Chagrin

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  not have children, as if the right and naturalness of motherhood is presumptive. But for lots of other women in this country, the opposite is true. Think about black women, poor women, immigrant women. Think about forced sterilization, about the term ‘welfare queens,’ or ‘anchor babies.’ All of that happened to enforce the idea that not all motherhoods are legitimate. Or more to the point, take my own family: ’m mixed. My own mother was made to feel, by her own family and her husband’s family and our neighbors in Vermont, that her mothering of me wasn’t legitimate.” Reese had not expected to be questioned on her right to victimhood as a trans woman. Apparently, no one had informed Katrina that among queers, trans women were still a subaltern du jour. Perhaps Reese had grown accustomed to leaning on that a little too heavily. “Tm not criticizing your feelings, Reese,” Katrina says. “I’m telling you that I feel the same. Because everyone gets criticized about how they should or shouldn’t be mothering. You don’t have to tell me, because I already know about how women are made to feel that they don’t deserve to be mothers—Chinese, trans, whoever. It’s part of why this pregnancy matters to me. Why sharing a child, or giving up a child, isn’t really so simple. So when I say I have reservations about this, it’s not just logistics; my own identity is part of it, just like yours is for you. You think it’s hard to be a mother because you're trans. I think it’s hard to be a mother as the mixed descendant of Chinese and Jewish immigrants. We have difficulty with motherhood in common. But my question wasn’t why this is hard. My question is: Tell me why you, specifically, you, Reese, want to have a baby. Ames has made a case to me. Now I’m asking you to make a case to me.” The challenge has singed Reese. There are so many reasons, but most of them are so simple, so embodied, that they feel inadequate to the question: She likes to hold children. To smell a baby’s hair. To soothe a crying infant and feel his little frame let go of rigid fear to settle in her arms, the weight go slack and calm so that for a moment she both gives and receives a rare peace. To rock a baby and communicate with your body: You’re safe. When she worked at the

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  impressions from experience. The next morning, we reported the findings to the advisers, and their response was equally bland. Their own experience of exercising careful judgment on complex problems was far more compelling to them than an obscure statistical fact. When we were done, one of the executives I had dined with the previous evening drove me to the airport. He told me, with a trace of defensiveness, “I have done very well for the firm and no one can take that away from me.” I smiled and said nothing. But I thought, “Well, I took it away from you this morning. If your success was due mostly to chance, how much credit are you entitled to take for it?” What Supports the Illusions of Skill and Validity? Cognitive illusions can be more stubborn than visual illusions. What you learned about the Müller-Lyer illusion did not change the way you see the lines, but it changed your behavior. You now know that you cannot trust your impression of the length of lines that have fins appended to them, and you also know that in the standard Müller-Lyer display you cannot trust what you see. When asked about the length of the lines, you will report your informed belief, not the illusion that you continue to see. In contrast, when my colleagues and I in the army learned that our leadership assessment tests had low validity, we accepted that fact intellectually, but it had no impact on either our feelings or our subsequent actions. The response we encountered in the financial firm was even more extreme. I am convinced that the message that Thaler and I delivered to both the executives and the portfolio managers was instantly put away in a dark corner of memory where it would cause no damage. Why do investors, both amateur and professional, stubbornly believe that they can do better than the market, contrary to an economic theory that most of them accept, and contrary to what they could learn from a dispassionate evaluation of their personal experience? Many of the themes of previous chapters come up again in the explanation of the prevalence and persistence of an illusion of skill in the financial world. The most potent psychological cause of the illusion is certainly that the people who pick stocks are exercising high-level skills. They consult economic data and forecasts, they examine income statements and balance sheets, they evaluate the quality of top management, and they assess the competition. All this is serious work that requires extensive training, and the people who do it have the immediate (and valid) experience of using these skills. Unfortunately, skill in evaluating the business prospects of a firm is not sufficient for successful stock

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  People literally fell in love with him and the image. Politicians can gain seductive power by digging into a country's past, bringing images and ideals that have been abandoned or repressed back to the surface. They only need the symbol; they do not really have to worry about re-creating the reality behind it. The good feelings they stir up are enough to ensure a positive response. Symbol: The Portrait Painter. Under his eye, all of your physical imperfections disappear. He brings out noble qualities in you, frames you in a myth, makes you godlike, immortalizes you. For his ability to create such fantasies, he is rewarded with great power. 40 • The Art of Seduction Dangers T he main dangers in the role of the Ideal Lover are the consequences that arise if you let reality creep in. You are creating a fantasy that in- volves an idealization of your own character. And this is a precarious task, for you are human, and imperfect. If your faults are ugly enough, or intru- sive enough, they will burst the bubble you have blown, and your target will revile you. Whenever Tullia d'Aragona was caught acting like a com- mon prostitute (when, for instance, she was caught having an affair just for money), she would have to leave town and establish herself elsewhere. The fantasy of her as a spiritual figure was broken. Casanova too faced this dan- ger, but was usually able to surmount it by finding a clever way to break off the relationship before the woman realized that he was not what she had imagined: he would find some excuse to leave town, or, better still, he would choose a victim who was herself leaving town soon, and whose awareness that the affair would be short-lived would make her idealizing of him all the more intense. Reality and long intimate exposure have a way of dulling a person's perfection. The nineteenth-century poet Alfred de Mus- set was seduced by the writer George Sand, whose larger-than-life charac- ter appealed to his romantic nature. But when the couple visited Venice together, and Sand came down with dysentery, she was suddenly no longer an idealized figure but a woman with an unappealing physical problem. De Musset himself showed a whiny, babyish side on this trip, and the lovers separated. Once apart, however, they were able to idealize each other again, and reunited a few months later. When reality intrudes, distance is often a solution. In politics the dangers are similar. Years after Kennedy's death, a string of revelations (his incessant sexual affairs, his excessively dangerous brinkmanship style of diplomacy, etc.) belied the myth he had created. His image has survived this tarnishing; poll after poll shows that he is still revered.

• From Querelle (1953)

  24 I JEAN GENET would make my ears ring with this oboe murmur: "My vulgarity is regal, and it accords me every right." By giving the ship's barber a curt order to clip his hair very short, Lieutenant Seblon hoped to achieve a he-mannish ap- pearance-not so much to save face as to be able to move more freely among the handsome lads. He did not know, then, that he caused them to shrink back from him. He was a well-built man, wide-shouldered, but he felt within himself the presence of his own femininity, sometimes contained in a chickadee's egg, the size of a pale blue or pink sugared almond, but some times brimming over to flood his entire body with its milk. He knew this so well that he himself believed in this quality of weakness, this frailty of an enormous, unripe nut, whose pale white interior consisted of the stuff children call milk. The Lieutenant knew to his great chagrin that this core of femi ninity could erupt in an i n stant and manifest itself in his face, his eyes, his fingertips, and mark every gesture of his by render ing it too gentle. He took care never to be caught counting the stitches of any imaginary needlework, scratching his head with an imaginary knitting needle. Nevertheless he betrayed himself in the eyes of all men whenever he gave the order to pick up arms, for he pronounced the word "arms" with such grace that his whole person seemed to be kneeling at the grave of some beautiful lover. He never smiled. His fellow officers considered him stem and somewhat puritanical, but they also believed they were able to· discern a quality of stupendous refinement under neath that hard shell, and the belief rested on the way in which, despite himself, he pronounced certain words. The happiness of clasping in my arms a body so beautiful, even though it is huge and strong! Huger and stronger than mine.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Voices in the hall. Alek rolled onto his side, could smell the fresh polish of the floor. He pushed himself up, rolled his shoulders, and spread his legs. He leaned forward. The door slid open—Mats and Octavius came into the room. They were talking loudly about something, about someone, and Alek tried not to listen, but their voices came closer and closer until the two of them were standing over him. Octavius’s purple-black skin almost gleamed. Mats was shorter than Octavius, who was a giant for a dancer, a slash of a man. They wore sweaters from East Coast colleges that neither had attended, hand-me-downs from their parents. Mats in a blue Yale sweater and Octavius in a crimson Harvard sweatshirt. They’d known each other since they were little boys and had attended the same prep schools. Their parents knew one another, belonged to the same African American Ivy League associations. Mats and Octavius were as close as one could come to an arranged marriage in this country. The two of them were in love with each other, but seemed not to know it yet, or so Alek thought. Mainly because they never seemed to be in love with each other at the same time, seemed to always be pointed past one another. In the fall, Mats could think of nothing other than Octavius, his kindness, his body, his winning shyness. But that fall, Octavius was in love with a white boy named James from one of his poetry seminars. And in the spring, Mats had moved on to Charles, and Octavius fell in love with the space left when Mats lost interest. That is, Octavius found Mats to be indifferent to him for the first time in his life, so he reacted by falling deeply in love with him. They each, in different ways and on different days, spoke to Alek about the other. Octavius is so stupid. Why doesn’t he get it? I’m in his room all the time. I’m lying here, half naked, basically wide open to him, and he does nothing, nothing. Why? Or, Mats is so cold to me these days. Why is he like this? He’s always gone now. He’s always out. What’s going on with him and Charles? “Can you believe it?” “Charlie and Sophie, you mean?” Alek asked, leaning back on his palms. He flexed his leg from left to right. Mats sat down next to him and started to stretch, too. Octavius took the spot on the other side of Alek. “They’re back together,” Mats said over Alek’s head to Octavius, who let out a whistle. “I mean, it was pretty obvious, but consider it confirmed.” “I guess some people can’t make up their minds,” Alek said flatly, meaning nothing at all by it, but then Mats turned to look at him with a gleaming hurt in his eyes, and he realized he’d strayed too close to the bone. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  One man in his time plays many parts. Embrace the next age, Steve. Embrace your inner Daddy. Find strength in this ring and then pass it along to someone else who needs it. Jason. When Steve turned into the driveway, his headlights panned across the length of Mrs. Alexander’s long covered porch. Beneath the trio of old wooden fans, Penny and Mrs. Alexander sat close together on a pair of straight-backed rocking chairs, drinking iced tea from tall sweating glasses. A plate stacked high with Mrs. Alexander’s signature lemon squares sat in accusatory silence on the small table between them. Steve shut off the engine, locked the car and walked over to the edge of the yard. “Good ev’ning, ladies,” he drawled. The two women looked at him with small, angry eyes. He stood with his hands on his hips, loose and unwilling to be troubled by the gathering storm. He tried again. “Mrs. Alexander, are those some of your amazing lemon squares I see there?” They stared at him in shared silence. “Who is she?” Penny asked. “There is no she,” he said. “There have always been shes, Steve. Dozens of them…since long before we got married.” “Please don’t start this again, Penny. There has been nobody but you for five goddamned years—” “You’ve got dried cum on your shirt,” Penny said. “Did that slut wipe her mouth on it after she went down on you?” He looked down at the smeared galaxy of silvery speckles on the blue fabric of his shirt riding just above his right hip. He saw the ring on his finger, interlocking circles glinting in the porch light. He knew they had passed the point of no return. A new age was upon him. “I want a divorce,” he said without looking up. DADDY DRADEN Jeff Mann for Master JW I’m awake at first light, dim dawn in my little nest. It’s chilly down here in Daddy Draden’s basement den, but the blanket I snuggle in is velvety and warm. My coziness is deepened by the sound of rain—the first hard September rain drenching Roanoke, pattering on the basement’s window—and by these bonds Dad has tied good and snug around my ankles and wrists. He’s real handy at making comfortable cuffs out of cotton rope. I roll onto my side, curl against the couch cushions, think of Dad and get hard. Normally, I’d just lie here till he let me loose, but this morning I aim to be bold. Last night, after two months apart, I was so excited to be with him that I came too fast. I shot as soon as he commenced to chew my nips, so the lengthy play we’d planned never came to pass; we were both disappointed. I’m hoping Dad won’t mind if I take the initiative for once. Rubbing my dick, I gather my courage and then start picking at the wrist-knots with my teeth.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Another charge which some readers have made is that Lolita is anti-American. This is something that pains me considerably more than the idiotic accusation of immorality. Considerations of depth and perspective (a suburban lawn, a mountain meadow) led me to build a number of North American sets. I needed a certain exhilarating milieu. Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity. But in regard to philistine vulgarity there is no intrinsic difference between Palearctic manners and Nearctic manners. Any proletarian from Chicago can be as bourgeois (in the Flaubertian sense) as a duke. I chose American motels instead of Swiss hotels or English inns only because I am trying to be an American writer and claim only the same rights that other American writers enjoy. On the other hand, my creature Humbert is a foreigner and an anarchist, and there are many things, besides nymphets, in which I disagree with him. And all my Russian readers know that my old worlds—Russian, British, German, French—are just as fantastic and personal as my new one is. Lest the little statement I am making here seem an airing of grudges, I must hasten to add that besides the lambs who read the typescript of Lolita or its Olympia Press edition in a spirit of “Why did he have to write it?” or “Why should I read about maniacs?” there have been a number of wise, sensitive, and staunch people who understood my book much better than I can explain its mechanism here.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  When I think of my mother I envy Alexander Portnoy. If only I had a real Jewish mother—easily pigeonholed and filed away—a real literary property. (I am always envying writers their relatives: Nabokov and Lowell and Tucci with their closets full of elegant aristocratic skeletons, Roth and Bellow and Friedman with their pop parents, sticky as Passover wine, greasy as matzoh-ball soup.) My mother smelled of Joy or Diorissimo, and she didn’t cook much. When I try to distill down to basics what she taught me about life, I am left with this: 1. Above all, never be ordinary. 2. The world is a predatory place: Eat faster! “Ordinary” was the worst insult she could find for anything. I remember her taking me shopping and the look of disdain with which she would freeze the salesladies in Saks when they suggested that some dress or pair of shoes was “very popular—we’ve sold fifty already this week.” That was all she needed to hear. “No,” she would say, “we’re not interested in that. Haven’t you got something a little more unusual?” And then the saleslady would bring out all the weird colors no one else would buy—stuff which would have gone on sale but for my mother. And later she and I would have an enormous fight because I yearned to be ordinary as fiercely as my mother yearned to be unusual. “I can’t stand that hairdo” (she said when I went to the hairdresser with Pia and came back with a pageboy straight out of Seventeen Magazine), “it’s so ordinary.” Not ugly. Not unbecoming. But ordinary. Ordinariness was a plague you had to ward off in every possible way. You warded it off by redecorating frequently. Actually my mother thought that all the interior decorators (as well as clothes designers and accessory designers) in America were organized in an espionage ring to learn her most recent decorating or dressmaking ideas and suddenly popularize them. And it was true that she had an uncanny sense of coming fashions (or did I only imagine this, conned as I was by her charisma?). She did the house in antique gold just before antique gold became the most popular color for drapes and rugs and upholstery. Then she screamed that everyone had “stolen” her ideas. She installed Spanish porcelain tiles in the foyer before it caught on “with all the yentas on Central Park West"—from whose company she carefully excluded herself. She brought white fur rugs home from Greece before they were imported by all the stores. She discovered wrought-iron flowered chandeliers for the bathroom in advance of all the “fairy decorators"—as she contemptuously called them.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Yeah,’ said Levi thoughtfully, as his mother pulled his head softly into her shoulder. ‘But sometimes it’s like you just meet someone and you just know that you’re totally connected, and that this person is, like, your brother – or your sister,’ adjusted Levi, for he had been thinking of somebody else entirely. ‘Even if they don’t, like, recognize it, you feel it. And in a lot of ways it don’t matter if they do or they don’t see that for what it is – all you can do is put the feeling out there. That’s your duty. Then you just wait and see what comes back to you. That’s the deal.’ There was a little silence here that Zora felt the need to puncture. ‘ Amen! ’ she said, laughing. ‘Preach it, brother, preach it!’ Levi punched Zora in her upper arm, and then Zora punched him back, and then they ran, weaving through the graves, Zora racing from Levi. Jerome called after them both to have some respect. Kiki knew she should stop them, but she could not help feeling it was a relief to hear curses and laughter and whoops fill the darkening day. It took one’s mind off all the people underfoot. Now Kiki and Jerome paused on the white stone steps of the chapel and waited for Zora and Levi to join them. Kiki heard her children’s clattering footsteps reverberate through the archways behind her. They rushed towards her like the shadows of people escaped from their graves, and came to a halt by her feet, panting and laughing. She could no longer see their features in this dusk, only the outlines and movements of beloved faces she knew by heart. ‘OK, that’s enough now. Let’s get out of here, please. Which way?’ Jerome took his glasses off and wiped them on the corner of his shirt. Hadn’t the burial been just to the left of this very chapel? In which case they had walked in a teasing circle.  on beauty and being wrong

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about disappointed . . . it’s not really a surprise. Stuff happens. And I did marry a man.’ Carlene looked at her curiously. ‘Is there another option?’ Kiki looked straight back at her hostess and decided to be brazen. ‘For me, there was, I think . . . yes. At one point.’ Carlene looked uncomprehendingly at her guest. Kiki wondered at herself. She was misfiring recently, and now she was misfiring in Carlene Kipps’s library. But she did not stop; she felt an old Kikian urge – once upon a time regularly exercised – to shock and, at the same time, to tell the truth. It was the identical feeling she felt (but rarely acted upon) in churches and upscale stores and courtrooms. Places she sensed the truth was rarely told. ‘I guess I mean, there was a revolution going on, everybody was looking at different lifestyles, alternative lifestyles . . . so whether women could live with women, for example.’ ‘With women,’ repeated Carlene. ‘Instead of men,’ confirmed Kiki. ‘Sure . . . I thought for a while that might be the road I was going to go down. I mean, I went down it some way.’ ‘Ah,’ said Carlene and brought her wobbling right hand under the control of her left. ‘Yes, I see,’ she said thoughtfully, blushing only very slightly. ‘Maybe that would be easier – that’s what you think? I’ve often wondered . . . it must be easier to know the other person – I imagine that’s true. They are as you are. My aunt was that way. It’s not uncommon in the Caribbean. Of course Monty’s always been very harsh on the subject – until James.’ ‘James?’ repeated Kiki sharply. She was irked to find her own revelation passed over so swiftly. ‘The Reverend James Delafield. He’s a very old friend of Monty  On Beauty – Princeton gentleman. A Baptist – he delivered the benediction at President Reagan’s inauguration, I believe.’ ‘Now, didn’t he turn out to be . . . ?’ said Kiki, vaguely recalling a New Yorker profile. Carlene clapped her hands and – of all things – giggled. ‘Yes! It made Monty think again, yes, it did. And Monty hates to think again. But the choice was between his friend and . . . well, I don’t know. The Good News, I suppose. But I knew Monty likes James’s conversation – not to mention his cigars – a little too much. I said to him: my dear, life must come first over the Book. Otherwise, what is the Book for ? Monty was outraged! Scandalized! It is for us to conform to the Book, as he said. He told me I’d got it all wrong

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The next day, Christmas, unable to endure my cell, and feeling that, after all, the day demanded a gesture, I asked to 116 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON be allowed to go to Mass, hoping to hear some music. But I found mysclt: tor a freezing hour and a half, locked in exactly the same kind of cubicle as in the wagon which had first brought me to prison, peering through a slot placed at the le\"cl of the eye at an old Frenchman, hatted, overcoated, muf fled, and gloved, preaching in this language which I did not understand, to this row of wooden boxes, the story of Jesus Christ's love for men. The next day, the 26th, I spent learning a peculiar kind of game, played with match-sticks, with my cellmates. For, since I no longer felt that I would stay in this cell forever, I was beginning to be able to make peace with it for a time. On the 2 7 th I went again to trial and, as had been predicted, the case against us was dismissed. The story of the drap de lit, finally told, caused great merriment in the courtroom, whereupon my friend decided that the French were "great." I was chilled by their merriment, even though it was meant to warm me. It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a sate remove trom all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it any more. In some deep, black, stony, and lib crating way, my lite, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and never can be stilled. Stranger in the Village F ROM ALL available evidence no black man had ever set fo ot in this tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told before arriving that I would pr()pabJY..._Qe� _"sight" fo r the village; I took this to mean that people of my complexion were rarely seen in Switzerland, and also that city people are always something of a "sight" outside of the city. It did not occur to me-possibly because I am an American-that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro. It is a fa ct that cannot be explained on the basis of the inaccessibility of the village. The village is very high, but it is only fo ur hours from Milan and three hours fr om Lausanne.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In my mind's eye I could sec him, sitting at the window, locked up in his terrors; hating and fearing every living soul including his children who had betrayed him, too, by reaching towards the world which had despised him. There were nine of us. I began to wonder what it could have felt like for such a man to have had nine children whom he could barely feed. He used to make little jokes about our poverty, which never, of course, seemed very funny to us; they could not have seemed very funny to him, either, or else our all too feeble response to them would never have caused such rages. He spent great cncrb'Y and achieved, to our chagri n, no small amount of success in keeping us away from the people who NOTES OF A NATIVE SON 67 surrounded us, people who had all-night rent parties to which we listened when we should ha,·e been sleeping, people who cursed and drank and flashed razor blades on Lenox A\·enue. He could not understand why, if they had so much energy to spare, they could not use it to make their lives better. He treated almost e\·erybody on our block with a most unchari table asperity and neither they, nor, of course, their children were slow to reciprocate. The only white people who came to our house were welfare workers and bill collectors. It was almost always my mother who dealt with them, for my father's temper, which was at the mercy of his pride, was never to be trusted. It was clear that he felt their ,·ery presence in his home to be a ,·iolation: this was com·eyed by his carriage, almost ludicrously stitf, and b�· his mice, harsh and vindictively polite. When I was around nine or te n I wrote a play \\·hich was directed by a young, white schoolteacher, a woman, who then took an interest in me, and ga,·e me books to read and, in order to corroborate my theatrical bent, decided to take me to see what she some what tactlessly referred to as "real" plays. Theater-going was forbidden in our house, but, with the really cruel intuiti,·eness of a child, I suspected that the color of this woman's skin would carry the day for me.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He used to make li ttle jokes about our poverty, which never, of course, seemed very funny to us; they could not have seemed very funny to him, either, or else our all too feeble response to them would never have caused such rages. He spent great cncrb'Y and achieved, to our chagrin, no small amount of success in keeping us away from the people who NOTES OF A NATIVE SON 67 surrounded us, people who had all-night rent parties to which we listened when we should ha,·e been sleeping, people who cursed and drank and flashed razor blades on Lenox A\·enue. He could not understand why, if they had so much energy to spare, they could not use it to make their lives better. He treated almost e\·erybody on our block with a most unchari table asperity and neither they, nor, of course, their child ren were slow to reciprocate. The only white people who came to our house were welf are workers and bill collectors. It was almost always my mother who dealt with them, for my father's temper, which was at the mercy of his pride, was never to be trusted. It was clear that he felt their ,·ery presence in his home to be a ,·iolation: this was com·eyed by his carriage, almost ludicrously stitf, and b�· his mice, harsh and vindictively polite. When I was around nine or ten I wrote a play \\·hich was directed by a young, white schoolteacher, a woman, who then took an interest in me, and ga,·e me books to read and, in order to corroborate my theatrical bent, decided to take me to see what she some what tactlessly referred to as "real" plays. Theater-going was forbidden in our house, but, with the really cruel intuiti,·eness of a child, I suspected that the color of this woman's skin would carry the day for me. Whe n, at school, she suggested taking me to the theater, I did not, as I might ha,·e done if she had been a :;-.Jegro, find a way of discouraging her, but agreed that she should pick me up at my house one evening. I then, ,·ery cle,·erly, left all the rest to my mother, who sug gested to my father, as I knew she would, that it \Votrld not be ,·ery nice to let such a kind woman make the trip for noth ing. Also, since it was a schoolteacher, I imagine that my mother countered the idea of sin with the idea of "educa tion," which word, even with my father, carried a kind of bitter weight.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Eventually we reached a magnificent apartment block—absolutely brand new, he was evidently a very rich dentist—and went up about ten floors. He lived there with his fierce old mother; she emerged in her dressing-gown and shawl, looking very disorientated and very possessive. "The apartment was stuffed with art, most of it rubbish but with occasional little things which it might have been worth getting down and looking at carefully. There were some Puvis drawings for instance. But the picture he wanted me to see was very much in the rubbish category, a crude portrait by someone who couldn't paint, which Orst, whatever his faults, decidedly could. I looked at it and pronounced upon it perhaps a little . . . firmly. It didn't even have the promised monogram. The mother stood around suspiciously, despite the son's urgings that she should go back to bed; it was only when I said I must return to my hotel that she shuffled off." Echevin's eyes rested on me for a moment. "I'm so slow to understand," he went on. "I popped into the bathroom before I left, and when I came out, wondering if I had enough money for the taxi back and imagining an embarrassing moment as I asked the dentist to help me out, there the dentist was, but now sans jacket and tie, waiting in the doorway of a dimly lit bedroom. I suppose I must have given some signal earlier on, or misunderstood something when we were talking at the party: my German's by no means perfect." "Oh, my god," said Maurice; and Helene and I laughed appreciatively. I could imagine how Echevin's nice looks and his neat, shy, independent manner might encourage this kind of confusion. "The awful thing was," he said, "that over his shoulder, and indeed over the bed, I could see a painting that made my pulse . quicken just the way the poor dentist must have hoped it would when I saw him. It was of course the Orst he wanted me to see, it had all been a front with that other awful daub; and despite the shadow, I could see that it was very like the middle panel in the old photograph—one of his deserted gothic town-scapes: actually the dimness made it very like the photograph. And I had to get into that bedroom! That was a testing ten minutes . . . " Echevin noticed his food, and set to catching up. "He must have been pleased to find he owned a valuable picture, though," said Inge. "Oh yes, he was—in the end. One could see the tussle of greed and hurt feelings. It was unsigned—had belonged to an uncle—our Bavarian industrialist, of course. The man liked it very much, which was why he had it in his bedroom.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I told Bongani I wanted a leather coat like Keanu Reeves wore, the ankle-length black one. Bongani shut that down. “No, that’s not practical. It’s cool, but you’ll never be able to wear it again.” He took me shopping and we bought a calf-length black leather jacket, which would look ridiculous today but at the time, thanks to Neo, was very cool. That alone cost 1,200 rand. Then we finished the outfit with a pair of simple black pants, suede square-toed shoes, and a cream-white knitted sweater. Once we had the outfit, Bongani took a long look at my enormous Afro. I was forever trying to get the perfect 1970s Michael Jackson Afro. What I had was more Buckwheat: unruly and impossible to comb, like stabbing a pitchfork into a bed of crabgrass. “We need to fix that fucking hair,” Bongani said. “What do you mean?” I said. “This is just my hair.” “No, we have to do something.” Bongani lived in Alexandra. He dragged me there, and we went to talk to some girls from his street who were hanging out on the corner. “What would you do with this guy’s hair?” he asked them. The girls looked me over. “He has so much,” one of them said. “Why doesn’t he cornrow it?” “Shit, yeah,” they said. “That’s great!” I said, “What? Cornrows? No!” “No, no,” they said. “Do it.” Bongani dragged me to a hair salon down the street. We went in and sat down. The woman touched my hair, shook her head, and turned to Bongani. “I can’t work with this sheep,” she said. “You have to do something about this.” “What do we need to do?” “You have to relax it. I don’t do that here.” “Okay.” Bongani dragged me to a second salon. I sat down in the chair, and the woman took my hair and started painting this creamy white stuff in it. She was wearing rubber gloves to keep this chemical relaxer off her own skin, which should have been my first clue that maybe this wasn’t such a great idea. Once my hair was full of the relaxer, she told me, “You have to try to keep it in for as long as possible. It’s going to start burning. When it starts burning, tell me and we’ll rinse it out. But the longer you can handle it, the straighter your hair will become.” I wanted to do it right, so I sat in the chair and waited and waited for as long as I could. I waited too long.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  A pessimistic view of the Roman marriage couch has become surprisingly entrenched. It is not impossible to find indications that sex was muddled, perfunctory, and embarrassed. In what age could a diligent search not return indications of the most varied sensual experiences? The truth is that many a Roman of the high empire would not recognize his experience in the pages of some modern treatments that deemphasize the charged eroticism of Mediterranean culture in the Roman world. Nothing gives the lie to the myth of the pent-up pagan couple like the artistic tastes of the imperial era. Erotic art flourished in the Roman Empire, in both commercial and domestic contexts. Indeed, the stark ubiquity of sex as a preferred aesthetic theme has even made the identification of ancient “brothels” a vexing challenge; what modern cultures might regard as obscene or pornographic was an ordinary part of bourgeois and elite domesticity. No one was shielded from the facts of life in Roman antiquity. Men, women, and children were surrounded by lush paintings of venereal acts in various stages of consummation. Truly elite villas, like the Villa Farnesina, often placed sensual art in bedrooms. At other times the placement was more public. Some of the most important specimens of Roman domestic art survive, of course, in the mural frescoes buried under the ashes of Vesuvius, long sequestered in the Pornographic Cabinet of the Naples Museum. Among the more striking examples of Roman erotic art is a beautiful painting from the house of a banker, Caecilius Iucundus, the son of a freed slave who built a successful enterprise offering financial services in the bustling port city. He commissioned the painting, in the portico of his villa’s garden, of a man and woman nude in bed, attended by a slave. The painting’s original placement was aimed at maximum visibility; it has been argued that Iucundus wanted to imitate the sort of luxuriant image prized by the high social elite to advertise his own refinement and experience of the good life.87

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Ironically, like an irrational Fisherian runaway, the idea of symmetry as an honest indicator of genetic quality got ever more popular, merely because it was so popular. One scientist who was excited by the idea and attempted to replicate its findings in his own research was distressed to find that he could not do so. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the effect,” he was quoted as saying in a New Yorker article published in 2010. “But the worst part was that when I submitted these null results I had difficulty getting them published. The journals only wanted confirming data. It was too exciting an idea to disprove, at least back then.” The adaptationist confirmation bias at work once again. But in the late 1990s, support for the idea that symmetry indicates genetic quality suddenly began to wane. A few critical papers came out, and then a few more. By 1999, meta-analyses of multiple data sets showed that support for the idea had simply evaporated. Of course, scientists are loath to admit that they are slaves to fashion like everyone else. So, contemporary reviews of mate choice in the animal kingdom rarely even mention this embarrassing episode. Yet the enthusiasm for honest symmetry is such a prime example of bandwagon science that it was prominently featured in the New Yorker article, mentioned above, about the sociology of failure in science. Unfortunately, it still lives on in adaptive theories of human sexual attraction, neurobiology, and cognitive science. You would think that, decades on, news of its collapse and discredit would eventually reach the evolutionary psychology researchers who continue to preach it. But the “honesty of symmetry” has become a zombie idea—an idea so attractive that it lives on and on despite being repeatedly falsified. In any case, the symmetry hypothesis could never have provided more than a very partial explanation of the evolution of complex ornaments like the patterns on the Great Argus’s wing and tail feathers. Even if it did exist, natural selection for perfectly symmetrical signals would fail to explain any of the myriad other specific and complex details within the Great Argus’s plumage and display. — A newly emerging adaptive mate choice hypothesis takes a page right out of Wallace’s critiques of Darwin. It has recently been proposed that elaborate courtship displays evolve in order to indicate male vigor, energy, and performance skill to their prospective mates. Accordingly, females prefer such displays because they raise the male’s heart rate, exhaust his energy reserves, or push him to the limits of his physiological capacity. The best dances indicate strong, fit fellows. Unfortunately, this popular idea fails in several ways to explain specific details of complex display repertoires like that of the Great Argus. There are many imaginable displays that would create far greater physiological challenges to the male than his relatively low-energy performance. So why haven’t more extreme tests of his physiology evolved instead?

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  He couldn’t speak in complete sentences. The two lawyers who were appointed to represent him at his capital trial were primarily concerned that only one of them would be paid the $1,000 for out-of-court time that Alabama provided lawyers appointed in capital cases. They began squabbling with each other, and one filed a civil suit against the other about who could claim the money. Meanwhile, the judge sent George to Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa for a competency examination. Ed Seger, the doctor who examined George, mysteriously concluded that he was not mentally ill but was “malingering” or faking symptoms of mental illness. Based on that evaluation, the judge allowed the capital murder trial to proceed. George’s lawyers bickered with one another, presented no defense, and called no witnesses. The State called Dr. Seger, who persuaded the jury that there was nothing mentally wrong with George, even as he continuously spit in a cup and made loud clucking noises throughout the trial. George’s family members were distraught. George had been working at a Pier 1 furniture store in Houston before his car accident. He left town without picking up his check, which had been ready for collection for over two days before his departure. His mother, a poor woman who knew the value of a dollar to someone like George, found this behavior more demonstrative of mental illness than anything else she could point to, and she authorized the lawyers to obtain the unclaimed check in the hope that they could present it at the trial to confirm George’s confused mental state. The lawyers, who were still bickering over the money, cashed the check to pay themselves instead of using it as evidence. George was convicted and given the death penalty. By the time we at EJI got involved, he had been on death row for several years, moving inexorably toward execution. When I met him, prison doctors were heavily medicating him with psychotropic drugs, which at least stabilized his behavior. It was so abundantly clear that George was mentally ill that it came as no shock when we discovered that the doctor who had examined him at Bryce Hospital was a fraud with no medical training. “Dr. Ed Seger” had made up his credentials. He had never graduated from college but had fooled hospital officials into believing he was a trained physician with expertise in psychiatry. He had masqueraded at the hospital for eight years conducting competency evaluations on people accused of crimes before his fraud was uncovered. I represented George in his federal court proceedings. There, the State acknowledged that Seger was an imposter but wouldn’t agree that George was entitled to a new trial. We eventually won a favorable ruling from a federal judge who overturned his conviction and sentence.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Duplicity and secrets were par for the course in the stories these women tell and the love lives they led; Elaine, Nancy, Loretta, and their peers were virtually unpathologized compared to our collective take on things today, when we have entire tomes dedicated to the devastating deceptions large and small that underpin infidelity. Contemporary titles like How Can I Forgive You? say it all. In fact, Druckerman’s interview subjects were so unabashed by what they had done in general, and their fibbing in particular, that they actually begged her to use their real names in her book, neatly inverting the sensibilities of the consensually non-monogamous, who call for disclosure, transparency, and honesty when it comes to extra-pair dalliances (Druckerman didn’t). Elaine’s, Nancy’s, and Loretta’s adult kids from their first marriages, on the other hand, are appalled by their mothers’ pasts; the women complained that in some cases their children wouldn’t even speak to them. The generational divide—about how mothers should behave and about the acceptability of affairs—is in this case an unbridgeable gulf. Elaine and Nancy and Barb and Loretta, and their friends Yvonne and Linda and Alice, lived in a different sexual culture than Sarah does. They also said “I do” when young and relatively inexperienced, and proceeded to have interesting sex lives after. Today, we’ve reversed things: we have sexual experiences and then “settle down.” And today these women can’t believe what tremendous prudes younger people are about how things were. They might have words for Sarah—“Live a little!” “Oh, come on, everybody cheats!”—but they know to speak only to one another. And to a curious, nonjudgmental female journalist who comes to call. EcologiesAnnika is every bit the modern Manhattanite. But she has more in common with Druckerman’s ladies in assisted living and the ethos of the Mad Men era than she does with her peer Sarah. Annika had apparently felt few of the restrictions Sarah had during her decade-long marriage; Annika had had numerous affairs and, another woman who referred me to her marveled, didn’t seem to feel guilty about them. Why might that be? I was curious about what precisely separates women who don’t pursue sex and romance outside a committed relationship from women who do. In the case of the older but far from tame ladies in Florida, it was about a particular place, and a specific era—Sinatra, Kennedy, womanizing, gaming the ethos of womanizing in your own self-interest if you were a young woman who wanted more. Are women who actually cross that line into non-monogamy today, risking being misunderstood, censured, ostracized, sometimes even killed by their husbands or boyfriends, essentially different from those who don’t? If so, in what ways? Is the difference in where and how they were raised? Their economic circumstances? Their temperaments? How do they manage to slip out of the handcuffs of self-censure?

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  The intimate story of a couple can indeed tell us a lot about their erotic life, but it can’t tell us everything. There is a complex relationship between love and desire, and it is not a cause-and-effect, linear arrangement. A couple’s emotional life together and their physical life together each have their ebbs and flows, their ups and downs, but these don’t always correspond. They intersect, they influence each other, but they’re also distinct. That’s one reason why, to the chagrin of many, you can often “fix” a relationship without doing anything for the sex. Maybe intimacy only sometimes begets sexuality. Separateness Is a Precondition for Connection It is too easily assumed that problems with sex are the result of a lack of closeness. But my point is that perhaps the way we construct closeness reduces the sense of freedom and autonomy needed for sexual pleasure. When intimacy collapses into fusion, it is not a lack of closeness but too much closeness that impedes desire. Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness. One does not exist without the other. With too much distance, there can be no connection. But too much merging eradicates the separateness of two distinct individuals. Then there is nothing more to transcend, no bridge to walk on, no one to visit on the other side, no other internal world to enter. When people become fused—when two become one—connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex. The dual (and often conflicting) needs for connection and independence are a central theme in our developmental histories. Throughout childhood we struggle to find a delicate balance between our profound dependence on our primary caregivers and our need to carve out a sense of independence. The psychologist Michael Vincent Miller reminds us that this struggle is vividly represented in children’s nightmares: “the abandonment dreams of falling or being lost, and the engulfment dreams of being attacked or devoured by monsters.” We come to our adult relationships with an emotional memory box ready to be activated. The extent to which our childhood relationships nurture or obstruct both sets of needs will determine the vulnerabilities that we bring into our adult relationships—what we most want and what we most fear. We all straddle both needs. Their intensity and priority fluctuate throughout our lives; and, as it happens, we tend to choose partners whose proclivities match our vulnerabilities.