​Heartbreaking. Infuriating. Degrading. Surreal. Galling. Shaming. Powerless.
 
Those aren’t the words I’m using to describe the rapes that I experienced while a graduate student at Columbia University. They are the words I am using to describe the feeling of my government dismissing experiences of sexual assault from which I have endured lasting trauma.
 
To be sure, the two rapes that I experienced have cost me greatly – years of productivity at work, years of happiness, an amount of time and money in therapy that would be too depressing to count, and it nearly cost me my life as my depression and PTSD symptoms escalated to suicidality. I have told friends. I have told doctors. I have told therapists. But I never reported to the police, and I knew that I never would.
 
The first rape was November 8, 2012 – six years to the day before sexual predator Donald Trump won the presidency. I was out celebrating President Obama’s reelection, having just returned to NYC from the campaign in Pennsylvania, where I worked for the home stretch of the election. Beers were followed by tequila shots, which were followed by Jager Bombs, which were followed by more beers. A cute man just a few years older than I smiled and bought me a drink. We flirted and kissed briefly.
 
Then I stood up, and as the room continued to spin wildly around me, I fell to the floor, then crawled my way to the bathroom, where I vomited profusely. Careening out of the bathroom and through the bar toward the exit, I paid my tab and told the man that I drank too much and was going home. As I reached for my coat, I fell to the ground again, noticing its stickiness now coated to hands, and regaining my footing, I walked out in search of a cab for the 25 blocks uptown to my apartment. He insisted that he take me home. I deliriously kept saying simply, “I’m just going home,” and I got a cab, and it took me a few minutes to realize that he was in the cab beside me, where I spent most of the ride trying (with mixed success) not to vomit more. When we arrived at my building, I did not invite him upstairs, and simply kept saying, “I’m just going home. I’m just going to bed.” Those are the only words I remember saying as I strained to make my way up the stairs to my 6th floor apartment (the elevator was out of service, with progress toward fixing it delayed by Hurricane Sandy). And then I passed out fully clothed on my bed.
 
When I woke up (I don’t know how long later), he was on top of me and inside me, and as I began to realize what was happening and struggled, he covered my mouth with his hand, before moving on to a type of sex with which I had at the time been inexperienced and that elicited a blinding pain. When he finished, I told him to leave. Leaving his name and number on my dresser as though it were a consensual hookup, he walked out the door, and I cried.
 
The next morning, I did all of the wrong things. I stripped the bed, wanting to be rid of his scent. I took the longest shower of my life, weeping as water beat down my trembling, bruised, and bleeding body and as I struggled to catch my breath. And when I went to the campus health center to find out whether I should be tested for STDs or whether they should preemptively treat for them, the doctor’s first question had been whether I had been drinking and whether I was sure that I said no. And that was it. (The doctor spent so much time researching the risks/benefits of STD testing vs. preemptive treatment that they ran out of time and sent me off without anything but a number for their counseling services.)
 
It was demoralizing. I knew rationally that it was not consensual. I had not invited him in to my apartment. I had been falling down and vomiting and passed out (a state in which I rarely find myself, thankfully, but it was a special occasion), so clearly I was not in a condition to consent. When I began to regain consciousness, he resisted my struggles. He did not use a condom. Yet the doctor viewed this as a drinking issue rather than a sexual assault issue, an exchange that hardly inspired in me the confidence to report anything further. I went to the graduate student workspace on campus, pretending to work but unable to concentrate, and after meeting with my advisor regarding a work matter, I had lunch at Tom’s Restaurant with a close friend from graduate school and I told him. And he listened. And I cried. And he let me cry.
 
For months, I threw myself into work as a distraction, sometimes working over 100 hours a week on data collection so as to leave less room in my mind for flashbacks. My relationship suffered, because even as loving and sensitive as my boyfriend was, sex had become loaded with negative associations, with flashbacks, with panic attacks. And when the relationship ended and the structure of the semester as well, the amount of space in my room to fixate on those events of November 8, 2012 terrified me.
 
And it confused me, because I felt as though a bad sexual experience should be more easily overcome, even forgotten. (Though of course I know that it’s not simply sex, but rather issues of power and control). All I knew was the shock and panic with which I reacted when touched unexpectedly, and the difficulty with which I was able to build trust with people, especially men, even though I didn’t fully understand why I experienced this with such magnitude. And I wanted to convince myself that sex was meaningless, something unworthy of derailing my personal and professional life.
 
So I had sex. A lot of sex. With a lot of people. (Sorry, mom.)  Hell, I was single in my mid-to-late 20s in New York City, so why not? I told myself that it was meaningless, so that remembering November 8, 2012 wouldn’t hurt so much, though it didn’t quite work out that way. And these antics were consequence-free for a while – I was always safe, and met nice people with whom I was simply not pursuing anything serious. But as I began a new antidepressant and prepared to go on the academic job market, I decided to lay low for a while and focus on work.
 
Until June 1, 2014, when I was watching the last 4 innings of a Mets/Phillies game in the Flatiron, waiting for a friend who due to MTA delays had decided at the last minute to do a raincheck. I met someone who seemed friendly, and we talked for an hour or so, and I stopped drinking so that I would be (more or less) sober for whatever followed. He invited me over for a glass of wine and I said yes, and when we arrived at his apartment, we opened a bottle of wine and began to talk (I don’t remember about what), then kiss, hands beginning to wander a bit. When I told him that I wanted to make it an early night and didn’t want to have sex, he was visibly annoyed, and hoping to talk me out of it as he reached up my skirt and I pushed his hand away. His kissing got rougher, and I pulled away, reaching for my purse so that I could try to make an exit, but he pushed me on to the bed, pulling down my clothes and holding me down firmly, enough for bruises to form around my neck and wrists. He turned me over so that I was lying on my stomach, his hands pressed on my back so that my face was smashed into his pillow until he finished.
 
And then I dressed and left, sobbing and trembling as I walked from his East Harlem apartment to my West Harlem apartment sometime around midnight. And as I curled up in a ball in my bed – the same bed on which my first rape occurred – I cried myself to sleep. The next morning, I put concealer over my bruises and taught my summer session course on constitutional law.
 
Again, I did not report. Especially given the campus health center’s callous reaction to the first assault, I could not imagine the number of questions that I would be forced to endure if I did so. Was I drinking? (Only a little – two drinks over four hours.). What was I wearing? (A skirt and t- shirt – nothing too alluring, not that it should matter.) How many sexual partners had I had? (Probably irrelevant.) If I didn’t want to have sex with him, why did I agree to a drink in his apartment? (Because I assumed – I thought reasonably – that there could be a few steps between a drink and flirtation and sex, and most men I knew understood and respected the word “no.”.) Why was this the time that I decided I didn’t want to have sex? (Because I simply didn’t want to, and every time I resisted, he got violent, which reinforced that I was not with someone who would respect my boundaries.)
 
I wanted to forget it all, though no amount of therapy and medication could help me to not feel their touch when I was with other men, even other men I trusted. And it is difficult to explain to a new partner why I have such visceral reactions to one moving too quickly or too aggressively (even within the realm of consent), or why certain sexual activities won’t be on the menu with me. My physical health worsened as I became worse at keeping up with medication regimens and appointments, and I contemplated dropping out of graduate school altogether. And eventually, it seemed easier to not exist than it was to heal, though my multiple severe intentional overdoses have shown to me that I’m not very good at ceasing to exist either.
 
I have struggled for years (with mixed success) to forget, to forgive, to heal. My depression has led me to an ICU with a tube down my throat. But even at my worst, I felt as though I was struggling because I had the misfortune of experiencing the bad the actions of a couple of bad people, in a world where people were generally on my side. Republicans’ defense of Donald Trump after the Access Hollywood tape, and now again as they dismiss Dr. Ford’s attempted rape allegations against Judge Brett Kavanaugh, is the time when I have felt most violated because it is my government legitimizing the actions of my rapists. This government is now saying that rapes that were a certain amount of time ago don’t matter, and that the most consequential legal and policy issues our nation faces should be able to be handled by people who themselves have committed sexual assault.
 
I do not know all that Dr. Ford has gone through, and I won’t pretend to. But I know the feeling of powerlessness and fear that consumes one when a man lies on top of you, stifling your cries for help, and not knowing what will happen next. I know the ambivalence of wanting closure versus wanting to erase the memories altogether. I know the anger toward men in bars and other such places when they more innocuously disregard consent with a wandering hand and the ignoring of personal space, and not knowing whether the anger is more from the present encounter or from the prior assault. I know the lasting fear in future sexual encounters, and the uncertainty of how to rebuild trust with people. I understand that while some moments from those nights feel as so vivid that they could have happened just yesterday, others are hazy memories (whether from alcohol or defense mechanisms, or some combination). And I understand a reticence about painful and uncomfortable reporting about sexual assault, lest one be subjected to uncomfortably personal questioning, accusations of crying rape when simply regretting the sexual encounter, or being ignored altogether so as to protect the reputation and career of the accused.
 
Indeed, looking at the probability with which those committing sexual assault are held accountable, there is very little incentive for survivors to endure the retraumatization of reporting.
 
I am grateful for Dr. Ford demonstrating the courage that I lacked (though as far as I know, those who assaulted me are not in politics or prominent positions of power). She should be rewarded for speaking out about someone who not only would be the deciding vote on women’s health care in a lifetime position on our nation’s highest court, but has himself been nominated by someone who boasted about committing sexual assault. That reward for testifying should not come in the form of being patronizing, with Lindsey Graham saying, “I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close.” Dr. Ford should not simply be given time in which to testify, but she should be respected, and she should be heard.
 
When the government signals that it is on the side of those who commit sexual assault, perpetrators win, because they see a world of consequence-free assault. And while the #MeToo movement has certainly empowered many of us to actively assert our rights, the message on November 8, 2016 was loud and clear: committing sexual assault is not a disqualifying characteristic for the President of the United States.
 
In 1991, America similarly saw the Senate’s callous disregard for the compelling testimony that Anita Hill provided regarding sexual harassment by then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. It would be nice if the Senate could show that it has evolved since then, but the upcoming hearings are being treated with even less seriousness in terms of the witnesses involved and the Senators’ comments regarding their determination to confirm Judge Kavanaugh despite these serious allegations. With Senator Graham and others expressing concern about ruining the life of Judge Kavanaugh by investigating these claims, it is crystal clear that the Senate Republicans are forgetting the life that was really ruined: Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, and the sexual assault survivors across the nation who are wondering if their government or communities would protect them, and if not, whether they should keep secret the sexual violence to which we’ve been subjected.
 
When the Republican men on the Senate Judiciary Committee ask in the upcoming hearings why Dr. Ford didn’t report the incident at the time that it happened, I hope that they have some mirrors handy. 

​While the National Rifle Association claims that gun control is an infringement on their Second Amendment rights, they demonstrate little understanding of constitutional law in reaching their conclusions. Indeed, the NRA has virtually rewritten the Second Amendment to the point of declaring gun rights unfettered, leading former Chief Justice Warren Burger – a Nixon appointee – to characterize in 1990 this reinterpretation of the Second Amendment as a “fraud on the American public.”
 
More recently, the Supreme Court in DC v. Heller (2008) – a case in which the Supreme Court upheld gun rights – also held that while the Second Amendment did protect one’s right to possess a firearm outside the context of service in a militia, “Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
 
Thus, the Court held that while a total ban on handguns was in violation of the Second Amendment, less expansive limits would be within reason. And while the Court famously struck down the Guns-Free School Zones Act in US v. Lopez on the grounds that its relationship to interstate commerce was too attenuated, it would be within Congress’s right under the Spending Clause to condition federal funding on compliance with guns-free school zones, especially with respect to assault weapons. Nor would a nation-wide assault weapons ban, background checks, and prohibitions of domestic abusers from having guns be out of accord with the Second Amendment or with the Heller holding.  
 
Such a reading is wholly consistent with our treatment of other constitutional amendments. We do not have blanket protections for freedom of speech, which is why in Miller v. California, the Supreme Court established that obscenity is not a class of communication that is deserving of First Amendment protection. It is why in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court established that while speech can enjoy First Amendment protection while advocating for illegal activities, it is not protected if it is “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and is likely to produce that illegal action. And it is why in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, the Supreme Court held that certain fighting words can fall outside the scope of speech that is protected under the First Amendment.
 
Some conservatives have sought limits on the scope of the Establishment Clause by encouraging the availability of school vouchers that may be used in a religious school. The first clause of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” would seem at first blush to preclude federal dollars to going toward a religious institution. The Supreme Court has, over the years, worked to decipher what constitutes an “establishment” of religion – that is, whether it simply means the preclusion of preferential treatment toward particular religions, or a wall of separation between church and state. And the Court has wrestled with the scope of its protections of free exercise protection, viewing the First Amendment not with absolutism, but rather balancing the individual’s interests in free exercise of religion against, for example, a state’s interest in educating students (Wisconsin v. Yoder) or ensuring compliance with anti-drugs laws (Employment Division v. Smith).
 
Limiting the scope of the Second Amendment is also consistent with limits on the scope of the Fourth Amendment, which is why in New Jersey vs. T.L.O., the Court held that public schools did not require probable cause to search a student, but rather only “reasonable suspicion,” because “striking the balance between schoolchildren's legitimate expectations of privacy and the school's equally legitimate need to maintain an environment in which learning can take place requires some easing of the restrictions to which searches by public authorities are ordinarily subject.” The flexibility with which the Court has interpreted the Fourth Amendment in times of national security also provides precedent here, with electronic surveillance capacity vastly expanded under the PATRIOT Act even with respect to those about whom there was not probably cause that illegal activity might occur. Rather, there was a balancing of liberty and security, which at times can be in tension with one another.
 
So is the case with gun violence.
 
There are some who attribute the gun violence epidemic to mental illness. Yet mental illnesses pervade many countries around the world, while the United States leads the world in mass shootings. Moreover, too often the legislators who dismiss mass shootings as problems of mental illness are legislators who themselves voted for legislation that reduces funding for Medicaid and destabilize for Affordable Care Act markets, both of which deliver vital coverage for mental health and substance abuse treatment. And while mental health background checks are sensible to be sure, the information one can glean from them is limited given their focus on involuntary commitment, thus leaving out those who have either not sought treatment at all or who have done so on a voluntary basis.
 
There are some who attribute the gun violence epidemic to exposure to violent video games. Yet many countries with access to such video games do not find that it spurs gun violence in their countries, and a ten-country comparison did not demonstrate a correlation between video game consumption and gun violence. Moreover, the countries that have the most deaths from gun violence do not tend to spend the most on video games.
 
Blaming gun violence on mental illness and video games is easy. What is necessary is recognizing the problem of the ease with which people acquire dangerous, high-capacity weapons under the guise of embracing the Second Amendment.
 
Constitutional questions are challenging, with multiple competing interests at play. But if gun rights advocates want to be taken seriously in opposing on Second Amendment grounds such basic policies as assault weapons bans, stronger background checks, and raising the age limits, they would do well to acknowledge (for better or worse) the malleability with which we have precedent in treating other constitutional rights in times of danger.
 
As Judge Richard Posner wrote, “Concretely, the scope of these rights has been determined, through an interaction of constitutional text and subsequent judicial interpretation, by a weighing of competing interests… The safer the nation feels, the more weight judges will be willing to give to the liberty interest. The greater the threat that an activity poses to the nation's safety, the stronger will the grounds seem for seeking to repress that activity, even at some cost to liberty. This fluid approach is only common sense.”
 
We can certainly debate the virtues of setting a precedent for relaxing First and Fourth Amendment protections, but to act as though any act of gun control is impermissible because of the existence of the Second Amendment is as ill-informed as it is dangerous. And quite rightly, lower courts have held that assault weapons bans are not inconsistent with the preservation of the Second Amendment and the central holding of Heller, with the 4th Circuit holding in Kolbe v. Hogan (2017) that the gun prohibition advanced an important state interest of protecting public safety. The reality is that we do not have a precedent of treating all rights in the Constitution in a dichotomous, all-or-nothing fashion, and to pretend otherwise limits our capacity to have serious and thoughtful discussions about the balancing of Second Amendment rights and the public safety measures on which lives literally depend.
 
The United States has more guns per capita than the rest of the world, and its epidemic of gun violence poses profound challenges of public safety and public health. With people dying every day from gun violence – both from suicide and from homicide – and with students left every day to wonder whether their school will be the next Sandy Hook Elementary School or the next Marjory Stone Douglas High School, we owe it to our students and to our communities to be better, and to do better. 

​Since the horrific and tragic events in Charlottesville, I have been torn between two thoughts. First, I try to give credit where it is due, and a number of Republicans have joined Democrats in condemning the white supremacy on full display at the rally (seriously, isn’t condemning Nazis the easiest part of the job?). But second, I find myself frustrated that those seeking solace in condemning Nazis (a condemnation apparently not of interest to President Trump…) so happily have empowered those who further entrench racism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia.

I don’t know that Republicans are necessarily racist. But when they empower racists as a means to achieve their precious tax cuts, they look an awful lot like racists.

Consider President Trump, who as a candidate was endorsed by former KKK leader David Duke and the modern KKK, and notably showed reluctance in disavowing David Duke while showing no such restraint in attacking the media or celebrities who criticized him. It is striking that our president has stronger words for Meryl Streep than for ex-Klansmen. Trump’s perpetuation of the deeply racist birther conspiracy theory ought to have itself been disqualifying, yet the party nevertheless heard him out on other issues salient to the party. Watching Trump question the impartiality of a judge on the basis of his ethnicity, Republicans failed to distance themselves from him as their party’s nominee. Sure, they may have issued a gratuitous tweet or press statement, but they didn’t withdraw their support. They did not raise the question of, “Does the man who David Duke thinks speak for him, also speak for me and for my party?” Or if they did, they didn’t answer with an affirmative “no.” And then they voted to defend the man who they held committed the textbook definition of racism.

Indeed, any condemnation of racism rings hollow when it doesn’t not confront fully the fact that our president ran his campaign claiming that Mexicans were rapists, alleging that immigrants were bringing crime, and seeking to impose a ban on Muslims’ entrance into the United States. Will Trump disavow unabashed xenophobes? Surely no. He is one himself. Will the Republicans in Congress disavow unabashed xenophobes? Surely not. Most of them voted for one for president, and in most cases they’re enabling his agenda.

Or how about President Trump’s embrace of Steve Bannon, whose ties to white supremacy, if not direct embrace of white supremacy, should have been an immediate red flag if not deal-breaker for Republicans throughout Congress. While President Trump’s Republican support pales in comparison to that of his predecessors, a number of his co-partisans recognize that working with this administration will be necessary to achieve common goals of tax reform to aid the wealthy and the decimation of health care (also to aid the wealthy). Toward this end, the Republicans have consistently overlooked the inconvenient truths of the Administration’s entrenchment in white nationalism.

Consider the vote for Jeff Sessions for Attorney General. The best way I can summarize the Sessions confirmation is, “Jeff Sessions: Too racist for 1986, but just racist enough for 2017.” This is a man whose history of racism is well-documented and precluded his successful confirmation as a judge in the 1980s – and who in recent years not only criticized consent decrees, but characterized the Voting Rights Act as “intrusive,” praising the Supreme Court’s deplorable gutting of the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder. Indeed, Sessions had at one point jested that he thought the KKK were okay until he learned of their use of marijuana, and former colleagues had testified that he had used the n-word. And at a time of well-documented police brutality against people of color, this is an especially dangerous person to head the Department of Justice, for whom “justice” will apparently no longer be the operative word. Yet not a single Republican voted against him to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

It should come as little surprise that Republicans have hardly been on the front lines condemning Attorney General Sessions’s subsequent expansion of support for the private prison industry, with those incarcerated disproportionately minorities (and in many states, likely to have their voting rights stripped away, thus leaving them devoid of political remedies to fight back against such policies in subsequent elections).

Now let’s turn to the vote for Ben Carson, whose qualification for the position of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development could only be on the basis of his understanding “inner cities,” which appears to be President Trump’s euphemism for majority minority communities. Characterizing civil rights protections as “extra rights,” there was little doubt that Secretary Carson would fail to vigorously enforce civil rights in public housing, thus opening the door toward further discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, or sexual orientation or identity. Consistent with expectations, as HUD Secretary, Carson “reinterpreted” an Obama-era housing rule that had aimed to combat housing discrimination by reducing segregation. There was not a single Republican who voted against his confirmation.

Consider the administration’s new war on affirmative action programs, which help to increase education opportunity for those from historically disadvantaged groups, but which some conservatives characterize as “reverse discrimination.” With education opportunity helping to increase economic opportunity, increasing access to quality, affordable education is imperative, and increasing diversity is a broad goal that the Supreme Court has affirmed in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and again in Fisher v. University of Texas (2016), conditional upon those affirmative action programs consisting of a holistic admissions review and thus narrowly tailored as opposed to a more sweeping quota system as under Bakke. Needless to say, the incompetence of the current administration doesn’t leave one with the sense that the takeaway of 2017 is that white people are disadvantaged and plagued with “economic anxiety.” At a time when we are already seeing a re-segregation of American schools, such a stand against increasing diversity would roll back decades of progress in education and economic opportunity. And this condemnation of affirmative action has been a long-standing conservative talking point.

Or we can address the government’s commitment to Medicaid allocations, which deliver health care to the most vulnerable segments of American society, and with 1 in 5 Americans on Medicaid or CHIP. With considerable persisting health inequality, including along racial lines, delivering health coverage to the vulnerable is imperative in helping people to be productive in the workforce, and in turn boosting economic opportunity across racial lines. Studies have found that minorities would be deeply harmed by cuts to the government’s Medicaid allocations. And yet Republicans’ failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act was in no small part due to the proposed legislation not cutting health care enough.

And for everyone’s dream palate cleanser after that, there’s Stephen Miller, over whom rumors have circulated regarding a potential promotion into a communications position after his castigation of the ideals embraced by the Statute of Liberty and “The New Colossus.” But hey, we’re all probably just being too cosmopolitan in rejecting the notion that America has been, and should continue to a nation for whom diversity is an asset, not a liability, and shouldn’t be erased away through white supremacist groups seemingly be in bed with the presidential administration.

Or how about the voter ID legislation that is sweeping the nation in the aftermath of Shelby County v. Holder. Studies have shown that non-white Americans are less likely than white Americans to possess government-issued ID, and thus that such laws would have a disproportionate impact in suppressing minority voters. And yet Republicans have time and again been the party sponsoring for political gain these restrictive voting laws, many of which previously had been blocked due to preclearance requirements but which the Supreme Court has now given the green light. While state secretaries of state of both parties have challenged the massive amount of voter information solicited by the voter fraud commission led by Kris Kobach, too often Republicans have enabled if not encouraged restrictive voting legislation in the name of guarding against fraud (which incidentally doesn’t exist in any significant level) but with the ultimate effect of reinstating Jim Crow by another name.

And let's not forget the Republicans' acceptance as a colleague Congressman Steve King (IA-4), a man who keeps on his taxpayer-funded desk a Confederate flag and has more than his fair share of race-related controversies.

Even as Senator Flake rightly criticized his party for not ardently opposing the birther conspiracy, he and 50 of his fellow Republicans confirmed for a federal judgeship John Bush, who not only has been outspokenly misogynistic and homophobic, but actively spread the birther conspiracy. There are principled and qualified conservatives with whom John Bush could reasonably have been replaced as a nominee, but the Republican Party lined up in his defense, feigning offense at racism only afterward.

Opposing one’s own party is hardly an easy task, and I recognize that. But there are some moral imperatives, and standing for basic equality is one of them.

People don’t deserve points for grimacing while voting for, and continuing to empower, bigots. They deserve points for speaking out against them and then acting on that conviction. It’s like what we all learn as young children: actions speak louder than words.

Writing press statements and tweets condemning Nazis is easy. Walking away from a set of policies systematically disenfranchising and otherwise disadvantaging minorities is harder. But the Republicans need to do it if they want to be taken seriously in condemning white supremacy.

​One of the things by which I’m most struck in the Trump era – and which may have helped cause the Trump era – is a remarkably abhorrent culture of selfishness. I’d happily blame Ayn Rand, but I’m guessing that many contemporary students’ version of reading The Fountainhead involves reading Wikipedia and SparkNotes. (That said, we all know Paul Ryan has been masturbating to Ayn Rand since his teens. Apologies for the unpleasant image.) But whatever the cause, it’s dismaying at both a personal and a societal level.
 
​Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said recently, “If we’ are not helping people, we should go the fuck home.” She was right. Indeed, the operative word in public service is service. Sadly, this sentiment isn’t shared by enough of her colleagues.

Watching Senator John McCain – who is fighting cancer and receiving taxpayer-subsidized health care – fly to Washington D.C. to proceed with Republican efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act is a perfect example: “I got mine, so I don’t care about you.” We see white men in Congress crowded around a table agreeing to undermine insurers’ coverage of women’s health. (Okay, if I’d been in abstinence-only education and had as little sex as they look like they’ve had, I might think a stork dropped me off too). We see doctors in the Senate who have taken the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm” working to advance legislation knowing that it will result in tens of millions fewer with insurance, but with so much “freedom” to go without care because of prohibitively high costs. We see wealthy senators without a care in the world voting to strip care from the nation’s most vulnerable populations, while claiming to embrace Jesus Christ, who, like, TOTALLY was all about just helping the rich and the healthy.
 
Of course, if we’re human, we’re fallible, and if we’re fallible, we can fall ill. The good fortune we may have had shouldn’t serve as a license to deprive basic needs from others less fortunate. And it’s almost like the Bible had a lot to say about that… What can I say, the religious right seems to be a lot better on memorization than reading comprehension.
 
Twitter is at times a fun, and at other times a disturbing place, where I have made friends with some and been told by others that my autoimmune conditions are my fault and that I’m a drain on the health care system. (Me, personally? I had no idea I was that powerful!). I’ve seen people freely say that their own ability to get health insurance should mean other people are on their own caring for their needs. And I’ve been left baffled by their transparent disregard for fellow citizens (don’t get me started on many people’s views on non-citizens…).

When did basic kindness and decency come to be viewed as prohibitively costly, as opposed to a moral imperative?
 
I’ve been asked more times than I can count whether I’ve had an abortion since I write a lot on Planned Parenthood (not that it’s anyone’s business, but I haven’t), whether I’m in the LGBT community since I’ve long advocated for LGBT rights (not that it’s anyone’s business, but I’ve explored with women but for all intents and purposes am basically straight, much to my chagrin at times), or whether I’m on Medicaid since I’m fiercely committed to its expansion (up until this month, I’d only ever had private insurance). I’ve been asked if my life is at stake with the repeal efforts and while it most definitely is, my passion for this issue preceded the decline of my health.
 
I care because I’m human and I care about people. But this isn’t me patting myself on the back, though I think I was brought up right. This is me saying that other people should care too. Indeed, it shouldn’t require a majority female Congress to have basic health care protections for women. And while greater LGBT representation in our government would be ideal, that shouldn’t be a necessary condition for opposing infringements on their basic rights, with the most recent attack being the barring of transgender individuals from the United States military.
 
I may be overly idealistic, but I’ve always believed that those who are self-serving rather than believers in loving thy neighbor shouldn’t opt for careers in public service. And for the love of god, if you hate government, don’t work in it. Instead, be businessmen on Wall Street, where they reward being a soulless schmuck if it means improving the business and one’s financial earnings.
 
Senator Ben Sasse recently wrote a book on the “vanishing adult,” viewing young adults as lacking the personal responsibility and independence observed in prior decades, rather existing in a perpetual adolescence. What he fails to truly confront is that this generation was graduating from college amid the greatest economic recession since the Great Depression, and has a Congress working to demolish safety-net programs on which millions rely but on which members of Congress have not themselves depended.
 
The reality is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to take personal responsibility when conservatives’ self-serving economic policy plunges the nation into deep recession. It’s difficult to take personal responsibility when white, heterosexual men make it easier to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and identity, or to maintain job security and maternity benefits when deciding to have a child. It’s difficult to take personal responsibility when Republican determination to micromanage women’s bodies means that women with unwanted pregnancies in some parts of the country may need to either obtain dangerous, illegal abortions or else have children for whom they cannot properly care and for whom a Republican-led government will not care either. It’s difficult to take personal responsibility when wealthy, healthy men never relying on safety-net programs work to gut Medicaid funding, thus leaving one with the “freedom” to choose between untreated illness and bankruptcy.
 
Selfishness under the label of “personal responsibility” is still selfishness. And while this selfishness under the guise of limited government (government so small it fits in bedrooms and bathrooms!) has been the Republican mantra for quite some time, we see it at full force now with unified Republican government as well as Republican-dominated governorships and state legislatures.
 
When the Republican budget won’t even provide for the bootstraps by which we can pull ourselves up, it is difficult to see their party as doing anything other than engaging in naked partisanship and selfishness to a degree that is now dangerously normalized, if not embraced.
 
Claiming to love America while showing utter disregard for helping tens of millions of Americans is no way to govern, or even to exist in the diverse, pluralistic society that defines America.

​For those who know me, I’ve had a really awful six years. Like, really awful. My mother had a heart attack. I did grad school. I was assaulted more than once. I struggled with a lot of medical (and consequently financial) issues, including several hospitalizations. We had Hurricane Sandy. I had a painful breakup with the love of my life. I moved a couple of times. I lost two friends to suicide within a period of six months. Republicans took Congress and stole a Supreme Court seat, and Donald Trump won the presidency.
 
Yeah. Fuck the last six years. Especially 2016. Fuck 2016.
 
Sure, there were some upsides. I made some extraordinary friends. I got a PhD. I adopted two darling cats. And I saw a lot of Springsteen shows.
 
But someone else helped me get through these truly shitty times. That person is Carrie Fisher, who is the latest and (for me, at least) one of the more devastating casualties of this truly fucked up year. And as someone who was so transparent about her life in her writing and her interviews, for many of us this loss feels akin to losing a friend whose writings and dramas have provided sources of comic relief and comfort over the years.
 
No, it’s not because of Star Wars (not that I’m Star Wars averse by any stretch – I even did all the midnight showings!). My first times discovering Carrie Fisher was through my love of two of her other films: When Harry Met Sally and Hannah and Her Sisters (I’ve been a Woody Allen die-hard from an early age… perhaps too early an age… it probably accounts for some, let’s call it quirkiness). I then saw her one woman show Wishful Drinking in my hometown of Berkeley, CA before it went to Broadway, a show to which I would come to relate much more a couple years down the line.
 
When you go to the hospital, they ask you to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten. Despite several hospitalizations for thyroid, GI, and cardiac issues, along with a couple of painful hand surgeries, depression has always been my real ten. And Carrie Fisher helped me to better comprehend it.
 
You see, for anyone who has struggled with mental illness or addiction, she provides a uniquely striking and brilliant voice for these sets of challenges and resilience in spite of it. My love for her writing began with the famous opening line to her semi-autobiographical book Postcards from the Edge: “Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number.” It was reaffirmed in reading her woes laced with wit through such lines as, “I was invited to go to a mental hospital, and you don’t want to be rude, so you go…. But this was a very exclusive invitation.” She was, as she wrote, very sane about how crazy she was, and through her candor provided others (myself obviously included) a great gift.
 
Suffice it to say that depression and PTSD followed the (incomplete) set of challenges of mine that I enumerated above. Maybe it was inevitable. I probably have some biological predisposition to depression, and certainly I was faced with a rather inordinate number of struggles in a fairly condensed period of time. In many moments through which I was struggling through depressive episodes, listening (and re-listening, and re-re-listening…) to the book on tape of Wishful Drinking felt like getting the extra therapy sessions that as a lowly graduate student I couldn’t afford (and who wouldn’t want those extra therapy sessions with Carrie Fisher?).
 
When it feels all too difficult to conceive of tomorrow being better than yesterday, one can’t overstate the value of hearing someone with such humor and wit and perspective talk about working through challenges of mental illness and substance abuse and finding strength and resilience in the end (in an emphatically non-Lifetime or Hallmark movie sort of way). Indeed, she reminded all of her readers and followers that if her life weren’t funny, it would just be true, and that is unacceptable. While we often have to take the bad with the good, when we look at the bad with the right slant, with enough time, we get perspective and eventually laughter (and maybe a book). Location, location, location.
 
There are so many lines from her writing that have been burned into my brain. When facing the uncertainties of dating someone new, I think of Carrie writing, ““What worries me is, what if this guy is really the one for me and I just haven't had enough therapy yet for me to be comfortable with having found him.” The desire for instant gratification is all too relatable. And amid the numbness that can accompany the aftermath of trauma, there was perhaps no line more apt than “I rarely cry. I save my feelings up inside me like I have something more specific in mind for them.”
 
Walking idly through the streets of New York City, one can feel strangely alone despite being surrounded by millions. Yet listening to her read Wishful Drinking, I enjoyed hearing her wisdoms – the distinctions between problems and inconveniences (problems derail your life, while inconveniences involve getting a bad seat on an un-derailed train), the cycling through therapists and treatments, the adaptation to accepting a certain quota of discomfort in her life without resorting to substances (something that I would later realize would be more formally characterized as distress tolerance), and in general realizing that one could derive from these struggles strength (and writing material!) and not simply the weakness and defeat by which one might feel consumed amid crisis. And for someone accustomed to a compulsion to be perfect, seeing a woman so powerfully embrace her imperfections and her struggles – and even more importantly, her strength in working through them – made it feel more acceptable to me to be open about my own struggles.  
 
And so while I had at my disposal limited means with which to numb myself from the pain that I experienced, following Carrie’s example, I put pen to paper through the guise of fiction: “For all its limitations, immediate gratification had never quite lost its allure for her, and distress tolerance seemed antithetical to recovery… There was so much she had once loved about New York City. The liberal intellectualism and appreciation of her humor and the number of people who understood the superiority of vinyl (but also the ready availability of $1 Motown CDs across the street from the Apollo Theater). The crisp air with the sun wafting in and the autumn leaves providing a crunch crunch beneath her feet as she speed-walked past the naked man who lay clutching his bottle of Wild Turkey. She had come, over the months, to regard his degree of nudity to be a makeshift thermostat. Full frontal, and it was safe to go with a skirt and halter. Pants draped loosely, it was a jeans and t-shirt sort of day. Fully clothed, it was time to bundle up. She had come, after years of insomnia, to rely upon the white noise of the above-ground subway, though not necessarily the 3 a.m. debates over who fucked who(m) without whose permission. She had even come to grips with an unfortunate Kafkaesque quality of living in the city that once left her queasy for days on end. Now the city haunted her, and the anonymity in which she had once found solace felt like externally-imposed isolation as she plodded trance-like up Amsterdam past the people who, as she had so many times previously, did not know how to recognize how much she wanted, needed, to feel the calm and comfort of someone who understood her and wanted her not simply to live, but to want to live, and to understand the difference.” (I am still working to emulate Carrie’s wit, but it’s something to which to aspire).
 
In her final advice column for The Guardian, Carrie responded to someone with bipolar disorder and wrote, “We have been given a challenging illness, and there is no other option than to meet those challenges.” To struggle with depression is sub-optimal to say the least, and in many cases can be a daily struggle for far too many people. We should all be so lucky to approach hurdles with such clarity and pragmatism, whether with respect to the trials of illness or the trials of the upcoming Trump Administration. Carrie passed away far too soon, but she left a great mark on how we as a nation talk about mental illness and substance abuse, and I’ll always be grateful to her for providing the wisdom and humor to – admittedly from a distance – help me through my own trials in the aftermath of trauma.
 
Rest in peace, Carrie. I hope that the force is with you, wherever you are now. 

​For the dedicated Springsteen follower, it comes as little surprise that Gillette Stadium’s (admittedly stingy) curfew would be treated as more of a guideline than a mandate, especially in a line of concerts consistently clocking in around four hours in length and in many cases recently breaking his own record for longest concerts (a feat at any age let alone nearly 67). And true to form, still playing “Dancing in the Dark” at 11:30, the audience knew that more songs would remain in store for this night that ultimately clocked in at four hours, ending a couple of minutes before midnight.
 
When the lights go down at a Springsteen concert, immediately yielding the eruption of Bruuuuce’ing from the audience, there permeates the stadium a feeling that anything is possible for the next few hours, in the company of fellow fans and the music of faith and redemption for America’s working class. As the final show on this tour, the energy of Gillette Stadium was buzzing with particular excitement that any songs were virtually fair game. And indeed, while not setting a record in concert length this time, Bruce and the band more than delivered with a setlist full of older favorites and some rarer treats. Following the now customary “NYC Serenade” opening song was “Prove It All Night” with the 1978 intro, a long, searing guitar solo leading into the fist pumping favorite that the song always delivers as. From there, he took the band on a long journey through his debut album Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, omitting only “Mary Queen of Arkansas,” “The Angel,” and “For You” (the last of which is likely the only one that was at all missed). Leading into “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” Bruce mentioned his upcoming birthday (“a big one”) and that he wrote this song when he “was a baby child.”
 
Perhaps enhanced by the upcoming release of his autobiography, though true over the course of his entire career, Bruce is first and foremost a storyteller, both in his lyrics and in the tales behind them that many fans recount fondly in the 1986 live album (e.g., “The River” and “Growin’ Up”). He is a songwriter who lays bare his vulnerabilities and doubts, his struggle for redemption, his strife with his father, his search for faith, a deeply personal record of music that allows for a closeness and intimacy between artist and fan that is not true of many of Bruce’s contemporaries. Reflecting in Foxborough on his teenage years (“My friends didn’t like me, my town didn’t like me, my family liked me okay…”) and his narrow aptitudes as a fourteen year-old (“I was really only good at one thing,” which he couldn’t do for four hours without seeking “medical attention”) until saving up $18 for his first guitar, which he earned through what he characterized as the only honest work he’s done. “Blinded By the Light” was a wonderful rocker that many fans are lucky to hear at all given its scarcity in his setlists, though to be sure its wordiness is not the most conducive to singing along.
 
Bruce then reflected on his development as a musician, first not realizing that he needed to tune his guitar, then practicing religiously but sounding terrible, and finally being asked in New York City to play a song, which led in to this fateful audition song that was “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” followed by “Growin’ Up.” For all the electricity and clapping and fist pumping passion that is a Springsteen performance, it is his stories that manage to make his 55,000 person concerts intimate, that allow Bruce to forge a bond with so many devoted enough to cross oceans or continents to experience (at least) one more time the feeling of a Springsteen concert in full force.
 
Following the ever-beloved “Spirit in the Night” and “Lost in the Flood,” the Wild and Innocent rarities were next, with “Kitty’s Back” leading into “Incident on 57th Street,” straight into “Rosalita,” a rocking crowd-pleaser that invariably has every audience member with a pulse dancing but which historically has tended to appear toward the end of his concerts rather than the middle.
 
A signature aspect of Bruce’s last few tours has been his collection of signs from the audience, with all eyes on to what extent the night’s “last show status” might trigger more unexpected selections from the crowd. Following the far from rare but nevertheless well-liked “No Surrender” (written across a fan that Bruce carried in his mouth while holding the numerous signs), he launched into a cover of “Boom Boom,” a fun rocker that came out of left field but that seemed as much a treat for Bruce as for the audience and almost akin to his performance of “Jailhouse Rock” in night two of the old Giants stadium shows of 2009. “Detroit Medley” and “Light of Day” were also unexpected rockers that brought everyone in the stadium to their feet. After all, no matter how tired the audience may be from hours of standing, no one is giving more than Bruce himself, nearly 67 and in better shape than most of his fans as he continues to put in marathon concerts across the globe. Bruce is, with reason, not a performer to go through the motions on stage. He gives 100% each night and expects 100% from his audience.
 
“Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” was a largely acoustic highlight as Bruce waved the band off until the conclusion of the final verse, at which point Charlie and the others joined in to play the familiar notes with which the audience is accustomed. The stripped-down version was unusual and to be sure lowered the energy level of the audience, but had the sweetness and softness of a walk down memory lane, which no doubt it was for him, and fitting given the tenor of the concert.  
 
The encore lead off with the requested “Long Walk Home,” prefaced with a comment on the ugliness of the present election cycle, along with his typical public service announcement, a reminder of the social conscience in which his music and his work continues to be rooted. Jake was masterful as ever in his “Jungleland” solo for so long identified exclusively with Clarence, and the frequency of it in the setlists never makes it less of a treat to hear. He has truly come into his own with the E-Street Band and is one of them now. “Rocking All Over the World,” was the final surprise of the night, with the exception of the disappointing absence of “Thunder Road” from the final show of the tour.
 
It is hardly common for a band to seemingly improve with age, especially past a certain age, but Bruce and his legendary E-Street Band seem in their marathon shows to defy the odds. And they may continue to do so, as Bruce uttered before leaving the stage the always coveted words, “We’ll be seeing you!”

“Let’s go for a road trip,” Bruce says with a smile, guitar in hand, between “Working on the Highway” and “Darlington County” (alas, absent the Nils-sized hat accompaniment). And indeed, that comment is quite apt for a concert by Bruce Springsteen , whose fans are known to take planes, trains, and automobiles to attend his shows, even crossing oceans to experience Boss Time in all its glory.
 
For those who do not know the love for his music, it is strange to invest so much time, money, and energy into a concert. For those who are his devoted followers, happily spending a day in a New Jersey Meadowlands parking lot during sound checks to hopefully fare well in the general admission pit lottery, it is more than a concert. It is a religion. It is faith. It is spirit. It is “getting gotten” by 60,000 strangers who for that for hours are sharing a spiritual experience in which redemption and hope are fair game as sparks fly on E Street.
 
There are times in life when feels elusive, when we are left wondering when or if we will, to paraphrase Hemingway, come to find strength in the broken places of our lives. There are times when even providing our pound of flesh still leaves us thinking, to quote a certain Boss, “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?” Enter Bruce Springsteen, long-time champion of America’s working class heroes, instilling in tens of thousands of followers each concert some much needed assurance that faith can and will be rewarded, and renewing belief in the promised land.
 
Bruce’s sound checked songs do not reliably make their way onto final setlists, but this first of three MetLife shows in East Rutherford, which began at 8:05pm and went until midnight, was an exception as the string section walked onstage in advance of the full E-Street Band, which then not just played, but opened with “New York City Serenade,” a fantastic concert rarity from his second album, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle (1973). From that moment onward, it promised to be a special show and it delivered, the entire audience serenaded and on its feet for four hours.
 
Seeing Bruce in New Jersey always comes with a couple of downsides (at times aggressive fans and a poorly-located venue), but the perks outweigh them tenfold, from the extra cheers for local spots (“My home is here in the Meadowlands… the blood is spilled, the arena’s filled, and Giants play the games”) and an energy in the band that is consistent with a happy homecoming. And on a perfect summer night (a vast improvement over his September 22/23 concert in 2012 in which a two-hour rain delay led to it being his effective “birthday concert”), Bruce came ready to celebrate summer with such songs as “Spirit in the Night” and “Something in the Night,” and joking with a fan’s sign request of “Santa Clause is Coming to Town” that it was “a good summer song.”
 
Perhaps because of Bruce’s upcoming autobiography release, he has return this tour to more storytelling. Before launching into a heart-wrenching performance of “Independence Day,” he shared stories of his father’s virtual non-responsiveness to his music, a central theme of which is his strained relationship with his father and his struggle to connect with him. Indeed, Bruce shared, absent the ability to have a real conversation with him, he sent his father his records, which his mother forced him to listen to but which provoked from him no commentary until shortly before his death. As with so much of his work, the show was deeply personal.
 
Something noted widely in the aftermath of First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention was the power of her commentary on Donald Trump without ever invoking his name. The audience got a similar experience with Springsteen, whose progressive politics are well-known (many love him for that, and others such as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie love his music despite his politics). The audience got a three-song sequence of “Mansion on the Hill,” “Jack of all Trades,” and “My Hometown” – all powerful songs that carry with them messages tied to economic inequality and a call to support the working class. Then after a stunning performance of “The River,” Bruce launched into “American Skin (41 Shots),” which was written in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of the unarmed young man Amadou Diallo in the Bronx and which remains immensely relevant amid extensive dialogue of racial profiling in policing as well as gun violence more broadly. The intensity of this election season is not lost o him (and a larger-than-usual number of signs read “Bruce for President”), but on stage he let the music speak for itself, and the message rang loud and clear.
 
To be sure, Bruce played a number of the usual crowd favorites (for example, “Badlands,” “Out in the Streets,” “Because the Night,” “She’s the One,” and “Rosalita”). Among the songs from The River that were played (he no longer performs the album start to finish) were “The Ties that Bind,” a rocking “Sherry Darling,” and “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch),” which is admittedly an ironic song for a musician notoriously flirtatious and known to crowd surf still. But Bruce also broke out some less common ones thanks in part to his taking song request from the audience. One person had a “Growin’ Up” sign because it was his thirteenth birthday, leading Bruce to play the song but not before joking that he wouldn’t get into what he was up to at that age. “Brilliant Disguise” was another rarity that was a real highlight from the generally underrated Tunnel of Love.
 
Jake Clemons had big shoes to fill, both literally and metaphorically, and he has done a stupendous job on the saxophone and in joining Bruce to ham it up on stage as only Bruce can do. Jake’s sax finesse is showcased no better than in “Jungleland,” which for some period had made the loss of Clarence feel all-too-acute and which now is a stunning example of how the E-Street Band can itself find redemption in a member of the Clemons clan who is truly one of them now.
 
There are a number of classic rock artists who to be sure have withstood the test of time. Peter Gabriel, Tom Petty, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and Billy Joel, among others, are notably excellent performers. But watching this nearly 67 year-old rocker on stage, in better physical shape than most of his fans young and old, putting on four hours of singing, dancing and fist-pumping without intermission, one cannot help but be reminded that there is no other artist who gives so much too – and indeed demands so much in return from – his audience, some of whom arrived for the general admission lottery at 10am. Bruce is known for long concerts and for never really wanting to leave, such that one can often leave a venue with the trepidation of “That was the end, right? He didn’t go back on, right?” Because until the house lights come on, it’s fair game for an encore. Despite going through his traditional closing songs – “Dancing in the Dark,” “Rosalita,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” and “Shout” – he splashed water on his face, Steve threw around his shoulders a mini-cape reading “The Boss” on the back,” and Bruce did a faux-shy dance up and down the stairs “deciding” whether to stay on stage for more. Next came a spectacular “Bobby Jean” and in response to another birthday request and oh-so-fitting for a summer night in New Jersey, “Jersey Girl” to close out the night at the midnight hour.
 
No doubt, a large share of that crowd looks forward to being serenaded again by the “heart-stopping earth-shocking earth-quaking heartbreaking, air conditioner-shaking, love making, Viagra taking, history-making, legendary E-Street Band” tomorrow night. 

​Reflecting in “Ode, Intimations of Immortality” on the diminished delights that he experienced relative to his youth, William Wordsworth wrote, “The rainbow comes and goes/ And lovely is the rose;/ The moon doth with delight/ Look round her when the heavens are bare;/ Waters on a starry night/ Are beautiful and fair;/ The sunshine is a glorious birth;/ But yet I know, where’er I go/ That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.”
 
At the risk of sounding like an overly curmudgeonly individual longing for the “good old days” – I know that I am too young to pull off such a rant in earnest (an am hardly one to contribute toward such a debate in the context of such issues as civility and profanity) – I can’t help but find myself despondent over the current state of affairs where writing is concerned. This feeling has been rendered all the more acute as in my health policy research I bask in the prose of Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Gawande’s Being Mortal, both in themselves poignant reflections on what makes life meaningful, but also standing out in the language with which these physicians and writers conveyed these messages. Such talent for prose is not as common as one might hope among those in the sciences (or even the social sciences, for that matter) given the emphasis on statistical significance levels, science, and technical writing to the exclusion of eloquent prose. Yet through this powerful mode of communication, they connect with their readers about this important subject matter and render it all too easy to sigh wistfully and wonder why this is seemingly so rare.  
 
When I was a young child, I admittedly was quite advanced where reading was concerned. In elementary and middle school, I was reading Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Jane Eyre, Little Women, Gone with the Wind, the list goes on. Elizabeth Bennett and Jo March were the kindred spirits with whom I spent my summer afternoons. When I was a little older, it was Salinger, Hemingway, Faulkner, Eliot, Borges, Sartre, Kafka, Fitzgerald, Marquez, Baudelaire, and so many more.
 
A former professor of mine from graduate school advised that if given the choice between being a reader and being a writer, one should be a writer. Setting aside the joy that one can get from reading great writing (admittedly, this was professional and not personal advice toward developing a scholarly career), it is good advice, though with the caveat that reading great writing can inspire one to do the same. Indeed, I find that the greatest antidote to writers’ block is to read writing that inspires me, often in the tone that I most want to emulate. When I seek inspiration to write fiction, I read Faulkner. When I am writing more humorous fiction or creative nonfiction, I read Salinger, or perhaps on a more contemporary note, Carrie Fisher. When I need discipline in academic writing, there is no greater discipliner than Hemingway, whose prose took longer to grow on me than did the writing of Fitzgerald, but who over time has held up better as far more modern.   
 
My favorite poet, T.S. Eliot, said famously, “Immature writers imitate. Mature writers steal.” But stealing must be from a good source. Whether intentionally or not, we are often influenced by that which we read. It is unclear to me the most prominent culprit or combination of culprits: whether it is that schools have stopped assigning to students as many of the great writers whom we studied previously (I do not believe that this is the case), whether the average quality of writing in previous generations was not lower than the present but that which has survived is simply the upper tail of the distribution and thus is an unrepresentative sample against which we judge the present (potentially true, though some evidence supports a decline in quality over the course of the last few years and an entire Tumblr page is dedicated to the tortured writing submitted to teachers along with the students' mangled history accounts (e.g., an apparent belief that Martin Luther freed the slaves with his "I Have a Dream" speech)), whether the 24/7 nature of media and entertainment has reduced the quality of what people read outside of the classroom, whether it is that we have stopped teaching people how to write well in school, or whether the use of social media has induced an excessive casualness to writing that has reduced its overall quality. It is clear that people read fewer books now than in years previous, with an all-time high of 23% of Americans not having read a book in the last year in 2014, compared with just 8% in 1978 (though this trend is not unique to Americans, as a fifth of adults in the UK reportedly do not know who wrote "Hamlet", while a third did not know who wrote Great Expectations). People become all-too-accustomed to finding shortcuts to communicating ideas – u instead of you, thx instead of thanks, r instead of are, and the like – and forget how to take the traditional let alone the scenic routes of written communication.    
 
To be sure, as a former New Yorker (and still, a New Yorker at heart even when walking the streets of Saint Louis), I succumb to the walking equivalent of the modal American’s attitude toward writing. I speed walk even if I am not in a hurry. I rush those in front of me regardless of whether I have two minutes or two hours to arrive at my intended destination. I take shortcuts unless the walk is for the purpose of exercise (which I usually do at the gym, where I find my exercise regimen more efficient). I know that within this domain, just as others view writing through the domain of the internet, I value efficiency over the quality of experience (though to be sure I still enjoy a more leisurely jog through Riverside Park, the Hudson River and the land of my favorite musician off to the right and trees and relatively sparse populations of tourists to my left as my feet beat against the pavement for a few miles.
 
In an era of expecting instant rewards, not to mention experiencing constant distractions with technology, expecting one to curl up with Anna Karenina (let alone finish it) has become a lot to ask of an individual. I am by no means advocating any reduction in technology for the sake of living a la Thoreau for a time. Take away my iPhone, and my anxiety goes from a level 3 to a level 8 instantly from that single treatment effect. We read synopses instead of the real thing. We cut to the chase. We compress messages to the virtual universe into text messages or 140 (often grammatically incorrect) characters, despite the fact that at least 30% of adult Twitter users have a college degree or higher (as do 74% of Facebook users). “Text speak” has become so common that a list of hundreds of such expressions has been accumulated, including such phrases as 2G2BT (“too good to be true”), 4e (“forever”), gn8 (“goodnight”), w8 (“wait), and the like. It has apparently become a norm well beyond Tigger’s “TTFN – ta ta for now”). And yet there is such simplicity in the pleasure of curling up with a blanket and a book (and in my case, a cat) and losing oneself in the Hemingway’s Paris or Leopold Bloom’s interior monologue, a simplicity that today seems to be all too lost. What’s more, writing – or more specifically, good writing – can do so much good in the way of raising human consciousness to important issues as a number of prominent physicians have done on issues of health, medicine, and bioethics.
 
Harold Bloom’s unapologetic advocacy in favor of the “great books” is something to which I am sympathetic in an era of greater valuing of those degrees that are lucrative or more likely to pave the way toward lucrative professions, not to mention a depressing decline if not death of quality journalism. (As someone whose second major very nearly was Classics with a minor in English Literature, I was not at the age of twenty a shining example of following the path of practicality). It is not simply because of my desire for my students to get my references, though that of course would be nice (though to their credit, they consistently do get my Sorkin references). It is not simply because I appreciate reading their extra rhetorical flourish, though to be sure I do. And I do not have evidence to support that the decline in students’ and others’ writing is a reflection on not being exposed to the “right” people to emulate or if it is merely a reflection on our declining premium that we place on writing (while we do need to invest in better education, my strong suspicion is that it is the latter scenario, as the works of Austen and Hemingway will forever be in print and available for public consumption). There must also be a will to adapt, or in this case more aptly, to revert. It is out of my optimism, my hope that in becoming reacquainted with the greats (and recognizing them as such), we might renew our attention to the seemingly lost art of what it means to be both great writers (whether fiction or nonfiction), and more broadly great communicators.

It is no secret that I am an avid fan of John Oliver (some might say obsessed). I look forward to his show every Sunday, not just because it is hilarious, but because he truly is one of the only people doing true investigative, gutsy journalism these days. As a consequence, I was quite surprised to come across this news story: a New Jersey high school teacher was temporarily forced to resign for showing his students the John Oliver clip on "Make Donald "Drumpf Again." 

There is not a secret as to Oliver's politics. There is an ideological bent to the show, which viewers can take into consideration when evaluating its content and trusting its message. But it also reports a number of stories that are highly salient and deserving of greater public attention, for example:

* Pharmaceutical companies' marketing of drugs to doctors
* Mandatory minimums in sentencing
* Voter suppression tactics and other constraints on voting rights
* DC voting rights
* The limited resources of public defenders
* The "revolving door" in government regulation with the FCC chairman appointee
* Abstinence-only education
* Paid and unpaid family leave
* Televangelists' seed-faith practices
* Sweat shop labor in the fashion industry

I, for one, have shown the clip on the FCC and interest group capture when teaching on the relationship between bureaucracies and interest groups. It is a crisp and recent example of the relationship between the communications industry and the federal government and the implications for effective and responsible regulation of monopolies (and of course, with a healthy dose of humor thrown into the mix).

The teacher's resignation provoked a marked response from the school community and led to him rescinding his resignation and ultimately reclaiming his position. But the broader point is that provided that instructors do not present the show as being an unbiased source of information (indeed, as with any op-ed, it should be a starting point for more, important investigation and discourse), one should hardly be justifiably fired or otherwise pressured to resign for using its political commentary as an instructive tool.