In this beautiful essay, Jasmine Attia recounts her experiences growing up as the American child of Egyptian immigrants as she and her mother make waraa eynab (stuffed grape leaves), a hand-made dish made with experience, tradition, and love.
But my hands must still learn what the right amount of meat feels like between my fingers. There is no recipe in my family, nothing written down, no measurements. Measurements are for the inept. This is my mother’s mantra. We, the proud women of the family, we feel and smell and taste and touch and create. We know when it is good because we know when it is good. But some of the clan is gone, and they are only echoes now. My mother and I don’t speak of the deceased, but we understand why I must be the one to roll. I am soaking in the instruction. It is a heavy responsibility.
My mother and I roll about a hundred grape leaves. They are now ready to be cooked. We lay them in a pot one layer at a time, one arranged horizontally and the next vertically. Garlic cloves are inserted throughout. A soup is made. You must put in sumac. No sumac, no waraa eynab. I understand this. My mother grabs a handful of the crimson powder, its lemony scent filling the air around us, and she drops it into the pot. The soup can’t be too loose. She stirs the unready soup with a spoon. It must be just the right thickness, and not too salty.
She shows me what is right. I must taste it to know. I must see it. I pour the soup over the precisely arranged grape leaves so that I can see just how much of them should be covered with soup. Too much soup and you get mush. Too little soup and you get cardboard. Both very bad outcomes for an Egyptian apprentice like me.
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Alexandra Kleeman covers a lot of ground in this examination of the recent remake of Dead Ringers: Comparison to David Cronenberg’s original 1988 psychological thriller, Rachel Weisz’s career, how pregnancy is portrayed in media, and reproduction in the United States. Cleverly interweaving her themes to avoid any overwhelm, this is sure to keep your attention — and make you want to watch Rachel Weisz’s stunning performance in the series.
So much of the anxiety around reproduction in the United States has to do with the contradiction of being dependent and isolated at once: dependent on a health care system that must be paid for privately; dependent on a political apparatus outside your control that can force you to give birth while denying any resources or care to the baby that is born; isolated by the moral codes and prescriptions that circulate in the media and among the people in our lives. We often approach pregnancy with a hunger for clean, clear answers — the exact week at which a pregnant body should no longer be allowed caffeine or soft cheese, or the moment at which a bundle of cells becomes a legally protected human being — but living matter resists these attempts at containment.
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Computer scientist Jaron Lanier suggests that for society to thrive in the age of artificial intelligence, data dignity — a concept under which people are paid for what they contribute to the web — is something we must carefully explore. It’s not about the robots taking over and obliterating the human race (although some think that’s going to happen!) it’s about putting people before machines, about prizing clarity of intent, purpose, and collaboration for the benefit of all.
The most pragmatic position is to think of A.I. as a tool, not a creature. My attitude doesn’t eliminate the possibility of peril: however we think about it, we can still design and operate our new tech badly, in ways that can hurt us or even lead to our extinction. Mythologizing the technology only makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well—and this kind of thinking limits our imaginations, tying them to yesterday’s dreams. We can work better under the assumption that there is no such thing as A.I. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we’ll start managing our new technology intelligently.
If the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration.
A positive spin on A.I. is that it might spell the end of this torture, if we use it well. We can now imagine a Web site that reformulates itself on the fly for someone who is color-blind, say, or a site that tailors itself to someone’s particular cognitive abilities and styles. A humanist like me wants people to have more control, rather than be overly influenced or guided by technology. Flexibility may give us back some agency.
Anything engineered—cars, bridges, buildings—can cause harm to people, and yet we have built a civilization on engineering. It’s by increasing and broadening human awareness, responsibility, and participation that we can make automation safe; conversely, if we treat our inventions as occult objects, we can hardly be good engineers. Seeing A.I. as a form of social collaboration is more actionable: it gives us access to the engine room, which is made of people.
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Music star and civil rights icon Harry Belafonte died this week at the age of 96. A decade ago, on the heels of the release of the icon’s memoir and a documentary about his seismic influence, acclaimed journalist Jeff Sharlet wrote an intimate, lyrical profile of Belafonte. It’s about his singular cultural symbolism and its complications, about witnessing the evolution of his own legacy, and about reckoning with what, in a life full of remarkable achievements, he couldn’t accomplish:
Belafonte wants to tell me about a movie he never made, probably never could have made.
Amos ’n Andy. Not like Bamboozled, Spike Lee’s postmodern riff on blackface, but Amos ’n Andy as a history of minstrelsy going back to the beginning. It was the director Robert Altman’s idea. A movie of a minstrel show. White men in blackface who mimicked every brilliant song, every joke, every true story ever told by a black woman or man: stole it all and played it again, as both tragedy and farce, tragedy because it was farce.
“It’s about the mask,” Belafonte says, speaking in the present tense like he’s talking strategy and tactics, sipping Harvey’s Bristol Cream. “It’s about how much time people spend being false, how often we façade our behavior. Nobody’s better at that than the minstrels. And in them I see all of us. Everybody’s in the minstrel show. Behind the mask, you can say and do anything. The Greeks did it. Shakespeare used it when he wrote the jester. Those he could not give the speech to, he created the jester to say it. All of America’s problems are rooted in the fact that we’re all jesters. Not one of us truth tellers. So how do you get to the truth? Well, how do Amos ’n Andy do it? What’s behind the mask?”
This: In the mimicry and the falsehood, you can still find the roots of the song. “The art for me is how do you bend it your way?”
Maybe it couldn’t be done. He told Altman, “You’re going to get us both fucking killed. Black people gonna be completely outraged. Don’t go to black people with blackface. And white people know it’s politically incorrect. There’s no audience.”
Altman said, “Except everybody.”
Belafonte’s quiet. Then: “But Altman left me here all alone.” Altman died in 2006. His last movie was A Prairie Home Companion. Belafonte shakes his head, talking to no one now. “Everybody’s in the minstrel show. Everybody’s a minstrel act.”
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In this essay for We Are the Mutants, Michael A. Gonzales describes his experiences in the ’80s as both a patron and an employee of the Tower Records on Fourth and Broadway in New York City. The details in his piece immediately transported me back to my favorite summer of my youth, in 1998, when I worked at my local Tower in San Mateo, California, alongside a bunch of cool, creative, and rebellious teens and young adults. We were all so different from each other, steeped in various musical tastes and subcultures, yet all came together inside our store to sell records, CDs, cassettes, and VHS tapes — and to talk about and share a collective passion for music.
My Tower Records experience is vastly different from Gonzales’ — famous artists and celebrities didn’t come into our store, for instance, and our Bay Area suburban strip mall location pales in comparison to the bustling, legendary location in the Village. But still, I appreciate the small moments he recounts, like his interview for the job, or running the register, or how employees raced to the stereo to change the music. I have similar fond memories from that glorious summer, when music became really important to me, and — with the encouragement of very expressive, interesting coworkers-turned-friends — when I embarked on my own journey of self-discovery.
Though I lived in Harlem and Jerry dwelled in Brooklyn, we often met in front of Tower when we planned on “hangin’ in the village.” We’d flip through racks of records for an hour or so, which was usually followed by smoking a joint in Washington Square Park while watching comedian Charlie Barnett. Back in those days, I had a bad habit of running late and, on one occasion, he befriended a guy begging for change in front of the store. An aspiring playwright, Jerry wrote a one-act about the encounter. Years later, I heard how fallen Grandmaster Flowers, a pioneering DJ from Brooklyn, used to shake his coin cup on that spot and I just knew that’s who Jerry had met. That same year I hung out with Jerry as he waited in line overnight to buy tickets for The Police’s Synchronicity Tour. That year we both worked as messengers in Manhattan, but we were ready to splurge our minimum wages on Sting.
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Twenty years ago, when I was 10, my mom died of colon cancer. That’s how I like to tell people: as quickly as possible. I say it before I know them. I say it as fast as I can, usually shoving a second topic into the same sentence. My mom died when I was 10 — what have you been reading lately? My mom died when I was 10 — do you want to order another round? I’ve said it on first dates and in job interviews. I say it as fast as I can because I can’t stand the face people make. Their eyes get a little wider, their eyebrows raise and reach toward each other, their mouths tug down just the slightest bit. They pity. Their faces say, “Oh, honey,” and I want to bolt, so I bolt past that part of the conversation. They always make the same face; I have learned how to make that face disappear as quickly as possible.
But there is another face, sometimes. I recognize other “dead mom kids” almost instantly. They don’t pity — they laugh. They raise their hand for a high five. They respond with, “Mine too!” and my whole body relaxes.
In writing, I have found more and more dead mom kids. (You’re a dead mom kid no matter how old you were when your mother died, by the way.) I was in a slam poetry club in college and performed pieces about my mom’s death, hoping that I wouldn’t have to tell all my new college friends individually. Ideally they would come to a slam and get the information they needed but they couldn’t ask any questions, and I wouldn’t be able to see their faces. But in the poetry group, I was one of many who had lost a parent. I didn’t have to talk about the loss with them — I could just talk about the writing. Years later, I attended a writing conference and read part of an essay about my mom after a poet read a dead mom poem and before a fiction writer stood up to say, “I guess I’ll do dead mom stuff, too!”
With writers, I can laugh about grief. There are so many of us, and we are so used to searching for the right words for it, a shorthand comes easily. No grief is alike — even when I meet people whose moms died when they were young, of cancer, our griefs are completely different. I have never read anything that got it exactly right, but I have read plenty that reminds me that I’m not alone. That it is, really, a club, and no matter the specifics of our loss, we all share a language.
The essays in this list attempt to answer questions or explain something about the feeling of being a dead mom kid. If you’re not in the club, may they function as an interpreter. If you are, I hope you recognize something of yourself somewhere in here. I hope you know we speak your language, too.
Too many times to count, I have been in the middle of watching a children’s movie with a friend who turns to me to say, “I never noticed how often the mom dies in these movies!” Perhaps they only noticed because they’re next to me. I never notice it; I just expect it. I anticipate it so well that if I’m in a movie theater, I try to spot the other members of the club: who drops their M&Ms, who carefully searches for the perfect kernel of popcorn for as long as the mom is dying on screen. In “Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead,” Sarah Boxer deep-dives into the history of dead mom narratives. In fiction, dead moms go as far back as 9th century China. Boxer traces the dead mother plot through animated movies of the 2000s, offering a why for this constant assault of dead moms. She notices that in many of these dead mother movies, the single father becomes an almost supernaturally perfect dad, and reminds us that in 2014, only 8% of households were led by single fathers. Boxer’s analysis is wide-reaching and thorough. She treats the dead-mom-in-movies phenomenon as questionable instead of a given, a choice instead of a necessity in the genre, and flawed instead of natural.
And yet, in this medium where the creators have total control, we keep getting the same damned world—a world without mothers. Is this really the dearest wish of animation? Can mothers really be so threatening?
Our mothers are often our introduction to food: They feed us first, and they choose what kinds of food to put in front of us. Michelle Zauner explores the connection between food and grief, and how certain foods connect her to the memory of her mother. Zauner is a writer and musician who fronts Japanese Breakfast and “Crying in H Mart” is the opening essay of her 2021 memoir of the same name. Zauner is half Korean; her mother was and is her connection to her Korean identity. Food is the bridge between Zauner and her mother: “I remember the snacks Mom told me she ate when she was a kid and how I tried to imagine her at my age. I wanted to like all the things she did, to embody her completely.” Zauner captures the sometimes illogical nature of crying over loss: She can calmly describe her mother’s cancer but cries wandering the aisles of H Mart, the supermarket chain specializing in Asian foods. At H Mart, Zauner is removed from her life in Philadelphia, partially because these stores are far from city centers, but also because she is surrounded by reminders of her mother and by others searching for a reminder of people and places that are far away. She shows the power of food to connect us to the people we have lost, especially our mothers, who feed us from the start and shape our relationship to food.
H Mart is the bridge that guides me away from the memories that haunt me, of chemo head and skeletal bodies and logging milligrams of hydrocodone.
Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding into a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard wall that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.
Mothers leave notes. They leave voicemails, they slip scraps of paper into your lunchbox. When they’re gone, it seems unbelievable that their messages are gone too. My own mother tried to write me and my brother letters while she was sick, but they made her cry, and crying made her fall asleep. When Morgan Talty’s mother was alive, she recorded voicemails and wrote notes that revealed her mood, whether she was safe. He knew her by the notes she gave him. In “Messages,” Talty shows how much grief lives in the moment conversations become one-sided. He listens repeatedly to the 60 voicemails from his mother he has on his phone. He searches and searches for a final word from his mother, and then he finds it. He’s right to predict that I would be jealous of his story, but he also captures something essential about mother death: Once they’re gone, we are desperate for any trace of them at all. It seems impossible that just because they are gone, they can no longer communicate with us. Whether we find a final message or not, we search for one.
Mom could kick your ass with her words, spoken or written, but she could also heal you. I still have every letter she wrote me, and when she left this earth, I went through them all — each scrap of paper she had given to me or that I had plucked from her apartment while cleaning it with my sister — looking for something, anything, from her to tell me where she’d gone. Because she was good like that.
Meghan O’Rourke’s 2011 memoir The Long Goodbye details the death of her mother, and her subsequent realization that on a societal level, we are not equipped to properly grieve. Nothing prepares us, even when a mother is sick for a while. And then, we are on our own, with only their leftover objects to feel them close to us. O’Rourke’s essay “In My Mother’s Shoes” describes how much those objects — gifts she gave before she died, a scent she used, a scarf she wore years ago — can function as a bridge between the living and the person who is gone. Putting on her mother’s clothes is an adult game of dress-up for O’Rourke, as she simultaneously tries to wear her mother’s responsibilities, like picking up new socks when her brother forgets to pack them. She shows the weight that these objects take on once their owner is gone, and the process of deciding which objects are the ones that matter enough to keep.
If it breaks my heart that I can no longer learn about my mother’s life by asking her questions, it helps in those moments to have touchstones of hers around me, to look at, to wrap myself in. The ordinary beauty of a pair of earrings or a scarf, the utility of these things remind me of my mom, talismans that bring me real solace.
Maggie Grimason’s father died when she was 8. Years later, the news of Notre Dame burning interrupted her mother’s funeral. In Grimason’s essay “What a Ghost Sounds Like,” the fire in Paris could only be connected to her mother’s death. Notre Dame was discussed with a distinct “before” and “after,” the same absolute and irrevocable splicing of time that happens when a mother dies. Nothing could be, or sound, the same. After her father’s death, Grimason listened to a tape recording of his voice saying just one phrase. Her essay explores sounds, how sound remembered can never be exact, how the bells of Notre Dame can never sound the same again, how her father’s voice can’t be identical to that recording, or her memory of the recording. Sound is connected to the ghost she saw as a child, and to grief, and to fear. She wants to write in order to remember the people she has lost, but writing can’t help us remember what it all once sounded like.
People love to say, That’s just a coincidence. Those words try to pare down the event while simultaneously acknowledging—and brushing off—its meaning. Empty or not, the poetry of Notre Dame burning, the steeple falling—we watched it again and again.
And as I watched, heavy with the grief of losing my mother, I thought Good, or at least, That makes sense.
Claire Hodgdon is a Brooklyn-based writer and educator with an MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia University. Her work has been published in journals Pidgeonholes and HAD and nominated for a Best of the Net award. She is working on her first book, an essay collection about the aftermath of loss at a young age. Find her at www.clairehodgdon.net or on Twitter @claire_hodgdon.
Editor: Krista Stevens Copy-editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
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When politicians and media pundits talk about public safety, what do they mean? Safety for whom, and from what? Katie Prout’s essay implores readers in Chicago to see unhoused people living on the city’s trains as vulnerable members of the public, not as threats. She also urges readers to acknowledge the difference between safety and emotional comfort:
To my knowledge, no evidence exists that shows unhoused CTA riders are more likely to commit crime or exhibit “unruly behavior” (whatever that is) than their housed counterparts, and yet this narrative linking the presence of unhoused people to dangers and discomforts for housed riders has been repeated over the last couple years: “CTA is developing plans with social service agencies to address issues of mental health and homelessness that also affect safety on trains and buses,” reported WTTW after the memo’s release; “Enhance safety for riders by expanding police officer patrols with the Chicago Police Department, increase the number of security guards from 200 to 300, reintroduce canine units, target fare theft with new tall fare gates and collaborate with social services organizations for unhoused people,” reported the Sun-Times.
“[The CTA is] . . . a big, crashing mess at the moment, with the tubes filthy and stained with graffiti, elevators and escalators out of operation, cars converted into rolling homeless shelters, rules about eating and smoking seemingly forgotten, and police presence all but invisible,” wrote Crain’s Chicago Business’s Greg Hinz in 2021, with the cadence and restraint of Peter Venkman terrifying the mayor in Ghostbusters. In the accompanying photo, taken by Hinz, a Chicagoan is curled up across four seats, huddled under a dirty jacket. “People just aren’t going to ride a system that is dirty, dark and scary,” he continued. “Are you listening, Mayor Lori Lightfoot?” A quick Google search of “Chicago CTA homeless” pulls up other photos of people — asleep, unconscious, and presumably unconsenting to being the example of all that is “dirty, dark, and scary” — in stories from CBS News, ABC7, WBEZ, Medill, and the Chicago Defender, among others.
Not every person who is homeless is mentally ill or uses drugs, and having one of those traits — or all three — doesn’t make you dangerous; it makes you vulnerable. Indeed, study after study demonstrates that people without homes are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than they are to commit it.
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