The sun has returned! After being pummeled by nonstop rain, I had forgotten how delicious the New York rays are when they cut through the frigid winter. I miss Paris every day, but getting blasted by some vitamin D and squinting your way through the streets really makes up for the cold that burrows into your bones, no matter how many layers you pile on. This could also be related to our landlord turning the heat off at night but who’s to say…
A sprinkling of flakes had me hopeful on Saturday but we still haven’t had an epic snow dump. I’m hoping to recreate David Hammons’ Bliz-aard Ball Sale when that does happen.
His friend Dawoud Bey took photos of him peddling snowballs in the East Village, on an unknown date in 1983. The balls were carefully arranged by size on a rug in front of him, and these handful of photographs are all that remain of the event. His performance has now become iconic, but at the time the artist himself didn’t spent much time publicizing this particular work. It feels as ephemeral as the snowballs he was selling.
Art critic Steven Stern wrote, “Hammons’ notion of an artist includes a constant flirtation with notions of the illicit and the fraudulent – the ever-present suggestion that the whole business might be a scam. What, after all, could be more of a scam than selling snowballs in winter?”
Victory! A huge congrats to the 7,000 nurses who spent three days on the picket line at Mount Sinai Hospital and Montefiore Medical Center. Their biggest demand was safer ratios of patients to nurses, something that currently only California regulates. They have now reached a tentative agreement to not only enforce safer staffing ratios but also to improve pay and hire more nurses, thus putting an end to the strike. Even before the pandemic, nurses have emerged as leaders in the movement towards valuing care work and making it accessible to all. If we ever see a universal health care in the U.S., I believe nurses will some of the people we’ll be thanking first.
I finally watched Toni Erdmann by Maren Ade which I had had on my list since 2016 but never came around to watching till now. This German comedy is so subtle and brilliant, about an eccentric father who pays a surprise visit to his daughter in Bucharest. It never gives in to sentimentality and reminded me so much of my grandfather Louis, the original prankster. It’s also slyly political, touching on generational divides and neoliberal economic reforms in Romania. The third act is especially excellent, with a scene that had me gasping, laughing and crying simultaneously. The payoff is very much worth the 2h40 runtime.
“Why Fish Don’t Exist” by Lulu Miller is a book my sister Kira lent to me with little explanation, beyond saying it would be up my alley. It is in fact the best book I’ve read in a very long time. The premise is very much about fish and the biologist David Starr Jordan who spent his life classifying them at the turn of the 20th century. The plot twists span earthquakes, love affairs, eugenics and a Hawaiian murder plot. It also weaves in a disarmingly raw memoir and a philosophical manifesto on how to find meaning in the face of chaos. If that doesn’t sell you on it, the title absolutely delivers at a moment when you least expect it…
It turns out Stockholm Syndrome has some deeply sexist roots and is essentially a made-up pathology to discredit victims of violence. In a 1973 bank heist in Stockholm, four clerks were held hostage for six days. When the inept police botched the situation, one of the hostages, Kristin Enmark, took matters into her own hands and strategically became closer to one of the gunmen. Finally, the police teargassed the place and wanted to make a big show of the hostages’ release. Enmark was fed up with playing the victim and refused a stretcher, walking out of the bank instead.
She remained critical of the police and their psychiatrist Nils Bejerot. To shift the focus away from her criticisms, he made up the term Stockholm Syndrome and gave her the first diagnosis despite having never talked to her personally. He explained the fear she had towards the police was irrational and could only be due to the bizarre emotional attachment she had developed towards her captors. Four years later, Enmark adamantly said “Yes, I was afraid of the police; what is so strange about that? Is it strange that one is afraid of those who are all around, in parks, on roofs, behind corners, in armoured vests, helmets and weapons, ready to shoot?”
Nimmi Gowrinathan examines this myth further in her brilliant essay, showing how Stockholm Syndrome has been used to easily explain away women “navigating within the circumstances they were given and those they create.” From those abducted by Boko Haram in Nigeria to the female guerrilla fighters in Sri Lanka, it’s in fact a survival strategy in the face of violence.
Another condition we now understand as apolitical that was also created in the 1970s? The term “burnout”, which was coined by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger. He self-diagnosed himself after being unable to get out of bed, following the 16 hour days he put in at the free health clinic where he worked in New York.
Kira turned me on to this article by Bench Ansfield which shows how Freudenberger, a Holocaust survivor who moved to the U.S. as a child, internalized his own burnout as over-dedication to his work, instead of seeing that his exhaustion came from working against a for-profit healthcare system.
Freudenberger saw himself in the burnt-out buildings all around him that were themselves also the results of structural policies. An arson wave at the time had landlords voluntarily setting their buildings on fire to collect insurance, valuing money over their tenants’ access to a safe home. Devaluing basic human rights such as health care and housing was and remains the culprit over individual actions.
If you know of other psychological terms that are ripe for revision/have dubious origins, please throw them in the comments. Let us spiral down this wormhole together?
Till next time,
ASK