The Squatters of Beverly Hills

Apparently all you need is a fake piece of paper to start a new lease on life. For Curbed, Bridget Read reports on the serial scams of those connected to 1316 Beverly Grove Place in Beverly Hills, California, a mansion overrun by fraudsters determined to live the lifestyle of the rich and famous—even if they had to steal it.

“When John A. Woodward IV got the listing in September, the mansion was priced at $4.995 million. It was unfurnished, so Woodward had to borrow old photos from the former broker, but other than that, it was in good condition. He hired a pool guy and a landscaper to keep the place looking nice for tours. There were the usual showings, some offers. Then, a few weeks before he heard from the producer, Woodward got a call from the pool guy. Someone had pulled up with a U-Haul, he said. He assumed there was a new owner and was hoping they might consider keeping him on. Woodward raced over to Beverly Grove to see what he was talking about. When he got there, he found his clicker no longer opened the gate. His keys didn’t work in the front door, either. Someone had even ripped up and discarded his FOR SALE sign. When he realized he was locked out, Woodward called the police. Two beat cops showed up and went inside; when they came back out, they said the people in the mansion were claiming they had a lease. It was a civil matter now, and there was nothing they could do.”

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A Bullshit Genius

Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk was the latest and most controversial in his series of biographies, but it was also in many ways the apotheosis of Isaacson’s own evolution—or devolution, in Oscar Schwartz’s view. In this deeply satisfying critical essay in The Drift, Schwartz takes stock of Isaacson’s career both on and off the page, creating a compelling argument that mythologizing Musk has long been Isaacson’s inevitable destination.

With Franklin and Einstein, Isaacson was simply rearticulating the achievements of canonical geniuses in the vernacular of his time. Jobs represented a different challenge: because he was still alive, a case had to be made for his inclusion in Isaacson’s coterie of polymaths. Following some two years of reporting, Isaacson wrote a fluent narrative about Jobs that, at least superficially, depicted a man with two sides. Sometimes he is a brilliant, intense, eccentric creative with an uncompromising aesthetic vision. Jobs drops acid and travels to India. He takes a course in calligraphy and later uses what he learned there to help develop the Mac’s font range. He sees a Cuisinart food processor at Macy’s and has the idea to encase his computers in molded plastic. Other times, Isaacson shows Jobs as volatile and cruel. He gets his girlfriend pregnant, then denies it. He betrays old friends (including his Apple cofounder, the true engineering genius Steve Wozniak). He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. But whenever Jobs behaves badly or demands too much of his staff, or loses himself in perfectionistic pursuit of some detail, Isaacson demonstrates how the unwieldy parts of Jobs’s temperament allowed him to create world-changing products. The cruel and authoritarian impulses were established, in other words, as necessary components of his creativity. “His personality and passions and products were all interrelated,” Isaacson writes, “just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system.”

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My Never-Ending Search for Adderall

For Esquire, Jason Diamond helps us to understand what it’s like to live with ADHD and to be without Adderall—the medication that allows him to focus and function. The drug has been in short supply since the end of 2022 and Diamond set out to learn why.

My brain moves fast and I’m unable to process thoughts or emotions. Then things get backed up. Sooner or later my heart is pounding, I’m sweating, and I feel like death. That’s not a great way to live. And so, in 2018, after two decades of living without it and with a host of mixed feelings after an overprescribed childhood, I went back on medication for my ADHD. Combined with meditation, exercise, and meds for my anxiety, the Adderall I’ve been prescribed has improved my life. I read hundreds of books a year and write thousands of words every day. I’ve published two books of my own and write for myriad publications. (It is not lost on me that my chosen career is one that requires sitting still for hours and turning my thoughts into words.)

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Freedom of Sex

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu delivers a characteristically provocative essay that skewers the anti-trans movement, including people she calls trans-agnostic reactionary liberals, or TARLs. She also asserts that trans advocates could, and should, make their cause more expansive:

The TARL will typically acknowledge the existence of a group of fully developed adults whose medically verified gender dysphoria is so persistent and distressing that the argument for compassionate care outweighs the Hippocratic prohibition on harming a perfectly healthy body. The basic strategy here is to create a kind of intake form with exactly two boxes on it. Every trans-identified person is either a participant in a craze or certifiably crazy. (Checking both boxes is permitted.) There is a touch of genius to this approach. It draws a bright line between the kids who say they are trans and the kids who really are while pathologizing all of them as either delusional or dysphoric. This line is as old as gender medicine itself, which for decades was careful to distinguish impersonators and fetishists from the “true transsexual.” So in most cases of gender variance, the TARL informs parents that it is perfectly healthy for boys to wear dresses and for girls to climb trees regardless of their biological sex, which need not be altered after all. He reassures them that the risk of suicide among trans-identified youth has been inflated by cynical activists trying to blackmail the public; what he means by this is that he does not think most kids are suicidal enough to be trans. In those rare instances of true misery, he advises the practice of “watchful waiting,” preferring to see the patient through the often-irreversible changes of puberty to adulthood, when her childhood experience of gender incongruence will finally acquire the weight of medical evidence. If only she had said something sooner!

This is obviously not a vision of justice; it is a response plan for an epidemic. This should not surprise us. The very simple fact is that many people believe transgender is something no one in their right mind would ever want to be. The anti-trans bloc has in general targeted children because Americans tend to imagine children both as a font of pure, unadulterated humanity and as ignorant dependents incapable of rational thought or political agency. This has allowed the movement to infantilize not just kids but all trans people, whom it only wishes to shepherd through the ravages of mental illness and the recklessness of youth. If the liberal skeptic will not assert in mixed company that there should be fewer trans people, he still expects us to agree on basic humanitarian grounds that at least there should not be more. It is quite possible, for instance, to believe that cancer patients should have access to aggressive treatments with potentially life-altering effects while also sincerely believing that, in a perfect world, no one would have cancer.

We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex. It does not matter where this desire comes from. When the TARL insinuates again and again that the sudden increase of trans-identified youth is “unexplained,” he is trying to bait us into thinking trans rights lie just on the other side of a good explanation. But any model of where trans people “come from”—any at all—is a model that by default calls into question the care of anyone who does not meet its etiological profile. This is as true of the old psychiatric hypothesis that transsexuality resulted from in utero exposure to maternal sex hormones as it is of the well-meaning but misguided search for the genes that “cause” gender incongruence. It is most certainly true of the current model of gender identity as “consistent, insistent, and persistent,” as LGBTQ+ advocates like to say. At best, these theories give us a brief respite from the hail of delegitimizing attacks; they will never save us. We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history. This may strike you as a vertiginous task. The good news is that millions of people already believe it.

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The Gender Refugees

When the Andersons fled Iowa City in 2022, they joined a growing group of American families escaping states that have become hostile for transgender communities. How many more will there be, and what about the people who can’t leave the places they feel threatened?

According to a June 2023 polling report by the think tank Data For Progress, 8 percent of transgender adults have moved out of communities or states because of the uptick in anti-trans legislation, and another 43 percent have considered doing so. GoFundMe data provided to ELLE found a 520 percent increase from May 2022 to May 2023 in fundraisers helping transgender residents looking to relocate from the state of Florida, which has enacted six anti-LGBTQ+ bills into law in 2023, including bans on gender-affirming care.

After the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services announced in February 2022 that it would begin investigating any reported instances of transgender children receiving gender-affirming health care, which Governor Greg Abbott deemed “child abuse” in a letter to DFPS, Kimberly Shappley began to fear what would happen to her own 11-year-old transgender daughter, Kai, who went viral for protesting anti-trans legislation in Texas when she was just 10 years old. “I just kept thinking that if they take our kids, no matter how mad people are, nobody is going to be able to come help us,” Shappley says. “And if they [did] come for our kids, do I have the money that it would take to fight this in court?”

In August 2022, the family sold their home in Austin and moved to Connecticut. Kai feels much safer, but the adjustment hasn’t been easy. “We’re homesick,” Shappley says through tears. “We didn’t leave Texas because I had some great job offer. We didn’t leave Texas because we had family we wanted to be closer to. We fled the government of Texas. We are refugees in our own country.”

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Tales From an Attic

In 1995, a curator at the New York State Museum opened a door in an attic of the soon-to-close Willard Asylum for the Insane and found hundreds of suitcases. The cases once belonged to people institutionalized at Willard, and they contained books, photos, letters, and other personal items. They have since inspired a photographer, a poet, and other artists, while also raising questions about the uses and abuses of historical archives, particularly ones pertaining to medicine:

Usually, hearing of other people’s secrets and private lives held a special kind of pleasure. This, after all, is one reason why we read novels or listen to gossip: to experience an interior life other than our own. My fascination with the people who lived at Willard wasn’t without some salacious curiosity and an expectation that their lives, presumably more extreme, more vivid than mine, were worthy of art.

But from an ethical standpoint, was it right to transform into art the lives of those who suffered quietly for so many years? What was the cost to the patient when photographs were taken, poetry written, song cycles composed, magazine essays published? Was I taking narrative pleasure from Freda B.’s suffering? Or was Crispin right in his belief that the primary emotional relationship that most people feel when they look at the suitcases is empathy? And what to do with the fact that Freda B. herself had no choice in the decision to photograph her suitcase, to have her personal effects displayed for everyone to see?

Empathy was an aesthetic term before it was a psychological one. The German word Einfühlung was once used to describe the feeling of emotional resonance with a piece of art, of knowing it from within. In the early 20th century, English-speaking psychiatrists translated the word to empathy, expanding its meaning to include the sense of feeling one’s way into the experience of another. Psychologists long believed that empathy was an inborn, fixed trait. More recent research suggests that it is a competency that can be strengthened or weakened with experience or training. Meditation can increase empathy. So can reading novels.

My whole life, I’ve believed that all of us share a few essential desires, fears, and perceptual experiences of being human. Our differences, I’ve always thought, were the result of differing life circumstances, which shape our preferences, our style, and our narratives. I have persisted in this belief because it has allowed me to imagine the possibility that I could understand other people, that we could be decipherable to one another. Someone told me once that sharing your life with a partner is consolation for only being allowed to live one life. That when you know someone else intimately, when you participate in the daily joy and sadness that person feels, it is as close as you can come to living more than one life. It seems to me that we need that consolation many times over, in many forms.

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My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza

As reported in December 2023, 93 percent of Gaza residents—more than two million people—are “experiencing crisis levels of food insecurity, or worse.” In a heartbreaking essay, Mosab Abu Toha describes what that actually looks like each day for the people who remain in Gaza, including his brothers, parents, and other relatives.

Three days later, on social media, Hamza posted a photograph of what he was eating that day: a ragged brown morsel, seared black on one side and flecked with grainy bits. “This is the wondrous thing we call ‘bread’—a mixture of rabbit, donkey, and pigeon feed,” Hamza wrote in Arabic. “There is nothing good about it except that it fills our bellies. It is impossible to stuff it with other foods, or even break it except by biting down hard with one’s teeth.”

In the morning, Maram cooked tomatoes and fried some eggs. Dr. Bahaa told us that it was his first normal breakfast in months. We dipped bread and feta into the olive oil. It smelled of the trees that grew the olives, and it tasted like Gaza.

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