Participation Ratio
On soccer referees, peer review, admissions criteria, fairness and community care
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PARTICIPATION RATIO*
Soccer is extremely popular in Croatia – it’s the “most important unimportant thing” to the nation – and most Croats have some sort of working knowledge of how a soccer match works. They know who the players you’re supposed to watch for are, and what sort of mistakes the referees are most likely to make. My father is no exception. There’s family lore about how he missed an important goal in a national team match while checking up on my brother while he was a toddler in 1996 and I still vividly remember the amount of yelling, cheering and cursing he engaged in in 1998 when Croatia won the bronze in the World Cup. I also watched a lot of soccer with my dad as a child. My favorite parts of these father-daughter afternoons in front of the TV where the pre-game and after-game shows where experts broke it all down, almost as if a soccer game was something you could engineer. One segment, in particular, was my favorite: Eagle Eye or, in Croatian, Oko Sokolovo.
In this segment a celebrated soccer referee would examine instances in which referees of various European soccer matches that week may have made the wrong call. The camera would zoom-in onto a foot crossing a line or the soccer ball hitting someone’s arm and the ref-turned-host would say “clearly the player in blue held his arm too far away from his body, but the 4th referee simply could not see as his view was blocked by the player in red” or “clearly, this was a mistake by the referee, this was absolutely on off-side and the goal should have been annulled”. The other host, a sports journalist, would lean in and somberly nod his head before pulling up another segment. Off-sides were a particularly sore spot as the referees seemed to call them incorrectly often and the fans seemed to get beyond enraged every time this happened. Even when I was in middle school, there were already conversations about soccer automating some of the refereeing process like some other sports had. Some experts wanted to introduce extra cameras, replays, and let robots make more accurate calls than humans. This was always controversial, and many soccer fans prided themselves on the game being fast and undiluted by real-time revision or machines. Even if that meant predictable mistakes and predictable conflicts with referees.
The author Michael Lewis, of the Moneyball and the Big Short fame, recently came out with the second season of his podcast Against the Rules which devoted its original run to diving deep into referees and refereeing in all facets of life. I remember thinking the show was quite good, not unexpectedly as Lewis has repeatedly proven himself to be a compelling storyteller. When my husband, who had not listened to the show when it was originally released, played a few episodes I found that I remembered more of the discussion of basketball referees than, for instance, that concerning authenticators of fine art. And I immediately thought about Oko Sokolovo.
In the pilot for the first season, Lewis says: “What’s happened to our idea of fairness? Here’s what I think: we still need referees, someone to make the call, someone to protects us when life’s unfair.” The way I think about authority and power, and especially the power to decide what is and isn’t unfair, has changed for me over the years. Lewis’s tagline therefore also made me rethink why I liked a segment about soccer referees refereeing other soccer referees all those years ago. I think I liked the “gotcha!” of it and the assertion that there are rules that apply to everyone, including those that enforce them. I think I liked the notion that folks that tell you what to do can in fact grow too big for their own good and get checked by an even higher power. At the same time, I am skeptical of the word “fairness”, or at least of the imagining of it where it is something that is enforced. Does the referee get to decide what counts as unfair and what protection means? Certainly, the rules they enforce were shaped by someone else and reflect one variety of fairness that may or may not work for everyone. As a child, I did like how meta Oko Sokolovo was. It laid bare the rules and norms that are the foundation of soccer as a game, which is a distinct from soccer as a national pastime. However, I definitely also liked the part of it that spoke to my ego – the expert, the one who has the proverbial eye as sharp as the eagle’s, could become an aspiration and someone I identified. The segment was built around the premise that he was absolutely, undoubtedly correct and I wanted to be that correct, and that righteous too.
Suggestively, in Croatian we use the same word to mean both “referee” and” judge”.
***
One of my very favorite anecdotes about the history of refereeing is the famous story of Einstein going through peer review at The Physical Review in 1936. He and his collaborator Nathan Rosen submitted a paper on gravitational waves that had some controversial conclusions, and the editor, John Tate, sent it out for an external opinion. Einstein was incredibly offended! He told Tate that he was withdrawing the paper because he had not authorized Tate to send it to anyone else before it was published.
If we think about Einstein’s past publishing experience, though, his shock makes sense. He was used to the German system in which editors like Max Planck evaluated and chose papers themselves. Also, Einstein’s previous submission to Physical Review had not been refereed — not every paper was sent out for referee opinions, only the ones that seemed controversial or possibly questionable. So the story really highlights the fact that peer review is not this unchanging part of science that everyone has agreed on since the seventeenth century.
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Though my participation in the world of sports never extended past long-distance running events in track and field and running on the cross-country team in high school, where rules are typically broken only rarely, I still spent a better part of the past decade dealing with referees. Admissions committees for colleges and doctoral programs alike are a type of referee. As an academic with ambitions towards an academic future I was also exposed to a non-trivial amount of refereeing after I was given a green light from those first two groups. To be valued as an academic, you have to publish research papers and to publish research papers you have to go through peer review i.e. you have to be heavily refereed.
Peer review, much like the scientific method, is a part the academic ecosystem that has been given so much value and lip service that it is taken to be a magic-like ingredient necessary for doing capital-G Good science. A research paper that does not appear in a peer reviewed journal is by default of suspicious value. A researcher that does not get their work published in peer reviewed journals is not one that gets acknowledged as true expert. Sure, your research may seem good and meaningful, but unless your peers get to examine it, judge it, analyze it and then discuss it, how do we know that you are not in some way biased or sloppy? Data gets cherry-picked, studies don’t replicate, results get falsified and conclusions get post-hoc-ed. To protect against that, we need referees.
No matter how reasonable this all sounds, research often shows that peer review just doesn’t work all that well. Studies in psychology and biomedical fields have repeatedly found that referees can be more sensitive to the name of the university attached to a paper they are evaluating than its content. Research trying to show that refereeing increases the quality of journals that employ it is often inconclusive. To an extent, this should not be shocking: referees are not paid for their work, they are often not trained for it in any systematic way, and the consequence of being a bad referee is simply not being asked to referee again (as opposed being provided with better guidelines etc.) Refereeing is unpaid labor that is seen as service to the science community. As such it can often end up being pushed onto more junior members of a scientific field. They are the ones that have to be proving themselves in every way possible anyway so their time is as constrained as their ability to refuse a service task. This aspect of how peer review is currently done i.e. the volunteerism part of it, certainly contributes to some of its shortcomings. The fact that many referees seem to use one’s institutional affiliation as a shorthand for quality or trustworthiness, for example, is then likely as often an indicator of overwork and time and attention shortages as it is of elitism or malice.
Moreover, peer review is often not just about correctness or fairness, but rather about allocating prestige. This is where scientific referees differ the most soccer referees: a soccer ref can make a mistake after something happens during the match (a foul, an off-side, an out) and triggers the need for a rule to be enforced, but a peer reviewer decides whether you even get to play in the match at all. Peer reviewers rarely advise against publication of research papers because they are incorrect or awfully written. Most of the time, they reject papers because though they are valid and by all means Good science, they are just no relevant or punchy enough for the journal at hand. Over the last few decades, journals have been receiving more and more submission and becoming more and more selective. They refined and heightened their standards because they now have more studies and experiments to choose from and they only want those with most impact. The referees are then really judging that potential impact, the theorized number of future citations. They are not just providing a check on the quality of data or clarity of the author’s presentation. Ironically, this is in part how incorrect papers get through and result in retractions and scandals – they are often among the punchiest.
***
We need to adjust our expectations about what peer review does. Right now, many people think peer review means, "This paper is great and trustworthy!" In reality, it should mean something like, "A few scientists have looked at this paper and didn't find anything wrong with it, but that doesn't mean you should take it as gospel. Only time will tell."
Let’s stop pretending peer review works by Julia Belluz and Steven Hoffman in Vox
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Publication related prestige is an ego boost for any researcher, but they also need it out of more pragmatic concerns. If you publish in high impact journals you are more likely to be awarded grants for future research because past record of meaningful work (according to past referees) is taken as a strong predictor of more future meaningful work (according to future referees). The more times you go through this process, the more your grants and publications buy you freedom to try out not just the studies that are hot right now, but also those odd ones that you just happen to care about. If you have a hard time being funded, you orient and re-orient your research in ways that will help acquire more funding. In this way, publishing, peer-review and grant-awarding criteria all conspire to essentially tell you what to do.
Often, academic scientists pitch their profession as “you can work on whatever you want to work on”. They often enthusiastically present it as some sort of an idealized curiosity utopia. This can sound intellectually fruitful and freeing to those that are just starting out in science, but they usually very quickly learn that none of that is actually true. Every graduate student that has spent their Ph.D. teaching to pay the bills because their advisor could not get enough grants to subsidize their research work knows this extremely well. There is a sense of scarcity in academic science, both in terms of how many really important publications there can be and how much money can be allotted to research. Peer review is part of what keeps that scarcity alive.
I was surprised to learn that peer review only really took off in the second half of the twentieth century, but the fact that for a long time the editor of a journal was the only ref plays into the prestige story almost too nicely. Historically, science and scientific experiments have been a privilege of the rich. They were the only ones that could afford the time and the materials. Their peers and their editors were of similar backgrounds thus forming a rather homogenous group of folks judging each other. While feuds and disagreements between Enlightenment era thinkers and scientists have in some instances become legendary, they were still disagreements between people that were in many ways alike and agreed on what the criteria for what is worthwhile should be. They were mostly rich white men that disagreed on things in categories that rich white men care about, using language that rich white men understand, and using criteria that rich white men think are fitting. (I think of this every time I am writing a response to a referee report and reach for a phrase such as “We thank the referee for enhancing our manuscript by pointing out this point of ambiguity” or some similarly Newtonian platitude.) The legacy of that is still part of the peer review process the same way it is the legacy of the science community’s striving for “objectivity” and “meritocracy”. In neither of these cases do we often enough stop to ask whether the people who made up these concepts, or brought them to the fore, may have influenced how they’re perceived and used today.
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“In our society we put a huge premium on the kinds of analytical problems the GRE measures. So if you’re a good abstract analytical thinker, you’ll do well on these tests,” says Robert J. Sternberg, a cognitive psychologist and professor of human development at Cornell University. “The GRE is like taking a cancer test that was invented in the 1940s, though. Most of us wouldn’t have confidence in the results from a cancer test developed then. We have more knowledge and a far better understanding of intelligence and ability now.” Some students simply don’t achieve stellar GRE results although they may be intelligent and exceptionally capable, says Sternberg, who has studied both intelligence and college admissions for more than three decades.
The Problem with the GRE by Victoria Clayton in The Atlantic
***
As academic institutions in the United States are increasingly grappling with the national conversation about racism and ant-Blackness, some scientists are starting to ask those questions about another celebrated refereeing tool: the Graduate Record Examinations or the GRE. The GRE is a standardized test that costs over 200$ to take and even more to report, as a part of a post-graduate program application packet, to every institution a person may be applying to. I am choosing to introduce the GRE this way rather than saying that it is supposed to evaluate one’s skill and knowledge and predict their success in graduate school, because from the jump the fact that this test costs money is a non-trivial hurdle to many aspiring academics. However, GRE scores have also been shown to not predict PhD completion rate or any sort of robust success metric and to especially “unpredict” the performance of traditionally underrepresented students. Findings along these lines for the physics GRE subject test have been so recent that they are certainly hard to ignore. In other words, even if you can afford to take and report the GRE, it will not reflect the passion and grit that made you find a way to do so and might not even accurately reflect your skills.
The defenders of the GRE argue that it should not be overvalued by admissions committees, therefore shifting the blame on committee members who are often professors that have not in any way been trained to referee applications. While both anecdotal and more systematic evidence confirms that some professors conflate the GRE with some sort of an intelligence score, it seems even more important to ask why this is the number we settled on and why are the skills it purports to measure the important ones? Quantitative reasoning or verbal ability as measured by the GRE are rather narrowly defined and presented in a very cumbersome and fast-paced format. Much like the most real-world-oblivious notion of objectivity, the GRE’s idea of, for instance, mathematical proficiency conflates understanding how some calculation should be executed with solving a problem very quickly. Folks that might be good problem solvers but happen to be slow or anxious basically don’t stand a chance to prove their quantitative reasoning skills within the confines of the GRE.
Not surprisingly, the best way to improve your GRE score is to pay for a preparatory course or hire a tutor. They can teach you pattern recognition tricks and help you train your test-taking reflexes. Some former academics, maybe even some people like me, build their whole careers on exactly this type of teaching. There is for sure a value to recognizing patterns, sorting problems into categories, and having quick recall when a person is actively doing research. But most of research success actually happens in the exact opposite modality of taking a standardized test – most of the time you are really slow, really careful, really confused and confronted with something that requires perseverance, creativity and lateral thinking. The GRE is not designed to test for these things. Admissions referees that like to use it as a tool are then rather explicitly saying that they don’t really care about those things either. This type of referring is probably really not about fairness all that much either.
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Photo: announcement from the University of Pennsylvania Philosophy Department concerning their GRE requirements
***
In sports, it may still be possible to argue that the referees are addressing the question of who is correct and what is fair, but in many other areas where we conceive of referees in the same way, the question they are answering is that of who is worthy or deserving. Worth is a loaded term and one that is both hard, and in many ways insulting, to measure when it comes to discussing people. The recent attempt from the government to highly restrict the rights of International students studying at American colleges and universities is a good example of how pervasive this type of thinking is. Many of the immediate arguments for these restrictions to not be put in place relied on enumerating how much economic and intellectual good International students contribute to institutions that sponsor their student visas. Their worth was enumerated, catalogued and presented as evidence. Commenters on Twitter were quick to point out that the force that was put behind this particular anti-government push was far greater than when students that were being targeted by the same arm of the law were undocumented or recipients of DACA. It is hard to fight the urge to be cynical and argue that the numbers for these latter groups just did not add up to a sufficient wort when translated into dollar signs.
Ironically, if these arguments could be pushed to their most offensive, most crude extreme maybe there would be less room for bias as immigrants and underrepresented people are often shown to invent more, to create more and to overall contribute to their institutions in positive ways. But even in this dystopia where something like actuarial science has become perfect and we can tell how productive in the most capitalistic of terms someone can be, that number-like measure would probably not force us into a “real” meritocracy. Social science research has shown that in evaluating potential employees or students, those that are acting as judges or referees can emphasize different criteria for different people in ways that reinforce their bias. This is the story of identical resumes with different names, reading as more female or more Black than male or white, being judged differently. It is also the story of choosing to emphasize a criterion that disqualifies a candidate that does not look like you when all other things are being held equal. And it is a story of inflexibility in judgement and not wanting to give someone a chance, unless the ref sees themselves in the person that could benefit from that, no matter how tiny, leap of faith.
In between being admitted to graduate school six years ago and being rejected for a number of postdoctoral positions well in the double digits, these issues did not weigh on me much except in one conversation I had with a newly hired researcher in my department. A member of a group that is traditionally severely underrepresented in physics themselves, they laid it out very clearly: the more senior you become in academia the more important it becomes whether your superiors see you as the kind of person that deserves success. To be more blunt, to graduate college you really only need to get passing grades in enough courses, but to complete a PhD it is up to a professor (or a few professors) to judge that you and your work deserve it.
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A similar experiment conducted by Hodson, Dovidio, and Gaertner (2002) replicated similar findings in college admission decisions. Participants were separated into two groups depending on whether they scored high or low on a self-report measure of racial prejudice. They were then asked to evaluate a group of students for college admission. The students had either high SAT scores and strong high school grades or only strong scores in one of the two categories. As expected, there was no bias in admission decisions when the student had strong grades combined with high SAT scores. The bias revealed itself only when students were only strong in one of these areas. In these cases, substantially more black students were rejected. Even more convincingly, prejudiced participants inconsistently reported to place more value on the particular score that the black students performed poorly in. When black students had moderate SAT scores, this was cited as a reason for their denial whereas when they had moderate grades and a higher SAT score, prejudiced participants reversed their values to support their discriminatory behavior.
***
Last year, my husband fell into fantasy football. We started having a lot of conversations about football. I don’t actually understand this sport at all, but I liked hearing about his strategizing and seeing him try to break it all down, analyze it and make calls that feel informed and rational-ish. I haven’t really watched sports by myself for years; thinking of them as games and systems of rules appeals to me more than anything that actually happens on the field. If I invested time into learning the rules of the football in some detail, I’d probably enjoy doing some armchair refereeing at home, the kind that my dad expressed through curses and grunts when I was growing up.
Regardless of the armchair referee in many of us, not everyone choses to be one professionally. In sports, those who do end up working towards their game of choice being more fair. The rest of us may think that we escaped that fairness responsibility by pursuing some other profession. That thought more and more strikes me as false. Part of it is surely due to my academic background. My work has been peer reviewed, I have served as a journal referee when asked and I have also seen faculty members serve on various search, hiring and admissions committees without being given any training on how to actually do that well. In this way, referring and faulty refereeing in particular are just top of mind for me. But if refereeing is truly about ensuring fairness then we all partake in it almost constantly regardless of what we do for a living. When we are out with friends, or in with family, and someone says something offensive isn’t deciding how much of a hard time you do or do not give them a little bit like being a referee? When a politician is creepy, but their policies are some semblance of good, isn’t deciding whether or not you give them your vote a little bit like being a referee? When a company whose products you like puts out an empty statement then contradicts it in its hiring practices, isn’t deciding whether you still want to give them your money a little bit like being a referee?
I am discomforted by the idea that we need referees because we need someone to protect us from unfairness. This way of thinking about fairness centers an individual and their individual judgement rather than diffusing the idea of fairness throughout their community. Ensuring fairness, protecting each other when life is unfair, should be part of practicing community care. If everyone recognized that they have a say in what is considered to be fair and worked internally to parse through their own idea of fairness, maybe we would not need to funnel all of our hopes for being protected against unfairness into some near-mythical referee figure. Thinking about everyone as something of a ref in their own right takes care of the power imbalances hard-coded in the fact that someone has to decide who gets to be a referee and tell them how to be one. Thinking about everyone taking part in refereeing also has potential for moving our rules closer to ones that silence fewer voices that may have historically been treated unfairly.
In science, some strides towards this have already been done with projects such as pre-print archives where academics can share their work with their whole community before it gets sent to one or two referees picked by a journal. Some argue that the process should continue to involve more and more layers of community engagement with and feedback on the paper manuscript both before and after it is published. In any case, in addition to suggesting that reviewers be paid for their labor which is in itself a more inclusive policy, most ideas about making peer review better involve reframing it as a community project instead of betting on a few select scientists at a time. The same spirit could help improve admissions processes, not just by not requiring the GRE anymore but by more generally designing the criteria with more than one type of community member, and more than one type of success, in mind. The qualities that tests like the GRE make admissions committees think are important are tailored with one type of person in mind. Often this is due to a simple historical reason: that type of person was the first to tailor the criteria to begin with. More inclusivity and more of an opening up of the process to everyone with stakes in it, for participation or just evaluation, could make it better and more fair.
There are a lot of big ideas about fairness and justice that are being challenged in the United States right now, and alternative structures and ways of being are being presented to anyone who has even an iota of energy for looking for them. The conversation about policing is one that has gotten the most attention. Here, community action has most often been proposed as a way to reimagine the status quo as well. It is not so much that communities of the future could be policing themselves in the carceral, punitive, violent way we associate with the word today, as they could build new kinds of networks and mechanisms for supporting and transforming those that are being punished or violent in today’s framework. Policing as we know it rarely asks why someone is doing what they are doing or what factors may have contributed to them doing so. A more community-based approach could ask all of those questions and address them from different angles while also working to restore trust that has been broken or heal hurt that has been endured. I’ve been really challenged and inspired by thought surrounding abolition and restorative justice. I have also been confronted by the deep seatedness of carceral logic within me when I realized that it never occurred to me to put together the somewhat simple “if the underlying cause of people doing X bad thing is Y, then let’s just work together to eliminate Y”. I am trying to find other places within me where the same harmful instinct guides my judgement. In that spirit, what I may like to see happen to our idea of fairness is this: let’s dissolve the referee and work together to have fairness emerge instead of unfairness having to be rectified by some select few.
Best,
Karmela
* The participation ratio is a measure of localization for quantum mechanical wavefunctions. Consider a chain of equally spaced atoms. A de-localized wavefunction is like a wave that extends throughout the length of the chain so there’s roughly the same amount of it associated with each atom. The participation ratio for such a system is approximately equal to the number of atoms in the system. The delocalized state corresponds to a state that can conduct electricity in an electronic system – the electrons described by the extended wavefunction are sort of everywhere. A localized wavefunction is, in contrast, shaped like a single peak at one or two atoms. The state it describes does not conduct as all electrons are stuck where these peaks are. In this case, the participation ratio is some small number, typically close to the inverse of the total number of atoms. Measuring or calculating the participation ratio can then be used to diagnose when some system behaves like a conductor or an insulator. For instance, in an experiment or a numerical simulation a physicist may keep changing some system parameter and recalculating the participation ratio at each parameter value to identify the exact point at which the system undergoes a conductor-to-insulator transition.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING I wrote a short note about ultracold atoms in space for Massive Science and a guest blog post about student organizing and sustaining student advocacy for Science on a Postcard. I also wrote about a diversity and inclusivity event that the American Physical Society hosted at the end of June and that attracted an unprecedentedly large audience among physicists for my website. I’d love it if you checked out any of these and shared them on social media if you find them interesting in any way.
LEARNING July 15th was the official end-date for the research position I held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, soon to be my alma matter. If graduate school was basically over for me when I defended my doctoral dissertation in February, now it is really, really over.
Psychologically, I have not been able to make that transition yet. That hectic graduate school feeling, the anxiety of always feeling like you should be working on something, always pushing yourself more, always trying to live up to being independent and a self-starter (as everyone points out you should strive to be from day one) is still at the core of how I feel and what I worry about. This is probably why I have been unable to say no to old obligations. I am still Zooming with collaborators and still helping facilitate meetings for my research group. I am still agreeing to Saturday afternoon due dates for bits and pieces of work that feel like they are still my responsibility; “first author” still reigns supreme over “person who wants to have a free Saturday”.
However, I have also very recently received a very attractive job offer and have happily accepted it. If finalizing my employment over the coming days goes well, this will put me on a more tangible future timeline than any I have been able to imagine in the past five months. Having been a foreign person in the United States for a long time, I am unnaturally weary of paperwork so I will probably not believe this new job is now my new job until I have at least a few copies of my contract firmly in my hands. But I am trying to learn to relax into this new reality, one in which I will distinctly not be a student anymore, as much as I can.
A few of my recent writing project may see the light of day soon, and I just finished drafting a thorough response to referee reports for a paper I have co-authored. It has been over a year since I had to write one of these responses, and I quickly remembered how much I dislike platitudes that they require even though I could be convinced that debating details of science can be kind of fun sometimes. I am really hoping that the second round of refereeing will be less labor-intensive. My husband and I will also take a trip to Illinois to pack up all of my belongings and execute something like a cross-country move soon. Putting it all together, my schedule going forward is not exactly leisurely. Regardless, I am flirting with the idea of actually taking some time off, maybe not even running or doing basement-floor crunches or being yelled at by overly enthusiastic Peloton instructors, and just staying in bed to read Alexander Chee and Hanif Abdurraqib and watch 90s X-Men cartoons on Disney+. In twelve years of living by myself and fending for myself overwhelmingly by myself as well, I never really learned how to just be without a big, looming project in the back of my mind or a scary deadline on the horizon. Right about now may be a particularly opportune moment to figure that out. I hope next week, in this space, I’ll have something to write about learning to be just a little more lazy, and a little more quick to convince myself that things will actually be some semblance of ok.
LISTENING This episode of 99% Invisible on the history of emergency medical services and the profession of paramedics. Turns out that the first EMTs were mostly Black, started as a community project, and had their work hindered by local police. It struck me as one of those histories that have been forgotten by the larger society, but that are impossible to ignore once you do learn them.
Call Your Girlfriend on friendships and how to maintain and cultivate them. Hosts Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow have over the years built up their brand and podcast on being “long distance besties”. They are basically best friends as a profession as much as they are journalists and now that they have written a book about it, they are taking an even deeper dive into what that relationships has really been like. I did not think I would enjoy the episodes that are really book promotion in a new form, but the conversations about their friendship have proven to be insightful, poignant and fairly generalizable so far. Though I very much believe that friendships are underrated compared to more explicitly romantic relationships, and that we don’t make the same amount of investment in them because of that, I have historically been quite unsuccessful when it comes to both making new friends and keeping friendships going for more than a few years. Sow and Friedman discussing their book pivoting from being a celebration of (female) friendship to working through the challenges in their relationship really spoke to me as a consequence.
READING The poem Underground King by Derrick Harriell, where he writes:
“in snow / do you know what it is to track
oneself / it requires divine patience / just when
you think you’ve found your target
it moves / the way a sober shadow might /
the way an almost granted wish does / the way
a badger moves once the last person on earth
places her head to the pillow / it peeks
above ground to let the bobcats know.
it isn’t dead”
Poet Caroline Randall Williams writing in the New York Times about the way in which origin stories of many Black bodies in America carry within them the violence of the racist past. This is a really powerful and blunt piece, making the more abstract conversations of the past few months, some of which have certainly slid too much into punditry and performance, more tangible and more viscerally painful. William writes:
“What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?”
Enzo Silon Surin’s poem When Night Fills with Premature Exits further reflects on Black bodies and Black futures. The whole poem worked so well for me that I could not pick out just a few lines, so here it is in its entirety:
“Is there a place where black me can go
to be beautiful? Is there light there? Touch?
Is there comfort or room to raise their black
sons as anything other than a future asterisk,
at risk to be asteroid or rogue planet but not
comet – to be studded with awe and clamor
and admired for radial trajectories across
a dark sky made of asphalt and moonshine
to be celebs and deemed a magnificent sight?”
This issue of John Paul Brammer’s advice column Hola Papi about being scared to learn new things and finding value in your own art besides competition with other artists. He writes
“But what I’ve learned is that I’m not in competition with other people in that way. I am on a mission to become myself, the most me that I can be, and as my abilities improve, the shapes in my head respond, change, and what I’m left with isn’t something that can easily be compared to anyone else. It’s an entirely unique articulation of me, of the things in my head.
My advice is to push other people out of your mind. Don’t think of it as a contest. I think of it more like prayer, or like dutifully nurturing a plant. It’s a quiet, personal act of devotion, one that can bring clarity of mind.”
This infographic on non-binary genders as Non Binary People’s Day was earlier this week.
WATCHING On the TV front, we finished the third season of Dark and the last few episodes did not change my mind about this show being if not bad then absolutely lost in the idea of what it was trying to be.
As a change of pace, we decided to pick up watching Hannibal next. I remember this show being really popular among friends I had in college that were invested in cultivating some edginess, I remember all the Tumblr fan content that was produced while the show was ongoing, and both my partner and I have been meaning to watch it ever since it was featured on Supercontext. Actually watching it now, I am surprised by how dated it feels even though it is only five years old. I don’t mean to say that the story hasn’t aged well, the books and films centering Dr. Lecter that it shares a universe with are even older after all, but the look and technical aspects of the series do not have the prestige TV sheen and intensity that I am certain they would have were it to be made right now. As it is, Hannibal reads as a gory procedural, almost a second or third cousin to the X-Files (Gillian Anderson cameos included, playing a character that has so far been an average of Dana Scully and Jean Milburn put together). It hits some police procedural beats a touch too hard, and the sheer amount of gore it displays with fairly gleeful creativity is really quite something (how long can it keep raising the bloody stakes at this rate?), but because it is not singularly focused on delivering some grand statement about crime or mental health, I haven’t been too bothered by it. We’ve made it through fourteen or fifteen episodes so far and the main characters grew on me enough that I want to keep watching. They have also been written and played compellingly enough for my motivation for sticking with the show to be more about the various fraught friendships than the mechanisms of the titular cannibal’s inevitable demise. And I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I am at least mildly interested in both Hannibal’s culinary prowess and what must be remarkable time management skills that allow for murder, cooking, a psychiatric practice and a very generous open door policy for the troubles of all of his friends.
We watched a fairly random assortment of movies over the past week or so, starting with Bad Education on Hulu. This film turned out to be a very different than what either of us expected from hearing it mentioned in passing on podcasts, and a much more interesting one. Maybe it says something about us that we expected a gut-wrenching story about emotional or gender-based abuse (or worse) and were instead delighted to find that it is a story about good old embezzling. One thing Bad Education certainly does is make a fairly simple and slow story pull you in very quickly and keep your attention focused. The biggest draw of Bad Education are the great performances by Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney as the film’s two protagonists, and also the film’s two biggest villains. They play into Long Island tropes beautifully while also bringing their own complexities to the crooked yet affective school administrators they are portraying. The movie also resonated with me as someone who has spent a lot of time working and participating in education – often it is argued that it is reasonable for university presidents and similar personnel to be paid so much more than an average professor (and ridiculously much more than teaching or non-tenure-track faculty) because they bring prestige and success to the university as a whole at a much larger scale. Jackman’s character is the perfect embodiment of this sentiment pushed to the extreme. He embezzles exactly to invest in himself, the face and leader of an unusually successful school district, but in the shallowest of ways as he finances facelifts and younger boyfriends with the stolen money. In this way, Bad Education is not only an exploration of how abuse of power happens, gets justified, and trickles down, but also an inadvertent satire about the many downfalls of treating educational institutions as businesses. While I did like this film a lot, I do have one concerns that is hard to let go off – the main villain of Bad Education is queer and not only are they queer but they’re a cheating queer, a vain queer and a secretive queer. That particular fact (with the caveat that the film is based on a true story), unlike many others about Bad Education, just plays into one stereotype too many.
In the past week or so we also checked out some classics, courtesy of my public library card coming with a Kanopy account attached. First, we watched Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ and then Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder. I always feel fairly unqualified to comment on films that have historical acclaim and a place in the overall pantheon of movie-making art, but both of these were certainly compelling watching experiences.
One of the Kanopy users commented that the amount of yelling, cross-talk and the long parade of side-characters made them think that 8 ½ must have been a big influence on last year’s, very different though quite amazing, Uncut Gems. I was surprised by how correct they were concerning the chaotic and unsettling, uneven feeling that 8 ½ is bursting at the seams with. Famously a film about creative block and artistic failings, it is rife with anxiety and manic soul-searching, down to the scene in which the protagonists fantasizes shooting himself in the head. Viewed through 2020 glasses, this film is also about the harm of traditional and rigid masculinity and limitations and confines of art that male creators produce when they cannot step away from that masculinity. Their consequent inclination is to see women as either their curses or their saviors and those mythologized feminine figures start to haunt their creative projects. Needless to say, the whole thing is also worth watching just to see how surreal authors were ready to get in 1963 and how many movies this work has inspired later on (like the dance scene in Pulp Fiction).
Dial M for Murder is more straightforward in its structure and plot. While the rhythm and the subject matter of its story are not necessarily relaxing, watching it also felt more familiar. If TV shows and movies today teach you how to watch them if you follow along for long enough then movies like this are such an ur-text for more than one genre of crime story that you can ease into its tension and intricacies without much mental effort. And doing so is really fun. While there is an undeniable undercurrent of misogyny to this film as well, Grace Kelly is still at her best Grace Kelly and her male counterparts are really effective in their own character work. The twists are somewhat expected, maybe because they had been recycled many times later, but still enjoyable. My husband and I were trying to out-guess each other on how the story will end the whole time. Inevitably, I found myself thinking that we should maybe just commit a month or two to watching all Hitchcock all the time.
Finally, because I have been absolutely in love with the action star version of Charlize Theron ever since Atomic Blonde, we sunk two hours into Netflix’s adaptation of the graphic novel The Old Guard that she stars in. This is a film that represents many firsts for the superhero genre: it is directed by a Black woman, centers two female heroes, one of which is also Black, and delivers some unapologetically passionate and romantic scenes between two male superheroes. Given all of this, I wanted to love The Old Guard instead of simply liking it. The truth, however, is that it is still a Netflix action movie and a 2020 superhero movie and both of those are genres that come with both baggage and compulsory beats that can feel more tiring than fun. This is a dynamic movie populated with interesting characters and well-choreographed action sequences. It does serve up some memorable visuals (the titular superhero crew wields some very old-school weapons that still look very good), and both Theron (wearing outfit after outfit that I am sure I actually own) and KiKi Layne who plays her protégé, are certainly at the top of their respective games. Nevertheless, I still wanted a little less explosion, a little more conversation, and some slightly less obvious plot twists. The director of The Old Guard, Gina Prince-Bythewood, was a recent guest on The Ringer’s The Big Picture where she spoke about being inspired by superhero movies like the 2017 Logan, and I could certainly see that influence in both her film’s successes and shortcomings. At the same time, both of these movies are something different compared to many MCU or DCU franchises. They are certainly less glib and more emotionally honest, even when diluted by bombs and cartoonish villainy. The way The Old Guard ends is a clear signal that a sequel will be coming and I would lie if I said I won’t be excited to watch it, even though it didn’t blow me away as much as I was ready for.
EATING:
(1) Since our Imperfect produce box a week ago included a jar of vegan kimchi I tried to dip my toes into Korean food as well, riffing on this kimchi soondooboo chigae recipe from the Korean Vegan and trying to replicate the best part of eating in Koren restaurant i.e. all the small sides (banchan) by turning to these braised potatoes and this sesame broccoli. As a first attempt, all of these were quite good and gave me a bit of a hunger for experimenting with Korean dishes more.
(2) We spent some time in the New Jersey countryside again which meant picking up truly farm-fresh produce, so I found myself with an abundance of sweet corn and zucchini i.e. a really great incentive to come up with meals that taste like summer. I used some of the corn we bought to make a meal inspired by Indian street food, starting with corn on the cob rubbed with lime wedges and seasoned with chaat masala. I left the corns in their husks in the 400 degree oven for 20 minutes then peeled them and charred them on the griddle before adding the toppings. In addition to corn, we had a simple slice cucumber and tomato salad with chopped cilantro, scallions, a good pinch of salt and juice of a lemon, some blistered shishito peppers, and tempeh, baby potatoes and onions tossed in a curry-heavy marinade then baked until crispy.
(3, 5) My husband defended his PhD a little over a week ago so to celebrate I made a vegan cinnamon roll cake. I used this recipe but divided the dough into only four rather large rolls which I then arranged very snuggly into a cake pan. During their second rise and baking they more or less melded together so I could serve them as one structure. I tipped them out of the cake pan onto a plate upside down (bottom of the pan facing the eater) so that all the caramelized, gooey and sticky cinnamon, sugar and vegan butter mixture would be on top. Drizzled with a tangy cashew cream (soaked cashews blended with powdered sugar, lemon zest, apple cider vinegar and almond milk for an imitation of a more traditional cream cheese frosting) and cut into wedges which revealed folds, nooks and crags filled with cinnamon in-between pillowy patches of yeasted dough, this was one of those cakes where the joy-to-effort ratio is really, really high.
(4) On the savory side of things, I attempted some Jamaican jerk soy curls and cauliflower based on this recipe and liked them quite a bit even though I misjudged the spiciness of the peppers we had at home and ended up with a sweeter jerk sauce than was probably optimal. We had it with rice and a lime-dressed mango, cucumber and tomato salad which provided a nice refreshing off-set.
(6) This baking project was hard to top but I found the ultimate banana bread from Smitten Kitchen (veganized with a flax egg – one tablespoon of ground flaxseeds mixed with three tablespoons of warm water then left to gel – in place of each egg) to be true to its name and probably the best I ever made. I noticed that the same website features an ultimate zucchini bread recipe as well, so now I have at least on more bake solidly on my to-do list.
(7) Over the weekend, I orchestrated a family pizza night, resorting to my favorite overnight pizza dough and making four small pies topped with different combinations of thinly sliced yellow squash, fresh basil, baby bella mushrooms, kalamata olives, parmesan and mozzarella or cashew basil cream. The reviews were raving, and I was pleased that my usual pizza practices (extremely warm oven, preheated baking sheets, short baking time, from-scratch red sauce) paid off once again.
(8) While in New Jersey, I made a corn soup that we topped with sweet, salty, smoky baked tofu, roasted pepitas and a spicy cilantro cashew lemon drizzle. Here, I used a trick I learned from Alexandra’s Kitchen (who in turn learned it from Samin Nosrat’s book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat): once you cut off the corn kernels from the cob you boil them in water to get the sweetest stock that then really elevates any soup you may be saving those corn kernels for. I also used one of my go-to flavor combinations to give the cubed tofu some serious umami (the kind you might associate with smoked ham or bacon): soy sauce, maple syrup, apple cider vinegar, smoked paprika and a small pinch of black pepper.
(9) The next day, I made a black bean chili and stuffed some zucchini with it before baking the whole thing until bubbly on top and caramelized at the bottom. We had these with a spring mix and avocado salad drizzled with a lime, cumin dressing. This recipe has useful tips for any sort of a zucchini filling-and-baking project and this dressing is where I started working on mine, cutting down the amount of oil slightly and adding a sprinkle of nutritional yeast (parmesan would be nice if you are not vegan).