From Endurance to Strength… in Perimenopause… with Plants… with Positive Groundlessness

In the last few weeks I’ve been making big changes to my nutrition and fitness routine, which call for some careful reflection. The whole thing started when a colleague–a badass athlete in her own right–lent me her copy of Stacy Sims’ new. book Next Level, the first (as far as I know) book about perimenopausal and menopausal athlete. Just a few days later, I attended an open water swim camp in Hawaii, where my wonderful and knowledgeable coach, Celeste St. Pierre, recommended the same book, and impressed upon me the vital importance of Lifting Heavy Shit.

Up to this point, my athletic endeavors were almost squarely in the endurance world. I swam long (and slow) in open waters, transitioning then to multisport to protect myself from injury. In the heyday of my marathon swimming days, I did no cross training whatsoever – only swimming. Later, I added on calisthenics, in the form of fusion classes (which I took and taught) and antigravity fitness (using silky hammocks.) I’m not quite sure whether I was fully aware of the importance of doing all these things at the same time, and I’m also pretty sure I wasn’t told to increase the resistance and challenge or to eat more. Generally speaking, and relatedly, my weight has been almost entirely the product of my diet: when I eat more and poorly, I gain weight; when, with great control and care, I eat less and well, I lose weight. Going in the former direction is easier than the latter.

For many important biological reasons that Sims explains in a lucid, straightforward way in her book, the wellbeing and athletic priority during perimenopause and beyond should be building lean muscle and bone. For many of us, this means changing our body composition, which is not an easy thing to do and not one that can be accomplished merely with dietary changes. The building block for muscle is protein, which has to be consumed in adequate amounts, and the muscles must be used in a progressively challenging fashion for them to grow stronger.

I read the book cover to cover and then, through the recommendation of another wonderful athletic colleague, was introduced to lifter Casey Johnston and her excellent couch-to-barbell program. Two weeks ago, for the first time, I mounted plates on my barbell, and am quite fascinating with this transformation, though I still have many questions and uncertainties. Here is some of what has been happening:

  1. I am lifting three times a week – twice at the school gym with my colleague, once or twice at home. This has required a certain change to my routine. I lift on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday; I now swim on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. I also kept up my pilates on Saturday and my boot camp (which includes lifting) on Sunday. On lifting days I also do a short plyometric set (quick, HIIT-type jumping). Monday is somewhat of a lighter day, though I do ride the cargo e-bike, as I do every weekday, to drop my son off at school. That means shorter but more intense workouts, which is what Sims recommends. It does feel weird, as someone used to endurance workouts, that there’s none of the prolonged suffering that we marathoning people tend to glorify. Hilariously, I am finding the mantra “I can take anything for twenty seconds” useful for both HIIT and lifting.
  2. I am already experiencing improvement in my strength. Last week I flew to Atlanta for a conference (ASC was very good this year, and I’ve already posted about some of what I learned–on court fees and on extradition) with a big, heavy backpack containing everything I needed for four days. When I got to my airplane seat, I lifted my bag into the overhead compartment–and was immediately struck by a big difference. Reader, it was child’s play. Not that it wasn’t heavy; I was stronger, noticeably so, and it was very gratifying. Same story with groceries. My partner was astonished yesterday when I came back from the co-op with a gigantic box of produce, oat milk cartons, and the like, and carried it myself as if it was nothing despite its weird shape. All of this is very good news and provides ample motivation to keep going.
  3. The progress arc at the beginning is very satisfying. Every time I lift I think to myself, there’s no way in hell I’ll be able to lift five pounds more in two days. And then the next workout arrives, and to my astonishment, I can! I’m sure this fast progress will slow down as I progress, but for now, this linear improvement (2.5-lb increments for upper body, 5-lb increments for lower body) is providing a huge motivation boost. This is a good thing. Throughout my life, I’ve often see-sawed between two good sensations: growth (picking up a sport or a skill I know nothing about and getting through the uncomfortable months/years that it takes to become “good enough” to enjoy it) and relishing skill (making small improvements in a sport I’m already quite proficient at.) Sometimes it feels like I need to stay in my comfort zone (as with, say, swimming or flute.) Sometimes I pick up something new (such as tai chi or the handpan.) Now is a time for the latter, and I feel excitement building for when I get “good enough” to know what I’m doing.
  4. I’ve also introduced some changes to my swimming. At the open water swim camp, Celeste taught us to activate our muscles through dryland practice before getting into the water. I’m finding this highly effective, and I’ve made one more adjustment–my sets are shorter and sprintier now. I cover fewer yards overall, but the intensity of the practice has increased, which is exhilarating. I’m also hitting some surprising times with my 50s and 100s – times I hadn’t seen in the pool since I was training for Tampa Bay in 2012. At 48, this is gratifying and makes me feel like I’m doing the right thing.
  5. I’m still not 100% sure what I’m doing, nutrition-wise, despite having gotten excellent advice. Sims’ book, the coaching figures in my life, and my awesome new acquaintance, vegan fitness coach Karina Inkster, have all emphasized two principles: I have to eat a lot more than I’ve been eating, and I have to prioritize protein. These things go hand in hand, because it is a pretty impossible job to double one’s protein intake (especially on a vegan diet) and keep the caloric situation low. Sims discusses the common problem of low energy availability, or LEA, and stresses how crucial it is to fuel properly before, during, and after workouts. We vegans love to scoff at ignorant meat eaters who ask us “where do you get your protein?” and, indeed, one can get a lot of protein on a plant-based diet, but it does require more planning, as the things one should eat (good, plant based food with fiber and phytonutrients) don’t tend to come in easy protein-rich packages. On Karina’s website, one can find lots of excellent resources for protein and other nutrition strategies for vegan athletes. She even has a handy vegan protein calculator, which instructed me to eat twice as much protein as I had been eating. This means I’m chasing protein throughout the day (tofu scramble; adding vegan protein powder to green smoothies; adding hemp, flax, and chia to my morning oatmeal) and all the other calories sort of work themselves out.
  6. I’m also not sure what’s happening with my body size-wise. Despite eating almost twice what I ate during the Big Weight Loss and Health Restoring Project, and despite putting on about 12 lbs or so, my size doesn’t feel significantly different. My measurements are almost the same. The scale is unhelpful, as its body composition readings are inconsistent and bizarre. Parts of me feel more muscular, other parts softer, and, in general, I feel more like a work in progress than like the chiseled ancient Greek statue my mind imprinted on as the picture of health and strength. I can’t argue with the functional improvement, but there is definitely a part of me that is terrified of regaining all the weight I lost through so much effort–if only because I have wonderful clothes and would like to continue wearing them. This is a really interesting and juicy place to explore in meditation–attachment to body, attachment to clothes, the possibility that I purchased my current wardrobe as a protective talisman against weight gain, lots of new things to learn about myself and my relationship to my body.
  7. Spiritually, the whole thing is weird, fun, and a bit discombobulating. One of my favorite teachers, Pema Chödrön, speaks of “positive groundlessness“: coming to a sense of tentative, floating peace with the idea that nothing is permanent and there is really nothing to hold on to:

The idea of letting go of fear and becoming comfortable with groundlessness has been a recurring theme for me in the last few weeks, pretty much since I participated in the Smithfield Trial and experienced the elation of its aftermath. Recently, Wayne Hsiung and I recorded our third podcast together, in which I espoused a theory about the judge’s closed fist where it came to affirmative defenses and evidence in the trial. I’m increasingly convinced that what drives these aggressive judicial court-management maneuvers is the fear that the trial will evolve and bloat into some landmark political moment beyond the judge’s ability to handle. Fear of uncertainty, of having nothing to hold on to, no buffer or protection, drives a lot of behavior, including very bad behavior. This includes my own fear: during the trial, as Wayne and I discuss in the podcast, I was sure that taking a mistrial was the right choice for him, but he decided to take the chance and see what the jury would decide. Happily, he was proven right. It was a moment that taught me that Wayne has more guts than me, and that I need to develop my relationship with positive groundlessness.

In his book Becoming a Man, one of my favorite authors, Paul Monette, wrote: “When you finally come out, there’s a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.” I think this is true for virtually anything worth being brave about: animal rights, helping incarcerated people, fighting against an unjust regime, resisting orthodoxies (from the right and from the left), and changing something as solid and fundamental as one’s relationship with one’s body. Let’s just say this lifting journey is a wonderful opportunity to explore my own bravery in picking up something new, and it’s a spiritual journey as well.

The Surveyed Female: The Toilet Edition

On social media, a wonderful post by Rebecca Solnit is making the rounds. It is a quote from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing:

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another….

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

It’s very well put, but it does remind me of Erving Goffman’s Gender Advertisements, which was published more than a decade earlier. Goffman analyzed dozens of ads, showing how women are gazing and gazed at the same time, perceiving themselves as the object of the male gaze.

I recently had the opportunity to contemplate the extent that this self-perception has been inculcated even in me. The annual meeting of the American Sociological Association was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, which is a huge venue with many multi-stall bathrooms. Upon arrival, I found out that the organizers converted almost all the restrooms (which had been gendered) into all-gender restrooms (with the exception of a restroom on the first floor) and festooned the entire venue with signs about respect and affirmation for LGBTQ people and nonbinariness (if not at a soc conference, then where?). The compassion and acceptance for all attendees was, of course, commendable, but I was surprised to be of two minds about the choice to ungender all toilets. On one hand, as a small-bladdered person who always must run to the bathroom (and has the criminal record to prove it!) I was delighted that the number of available stalls and their proximity increased! On the other, I was uneasy with the presence of urinals in the bathrooms (even though they were not used in my presence) and felt wary of checking my appearance in the mirror, which is something I do without giving it a second thought in women’s bathrooms.

When talking about this to a colleague, she noted that there was one restroom marked “women” on the first floor of the humongous five-floor building, which she made a special effort to use. It would have taken me half an hour to get from the rooms where I gave and attended talks to make it to that bathroom, which perhaps gave women an opportunity to sample the experience of folks with disabilities and gender nonconformities of various types, who typically have to trek to find the “special” bathrooms. So, while discomfiting, this at least was educational.

I’m not sure that completely eliminating gendered bathrooms is in our future, nor am I sure that it’s a desirable future (that’s a debacle for a different day), but it sure made me think whether my instinctive reaction was an expression of the Goffman/Berger “woman watching herself being looked at” thing, and if so, whether it’s something we should accept, attempt to root out, or something in between. Curious to hear your thoughts.

Love Makes a Family: Does Reproductive Justice Include Only Biological Reproduction?

Recently I listened to Chen Zausmer’s fascinating podcast “What Are You Waiting For?”, which documents her egg-freezing journey. The podcast is moving, disquieting, and extremely well done, documenting Zausmer’s emotional process as well as the physical and financial practicalities of the procedure. Among the things that make this a worthwhile listen are the embedded recordings of personal conversations between Zausmer and her friends and family, in which they raise uncomfortable, emotionally loaded subjects such as “giving up” on couplehood and a two-parent framework, questions on reproductivity and self worth, womanhood and femininity, and other complicated, soul-searching issues. It is also an admirable example of honestly and vulnerably offering a meditation on subjects that can be, and are, deeply private issues for wide public consumption.

When someone does make the choice to make their very private affairs public in this form (the podcast is accessible on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and pretty much anywhere else podcasts can be found), though, the audience’s thoughts about it are not merely nosy/judgmental commentary on another private person’s journey. Each of us consumes art and media through personal eyes. And, in my case, that meant listening to four lengthy episodes detailing a plethora of emotional, physical, and financial trials and tribulations focused on a very particular biological choice, without even a brief mention, a suggestion, or a whiff of possibility, around nonbiological parenting through fostering and adoption. And as an adoptive mom, this was crazymaking.

This is not a personal critique of Zausmer’s options–she is, of course, free to do as she wishes with her body, soul, and financial resources–and for what it’s worth, she comes off as a thoughtful person who engages in unflinching self-inquiry, which is admirable. But those who don’t want their deepest personal struggles to evoke a range of emotions, thoughts, and reactions, seldom make podcasts out of them, so I’m offering some thoughts in that spirit.

As in the pro-choice/pro-life debacle, becoming a mom through adoption has gifted me with a more nuanced perspective that untethers parenting from biology, which I elaborated on elsewhere (here and here.) I always feel like these perspectives are left unexamined because of the strong bias in favor of biological parenting. The conversations about reproductive justice that I’ve been privy to not only prioritize biology but actively push any notions of nonbiological parenting out of the conversation. For a number of years I’ve been surrounded by people, some of them close friends, who have gone through numerous circles of IVF hell, back-and-forth with surrogates and the adjacent ethical issues, and the deep tragedies of miscarriages and losses. And yet, suggesting adoption or fostering to people who are undertaking unbearable physical, emotional, and financial difficulties in their torturous journey to become biological parents is considered terribly rude, and the social consensus is that people’s willingness to jump through absurdly challenging hoops to ensure that they go through pregnancy/birth, or even just that their genetics are passed on, should be unquestionable accepted, without opening other doors and possibilities.

I remember noticing this when I attended an event celebrating Dov Fox’s new book Birth Rights and Wrongs. To his great credit, Fox provides a thorough and thoughtful overview of the myriad problems caused by reproductive technologies, including unreported medical conditions of sperm donors. The book’s agenda, however, is clearly to empower parents to address these serious technological and medical challenges through lawsuits in torts. One walks away with the sense that any procedure for procuring biological children–as complicated, experimental, expensive, and taxing as it might be–should be the unshakable right of any prospective parent, complete with the legal power to sue at every wrinkle at which something goes wrong. Expanding these litigation rights is a tacit expression of the law’s preference for, and encouragement of, biological reproduction.

This may be outside the cultural/biological/social norm, but I know I’m far from the only one: I have never wanted to get pregnant or to give birth, and at the same time I am thrilled to be a mom and my son is the light of my life. I accept that many, perhaps most, women do want to experience pregnancy/birth. But it is hard for me to responsibly participate in conversations with people who are experiencing horrific suffering and sorrows through their pursuit of biological parenting at all costs, and are completely unwilling to even consider other paths to parenting. Because we are very open about our adoptive journey, over the years I’ve happily had several lengthy conversations with friends and acquaintances who, throughout this journey started “despairing” and “thinking about adoption”–as if it’s a secondary choice to biological reproduction, only to be pursued if the “normal” path has failed, because multiple IVF rounds involving extensive travel and six-figure-dollar amounts is apparently more “normal” than offering a home to a newborn that also saves the life of young people saddled with an unwanted pregnancy. Afterwards, sometimes I get a phone call saying that they discussed it amongst themselves and at least one of them was adamant that what they really wanted was “a child of our own.” Get it? A child of our own–as if your kids through adoption or fostering are not really “your own”, or it’s some testament of your inferiority that you chose nonbiological parenting. I always want to ask: Why is it so important for you to propagate your specific genes, and how are they uniquely better or more important to propagate than those of other members of the human population? It’s especially jarring when, in opposite-sex couples, virtually all of the physical suffering is endured by the woman, and it’s the man who clings to the genetic imperative at the price of his partner’s health and wellbeing. Can I say something about this, compassionately and gently? Of course not! It’s none of my business, and there’s such a taboo against suggesting this even in the most compassionate way–and I submit the taboo exists because we harbor a deep bias against nonbiological parenting.

But this is not just an issue of people’s personal choices, for whom I have all the compassion in the world (another person’s suffering is 100% understandable and relatable, and gets 100% support and love from me, even if I’m not on board with the cause of the suffering.) It raises serious questions for all of us as a community. Societies that do not fully support solid, comprehensive sex education, keep young people ignorant of their bodily functions, allow young men to walk away from the consequences of their sexual activity, sticking young women with the agonizing expectation that they carry unwanted pregnancies to term, are societies that produce babies born into untenable situations who need stable, solid, loving homes. And such societies should do everything in their power to guarantee a good starting point for all these babies–starting with completely destigmatizing, and even encouraging all forms of nonbiological parenting, through resources, education, and unwavering social support. Investing enormous amounts of medical progress, public funding, and unquestioning social validation in biological procreation for the wealthy at all costs has a price, and that price is delegitimizing and neglecting fostering and adoption. And in the current political climate, this does not strike me only as precious and capricious, from a governmental perspective, but also as morally untenable.

My great aunt Carmella had a beautiful child-free life: she had her own business and traveled around the world with a lovely and similarly adventurous husband. They worked hard and arrived at a place of wealth and financial comfort. And yet she was deeply unhappy throughout it all. One of the main reasons: She desperately wanted to be a mother, bitterly envied her siblings (including my grandma) who had kids, and this filled her with frustration and contempt. Toward the end of her life, which she spent giving backhanded compliments and insulting family members, my mom called her to let her know that we had a son, and shared briefly about the adoption. There was a long silence on the other end of the line, and then Carmella, who was never at loss of words, said quietly, in a little girl’s voice: “Hadar is very wise.” When my mom shared this with me, my heart broke for Carmella and for the decades of joy and fulfillment she robbed herself of by not even considering fostering and/or adoption.

If you are reading this, no matter where you are in thinking about parenthood, what I most desire for you is to be happy. And what is most important to let you know is that there are many ways for you to find happiness. You can, and definitely should, consider the many possibilities of becoming parents through both biological and nonbiological means. You can, and definitely should, consider the very legitimate possibility of living a wonderful life full of meaning and fulfillment as a non-parent (with or without children in your life in one form or another.) A lot of the suffering we undergo in life when we choose a certain path comes from the stubborn (and incorrect) belief that it is the only viable path to our destination. I don’t want this for you–I want to you to offer yourself more freedom, and this freedom starts in your own mind, outside the socio-cultural expectations, pressures, or inducements. I’m sending you good wishes on this journey.

Guest on The Green Pill Podcast

It was such a pleasure last week to be a guest on Wayne Hsiung’s excellent podcast The Green Pill. Wayne is one of my favorite people, whom I admire a great deal for his selflessness: he is a relentless animal rights activist and one of the founders of Direct Action Everywhere. For his involvement in intrepid open rescues of animals (piglets, chickens) and documentation of the horrific conditions in so-called “humane” and “cage-free” slaughterhouses, he has faced serious criminal charges in multiple states, the latest of which is his upcoming trial in Utah. Wayne is also a deep thinker, a

We took some time to talk about the trial, from legal and emotional perspectives, but also about so much more. Our conversation, which you can listen to here, revolved around animal rights, prison litigation, and in general–how to remain hopeful and healthy, for oneself and for one’s kids, in a world so full of suffering. I hope you enjoy the program! For those who prefer reading to listening, here’s Wayne’s blog post about our conversation.

Preschool Graduation: Thank You, SOMACC!

Today our son Rio graduated from his preschool, South of Market Child Care (SOMACC) in San Francisco. It was an emotional morning for our family: Rio joined SOMACC a week before the pandemic began, only to be sent home when all childcare facilities shut down. He returned in August 2020, which was a true blessing for all of us. I’ve written before about how the wonderful education he received there enabled me to go back to work and revolutionize my pedagogy during an exceedingly difficult time. But I haven’t written about my deep appreciation of SOMACC’s pedagogy.

SOMACC’s curriculum is inspired by child-led educational philosophies my family deeply supports: RIE, an early-age approach that supports autonomy and curiosity, and Reggio Emilia, a philosophy that emphasizes diversity in interests and “languages” of learning and interactions with teachers and peers. These heart-centered approaches characterize every aspect of SOMACC’s mission. The children learn through art, play, and interaction. We are going through all the wonderful materials from Rio’s years there, and I am blown away by the careful attention that his teachers (pictured above with him) have paid to his development. They documented his activities, skill development, and the wise things he said, in writing; we have volumes upon volumes of anecdotes and sparkling moments of his school life. The school sent us weekly “meaningful moments”, but they were a drop in the bucket compared with the constant affection, attention, and nurturing that they showered on Rio and his friends.

Another aspect of SOMACC’s deep values is the extent to which they *do* social justice every hour of every day, rather than performatively talk about it. San Francisco is a city with deep inequalities: some families have Teslas and private jets and others suffer from food insecurity and housing instability. At least at SOMACC, these gaps are bridged–the school makes an enormous effort to give everyone the best possible start in life. The children receive breakfast, a snack, and lunch in school. In a small room out of sight, the school keeps basic groceries for families in need, who can help themselves without asking or being seen. Whenever the school fostered movie night, every child went home not only with a viable option to watch the movie for free, but also with snacks and activities related to the movie. The attention to every detail, the nurturing of every child, the assistance to every parent, were visible at every turn.

At today’s ceremony, Rio was overcome with emotion and overwhelm and walked on stage teary-eyed. It was heartwarming to see his teachers rally around him and offer him love and warmth. Much as we look forward to Rio’s continued educational journey, we are sad that this wonderful chapter has ended, and wish all the very best to all of Rio’s friends and their families as they move on to big kids’ school. Rio offered his teachers cards and flowers, which we prepared for them this morning. The pandemic has left so many of us with compassion and empathy deficits to the point that, even as educators make huge efforts for their students, they do not receive the immense gratitude that they deserve. I hope this post goes a little way toward expressing the vast gratitude and love we have for all teachers, especially our son’s.

The more I despair of the intractable problems of our society, the more I believe that the best answer to many of them lies in early age education, and with places like SOMACC in existence, one can’t help but feel hopeful.

My Day in (the Food) Court

In 1992 I left home and moved to Jerusalem for law school. Being on my own for the first time was an opportunity to revise and question many habits, including my nutrition. The impetus for becoming vegetarian came from a humiliating (but, in hindsight, funny) incident: in my first year of law school I dated a classmate who came from Jerusalem’s academic aristocracy. His family invited me to a famous gourmet steakhouse. I had obviously not grown up eating such fancy things and had no idea how to order my steak, so I thought well-done would be safe, and they proceeded to repeatedly ask me throughout the meal in concerned tones: “Are you sure your steak is not too dry?” That meal was the last nail in my carnivorous coffin; I eschewed animal flesh that evening when I came home.

Ours was not a kitchen-centered household, and my hard-working mom would bring me food from restaurants near the courts where she tried criminal cases as a defense attorney; so, being a serious person, I decided to teach myself how to cook and eat vegetarian by purchasing my first cookbook, Phyllis Glazer’s A Vegetarian Feast. I also discovered an amazing natural foods grocery store in a nearby kibbutz, Ramat Rachel, which was a complete revelation. It was there that I encountered whole grains for the first time, as well as exotic things like tofu (promoted as “soy cheese”); I come from fairly humble beginnings and did not grow up eating such foods. My new way of life was strange to my family, who were pained by my avoidance of meat and were puzzled by the whole grain thing (gradually, they all came around.)

My knowledge of nutrition was fairly limited at the time; the reigning theories of vegan and vegetarian nutrition were the now-debunked “food combining” and “complete protein” myths, which seemed like a whole lot of trouble. I had no concept of the extent to which the cruelty to animals permeated the dairy and egg market (I did buy “cage-free” eggs after visiting an army colleague’s home and being horrified by her family’s chicken coops.) And I had no idea how to stay healthy on a vegan diet; vegetarianism was already a pretty radical step considering where I came from. So, I was a lacto-ovo vegetarian, and remained such until getting to the States in 2001.

Arriving in America was a harsh blow to my health and digestive system. U.S. food was richer, more laden in chemicals, and far less fresh and healthy than its Israeli counterpart, and throughout grad school I suffered from debilitating stomach aches and miseries that would put me out of commission for days at a time. With the help of a wonderful nutritionist I met through my Chinese medicine studies at the Acupressure Institute, I did an elimination diet and eschewed bread and dairy; I immediately felt better. Since I didn’t quite know what to substitute it with, I went back to eating fish. Meat crept back into the menu several years later, when I was training for long marathon swims. I thought I needed the protein, but the whole thing never sat well with me, morally and ethically.

Everything changed in 2014, when I saw Judy Irving’s wonderful documentary Pelican Dreams and suddenly realized that everything was interconnected–the food chain, the ecosystem, the planet, our health, the health and welfare of our nonhuman friends–and that I wanted nothing to do with the animal torture industry. I came home that very evening and told my partner I was going to be vegan from now on (he joined me not long after and we’ve been happy and proud vegans ever since, raising a happy and proud vegan son.) I became involved with Direct Action Everywhere and started writing about factory farms and open rescue. It was also, as it turned out, an easy and convenient time to go vegan, because the next generation in quality nut cheeses and meat substitutes emerged.

During the pandemic, we relied a lot on these substitutes, which were not only easy to procure and order in, but also psychologically soothing (salt and oil will do that.) My weight started creeping up to an alarming degree, and unpleasant, debilitating symptoms, which I had ascribed to perimenopause, became a way of life: relentless low-grade headaches, digestive problems, brain fog. Litigating the San Quentin case and advocating for incarcerated people during the pandemic took an enormous psychological toll, and my health continued to deteriorate. In March 2021 I fell in the street and could not get up – to this day I’m not sure if it was cardiac or something else. It was a sense of utter weakness and frailty. But at that instant, all the shame I had been feeling about my health decline turned into rage: I don’t deserve to live like this, I thought, I deserve a better life. The next day I bought all the vegetables and fruit I could think of and took a walk around the block. I juiced for 30 days, then added fresh salads, soups, and smoothies to the menu. The walks grew in length and became runs, I bought a bike, I started swimming again, I completed my lifeguard training. In March 2022, a year after I fell in the street, I completed the Oakland Marathon. At that point, all my symptoms were gone, my bloodwork cleared up, all my health metrics were transformed, and I lost 60 lbs, getting back to my high school weight. My swim and run times were, and are, better than ever in my life, and I continue seeing personal bests in the pool and on the trail.

Most of the inspiring success stories on the Forks Over Knives website involve folks who ate the standard American diet before shifting to a whole-food, plant-based plan. I’m here to tell you that it’s entirely possible to be 100% vegan and eat in a horribly unhealthy manner. I’m so glad I shifted to whole foods, juices, smoothies, chilled soups, and other vegetable-rich meals. I am sure that eating this way has saved my life. On social media, I frequent various vegan groups, and many of the posts involve a search for the perfect meat analog, faux egg, or rich cheese on a pizza; I very keenly recognize the feelings driving this quest in myself as well. It’s not just cravings from the animal-consuming days; it’s a sense of deprivation and righteousness. Whenever I crave something like this, I detect in my own thinking a sense that dammit, I’m doing the right thing here for the animals and the planet, I deserve this tasty reward.

I have found a way to set aside this righteous thinking pattern: I interrupt it by thinking, what I deserve is to feel splendid, wake up fresh and pain-free, and live many years to be with my son and to push myself to athletic heights. That’s my reward. The way to earn my “just desert” is through chilled green soups, delicious salads, and concoctions rich in healing greens. To learn more about nutrition, I’ve read up on the latest research on a variety of conditions, and taken my plant-based nutrition certificate from the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies, as well as the Forks Over Knives cooking course. I feel so wonderful now that I don’t want to ever not feel this way; I wake up every morning yearning for everyone to feel this way. It’s hard to describe how profoundly pleasing it is to go about my day with everything humming and working the way it should. I want the same for you, and for everyone else.

LSA 2022 in Lisbon!

Hello, Everyone! Today I’m heading out to Lisbon, Portugal, for the annual meeting of the Law & Society Association. At the meeting I will be quite busy, participating in five panels:

Wednesday, July 13, 8:15-10:00am Lisbon time: Criminal Law. I will comment on three groundbreaking papers on topics ranging from the politics of self defense to the criminal responsibility of AI entities.

Thursday, July 14, 10:15am-12:00pm: Politics in and of Punishment. I will comment on papers examining public opinion, punitivism, and political machinations in punishment.

Friday, July 15, 2:45-4:00pm: Emotional Labour of Conducting Research. A topic near and dear to the heart of anyone doing work in and about correctional facilities, I will comment on papers unpacking the emotional toll of researching complicated settings (my comments will highlight, among other issues, secondary trauma, and provide some practical mindfulness and wellbeing tips for advocates and activists as well as journalists and interviewers.)

Saturday, July 16, 12:45-2:30pm: Punishment’s Nuance: Looking at Incarceration and Parole in New Contexts and Perspectives. I will present Chapter 3 of my forthcoming book with Chad Goerzen FESTER: Carceral Permeability and California’s COVID-19 Correctional Disaster, which surveys the pains of COVID imprisonment. Ashley Rubin will comment. The other papers of the panel are well worth hearing.

Saturday, July 16, 4:45-6:30pm: Contrasting penal trends across the Global North and the Global South III. I will comment on four papers by criminologists and social historians on the political economy of punishment across borders, and will center my remarks on the malleability of the concepts of “developed” and “developing” countries (a topic I discussed here.)

All of my panels, including locations, are listed in the event tabs of the blog. I’ve already read most of the papers I’m commenting on, and the quality is outstanding!

As the outgoing co-organizer for CRN 27, Punishment and Society, I also plan to attend our informational/social meting Wednesday (13 July) from 12:10 to 1:10 (location TBD for CRN members.) 

I am also the book review editor for Law & Society Review (until the end of 2022) and happy to discuss your new publication and how to celebrate it in our flagship journal. And, as a member of the LSA Publications Committee, am at your disposal if you want to discuss the open call for a new LSR editor-in-chief.

I do not have a Portuguese SIM, and my responsiveness to texts throughout the day will depend on internet availability. The safest way to schedule something with me is through my email (messages to this website end up in the same inbox, so you can do that, too.)

Thinking Like a Community

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the disappointing, but not unexpected, outcome of Happy the Elephant’s case. Taken with similar attempts to imbue animals with legal personhood, this can induce a lot of despair: fringe legal philosophies have not produced the change we’re hoping for.

But perhaps there is another way to go, which learns from contemplative and deep ecological perspectives. At 5:30am on election day I rode my bike to the polls and was treated to a magnificent dawn chorus of San Francisco’s diverse and colorful bird population. A thought flew through my mind: The birds don’t know and don’t care that there is an election today. Much of what we will vote on (transit, construction, garbage collection) will directly affect their lives, but they are not involved in this process–they live adjacent to it, oblivious of what it may bring in its wings. Who will speak for their interests at this election? 

I’m obviously not the first person to introduce contemplative practices into ecology and animal rights. In their 1988 book Thinking Like a Mountain: Toward a Council of All Beings, John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Flemming and Arne Naess propose a blueprint for human decisionmaking that takes all perspectives in mind. Through transformative, contemplative practices, a Council of All Beings invites humans to deeply adopt and articulate the perspectives of nonhuman entities in decisionmaking. I participated in one such Council as part of a facilitator training; I spoke for a mushroom and some of my fellow participants spoke for parrots, rocks, and blades of grass. It was a profound immersion in the interests, if they can be called that, of nonhuman entities.

This transcendent notion of perspective taking has migrated from deep ecological theory to the legal realm, with some expressing optimism for its potential for transformation. In his article We Are the River, my colleague and friend David Takacs offers some examples: The New Zealand Parliament has recently granted the Whanganui River and the Te Urewera mountain ecosystem rights as legal persons, with a Māori governing board to speak for the nonhuman entities, based upon traditional cultural precepts. Similarly, governments in Australia, Colombia, Ecuador, Bangladesh, India, Uganda, and the U.S. have also declared that rivers and other living systems have legal rights. While these initiatives stem from  disparate historical, philosophical, and legal backgrounds, and pursue disparate goals, they all seek to enshrine in the law the fundamental symbiosis between human and nonhuman ecological health, and to empower suitable stewards who will nurture that symbiosis. As Takacs explains, newly vested spokespersons for nature–often indigenous populations, who savvily position themselves as more authentically empowered to speak for natural entities–can, and sometimes do, turn novel legal theories into real legal work that protects human and nonhuman communities. 

So, perhaps the solution to our failure to effect real change through animal personhood is to eschew performative (often prosecutorial and anthropomorphized) rhetoric on behalf of animals and give some careful thought, through discerning political considerations and contemplative experiences, to two important questions: what are the genuine interests of nonhuman animals and who should be vested with the authority to represent these interests? As I explained here and here, and as Justin Marceau explains so well here, deep engagement with the true interests of nonhuman animals does not and should not include a reliance on incarceration. The answer, perhaps, is that criminal courtrooms are not the right places for deep, thoughtful perspective-taking. This is not to say that meditative retreats or multiparty government meetings would be completely free of anthropomorphism: any humans speaking for nonhuman entities necessarily translate very different lives to their own into human terms and might, manipulatively or carelessly, twist or convert these into their own interest. This is why it is essential to identify speakers for animals who are truly curious, knowledgeable, and sincere. 

When we understand on a deep level what animals want (they are more similar to us than we might think, as Larry Carbone explains in his treatise on laboratory animals), the solutions are up to us. Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute often explains that the true solution to the horrors of factory farming lie at least partly in the hands of the market: we must create substitutes to animal products that taste the same or better, and cost the same or are cheaper. Would factory farmed animals provide us with this solution? Naturally not. This is an entirely human solution, derived from an entirely human conceptual world, for the genuine problem nonhuman animals face–the horrific reality of exploitation and torture that is the CAPO industry. What Friedrich’s solution shows us is that, when we set out to comprehend the unmediated experience of our fellow living beings, with as little imposition of our own agendas on it as possible, we can then fashion human solutions to these problems. I resolved to participate in (human) elections and vote on measures that humans introduced, and on human candidates, while “thinking like a mountain” at the ballot box.

But we can find even more uses for thinking like a community, such as in physical and mental health matters. Recently, I read and enjoyed Will Bulsiewicz’s Fiber Fueled and listened to this podcast with him, in which he explained that we should think of our eating habits as eating not just for ourselves, but for a whole community including trillions of microbes. What I eat is for them as much as it is for me, or for whatever “me” is (not that easy to parse, with so many microbes in the mix, right?) So, when you crave a mountain of nutrition-empty things, consider that there’s an emotional aspect of “you” who wants them, while there are many aspects of “you” – the physical, biological, mental “you”, that needs other things. Think of the cliché of pregnant women “eating for two:” we’re all eating for trillions.

There’s also a psychological aspect to this: I’m enjoying Richard Schwartz’s No Bad Parts, an excellent introduction to family systems theory in psychology, which is all about the notion that we contain multitudes. It is useful to give a voice to neglected parts of the self, even if one believes there’s some “core self” (a better fit for western psychology than for Buddhist psychology.)

Next time you’re involved in decisionmaking, for yourself or for others, try thinking like a community and see how it feels.

On the Administration of Tough Love

This spring brought in its wings a mountain of work: in addition to my full-time Hastings position, I guest-taught across the bridge at my alma mater, UC Berkeley. I accepted the overload job for various reasons, financial and others, but in addition to the academic joys of being near many old friends (and especially my beloved and admired mentor) and resuming old professional conversations that I enjoy, there were immense athletic joys: every day I was there, after class and office hours, I would revisit my old stomping (splashing?) grounds and swim a good workout on campus. With my favorite facility, Hearst Pool, closed, I sometimes swam in the gorgeous Golden Bear pool, surrounded by a forest and almost always empty, but most of the time I swam at Spieker Pool, the enormous Olympic-sized facility that is home to Cal’s celebrated swimming and diving teams. Oftentimes over the years, when I swam there, the Cal women’s team would be training in adjacent lanes; I was starstruck by all the fantastic athletes I cheered during Olympic games and world championships and concluded that, if I was managing one lap to every two of Missy Franklin’s, then I was not too shabby.

Like many Bay Area swimmers, I had enormous respect for Cal’s legendary champion, Natalie Coughlin; I read her biography, Golden Girl, which highlighted her special working relationship with coach Teri McKeever. Both women rose to prominence on parallel tracks: Natalie earning medal after Olympic medal, Teri becoming the first woman to coach at an Olympic level. In the book, Teri is presented as a thoughtful, considerate coach, who treats Natalie like the adult that she is, by comparison to Natalie’s prior coach at the Terrapins team. Teri is also presented as sensitive to the needs of the teammates as whole young women, often counseling them on personal and interpersonal problems.

Which is why it came as quite a shock to read in the Mercury News and in the OC Register an exposé revealing serious allegations of bullying and abuse against McKeever from several swimmers:

[I]n interviews with SCNG, 19 current and former Cal swimmers, six parents, and a former member of the Golden Bears men’s team portray McKeever as a bully who for decades has allegedly verbally and emotionally abused, swore at and threatened swimmers on an almost daily basis, pressured athletes to compete or train while injured or dealing with chronic illnesses or eating disorders, even accusing some women of lying about their conditions despite being provided medical records by them.

The interviews, as well as emails, letters, university documents, recordings of conversations between McKeever and swimmers, and journal entries, reveal an environment where swimmers from Olympians, World Championships participants and All-Americans to non-scholarship athletes are consumed with avoiding McKeever’s alleged wrath. This preoccupation has led to panic attacks, anxiety, sleepless nights, depression, self-doubt, suicidal thoughts and planning, and in some cases self harm.

Following the publication of the allegations, as the Mercury News reports this morning, Berkeley swimmers walked out on McKeever on this morning’s practice.

I found myself extremely upset at learning all this; it comes in the heels of Mary Cain’s exposé of running coach Alberto Salazar’s abuse (she thoughtfully reflects on her time training with the Nike team in this great episode of the Rich Roll podcast and in this NY Times video.) We are all still collectively reeling from the sexual abuse that Simone Biles and others suffered at the hands of Larry Nassar, and from the neglect–no, dereliction of duty–on the part of their coaches and sports association to offer them any help. These latest scandals brought home the understanding that U.S. coaches and mentors were perpetrating the same horrors as the infamous Romanian and Russian coaches. Which, as someone who teaches and mentors people at these age brackets (young adults), makes me wonder – what is the meaning, or the purpose, or the appropriate concoction, of tough love?

It’s hardly disputable that the current generation of young students/trainees/athletes have a strong culture of bringing into the light things that previous generations believed should be suffered in silence. I found this interesting article about the attributes of Gen Zers as students instructive and useful. This trait, of not tolerating abuse/indignity, has both lights and shadows. At its worst, it creates a grievance mentality that encourages people to marinate in their traumas and difficulties without fostering the resilience they need (and that previous generations seemed to possess to a greater degree) to overcome them. But at its best, it makes some of us older folks question whether we should have spoken up, rather than remain silent when we suffered similar or worse harm at the hands of the people who were supposed to teach or mentor us.

As I write this, I vividly remember a whole litany of small and medium-sized cruelties that were inflicted on me during my youth and adolescence, starting with my school’s ignorance/inaction at the sadistic and systematic bullying experiences I went through between the ages of 9 and 14, continuing with the terrifying and inhospitable (albeit publicly admired and celebrated) professors and intellectuals who taught us in law school, and then with the gallery of commanders and trainers who used us, in the army, as their psychological punching bags. If anything, I marvel at the fact that the 1980s and 1990s, when all this happened to me and around me, were years in which we gradually developed sensitivity to sexual harassment, while ignoring all other forms of harassment that were still happening, unopposed, in plain sight. We regarded all that stuff as rites of passage and fodder for our hindsight comedy about the hazing we received. The thing to do, our boomer parents taught us on the rare occasion that we revealed our unhappiness to them, was to laugh it off and develop tougher skins. And I can’t say that this advice was completely misguided: later in life, when a staff member at Hastings raised her voice at me about some administrative matter or other, I calmly replied, “Girlfriend, I have been yelled at by people much scarier than you, so I propose you lower your voice and think twice about opening your mouth again.” For me, the experience of suffering was also a gateway toward empathy and compassion: I have never been incarcerated, isolated, or on death row, and I’ve never been assaulted in prison or neglected medically, but I sure as hell know what it’s like to be lonely, hated, disbelieved, and frightened, and I feel kinship with anyone who has shared this ember of the human experience, even if superficially their lives look very different to mine. At 10 years old, I wrote in my diary, “because of what is being done to me, I vow to spend a lifetime helping the helpless and the weak against the powerful bullies.” And I hope my life’s work delivers on at least some of this promise.

Perhaps my ability to grow a useful, and hopefully beautiful, lotus out of the mud comes from sheer good fortune: I just lucked into being genetically predisposed toward happiness and high energy and into having strong psychological muscles. Surely, at least some of my fellow Gen Xers may have emerged psychologically bruised from the roughness with which so many of us were handled. This makes me wonder whether the appearance that the Gen Zers we teach seem considerably more anxious, depressed, and psychologically brittle than us has more to do with their willingness to open up and report about their struggles than with their personalities. But it also has to do with the planetary anxiety (climate crisis, financial crises, political endgame horrors, soul crushing school shooting tragedies) that has characterized their formative years. Either way, the fact is that many of us teachers and mentors encounter young folks who struggle with very powerful demons–depression, anxiety, and others–and that raises serious questions about the extent to which great results can be coaxed out of people through “tough love.”

It’s important not to confuse “tough love” with an uncompromising approach to achievement, or even excellence. I staunchly believe that, by lowering standards, we are misguidedly providing a disservice to the people we try to help. I’ve seen this operate not only in my law school teaching, but also at Balboa Pool, where I work as a lifeguard. Some of my fellow lifeguards teach the Red Cross swim curriculum and are very adamant not to pass children to the next level unless they demonstrate having actually acquired the necessary skills. “They are taking my class,” said one of my colleagues, “not so that their parents will like me, but so that they will know how to swim,” which is not some fancy unimportant frivolous accomplishment: it is an essential lifesaving skill. When the big wave comes for you, you either swim or you don’t. Providing you with the feel-good illusion that can perform a task when you actually cannot is not helping you go forward in life. Similarly, giving you a diploma and a license to practice law when you are incapable of solving other people’s problems with knowledge and confidence is doing a disservice not only to you, but to your clients.

The issue I’m tackling here is quite different: it’s not so much about the standards but about the path toward achieving them. It looks like, at least in athletics (and perhaps in law schools – remember Prof. Kingsfield?) there is a dying breed of old-school coaches and instructors who strongly believe that the way to greatness–Olympic medals, world records, you name it–necessarily requires “toughening people up” through being mean to them. I find myself agnostic: surely some level of toughness and resilience is an important quality to cultivate in people who are aiming at performing and achieving at a high level. But does this really extend to a need to insult and humiliate? The public belittling and verbal punching doesn’t seem to produce the right results in this generation, but did it really prove successful in previous generations? Or did people like Natalie Coughlin, Dana Vollmer, and others accomplish incredible feats despite–rather than because–an atmosphere of toughness and abuse? Could it be that the successful folks were not the one on whose heads the cruelty was rained?

If, with the exposés of Salazar, McKeever, and others, the breed of “tough love” or just “tough” coaches is dying, we certainly have not done enough thinking on whether, and how, to get great results without the great cruelties and indignities. If it is possible, then what is the best model for this? I was very lucky to have, in grad school, the mentorship of Malcolm Feeley, who never once mistreated me, always regarded me as his protégé and friend, and always shone in my skies like a good fatherly sun. To this day I can always count on his steady guiding hand and good advice, and if I have achieved anything in my professional life, it was because, rather than despite, his infinite generosity and kindness. So I know that it can be done, and if a Malcolm-esque model of mentoring could be scaled up to athletics, the world would be better. This, of course, assumes that there’s nothing unique to sports that requires that cruelty be added to the cocktail of instructive styles and methods.

But let’s assume, for a dark teatime of the soul, that it does. Let’s assume that the medals and world records and all that are fueled, to some extent, by the cruelty. That there’s some demonstrable correlation between calling people names and publicly humiliating them and these same people running or swimming very fast and winning races. Do we really care about results so much that we are willing to accept any method for achieving them? Perhaps we’re not there yet. As my friend Aatish suggested in a conversation about this today, “the spectacle demands the next record being broken. No one is going to be all like – oh hey, it’s cool that the mile times will all get slower because now we’re being more ethical.”

And perhaps the same question applies to law school. In the above-linked piece that defends Prof. Kingsfield, Michael Vittielo writes, “Few commentators have asked whether law students are as well prepared today as they were thirty years ago, now that they graduate from far more student-friendly law schools, or whether they are less cynical if they attend law schools where their professors solicit their personal views.” If empirical evidence an be provided that law students are less well prepared now than they were in those rough Socratic method years–can it still be said, “okay, but we’re willing to sacrifice some preparation/proficiency because we don’t want to publicly humiliate our students anymore”?

A strange analogy comes to mind. During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Speedo pioneered a techsuit called the LZR racer, which was proven statistically to have contributed to the many world records that were broken in the pool. Now, when looking at the record book, all records and results achieved by a swimmer wearing a LZR racer are marked with asterisks. If the analogy isn’t clear, let me spell it out. As more and more evidence of cruelty toward and neglect of young people in sports coaching surfaces, and as more and more of us find it abhorrent and unconscionable to treat people this way even if it produces results, will there ever come a time in which records accomplished partially as a consequence of humiliation and abuse will be marked with an asterisk for posterity, and will no longer be an accomplishment we are willing to tolerate?

Sherlock Holmes Revisited: Re-Creative Reading

A couple of years ago I took a facilitator training in VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies), a nuanced and inclusive way of looking at and speaking about art. At the training, we learned to facilitate conversations about art among students of all ages, brought about by complex, ambiguous images. The power of VTS lies in the simplicity of the method. The students are asked three questions: (1) What is going on in this picture? (2) What do you see that makes you say that? and (3) What more can we find? The facilitator then skillfully rephrases what the students say, clearing their perspectives of preconceptions, and opening the door to a multiplicity of interpretations.

Because these questions are not rooted in any preconceived notions about the art, they open the enjoyment of art and the meaning-making process to a variety of audiences of all ages, from police officers to medical students. Not only does this method subtly encourage inclusivity and pluralism without shaming, but it also increases powers of observation and interpretive flexibility.

One of the many things that are interesting about VTS is that there are many layers of engagement with art. Abigail Housen, whose research informed much of the VTS approach, identifies five stages of aesthetic development:

Stage 1 – Accountive
Accountive viewers are storytellers. Using their senses, memories, and personal associations, they make concrete observations about a work of art that are woven into a narrative. Here, judgments are based on what is known and what is liked. Emotions color viewers’ comments, as they seem to enter the work of art and become part of its unfolding narrative.

Stage 2 – Constructive
Constructive viewers set about building a framework for looking at works of art, using the most logical and accessible tools: their own perceptions, their knowledge of the natural world, and the values of their social, moral and conventional world. If the work does not look the way it is supposed to, if craft, skill, technique, hard work, utility, and function are not evident, or if the subject seems inappropriate, then these viewers judge the work to be weird, lacking, or of no value. Their sense of what is realistic is the standard often applied to determine value. As emotions begin to go underground, these viewers begin to distance themselves from the work of art.

Stage 3 – Classifying
Classifying viewers adopt the analytical and critical stance of the art historian. They want to identify the work as to place, school, style, time and provenance. They decode the work using their library of facts and figures which they are ready and eager to expand. This viewer believes that properly categorized, the work of art’s meaning and message can be explained and rationalized.

Stage 4 – Interpretive
Interpretive viewers seek a personal encounter with a work of art. Exploring the work, letting its meaning slowly unfold, they appreciate subtleties of line and shape and color. Now critical skills are put in the service of feelings and intuitions as these viewers let underlying meanings of the work what it symbolizes emerge. Each new encounter with a work of art presents a chance for new comparisons, insights, and experiences. Knowing that the work of art’s identity and value are subject to reinterpretation, these viewers see their own processes subject to chance and change.

Stage 5 – Re-Creative
Re-creative viewers, having a long history of viewing and reflecting about works of art, now willingly suspend disbelief. A familiar painting is like an old friend who is known intimately, yet full of surprise, deserving attention on a daily level but also existing on an elevated plane. As in all important friendships, time is a key ingredient, allowing Stage 5 viewers to know the ecology of a work — its time, its history, its questions, its travels, its intricacies. Drawing on their own history with one work in particular, and with viewing in general, these viewers combine personal contemplation with views that broadly encompass universal concerns. Here, memory infuses the landscape of the painting, intricately combining the personal and the universal.

As we saw at our facilitator training, the vast majority of people who look at art make observations that reflect stages 1 and 2–which is not to say that they are limited, or uninteresting; plenty of deep observations can emerge from these stages. Stage 3 typically reflects prior knowledge in art history or technique, whereas Stage 4 reflects a deeply intimate and emotional relationship with the art. Stage 5, we were told, typically reflects viewers of advanced ages, who have had the experience of engaging with a particular work of art over the course of their lives, which entwines the evolving personal experiences of the viewers with the universal (and possibly changing) themes of the work.

Today I had the luxury of revisiting Housen’s important work by experiencing what re-creative enjoyment of art looks like in the realm of literature: I read Ruth Wilson’s wonderful book The Jane Austen Remedy. To get a sense of Wilson’s project, here she describes it in her own words:

In my eighties I reappraised Jane Austen’s fiction in a doctoral thesis, and was commissioned to explore my own identity, dispositions and values in a recently published reading memoir.

Now I find that the processes of rereading, investigation and reflection have led me to the best time in my life. Reading memoirists raised issues in my mind about memory, truth telling and artistry. In weaving together these aspects of my own reading experiences in my thesis, I discovered parts of myself and aspects of my most intimate relationships that I had not previously explored.

On the one hand I felt removed sufficiently to take stock of the best and worst of times in my life. And on the other, I became deeply immersed in the reflective process. I was surprised to realise that longstanding dissatisfactions were evaporating around me. I was experiencing waves of exhilaration while my level of wellbeing soared beyond anything I had previously known. While writing the memoir, reading, writing, and rereading occupied my days and gave them added meaning.

Wilson wrote her doctoral dissertation on the experience of reading Austen as promoting empathy in her mid-80s. She devotes a chapter to each novel, unpacking the relevance of themes to her own life and to universal issues and exposing layers of understanding and relevance that have evolved throughout her repeated engagement with the texts in her life. In that sense, Wilson’s appreciation of Austen’s body of work is the literary equivalent of Housen’s fifth stage of aesthetic appreciation.

To my delight and nourishment, I am finding that the same is true for me as I reengage again with texts I have read and loved throughout my life: Arthur Conan Doyle’s canon of Sherlock Holmes stories. I already shared here that this is likely going to be my next book project. I’m finding layers of personal and professional meaning that was added to the stories throughout the years. In my childhood–I first encountered the stories when I was ten years old–I found the deductive process intoxicating, particularly when demystified as a scientific series of steps. But over the years, I learned more about this. My criminological education and my richer background in law and the social sciences highlighted other themes: the centrality of the positivist criminological paradigm in the Holmesian universe, understandable given the period’s great excitement about the scientific method, the measurability of social facts, and the medicalization of crime (the inspiration for Holmes was Doyle’s mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell.) This brought out of the shadows some of the more unsavory aspects of the stories: the racism, misogyny, colonial paternalism, social Darwinism, etc., which are highlighted throughout the canon. This critique is much more salient to me now than it was earlier in life, but I can unearth more layers beneath and above it: the understanding of the fear of crime as an unknown/unexplainable phenomenon that might become just a bit less unruly if we can subdue it to the laws of nature. I see the same animus behind the current tendency, for example, to unfairly blame Chesa Boudin for everything that is wrong in the dystopian San Francisco zeitgeist.

There are other readings of the text that have spoken to me over the years. As I grew up and acquired experiences–ranging from sublime to heart-shattering–with various affaires-de-coeur, queer readings of the Holmes canon, especially understandings of his relationship with Watson, became salient as possibilities. Then, inspired by my colleague and friend Ethan Leib’s work on friendships, I began to wonder what was more revolutionary: to ascribe sexual meaning to a relationship that is ostensibly portrayed as platonic and friendly, or to ascribe this relationship intimate importance despite the lack of an explicit sexual aspect? It is a complicated friendship, which includes true love, professional camaraderie, and on occasion, shocking emotional abuse, that brings to the surface themes that we generally are happy to explore in romantic liaisons but do not deeply analyze in platonic friendships, and in that sense brings a revolutionary aspect to the book.

And then there is my own move to the new world and the colonialist reading of what America, and Americans, is/are all about; Doyle’s exoticization of both America and Australia evoke some interesting parallels in American Political Development (APD) and in the USian tendency to exoticize the Global South. This becomes especially salient in novels and books describing the frontier, including The Valley of Fear, A Study in Scarlet, The Boscombe Valley Mystery, The Noble Bachelor, and others.

In short, much of the canon, like the Austen canon, is not just about the work itself, but also about the ongoing relationship, over decades, between the work and the reader, themes constantly sharpening and blurring, progressing and receding in importance, as my relationship with the inhabitants of 221B Baker Street deepens. I feel it’s time to write about this interplay and to celebrate this canon, especially because, as opposed to Jane Austen’s works, it was meant to be read serially, in the Strand newspaper, by people of all walks of life, each of whom would project their own interests and values on the narrative.