I am an early childhood teacher by trade. I love kids; not in the “aww, you’re so cute” way, but in a deeply intellectually stimulating way. Being around a group of young kids feels like an incredible opportunity to understand what it’s like to be human. I’m never bored in the classroom. The times when I’m frustrated always feel like being close to unlocking important understanding. I’ve never failed to “get” and love even my most challenging students, and I’ve always learned important things from every little kid I’ve taught. I don’t mind the chaos, the loudness, the misbehavior, or the mess. It makes me happy. It makes me feel alive and purposeful. So I wasn’t worried about having kids.

I married my daughters’ father young: I was 19 when we met and 23 when we married. I loved him a whole lot. He was a fair bit older. We both wanted kids, but felt we had time to enjoy being by ourselves for a bit. I had my first daughter, Mira, at 30. Unremarkable pregnancy and birth, healthy mom and baby, intact pelvic floor, successful breastfeeding. Baby slept with me, and we figured out how to nurse side-lying, so I slept okay.

I am fairly skeptical that depression is only due to a “chemical imbalance.” But let me tell you something about hormones: that shit is CRAZY.

Giving birth, I was absolutely not in control of my body; my organs were doing things, and I was just along for the ride. And I was high as a kite, on nothing but my own chemicals. When Mira emerged, looking at us seriously, one little fist against her cheek, I felt an overwhelming amount of love for everyone in the room. Not just my baby and my husband, but also my midwives and the birth attendant. Even now, almost 14 years later, I feel a swelling of affection when I think of them, like being in the same space for the birth instantly bound all of us.

I remained high for months. I wasn’t manic or deliriously happy, just obviously altered, a not-unpleasant sort of fog. I was never weepy, never got the Baby Blues. I had intrusive thoughts, but I was prepared for this. People talk a lot about intrusive thoughts in early motherhood, because they’re weird and disconcerting — but they’re normal. Intrusive thoughts are not voices or commands: they’re vivid images of bad things happening to your baby. Your amygdala is hypervigilant, scanning for potential danger. I would see a knife on the counter and flash to an image of Mira bleeding. Walking down the street, I would flash to an image of her run over by a car. Disturbing, yes, but I knew to expect this, and I never took it to mean I secretly wanted to kill my baby. The intrusive thoughts gradually went away by 3 months.

Then, when Mira was 6 months old, my period returned.

I had worn Mira in her carrier to walk to the grocery store. The day was beautiful, a crisp, sunny February in Seattle. When we returned home, I sat down on the couch to nurse my girl, sniffing the blond curlicue on top of her head, when I suddenly noticed drops of blood at my feet. Blood was flowing down my pants and onto the floor.

Over the next few days, I started despairing. I went from a little tired, a little bored, but managing and content, to empty. I became drained of enjoyment and purpose. The color went out of the world.

Depression is insidious and lonely-making, because it makes you need everything and want nothing. I stopped coming out of the bedroom after Mira had fallen asleep. I needed to sleep but stayed up reading or watching shows instead, because I wanted to be somewhere else. I had no taste for food, but would become suddenly ravenous, uncontrollably shoving anything into my mouth. As things got worse towards the end of the first year, I had days when I felt like I couldn’t pick up my limbs. Lifting my arms, putting one foot in front of the other felt like moving through molasses.

I wasn’t sad. I think this is one of the hardest things for people who have not been depressed to understand. It’s not sadness; it’s a vast emptiness. An absence. A lack. I didn’t know what was happening, and I also only vaguely realized something was wrong. My world condensed to a diameter of a few feet. My time horizon shrank down to 5 minutes. I couldn’t look past the tiny container of suffering I was in.

It didn’t occur to me to ask for help. Help with what? I wanted nothing.

The penny dropped in the waiting room at the pediatrician’s office. The dad of a toddler oohed and aahed over Mira, as you do, and asked how old she was.

“One,” I said.

“Oh, congratulations! It only gets better from here!”

Better from here? I hadn’t thought about the future in so long. I hadn’t thought of my raising Mira as “good” in many months. And I found myself completely unable to believe this kind dad, who clearly enjoyed his toddler, that things could get better.

I started taking Zoloft a couple weeks after this. Once I began considering taking medication, I was worried that “they” would take Mira away. I’ve heard many women say the same thing. So I went in prepared to reassure anyone who might ask that I had never thought of harming myself or my child. No, I had only vividly daydreamed about walking down the stairs, getting into my car, and driving away. Just driving, leaving, going somewhere else.

But the doctor was kind. She listened, and she understood. She had seen a lot of women like me.

The meds helped. My body and mind gradually became more like my own again. I could function. I went back to work a couple years later and then had another daughter, staying on Zoloft throughout. It was fine. Everyone was fine.

Depression is humbling in its inscrutability, to the depressed person as well as to doctors and scientists. That I started sinking when my period returned is an important clue. An SSRI probably didn’t “fix” my hormones, but it allowed me to function again. There, but for the grace of God and a toddler dad, go I.

There is an anecdote about one of my favorite Romanian writers, Mihail Sebastian. An up-and-coming young novelist and playwright, part of the vibrant, bon-vivant interwar intelligentsia of Little Paris (as Bucharest was then known), Sebastian idolized Nae Ionescu, a blustery and charismatic Philosophy professor with a German Ph.D. In 1934, when preparing to publish his novel For Two Thousand Years, whose protagonist is a secular Jewish student reacting to the increasing antisemitism surrounding him, Sebastian sent Ionescu an advance copy and asked him to write a foreword. Ionescu took the opportunity to write a lengthy treatise on the immutability of Jewish identity and Jewish people’s unavoidable and well-deserved eternal suffering. Jews failed to accept Jesus as the Messiah, and thus they are destined to roam the Earth in perpetual agony:

Iosef Hechter, (Sebastian’s given name) you are diseased. You are fundamentally diseased, because you can only suffer; and your suffering is endless. We all suffer, Iosif Hechter; us Christians suffer, too. But we have an exit, because we can be saved. I know, you have faith; you have faith that your Messiah will arrive on a white horse and you will then rule the Earth. Keep your faith, Iosef Hechter. It’s the only thing you have left.

Although deeply shocked and hurt, Sebastian took a few days and then told his publisher to go ahead and print Ionescu’s foreword.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

In the wake of 10/7 I, like many other secular, assimilated, small-l liberal American Jews, was shocked by the ease with which anti-Jewish, not to mention anti-Israeli sentiment, took over the mainstream. We had BLM Chicago posting a paraglider meme within, what, less than a day?

Over the past three months, we’ve seen Ivy League university presidents prevaricate on whether antisemitism is okay a) never; b) sometimes; c) often; or d) it depends. We’ve seen the President’s spokesperson answer a question about anti-Jewish crime with a tidbit about anti-Muslim crime. We’ve seen the New York Times uncritically repeat outrageous Hamas talking points featuring astoundingly accurate casualty numbers acquired at night, during a catastrophic bombing, within less than 90 minutes. We’re continuing to see folks unconvinced that a corpse with legs spread, undergarments torn, and extensive genital trauma is evidence of rape, because “there are no first person accounts.”

This is all very disappointing. American Jews fought in Europe in WWII. They marched alongside Blacks for civil rights. They championed women’s liberation. And yet here we are: it only took a generation after the Holocaust for the elites to turn on the Jews.

A story as old as time.

This may surprise some folks, but Jews haven’t always had uncontested control of the levers of power. The Jews who were around in Jesus’ time, Roman citizens or subjects, slowly died out as the Holy Roman Empire crumbled. It took new (male) arrivals from the Middle East having babies with Central European women a little less than 1,000 years ago to give birth to the vast majority of Jews that we know today. Withstanding war, pestilence, and prejudice, these people grew from roughly 300 souls in 1250 to more than 500,000 in the 1,600s. And once the Dark Ages retreated from the advancement of reasoned thought, this nerdy, bookish people, raised on a tradition of arguing with everyone, especially God, found a niche for themselves among the technocrats and philosophes of the age of Enlightenment.

Non-Israeli Jews today (which is to say, most of the world’s Jews), owe their distinct yet integrated identities to the Haskalah movement. Towards the end of the 1700s, around the time when human prosperity began increasing exponentially in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, a Jewish Enlightenment started sweeping Central and Eastern Europe. The Maskilim, as the adherents of the movement were known, wanted to leave the insular world of old-timey, isolated, Rabbinically-ruled settlements and become part of society — but without losing their Jewishness. Tevye the Dairyman from Fiddler on the Roof is an excellent witness to Haskalah: he is an old-timey Jew with Maskilim daughters, whose struggle is whether or not to accept that joining Gentile society is compatible with being Jewish. (Shalom Aleichem, who created Tevye’s character, was himself a late-generation Maskil.)

Haskalah was an incredibly effervescent movement: Jewish children started enrolling in Gentile schools; Jews joined their respective countries’ civil service; an entire canon of Yiddish and Hebrew literature was written in the span of roughly 80 years. Maskilim created a vibrant Yiddish press, and an immensely popular Yiddish theater. Haskalah created secular Jews as we know them today.

And then, in 1882, the May Laws put this fire out. Tsar Alexander III’s “temporary” regulations confined Jews to the geographic area of the Pale of Settlement, curtailed Jewish property rights, and instituted quotas for the admission of Jews into Gentile schools.

I can only imagine the disappointment. Jews who had actively sought to be part of their countries’ culture and society, who had often incurred the loss of family or friends for their decision to leave the shtetl, were unequivocally told they weren’t wanted. Over the next few decades, those who could leave (for the US, Argentina, or Palestine), left.

50 years later and a bit to the West, the Nurnberg Laws were a similarly shocking blow, made perhaps even more egregious by the fact that most Western European Jews had, for several generations, been living lives indistinguishable from those of their Gentile neighbors.

I don’t quite know what to make of this. I like looking at the past because it’s informative, but it’s not predictive. Are we heading towards an American Holocaust? It’s very unlikely, for many reasons, paramount of which is that the American population has the right to bear arms. But we’re probably going to see violent clashes at some point in the near future.

I’m a lot more uncertain and confused about the perception of Jews as a … class? group? people? It does seem that young Americans are a lot less sympathetic to the notion that world Jewry went through an extinction-level event less than 80 years ago, and that a feeling of insecurity among the descendants of survivors is not unreasonable. Not to mention the fact that the Jewish state has not existed in peace since its foundation. In the victimhood culture that Gen Z is growing up in, being successful necessarily means being an oppressor, and oppressors must be defanged.

Nae Ionescu’s claim that “Judah’s destiny is to suffer” as punishment for not recognizing Jesus as the Messiah is obviously demented. And yet, Jews have a consistent track record of being expelled or violently persecuted at the exact moment when a cosmopolitan Jewish elite had begun to thrive. I sure hope that American Jews can remain both American and Jewish — but I am bracing for disappointment.

We, as a species, love to cause permanent changes to our bodies. We do it so much that it becomes routine: piercing earlobes, straightening teeth, cutting fallopian tubes. And yet we, as a culture, never fail to be scandalized when we encounter another culture’s displays of body modification. We shudder at bound feet and elongated heads and stretched necks.

Or removed breasts.

Body modification is a marker of group identity. This matters a lot to humans, so much so that they will go through significant physical pain to acquire it. There’s often ritual and storytelling involved, even when the practice is not done for explicitly religious reasons (lots of secular Jews will have their babies circumcised by mohels; getting braces is a rite of passage into teenagehood; we “let” girls have their ears pierced at specific and arbitrary ages).

Openly displaying the markers of group B while surrounded by mostly members of group A is an act of defiance, a low-intensity provocation that activates our hunter-gatherer brain. It says, “Yeah, I’m here, I probably have different goals than you, what are you going to do about it?” Even if, rationally speaking, cis and trans people do not compete for resources in any meaningful way, the hunter-gatherer brain starts getting worked up when members of different groups get too close.

This is why the “mainstream” freaks out when erstwhile starlets like Eliot Page and Liv Hewsom declare a transgender identity and flaunt their surgically-flattened chests: “Enemy within the ranks! And they’re coming for our kids!”

Transgender is today’s sensitive, thoughtful young person’s outcast identity of choice. In another age, such young people might have been Romantics, or Hippies, or Goths. This doesn’t diminish the reality of trans identity any less than Judaism diminishes the reality of Islam. Neither does it diminish the importance and power of the transgender movement, both in terms of what it does for its members, and the impact it has on society at large.

The transgender identity group, like any other group, requires would-be members to sacrifice something in order to prove their earnestness. Becoming a Christian requires baptism; becoming trans may require changing one’s name, pronouns, or appearance, or simply making a public statement deemed controversial and risky: “I am coming out as transgender.” Publicly adopting a group identity is meant to be fraught, as a test of faith, and it’s meant to create distance from non-group members while providing default closeness among the group. Page and Hewson’s elective mastectomies are no different than immersing yourself in the river and emerging born again. You are now different than you were; you’ve gained a new community while leaving your old one behind. You’re choosing to open yourself to suspicion and exclusion based on your group membership because the perceived benefits outweigh the costs.

Both the idealized narratives that Page, Hewson, and their supporters (“allies”) present around their surgeries (“I was depressed/not myself/living a lie, but now I’m living authentically/experience the euphoria of life/everything feels right”), and the outrage and criticism they inspire are as old as time. Elective mastectomies are trials by fire, costly displays of extraordinary devotion to a cause. They’re meant to inspire adulation, or revulsion, depending on group membership. But they’re neither evidence of the dawn of a more enlightened age, nor harbingers of civilizational decline.

The articles referencing the new guidance for lactation in trans-identified males link back to two sections of the CDC’s website that… do not talk about trans-identified males at all. The first, under Breastfeeding and Special Circumstances, specifically addresses breast surgery. Towards the end of the page, after paragraphs on implants, breast reduction and mastectomy, we find this:

Can transgender parents who have had breast surgery breastfeed or chestfeed their infants?

Yes. Some transgender parents who have had breast/top surgery may wish to breastfeed, or chestfeed (a term used by some transgender and non-binary parents), their infants. Healthcare providers working with these families should be familiar with medical, emotional, and social aspects of gender transitions to provide optimal family-centered care and meet the nutritional needs of the infant. These families may need help with the following:

• Maximizing milk production

• Supplementing with pasteurized donor human milk or formula

• Medication to induce lactation or avoiding medications that inhibit lactation

• Suppressing lactation (for those choosing not to breastfeed or chestfeed)

• Finding appropriate lactation management support, peer support, and/or emotional support

The text is obviously referring to trans-identified females: top surgery means removing the breasts; it’s an elective mastectomy. So what the CDC is saying is that biological women who have had their breasts surgically removed may be able to breastfeed their babies.

Observe then the last sentence, emphasizing “optimal […] care and […] the nutritional needs of the infant,” followed by a list of likely areas of support. Sure, medication to induce lactation is mentioned, but again, this is clearly about females who have had most of their breast tissue removed, AND the text makes it clear that the health of the entire family is important, especially the baby.

The second page of the CDC’s supposed guidance for breastfeeding men is located under Nutrition, and addresses Health Equity Considerations (because of course.) Halfway down the page there is a section on Language, which is a perfectly boilerplate recitation of the current rules for linguistic inclusion and equity. Underneath the inevitable section on pronouns, there is this, in a highlighted box:

Remember that:

• Transgender and nonbinary-gendered individuals may give birth and breastfeed or feed at the chest (chestfeed). The gender identity or expression of transgender individuals is different from their sex at birth. The gender identity of nonbinary-gendered individuals does not fit neatly into either man or woman.

• An individual does not need to have given birth to breastfeed or chestfeed.

• Some families may have other preferred terminology for how they feed their babies, such as nursing, chestfeeding, or bodyfeeding.

Again, the transgender individuals mentioned here are obviously female: the “may give birth and breastfeed” makes that very clear. I suppose that if we were to squint, we could see the second bullet point, “An individual does not need to have given birth to breastfeed” as sort of maybe possibly hinting at the fact that men could breastfeed. But the fact that this passage is part of a discussion on equity, specifically “inclusive language,” and it is nestled between a point on gender identity and a point on preferred terminology makes it very hard for me to read it as anything other than an exhortation to not automatically dismiss a non-birthing parent who may want to breastfeed. It is certainly isn’t an endorsement of men lactating.

@shellenberger, as well as media outlets that makes it sound like the CDC provides, on its own website, a protocol for inducing lactation in men. The CDC does no such thing. At the very end of the page on Breastfeed and Special Circumstances, there is an external link to a paper on Lactation Care for the LGBTQ+ Patient, from the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine (which, to be clear, is not a governmental body). The CDC website makes it very clear, via pop-up window, that you are leaving hallowed CDC ground and venturing into the land of content that the government cannot vouch for. Let me repeat: an endorsement this is not!

And what of the paper itself? Does is promote a lactation protocol including ”a contraceptive pill to produce estrogen, an anti-nausea medication, a heart medication, an antipsychotic, a sedative, and an off-label lactation drug called domperidone”?

No. In fact, on page 4, it states the following:

There exists no standard guidance on inducing lactation for any patient population. Different methods have been used for inducing lactation, including visualization/meditation, expression by hand or pump, feeding at the breast/chest, and combinations of oral contraceptive use followed by hormone withdrawal combined with galactogogues and expression

Sounds like not even the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine is able to endorse a lactation protocol for males! WOW!

Look, I am not entirely unsympathetic to some of the concerns about “trans discourse.” I do think there is an element of social contagion in the rising number of autistic teenage girls identifying as trans; I think we should be curious about all children’s reasoning rather than defaulting to “affirming” their statements. I think it’s probably a bad idea to allow convicted male sex offenders to self-id as female in order to be housed in female prisons.

But

The kind of running-with-a-shocking headline that Michael Shellenberger et al are engaging in here is deeply unhelpful. There is no story here. Making a nothingburger into a story only cheapens your message and alienates anyone who isn’t already in the ingroup.

Make a bigger circle folks, always.

I was a genuinely privileged case. I had met an American boy and wanted to move for him, but my grades were good enough and my parents wealthy enough that I was able to come here on a student visa. The American boy and myself stayed together for 20 years and had 2 kids -- and that's not bad for getting together at age 19!

I got my Green Card during my senior year of college and my citizenship 3 years after. This was after 9/11, but way before the Trump-era, several years-long immigration timelines for first degree relatives. Once again, lucky.

Here are some things that I have done as an American between the ages of 20 (then) and 40 (now) that I wouldn't have been able to do if I had stayed in my native country. Most of them are small, but that's exactly the point. The feeling tone, that is to say the experience, of life lies mostly in the small things.

I went to school with people whose young lives had looked very different from mine.

I ate food from several dozen culinary traditions.

I walked down city streets without being harassed.

I had thousands of polite, positive interactions with folks behind the counter, folks on the phone, and folks on the street.

I got jobs based solely on my merits.

I chose a career that I didn't go to school for, and advanced in it based solely on my merits.

I birthed my children at home, attended by midwives.

I taught children in private schools with wildly different approaches.

I ended a marriage, and sold a house, and made a trans-continental move without harming my reputation and earning power.

I started over at age 39.

There is a fundamental openness, a lack of suspicion, and an inherent curiosity to the American mindset that is difficult to convey to outsiders -- or at least to Europeans, the only outsider group I can claim first-hand familiarity with. Americans will pull over to help you change a flat; they'll give well-meaning advice to strangers in a coffee shop; they'll naturally connect across ethnic and religious divides, yes, they'll do so more every day than most enlightened Europeans will do in a month.

For all its flaws, the US is still a city on a hill: not for its conspicuous wealth, not for its cultural ascendancy, but for its stubborn, fundamental belief that all humans are equally dignified by virtue of being human.

Happy Independence Day!

The human species has always been scared of new technology, particularly when this technology threatens to change what we amorphously intuit as “culture.” Plato thought writing was a terrible thing, a cheapening of thinking, at best a way to capture, but never to generate, ideas. Opponents of the printing press worried about the loss of godly self-discipline that would come out of monks and scribes no longer needing to spend their lives copying text. Plus, peasants reading pamphlets would surely be against the divine order, no? Bicycles were viewed as a shocking tool allowing women to straddle objects other than their husbands. Photography? A gateway to vanity and narcissism. Condoms? Practically heralding the fall of Western civilization.

Among a certain subset of public intellectuals today, the cheap, reliable and widely accessible birth control options that modernity has blessed us with are seen as harbingers of moral decay. On its face, such an assertion is unexceptional: look closely enough and everything spells doom to someone. But the loudest voices arguing the societal harms of birth control are not only women, but self-described feminists. (And also British, which, hmm, is there something there?)

Louise Perry and Mary Harrington are both, in their own words, former liberal feminists who stopped drinking the kool-aid of female empowerment through reproductive freedom and are now advocating, respectively, Against the Sexual Revolution and Against Progress. Perry is in her early 30s and Harrington in her mid-40s, which I only mention because it makes sense given their particular areas of focus: Perry is concerned about the exploitation of women; Harrington worries about the breakdown of the family. But they both believe that sexual liberation is a Very Bad Thing Indeed.

Their central argument reads as follows: contraception enabled the Sexual Revolution by making women available for consequence-free sex at any time. This is obviously a good thing for men, because they love that sort of thing, and bad for women, because what they want are stable, committed relationships. (There is no discussion about the possibility of women wanting consequence-free sex within those relationships, but okay.) The result is a culture of disrespect and humiliation for women, because a) the only thing keeping men from being total cads is the threat of pregnancy and, b) the loosening of sexual mores leads inevitably to that most heinous of paraphilias, that veritable spawn of Satan’s wet dreams: rough sex (GASP.)

Look, I think Perry and Harrington’s argument from evolutionary biology is welcome: men and women are different. They are, if you’ll allow me, born this way: different roles in sexual reproduction (which, as far as biology is concerned, is Why We’re Here), different bodies, and different behaviors. A few years ago I would have thought this went without saying, but now that the Gender Unicorn and demisexuals are a thing, I’m not so sure. So, good on Louise and Mary for bringing common sense back.

But reactionary feminists (this is Harrington’s term), fundamentally misunderstand the premise of the Sexual Revolution: it’s not that women should be able to have sex like men do, which Perry in particular agonizes about, but that they should be able to have sex like they want to. Birth control does not amount to the removal of a check on men’s ability to have sex, because men have always been able to have sex with relative impunity. Ejaculating is easy; it’s rearing a child until self-sufficiency that’s difficult. And, for obvious reasons, the responsibility for child rearing has always fallen on the woman. Since no lopsided exchange is durable, women have historically received countless benefits in exchange for their carrying and birthing babies: they’ve been spared the hunt, war, and physically dangerous jobs. They’ve been offered assimilation and spared death during societal defeat. They’ve been treated, with few exceptions, as the more biologically valuable half of the species that they are.

And yet, until the hallowed morning of June 23, 1960, when the FDA first approved the oral contraceptive pill, a woman could never have sex spontaneously, without the careful application of a cumbersome barrier prophylactic, and be basically sure she wouldn’t conceive. A dramatic change indeed. (For men as well, I’m sure, at least cognitively; but I focus on women here because, having been pregnant myself thrice, once unintentionally, I can attest that the thought is always there.)

So dramatic, in fact, that pre-pill American society looks unrecognizable in broad ways that go far beyond sexual behavior. There are 250% more women working outside the home, and 100% more women getting bachelor’s degrees now than in 1950. In 1968, you couldn’t get a no-fault divorce anywhere. A woman couldn’t own a credit card in her own name until 1974. And Columbia University, where 55% of graduates are now women, did not become co-ed until 1983. From 0 to more than half of the student body in 40 years. That’s bound to give some folks whiplash.

Perry and Harrington’s primary whiplash symptom is a fundamental disbelief that women can, and in fact do, and in any case should, enjoy sex as a physical interaction for its own pleasurable sake. Men enjoy sex; women enjoy relationships. A woman who actively pursues sexual gratification is either the victim of a psyop and perpetually just 5-minutes-alone-with-a man away from rape (Perry) or a morally bankrupt bio-libertarian who has been brainwashed into favoring the transactional over the relational (Harrington.) The idea of women’s sexual agency is a lie invented by men to allow them easier access to the vagina. Consent is but an attempt to belipstick a pig, since there are Some Things (ranging from meh sex to choking) that simply cannot be consented to. At any rate, freedom, individualism, and the free market are to blame.

At the very bottom, beyond the fair arguments from biology, the myopic-though-not-unreasonable mistrust of men, and the apocalyptic vision of the future, Perry and Harrington show a deep discomfort with choice. A variety of options feels… icky. Icky and dangerous. Like Bernie Sanders lamenting the “choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants,” reactionary feminists decry the fact that humans now have the choice to treat sex as consequential — or not.

This does feel understandable; variety is often disorienting. Decision fatigue is a real thing. Choice is inherently complicated, and I can comprehend nostalgia for “simpler times,” no matter how misguided it might be. But ickiness and nostalgia are, as the kids might say, vibes. And vibes are a terrible basis for sweeping claims about the rightness of people’s behavior, particularly when such behavior is victimless and consensual.

This might make me a bio-libertarian. I’ll respect your agency to refer to me as such, or not. It’s your choice.

America’s contentiousness over public education is unique among Western countries. Nowhere else in the "developed" world do non-educators and non-parents get so riled up about what happens in the classroom. Nowhere else do education-related bills make the national news.

Is that because Europeans, for example, love their children less?

No.

It's because, for Americans, children are a great rhetorical weapon.

US public schools enroll over 50 million students, and these kids are a more diverse mix than the American population. For all its drawbacks, the neighborhood school does, on average, bring together a whole bunch of people from a whole bunch of backgrounds, both cultural and ideological. You're likely to meet people at a school function that you'd have to go out of your way to meet at work, people who look, act, dress and speak very differently. People who sometimes believe fundamentally different things about the world.

Naturally, differences of opinion about what should happen in the classroom will arise. In the quirky American way which recognizes only two tribes, those differences will be slotted into one of two pigeonholes: Right or Left, progressive or conservative. That's just how we do things in America. And, because this is a civilized democracy, damn it, we like to pass laws to sort out differences rather than taking it outside. Small favors, I suppose.

The US has a long and storied history of fighting culture wars in the guise of curriculum battles. 

Tennessee's 1925 Butler Act prohibited the teaching of evolution in the state’s schools. The law was catapulted into the national spotlight during the Scopes Trial, and helped crystallize a chasm between Christian fundamentalists and proponents of a scientific view of the world. In a process that is eerily reminiscent of what is currently happening with Florida’s H.B. 1557 (the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill), the Butler Act inspired a rash of copycat laws before being ruled unconstitutional in 1968.

1974’s Kanawha County textbook controversy is another instructive example. In response to a shift towards “multiculturalism” in West Virginia’s curriculum, a group of conservative Christian parents organized a massive boycott, demanding the ban of a slew of books by such luminaries as Allen Ginsberg and Sigmund Freud. 20% of the county’s elementary students stayed home, and the situation turned violent when a school was dynamited and some of the students who continued to attend school had rocks thrown in their windows. (Jon Ronson interviewed Alice Moore, the organizer of the boycott, in a fascinating episode of Things Fell Apart.)

Both the Butler Act and the Kanawha book ban were attempts to legislate the “right” way to teach children. They were doomed to fail from the start, because children’s learning is not subject to legislation.

Children hold a hallowed place in the American imagination. The nuclear family with kids running around is the foundation of the American dream. “Parenting” became a verb in this country. Leaving the world better “for the children” is the highest vocation.

It’s also a great way to score political points.

Ever since the infamous Daisy Girl ad scuttled Barry Goldwater’s presidential prospects in 1964, politicians have found that focusing on emotional triggers is a great way to earn votes. Florida’s H.B. 1557 is no exception. While the bill does probably reflect a genuine concern about the changing landscape of childhood and identity development, it can't possibly do anything to address these concerns. No law can. In a democracy, legislation is downstream of culture, not the other way around.

Kids, especially little kids, live in a world that is infinitely more connected than the one their parents grew up in. While adults can, and should, set boundaries around the content their children consume, they will never be able to silo childhood: “dangerous ideas” are no longer housed as physical tomes in libraries, but they are in everyone’s pockets, literally traveling through the ether. This is new and different, but it does not, as Conservatives fear, spell the end of childhood innocence.

The most frustrating and wonderful thing about children is that they are not receptacles into which adults can pour knowledge. Children learn by actively engaging with the world. As their brains develop and they accumulate experience, kids form ideas which they constantly test, adjust or change. A 1st grade lesson on gender stereotypes is silly, misguided, and an utter waste of time because 7 year-olds do not have the mental capacity to understand what a stereotype is: the ability to abstract only starts developing around puberty. Kids may come away from the lesson able to recite the learning outcomes verbatim, but that does not mean they have internalized “gender identity ideology.” A gender unicorn presentation will not make a little kid trans, gay, or straight. 

Nor is, as Chris Rufo shamefully claims, the introduction of gender identity-related curriculum a concerted “grooming” attempt on the part of school teachers: grooming a child for sexual abuse requires secrecy and increasing isolation. How would you groom an entire classroom? Why would you publicize a grooming curriculum? And to what end?

Using legislation to mandate or ban curriculum is like opening a soup can with a jackhammer: expensive, loud, and messy – and it leaves you with no soup. Of course parents should have a say in what happens at school. Of course teachers should be transparent and receptive to their students’ families. For the most part, this is the case throughout American schools, every day. When there are breakdowns, communication goes a long way. (And school choice would go a longer way, still.) But curriculum laws are the wrong tool for the job.

H.B. 1557 is billed as the “Parental Rights in Education Act.” A better title would be, the “Helen Lovejoy Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children Act.” But “love”, and “joy”? Directed at children? By teachers? Sure sounds pretty groomy. 

This is bad for liberalism, and really bad for children.

The defining characteristic and main contribution of liberalism (and I’m drawing heavily from Deirdre McCloskey’s thesis in the Bourgeois Values here) is a radically different idea: the notion that all human persons are equally dignified by virtue of their being human. Neither status, nor ability, nor any immutable characteristics detract from the equal dignity value of a human person.

How do children fit into this worldview? In her latest for The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig astutely identifies the difficulty of discerning children's rightful status in a liberal society: they are wholly worthy, as persons, even though their immaturity obligates adults to negate fundamental aspects of children's personhood and act for them.

Americans who are heavily involved in public life and "discourse" appear to take this as a duty to inculcate their children into a very specific worldview, the purpose of which is to ensure that the kids grow up to be Good Persons. 

This is of course not new: parents have always sought to raise children who are conversant in social norms, and a failure to do so has always been perceived to bring great shame to a family. 

What is new is that liberalism recognizes that there are countless ways to be a good person and live a moral life. For all its polarization and screaming matches, American society is genuinely pluralistic and tolerant. 

Except when it comes to children.

Elizabeth Bruenig’s perceptive claim is that this is because, due to their dependent nature, children obligate both private persons as well as the State to actively care and provide for them. Whereas an illiberal state has a much easier task, because there is only one way to be, a pluralistic liberal democracy will struggle mightily: which of the countless paths towards being a good citizen should one direct a child towards? And so adults are forced to argue publicly about things they would rather be left to the individual conscience. This is uncomfortable, per Bruenig, and brings out the worst in adults.

I agree with Bruenig , but I think there is more going on.

Children necessarily bring out the most authoritarian impulses in adults. They do this by providing a constant, tantalizing tension between control and utter powerlessness. If you've spent any time with a child, you are familiar with the disorienting, whiplash-inducing changes between feeling that you know what you're doing, and feeling completely lost. On the one hand, children are small enough that you can physically place them wherever you want in space. On the other hand, they are indomitable enough that even an infant will not let you rest until their very specific needs are met.

The same applies to other people interacting with your children. As an adult, you have a great deal of choice over who your child socializes with, where they go to school, and what ideas they are exposed to. Even more, it is your duty as an adult to control such things, because children are too small to. But the world is wide and unpredictable, and even a small child will interact with it in unpredictable ways. 

The debates over CRT in schools, and especially over whether "parents should have a say about what is being taught in the classroom", illustrate this perfectly. Well-meaning adults on each side feel they are entitled to decide what children should be taught. Children’s dependence inspires a moral imperative in the adults that care for them, whether or not such adults are kin. Evolution makes it so: humans have survived and flourished because of the devotion we are able to muster for children who are not ours. Not only are adults moved to act in children’s best interests, but doing so feels good and purposeful. We have evolved not only to care for children, but to think highly of those who do. Being a good caregiver is inherently virtuous.

But this instinct evolved to guard children against bodily injury or death, not unapproved ideas. While the urge to protect children against perceived harm does not discriminate between a potential kidnapper and a teacher talking about systemic oppression, this is where the adults need to act like, well, adults.

Disagreements about what children should learn in school are important: both parents and educators have a stake in producing a competent citizenry, but they have different skills and perspectives. The more these perspectives come into contact with each other and the more information is exchanged, the better: to roughly paraphrase Matt Ridley, we acquire better ideas when we allow existing ideas to be promiscuous with each other. 

Laws aiming to ban the teaching of various controversial topics are the absolute worst way to handle curricular disagreements. The legislators who introduce these bills claim their goal is to prevent children from being exposed to “divisive concepts” or “harmful ideas”: a virtuous attempt to protect the young. But ideas are not predators, and they cannot be contained, let alone eliminated. For their part, politicians or school districts who aim to prevent such bans by taking the position that parents have no say in what happens in the classroom are equally misguided. Theirs is not a virtuous position, either: children do not need to be protected from their parents’ influence.

The tension between vastly different solutions to a common problem is a feature, not a bug of democracy. Disagreement brings us closer to the truth. When it comes to school curriculum, it is the adults’ responsibility to take a deep breath, tone down the rhetoric, and approach the matter democratically, through vigorous, good-faith debate.

My father’s day job was heading a department in an electronics research institute, which was an advantage when it came to making tuica, the traditionally plum-based but infinitely flexible Romanian moonshine: he had access to a quality supply of glass vials and plastic tubing, which he fashioned into an unnecessarily ingenious still. 

Distilling tuica is relatively simple. You need a large pot to boil the horinca (the fermented slurry). This pot requires an airtight lid with a small opening you can fit a tube into.  The tube leads to a glass cylinder seated lengthwise, fitted with a small spout: the condensation chamber. To cool the condensation chamber, you run a small tube from the kitchen faucet, wrap it around the glass cylinder, and run it back to the sink where it drains.

My family had a stovetop pressure cooker which made a perfect boiling pot, as Dad would simply remove the pressure valve and stick a tube into the opening. Not content with inelegant solutions, he rigged an adjustable metal frame for the still, so the condensation chamber and the tubes slanted just so above our red formica kitchen counter, the tuica dripping into clear glass liter bottles.

Making tuica was a near-universal occupation in the late Fall. Having collected fermentable materials over the summer, barrels everywhere began giving up their odorous contents in November, and urban heads of family began making frequent trips to manholes behind the apartment buildings in which they resided. The personal manufacture of tuica was against the law, and no responsible bootlegger wanted to possibly incriminate his fellow apartment dwellers by discarding the byproducts of distillation into the building’s dumpster. So, under cover of night, a gentleman well under the influence of his day’s work turning stone (fruit) into liquid would grab a pry bar and a plastic bag of mush, find the nearest storm drain, pop off the lid and plop down the refuse. Neighbors often encountered each other during such excursions; I’ve always wondered what pleasantries they exchanged on the occasion.

While technically illegal, making tuica was nearly universal, for two main reasons: 1) Communism sucks, and booze helps people endure things that suck; and, 2) Communism sucks, and the booze legally available on the market was abysmal in both quantity and quality.

Having noticed a near two-fold increase in per capita alcohol consumption between the mid 40s and the mid 50s, the Communist party rationed alcohol consumption and waged a vigorous campaign against drinking in the workplace (!) as well as public drunkenness, which was punishable by temporary consignment to alarmingly named “sobering rooms'' at the police station. The Party’s concern had less to do with impaired productivity or safety and more with the fact that drinking and smoking were seen as capitalist vices which needed to be educated out of the New Communist Man.

But Romania is an agrarian country, with a long history of making do and an even longer tradition of imbibing alcohol. Everyone made booze. Growing up in the 1980s, I don’t remember the adults in my family buying alcohol except for a bottle of champagne for New Year’s, but there was always alcohol around. Folks living in rural areas would flaunt ordinances against growing grapes on their modest plot of land and make wine every year. The grape harvest usually took place in late August and, in the absence of equipment, wine was pressed the old fashioned way: dumping a bunch of grapes in a large vat and stepping on them. The resulting liquid, called must, was intensely sweet, on the thick side, and already slightly fermented, and kids and respectable ladies were given sips as a token of appreciation. Wine was left to age for only a few months, usually the span between harvest and Christmas, and then stored in large glass vessels encased in woven twigs, called damigeana (demijohn, duh).

As stone fruit, especially plums, were ubiquitous, hard fruit liquors were also particularly easy to make. Traditionally, tuica is made from plums, but the recipe is forgiving enough that you could use anything that ferments. Romanian performance artist Ciprian Homorodean distilled a batch of 42 proof liquor out of parka filling and chicken shit. Hai noroc!

Once bottled, booze had almost unlimited uses. It was currency: in the multilaterally developed Communist economy, where people were nominally paid but there was nothing to buy, barter was how we acquired necessities. Tuica was extremely giftable, and an appreciated bribe (second only to cartons of Kent cigarettes). It was a source of calories and a way to get warm when the water pumped into the calorifer was frigid, which was often. Tuica was even medicine; coughs were often treated by wrapping a high proof alcohol compress around the neck, and in a pinch you could use it to disinfect wounds.

None of these reasons were why my father made moonshine, though. He did it because he found it funny. The whole endeavor was ridiculous: adapting a messy, smelly, “country” operation to the constraints of an 800 sqft. city apartment; the turning of literal kitchen scraps into liquor; the necessary subterfuge and dissimulation during the entire process; the fact that officials nominally tasked with enforcing the prohibition on home distilling would inevitably receive some of its products as bribes. Making moonshine in our kitchen, my dad felt he was giving the finger to a Communist Party that wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

I’ll drink to that.

Vaccines are widely available for everyone over the age of 5. 60% of adults, including 80% of the adults over the age of 60, who are most at risk, are fully vaccinated. Pfizer just announced extremely promising results from clinical trials of its new therapeutic which, if representative at population-level, cut the risk of hospitalization by 89% among adults with COVID, and reduced the mortality rate to 0. This is a really good time to start thinking about lifting restrictions.

And masks on school kids need to be the first to go, for two very simple reasons: they are unnecessary, and they are harmful.

Masking Kids Is Unnecessary

COVID spares kids. This is an incredible silver lining to the unfortunate reality that we are stuck with an endemic virus that is, on the whole, likely to be twice as deadly as the flu. But kids are spared. Even before the vaccine, at most 2% of pediatric COVID cases resulted in hospitalization, and 0.3% (576 under the age of 17 since the beginning of the pandemic) resulted in death. In contrast, while influenza has a similar mortality rate for kids over 5, it is six times as deadly for infants and toddlers, at 1.8%. 

We have never masked, nor closed day cares and schools, nor conducted mass surveillance through testing for influenza before. People at risk were encouraged to get the flu shot, and everyone was urged to voluntarily stay home when sick, and that was it. We understood the risk in context, and we were able to continue living our lives. 

Yet COVID seems to have completely destroyed our ability to assess risk. I am wary of mentioning shifting goalposts because the phrase implies some sort of nefarious, conspiratorial intent, and I do not think this is the case. But boy, have the goalposts shifted, as evidenced by this ABCnews piece, which recommends that folks who have gotten their boosters follow “public health measures just a bit longer,” because “Getting a booster shot doesn't guarantee you won't be infected with the coronavirus. But it can help your immune system build protection against severe disease or hospitalization.” I mean, yes? I thought that was the point? How does the goal of unprecedented public health measures shift from an understandable “2 weeks to slow the spread”, to an indefinite “until we can guarantee no risk?”

This is a case of the Politician’s Syllogism: We must do something. This is something, therefore we must do it.

And when it comes to kids and COVID, mask mandates are indeed the wrong thing, which is worse than doing nothing at all.

Masking Kids Is Harmful

Here’s an interesting tidbit: kids are different from adults. Not just in size, immaturity and inexperience, but their brains are functionally and morphologically different. The way kids learn is fundamentally different from the way adults learn. What’s good for the goose is definitely not good for the gosling.

The fundamental difference is that for children, learning anything is a social, emotional and physical act. Humans are an extremely social species with an incredible amount of what Jean Piaget called social knowledge. We have developed complex, highly specific languages that we use to store and transmit a huge trove of man-made knowledge (per Piaget, social knowledge includes things like norms, rules, rituals, beliefs, recipes and strategies, stories, songs, and poetry.) 

Any kind of learning that a pre-adolescent child does, happens in a social context: the passing on of social knowledge is of utmost importance for survival. Child brains are primed to carefully observe (since the moment of birth!) the faces and later bodies of their caregivers, teachers and peers, and mimic their expressions, tone of voice, and body language.

Which brings us to masks. The pieces of paper or cloth we have all been wearing for the past year and a half take up a whole lot of real estate. They obscure the entire lower half of the face. When I last wrote about this, I mentioned how masks make communication harder because they both dampen voice sounds and obscure the lips which might otherwise provide additional clues as to what is being said. 

But the impact is more severe than that. Masks have a significant negative effect on children’s ability to read other’s emotions. Being attuned to the emotions of those around you isn’t only important for forming and maintaining friendships, but it hits at the very heart of learning. Whenever we teach something, or learn from someone, we engage in a process of emotional alignment. Unconsciously, students mimic the teacher’s facial expression, body language and emotional state. Our mirror neurons start firing, creating a simile of the teacher inside our own brain. (And a good teacher will do the same when interacting with a child, creating a simile of the student inside their brain.) That is how learning happens; but in order for it to happen, we need to be able to see each other’s faces.

Strikingly, the younger the child, the more masks impair their ability to discern emotion. The categorical understanding of emotion (both knowing that tears and down-turned mouth means “sad”, and that “sad” is a negative) is not fixed until about age 5, strongly suggesting that there is a critical period for the development of the ability to read emotion. It stands to reason that toddlers and preschoolers who are not exposed to whole faces in a variety of situations and environments will miss out on the opportunity to refine their understanding of facial expressions, perhaps permanently.

The quality of the emotion expressed during the learning exchange also directly affects thinking. Frequent smiles improve both attention breadth and flexibility. With the part of the face that is overwhelmingly involved in expressing positive emotion concealed by masks, both teachers and students are missing an important tool for improving cognition and learning.

American school kids have already lost more than twice the instructional time that other developed countries lost to COVID closures. They are, on the whole, several months behind expectations in both English and Math. Having finally returned to classrooms, they are handed a physical barrier to place on the second-most critical (after the brain) body part for learning: their face. This was laughably unnecessary at the beginning of the school year, when all vulnerable adults had already had ample opportunity to be vaccinated. Now that the vaccine is available for school children, masks are indecently cruel. Take ‘em off!

The latest contribution to the cacophony comes from Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berskhire, via the Washington Post. Their piece features more strawmen than my local pumpkin patch in late October, but to sum it up, Schneider and Berkshire draw a direct line between parent involvement in local school curriculum and our democracy lying in a “pile of rubble and a heap of ashes.” To arrive at this grim image, Schneider and Berkshire take a detour through a number of attractions meant to invoke a pleasant amount of seasonally-appropriate horror: “parents’ right” to educate their children, homeschoolers, religious fundamentalism, and education savings accounts (horrifying!), before ending this tour de force with the specter of voter suppression. While I enjoyed the ride, I’m still not sure where either curriculum or children come in. They may have gotten lost in the corn maze.

The United States has a long, rich history of waging culture wars in schools. From fights over the teaching of evolution, to desegregation, to pearl-clutching over sex education and now the pitched ontological battles over whether CRT is being taught at all, both sides in the culture wars have been using the rhetorical trick made famous by Maude Flanders: “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”

They use this trick because it works: everyone loves children, at least nominally. Nobody can deny that adults’ stewardship of the world is for the children. If you’re not doing good things for the children, what are you even doing? Children are the litmus paper of virtue.

Which is truly unfortunate — for the children. 

When kids become pawns in adults’ conflicts, they end up getting hurt. And it is particularly egregious when the adults actively doing harm are the very adults tasked with advocating for children. The current culture war, broadly waged about racial equity, has already amassed an impressive body count, from the dismantling of gifted programs to state legislation that expressly prohibits specific topics of discussion in the classroom. In this contest of one upmanship, any win for any side is a net loss for kids.

But what concerns me even more than bad policy outcomes is the tribal, profoundly illiberal rhetoric that permeates conversations about schools and education. Not only is neither side willing to countenance the opposing viewpoint, but they are expressly seeking to prevent each other from speaking at all. The intensity ratchets at every turn, and in short order we find that we have gone through the looking glass into a world where self-proclaimed education historians will assert with a straight face that parents do not have the right to be involved in their children’s education.

Won’t the adults please think of the children and choose a more suitable arena for their pissing contests?

Looking even further into the future, Rochelle Walensky opined that schools should maintain mask mandates even once younger children are vaccinated.

Why? What are we doing here?

COVID-19 is endemic. It will always be around. Everyone will be exposed at some point, and most people will acquire some form of immunity, either from vaccination or from fighting off the illness. And, very sadly as Matt Shapiro points out, people will die, possibly at twice the rate that people die of influenza. We are stuck with a virus that is twice as deadly as the flu.

Marginally Compelling

Planning For The COVID Endgame

Very early on in this crisis, I wondered what the worst-case scenario for COVID was and I came to the conclusion that it would be if COVID became endemic, a new member of the family of diseases that endlessly circulate through the human population. It seems increasingly likely that is the scenario we have. To be fair, when I said that, we had no idea if …

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5 years ago · 19 likes · 2 comments · Matt Shapiro

But life, today as ever, is for living, not for cowering in fear. A fascinating analysis by University of Edinburgh’s Jean-Francois Daust shows that

the elderly people, i.e. the most vulnerable population, are not systematically more responsive in terms of prospective self-isolation (if they were told to do so) and willingness to isolate. Moreover, they are not more disciplined in terms of compliance with preventive measures, especially with wearing a face mask when outside their home.

Older folks, who have objectively less time left to live, seem to favor not spending this time in isolation, even at the risk of contracting a deadly disease. This seems reasonable to me. We will all die. Every single one of us. Death is a rock-solid certainty. That is why we want our lives to be fulfilling, meaningful and happy -- because we know they will end.

While the death of a person approaching their natural life expectancy may at least be cognitively understandable, thinking about kids dying is incomprehensible and horrendously painful. Kids are meant to outlive us; the death of a child feels like a crime against nature. Adults will rightly want to do anything in their power to prevent this, and temporary inconveniences feel like acceptable trade-offs when considering the 7-8 decades that still lay ahead.

But kids also need to live happy, fulfilling, meaningful lives, not just in the future, but now. We don't have the right to put kids in literal boxes, or lock them in their rooms (no matter how comfortable), in order to protect them.

Our kids are living in a world where COVID-19 is endemic, and fortunately they are the least likely to be affected. Yet we continue to cover their faces, keep them away from each other, and periodically remove them altogether from their peer group. For an illness that, when symptomatic, acts like a cold. In a country where all adults can get vaccinated.

Who is this for?

While kids are spared the worst of COVID-19, they are not immune to the effects of mitigation. My eldest daughter is 9. I've known her two closest friends since they were 2. They have always been active, happy, gregarious kids. Over the past year, I have heard them say things like, "I don't want to play with these kids, cause they're not in my pod," and "Ugh, taking my mask off freaks me out!" and "I can't go to this birthday party, because it's inside." Adults have been misguidedly projecting their own anxieties and fears onto the group least affected by the pandemic. In turn, this has made children twice as depressed and anxious as they were just a couple years ago.

Why? Who is gaining anything here?

And the grownups are still unwilling to even think about turning this minivan around. While the European CDC, hardly a backwater, regressive institution, expressly recommends that children under 12 not wear masks in schools, the US has no plan for doing away with restrictions even after kids are vaccinated.

It's almost as if kids have become fidget toys, objects that adults can do things to in order to make themselves feel better. Please stop. Enough.

One angle that has been sorely lacking in the discourse surrounding kids and masks is a discussion of trade-offs. This is always hard when it comes to assessing risk to kids; the idea of any child, anywhere, suffering disease, injury or death is very difficult to fathom. We’d rather not think about it. When we do think about it, we feel moved to do whatever we possibly can, no matter how small or inconvenient, to prevent any child from being hurt. This is normal and good: we are built to become beside ourselves at the thought of children suffering. The human species has endured in no small part because adults are highly motivated to care for their young for a very long time.

But I think it is crucial to match the commendable impulse to protect children with a rational assessment of trade-offs: there are consequences for any action. What are we missing when we implement a particular policy? When we go down a particular path, what are we necessarily giving up?

I have two daughters, 8 and 4, who have worn masks at school and daycare for the past year. I have also been teaching in a masked preschool/elementary environment, in person, since last June. And both my personal experience and my professional knowledge make it plainly clear that masks are not zero-cost.

Masks require additional time and attention, and if you know kids (or parents!) you know that these two assets are already in grievously short supply. They are one more thing to purchase, keep track of and maintain. Both my kids and my students have been very responsible about masking, but the damn things still slide down, or get misplaced, or need washing, or are forgotten. Masks require additional time and labor. In the classroom, I spend about 10% of my time interacting with kids on something mask-related. It's not a huge amount of time, but it's not insignificant.

Masks make talking to people harder. In a quiet room with other adults, this is not an insurmountable obstacle, but in a classroom with kids, this is a significant difficulty. Masks dampen the sound of the human voice by as much as 20 decibels. In a classroom that is already noisy and unavoidably “busy”, this can make it very hard to hear the person speaking. Masks also obscure the physical cues that we might use to both decipher someone else’s speech and make our own words clearer.

As a teacher, I have a much harder time talking to kids (and I'm in preschool, so I do not lecture groups). I often have to get closer and physically touch kids to get their attention or communicate things. The things I say have to be simpler, which negatively affects the complexity of the language that I can model for them. When kids talk to me I sometimes miss what they say. I often have to ask them to repeat themselves, which makes everyone feel frustrated. It also takes me longer to discern how a child is feeling or what they are thinking. This makes it harder for me to figure out what kids know now and what they might need to know next. Masks make it harder for me to know who my students are as learners.

When kids talk to each other, they have to be louder. They often misunderstand or simply do not hear each other. It's harder to collaborate and easier to fight. Kids get frustrated and give up on their peers a lot more easily. It's much harder for younger kids to make friends — largely, I think, because masks make it harder to tell people apart. I have noticed that kids take longer to learn others’ names. Both my co-teacher and I have always gone by our first names with our students, and this has never been a problem. This past year, though, most of our students have been calling us “teacher.” With masks on, we’re just another adult body in the room.

Because kids can't easily hear each other’s words, or use their faces to communicate, emotions become bigger. You see this happen in pre-verbal children: toddlers have huge reactions not just because their emotional regulation is immature, but also because, in the absence of words they can communicate, they need to make sure they are understood. When you can’t articulate the case for wearing a particular pair of shoes, you will put your energy into objecting loudly and persistently to all the undesirable pairs. Masks limit children’s ability to use verbal communication, so they begin acting younger. This makes them feel less competent and capable, which affects their ability to learn.

Another factor that affects kids’ learning is the feeling of closeness and trust with both adults and peers. Masks make it harder to decipher emotion, make people appear less trustworthy, and engender less closeness. We trust a masked person less than an unmasked one. For young kids, this is hugely important because until the emergence of abstract thinking (usually around puberty), learning is an emotional process. Young children learn through mimicry, and picking up a new skill is a whole-body endeavor: kids' brains mirror the whole person of the teacher, from the emotional tone to the body language. To be able to learn, kids need to be able to see themselves in the teacher, to identify the teacher as trustworthy, reliable and sufficiently similar to them. By obscuring the main non-verbal conveyor of emotion, the face, masks make interaction, communication and learning more difficult in ways that body language alone cannot compensate for.

Young children have overwhelmingly been spared the brunt of the COVID-19, and their adult caregivers, at least in the US, have near universal access to vaccines. Still, kids under 12 cannot yet become vaccinated, and new variants of the virus are circulating. Masks may make sense in some cases next year. But before we can assess that this is the case, we need to understand what the trade-offs are. Masks make it harder to talk, harder to play and harder to learn. Let's make sure the benefit they provide is worth it.

It was early spring, 1983. Romania had been a Communist country for close to 40 years, officially secular, dedicated to stamping out “obscurantism and superstition” and replacing them with “scientific historical materialism.” While most Romanians had privately continued to hold on to a degree of faith, observance, and certainly superstition, religious life was severely constrained. People could come to church for the important personal sacraments (baptisms, weddings, burials), but services were small and furtive. While not exactly dangerous, stepping into church was uncomfortable, slightly uncouth, “not done” though widely accepted. It required a certain degree of conviction.

Which is why my family’s choice to have me baptized would have appeared completely befuddling to anyone who knew them. Going back at least a couple generations on either side, I don’t think my family would have been able to point to anyone with genuine religious conviction.

My mother’s family were small-town Ashkenazi Jews. Originally hailing from Carpathian Ruthenia, the mountainous area spanning Northeastern Romania and Southern Ukraine, my mom’s maternal side, by the name of Saim, moved South to Ploiesti early in the 20th century. There, they became successful during the oil boom of the 1930s, catering to the interests and disposable incomes of an emerging middle class. 

The Saims had a popular “Fashion House” (Casa de Moda) where both my great-grandfather Benes and my great-grandmother Etla worked; she drew the designs, and he cut them. At the height of their success, they employed more than two dozen “girls” (seamstresses). Their four children were enrolled in good schools, had nannies, and would take weekends off to gamble at the Casino in Sinaia, then the hottest mountain resort in the Bucharest orbit. In the 1930s, Ploiesti was roughly 5% Jewish. By comparison, this is similar to Los Angeles today, which ranks as the second largest concentration of Jews in the world outside of Israel (New York is first at 13%).

My mother’s paternal side, named Peters, has a darker and more mysterious history. My mom’s paternal grandfather had immigrated from Austria at the turn of the 20th century, a Catholic convert. In spite of his papered Christianity, he settled in Iasi which, with Jews making up more than 40% of the population, was then the center of the Yiddish-speaking world. An intellectual, professorial type, “Grandpa Max” had trouble putting enough food on the table for his six children, so he sent my mom’s dad Jacques and one of his sisters away in the care of a wealthier relation in the South.

My dad’s people hail from decidedly more diverse stock. My grandfather Eugen, whose mother was Turkish, was barely out of middle school when his Romanian father left the family and skipped town with his mistress. To support his mother and sister, my grandfather enlisted in the Army. A promising young man, he obtained a scholarship to Lazar high school, then (as well as now) one of Bucharest’s finest, where he walked the beautiful neoclassical hallways alongside Romania’s ill-fated boy-king, Mihai I. My grandfather’s only comment on his illustrious classmate was, “He was a nice boy. Nobody treated him any different.” 

And then, when he was barely 18, the War started. In 1945, having recovered from a shrapnel wound to his shin, he found himself garrisoned with his anti-aircraft battery in the little village of Pecica in NW Romania, on the outskirts of the former Austro-Hungarian empire. It was there that he met my bubbly, young grandmother. She was, in her own telling, instantly mesmerized by his “unusual, grey-colored eyes,” versions of which passed on to my father, myself, and my eldest daughter, in spite of the supposedly dominant brown allele being present in each generation.

While my grandfather was the poor son of a philandering father, my grandmother, imposingly named Gheorghina Aglae Edita though she always went by her baby nickname Dunda, was the daughter of a solid, respectable Imperial family. Her parents were in what we might today call a mixed marriage: dad was Orthodox and mom was Catholic. My grandmother and her older sister Iris viewed this as a great advantage: “Oh, we loved it! We got twice the holidays, twice the presents and twice the school breaks.” 

This was not unusual. My grandmother’s family lived just north of Timisoara in the Banat region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the general area speckled on the map above with red, orange, green and tan. In my grandmother’s telling, this was a prized feature: it meant access to a number of traditions, particularly of the culinary kind, which she continued to appreciate for the rest of her life. And culinary exchanges between “races” happened regardless of official, or accepted norms. 

My dad tells a story about a type of interfaith exchange that would have raised serious eyebrows, but that the parties involved found sufficiently valuable to brave potential opprobrium. My grandmother’s family had Hungarian Jewish neighbors who also liked to eat. Sadly, the laws of Kashrut prevented them from enjoying some of the delicacies that the local gentiles had become adept at preparing -- such as crispy pork cracklings. So, the neighboring families made use of the narrow, unlit roads of the village to exchange Kosher for un-Kosher fat under the cover of darkness: a paper parcel of goose fat cracklings (gribbenes) for a paper parcel of pork fat cracklings (jumari).

The Jewish side of my family also had their share of interfaith dialogue, both virtuous and sinful, and both in happy times and sad.

…

More in Part II.

Children are highly attuned to both differences and similarities between individuals and groups. This is because human brains are tribal. We are born with the ability to adapt to a virtually unlimited number of environments and cultures, but also with the mechanisms to quickly identify, prefer and conform to "our" group. This is morally neutral -- neither good nor bad, just is.

Little kids are very good at noticing differences and using them as organizing criteria: I've known kids to form groups based on gender (of course), but also hair length, shirt color, and Paw Patrol character preference. During my second year teaching preschool, I witnessed a group of young children having the following conversation:

Kid 1: Do you like going up and down?

Kids 2&3: Yeah!

Kid 1: Which do you like best? Up or down?

Kid 2: Up!

Kid 3: Me too!

Kid 1: Me too!! Wow, we're like best friends!

And they remained best friends for the remainder of the year. I had no idea what they were talking about, nor was I able to tease it out of them. It didn’t matter: they had found something to coalesce around: going up. (This is where I would insert the shrug emoji).

Years later, when I was teaching second and third grade, my students created a sex club. I first found out when our beloved school counselor came to inform me that a few of the kindergartners were inconsolable because my students had not allowed them to join the sex club (and this is not even in the Top 10 of unexpected things that I witnessed while teaching young children). Upon investigation, it turned out that some of the 9 and 10 year-olds had decided to create a club for kids who had had “the talk”, and they had considerately resolved to exclude anyone who did not know about the birds and the bees. “Sex” was not the purpose of the club. Awareness of it was simply the selection criterion.

But while kids do segregate based on perceived differences all the time, they do not assign any value to those differences. Hair texture is just as salient as skin color, or favorite anime character — or awareness of how babies are made. For children, group membership is fluid and temporary. As with everything that is important, kids play at forming, joining, leaving and dissolving groups in order to figure out how to navigate such dynamics and suss out what it truly important. Children’s play often looks callous or insensitive to kindly adults, especially when it involves power dynamics or hints at violence. I have known many teachers and parents who become alternately mortified and deeply concerned when they hear “You can’t play with us, this is only for big girls!” or when they witness gun play. But such play is vitally important not only for the development of social skills, but for democracy itself. Children need to play at exclusion and violence in order to become inclusive and peaceful. Playful experimentation with peers is the most important way kids learn.

The *other* way kids learn is by watching the adults around them and internalizing their values. And this is important, because when it comes to immutable characteristics it's the adults who imbue differences with significance. Where kids see skin color, adults see race. And if adults have a chip on their shoulder about race, kids will develop a chip on their shoulder about skin color, only without the ability to understand the historical and social context. The old truism that children will grow up to do as you do, not as you say is, well, true.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t talk to kids about skin color. You should talk to your children about anything they bring up! But remember that adults brains are different from children’s brains. Until roughly puberty, kids are literal. They cannot abstract and engage with intangible ideas, so your best in conversation is to be as literal and practical as you can. A question of “Why is Ileana’s skin white?” does not require a primer on the category of race, or an explanation of how melanin content in the skin is an adaptation to the amount of sunlight in the environment, or an overview of human migration patterns. An answer of “She was born that way. People’s skin can be different colors” will be sufficient and satisfactory.

Still, summer was my favorite season. If it got hot, at least it wasn’t cold. Since the opposition to thermal comfort extended in both directions, heating was minimal at best during the winter. Comrades feeling cold in the 40 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit that their concrete apartments often registered between November and February were simply encouraged to “put another layer on”. My family was fortunate to have procured an electric oil heater, which served not only a source of warmth, but also as a laundry dryer. It was a lifesaver when the electricity was on, which happened about 50% of the time. But summer days were long, and hot, so it didn’t matter as much if the lights went out at 6 PM, or if the hot water was cut off for several weeks at a time (which it continued to be every August well into the 1990s, “for maintenance”).

But I loved summer best because it was vacation season. A Latin culture at its core, Romania has a reverence for summer vacation that rivals only the French. Schools were out between June 15 and September 15 every year. While a couple weeks of sleepaway camp might be provided to the most worthy pionieri, there was no summer day camp. Not so much because day camp was considered an example of Imperialist decadence, but because first graders were usually provided with an apartment key hanging on a shoelace to be worn around the neck on the first day of summer vacation, given a bread and butter sandwich, and instructed to stay out of the house and out of trouble until evening.

A similar admonishment would, usually from late July to late August, be extended to the adults by their various comrade chiefs. Every good om al muncii (literally laboring person, but actually meaning only workers employed by the state, which upwards of 90% of Romanian adults were) was entitled to 2-3 weeks' paid vacation per year. And with entertainment and leisure options only available in a few specific, dedicated locations throughout the country, staycationing was decidedly unappealing. Any sane comrade would want to get away.

When it was time to plan a getaway, you could go to your (mandatory) union office and purchase a 7-day package (7 days only, please, choice is a capitalist construct) to one of the resorts on the Black Sea litoral (shore).

Forever a class-conscious sort, Romanian Communists divided even their vacation destinations into classes: the Northern resorts, clustered around Constanta, the local urban center, were Class I. Accommodations, which were highly subsidized and subject to aggressive cost-cutting measures at every level, ran roughly 3% of the average monthly salary per night. Class II resorts, closer to the Bulgarian border, dropped to around 1% of your monthly pay per night.

Meal vouchers were not only available, but also compulsory, because where else were you going to eat if not Comrade Elena's Commie Kitchen? Here's a drink menu from one of the Class I resorts. Please note that only the entries with a handwritten price next to them are available. 

Once you had selected your preferred resort, you had a wide variety of choices for spending your free time, as long as those choices were going to the beach in the morning and having a weak drink alfresco in the evening, no later than 10 PM though, because laboring people gotta sleep.

When I was little, my mom and I would go to the Black Sea Coast every year. My dad never joined us, because he "hates the beach". Dissidents that we were, we never stayed in one of the Party-sanctioned resorts. Instead, we rented a room in a proto-Airbnb in Mangalia.

Mangalia is chiefly known for having lent its name to a particularly cute breed of pig, the Mangalitsa.

Every year, we stayed in a 10x12 room in a long, squat rooming house. There was a communal sink and faucet in the yard, and an outhouse around the corner. But, there was a garden: vegetables on one side, flowers on the other, divided by a narrow pathway bordered by a low, ornate wrought iron fence. I took my first independent steps there, my grandmother distracting me from the enormity of the event by pointing to one flower, then the next, and then the next until I had made my way from gate to porch.

The woman who owned the rooming house did, in fact, keep pigs. The pig pen was right next to the outhouse, which was a bigger problem for the pigs than the humans, as the pigs were "extremely particular about being clean" and required daily hose showers for their well-being. 5 year-old me got to help with the showers sometime.

If you however, unlike the pigs, were not particular about being clean and were susceptible to magical thinking, the Black Sea coast provided a health-conscious destination: Techirghiol, where ailing Commies went not to drink the waters, but to do this.

That is special, sapropelic mud. Local legend has it that a peasant and his sore-ridden donkey wandered into Techirghiol lake and emerged rejuvenated and with the dermis magically healed by the sticky, odiferous mud rich in decomposing crustaceans. The locals must have shrugged and started advertising, and ever since, foul-smelling mud therapy has been a staple of the Black Sea vacation experience. To reap the benefits of the mud, you slather yourself in it, turn towards the sun to let it dry, then "rinse" yourself off in the putrid lake from which it comes. There, good as new!

The Black Sea litoral did not only appeal to Romanians, or even to commies! During the late 1960s through the end of the 1970s, when Romania was relatively more open to the world than at any time during Communism, foreigners did visit. This gave a beach vacation an exciting thrill of unsanctioned possibility. My mother knew somebody whose daughter had met a Swede on the beach, married him, and emigrated! The women in my family told this story in hushed tones, heads shaking ambiguously between praise and disapproval.

But potential foreign contacts were not only exciting for matrimonial purposes: more prosaic ends were just as important, none more so than commerce. Black market trade was one of the lifelines of the Romanian Commie, especially in the 1980s, when store shelves were empty most of the time.

The Black Sea coast's proximity to Bulgaria and Turkey, as well as the plausible deniability of foreigners traveling there "for pleasure" made it a hub for trade. Non-perishable, everyday staples were the most sought after: undergarments, nylons, pots and pans, small utensils and electronics, soap, cigarettes and candy were vigorously bought and sold.

I remember my grandmother haggling with a Bulgarian woman over a package of clothespins. Neither spoke the other's language, but they negotiated fiercely by writing prices down on a piece of paper. I personally bought a tube of strawberry toothpaste from a tourist trader. It was open and half empty, but it was still the most delicious dentifrice I had tasted.

At the end of your State-sanctioned vacation, having tanned, spent your vouchers, been cured by mud, and illegally shopped, it was time to go home. Most travelers took the train, as gasoline was prohibitively expensive, even if you owned a car. Until next time, Comrades!

I have no doubt that working in an Amazon warehouse sucks. It sounds like a fast paced, repetitive, and physical job. Hardly anyone’s dream career. But also hardly “grinding exploitation.”

The difference between a crappy job and exploitation is coercion. An Amazon warehouse or delivery worker in the US has chosen this job freely and rationally. The fact that such a job is the only/best choice for some people can indeed be seen as sad, or even unfair. While life is often sad and unfair, we are justified in trying hard to mitigate the unpleasantness and expand the flourishing. But the fact that some work environments are dismal does not mean that people who work there are being oppressed.

Being oppressed through labor looks like this: you could live in a country, like the Romanian Communist Republic, where unemployment is illegal, as in against the law and punishable with imprisonment. This “anti-vagrancy” law was passed in 1968, and it criminalized “not working though you are able to do so.” 

It also looks like this. 

These are college students engaged in so-called “patriotic labor”, bagging potatoes. In Communist Romania “intellectuals”, meaning anyone affiliated even loosely with higher education, were required to spend one month every summer working for the Party. The more threatening your field of study, the worse your assignment would be: the purpose of such patriotic labor was not only to significantly lower labor costs, but also to pre-emptively break possible enemies of the state. My mother was a professor of French linguistics at the University of Bucharest. While her discipline was quite technical, it still had to do with the Capitalistic West, so for a number of years my mom, her colleagues, and her students were assigned to pick and shuck corn. The work conditions were abysmal: an entire academic department was housed in a barn on a field with no running water or plumbing, no food provided, no shade or sun protection, and nominally undercover Securitate agents “gently” reminding professors that censure was a possibility if they didn’t meet their production quota. One of my mother’s mentors, an elderly professor, died during one such patriotic labor session.

Fortunately for my mom, one of her students happened to be the daughter of a head honcho in the Securitate, and she was able to finagle a more desirable patriotic labor assignment for the entire department: harvesting grapes. My mother was delighted, because “the vineyards were shady, and you could eat the grapes when you were hungry.”

Exploitation through labor also looks like this.

This is a clipping from the newspaper Scinteia (“The Spark”), the mouthpiece of the Romanian Communist Party. The title in all caps reads “Let’s Shovel Snow Without Delay”, while the subhead in the center is “Bucharesters, join your shovels with the snow plows!” (Stop for a second and reflect on this.)

In Communist Romania, your time off work was never really off. Something breaking, an act of god, a local emergency or simply something needing done somewhere meant mandatory “mobilization” in order to “volunteer” your labor for the Party. Such volunteerism was enforced by the omnipresent agents of the Securitate who were your neighbors and coworkers, and who could ensure compliance.

It also looks like this.

Another clipping from Scinteia. The title reads “We are organizing, we are organizing” “Yes, but make sure you leave time for concrete activity!” while the subhead goes “Why the units of the new Central Organization for the Recovery and Valorization of Reusable Materials have been so slow to start.”

Forget toothless city ordinances banning forbidding you from putting your recyclables in the garbage: in Communist Romania, if you don’t collect scrap metal the Party recycles you!

Finally, exploitation through labor looks like this. 

This is a parade to celebrate August 23, the national holiday. Unlike 4th of July parades, a parade in Communist Romania was a mandatory affair that involved everyone, starting with elementary school students and ending with retirees. Literally everyone: if you were not parading, you were expected to watch from the sidelines. And if you were parading, you were expected to have put in months of work to design signs, costumes and decorations, as well as hundreds of hours of rehearsals. All voluntarily, of course.

Many jobs are physically hard, dangerous or demoralizing, but in the absence of coercion a shitty job is not evidence of exploitation, no matter the wage cap between line worker and CEO. It is possible to be interested in improving work conditions for everyone without heaping opprobrium on the wealthy. I am personally looking forward to the time when robots take all the jobs we’d rather not do. Until then, though, just remember to say no to totalitarianism.

For more on this, check out Valeriu Antonovici’s excellent website: https://muncapatriotica.ememorie.ro/ That is where I found the newspaper clippings, but there are lots more primary sources as well as a great couple excerpts from his book on patriotic labor. All in Romanian, but Google translate should work.

There really is nothing that rouses public intellectuals’ passions like the numbers related to reproductive decisions: from the age of first-time motherhood to the exact-to-the-decimal number of children average couples have, to the number of people that are perishing due to famine while you are reading a book title, it’s always been figures all the way down. This obsession with precision obscures an undeniable truth: when it comes to the “ideal” reproductive policy for a society, talking heads have never been right. Ever. This should give us pause.

I was born in Romania in 1983. Before giving birth to me, my mom had struggled with pregnancy loss and infertility. I was very much wanted and cherished as a child, which made my family one of the lucky ones. While my parents had worked hard to have a child, most other couples at the time had to contend with the specter of unwanted pregnancy.

In 1966, Secretary-General of the Romanian Communist Party Nicolae Ceausescu had banned abortion, in a bid to increase Romania's population. Part of Ceausescu’s unique vision among Eastern Block dictators was the desire to re-engineer society by creating a New Man. The engine of the “permanent revolution” that Ceausescu envisioned, the New Man would value the “cult of labor” and reject “mysticism and obscurantism” in favor of “dialectical materialism.” Ceausescu understood that becoming a New Man was much more difficult than simply being born as such, so he embarked on a mission to see lots of New Babies emerge from the birth canals of Romanian women.

The abortion ban, enacted as Decree 770 and colloquially known as the Decree, had an immediate but short-lived effect on birth rates. While the birth rate doubled between 1966 and 1967, by the time I was born 17 years later it had gone down to its pre-Decree level of roughly 2. But the Decree did have lasting effects on an entire generation of unwanted and often abandoned children, and on Romanian attitudes towards sex and gender roles.

The first, immediate effect of the abortion ban was the birth of a large number of unwanted children. Giving up children after birth, or sending them away to live-in situations resembling various degrees of modern servitude had been a common practice in Romania, as in most of Eastern Europe, for many centuries. My own paternal grandfather was one of 7 children. Born to an urban but poor Jewish family in Iasi, then one of the centers of Jewish life in the region, my grandfather and one of his sisters were sent away to be raised by a childless uncle in order to ease his own family's financial burden. To my grandfather’s family, the gamble paid off, as all 7 children survived into adulthood and were at least moderately successful, and my grandfather was the one who took his own ailing parents on and cared for them in their waning years.

But the Decree, as most coercive legislation does, primarily affected the poor and under-resourced. Growing up solidly middle class in Bucharest, the only visible effects of the Decree were unusually large age gaps between siblings in the families that had more than one child. In my social circles, one child per family was the norm, in spite of Ceausescu’s efforts. My own mother often told me that she would have liked to have had more than one child, but “the conditions were simply not propitious.” Roughly a third of my friends had siblings, and most of the age gaps were around 7 years; almost invariably, one of the children was a Decretel, or “child of the Decree.” An oops, in other words. In urban, relatively-well off Bucharest, an unexpected pregnancy right around the time when the first child entered full-time schooling (and became therefore a lot less resource-intensive) was sometimes allowed to continue. The family made do.

But poorer, rural areas of the country with little social capital (most of Romania, to be fair) were triply affected by pro-natalist policies, poverty, and a gutting of civil society. Where religious institutions and charities had previously stepped in to ease the burden of unchecked fertility, the Communist state now asserted the only authority to care for unwanted children. Before the 1940s, an unwanted infant might be left on the doorstep of the local church. An unwanted older child might be given up to a monastery or placed in domestic servitude or various apprenticeships. The luckier ones were shipped off to a wealthy relative, like my grandfather. But the new Communist society replaced these institutions with the scientific and magnanimous care of the Party. For unwanted children, this meant placement in a Children’s Home.

In a country where scarcity was so extreme that my own, privileged, capital-dwelling family had to purchase meat on the black market, the euphemistically named Children's Homes (orphanages) became de facto storage facilities for children. They were deprived of resources not due to cruelty, but simply because there was not any more food, heat, or love to be found. The utter lack of resources also naturally skewed the population of abandoned children towards those with physical or developmental problems; those who required more care had to go first.

There have been a number of stories following the lives of Romanian orphans, 30 years later. They are bittersweet. People are incredibly resilient. And neglect is extremely harmful.

But children were not the only casualty of pro-natalism. Romanians' views on sex and gender roles also suffered. When Romania became Communist at the end of WWII, it was a largely patriarchal, deeply Christian Orthodox country. With very few exceptions, mostly in urban, educated, Western-oriented areas, men and women lived fairy different lives, only coming together in the family, with well-established and inelastic gender roles. While traditional Romanian culture is often raunchy and loves a good alcohol-fueled party, the fire-and-brimstone view of sin inherent in Eastern Orthodoxy has always prevented a humanistic understanding of the pleasures of the flesh.

Contrary to the rhetoric emphasizing giving “to everyone according to need”, and certainly contrary to such laughably inaccurate accounts as Kristen Ghodsee’s “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism”, Communism had neither understanding nor patience for people’s needs in the bedroom. The Communist take on gender roles and relations was, roughly, “men and women are equal and should do equal work. Also, they should have lots of children, but they need to do this while sharing a small, dark, cold apartment with the rest of their family. And, no one can talk about sex or show dirty pictures because, ew, that’s Western decadence.”

I was only 7 when the 1989 Revolution toppled the Communist regime, so I have no first hand experience of what being sexually active was like during Communism. But the effects of not talking about sex lingered long after. I was a teen in the 90s, at an elite high school in the Capital, and I had maybe one whole hour of sex education in school. My friends had but a nebulous idea of how one gets pregnant. I remember my classmates confidently reassuring a friend of mine who had just started daring an older man that “you can’t possibly get knocked up the first time, it just doesn’t work that way!” Me, on the other hand, I spent most of my time watching MTV, which provided an adequate amount of education on the matter. During my first adult physical, at 18, I asked my doctor for a birth control script. She talked me out of it. This was in the year 2000, mind you. My Romanian physician dissuaded me from going on birth control, because "it has male hormones in it and it will make your facial hair grow." I still don’t know whether she was being honest, though painfully misinformed, or whether she thought that denying me birth control would make it less likely for me to have sex.

Non-straight sex was so taboo that it was practically unutterable, even after the fall of Communism. The only gay person that my family talked about was the son of a friend who had emigrated to the United States and requested asylum on the grounds on being a persecuted sexual minority. In retrospect, my parents had a number of close friends, both male and female, who had “never married” or had had “a short-lived marriage” who were undoubtedly gay. But this is not something we even whispered about. And for good reason, too: gay sex remained punishable with imprisonment for up to 5 years until the year 2000!

Ceausescu’s coercive pro-natalist policies did produce the largest generation of the post-war years, but his vision of a New Man reinventing a New Society remained mercifully unfulfilled. Instead of laborers engaged in dialectical materialism, the Decretei (those lucky enough not be placed in Children’s homes) grew to be the hungry and bitter adults who toppled the man to whom many owed their existence. They did become revolutionaries — just not of the kind Ceausescu had in mind.

Sadly for anyone subject to politicians’ whims, science has very little to say about governance. As a daughter of Communism, one of the earliest lessons I learned about political messaging is that whenever science is invoked, the people are in for it.

I would like to offer a cautionary tale from my early childhood in 1980s Romania.

This is a typical grocery store in Bucharest in the 1980s. Aside from the Mid-Centrury aesthetic, a perspicacious observer might notice that the displays showcase no more than two distinct canned/jarred products, arranged creatively in groups. Pyramids of cans were particularly prevalent in stores at the time: always the same product, usually baked beans that were rumored to give you a gastrointestinal ailment, that I never actually witnessed anybody purchase.

Here is another store. This one is well stocked, right? It looks that way, but if you zoom in you will notice that the shelf on the left has a large amount of the same jarred product, probably a sort of fruit preserves, while the shelf on the right is buckling under the weight of bags upon bags of an unspecified dry good, likely cornmeal. Flour was relative scarce, so I would be surprised if it were that.

I need to note that I never saw a store like this (“cu atoservire”, or self-service) until probably the mid-90s. Groceries were so scarce, and the society so low-trust, that it would have been inconceivable to have products just there, on the shelf, for anyone to pick up. Everything was behind the counter — except for the pyramids of cans.

Also notice the perfectly centered, well-dressed mother and her Pioneer child bonding over a jar of something. Pioneers were the Hitler Youth of Communist Romania, the children’s arm of the Party. The distinctive sartorial indicator of a Pioneer was the red neck kerchief, which was typically conferred ceremonially upon studious and well-behaved elementary students, starting in second grade. The presence of the Socialist family unit in this handsomely provisioned store aisle makes me think this is a propaganda shot, likely meant for a foreign publication, because a local would have seen right through the effort.

Such propaganda was necessary because, in the 1980s, the Romanian Communist Party was engaged in a ruthless attempt to prove the value of its policymaking by obtaining absolute financial independence. Ceausescu decided to prioritize paying down *all* of Romania’s external debt by the end of the decade, and sought to accomplish this by selling everything that wasn’t chained down. Including food.

While official messaging went heavy on the benefits of paying off the debt, the resulting hunger proved difficult to sell as a worthwhile tradeoff. So the authorities turned to… Science!

In 1978, Ceausescu’s personal physician, Iulian Mincu, published a comprehensive nutrition tract with the riveting title “Rational Nutrition for Healthy and Sick People.” Weighing in at a whopping 600 pages, the tract “established” the scientific basis for heavily restricting Romanians’ access to food. The ideal daily calorie intake was set at between 2,000 and 2,800 per person per day, depending on the activity level required by your occupation.

In 1982, food began to be heavily rationed. This illustration shows the allotted amounts of food per person per month in the South-Eastern city of Galati in 1987. The amounts are in grams and kilograms. Most of the pictures are self-explanatory, but “zahar” is sugar, “faina” is flour, and “malai” is cornmeal. As a point of reference, Romanians were allotted 1kg of poultry per month; Americans consume four times as much. When it comes to beef, Americans eat 5 times as much as the rationed amount — and the ration guidelines lump beef AND pork together.

Fruits and vegetables were not rationed, but most producers were forced to join agricultural cooperatives that collected and distributed produce through government operated markets called “aprozar.” There were stringent laws against “hoarding” produce; everything that came out of the ground was supposed to go to the co-op.

However, very small farmers were exempt from the obligation to join a cooperative, which ended up being the saving grace of 1980s Romania. Backyard dirt patch growers of produce, selling their wares in quasi-unregulated open-air markets, essentially stood between Romanians and famine.

In practice, the Rational Nutrition Program looked like this. Stores were mostly empty, most of the time. Animal protein and fat sources other than dairy were particularly scarce. My parents tell a story about having to drive an hour out of the city, in the dead of night, to buy a few ounces of beef from a guy on the side of the road so they could feed me.

Food supplies were delivered to stores at unpredictable times. When a food-filled truck parked in the back of a store, the neighborhood grapevine would mobilize. A couple hungry Paul Reveres, usually retirees who would spend most days on a folding stool in front of the empty store, would sound the alarm, with a cry of "Se baga la magazin!" meaning "there will be stuff at the store." The "stuff" was often left undefined because you usually couldn't tell what the food truck contained. It could be chicken wings. It could be pigs feet. It could be mixed offal. If you were unlucky, it could just be soy salami. An anecdote that I personally heard while waiting in line with my grandmother was that, after purchasing his ration of largely inedible soy salami, a man had tossed it to a stray dog. The dog, skinny and mangy, had quickly taken a bite only to stop short, toss the salami, and slink away sadly. I guess the soy salami must have really sucked.

Speaking of grandparents, the economy of the rational nutrition project depended heavily on them. Because food was so scarce and its delivery so unreliable, procuring victuals was largely the province of the large retired class. Grandparents would line up in front of stores every morning, not knowing whether food would actually be delivered that day or not.

People would often bring stools and newspapers. They would gossip. They would do the crossword puzzle. They would hang out with their grandchildren. I spent many hours of my young childhood hanging out in line for food with my grandparents. My favorite memory of foraging for necessities in the 80s is this. I was out on a walk with my grandmother, when we came upon a truck tucked behind the neighborhood market. It was selling napkins: unadvertised, un-rationed, literally off the back of the truck. We were able to buy enough packages for all three branches of the family (my parents and the two sets of grandparents) to use for a few months. The napkins were small, square and rough -- but they were napkins!

This is why I feel particularly concerned when authorities talk about believing the science. Science is explicitly about proof, not belief, about sight rather than faith. There is a long, brutal and well-documented history of Science being used as a bludgeon of repression. When governments urge people to believe the science, they are just appealing to authority in order to stifle dissent. In Jonathan Rauch’s s wise words, science is a way of knowing, not a body of knowledge. Science is never settled. It is never indisputable.

When authorities ask you to believe the science, you can bet they’re up to no good.

"One of the most important goals of the Party policy was to form the “New Person”: a citizen with revolutionary spirit, motivated by socialist revolutionary patriotism, devoted to socialist ethics and equality."

In the name of equity and social justice, public school districts across the US have been implementing policies like dismantling gifted programs, doing away with testing, and closing magnet schools with merit-based admission. The stated goal is to decrease unequal outcomes.

This is not going to work.

I know this because I started school right after the 1989 Revolution in Romania. My entire K-12 education took place in a school system that had been built explicitly to promote the new, egalitarian order of a socialist republic. Socialist public schooling was mandatory and universal. Everyone across the country used the same curriculum and the same textbooks. The very few ethnic minorities “recognized” by the state (mostly Hungarians and pockets of ethnic Germans in the NW of the country) were permitted to teach in their native language, but even then, the textbooks were the same, just translated.

In school, we were all comrades. I called my elementary teacher Comrade Educator, or simply Comrade (Tovarasa). When the teacher was feeling particularly glib, she would refer to us first graders as Little Comrades.

Communist education prized uniformity above all. There were no separate tracks, no gifted programs, no special education, and nothing was individualized. While students were graded on a 1-10 scale beginning in first grade, with anything above a 5 constituting passing, the grades didn’t amount to anything beyond bragging rights in the classroom. Everyone advanced along with everyone else from year to year. Top students didn’t qualify for advanced learning; bottom students didn’t qualify for extra help. And there were no alternatives: private schools did not exist.

Even at the best schools, kids didn’t really learn much in the classroom: there were between 30 and 40 kids in a class, K-12. Teachers showed up at all about two thirds of the time, and they were almost always 15 minutes late or more. The most common teaching strategy was reading out of the textbook while the students took dictation. The most common assessment strategy was either an oral or a written exam requiring the student to recite yesterday’s lesson. For especially summative assessment occasions, like a term or final exam, a student could expect to be asked to recite any of the two or three dozen lessons covered that semester. And in a system where uniformity is the ultimate goal, this is all reasonable: if there is no reward for excellence, lowering the bar benefits everyone.

Romanians have a saying about this: Ei se fac ca ne platesc, noi ne facem ca muncim, which translates to “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

While public school attendance was mandatory for 4 - 8 hours a day, real learning took place after school. It turns out that parents want the best for their children regardless of state ideology. Most teachers taught private lessons in the afternoon ("meditatii" in Romanian). Competition was fierce to get in with the best teachers, as demand outstripped supply. Schools were residentially assigned, but in practice backroom deals took place in the Prinicipal's office, with parents offering generous bribes to ensure their children's enrollment and, by extension, their access to the best pool of available private tutors. The bribes were always in kind. Money was not worth much in 1980s Romania because goods of any kind were so very scarce, so the bribes were always goods: soap, cigarettes, perfume, produce “from the country”, home-made moonshine, etc.

In some cases, demand for good teachers was so much greater than supply that schools became caste systems. My own elementary school had three classes per grade: A, B, and C. In the Fall, when new students registered, the Principal assigned each incoming First Grader to a class, based on their family's status and potential to hire classroom teachers as private tutors. This assignment mostly remained permanent for the duration of the student's enrollment in the school. The A class was the best: "good families" of "unimpeachable extraction" with white collar jobs. Or families working for the Secret Police (Securitate). B class was "good" blue collar families, or otherwise “top tier” families with "stains" on their resume, like having a child out of wedlock or being of suspicious ethnic ancestry.

C class was for everyone else, the refuse, the kids who we all knew were going to go to vocational high schools and then work in a factory or behind a cash register.

My mom was an academic of very well concealed Jewish ancestry, so I was in A class. There was no graver punishment than being threatened with demotion to C class. That's when we A class kids knew we had really fucked up. Our 6th grade teacher once made a big show of walking one of my misbehaving friends down the hall to C class and leaving him there for the day. No one moved an inch out of their seat for the rest of the week.

While everyone who came to school passed, and everyone who hired the right private tutor got an A, the one place where kids could compete academically was the academic olympiad system. Subject-area olympiads were similar to the Spelling Bee: you start with a school-wide contest, and then progress from level to increasingly selective level until a national champion is crowned. There was an olympiad for most subject areas; the hard sciences had international levels, too. If you were good at Math you could travel to another Eastern Block country and have fun taking a written test.

A teacher whose students did well in an olympiad attracted many more private students, and likely the pique of their colleagues. (And in a painfully uniform society, let us not underestimate the appeal of drawing your comrades’ pique!) A student who did well in an olympiad got physical prizes, money, and renown. Full disclosure: I, um, won such an olympiad when I was in 9th grade. I apparently spoke the best English of any student in Romania. My English teacher gained a lot of reputation points for my win, and I was paraded around by the mayor of Bucharest.

• • •

The moral of my tale is as follows.

Schools are for learning, not for achieving social policy. Whenever schools attempt to get in the way of learning, by making assessment impossible, say, or by substituting indoctrination for instruction, illicit markets spring up. And because education is so closely linked with social capital, these illicit markets benefit those of higher status.

To be equitable, education must be meritocratic. I am not a huge fan of standards in the classroom, because children are different by design, and it's difficult for standards to reflect the breadth of useful diversity that humans exhibit. But doing away with standards makes the table much smaller rather than much bigger. The absence of an objective standard gives ascendance to the subjective standards favored by the already powerful.

We can fight restrictive standards with different standards. We cannot fight inequality with no standards.