sat in the dark drinking cocktails. My friend asked if I was doing okay. I started crying.

For some reason, going to the head shop every day and selling oil burners, porn, and tattoo kits for $8 an hour gave me a sense of purpose. And the owner, a middle-aged British expatriate, clearly needed my help. She had recently gotten out of prison, and because of her parole arrangement, she wasn’t allowed to enter the main part of the store. I would unlock a side door for her each morning so she could enter her office, where she kept a stash of chips and imported British candy for employees to munch on during the day.

The owner called me “hun” and would text me during the week to check in and make sure I was doing okay. (“It’s a great day to be healthy, free, and happy,” one text read.) In case things were not okay, she had put a pink pellet gun in a drawer under the register.

One day the owner found a half-broken plexiglass sheet in one of her many piles in the storage room. She propped it up in front of the register as a makeshift protective barrier against the virus. There it remained for months, in spite of her promise to purchase a less broken and more effective solution.

After several days behind the counter, I adapted to my new environment. To hide how green I was, I acted casually nonchalant in response to all questions. Occasionally, I was asked if I sold drugs or knew anyone who did. (I always said no.) But for the most part, people were just looking for advice. Some customers wanted my opinion on the water pipe or bong they were considering. A few regulars would ask if the store had gotten any new porn DVDs. I helped a woman purchase her first sex toys—and then, when she called the store a few hours later, I explained how to use them. A Hells Angels member spent half an hour showing me pictures of his cat.

To fit in better, I came to work in black skinny jeans and combat boots, a black trucker hat pulled low over my eyes and my hair down. I started smoking cigarettes again. I also started becoming curious about my customers. I would try to guess what they were going to buy as soon as they walked through the door. Would they head for the tattoo kits? Make a beeline for the porn and sex stuff? Spend an hour selecting the perfect glass “tobacco” pipe?

One day, a man entered the store. He was at least six feet tall and looked like he could easily bench double my body weight. I found him handsome in a “gym rat, low-carb, protein powder” sort of way—handsome, that is, except for his lips, which had been chewed to shreds. I guessed that he would head for the sex stuff, in search of Crazy Rhino or some other male enhancement supplement. Or maybe he would get some poppers, an inhalant sold as a nail polish remover and said to increase pleasure during sex.

Instead, the man approached the counter and pointed to the oil burners in the display case. “I hate buying these things,” he said, staring at the floor as his face flushed with embarrassment.

“Yeah,” I replied, not really knowing what to say. I was surprised by the shame in his voice.

I reached into the display case and set the oil burner on the counter. “Hey, how do my lips look?” he abruptly asked me. “Do they look bad?”

I felt myself involuntarily grimace. “Yeah, they look pretty bad. You should probably go home after this.”

I carefully wrapped the oil burner in a paper bag as the man laid seven crumpled ones on the counter. Then I handed the bag to him around the broken plexiglass barrier.

From the front window, I watched the man climb into his pickup truck. It was a new truck with a lifted suspension, and I couldn’t figure out why someone with that kind of money—who worked out and obviously cared about his health—would also be a meth user. I wondered about what actually set me apart from this person in pain, someone clearly in the throes of a meth binge.

A few days later, I met Overalls and her boyfriend for the first time. Like most of my customers, I never learned this woman’s name, but I decided to call her “Overalls” because I never saw her wear anything else besides her faded denim overalls. She looked like she used to be thin but had recently filled out, and her body didn’t know where to put the new weight. Unlike many customers, she smiled with a full set of teeth. Overalls was always in motion—talking, laughing, flicking her dishwater-blonde hair over her shoulder. Her boyfriend was a back-alley tattoo artist. Quiet and scrawny, he had a habit of cupping his baseball cap with one hand to hide his eyes when he spoke, which was seldom. Overalls did the talking.

At our first meeting, Overalls walked up to the counter and started mumbling excitedly at me, her words slurred from whatever drug she was on. Her boyfriend stood bashfully a few feet behind her, hands in his pockets, staring at the floor. I’m not from the South and have a hard time with rural accents even when the speaker is sober, but I pieced together enough of her words to gather that her boyfriend needed a picture printed to use as a stencil for a tattoo.

Luckily for Overalls and her boyfriend, the store’s owner was in that day, and I was bored. I stepped into the back office and explained the situation to my boss. We spent the next forty-five minutes struggling with the printer and the wi-fi. I went back to the counter while the owner tried to troubleshoot the issue. Overalls kept up a steady stream of chatter as we waited. I eventually found myself sucked into a lively, if somewhat one-sided, conversation. She told me that the tattoo was going on someone’s forearm, showed me a tattoo of a flower on her shoulder—her boyfriend’s work—and recounted her conversation with the gas station clerk that morning.

Finally, the owner emerged from the back office with the printout. As it turned out, the boyfriend knew the owner’s ex from a prison stint. I watched her face light up at the mention of his name, and her usually brisk demeanor suddenly become warm and maternal. She seemed to genuinely care about the down-on-their-luck couple, whom I had been observing until then—I realized, guiltily—with a morbid curiosity.

At one point, Overalls’ boyfriend insisted that the owner’s ex still loved her. “I don’t think he wants anything to do with me anymore, hun,” she replied, her smile vanishing.

She held out the printout. “Will this work for you, dear?” she asked.

The boyfriend nodded.

“Take care of yourselves. Come back if you need anything else,” she said.

Back at home, my relationship with my boyfriend continued to deteriorate. Minor disagreements turned into long silences. Attempts to talk through our issues turned into slammed car doors and dramatic exits. I found myself becoming smaller and smaller—emotionally shut down and uncommunicative. My best friend told me to leave him, but I felt trapped by the circumstances of the pandemic and my ill-advised move across the country.

Over the next few weeks, Overalls and her boyfriend kept dropping by in their rusty Chevy Blazer, in search of printouts to use as tattoo stencils. I was beginning to realize that some of the store’s customers were giving back-alley tattoos to make the money they needed to buy drugs. Nevertheless, I looked forward to my conversations with Overalls. She always had a lot to say, though she careened wildly from subject to subject, never spending more than a few sentences—or, sometimes, even seconds—on a particular topic.

Her interactions with the gas station clerk were a common theme. “We were in there this morning, and she said that she could tell we were high!” she told me one day, her eyes widening with outrage.

“Yeah,” I said mildly.

“I mean … she didn’t have to say that,” she continued sullenly, clearly taking issue with the clerk’s accurate assessment.

Overalls was always animated and enthusiastic. Her appearances at the store brightened my mood amid everything that was going on at home. I realized that I genuinely liked Overalls as a person.

The twentysomething couple I’d met on my first day became regulars as well. The rail-thin man with the prison tattoos would pace the store like a caged tiger while the blue-haired woman bought tattoo supplies and oil burners. She was exceedingly polite, I noticed. One day, she was forty cents short. I let it slide, but she returned later that day to pay me back.

Eventually, Tennessee eased its lockdown restrictions, and I was able to return to my job as a kayak instructor. I stuck it out with my boyfriend for another month or so after that, but the pandemic had changed things between us. It had changed me, too, by bringing me face-to-face with people I’d looked down upon before. I never saw the man with the chewed lip again, but I still wonder about him. Since the pandemic began, the use of meth and other drugs appears to have soared across the country, along with drug overdoses.

I still think about Overalls from time to time, too. At some point, the store’s printer stopped working, and she stopped coming by. With more time, though, perhaps we would have become friends. I wonder where she’s printing her stencils these days, and if she’s still exclusively wearing overalls. Wherever she is, I hope she’s happy.

The post Gateway Drug appeared first on In The Fray.

The economic impact of market restrictions prompted by the pandemic—not to mention the coronavirus’s broader toll of more than 200,000 Americans deaths and other losses from ruined health and well-being—will likely linger well into the next president’s term. In the meantime, the pandemic appears to be accelerating trends toward greater income and wealth inequality within the country. U.S. billionaires have fared spectacularly well under the lockdown, having increased their wealth by $931 billion since March, according to data from Forbes analyzed by Chuck Collins and his collaborators. A report by the anti-poverty group Oxfam estimates that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos now has so much money that he could pay each of his employees a six-figure bonus and still have more wealth than he had in March. Meanwhile, less advantaged Americans have been hit hard by the lingering downturn. Although stimulus checks and temporary expansions of unemployment benefits for a time worked well to mitigate the damage, poverty rates have recently spiked. Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and fatalities are disproportionately high among people of color. And while high-wage earners have recouped almost all their job losses, employment among low-wage earners remains almost a fifth lower than it was at the start of the pandemic, according to an analysis by Raj Chetty and other researchers.

Amid this upheaval, the next president will make policy decisions with major implications for whether the gap between the rich and poor in this country grows or narrows. Joe Biden and Donald Trump have put forward two starkly different visions for the country’s economy—particularly in regards to tax policy, which will dramatically shape income and wealth inequality over the next decade. In general, Trump argues that the tax cuts on high earners that his administration pushed through in 2017 should be extended, which he believes will lead to greater economic growth. Biden supports rolling back tax cuts for those who earn more than $400,000, saying on the campaign trail that the wealthy need to pay their “fair share.” The continued impact of the coronavirus on the economy will complicate these policy decisions moving forward, but we can sketch out the sort of agenda each candidate will likely push forward once in office—based on their stated proposals as well as their track record while in office—and the possible impact of a Biden or Trump presidency on economic inequality.

First, it is important to note that income and wealth inequality have been growing almost without interruption since the 1980s, according to the World Inequality Database, a repository of data maintained by an international team of researchers. Since around 2012 the levels have stayed more or less steady, though the latest available figures do not account for the impact of the pandemic. For example, after taxes, the top 10 percent of earners took in 39.9 percent of all income in 2012—the end of Barack Obama’s (and Joe Biden’s) first term in the White House. That figure has stayed slightly below that level in the years since, landing at 39.0 percent in 2019, Trump’s third year in office. The richest tenth of Americans took in 73.9 percent of the country’s wealth in 2012, the highest level since World War II, but that share has also fallen slightly since. Granted, it can take years for shifts in policy to register on observed levels of economic inequality, and many trends that affect inequality—such as automation, education, and globalization—are massive tanker ships that heads of state can only turn by degrees, if at all. Nevertheless, the next president will be able to shape levels of inequality rather directly in two ways: through the repeal, or survival, of the tax cuts that the Trump administration passed in 2017, and through the administration’s response to the ongoing economic fallout of the pandemic.

While it lowered taxes across the income spectrum, the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA) benefited the well-off much more in both absolute and proportional terms. In 2018, for example, a typical low-income household saved $40 and a typical middle-income household saved $800, while the top 1 percent of households—those making $733,000 or more—received an average tax cut of $33,000. Unless extended, these individual tax cuts will expire at the end of 2025, but the legislation’s large cuts to corporate taxes—which largely benefit wealthy households that own stock—are permanent. In its current form, the legislation is costing taxpayers $1.9 trillion in lost revenues over an eleven-year period, according to the Congressional Budget Office. A recent analysis by the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank, concluded that—contrary to the claims of its supporters—the legislation failed to pay for itself by stimulating the economy.

Trump has stated that preserving the tax cuts would be a priority of his next administration. Biden plans to restore Obama-era tax rates on households that make more than $400,000 and limit how much high earners can deduct. His proposal to tax the capital gains and dividends of millionaires at the same rate as employment income would also have major implications for inequality, given that rich households make much of their money from stock, and yet often pay lower taxes than salary and wage earners on it. Biden also proposes to increase Social Security benefits for lower-income and older seniors, which will reduce poverty among the elderly, even as he rolls back some of the exclusions that have shielded higher incomes from Social Security taxes. Finally, Biden has proposed increasing the top corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent—still substantially lower than under the Obama administration, when the rate was 35 percent—and increasing minimum taxes on profits, especially foreign profits. If Biden’s tax proposals become law, government revenues will grow by $4 trillion over ten years, the Tax Policy Center estimates.

During the Democratic primary, Biden’s rivals criticized his actual commitment to taxing the rich, particularly after Bloomberg News reported that he told wealthy donors that “nothing will fundamentally change” were he to become president. However, one of those erstwhile rivals, California senator Kamala Harris, is now his running mate, and the Biden-Harris campaign now supports her proposal for a dramatic expansion of the earned-income tax credit, a wage subsidy for lower-income workers. Biden has also come out in support of making housing vouchers for low-income renters a funded entitlement, and is considering a Democratic plan to transform the federal child tax credit into a larger, unconditional child allowance—two measures that will greatly widen the circle of households that receive assistance under these programs. Columbia University researchers recently analyzed the potential impact of these three proposals and concluded that together they would cut the poverty rate by half, reduce the child poverty rate by three-quarters, and substantially narrow the racial and ethnic poverty gap.   

Until the pandemic hit, the U.S. economy had been experiencing an unprecedented economic expansion across the Obama and Trump administrations. To the extent that economic growth increases the size of the overall pie, it may be more beneficial than redistribution in raising the well-being of ordinary Americans in absolute terms. Indeed, between 2017 and 2019 the poverty rate fell from 12.3 percent to 10.5 percent, according to census data. For his part, Trump predicts record-breaking growth in his next term (in the 2016 campaign, he promised 4 percent annual growth, which in reality has ranged from 2.3 to 2.9 percent between 2017 and 2019). Even if such growth rates could be attained, however, there is concern that income inequality has reached such extreme levels that headline indicators such as GDP growth—or, for that matter, stock market indices—do not adequately reflect the well-being of typical American households. In addition to redistribution through tax policies, then, more direct approaches to reduce inequality—such as labor regulations, targeted job creation, and debt relief—are needed.

When it comes to the employment policies, Biden supports a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour. During the 2016 campaign, Trump expressed support for a $10 minimum wage, while arguing that the states should really decide such policies (Larry Kudlow, director of the president’s National Economic Council, has argued the minimum wage should be zero). While Trump appointees in the National Labor Relations Board and the courts have moved to weaken labor unions and worker protections more broadly, Biden has pledged support of legislation to expand collective bargaining rights for workers and punish violations by employers. Given the role that a strong labor movement plays in reducing income inequality, the next administration’s relationship with organized labor will be decisive, and some labor leaders have expressed hopes that a Biden will institute the most pro-union administration in generations. Biden’s track record, however, is complicated in part by his support over the decades of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the normalization of trade relations with China, and other free trade agreements. In recent years, research has highlighted the major impacts that free trade—particularly with China—had on U.S. manufacturing firms, devastating working-class communities that relied on relatively well-paid factory jobs for those with less formal education. Trump renegotiated NAFTA with Canada and Mexico, with the agreement’s stronger worker protections (including changes to Mexican labor rules on union organizing) gaining the backing of Democratic lawmakers and labor groups. With less bipartisan support, Trump has made his tougher line on trade with China a centerpiece of his reelection campaign. Trump argues that his trade war will ultimately restore domestic manufacturing jobs; in the short term, it is levying substantial costs on American consumers.

Trump campaigned in 2016 on promises to invest in infrastructure, which would presumably have positive benefits for middle- and lower-income Americans, who would be in line for many of the jobs created. For much of his presidency, he has pushed for a $2 trillion infrastructure bill to rebuild crumbling roads and bridges and invest in future industries. Over the years his proposal has failed to get any traction, in part because Trump pulled out of negotiations with Democrats on the legislation, stating that a deal was not possible while Democrats continued to investigate him. Recently, the administration unveiled a smaller $1 trillion infrastructure plan, but it has stalled in the Senate due to Republican concerns over the debt. For his part, Biden has called for $2 trillion to be spent over his first term to create jobs in manufacturing and clean energy research, construct and modernize schools, and upgrade roads, bridges and highways. The proposal is intended to stimulate the economy and create jobs for ordinary Americans while adhering to Biden’s net-zero greenhouse gas emission target.

Another plank of Biden’s platform with major consequences for inequality is his proposal to forgive student debt. Americans currently owe more than $1.5 trillion in student loans, a figure that has risen fivefold over the last two decades to become the second-largest source of debt behind mortgages. Thanks to the passage of 2005 legislation widely supported by the financial industry—and by Senator Joe Biden—this particular debt cannot be absolved through bankruptcy. Millennials and Gen Zers have faced mounting tuition costs, and the loans taken out to finance their higher education wind up stunting their later financial progress, particularly for the children of working-class households. Biden has called for making two years of community college tuition-free and doubling the maximum value of Pell grants for lower- and middle-income students. To highlight racial economic inequality, his plan includes an additional $70 billion targeted to historically black colleges and universities.

Meanwhile, the fate of the Affordable Care Act under the next president will have major repercussions for lower-income Americans, who benefit especially from the expanded Medicaid access provided by the law. After the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the percentage of uninsured Americans fell. Trump has acted in various ways to subvert the law, and the number of uninsured has risen under his presidency, from 8.6 percent in 2016 to 9.2 percent in 2019. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has estimated that the health care plan that Trump supports as a replacement for the Affordable Care Act would raise the number of uninsured by an additional 21 million, or about 7 percentage points, and increase health care costs by $330 billion over ten years.

The Biden campaign claims that its health plan would extend health care to an estimated 15 to 20 million people, half the total of Americans currently uninsured. Among other things, it would lower the age for Medicare eligibility by five years and offer all Americans a public option for insurance. Given the offsets from lowered drug costs and higher taxes, the Biden health care plan could potentially save Americans money in a best-case scenario, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, but will more likely end up costing roughly $850 billion.

Regarding the nation’s debt, a strict look at receipts and outlays, provided by the Office of Management and Budget, shows that the Obama administration increased debt by $7.7 trillion over eight years, which includes the 2009 economic stimulus package and the variety of other interventions the administration pursued to stave off the Great Recession. Through the first term of the Trump administration, debt increased by $3.6 trillion, not including the $3 trillion in Covid-19 stimulus legislation passed so far. The danger of the current level of debt—$27 trillion, or $81,800 per citizen—is not so straightforward, however. Economists tend to reject the layperson’s view that a government taking on debt is equivalent to a household taking on debt; in fact, one school of thought associated with the Obama administration—modern monetary theory—makes the case that government debt at current levels is a sign of a healthy national economy, which foreign investors want to have a stake in, and which grants the federal government access to relatively low-cost loans to fund its expenditures. That said, those close to Biden have characterized him as wanting to restrain spending in light of the recent growth in the federal deficit.

In the short term, however, both Trump and Biden seem willing to spend emergency funds to help the many Americans out of work because of the pandemic. Roughly twenty-five million Americans now collect some form of unemployment benefits, and racial differences in unemployment remain stark. Because of the many Americans still left out of the recent improvements in the economy, some commentators have taken to calling the recovery “K-shaped”—with separate trend lines for the country’s wealthier and poorer citizens. Those out of work tend to have service jobs that cannot be done from home, while well-paid office professionals have more easily transitioned into teleworking. Meanwhile, Main Street businesses have taken a beating, with data from the review app Yelp suggesting that 60 percent of businesses that have closed since the pandemic began have shuttered permanently.

The $2 trillion put to use by the CARES Act did provide a substantial amount of relief to ordinary Americans in the months after it passed—among them, one-time stimulus checks, temporary expansions to unemployment benefits, and forgivable loans to small businesses that continued to pay their workers. (Granted, the CARES legislation also offered relief for the wealthy, given the ways that large corporate chains were able to take advantage of the small-business loan program, and thanks to provisions that Republican lawmakers inserted to cap real-estate losses and offer other tax benefits that disproportionately benefited the ultra-wealthy.) This massive infusion of government funds kept nearly ten million Americans out of poverty, according to the Urban Institute, and meant that the poverty rate actually continued to decline into April, May, and June, bottoming out at 9.4 percent. However, the expiration of the legislation’s $600 weekly federal supplement for unemployment benefits in July has been followed by a spike in poverty and an uptick in new unemployment claims, which remain higher on a weekly basis than during the peak of the Great Recession. President Trump has repurposed federal funds to make up for some of the lost supplement—though not all states have accepted the money, and many of those that did have yet to distribute it. His administration has also extended federal moratoriums on evictions and student loan payments to the end of the year.

At the moment, Democrats and Republicans continue to negotiate over another stimulus package. Congressional Democrats and Trump have both argued on behalf of a larger stimulus, but Senate Republicans have blocked such measures, arguing that they are unneeded and that the impact on the deficit would be too great. There is still a chance for a last-minute deal, but the broader shape of U.S. inequality will likely be determined in the next president’s term—above all, in what is sure to be a bitter fight over tax policy and continued assistance for the many Americans who will likely still be left out of any recovery.

This essay was coauthored by Timothy Beryl Bland and Victor Tan Chen and cross-published in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Election 2020 blog.

The post Comparing Biden and Trump on Economic Inequality appeared first on In The Fray.

On November 15, 2012, I woke up to discover that my partner had died while we slept. He was forty. I was thirty-seven. Our kids were three and six. The cause would later be identified as an undiagnosed heart condition, but in the hours right after his death, I had no idea what had happened. I remember the seemingly endless procession of strangers who crowded into our small Brooklyn apartment that day. EMTs. Two incredibly young cops. A pair of detectives. The city’s medical examiner. All asked the same things. Later I realized that most of their queries were designed to clear me of any wrongdoing before they allowed me and my children to leave the apartment and decamp to my aunt and uncle’s home in the suburbs. But at the time I just couldn’t figure out why I had to keep repeating myself, and why—when I had called 911 at 7 a.m.—my children and I were required to remain in the apartment with my partner’s lifeless body still on our couch late into the afternoon.

Within thirty-six hours, my parents and my two brothers arrived from my hometown, Vancouver. Over the next few days, other family and friends showed up as well. I was shocked by the number of people who flew in from out of town for the funeral. “I can’t believe you’re here, that you came so far,” I kept saying.

A year and a half later, I was the one making a rushed trip across the continent. My mother had been diagnosed with cancer eight years earlier. After a period of remission, the cancer had returned, and my mother was dying. I booked a flight to see her one last time. Days later my father called to tell me her condition was deteriorating faster than expected, and I hurriedly bumped up the arrival date, changing my ticket to the next day. When my plane landed, I saw my father standing outside baggage claim, and I knew I was too late. At her funeral, I found myself uttering a familiar refrain to others who had traveled: “I can’t believe you’re here, that you came so far.”

That mobility—that ability to come from so far—was something I took for granted before the global pandemic closed borders and sheltered us in place. I’d been free from constraints that hamper so many others. Wars, travel bans, immigration quotas, incarceration, disability, financial difficulties—none of these things had ever prevented me from going where I needed, or wanted, to go. Mostly, I traveled to go home to Vancouver. Being a teacher meant I could often return for a week during the school year and then again for a month in the summer. I cherished that month at home. I spent it catching up with friends, sitting in my parents’ backyard, and taking my son and daughter on outings around the city. I even enrolled my kids in swimming lessons and summer camps there—the place that had shaped me was their place, too, I wanted to remind them.

Previous generations of my family could never have imagined such casual freedom of movement. My Jewish grandparents fled Nazi Germany for New York when my grandfather, Hans Lange, was thirty-nine years old and my grandmother, Kate Rosenberg, was thirty. Those they left behind perished. Those who escaped scattered to all corners of the globe. My grandfather’s siblings and father wound up in Shanghai, where his brother Horst set up a successful medical practice and the family members made good lives for themselves. When the communist regime took over and they were forced to leave, they reunited with my grandfather in Queens—having not seen him for over a decade. By then, my grandparents had met in their adopted country and married in a courthouse ceremony. What followed was many years of miscarriages and stillbirths. Finally, at thirty-eight, my grandmother had what was then called a “late-in-life” baby. My grandfather was a decade her senior, and he died while my mother, their only child, was still in high school.

My parents left their homes and families, too, though under very different circumstances. Both were newly minted historians, having met while graduate students in New York. It was 1974, the city’s economy was crashing, and my father accepted a job at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Back then, the same distances felt farther than they do now. There were no direct flights, and the infrastructure of low-cost air travel we take for granted nowadays—discount airlines, frequent flyer miles, regular fare sales—did not exist. Vancouver was a much different city then, too. It was far less multicultural, with a very small Jewish community at the time. It was also a slower city, one that—as my mother discovered after one too many bus trips with small children—would require that she learn how to drive.

To stay in touch with their families, my parents wrote lots of letters. They made carefully timed phone calls on weekend evenings, when the long-distance rates dropped. Once a year, they would go home to visit. Once a year, they would host their own families in the modest stucco house where my father still lives.

When I was a child, I found the thought of those losses overwhelming. My grandmother had endured the Holocaust murders of her parents and once large family. She had seen the destruction of her entire community. She had left the life she had known in Berlin and started again, utterly alone, in a foreign country. Once there, she had struggled with infertility, the loss of several pregnancies, and the loss of her husband. And then her only child had moved far away. There had been plans to get her an apartment in Vancouver, but the stroke put an end to them, and my grandmother spent the last seven years of her life in a nursing home a continent’s width apart.

Growing up, I vowed never to live so far from my parents.

And yet shortly after I graduated from college, I did just that. I wanted to see what it was like to live in New York. My parents encouraged me to get to know the city where they had both grown up, and thanks to them, I had an American passport and family who was happy to help me settle in. “I’m only going for a year,” I told my sweet boyfriend at the time. “We can be long distance. Plenty of people do that.” That year became two, and then more, and, as it happened, we did not turn out to be those people. Instead, I went to grad school, started a career, met the person I thought I would be with for life, and had children with him.

In the time following my partner’s death, I had been going back to Vancouver regularly. On one of those visits, I returned for a friend’s wedding. There I reconnected with someone I had known as a teenager. Even though he lived in Toronto and I was still in New York, we started dating. A few years later, we married in my dad’s backyard in Vancouver, and our long-distance relationship turned into a long-distance marriage. When he was finally able to move to New York, I was already pregnant. The baby arrived a few months later.

It was a series of unexpectedly joyful events following a series of unhappy ones. Suddenly, I not only had a new partner and new baby, but also a whole new side of the family as well. They were based mostly in Ottawa, which, unlike Vancouver, was a drivable distance from New York. Once or twice a year, my now sizable family would cram into our increasingly creaky old Camry to make the trip. Every few months, my in-laws would drive south to see us.

Then, in March of this year, the Canada–U.S. border closed because of the pandemic. The day of the announcement, I felt deeply unsettled. How long would this closure last? What if someone in my family got sick or injured? What if someone died? In a moment of panic, I tweeted at the Canadian Border Services Agency: if something happened to my in-laws or to my dad, would I still be able to come home? They didn’t reply, but eventually I got them on the phone. While travel was not recommended, an agent told me, if we quarantined for fourteen days after we arrived in Canada, as citizens we could be repatriated. “Canadians can always come back,” the agent calmly explained.

Upon hearing that, I felt such relief—and gratitude. I had lived in New York for over twenty years, but it wasn’t fully home. By now, neither was Vancouver. I imagine many people feel that way: rooted in multiple communities, and having the freedom—prior to the pandemic—to be able to flit between them as needed, keeping the bonds in each place strong. Unlike for my grandparents, and unlike for so many other people without the means or access, planting new roots had never forced me to unearth the ones I’d originally put down. Being separated from loved ones because of the pandemic has reminded me how privileged I am to have that mobility. That’s something I won’t treat nearly so casually, I hope, when the lockdown finally and fully lifts.

The post Distance from Home appeared first on In The Fray.

The pandemic has forced everyone to reconsider how to live, survive, and cope during a time of loss, economic upheaval, and social unrest. For some, the period has also been marked by discovery, resilience, and perseverance. How does one navigate when things are out of control, when civil discourse is anything but, and when six feet is today’s social norm?

In The Fray magazine is looking for essays, reportage, and photo essays that examine how people have responded and what has lifted them up during this time of uncertainty. Please review our submissions guidelines at inthefray.org/submit and send a one-paragraph pitch NO LATER THAN SEPTEMBER 30. You may attach a complete draft if you have one.

We also welcome submissions of news features, commentary, book and film reviews, art/photography, and videos on any other topics that relate to the magazine’s themes: understanding other people and cultures, encouraging empathy and compassion, and defying categories and conventions.

We look forward to hearing from you. Please distribute this call widely across your social networks, or let us know how we can spread the word.

The post Call for Submissions: Resilience appeared first on In The Fray.

It’s not 1975, and we aren’t Americans and South Vietnamese fleeing the advancing Viet Minh forces. It’s forty-five years later, in the middle of March, and we are mostly Australians (along with some New Zealanders) fleeing the contagion of the novel coronavirus.

Amid rumors that the country will soon halt international flights, I board Vietnamese Airlines Flight VN773 out of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon. Bound for Sydney, the plane is scheduled to take off on this balmy Sunday night with a full load of passengers. When I flew in just one week before, my plane had been almost a third-empty. Only the cabin crew wore masks. Back then, the number of reported cases worldwide was under 100,000, with most of the infected in China and only a few dozen in Vietnam. But on tonight’s flight, the faces of all the passengers are half-hidden in paper filter masks. Cases in China and elsewhere have surged, and the World Health Organization, which announced just days earlier that the COVID-19 outbreak was a pandemic, is urging governments around the world to mobilize to stop its spread.

On the night of our evacuation, there are no tanks in the streets, and no artillery shells or small-arms fire lighting up the sky as in 1975. But the city is shifting into a lockdown. Having already closed all schools, the government yesterday ordered nightclubs and bars to shutter While the rumors of a total shutdown of international travel turn out to be untrue, Vietnam is now refusing most entry visas and quarantining those individuals who do make it into the country. Foreign tourists are leaving in droves. One Australian couple sitting across from me say they were denied entry into Vietnam because they had arrived from South Korea—at that time, a coronavirus hot spot.

When Saigon was evacuated on April 30, 1975, eighty-one helicopters flew 1,373 Americans and 5,595 Vietnamese out of the city. Tens of thousands of other Vietnamese refugees made their way across the water on fishing boats, barges, and makeshift sampans to seek refuge on the U.S. Seventh Fleet’s warships anchored offshore, fearing reprisals from the advancing North Vietnamese forces.

COVID-19 is more of a terrorist than an invading army. It seeks out a seemingly random selection of victims, though it is most lethal for those who are older or have preexisting medical conditions. In China, where the virus is believed to have originated, high smoking rates and the toxic soup of air pollution in industrial cities have made the population there particularly vulnerable.

I remember a conversation I had with my shuttle driver on the way to the airport. He said his wife and three children live in his hometown of Hoi An, in the pinch-waisted central part of Vietnam. He spends just four holidays a year at home: one for Tet, the lunar new year festival, and one each for his children’s birthdays. He said he’s lucky to have a good job ferrying passengers to and from the airport, but the future is looking decidedly bleak. Even though Vietnam calls itself a “socialist republic,” there are no unemployment benefits or public pensions. Schooling and health care are not free. In other words, there is not much in the way of a safety net to cushion the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then again, the situation in my country, Australia, is worrisome, too. The principal reason that I came to Vietnam was to get my teeth fixed; the same dental procedure in Australia would have cost three or four times more. With the coronavirus spreading, I’m anxious about my future livelihood. The government just announced that all Australians returning from overseas must self-quarantine for fourteen days. When my plane lands in Sydney, I will be under a kind of house arrest and unable to earn an income. In an economy that rejects permanent employment, I have no paid sick leave to fall back on. Perhaps there will eventually be some sort of bailout from the federal government to help people who have been economically affected by the pandemic. That said, there are limits to Australian socialism, particularly if the recipient is not destitute. (Such limits, of course, do not apply to banks or financial institutions.)

The Vietnamese cabin crew are polite and efficient. They serve us dinner, and for a moment the passengers look normal again, our masks no longer hiding our faces as we eat our hot meals. I chew my pork and rice cautiously with my newly crowned teeth.

Our plane is now flying over what the Vietnamese call the East Sea and the rest of the world knows as the South China Sea, a body of water whose islands and undersea wealth are claimed by several nations—most aggressively, China. This is one of the world’s most important trade routes, linking China and its markets across the globe. But fewer goods are flowing across it nowadays: trade volumes have sunk dramatically as China has struggled to contain the virus.

Our dinners eaten and trays dispensed with, we don our masks again. The cabin lights are darkened shortly afterward, and the passengers settle down to enjoy a video or catch what sleep we can. Next to me, an elderly Vietnamese lady begins to doze, her head toppling gently onto my shoulder. I watch a long movie and find afterwards that I cannot sleep. Instead, I watch the dawn gradually peep in through the darkened cabin windows.

We touch down in Sydney on a cool, drizzly morning. There is an air of finality as we leave the plane. This will be one of the last flights on this route, at least for the time being.

The post The Evacuation of Saigon, 2020 appeared first on In The Fray.

It’s one of the most grueling, dangerous jobs on Earth. Workers at the Cerro Rico mines near Potosí, Bolivia, toil from dawn till dusk in constricted, dust-filled passages, knowing they might die at any moment and likely will never reach middle age. Now, Cerro Rico has become a leading tourist attraction—despite the risks, the plight of the miners, and the downward spiral of a community that has fallen far from past wealth and glory.

“It’s like going to the zoo, looking at animals,” said Julio Morales, an ex-miner turned mining tour operator turned activist, who believes the visits are getting out of hand. “The mines are not a game.”

In the sixteenth century, Spanish conquistadors discovered silver inside a mountain overlooking a remote village in the Andes. They named the mountain Cerro Rico, “rich hill.” At the time, Cerro Rico contained the largest silver deposit on the planet. The precious mineral was so abundant it bankrolled the Spanish empire and transformed the village of Potosí into a world economic powerhouse. By 1611, the population had risen to 160,000, making Potosí one of the largest cities on Earth.

As wealth flowed out of the mines, indigenous and African slaves flowed in. The Spanish forced the slaves to live underground—often for days at a time—enduring brutal conditions as they labored to extract the silver ore. Many never resurfaced, succumbing to hunger, disease, and overexertion. By the time the Spanish departed Bolivia three centuries later, millions of workers had perished, earning Cerro Rico the nickname “the mountain that eats men.”

Today, the silver that made Potosí famous for its extravagant wealth is all but depleted, but miners continue to work the mountain. In addition to trace amounts of silver, the sought-after minerals are now tin, lead, and zinc—used in the manufacture of paint, ceramics, pharmaceuticals, textiles, batteries, auto parts, and electronics. The workers at Cerro Rico are no longer slaves, but their working conditions are still dangerous. Approximately half of Potosí’s mines are at least a hundred years old; some date back half a millennium. Wooden planks hewn in colonial times still brace many of the 20,000-plus tunnels crisscrossing the mountain. Cave-ins are common, and they have become even more so in the past decade, as miners have shifted from following veins to indiscriminately removing mass quantities of rock from shafts, or even mining at the surface of the mountain. Taking these more aggressive approaches extracts more of the Cerro Rico’s ever-diminishing minerals, but they also weaken the mountain’s structural integrity.

In 2011, a sinkhole opened at the peak of Cerro Rico. The government filled it with cement to stabilize the rock. The summit has continued to cave in slowly, however, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which previously named Potosí one of its World Heritage sites, added the city and Cerro Rico to its list of endangered locations in 2014. A report by UNESCO and the International Council on Monuments and Sites called the situation at Cerro Rico “urgent,” saying that extensive mining had “severely weakened” the upper part of the mountain and resulted in “a significant risk that miners could die from collapses inside the tunnels, as … has already occurred.”

Tom Perreault, a geographer at Syracuse University, describes Cerro Rico today as a “honeycomb.” “There are hundreds of mine openings, and miles and miles of mine shafts,” he says. “It is anyone’s guess how structurally sound the mountain is.” In spite of the danger, Perreault says government officials have little interest in regulating the mining industry, given how important it is to the economy. “They don’t want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”

Thanks in large part to relatively high prices for minerals, gas, and other commodities, Bolivia’s economy has grown steadily over the last two decades. The boom allowed Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous president, to fund dramatic increases in spending on schools, hospitals, and infrastructure, among other things, which experts say contributed to a sharp reduction in levels of extreme poverty during his presidency. (Morales, who had been in office since 2006, won an unprecedented—and, his opponents say, unconstitutional—fourth term in October, but was forced into exile after outside election observers discovered vote-counting irregularities, sparking deadly riots across the country.) Economic growth has tapered off somewhat in recent years, however, as worldwide commodity prices have dropped. Meanwhile, a lack of infrastructure and education has stymied Bolivia’s efforts to pursue alternatives in industries that are not as volatile.

Potosí’s star, of course, faded centuries ago. The hunt for tin, lead, and zinc has kept the mines humming but not brought back the city’s old glory. Once equal in population to London, Potosí is now one of the poorest cities in South America’s poorest country, and there are few employment options in the area. Potosí is located at a high altitude (13,000 feet) in a desert, making farming difficult. Other than mining, the only jobs available are in restaurants and hotels geared to international tourists. Tourism is a growth industry in Bolivia—the World Bank says almost one million foreigners visited the country in 2016, 67 percent more than in 2007—and locals are hopeful that more of these tourist dollars will make their way to the country’s southwestern region. In recent years, dozens of entrepreneurs there have launched tours into the mines, trying to build Potosí’s future on the back of its past.

A trip with one of Potosí’s travel agencies normally costs $10 to $20, including protective clothing, rubber boots, and a helmet with a headlamp. Many companies hire ex-miners to lead the excursions. On a recent trip to Potosí, I join a group led by Jose Antonio Ferrufino Ticona, a middle-aged ex-miner who runs Potochij Tours. Ticona started working in the mines decades ago, at the age of fourteen, but he quit five years later after his father, a miner, died of lung disease. (His grandfather, also a miner, had died of a similar condition.) Ticona switched to guiding to escape the profession, he says.

As is typically the case at Cerro Rico, the tour begins with a stop at the local miners’ market, located near the base of the mountain. There, visitors are strongly encouraged to buy gifts for the workers, such as dynamite, cigarettes, and coca leaves (miners chew the leaves to boost their energy and reduce hunger during their long shifts). Though it might be considered poor form, I can’t bring myself to purchase anything. Giving a miner crackers to “perform” for me feels a bit unsettling and suspect.

We get into a small passenger van and drive for a few minutes up to one of the mine’s many entrances. Given how deadly a place Cerro Rico is, the entrance seems rather mundane: a cramped, unlit opening in the side of the mountain, framed and supported by weathered timbers. As our group of six guests approaches in the late morning, we come upon a heavyset tourist from another group standing just outside the entrance. After staring into the darkness, she tells us, she lost her nerve to go in. “I can’t do it,” she says, sobbing.

Over the next two hours, we walk in the darkness through uneven, muddy shafts, squeeze through tight, claustrophobic spots, and gingerly scramble up and down rickety wooden ladders that appear to have been in place for decades. We descend four levels deep into the mine; Ticona says he steers clear of the other ten levels, where there’s increased activity and an increased chance for mishaps.

The Bolivian government once ran Cerro Rico’s mines, but it decided to lease them out to mining cooperatives in the 1980s when worldwide commodity prices crashed. Cooperative mining partners, or socios, pay the government for the right to work sections of a mine. The socios form “workgroups” to extract the minerals from their sections, covering the costs and reaping the rewards of the work done there.

The cooperative mining sector has grown dramatically in recent years. In 2014, there were 113,000 socios representing 155 cooperatives, up from 49,000 partners and 94 cooperatives just six years earlier. But these figures do not account for the day laborers, or “peons,” who make up half of the workforce in the Cerro Rico mines. The socios can tap this pool of contingent labor when mineral prices are high and they can afford the extra help. The peons have no ownership stake and only get paid either a set, pre-determined wage or a percentage of what minerals they collect. A day’s work can earn them as much as twenty-one and as little as ten U.S. dollars—an average to below-average monthly wage in Potosí. Sometimes the peons must even provide their own tools, including dynamite to blast through rock. While socios can potentially receive a big payoff if their workgroup strikes a rich vein, they are often not much better off than the peons, given that they also bear the expenses and risks of the excavation. “The majority of miners are living paycheck to paycheck,” says Kirsten Francescone, Latin American coordinator for MiningWatch Canada, an international watchdog agency. “If they get ahead for a week or two, they quickly fall behind when they get sick.”

Critics say the “cooperatives”—which tend to be run by families or small groups—are nothing more than unscrupulous businesses that exploit their workers. In Bolivia’s nationalized mines, the miners are represented by labor unions and receive fixed salaries and benefits. But the private cooperative sector now dominates the industry, accounting for 88 percent of the country’s mining workforce.

In Cerro Rico, roughly eight thousand people are employed across four hundred mines. (This includes child labor: a 2014 report by the Bolivian national ombudsman’s office said there were 145 child workers at Cerro Rico, most of them between the ages of fifteen and seventeen.) Miners typically work eight to ten hours a day, and sometimes more when the prices of the minerals on global markets fall. But in spite of the constant danger of falls, collapsing tunnels, dynamite blasts, and carbon monoxide, most of these miners have just helmets and rubber boots for protection and use the most primitive tools—dynamite, picks, and shovels—to excavate the tottering mountain. The biggest health threat is silicosis, an incurable lung disease caused by breathing in tiny rock particles from drilling and explosions, yet few miners wear masks. Because of these hazards, Francescone says, the average life expectancy of a Cerro Rico miner is between thirty-five and forty years.

The Bolivian government claims it keeps no national statistics on deaths or accidents associated with the mining cooperatives. Reliable figures are hard to come by, given that police reports of mining accidents—which recorded twenty-two deaths in 2010—suffer from underreporting, even as the number of cooperatives has swelled. One tour operator estimates that each month five to six people die in Cerro Rico, the majority from cave-ins. MUSOL, an advocacy group that works with local women and their families, calculates that mining-related accidents and diseases create fourteen widows a month. “A lot of miners completely understand they are killing themselves,” says William Strosnider, an ecological engineer at the University of South Carolina. “They are making a deal with the devil for higher earnings … but shorter lives.”

Most of these dangers could be avoided if the cooperatives invested in modern mining technologies. For instance, wet drilling—a method of mining that uses compressed air to force water out of the end of drill bits—eliminates almost all the dust that causes silicosis. But the equipment is expensive to purchase and maintain, and the cooperatives argue that they are already on the edges of profitability. They have fiercely resisted any government regulation of their activities, and they have the grassroots power and political clout to punish those who cross them. In 2016, cooperative miners staged nationwide protests, in part calling on the government to relax environmental rules so that mining output could be increased. Bolivia’s deputy interior minister, Rodolfo Illanes, was kidnapped after going to negotiate with the miners at a roadblock they set up outside the capital. The next day Illanes was found beaten to death on the side of the highway. In July, four cooperative miners were sentenced to five years each for the murder.

As our tour group continues exploring the fourth level, we eventually run into a group of miners. A half-dozen men are using well-worn sledgehammers to smash rock from an earlier explosion. None of them wear eye protection or masks, even though a haze of rock residue fills the air in the confined passage, making it challenging to breathe.

Our guide Ticona greets the miners, and we stop for a moment. As he distributes the various presents we bought at the market—crackers, juice, cigarettes, coca leaves—I notice that one of the miners is sitting off to one side. He appears to be a veteran of Cerro Rico, perhaps in his late thirties. Though still early in the shift, he slouches heavily against the wall, already spent.

I start chatting with another miner, who tells me his name is Ivan. “I’m Russian,” he jokes, before erupting into laughter.

I ask how he feels about our presence underground. “You are welcome,” he says. “You bring gifts. You bring coca leaves.”

There’s no avoiding the moral question of whether tourists are helping or exploiting the very miners they come to see. At the end of the guided tour, I ask the other people in my group—five twentysomething tourists from around the globe—how it felt to visit the mines. Hanna Michali, a tourist from Germany, tells me that “everyone” should see what is going on in Cerro Rico—and “how lucky we are compared to how hard others work,” she adds. Annabelle Brewer, a New Zealander, points out that tourism is a “big help” to people in the community, but she also feels uneasy about being in the mine. “It felt weird just going into someone’s workplace and taking photos.”

According to critics of Cerro Rico’s guided tours, too many visitors are coming to Potosí in search of extreme tourism—here, a sort of “danger tourism,” given the mountain’s real risks—without regard for how chasing such exotic experiences might sensationalize and demean the local culture. Julio Morales worked in Cerro Rico for three years before founding Greengo Tours, which leads tourists into the mines. He has grown more conflicted about his work over the years. He rails against the “stupid” tourists who, in search of thrills, will harass guides to take them to the mine’s more perilous areas. “They don’t care about the miners. They just want selfies.” Visitors to Cerro Rico, he adds, need to show respect for what happens there. “They are going to a real mine, where miners die.”

In 2019, Morales stopped leading tours, in part because he was shaken by a mining accident that killed four of his friends. “I have ghosts in my life,” he says. “That is why I want to change the system.” Morales says he and other activists have been lobbying for more government oversight of mining tourism. Among other things, Morales wants to limit tourists to just one mine considered to be safe, require better training for guides, and mandate that a fixed amount of tour proceeds go to social welfare programs that benefit the miners and their families. (As a goodwill gesture, tour companies advertise they donate around 13 to 15 percent of their proceeds to the cooperatives or social welfare programs, but advocates for the miners claim the percentage is much less.)

For his part, our tour guide Ticona says the trips serve an important educational purpose. “If we do not visit the mines, we will continue to consume electronic products without knowing and valuing the sacrifice they make to obtain the metals that are the basis of these products.” (Some of the metals extracted from Cerro Rico are used in circuit boards and computer chips, meaning the smartphone or laptop you’re using to read this article might contain a bit of the mountain’s minerals.) Other supporters of the tours point out that it sustains small local businesses and provides work other than mining for the people of Potosí to do. The miners, they add, are proud of their ability to persevere underground, and some enjoy teaching tourists about what their work looks like. “It is one thing to think theoretically about mining. It is another to see it,” says Ricardo Farinha, a Portuguese tourist who was also in my group. Farinha acknowledges having qualms about the “zoo”-like nature of the tours. “But I wanted to see the working conditions, so I put my morals aside.”

Every once in a while, a group of miners will strike it rich by discovering a high-grade vein. This is a dream that drives many workers at Cerro Rico. “The mine is like a lottery,” Morales says. “Today might be the day.” Yet today might also be the day that they are injured or killed in the course of their work, he adds. “You have to be crazy to work in the mines, with the conditions. But there are no other alternatives.”

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