Disgust

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 White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  There is Beal and his mother, Merry Merry Bean, the latter of whom is crazy and kept locked in a tree house. Reuben is a violent drunk who ends up in prison; Auntie Roberta pops out babies like the rabbits she skins and eats. Reuben’s girlfriend, Madeline, endures beatings at his hand. The characters’ only talents are shooting and procreating. Beal sleeps with Roberta, and some of her children may be his. She, meanwhile, would never win any awards for mothering, allowing her babies to roam at will and to spit, hiss, and swallow pennies. Beal rapes (or doesn’t rape) his neighbor Earlene Pomerleau, who becomes his wife, though he continues to sleep at his aunt’s. Madeline parades around in flimsy halters that let her breasts fall out. 6 Earlene is a step ahead of the Beans in class terms, at once disgusted by and attracted to them. She compares her first sexual encounter with Beal to being mauled by a bear. She is horrified by his large feet. As she completes the sex act, she “pictures millions of possible big Bean babies, fox-eyed, yellow-toothed, meat-gobbling Beans.” Beal injures his eye at work, loses his job, and is racked by pain and a range of physical disabilities, but still he forbids Earlene to get food stamps. He refuses to go to a hospital until he is finally carried away by rescue workers. “I ain’t worth a piss,” the broken man says, scowling. He dies in a hail of police bullets after shooting out the windows of a wealthy family’s home. Earlene watches him fall, the gun clasped in his hand. 7 The Beans are waste people. Their women are breeders. They talk about Bean blood, and they all look alike. Earlene’s father damns the Beans as uncivilized predators: “If it runs, a Bean will shoot it. If it falls, a Bean will eat it.” Earlene’s father is superior to these “tackiest people on earth,” he believes, because they inhabit an old trailer, while he built his own house. As to the womenfolk, he singles out Roberta, muttering that there should be a law that after nine children with no husband, “you get the knife,” that is, “tyin’ the tubes.” And when Reuben is taken away by the police, he voices the hope that they will “hog-tie the rest of the heathens.” What he means is: round up the children and exterminate them before they become “full-blown Beans.” 8 In The Beans of Egypt, Maine, class warfare is played out at the lowest level. The middle class has no meaningful presence in the book: all that distinguishes the Pomerleaus from the Beans is Gram’s religious discipline and the fact that Earlene’s dad possesses artisan skills. Class is vividly shown when Earlene’s father insists on patrolling the driveway dividing the two properties. He commands Earlene, “Don’t go over on the Beans’ side of the right-of-way. Not ever!” But of course she does. He loses his daughter to the other side. 9

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Athletes, too, as noted earlier, are overrepresented in sexual misconduct cases: although they make up just 4 percent of students in college, they are involved in 19 percent of assaults. “Official” players are not the only culprits; more than half of both intercollegiate and recreational athletes in a 2016 survey admitted to coercing a woman into sexual activity, defined as “any unwanted oral, vaginal, or anal penetration as a result of verbal or physical pressure, including rape.” Teams that celebrate tribalism, aggression, and male dominance over personal integrity (as well, of course, as those that practice any form of hazing) should raise a red flag, both in terms of a young man’s participation and fans’ support. Athletes, who tend to hold a vaunted position in school communities, also too often know that they can act with impunity and will be protected from consequences by athletic departments, school administrations, even, potentially, by the NCAA. That must stop. Coaches, who commonly act as mentors and surrogate fathers (not to mention gatekeepers to college recruitment), are in exceptional positions of influence, especially in high schools where male athletes can dictate the social culture. They should have zero tolerance for degrading talk about women (including song lyrics blaring in the gym) or sexual braggadocio; zero tolerance for sexual misconduct; zero tolerance for calling boys (teammates or the opposition) derogatory names or teasing them about their anatomy or sexual prowess. Guys, as I’ve said, will often go to great lengths to convince themselves they don’t need to intervene in a troubling situation, whether it’s some version of so-called locker room talk, sexual harassment, or potential assault. They rationalize. They minimize. They become passive. They convince themselves they can’t actually make a difference. They laugh. They join in to avoid becoming victims themselves. Stepping up is hard and risky, especially if you are less socially powerful: strength of character can paradoxically be mocked as weak. Boys are just trying to survive, according to educator Charis Denison, to feel “safe, seen, and significant. And, if they can do that through displays of dominance and aggression, then of course that’s what they’re going to do.” Coaches can shatter the complicity of silence, making it clear that objectifying women is not a masculine rite of passage. Consider a yearlong study of two thousand high school athletes that found considerably reduced rates of dating violence and support for other boys’ abusive behavior among those who participated in short, weekly coach-led discussions about personal responsibility, respectful behavior, relationship abuse, insulting language, and consent. That’s encouraging: all-male enclaves may be notorious as crucibles of sexism, but they could also become crucibles of change.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Various social analysts have tried to find the causes of prostitution; historical theories include the blurring of class lines, female sexual dysfunction, a hostile Oedipal complex, a lack of self-esteem. At times the perverse nature of lesbianism has been blamed for prostitution, as has, more reasonably, poverty and a lack of education. Then there’s lack of moral training, a failure of religion. Female chastity as a virtue is an obvious cause, but it’s never acknowledged. Instead, in perfect symmetry, the awakening of a woman’s sexual urges is also considered a cause of prostitution. In the end, prostitution is “caused” by women themselves, by their nature. “She is a woman with half the woman gone,” wrote the physician William Acton in 1857 in an influential tract on the subject. He blamed the “sinful nature” of women, along with the associative traits of “idleness, vanity, and love of pleasure.” Prostitutes speak directly to the barely controlled sexuality of men. Prostitution depends on “demand and supply,” wrote Acton, but most of all, it “is itself a cause of its own existence.” In other words, prostitutes create customers. In every modern war, prostitutes have been accused of corrupting and degrading (and giving diseases to) innocent soldiers. “Women give many more gonorrhoeas than they receive,” wrote William Acton. “In fact they originate the disease.” The great male myth of prostitution is circular: Female sexuality is dangerous, seductive, barely in check; “good” women avoid sex; men go to “bad” women for sex; these “bad” women are sexually experienced and therefore seductive and dangerous; these “bad” women have started the whole thing. Medieval lawyers hesitated even to punish the prostitute, because she acted only according to her nature. Her nature is to become what men want her to be; whores stigmatize themselves as sex partners to fit the stigmatized act of sex. “… Paid or not, she is equally called a whore,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, “but if paid, an overshrewd one; when she wants her money, the man will pretend he did not think she was that kind of girl, and so on.” I was sitting in a hotel bar with a friend not long ago, at about ten o’clock on a Tuesday night. A delivery man walked in with three flower boxes, the long, slim kind for a single rose. He handed them to one of two men standing at the bar, both in their late forties, balding, one with a mustache and one wearing glasses—prosperous nebbishes. A few minutes later, three good-looking well-dressed young women strolled in—a cool brunette in a red blazer, a short-haired voluptuous blonde, a wan, long-haired blonde. The brunette approached the men at the bar, and I watched the introductions all around, the low, close conversation, the presentation of the flowers, the women’s exclamations and quick kisses of thanks. They shared a brief round of drinks and together left for a large car waiting at the curb.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Although all the boys I met had watched porn—one equated his morning session to sneezing—they didn’t all relate to it in the same way. A small group, after some experimentation, had rejected explicit media entirely. “In middle school, porn was considered cool,” a senior at a Southern California high school told me. “Guys knew the names of porn stars. And I watched it almost because it was like the unknown—like the same impulse that makes me want to climb a rock or go to a forest. But pretty quickly, I was like, ‘This is just so fucked up.’ What’s on the screen isn’t actually sensual, not for either person. And often the only part that’s touching between the two people is their genitals. That’s literally all that’s touching. And I was like, ‘What am I watching?’ It doesn’t make sense to me, how you can look at a woman with tremendous respect and then go watch porn. So I stopped.” A second group felt that their porn use had no effect on them, many of them asserting, “I can tell the difference between fantasy and reality.” That, as it happens, is the instinctive response people give to any suggestion of media influence. None of us wants to think we’re so impressionable, though we’re quick to recognize that others are (several of the boys I interviewed made grim predictions about the impact of iPhones, video games, social media, and porn on “the next generation,” by which they meant their slightly younger siblings). But decades of research show that what we consume becomes part of our psyches, unconsciously affecting how we feel, think, and behave. When false information is embedded into a fictional story, people will come to believe it (yes, reader, you would, too), and those beliefs are strengthened over time. Consider the college students who were given a short story containing the bogus “fact” that exercise weakens the heart and lungs. When questioned directly afterward, they were unconvinced this was true, but two weeks later, they had become certain it was. Karen Dill-Shackleford, a media psychologist at Fielding Graduate University, speculates that there is something about the way we suspend disbelief when swept up in a story that opens us to uncritically and even permanently accepting its reality (that theory also partly explains both the spread of fake news and why the repetition of obvious lies can be a successful ploy for political candidates).

• From Jesus and His Jewish Influences (2015)

  19Lecture 3—The United and Divided Israelite KingdomsJesus and His Jewish Influences ●● Omari, a king of Israel after Jeroboam, secured an alliance with the Phoenician king of Tyre by marrying his son Ahab to Ithobaal’s daughter Jezebel. Notice that Ithobaal and Jezebel both have a similar component in their names: baal or bel. Baal was the national god of the Canaanites and the Phoenicians; thus, embedded in the names of Ithobaal and Jezebel is the name of the national deity. ●● King Ahab (c. 872–851 B.C.) was actually a capable king under whose rule the kingdom of Israel prospered. However, Ahab is presented in an extremely negative light in the Hebrew Bible because the writers or editors were anti-north and anti-Israel, and because Ahab was an inclusive Yahwist, like other members of the Samaria aristocracy. What’s more, Ahab’s wife Jezebel aggressively promoted the worship of Baal in Israel. ●● Ahab reigned over Israel and Samaria for 22 years, but he provoked the God of Israel by also worshipping Baal. After Ahab died, the members of his family were executed during a bloody purge, and Jezebel was put to death. ●● About two centuries later, the Northern kingdom of Israel fell. At this time, the dominant power in the ancient Near East was the Assyrian Empire, based in the northern part of modern Iraq. In 722 B.C., the Assyrians conquered the Northern kingdom of Israel and sent the people of Israel into exile. This is the source of the story of the 10 lost tribes. From Baal to Beelzebub ●● Analyzing the worship of Baal, the patron deity of the Canaanites and the Phoenicians, leads us to a figure who is connected with the New Testament accounts: Beelzeboul. In Mark 3:22, we read, “And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, he has Beelzeboul. And by the ruler of the demons, he cast out demons.” In other words, in the New Testament, Beelzeboul is the ruler of the demons.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 114 < Lecture 17  Early Christian Apologists y They were thought to be morally reprobate, engaging in wild and illicit activities that threatened decent society. ` The charge of atheism seems especially odd today. Ancient pagans viewed matters differently. The pagan religions supported the worship of numerous gods. These gods resided in different places and had different functions. There were hundreds of gods, worshiped in innumerable ways. These gods made life possible and potentially even happy. ` Christians denied these gods. Some Christians said they didn’t exist at all. Others claimed the pagan gods were actually evil demons. The Christians were “without the gods.” That’s what the term atheist means. ` One might respond that Jews too were without the gods. But Jews were always treated as the great exception to the need to worship the gods because they had such ancient traditions. Their religious practices had been around for many centuries, long before Rome itself came on the scene, so they were essentially grandfathered in. < 114 < < 115 < Lecture 17  Early Christian Apologists ` Christians were seen as a different story. They were almost entirely former pagans who had given up their ancestral religions for one that had just appeared. ` Why would pagans care if a strange-seeming religious group was in their midst? There were many other groups, but all of them involved pagan divinities, and none of them forbade their followers from worshiping all the gods they wanted. Only the Christians did that. ` Thus, pagans sometimes considered Christians to be a problem. Any community that housed them could also be in for some dire problems. Writings ` The writings of Tertullian reveal much about pagans’ views. Tertullian was a prolific Christian writer from around 200 CE. In his book called The Apology, he summarizes the problem pagans had with the Christians, claiming that any disaster that ever happens is because the gods are punishing people for allowing Christians in their midst. ` Tertullian was not the first highly educated Christian to write defenses of the Christian view in light of these kinds of attacks. The first surviving apology comes to us from a Christian intellectual named Justin from Rome in 150 CE, more commonly called Justin Martyr. ` Some 30 years later came an apology by Athenagoras of Athens. After another stretch, Origen of Alexandria produced one, and there were a number of other authors in between. Defenses ` These apologists and others like them were both distressed and incensed that they were being called atheists. Their view is one that will resonate with many people today. y They insisted that Christians alone were the only people who were not atheists. They believed in the one true God—the God who created the world. The other gods simply didn’t exist or were demonic forces.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  into his colony, because it went against the core principle of the trustees: “to relieve the distressed.” Instead of offering a sanctuary for honest laborers, Georgia would become an oppressive regime, promoting “the misery of thousands in Africa” by permitting a “free people” to be “sold into perpetual Slavery.” 48 He had written similarly about English sailors back in 1728. Strange though it might seem to us, Oglethorpe’s argument against slavery was drawn from his understanding of the abuse sailors faced as a distinct class. In the eighteenth century, seamen were imagined as a people naturally “bred” for a life at sea, whose very constitution was amenable to a hard life in the British navy. In his tract protesting the abuse of sailors, the more enlightened Oglethorpe rejected claims that men were born to such an exploited station. For him, seamen literally functioned as “slaves,” deprived of the liberties granted to freeborn Britons. As poor men, they were dragged off the streets by press gangs, thrown into prison ships, and sold into the navy. Poorly fed, grossly underpaid, and treated as “captives,” they were a brutalized class of laborers, and in every way coerced. 49 According to Georgians who petitioned for slaves, Negroes were “bred up” for hard labor in the same way as sailors. Africans would survive in damp, noxious swamps as well as in the sweltering heat. They were cheap to feed and clothe. A meager subsistence diet of water, corn, and potatoes was thought adequate to keep them alive and active. One outfit and a single pair of shoes would last an entire year. White indentured servants were fundamentally different. They demanded English dress for every season. They expected meat, bread, and beer on the table, and if denied this rich diet felt languid and feeble and would refuse to work. If forced to labor as hard as African slaves through the grueling summer months, or so the petitioners claimed, white servants would run away from Georgia as if escaping a “charnel house” (a repository for rotting corpses). Proslavery Georgians were not above accusing Oglethorpe of running a prison colony. 50 Oglethorpe was unmoved by their demands. Just as he had earlier called press gangs “little tyrants” with “great sticks” when they forcibly turned poor men into sailors, he now charged that the Georgians who fled to South Carolina preferred “whipping Negroes” to regular work. Oglethorpe pointed to those settlers who were not afraid of labor, who knew how to “subsist comfortably” without clamoring for slaves. They were the Scottish Highlanders and German settlers who had petitioned the trustees to keep slavery out of the colony. Oglethorpe felt that these folks were hardier and their predisposition to work was

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  New initiates were “smothered in attention.”340 Many contributed substantially to their guru’s cash revenue, often paying as much as [$625.00] a month into his personal bank account. Detective Giles told reporters, “When he was first charged the movement managed to put up his [$468,300.00] bail incredibly quickly.”341 One die-hard devotee even testified in his defense at trial despite the fact that her parents strongly opposed the guru and had cooperated with the prosecution.342 After appearing in court as a witness for the prosecution, one of Michael Lyons’s victims told the press, “It was an incredibly liberating experience. Looking at him in court I felt disgusted by him. I can’t believe that a master manipulator like him walked the streets for so long and I’m just glad that he will no longer be able to take advantage of other vulnerable people.” 2012—Faith Healing Deaths During 2012 there were multiple criminal convictions in the United States tied to the deaths of minor children due to medical neglect. This focused public attention on the faith healing beliefs of certain small religious groups and somewhat larger but not widely known churches. In May 2012 Jacqueline Crank and her “spiritual father,” Ariel Ben Sherman, were found guilty of misdemeanor neglect resulting from the 2002 death of Crank’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Jessica. Under Sherman’s influence Crank decided not to pursue medical treatment for a growing tumor in her daughter’s shoulder. By the time authorities intervened, it was too late to help the girl. The conviction of the pair occurred only after years of legal wrangling and proceedings in the state of Tennessee. Tennessee law allows parents to choose between faith and medicine, even in a medical emergency. The law, however, states that their faith must be a “recognized church or denomination.”343 Apparently Crank’s mentor, Sherman, didn’t meet this criterion. Instead, he led a very small group that included the Cranks and about six other members. They lived together in a six-bedroom house. After their conviction Crank and Sherman were sentenced to probation, but despite this they both promised to appeal the court decision.344 Ariel Ben Sherman had a history of legal troubles. The itinerant preacher previously led a religious commune in Oregon during the 1980s. He was charged in Oregon with five counts of child abuse but fled prosecution.345 Susan Grady of Oklahoma didn’t find refuge in any special provision under the law as Jacqueline Crank did. In 1983 the Oklahoma state legislature specifically ended the use of religious faith as a defense in the event of a child’s death due to medical neglect.346 In May 2012 Grady was found guilty of second-degree manslaughter in the death of her son, Aaron. The nine-year-old boy died in 2009 of complications from diabetes. Grady is a member of a controversial religious group known as the General Assembly Church of the First Born. The group has a long history of legal problems due to its beliefs about modern medicine. Susan Grady didn’t receive probation.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  was still in England as war approached) for a copy of Oliver Goldsmith’s History of Earth and Animated Nature (1774). Goldsmith, Franklin, and Paine all embraced the popular science of natural history, which divided the continents into distinct breeds or races of people. 44 On this basis, Paine pursued two powerful arguments about breeding. One highlighted the notion that Britain’s monarchy was rooted in antiquated thinking and political superstition. The other aimed to prove that Americans were a distinct people, a lineage based not on superstition but on science. The widely regarded theories of Linnaeus (1707–78) and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88), which influenced Goldsmith’s treatise, divided the world into varieties and races shaped by the environment unique to each major continent. The Swedish botanist Carl von Linné, better known to history as Linnaeus, organized all of plant and animal life, and divided Homo sapiens, the word he coined for humans, into four varieties. The European type he said was sanguine, brawny, acute, and inventive; the American Indian he deemed choleric and obstinate, yet free; the Asian was melancholic and greedy; and the African was crafty, indolent, and negligent. This grand (and ethnocentric) taxonomy served Paine’s purpose in justifying the American Revolution. To “begin the world over again,” Americans of English and European descent had to be a new race in the making—perhaps a better one—as they laid claim to North America. 45 In Paine’s simple formulation, breeding was either conditioned by nature or it was corrupted through superstition. The first possibility allowed a people’s fullest potential to be unleashed, while the latter only reduced their ability to grow and improve themselves. Again, he was not alone in equating monarchy with bad breeding. Paine echoed another of Franklin’s friends, the Unitarian cleric and scientist Joseph Priestley, who argued in 1774 that British subjects were comparable to the “livestock on a farm,” being passively transferred from “one worn out royal line to another.” Even more telling, a newspaper article published in both London and Philadelphia in 1774 pointed out that the worship of kings was “absurd and unnatural” and defied “common sense.” This unnamed writer sarcastically contended that “simpering Lords” in England would worship a goose if it had been endowed with all the royal trappings. The line that would have caught Paine’s eye was this: that kings were “made to propagate, to supply the state with an hereditary succession of the breed .” 46 But there was nothing sacred about a royal breed. Blind allegiance to what enlightened critics had reduced to a barnyard custom exposed how an intelligent, civilized people might lose their grip on reality. The natural order was greatly

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  A psychiatrist talked to those of us assembled about how to prepare for the surgery, how to deal with food once our stomachs became the size of a thumb, how to accept that the “normal people” (his words, not mine) in our lives might try to sabotage our weight loss because they were invested in the idea of us as fat people. We learned how our bodies would be nutrient-deprived for the rest of our lives, how we would never be able to eat or drink within half an hour of doing one or the other. Our hair would thin, maybe fall out. Our bodies could be prone to dumping syndrome, a condition whose name doesn’t require a great deal of imagination to decipher. And of course, there were the surgical risks. We could die on the operating table or succumb to infection in the days following the procedure. It was a good news/bad news scenario. Bad news: our lives and bodies would never be the same (if we even survived the surgery). Good news: we would be thin. We would lose 75 percent of our excess weight within the first year. We would become next to normal. What those doctors offered was so tempting, so seductive: this notion that we could fall asleep for a few hours, and within a year of waking up, most of our problems would be solved, at least according to the medical establishment. That is, of course, if we continued to delude ourselves that our bodies were our biggest problem. After the presentation there was a question-and-answer session. I had neither questions nor answers, but the woman to my right, the woman who clearly did not need to be there because she was no more than forty or so pounds overweight, dominated the session, asking intimate, personal questions that broke my heart. As she interrogated the doctors, her husband sat next to her, smirking. It became clear why she was there. It was all about him and how he saw her body. There is nothing sadder, I thought, choosing to ignore why I was sitting in that same room, choosing to ignore that there were a great many people in my own life who saw my body before they ever saw or considered me.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  land. A long tenure on the council ensured that he acquired the most fertile land, conveniently situated along major trade routes. By 1760, only 5 percent of white Georgians owned even a single slave, while a handful of families possessed them in the hundreds. Jonathan Bryan was the perfect embodiment of the “Slave Merchants” who Oglethorpe had warned would dominate the colony. 59 Oglethorpe’s ideas did not entirely disappear. Both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson agreed that slaveowning corrupted whites. The idea of promoting a free white labor buffer zone went into Jefferson’s draft of what became the Northwest Ordinance (1787), a blueprint for the admission of new states to the Union. Franklin and Jefferson were equally passionate about mobilizing the forces of reproduction. They saw population growth as a sign of national strength. Slavery, too, was to be measured as a numbers game. As Reverend Bolzius had observed, if slaves were encouraged to “breed like animals,” then poor whites could not reproduce at the same rate and hold on to their land or their freedom. It was already apparent that slavery and class identity were intertwined. Oglethorpe had connected free labor to the idea of a vital, secure, (re)productive society. Free white laborers, while adding to the military strength of a colony, could not compete economically with a class of land-engrossing slaveholders. What had been considered “peculiar” about Georgia—the banning of slavery— would ironically come to mean the precise opposite when in the nineteenth century slavery became the “peculiar institution” of the American South. All the while, the deeply ingrained English disgust for idleness persisted. The rural poor, though seen as a liability, became an unbanishable part of the American experience. Not only did free laborers exist in contrast to imported African slaves, but they also stood apart from useless white lubbers. Land was the principal source of wealth, and remained the true measure of liberty and civic worth. Hereditary titles may have gradually disappeared, but large land grants and land titles remained central to the American system of privilege. When it came to common impressions of the despised lower class, the New World was not new at all. CHAPTER THREE Benjamin Franklin’s American Breed L The Demographics of Mediocrity Can it be a Crime (in the Nature of Things I mean) to add to the Number of the King’s Subjects, in a new Country that really wants People? —Benjamin Franklin, “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker” (1747) ike every educated Englishman, Benjamin Franklin was obsessed with idleness. In his Poor Richard’s

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Call it a collective yearning, a simultaneous rush of welt-schmerz, a sense of general exhaustion with the rigors of traditional fine-dining-style service, or simply a growing realization that the previously de rigeur features of the high-end dining room are too damned expensive to be practical; but thankfully, more and more culinary gurus appear to harbor similar instincts and are moving away from the idea that good food has to be served in hushed temples of gastronomy. Some of the world's best chefs, if not always entirely abandoning the churchlike atmosphere of the Michelin-starred dining room are, at the very least, successfully exploring other options. I think it's a long overdue development. Opening up more accessible, less formal, fashionably downscale outlets than their signature mothership operations(s) is, of course, nothing new. Alain Ducasse spawned his Spoons for a presumably less moneyed, more on-the-go crowd looking to suck up a little reflected glory with their bento boxes. Charlie Trotter's Trotter To Go enabled those who felt they weren't paying enough for a potato to fulfill their dreams of haute takeout. And Wolfgang Puck famously embraced the Beast entirely, opening a vast empire of airport pizza joints. Jean Georges Vongerichten, while maintaining the impeccable JeanGeorges mothership, has frenetically (and usually successfully) flirted with a variety of dining styles and themes—everything from family-style Chinese eaten at communal tables to Singaporean street food—without noticeably diminishing the "brand." Even Thomas Keller has opened a (nonetheless Keller-ized) bistro in the heart of ugly-shorts capitalist darkness, Las Vegas. But the most radical moves have been taken by chefs as far apart geographically as Paris, New York, Chicago, and Montreal, chef-operators as different in temperament and training as any could be. What seems to unite them is their willingness—nay, eagerness—to dispense almost entirely with all they deem unnecessary to the service of highest-quality food: the extensive glassware, the tablecloths, the expensive silver and floral arrangements, even the table itself. In this bold new vision of the way it could—and perhaps should—be, the finest ingredients, prepared by the very best chefs and cooks, are served over a counter, diner style. It's a revolutionary shift, or more accurately, a reactionary one. Not so much about what chefs want to do as much as about all the things they don't want to do anymore. And the change from black-and-white-penguin-suited tableside service to counter service looks to be an almost entirely chef-led trend, reflective of what chefs themselves like to eat in their few hours away from their own kitchens and, as significantly, where they are eating.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  In an oversaturated media marketplace, attention is the most prized currency. The best way for porn to capture and keep its share is to perpetually up the ante on aggressive and cruel acts—face fucking! Bukkake! Stealth “creampie”!—none of which are likely to result in orgasm for most women. Quite the opposite: some recent porn trends are so physically demanding that female performers later require surgery to repair prolapsed vaginal walls or anuses (there is little regard for women’s safety on set, and certainly no worker’s comp or disability pay). Porn is also pushed to extremes by conventional media, which has become ever more explicit in its own quest to lure viewers. Even so, most heterosexual porn still centers on “the big six”: digital stimulation of the vagina by a partner, self-stimulation (by either sex), fellatio, cunnilingus, and coitus. Those acts tend to appear together, according to Bryant Paul, an associate professor of media psychology at Indiana University who studies the impact of porn. So if you see one in a clip, you’re likely to see them all. But “the big six” also often cluster with certain, harsher acts: men spitting on women, “facial abuse” oral sex, anal sex. What’s more, specific behaviors don’t tell the whole story. Pornhub’s front page features the most popular videos in a viewer’s home country; in the United States (the world’s biggest consumer of adult content) that means an array of pseudo-incest porn (stepmothers, stepsiblings, teenage “besties” who have sex with each other’s “dads”). Even if the sex itself is fairly routine, the taboo that it flirts with to amp up arousal—the fantasy it promotes, reinforces, and possibly normalizes—is not.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  4This book, Hunger, is a book about living in the world when you are not a few or even forty pounds overweight. This is a book about living in the world when you are three or four hundred pounds overweight, when you are not obese or morbidly obese but super morbidly obese according to your body mass index, or BMI. “BMI” is a term that sounds so technical and inhumane that I am always eager to disregard the measure. Nonetheless, it is a term, and a measure, that allows the medical establishment to try and bring a sense of discipline to undisciplined bodies. One’s BMI is one’s weight, in kilograms, divided by the square of one’s height in meters. Math is hard. There are various markers that then define the amount of unruliness a human body might carry. If your BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9, you are “normal.” If your BMI is 25 or higher, you are overweight. If your BMI is 30 or higher, you are obese, and if your BMI is higher than 40, you are morbidly obese, and if the measure is higher than 50, you are super morbidly obese. My BMI is higher than 50. In truth, many medical designations are arbitrary. It is worth noting that in 1998, medical professionals, under the direction of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, lowered the BMI threshold for “normal” bodies to below 25 and, in doing so, doubled the number of obese Americans. One of their reasons for lowering the cutoff: “A round number like 25 would be easy for people to remember.” These terms themselves are somewhat horrifying. “Obese” is an unpleasant word from the Latin obesus, meaning “having eaten until fat,” which is, in a literal sense, fair enough. But when people use the word “obese,” they aren’t merely being literal. They are offering forth an accusation. It is strange, and perhaps sad, that medical doctors came up with this terminology when they are charged with first doing no harm. The modifier “morbidly” makes the fat body a death sentence when such is not the case. The term “morbid obesity” frames fat people like we are the walking dead, and the medical establishment treats us accordingly. The cultural measure for obesity often seems to be anyone who appears to be larger than a size 6, or anyone whose body doesn’t naturally cater to the male gaze, or anyone with cellulite on her thighs.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Because unanimity was required to impose a capital sentence, Dan’s life was spared. According to the jury foreman, one of the jurors who balked at executing Dan was a woman whom he had manipulated through “eye-contact, smiles, and other charismatic, non verbal attachments and psycho-sexual seduction,” causing her to ignore both the evidence and the instructions provided by the judge. The foreman, aghast that Dan had thereby avoided a death sentence, was furious. Dan says that he, too, “was a little disappointed that I wasn’t executed, in a strange sense.” Addressing the convicted prisoner with undisguised scorn, Judge Bullock reminded Dan that it was “man’s law, which you disdain, that saved your life.” Then, his disgust getting the better of him, he added, “In my twelve years as a judge, I have never presided over a trial of such a cruel, heinous, pointless and senseless a crime as the murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty. Nor have I seen an accused who had so little remorse or feeling.” This admonishment came from the same hardened judge who, in 1976, had presided over the notorious, history-making trial of Gary Mark Gilmore for the unprovoked murders of two young Mormons. * After telling the 1985 court that the jury had been unable to agree on a sentence of death, Judge Bullock turned to Dan and said, “I mean to see that every minute of [your] life is spent behind the bars of the Utah State Prison and I so order.” He sentenced Dan to two life terms. Ron’s trial began almost four months later, in April 1985, after a battery of psychiatrists and psychologists had determined that he was mentally competent. His court-appointed attorneys hoped to get the murder charges reduced to manslaughter by arguing that Ron was suffering from mental illness when he and Dan murdered Brenda Lafferty and her baby, but Ron refused to allow them to mount such a defense. “It seems it would be an admission of guilt,” he told Judge Bullock. “I’m not prepared to do that.” Ron was convicted of first-degree murder, and on this occasion the jury did not balk at imposing capital punishment. They sentenced him to die, either by lethal injection or four bullets through the heart at close range. Ron chose the latter. On January 15, 1985, immediately after Judge Bullock decreed that the remainder of Dan Lafferty’s life would unfold in captivity, he was taken to the state prison at Point of the Mountain, near Draper, Utah, where a corrections officer cut his hair and sheared off his whiskers. That was nearly seventeen years ago, and Dan hasn’t shaved or cut his hair since. His beard, wrapped with rubber bands into a stiff gray cable, now descends to his belly. His hair has gone white and fans across the back of his orange prison jumpsuit. Although he is fifty-four years old and crow’s-feet furrow the corners of his eyes, there is something unmistakably boyish about his countenance.

• From Banned Books

  9. Artistry, Morality, and Nabokov’s Lolita OVERVIEW OF LOLITA Lolita is an elegant trickster of a narrative . It opens with a foreword, written by a fictitious editor named John Ray, Jr ., Ph .D . Already, in this foreward, you can see Nabokov poking fun at academic pretension and false humility . Ray justifies his dubious decision to edit the novel by saying it should serve as a moral lesson for future generations . Again, Nabokov is having fun here, tweaking conventional expectations about “uplift and edification” that middlebrow readers might expect from books . However, Ray informs, no lessons will be offered in the pages that follow, only questions and deep moral complexities . Soon enough, Humbert is introduced—a self-aware, lively, erudite, droll, and deeply unreliable narrator . Through Humbert’s eyes, you glimpse Lolita herself . It’s one of the most memorable opening passages in all of literature . Here’s Humbert speaking: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee- ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. As readers quickly discover, when Humbert first glimpsed Lolita, she was 12; he was 36 or 37 . Humbert goes on to recall his childhood on the Riviera, where he met his first love, Annabel Leigh . Here, Nabokov is referencing the poem by Edgar Allan Poe—another older man who was sexually involved with a young girl: Poe was 27 when he married his 13-year- old cousin, Virginia Clemm . Humbert says he and Annabel Leigh never had a chance to become lovers since she died young . EDGAR ALLAN POE 69

• From Banned Books

  9. Artistry, Morality, and Nabokov’s Lolita Thus, forever after, he remains obsessed with young girls, whom he calls “nymphets .” This is one of the many words Nabokov makes up throughout the novel that have become part of our lexicon . Humbert eventually marries, divorces, and moves to America . There, he is a fish out of water in what he sees as the wasteland of post-World War II American suburbia . Renting a room in the house of a widow named Charlotte Haze, Humbert is transfixed by his first sight of Charlotte’s 12-year-old daughter, Dolores—or, as Humbert calls her, “Lolita .” Conniving Humbert marries the eager widow Charlotte to have access to her daughter . Soon thereafter, Humbert makes plans to kill Charlotte to get her out of the way— but no need . One day, Charlotte discovers evidence of Humbert’s obsession with her adolescent daughter . In a blind fury, Charlotte dashes out of the house, is hit by a car, and dies . Dolores, or Lolita, becomes the ward of her predatory stepfather, Humbert . Humbert picks up Lolita from her summer camp and breaks the news to her of her mother’s death . They spend a night together in a motel, and—according to Humbert—the 12-year-old Lolita seduces him . Repulsive as this plotline is, there’s also an undeniably farcical element to the way fate works in Humbert’s favor in part 1 of the novel . Since Humbert is the most entertaining and witty character in the novel—and the narrator— it’s hard for a reader to resist his charm . Perhaps some people’s unease with Lolita lies in their awareness that they’re enjoying it too much . In part 2 of the novel, Humbert takes Lolita on a yearlong on-the-road odyssey across the United States . This is where all Nabokov’s scribbled observations about crummy motels and flora and fauna come in handy . Throughout this excursion, Humbert repeatedly rapes Lolita . Humbert doesn’t call his violations of Lolita rape, but sometimes her voice breaks free of Humbert’s narration . For example, Humbert comments that Lolita sobs at night and quotes her as telling him in the car that she “could not sit, said I had torn something inside her .” Eventually, Humbert obtains a teaching position and Lolita enrolls in the local high school . As she begins to pull away, taking part in a school play and other peer-group activities, Humbert becomes more unhinged . He whisks her off on another road trip . On their last excursion, Lolita falls ill and enters a hospital . There, she vanishes, leaving with another man the nurses refer 70

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  makers that the Caribbean islands should not be the preferred colonial model. Franklin deplored the racial imbalance in the West Indies, which kept the population of laboring whites at artificially low numbers. Slaveowners, who didn’t perform their own labor, suffered from physical defects: they were “enfeebled, and therefore not so generally prolific.” In short, he concluded that slavery made Englishmen idle and impotent. 12 Franklin also believed that slavery taught children the wrong lessons: “White Children become proud, disgusted with Labour, and being educated in Idleness, are rendered unfit to get a Living by Industry.” His words here echoed what William Byrd had written about poor whites in Virginia. Byrd admitted to the Georgia trustees in 1726 that poor white laboring men learned to despise labor, and would rather steal than work in the fields. Franklin changed the above equation: slavery corrupted all white men, rich and poor alike. On a larger scale than Oglethorpe, Franklin was fashioning a free-labor zone for the northern colonies. The magic elixir to achieve his idealized British America was, in a word, breeding. In his imagination, a continental expanse populated by fertile settlers would create a more stable society. Children would replace indentured servants and slaves as laborers, mirroring the system of labor that Oglethorpe had tried but failed to permanently institute in Georgia. Franklin expanded his theory amid global war and shifting boundaries on the North American continent. By 1760, he was writing in support of Britain’s claim to Canada, eager to add that large territory to the empire after the British victory over France in the Seven Years’ War. British colonists would fill up the land, and the majority would remain a “middling population” happily engaged in agriculture. Unlike the structurally imbalanced sugar islands, North America’s desirable “mediocrity of fortunes” would lead the growing population to rely heavily on the consumption of British-made goods. This was a win-win situation for British merchants and American colonists, because population growth would at the same time augment commerce and manufacturing back in England. Not afraid of hyperbole, Franklin offered a warning to Parliament if it tried to hem in the colonial population. By refusing to add Canada, the highest legislative authority would be no better than a cruel midwife stifling the birth of every third or fourth child in North America. 13 Franklin’s theory of breeding would remain a staple of American exceptionalism for centuries to come. He provided three irresistible arguments. First, he promised that class stability accompanied western migration. Second, he reasoned that the dispersal of people would reduce class conflict and

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  When he was arrested in Reno in August 1984, he told the arresting officers, “You think I have committed a crime of homicide, but I have not.” He still insists that he is innocent of any crime but, paradoxically, does not deny that he killed Brenda and Erica. When asked to explain how both these apparently contradictory statements can be true, he says, “I was doing God’s will, which is not a crime.” Lafferty isn’t reticent about describing exactly what happened on July 24, 1984. He says that shortly after noon, he, Ron, and the two drifters who had been traveling with them, Ricky Knapp and Chip Carnes, drove to the apartment of his youngest brother, Allen, in American Fork, twenty minutes down the interstate from where he is now imprisoned. Inside the brick duplex he found his fifteen-month-old niece, Erica, standing in her crib, smiling up at him. “I spoke to her for a minute,” Lafferty recalls. “I told her, ‘I’m not sure what this is all about, but apparently it’s God’s will that you leave this world; perhaps we can talk about it later.’ ” And then he ended her life with a ten-inch boning knife. After dispatching Erica, he calmly walked into the kitchen and used the same knife to kill the baby’s mother. Now, seventeen years after committing these two murders, he insists, very convincingly, that he has never felt any regret for the deed, or shame. Like his older brother, Ron, Dan Lafferty was brought up as a pious Mormon. “I’ve always been interested in God and the Kingdom of God,” he says. “It’s been the center of my focus since I was a young child.” And he is certain God intended for him to kill Brenda and Erica Lafferty: “It was like someone had taken me by the hand that day and led me comfortably through everything that happened. Ron had received a revelation from God that these lives were to be taken. I was the one who was supposed to do it. And if God wants something to be done, it will be done. You don’t want to offend Him by refusing to do His work.” These murders are shocking for a host of reasons, but no aspect of the crimes is more disturbing than Lafferty’s complete and determined absence of remorse. How could an apparently sane, avowedly pious man kill a blameless woman and her baby so viciously, without the barest flicker of emotion? Whence did he derive the moral justification? What filled him with such certitude? Any attempt to answer such questions must plumb those murky sectors of the heart and head that prompt most of us to believe in God—and compel an impassioned few, predictably, to carry that irrational belief to its logical end. There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  “They’re coming after us again,” he complains, “and they’re even using the same language.” But there is a documented pattern of sexual abuse in Colorado City that severely undermines Mayor Barlow’s attempt to frame the issue as one of religious persecution. In April 2002, for instance, the mayor’s own son and namesake, Dan Barlow Jr., was charged with molesting five of his daughters over a period of many years. The town closed ranks around him, and his father, the mayor, went before the court and pleaded for leniency. In the end, four of the daughters refused to testify against Barlow. He got off with a suspended sentence after agreeing to sign a statement that said, “I made a mistake. I want to make it right. I am so sorry. I want to be a good person. I have raised a good family, been a good father. I love them all, a fatherly love.” “Nobody who knows anything about this religion is surprised Dan didn’t go to jail,” says Debbie Palmer, a former member of the Canadian branch of the religion, barely able to contain her disgust. “Do you have any idea what kind of pressure those poor Barlow girls must have been under not to testify against their father, the mayor’s son? I’m sure the prophet told them that if they said one word, they were going straight to hell. When I was abused by prominent members of the religion, that’s what I was told, every time.” Folks in Colorado City pay little heed to such blasphemous talk from the likes of Palmer. They’re convinced that Satan, along with nefarious Gentiles and apostates who’ve fallen under his influence, are wholly to blame for the town’s problems. “Satan has been jealous of God since day one,” a young, bright-eyed, very devoted member of the priesthood explains after first looking nervously up and down the dry bed of Short Creek, then looking up and down the wash once more, to make sure nobody is around to see him talking to a Gentile writer. “Satan wants to rule. He doesn’t want God to rule, so he tricks weak people into apostatizing and going over to the other side.” This young man, along with most of the other residents of Colorado City, believes that in very short order the world will be thoroughly cleansed of Satan’s minions—apostates, mainline Mormons, and Gentile writers alike—because the prophet has told him so many times in the past few years. In the late 1990s, as the new millennium approached, Uncle Rulon assured his followers that they would soon be “lifted up” to the Celestial Kingdom, while “pestilence, hail, famine, and earthquake” would sweep the wicked (i.e., everyone else) from the face of the earth. Fearing that single women would be left behind to perish in the apocalypse because they had not yet been given the opportunity to live the Principle, the prophet married off a spate of teenage girls to older, already married men.