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If you're a great web developer who loves Slate and Double X, we want to talk to you. We're looking to hire a senior-level web software engineer for Double X. A well-suited candidate will be comfortable working closely with the editors to design and develop our site. You will be working directly with editorial staff to propose, define, design, and implement creative long-term solutions for recurring business needs; address daily production system issues; and provide leadership to the development team.
Strong troubleshooting, communication skills, and sense of humor are a must. This is an ideal position for a highly motivated senior web developer with an affinity for journalism. You can read more about the position and the required skills here. To apply, please send your résumé to Slate technology lead Jing Gu (jing.gu@wpni.com) and Slate art director Vivian Selbo (vivian.selbo@slate.com).
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How sad that Summer Stiers, the young woman suffering from an as-yet uncategorized illness who was profiled so heart-breakingly by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times Magazine, has died. At least she ended up at the National Institutes of Health where the doctors tried—unsuccessfully—to puzzle out the reason for her many medical maladies.
One of my daughter's favorite shows is Mystery Diagnosis, which presents the story of someone with strange symptoms who goes for years without being able to get a diagnosis. Inevitably, during the course of their search, a doctor, or doctors, tells these patients that their symptoms, from nightly vomiting to loss of consciousness, are all in their heads.
This, too, happened to Summer Stiers, as Robin writes, even though she ended up with kidney failure and loss of eyesight. These difficult patients are told they should just see a psychiatrist, pop some anti-depressants, and leave their busy internists alone. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times have regular features that describe the quests of people with anomalous symptoms to get help. These accounts are full of dismissive doctors who tell the patients there's nothing wrong with them. I have great respect for the medical profession and understand that doctors are under constant pressure from all sides. I'm sure there are patients who are physically fine and suck up busy doctors' time. But over and over I've wondered why it is that doctors, when they don't know what to do, can't say to suffering people, "I'm sorry you're going through this. There is something wrong with you, and right now I don't know what that is. But I will do my best to find out."
Photograph by Getty Images.
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If ever you think you have too much to do or you’re fretting about your “work/life” balance, peek into the life of Rebiya Kadeer, the Uighur activist who did or didn’t set off the latest protests against the Han Chinese. She started off as a laundress and somehow became the Uighur community’s most successful business person by importing steel from Kazakhstan. She was a favorite of the local Chinese leadership until she started pushing back against Chinese government repression of Uighurs. She’s Muslim, wears her hair in thick long braids, wears a business suit and carries two cell phones. She's also the Enjoli woman of the year. Many of today’s profiles call her the “mother” of the Uighur movement, and it takes several paragraphs before they mention—and this is my favorite detail—that she has 11 children. Take that, Kate Gosselin.
Photograph of Rebiya Kadeer by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images.
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From my many years of writing about evangelicals, I often get e-mails from conservative Christian sites. One I got yesterday labeled: “WARNING: Protect Your Children” caught my eye. Bands of child molesters? Gay teachers? More abortions? No, worse. Sacha Baron Cohen. The e-mail is a classic in the genre of scold while titillate:
"BRÜNO is the most vile, perverse movie ever made by a mainstream movie studio,” the e-mail from the Christian review site Movieguide begins.
This disgusting, abhorrent movie contains (among other things) extremely graphic scenes of heterosexual and homosexual sex acts, explicit scenes and extended close-ups of full male and full female nudity, an extended scene of a totally nude heterosexual woman repeatedly whipping a homosexual man in his bikini briefs, partial nude scenes (including full rear male nudity) where body parts are partially covered up with black bars placed in strategic places, obscenely graphic verbal descriptions of perverse sex acts in dialogue and conversations with real people, and images of a male black baby from Africa in a hot tub with white adults who are clearly interested in doing some kind of sex acts with one another.
This movie is going out to thousands of theaters in neighborhoods like yours. Many of these theaters are located in shopping malls and movie multiplexes where children of all ages congregate, with and without parents or adult guardians.
Time is short, so we have to act now!
Photograph of Sacha Baron Cohen as Bruno by Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images.
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Whew Willa, you offer some tricky psychoanalysis here. None of us can say what the Jacksons were thinking on that stage with Paris, or what they were trying to project to the YouTube audience. What we can safely say is that despite being a dysfunctional family, they are clearly a family in grief. I think it’s unfair to try to interpret their intentions. Would it have been better, or more believable, if they had not embraced Paris and just stood off to the side and whispered to her to suck it up? Is it really that implausible that with Michael now gone they would want to surround his children in a protective cocoon? To pass the love they felt for him—and yes, even dysfunctional families can show and feel love—on to his children? Only a heartless person could have resisted the urge to hug that child at that moment.
As for Janet’s supposed nod to Jackie O, come on. Is it the sole domain of Jackie O to project a certain sartorial sensibility when grieving? I recall Jackie O wearing a black veil at JFK’s funeral, not a very hip black beret. What exactly was so nightmarish about Janet’s outfit? What female star hasn’t dressed glamorously for a widely televised funeral? Call her outfit cliché maybe, but when you point to it as an example of Janet’s inauthentic nature you're on shaky ground. Janet and her sisters didn’t look any different than lots of rich, glamorous women attending a rich and glamorous funeral. (And by the way, hats, all kinds of hats, are a staple of black funerals.) What should Janet have worn? The outfit from her wardrobe malfunction moment during the halftime show at the XXVIII Super Bowl?
There was no mass denial about the dark side of celebrity at the memorial service; everyone present and the millions watching on television knew full well that MJ was very much a victim of his celebrity and and his upbringing. Berry Gordy for one (no exemplar of high ethical standards himself) made a gentle reference to "sad times and questionable decisions on his part." Still, after nearly two weeks of non-stop coverage of MJ’s death and countless stories dissecting every dark corner of his life, is a memorial service attended by those who loved and admired him really the place for critiques about how he lived his life? I have yet to see such a memorial for any famous person, or non-famous person for that matter. It’s pretty well accepted that funerals and memorials are occasions where the deceased is celebrated, not picked apart for his failings. The survivors usually focus on the good and leave the bad stuff for another day. I sure hope my family and friends follow this tradition when I’m gone and not treat my departure as some sort of collective analysis of all that was wrong with me. That would surely bum out my spirit.
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Last night I listened to a member of the U.S. Coast Guard narrate the experience of intercepting a boat full of Haitians trying to reach American soil. The worst part, he said, was that the immigrants thought they’d found “the welcome wagon.” The Coast Guard was enthusiastically invited onto the boat before they burned it and repatriated its passengers.
I was thinking about that experience as I read Anna Clark’s piece on women prisoners—frequently, it seems, women in the process of being deported—who are forced to give birth in shackles lest they try to run while in labor. And I was still thinking about it as I read Nina Berstein’s New York Times report on 43-year-old Tanveer Ahmad, a New York City cab driver who died in an immigration detention center and whose death went unacknowledged by authorities for three years. He died of a heart attack in a facility that “did not allow guards to send detainees to the medical unit without prior approval.”
Imprisoning peaceful people who happen to lack papers is coarsening work. If you draw a paycheck for catching women who’ve just completed a life-threatening journey across the desert in Arizona, or for keeping entire families behind bars in Texas, you’re going to develop a certain capacity for emotional distance. That would seem to imply the necessity for oversight and transparency. But as Berstein’s article demonstrates, and the ACLU has long complained, the world of immigration detention is at once antiquatedly barbaric in a Wild West kind of way and almost comically bureaucratic in a Terry Gilliam’s Brazil kind of way. Is American immigration policy so ugly even regulators can't bear to look?
Photograph of a man protesting American deportation policies by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
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A guest post from Robin Marantz Henig, a contributor for the New York Times Magazine (and Sam's mom!):
The death two weeks ago of Summer Stiers, a young woman I met last year and wrote about at length for the New York Times Magazine, made me think about how hard it was for her to get anyone to take her perplexing illness seriously. Whatever ailed Summer seemed to cause a wide range of symptoms, which is why nobody could quite figure out what was wrong with her. She bled from her intestines; her kidneys failed; she had chronic pain in her legs and back; she developed severe toxemia while pregnant and lost her baby; her bones were damaged; she had frequent mental blackouts attributed to seizures; she had lost one eye, and the retina in the other was damaged; she was profoundly fatigued; her hair was completely gray, even though she was only 31.
When Summer first made the rounds of physicians, beginning in her teens, she was often thought to be exaggerating. Some doctors thought she might have a relatively common but vague condition, the kind that is diagnosed in many young women, like chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, or irritable bowel syndrome.
It took one astute physician from her home town of Bend, Ore., to realize that all of Summer's complaints might be linked, and to put her in touch with the National Institutes of Health, which had recently created a program to study people with mysterious, undiagnosed diseases. The NIH scientists took Summer seriously, but even now, seven months after they first met her and took samples of her blood and skin to probe her DNA, they have no real idea what she had or why she died. They're getting close, but it will probably take a long time still, and it will obviously be too late to help Summer.
Summer’s case is a reminder that lumping together too many disparate conditions into the same diagnostic grab-bag can be a serious mistake. Maybe a lot of the people (mostly women) who are diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome have completely idiosyncratic causes for their symptoms—Summer certainly did—and it's wrong for scientists to insist on looking for the single unifying problem. If we're to get anywhere in the age of genomic medicine, we have to get past the tendency toward glib diagnostic categories. It might turn out that most people with weird, often subjective (and therefore easy to dismiss) symptoms, like poor Summer Stiers, have unique problems that we have to dig deep into the genome to really understand.
Photograph by Getty Images.
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