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National Security Archive: DON’T SHRED ON ME! USAID documents destruction breaks the law, according to National Security Archive - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-03-13T21:19:42.000Z

National Security Archive: DON’T SHRED ON ME! USAID documents destruction breaks the law, according to National Security Archive. “The email from Erica Y. Carr apparently convened remaining AID staff at the Ronald Reagan Building Tuesday morning at 9:30 a.m. to use shredding machines to get rid of classified records and personnel files, directly violating the Federal Records Act and the existing records retention schedules that protect such records.”

The post National Security Archive: DON’T SHRED ON ME! USAID documents destruction breaks the law, according to National Security Archive first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

On Troubleshooting - Cecily

2025-03-13T20:01:02.000Z

Curiositry | Autodidacts | 22nd February 2025 | U

Much of what I do, in multiple fields, could be reduced to one skill: troubleshooting.

I’ll define troubleshooting as systematically determining the cause of unwanted behaviour in a system, and fixing it.

Troubleshooting is often learned tacitly, in the process of explicitly learning “the skill”. Troubleshooting is rarely discussed as a skill unto itself. But many features of an effective approach to troubleshooting are domain-agnostic.

Realizing that I spend more time troubleshooting than I do building or doing, and that the skill of troubleshooting can be honed separately from the domain it’s applied to, I decided to try to figure out how to improve my troubleshooting skills — and as a result, my effectiveness in multiple domains.

The way I do it, troubleshooting mostly boils down to scratching my head, Googling the error message, and thinking up and testing hypotheses to narrow the search space. But I frequently catch myself making errors I have made before. So here’s what I try to remember when I’m troubleshooting, to keep myself on track and avoid dead-ends.

Step 1: step back

Troubleshooting takes a certain mind-set. It takes, as far as I can tell, an interest in the underlying structure of the system — “classical” thinking, to use Pirsig’s term — patience, attention to detail, and tenacity.

It’s sometimes more effective to approach troubleshooting slowly, thoughtfully, meditatively, even when in a hurry.

It’s easy to get lost in reactive problem whack-a-mole without stopping to think: what’s the real cause of this issue? What, exactly, is going on here?

The troubleshooter is part of the system. Hence, probe effects and the legendary heisenbug.

Make sure you’re tuning the right string

Anyone who’s played guitar for a while knows the visceral feeling of realizing they’re turning the tuner of a different string than the one they’re plucking. No wonder nothing is helping!

When trying to fix a system, before setting to work, I do something that’s guaranteed to have an effect.

If I think I know which wire to cut, I pull on it first to make sure it moves at the other end.

When I’m troubleshooting a CSS bug, I often start by setting * {color: red !important;}, so that I know the code I’m writing is in the right file, and is actually getting run!

Determine the flows

It’s easy to spend a lot of time trying to “fix” the problem. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is understanding the system, and then isolating and understanding the problem.

I usually start with how the “stuff” — electricity, water, gasoline, air, force, data, sewage, or whatever it is — flows through the system, and is transformed into different stuff in the process.

What are the inputs, outputs, and transformations? Can the different types of stuff flowing through the system be grouped into semi-distinct subsystems?

In an electrical system, it’s often helpful to physically trace the wiring. In mechanics, the same applies to pipes that carry liquid or gas, or to control cables, cams, gears, chains, and other items that conduct mechanical force. In software, trace the data. In social dynamics — good luck!

Observe the symptoms

What’s supposed to be happening here, what’s actually happening, and where do the two diverge?

If possible, I narrow down which subsystem(s) are affected based on the symptoms. If my car’s brake light isn’t working, the problem is likely electrical; if there’s an oil slick under the car, it’s probably not an electrical problem. If the engine won’t start, it could go either way, and more investigation is needed.

The belief that I understand the system is often a barrier to troubleshooting. Even if I “know the system inside out”, I’m unlikely to fully understand it. Even systems I built are composed of systems I didn’t; and even seemingly simple systems are infinitely complex. (As Carl Sagan put it: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”)

Isolate the problem

The next step is to figure out what step the subsystem is failing at.

My basic approach: “doing science” on the system.

Form a hypothesis about the problem. This can be an intuitive first impression from the symptoms, or a best guess from extended observation.
- Rule out the easiest and most likely problem areas first. Things that are meant to be serviced, have failed before, or are subject to mechanical stress. Good systems are designed to make what’s likely to break easy to service. Examples: electrical fuses & circuit breakers, belts and chains, filters, terminals and connections of all kinds, I/O devices.
- If there’s no easy way to guess which area of the system the problem lies in, perform an informal binary search.

Find the simplest way to falsify my hypothesis. Generally, this means “cutting” the system immediately upstream/downstream of where I think the problem is, and testing for functionality at the cut-points.

Disconnect the subsystem

When possible, I disconnect the subsystem I’m debugging.

This has three benefits:

It prevents weird interactions with the rest of the system from complicating the diagnosis (once I get the subsystem working on its own, I can connect it back together and see if it keeps working)
It protects the rest of the system from my stupidity
It often shortens the feedback loop

Or not

If I can’t (or don’t want to) fully disconnect the pieces, another approach is to probe — or cut and probe — at different points.

If I know or can intuit the acceptable range for the parameter in question at the test-point when the system is functioning correctly, the actual value can indicate the location of the problem.

Find good cut points

How many points can I “cut” the system at while maintaining functionality to test?

A spark plug is an example of a cut-point between subsystems.

If an engine won’t start, but I can get a spark, the problem probably isn’t in the electrical subsystem.

In additional to internal cut points, I always try to test at the interface between the system I’m responsible for and the rest of the world. This helps me figure out if “my stuff” is broken, or just getting fouled up trying to interact with “other people’s stuff” that’s broken (which it may or may not be within my power to fix). Trying to fix something that has nothing wrong with it can chew up a lot of time!

Balance getting informed, and attempting fixes

How much effort should be put into attempts to fix the problem, and how much effort should be put into getting information about the problem?

If my intuition’s right, jumping right into fixing the problem is way faster.

But if it isn’t, systematically gathering information is more efficient in the long run.

We go into troubleshooting situations with a prior about the hardness of the problem we’re facing, and this informs when we try to jump in and fix the problem, and when we try to gather more information about it.

But often our “hardness prior” is wrong. So we need to develop some kind of meta-prior about how accurate our troubleshooting hardness prior is likely to be, based on our personal tendency, and domain expertise.

Know the stakes

The stakes for troubleshooting problems can range from zero (hobby software project), to life-altering (medical diagnosis), to existential (AGI, nuclear weapons), and this should inform how the problem is approached.

So I try to ask myself:

What’s the worst thing that could happen? What are the risks if I screw up? And, what are the chances that I’ll screw up?
- Danger to troubleshooter: How dangerous is the system to work on? Is there high voltage, inflammable materials, toxic chemicals, jack-alls, or possible data loss involved?
- Danger to bystanders: Same as above, but factoring in the size of the blast radius, and the bystanders’ potential ignorance of danger and lack of safety equipment.
- Danger to system: How delicate is this system? Is it replaceable?
- Danger to others: What are the possible consequences of this system behaving unpredictably? Who is downstream from this system?
What are the comparative risks of attempting a fix, and not attempting a fix?
- If something is already dangerously broken, repairing it is comparatively safer, even if repairing it has risks of failure.
Who does the system belong to?
- Did I break this system? Am I responsible for fixing it?
- Am I getting paid to fix it? If so, what are my chances of success, failure, and catastrophic failure, and does the client know the risks? (I no longer do volunteer tech support for people who haven’t backed up their system.)
How can I reduce downside risk of this intervention?
- Generally, working more slowly and carefully (so I don’t screw up); working on a “staging” rather than “live” system; backing up the system.

Danger, in this case, has at least four components: timeframe, intensity, reach, and physicality. The most obvious dangers are immediate and physical. But as far as harm/benefit, working on critical code for a major investment bank may be in the long run as physically risky; the risk is just distributed, deferred, and invisible.

A hobby software project might have long-term upside or downside risk, but in the short term, tends to have few people downstream, who don’t rely on it, and aren’t particularly affected by it, physically or otherwise.
Car brakes are moderately dangerous to work on, but if you screw up, everyone on the highway (and everything they’re responsible for) is put at risk.
If my car has quit at dusk in a sketchy neighbourhood, jerry-rigging the battery might be safer than wandering around trying to find a hotel and a mechanic.
Making a medical diagnosis has immediate, potentially life-altering stakes for one person. Working on medical software has deferred life-altering stakes for many, many more people. Influencing foreign policy or nuclear strategy has deferred life altering stakes for some or all of the planet.

Don’t overthink it

Don’t assume it’s complicated. Just because it’s complicated to debug doesn’t mean that the cause is complicated.

But don’t assume it’s simple, either.

Be patient

Enough said.

Find information about the system.

By definition, a troubleshooter is out of their depth. Good troubleshooters have to get used to being in a state of ignorance.

What information is needed, and how to get it, varies based on the details of the system and problem.

Knowing what search engine to use for what kind of information

Sometimes (with, say, mechanics, or failing to catch fish) I need to know someone who knows how to do it, and bring them a case of beer.

Other times, I need to know how to use libraries or manuals. (Case study: the electric windows on my mother’s Subaru stopped working. Various car people tried to fix them. I checked the fuses. But she was the one who had the brilliant thought of reading the manual rather than just skimming it to find out about the fuses. The child safety lock was on.)

In the modern world, I mostly need to know how to use search engines. Different search engines are useful for different purposes, and Google no longer seems to index many niche sites.

I might need an LLM because I don’t know how to phrase my question in the right terminology, search a domain-specific forum to cut the fluff, search YouTube if it’s a physical skill that’s hard to describe verbally, or directly search the documentation/manual of the system in question.

Knowing how to narrow the search space with advanced search criteria

Though none of them are troubleshooting-specific, here are three articles to get started if you aren’t familiar with search operators:

⇒ How to find anything on the Internet (Google specific, by example)

⇒ Google Search Operators: The Complete List (44 Advanced Operators) (Google-specific, more complete, marketing focussed)

⇒ Internet Search Tips (Exhaustive, academically focussed)

Knowing how to widen the search space & tune out irrelevant information

Most systems emit information of many kinds, and of widely varying relevance.

In software logs, there are lines and lines of repetitive chatter, and then one line that tips me off. Usually, it will say “error” or “fail”, or mention the affected subsystem.

Similarly, engines make a lot of noise. Most of the noise is normal. The relevant data is what changed about the sound. When the expected noise is subtracted from total noise, what’s left? The sonic fingerprint of the problem.

Only some parts of the error message itself matter.

Most software error messages will turn up very little useful in Google if I paste them verbatim, because they include things specific to my device. I generally start with the full error message, minus obviously device-specific info. If nothing turns up, I widen my search space. I stop looking for info about the specific version. I stop looking for info about the specific hardware. I stop looking for info about the specific software, even, and then I find people in the forums who have a different laptop, running a different app, that shares the dependency that’s causing the error. Their fix might not work, but it might point me to what the problem is. Then I can get more data and repeat the process.

Learning to fish

If something needs repair, I can try to do it myself, which can be slow and inefficient. Or I can get an expert to do it, which is fast and easy. The catch with getting someone else to solve my problem: I don’t learn much.

If I have a troubleshooting problem, and I’m clueless about the domain, a highly effective approach can be to:

Find a domain expert for the type of system/problem
Rather than having them fix it for me, get them to fix it with me.

This is slower and sometimes less fun for both parties, in the short term, but a lot can be learned. And next time I might be able to do it myself.

It’s a continuum, with watching them fix it on one end, and fixing it myself while they watch on the other. The more hands-on I am, the slower and more frustrating it is for everybody — and the more I’m forced to learn.

Get information from the system

The more information I get from the system, preferably as the error is occurring, the better.

I get all the information I can from the system: more output, and more specific output, from more points in the system.

In software, that means logging, or attaching a debugger to the process while it’s running.

In electronics, the first step is usually to get a multimeter, and check for the state of the system at different points.

In mechanics, which I’m not very good at, I’ve noticed my older brother generally runs the thing with the hood open, while watching, smelling, and listening closely.

Eric Barker writes about this in relation to people in Plays Well With Others. We’re bad at reading people (even when we think we aren’t), and one of the few things that helps is to interact with the person in a way that generates more information. “Getting more information from the system” is among the few scientifically-validated methods of lie detection (liars eventually contradict themselves). Relatedly: many people can talk authoritatively on complex subjects, but two or three well-chosen questions that drill into the details can separate the real experts from those who are just repeating other’s surface-level opinions to sound impressive.

When we’re debugging ourselves, the mere act of getting information from the system (journaling) sometimes mostly fixes it.

Intuit the tolerances of the system

Sometimes, in the process of fixing things, we break stuff, accidentally or because it can’t be helped.

Different materials have different tolerances. Certain parts can incur certain kinds of damage without changing the functionality of the system. Other areas might cause the whole system to fail if they’re treated the same way.

With physical things, it takes mechanical intuition to apply the right amount of force, and understand what parts can and cannot withstand damage. A bore, or a seal, is more sensitive than the outside casing.

I recently watched (and attempted to help) my older brother rebuild a gnarly old Jabsco impeller pump: the saltwater cooling pump for a marine diesel engine.

My brother didn’t exactly know what he was doing. The pump was full of surprises. But, he managed to rebuild it.

I would have given up multiple times. Because in the process of rebuilding it, he broke it, multiple times. But the ways he broke it weren’t as important as the ways he fixed it.

The pump was press-fit together, and supposed to be worked on with a hydraulic press; but various hammers, pliers, and pieces of steel allowed him to bang it apart.

In the process:

The impeller was destroyed (probably unavoidable, because the correct tools weren’t on hand)
The cast piece around the shaft that held a pin in a slot broke in two when hammering the pump apart, or was already broken (not important, because it would still fulfil its function).
The bearing seal turned out to have been put in backwards, and was destroyed (unavoidably) when it was removed; and the rebuild kit was missing the bearing seal.
The new bearings weren’t a perfect match
The new impeller was the wrong part number, and made a pile of bronze shavings going on (discovered too late: “that’s never coming back out in one piece.”)

He didn’t know what he was doing specifically, but he knew about press-fit parts, seals, bearings, and so on. So, he could recognize function from form, and treat the system accordingly. As a result, he applied far more force than I would have been comfortable using (to the point of breaking things!), and took extra care at other points (having me polish out the burrs where the seals would be seated, checking for scratches on the inner bore, etc.)

Even though something went wrong at nearly every step of the rebuild, the pump came apart, and it went back together.

Have a good relation to the system

I’ve noticed: people who dislike their computers tend to be ineffective with computers; and people who dislike people tend not to get what they want from them, unless they’re good at hiding their feelings. It sounds wishy-washy, but I think appreciating the beauty and complexity of the system that’s misbehaving makes one a more effective troubleshooter. Treating the system as an enemy makes it one.

In my mind, an enemy is distinct from an opponent. Friendly competition with the system, trying to “beat it at the game”, doesn’t seem to impair troubleshooting. Opponents must be respected and understood to be beaten. It’s the “bad dog” stupid-computer-won’t-do-what-I-want mentality that’s to be avoided. Enemies, when hated, are stripped of their individuality, and become a caricature of themselves; and you cannot troubleshoot a caricature, because it does not map to the actual system.

Anecdotally, I know two local mechanics. One of them swears and bangs things and sometimes throws tools around. He is nicknamed “Angry [Name Redacted]”. He is the inexpensive mechanic. Another tells stories of fixing Toyotas with duct tape and women’s stockings. Everyone I know, regardless of their opinion of him, respects his skills as a mechanic. Talking to him gives the impression that he loves cars, and takes delight in working with them. He is considered the best mechanic in the area; he’s also the most expensive.

Make do with what’s available

It helps to have the correct tools to test, disassemble, repair, and reassemble the system.

In practice, it’s usually more important to be able to improvise, and find both tools and replacement parts based not on labels or preconceptions, but on underlying form.

Shorten the feedback loop

In order to fix a system, I need to be able to reproduce the problem. In order to get enough data about the cause of the problem to reproduce it reliably, I often need to run the system multiple times under different conditions. Then, once I can reproduce it, I often need to run the system a bunch more times, tweaking the parameters each time, trying to sus out what aspect of the conditions is actually triggering the problem.

Sometimes, a system will have some built-in delay or latency, making it difficult to reproduce the error without a complicated set of steps.

When this is the case, I ask, “is there any way I can shorten the feedback loop?”

In code, it might be reducing a hard-coded timeout, working on just the subcomponent (with dummy input and output), testing it locally so I’m not hitting the network, enabling hot-reloading, or automating the deployment process.

With electronics, it might be as simple as taping the multimeter to the terminals.

A somewhat pathetic example: when troubleshooting, I often find myself looking stuff up on a tiny phone with a slow connection, or going back and forth between the thing I’m fixing and the source of information about the thing I’m fixing. Propping up the manual or computer right where I’m working can be surprisingly time-saving.

Reduce noise

Before performing an intervention, I try to reduce confounding variables and “slop” in the system.

Disconnecting the subsystems helps with this, because interactions with other subsystems can confuse the results of tests.

Shortening the feedback loop can help, because a time delay gives a chance for other variables to affect the state of the system between when the input goes in and when the output comes out.

Write it down

Writers are fond of saying that “writing is thinking”. Here are two ways I use writing as a troubleshooting tool:

Rubber duck debugging like a pro: I can often solve my problem by drafting a forum post without posting it. The effort required to articulate the salient details of the system and the problem, without looking dumb, is higher than the effort I have usually put in at the point I decide I need help. Corollary: making a forum post without sounding like I haven’t done my homework also tends to put me over my time/energy budget for solving a seemingly-trivial problem.
Behold the trail of crumbs: I find that writing and diagramming, while helpful for many troubleshooting projects, are essential for multi-session troubleshooting projects. I overestimate how much I will remember about the context, as well as how soon I will get around to continuing the project. A troubleshooting notes file, no matter how obvious or incomplete the information in it seems at the time I write it, leaves a trail of crumbs that I can follow next time. (I have often repeated, verbatim, an entire troubleshooting process, found the problem — and then remembered I troubleshot the exact system, and arrived at the same conclusion, years ago; but there was some hiccup, and I failed to order or install the new part.)

Look inside black boxes by dropping weirdly-specific things into them and watching what comes out

“Disconnect the subsystem” notwithstanding, sometimes I have to troubleshoot black-box systems. One way to do so is to feed them very specific input, and watch what happens. If a system fails on certain input, it can be helpful to take one of two approaches:

Take the conditions/input that caused it to fail, remove a component of the condition/input, and feed that into the system. If it still causes the problem, remove another factor (optionally, restoring the previous factor). Repeat until all that’s left is the thing that’s really causing the problem, or as close as I can get.
Take some known-okay conditions/input. Add one factor that was present in the failure-causing input/condition. Repeat (one by one, or additively) until the system fails.

Understanding the problem

Maybe one of the widgets is fried. But why is it fried? Is it normal that widgets just fry on a Tuesday afternoon? Or, is there a short circuit, or water damage, or heat dissipation issues, or (as in a recent case), a susceptibility to getting knocked out by nearby radar?

If something isn’t supposed to fail, and it failed, there’s more to the story.

Before I put in a new part, I want to be confident it won’t suffer the same fate. Either the previous part was under spec, or something else in the system is putting it under undue strain.

Fixing the problem

A problem that is understood is already mostly solved, unless parts are hard to come by, or hard to install.

“Fixing” something is generally a synonym for “swapping out the broken component.”

How well I understand the problem and the system determines how large a piece of the system needs to be replaced. “Part swapper” is a derogatory term for a bad mechanic. Generally, the better the troubleshooter, the smaller the component replaced.

These statements might all be true:

This sound system is broken.
This MP3 player is broken.
The headphone jack on this MP3 player is broken.
The solder joint on the headphone jack of this MP3 player is broken.

I can replace the MP3 player. I can replace the headphone jack. Or, I can reflow one solder joint. The results will be the same.

Although it’s wasteful and inelegant to replace more than necessary, a good troubleshooter also needs to know when to give up on getting to the root of a problem that doesn’t really matter, and settle for a more resource-efficient band-aid solution.

Sometimes I get to the root of the problem, and sometimes I don’t.

Can troubleshooting be taught?

I’ve been working on this essay, intermittently, since May 2024. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I seem to have gotten better at troubleshooting. The biggest change is that now I bother. I take on otherwise-unappealing troubleshooting problems in order to test my theories, regardless of whether I consider them worth my time. And because of how much time I’ve spent thinking about and talking about troubleshooting, I feel like I should be some kind of local expert, and want to live up to that reputation even if it exists only in my mind.

If I had the budget, I would test this scientifically. I would recruit a bunch of people. Half of them would read this essay, and the other half would read something the same length and style that wasn’t about troubleshooting. Then, both groups would try to solve Linux server troubleshooting puzzles on a site like sadservers.com. Which group would be more effective? If the ones who read this essay did better, the experiment could be repeated in other domains, to see how well troubleshooting skills generalize. (A more entertaining and less rigorous possibility that I considered: pitching Wired magazine for a gonzo journalism story wherein I apply the advice in this essay to a bunch of troubleshooting problems in domains I’m embarrassingly clueless about.)

Conclusion

Once I get into the troubleshooting mindset, most things start to look like troubleshooting problems. This system-problem-solution way of seeing the world is effective in certain circumstances, but it’s not the only way of seeing the world, and it’s not the best approach for everything.

It saves a lot of time to realize when I’m dealing with a troubleshooting problem, and consciously troubleshoot it. But it’s equally important to realize not everything is a problem that needs a solution.

Here are some troubleshooting stories I’ve run across on the web:

Happy troubleshooting!

When I asked a Llama3 LLM to “List all spelling, grammar, and reasoning errors in this essay”, it produced a motley list of real and hallucinated errors, including “Oversimplification of complex systems (e.g., motorcycles)”, concluding:

Overall, while the essay attempts to provide some guidance on troubleshooting approaches, it is marred by numerous errors that detract from its clarity and effectiveness.

But perhaps you could help me troubleshoot this essay. Is there a key technique I’ve missed? Something I’ve included that you think is bogus? Leave a comment or send me an email.

Thanks to everyone who gave feedback on early drafts of this essay, or spent hours discussing troubleshooting with me. All errors are my own.

Special thanks to my older brothers, for granting access to the famous licorice tin of scavenged electronic components; building Van de Graaff generators, morse code telegraphs, pneumatic spitball shooters, seaweed cannons, autonomous robots, rockets, and spot welders with me; and making it possible for me to write (rather optimistically) in my journal at age ten: “Today I lerned PHP!!!”.

A Unified Theory Of The Handbag - Cecily

2025-03-13T20:01:02.000Z

Audrey Wollen | Yale Review | 11th March 2025 | U

Was an accessory the secret to evolution?

Jean-François Millet, Des glaneuses (The Gleaners), 1857. Public domain

There is a phrase to describe the ﬁrst twelve weeks of human life: “the fourth trimester.” Some mammal babies slip out of their mother’s body wrapped in their own ghost, something between alive and not—a gaunt cloud, wetting the dust. A deluge of liquid and cramped muscle, sunset-colored. Within seconds, limbs flex and cohere, the spectral casing tears (sometimes licked off by a corrugated tongue), and suddenly, slowly, there is a new creature on earth. In comparison to our fellow animals, we humans are still virtually fetal for the first few months of our lives. Always born prematurely, we depend on the parent’s body for warmth, sustenance, or any significant relocation. Our flat bones still stray, like ancient continents shuffling across cranial oceans. At birth, we can’t even lift up our own heads. We can’t look around the room, let alone lollop alongside our herd, flock, pack, or pod.

This is the price humans paid for the ability to walk on two legs, although “price” implies some conscious trade. Really, it was more like this: a small bone moved, and many lived, and many died, and then another small bone moved, and so on. Deformations repeated themselves until what was once an aberration became the norm. According to one theory of our evolutionary development, when that big toe hardened and our feet were no longer hands, the pelvis and birth canal narrowed to keep us balanced as we stood upright. Our infant heads shrank to fit through this newer, smaller opening. We became born unready, into a state of urgent needfulness. Our little thumbs couldn’t even grasp our mothers’ hairy backs; we had to be wrapped up and carried like heavy, mottled gourds, like sizable eggplants that could also scream. Scream, and learn.

The need to be carried has been used to naturalize gendered divisions of labor throughout Western culture. False histories of early human life are everywhere, spread across high-school classrooms, university departments, bestseller lists, even the familiar shorthand of “caveman” behavior in cartoons and movies. Like a nebulous fog that obscures the road ahead, these impressions merge to create a hazy wall of so-called logic, disguising hard-edged exploitation: back then, someone needed to carry the baby, and it makes sense that it would have been the body that was also in charge of feeding the baby. And if the person’s hands were busy carrying, then naturally, those that weren’t busy in such a way should have been contributing to the well-being of the group in other ways, like through hunting, protecting, discovering, inventing, adventuring, ruling. This all sounds reasonable, practically magnanimous, even communal—from each according to their ability, et cetera.

This rearrangement, or rearticulation, has implications for storytelling at large.

Could this millennia-old system of domination really have germinated in a logistical problem of infant immobility? Is the battle of the sexes simply a matter of full versus idle hands? The story goes: before any concept of “home,” mothers stayed with the baby, while fathers roamed. The idea that the need to be carried would propel the full-handed carrier forward into creative thought, use of tools, and expansive, collaborative relationships with the world around her has not been incorporated into the conventional narrative of how our families work.

There is a different story to be told, but it must be cobbled together from bits and pieces, glimpsed in the interstices between different styles of imagining: the scientific and the literary. The verifiable reality of our ancestors’ lives as they were conducted five to eight million years ago is not my strict concern, for obvious reasons. (Eight million years from now, I doubt our day-to-day will be fully conceivable to whatever life-form is looking back at us.) Widening the scope of what our origins may have been, nudging the frame a little wider to let in versions of family and self that remain forcefully excluded, seems more important. This rearrangement, or rearticulation, has implications for storytelling at large. The human infant’s need to be carried has been mythologized as the downfall of an entire gender, an unfortunate but unavoidable hampering of freedom and movement. But what if it could be restaged as the first act of object-based problem-solving? What if the first human tool wasn’t a weapon of some kind—a bashing stick or a sharpened stone—but a bag, to keep one hand free for the baby and another for the world?

By broadening our speculative past, we can revalue dependency, neediness, and the feminized labor of care as generative rather than limiting. And not only generative on the personal or aesthetic level but also dynamically constructive on the level of civilization itself. This imaginative work is deeply literal, as in the work of the autodidactic feminist anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher; I’m talking about actual bags, actual babies, actual ways of moving around, noticing, carrying, wandering, and returning. But it is also metaphorical, as manifested by Ursula K. Le Guin and Oscar Wilde: a blueprint for how we move through our own senses of personhood and what we carry with us on those journeys.

in her 1979 book, Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society, Elizabeth Fisher imagines backward, proposing a new account of human development that she calls “The Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution.” Her book, a fascinating synthesis of feminist evolutionary research, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize that year, ironically losing to Edward O. Wilson’s On Human Nature, an opposing work of sociobiology. Wilson proposed that all social behavior has a biological root, developed through natural selection; this included “a genetic bias” toward women “stay[ing] at home.” He argued that even with equal educational and professional opportunities for all genders, men “are likely to continue to play a disproportionate role in political life, business, and science.”

Wilson remains lauded as our “modern-day Darwin.” These days, Fisher is all but forgotten; her Wikipedia page is short, her 1982 New York Times obituary even shorter. One gets the feeling that if she hadn’t died by suicide at fifty-seven, her death wouldn’t have made the news at all, despite the success of Woman’s Creation only three years earlier. The amnesia seems to have been almost immediate. Her name appeared briefly in The New York Times the year before her death—in a letter to the editor regarding a review of Nancy Makepeace Tanner’s On Becoming Human that called it “the first book to marshal evidence supporting the central role of gathering and females in human evolution.” The letter, sent from a fan, was simply to remind everyone of Fisher’s existence.

Before writing Woman’s Creation, Fisher was responsible for founding, in 1969, the magazine Aphra, which is considered the first feminist literary magazine in the United States. She edited it for seven years. The acknowledgments section in Woman’s Creation is a time capsule of a wonderfully specific moment in American feminism. She credits Aphra with creating the intellectual environment that allowed her to venture into the science of early human life with zero credentials or institutional backing—she relied on “the very real lift of women helping women.” In a favorite detail of mine, she thanks Gloria Dialectic, a self-named Oklahoma social worker, who “read and criticized and discussed.” (How could Ms. Dialectic do anything but!)

Such a large undertaking—perhaps the largest there is: a new history of humankind—was experienced by Fisher as both lightning bolt and slog. In an alarmingly relatable anecdote, she reminisces: “After one visionary night, I said to myself, ‘I’ve just rewritten Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,’ which was patently untrue since at that moment I had written nothing.” It took her seven years, wading through the New York Public Library stacks and cross-referencing extant translations of ancient cuneiforms, but “later on it would be true and untrue.” Her approach was unfettered by scientific norms of both thought and style, proudly feelingful, crediting her lived experience as the source of hunches later backed with research. “There is no intelligence without feeling,” she writes. “In order to think you need to care. One may feel in negative, destructive ways, but hostile or positive, you cannot think without wanting to think, and that’s desire.”

So, it was handbags that produced the conditions for human intelligence.

In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution,” what does Fisher desire when she thinks about beginnings? She tries to correct a fundamental misunderstanding, popularized in an assortment of works, such as Richard Lee and Irven DeVore’s collection Man the Hunter in 1968 and Robert Ardrey’s The Hunting Hypothesis in 1976. Fisher writes, “The previous explanation for human evolution gave hunting as the master behavior pattern for the human species.” In the practice of hunting, men learned to observe, problem-solve, and work together, and our advanced nervous system developed through this stimulation. Motivated by hunger, early hominids also studied animals and their habits, and felt the need to communicate subtle information to each other—“the elk are on the north side of the lake today”—precipitating experimentation in language.

Gendered labor aside, I need not linger on the deep shadow cast over us if all knowledge sprang from the wish to destroy other living things. Although this consensus has since been challenged within the field of evolutionary science, it remains widely accepted in mass culture. The fossil record has created bias toward the stone tool, often a weapon, making it hard to imagine any other potential technologies. But here, standing alone next to this ideological megalith, Fisher offers us one of the most wonderful sentences ever written: “Perhaps there is an alternative: I submit woman’s invention of the carrier bag as the take-off point for the quantum advance which created the multiplier effect that led to humanity.”

So, it was handbags that produced the conditions for human intelligence. You don’t have to tell me twice—I’ve literally never believed anything faster. Still, Fisher convinces, consolidating the thoughts of contemporaries such as Tanner, Sally Slocum, and Adrienne Zihlman, all of whom were publishing disruptions of ambered patriarchal analysis in archeology and anthropology through the 1970s. Her argument is simple: fossil evidence shows that most early hominids had vegetable-majority diets with a few protein-rich exceptions, handy and hearty, like nuts, seeds, shellfish, rodents, insects, and lizards. Our ancestors were nomadic; the earliest proof of permanently settled communities appears roughly twelve thousand years ago, which is recent. Human babies became unusually dependent on their parents as a step toward our current biological reality. What would prompt our transforming minds to fashion a new object from a found material? To alter the verdant consensus of our surroundings? Did we need a spear, a blade—for what? The pipe dream of killing an elephant?

No. What we needed was much more urgent. We required a flexible container, allowing us to roam, to hold on to what we encountered, every precious morsel from our explorations, and to carry our beloved, screaming eggplants alongside us. We needed to move around with our babies and keep our hands free.

To contribute to her fellow feminists’ political work of living with a different set of relations now, Fisher undertook the imaginative, almost literary, work of having started out differently, having had a new beginning then. Our brains learned, not from strategizing means of systematic death but from the “accumulation of botanical information,” the art of collecting, looking around, being with children, and sharing with one another. Language develops from this communal responsibility, unfolding sounds in time: “Mash these up while I go get some more” or “Wait a bit—the berries turn red and delicious when the days are longer.” Observations become intentions, projections, wonderings, fictions. Imagine the first made thing: a net sack, hooked over the elbow, brimming with closed oysters, like gray clouds clinking against each other, a synapse wedding song.

seven years later, in 1986, Ursula K. Le Guin, another feminist anthropologist but of mostly fictional worlds, wrote “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” which refashioned Fisher’s idea into a metaphor for storytelling. Le Guin’s essay has eclipsed Fisher’s work in the public consciousness. In an example of “the very real lift” Fisher describes in her acknowledgments, Le Guin writes that encountering Woman’s Creation made her feel “grounded,” offering her a narrative of early humanity that resonated with her ethical formation as a woman. If “elaborating upon” rudimentary killing devices was conceived as the primal and true origin of humankind, then that excluded most persons, including Le Guin. But, she continued,

if it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag,…and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up,…if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.

I am struck by the quick associations here, the murmuration of commas, the potentialities that drift into her open-armed “or what have you.” The vagueness of what we have, a small gesture toward the inadequacy of language to proffer all options, the un-limits of our infinity-great-grandmother’s craft. A craft that answered to all the different ways humans need: the “useful, edible, or beautiful.” We cannot ever know what it was like hundreds of thousands of years before we were born, but we can imagine, we can even surmise, and we can feel grounded and understood by such gallivanting details. Human, yes, perhaps, us.

As a science-fiction writer, Le Guin might have been especially attuned to seeing the folkloric aspects of facts. She approached Fisher’s work as a new origin myth, having as much to do with mythmaking itself as it does with original life. Le Guin proposed a concept of “the killer story,” which follows the linear arc of a spear throw, whistling through the air from the hand of our (male) hero, culminating in mortal conflict. It ascends, strikes, wounds, and falls. It sounds familiar. You just heard it—the man-the-hunter account of evolution aligns with the killer story in both form and content. We were taught to write like this in school: inciting incident, rising action, climax, et cetera. But Le Guin followed Fisher in her turn toward a different pace and utility.

Perhaps, she writes, we might imagine narrative as a bag, a held collection of found objects that create roving juxtapositions as they jostle around from place to place. The ultimate found object is the word itself: we stumble across the means to communicate, toddle over to metaphor, pocket vocabulary for later use. “A novel is a medicine bundle,” Le Guin writes, “holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” The “life story,” then, is one that does not pierce but places beside—gathers rather than hunts. The bag contains, delimits, as a book does, but it is also expansive, almost magical in its pliancy—think Mary Poppins. The story stretches to carry home the fragments of experience.

Maybe we studied the blooming of a spiderweb, arduous and secretive in the warm, silver night.

Le Guin doesn’t say this, but the natural extension of her argument is that writing fiction could or should enable freedom of movement instead of monument building. “He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle,” she writes of the Hero who kills. “You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.” The pedestal is interesting because it is not merely intimidating, a stone made to elevate and distance its subject; it is, by nature, fixed in location. What is propped up there cannot stray. The potato, however, is made to be gleaned, expropriated, traveled with, and transformed. Le Guin’s line makes me think of another feminist anthropologist, Agnès Varda, and her film The Gleaners and I, in which she personally identifies with the scavenged potato—the excess of mechanized harvest—neither stolen nor bought but simply picked up, bagged, eaten, and enjoyed.

Le Guin focuses on what the writer puts inside her bag; she gathers narrative details like acorns. But there is a second language in the crafting of the early bag itself. Fisher describes large leaves folded together, damp and elastic bark, a broken ostrich egg. A decorative knot, a smartly angled snap. Maybe we did learn something from hunting—not our own but the starry traps and nests of other life-forms. Maybe we mimicked the bird’s diligent search for the right-size twig. Maybe we studied the blooming of a spiderweb, arduous and secretive in the warm, silver night. The first bag might be the first act of translation too.

Fisher’s hypothesis offered Le Guin a powerful metaphor for storytelling because it speaks not only to the prickly instincts we have about our largely obscure prehistory but also to the keen and muscular routines of contemporary life. Many of us are intuitively familiar with the hierarchy-less interior of a handbag: a nub of lip liner, inky cash, keys, medicine, mystery crumbs, a snack, a deck of accumulated identification, a leaking pen, all blindly grabbable from a cute, portable void. It is an admirable political, even spiritual, schema. It proposes ease of personal movement and the right to forage—simple ideas that contain much larger freedoms, the end of borders, prisons, and detainment, the flourishing of public space and resource—as the prerequisites for all other kinds of usefulness and beauty.

the transvaluation that fisher and Le Guin enact when they posit the handbag as a political artifact or a new architecture of narrative does not require solemn reverence. In more recent civilizations, handbags are also seen as the place where femininity’s secrets hide in plain view (never look in a woman’s purse…), which means they are objects that wink as well as roam. How might we supplement Le Guin’s theory to accommodate this aspect of bag carrying, the ribboned parcel of irony that perpetually accompanies certain self-presentations? We might turn to Oscar Wilde, another great thinker who, nearly a century before Fisher and Le Guin, proposed the handbag as a possible site of origin.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, which debuted three months before his incarceration for homosexuality in May 1895, Wilde disassembles paternity as the exclusive well from which we can draw a feeling of sourcefulness, the state of having a source. When it opened, the play was adored and dismissed for its profound frivolity, taken as an encapsulation of the era’s love of the unserious, the bratty, the girly, the witty. But the play is both that and truly classical in its comedy. Two friends, Jack and Algernon, both try to convince their crushes, Gwendolen and Cecily, to marry them by pretending to have the name Ernest, which the two women, unrelatedly and arbitrarily, require of their suitors; the false identities mushroom into increasing mishap. The Name-of-the-Father, to borrow Lacan’s term, is obscured, leaving the male characters unable to enter the symbolic order of highly classed social life, which in Wilde’s hands reveals the true silliness of the entire idea of fathers—their innate indeterminacy, their primary existence as speech acts.

Though the sociobiologists would have us believe in the father’s vital role as elephant hunter, biological dads are remarkably absent from this universe, evidently inessential, which is maybe the most relatable component of Wilde’s highfalutin, frippery-laden setting. One has siblings, cousins, uncles, grand-matriarchs, pretty women of eligible age, domestic servants, priests, adopted wards, social acquaintances, imaginary friends, and the constant companionship of wordplay, but never dads. This particular lack rings true for many. I mean, do you know anyone who has one—at hand?

Source becomes truly precarious when Jack, going by Ernest, is interviewed by Lady Bracknell after proposing to her daughter, Gwendolen. Jack reveals he has no relations and therefore no class position (although he certainly doesn’t lack money). In fact, he was not born but found. In a handbag, in a cloakroom at Victoria Station—“the Brighton line,” to be specific, a classic Wildean pun, replacing the liminal space for the biological lineage. Jack is without even the natal fixity of an infant discovered on a doorstep or church pew. The cloakroom of an urban train station is the quintessential scene of the lost item, untraceable, as everyone who passes through is, naturally, not at home.

“I was in a hand-bag—a somewhat large, black leather hand-bag, with handles to it—an ordinary hand-bag in fact,” Jack explains. The bag was mistakenly passed off to a wealthy gentleman, who named the baby Worthing, after the first-class ticket to Worthing in his pocket. (Interestingly, Worthing is the Sussex holiday town where Wilde wrote the play. Wilde might have had a used ticket to Worthing in his own pocket—the pocket, almost indistinguishable in function from a carrier bag, one must note—at the time of writing, or just before, exemplifying the foraged origins of fictional detail, and the wonky parentage of imagining people into existence. Wilde is, perhaps, the distinguished gentleman who was handed the infant-story by accident, during his travels.) Lady Bracknell responds, aghast: “To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that remind one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.”

Lady Bracknell’s dismay might have struck a chord with Wilde’s original audience: at the time, London was the biggest city in the world by far, with over five million residents, and anxiety about the itinerant worker, loosely tethered to a rented room, was still pervasive for the property-owning class. For that matter, the leather handbag, as carried by a woman during solo train travel, was a relatively new invention, described as an oddity in one 1841 story but becoming overwhelmingly popular by the 1890s; similar to the bicycle, it connoted the New Woman, free to whiz around or lug books or pack her things and hitch a ride out of her stifling small town. Perhaps Lady Bracknell seemed a touch less outlandish in her alarmed reference to radical family structures. The excesses of her aristocratic disparagement cloak a utopian possibility, however heavily Wilde ironizes it.

I see the stone tools of the written word, notched into history, and then I see the ghostly scrim of leaves made from women speaking.

Algernon describes families as “a sort of aggravated form of the public” in the same scene, but in Jack’s case, his family really is the entire public, the bustling crowd, embodied (or disembodied, perhaps) in the detritus of modern life: the banged-up bag abandoned in transit. Jack Worthing is nobody’s and therefore everybody’s baby, and London is the city as kin. The crowd is a kind of stretchy vessel in itself, picking up whatever it encounters, folding individuals into an unnamed intimacy. (Just as Lady Bracknell’s anxiety might have been felt by some of Wilde’s audience, one also imagines that for the gay subcultural networks that followed Wilde’s work, the feeling of being London’s son, rather than the heir to a heteronormative family structure, must have resonated.) The only other example of such circumstance that I can think of—another famous issue of parthenogenetic conception, an infant born and bred in temporary shelter during a period of rejection and transience, conspicuously unrelated to his amiable father but child of the entire world—well, Lady Bracknell would probably observe that he famously did not marry.

Lady Bracknell and the word handbag are now practically synonymous; a particular vocalization of the word by Dame Edith Evans—“A Haaaaaandbaaahg?”—is, according to critic Alastair Macaulay, “the most celebrated line-reading in theatrical history.” The claim Evans had on the role was sacrosanct, reprised many times: on stage between 1939 and 1942, on the radio, in the 1952 film, in a 1954 studio recording, and on television. Her reading of the line became a kind of camp object, diffused by mimicry throughout Britain. Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith both whispered the line, as if in deference to the almighty utterance that preceded them. I grew up in the 1990s familiar with the word, said in that particular way, before encountering the play itself; Jerry Falwell’s homophobic response to Tinky Winky’s red handbag, in particular, was welcome fodder for Bracknell impressions. Lady Bracknell is not only a coveted role for character actresses; her glottal vibratos of high matriarchy are now often performed in drag. Rising imperiously, she glances over conventions of biological sex as negligible barriers between herself and her own flair for command, allowing those performing her to do the same. In his memoir, Come Back in September, Darryl Pinckney recalls W. H. Auden’s secondhand quip that “every actress wants to play Hamlet, just as every actor wants to play Lady Bracknell.”

When I imagine the fossil record of literary culture, I see the stone tools of the written word, notched into history, and then I see the ghostly scrim of leaves made from women speaking, the way individuals use those words. Nothing is quicker to decompose than a style. I mean a self-fashioned way of being, the passing gestures of the surveilled, the long-standing terrain and technologies of femininity, onstage or off. Wilde made that point well and often. And yet the echo undeniably lingers, bouncing off the far, flat surface of the official, printed past. As Le Guin writes, “It doesn’t come easily, thoughtlessly, to the lips as the killer story does; but still, ‘untold’ was an exaggeration. People have been telling the life story for ages, in all sorts of words and ways. Myths of creation and transformation, trickster stories, folktales, jokes, novels…” Evans folded a small echo into her version of Wilde’s word, an undulation tucked into two syllables, making “A handbag?” into a carrier bag of sound, stretched to transport her own humor and flamboyance.

the importance of being earnest ends with as many matrimonial engagements as possible, the same overabundance of closure that one associates with A Midsummer Night’s Dream or old MGM musicals. At first, this might sound consistent with the arc of the killer story, Cupid’s arrow hitting his target and then some. In fact, it’s the showy counterweight to the excessive identity mix-ups that constitute the narrative. Twinned figures crisscross intentions and assumptions, names are passed around like party hats, and the pursuit of a truer self through a false one is a recurring theme. It is almost as if Wilde’s story is so overly compliant with the killer-story structure that it becomes baggy by sheer magnitude. As everyone knows, if you follow the rules of patriarchal narrative too closely, you end up breaking them. In Earnest, almost every character has their foil, a “country” version, or an offstage (often imaginary) double, and families are disassembled and reassembled around these mirrored pairs at whim. Relatives are relative in the moral sense; they only exist from certain vantage points.

Lady Bracknell’s counterpart—another older woman, one with plenty of declarative aphorisms aimed at the younger generation—is Miss Prism, the unmarried governess of Jack’s household. The edges of the family are further smudged by the figure of the governess and her tangential yet requisite relationship to the reproduction of the upper classes. She is neither mother nor father but must often act a bit like both, creating a third zone of intimacy. This is similar to the avuncular or the aunt-ish, like Lady Bracknell, a.k.a. Aunt Augusta, but the governess blurs the boundaries to an even greater degree. She is both stranger and parent. This inside-outsideness is often depicted as almost magical in literature—we might again recall Mary Poppins—perhaps to veil the labor conditions that produce it in reality.

Michael Redgrave as Jack Worthing and Margaret Rutherford as Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by Anthony Asquith in 1952.

Lady Bracknell accuses Miss Prism of an extreme form of this boundary-crossing: cruel and unusual dismantling of the family. “A female of repellant aspect, remotely connected to education,” Miss Prism is infamous in Lady Bracknell’s home for having lost a baby—literally misplaced one—decades before. Having departed for her daily walk with the infant in a pram, Miss Prism and the baby never returned. The pram, however, was located, and it held “the manuscript of a three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality.” Miss Prism confesses: “I had also with me a somewhat old, but capacious hand-bag in which I had intended to place the manuscript of a work of fiction that I had written during my few unoccupied hours. In a moment of mental abstraction, for which I never can forgive myself, I deposited the manuscript in the bassinette, and placed the baby in the hand-bag.” In other words, she mixed them up; they were indistinguishable to her, so much so that she laid the novel gently into the pram—swaddled, perhaps—as her true object of care.

The dyad of Lady Bracknell and Miss Prism dramatizes two sets of family values. Lady Bracknell, the sentinel at the gate of matrimony, guards the family line, whereas Miss Prism disrupts inheritance by mismanaging the output of her reproductive labor: nannying and novel-writing. Lady Bracknell represents the satirical height of heterosexual resolution—it turns out that Jack is a perfect candidate for Gwendolen because he is actually her cousin—contrasted with the feminine dissolution of Miss Prism, a literary spinster who can’t keep track of what a baby even is. The go-between is the strangely maternal object of the bag itself, which, when it is revealed and examined, verifies Jack’s relation to Lady Bracknell’s sister and allows him to marry into the family he was unknowingly already within.

Miss Prism’s dilemma might be read as that of all writers who escape the boundaries of masculinity, choosing between their draft and their (real or hypothetical) child. I am reminded that when I told my former analyst my ten-year plan—“Book, baby, book, baby”—he leaned back and said, “Did you make that up by your-self?” There is something oddly moving about Miss Prism’s switcheroo. Did the novel feel warm in her hands? Did it kick and wriggle? Did she hear the cries and murmurs from her handbag and find them fitting, appropriate to the truth of what she was writing, three volumes patched together in her “few unoccupied hours”?

I think that Wilde is perhaps offering us something slightly stranger than my made-up mantra: Book, baby, book, baby. For Miss Prism, the two words are not an either-or choice or an idealized consecutive sequence or even a muddle of priorities—they are equivalents. Two bundles of language that need to be carried. In a bag, they weigh the same, feel the same.

The cloakroom of history, or prehistory, is filled with everything we’ve lost along the way, all that’s neglected in the hustle and bustle of getting somewhere new. It is haunted by the disintegrated tools and technologies of early human life, craft to ash to soil, all the stories that were never written down, all the works of “more than usually revolting sentimentality” dreamed up by not-quite-mothers. Elizabeth Fisher posited that moving around with our babies is what helped us human beings create words, through women’s transformation of journeying, caretaking, and collecting into one simultaneous activity. Turning the raw material of nature into a surrogate limb or hand, she imagined, is what allowed the possibility of the surrogacy of language, the scattering of the inner world into externalized objects. The baby’s incontrovertible needs are the source of the book’s eventual existence. Ursula K. Le Guin proposed that this prehistoric legacy—our apparent desire to create a mutual reality and to further one another’s existence within it—is a good blueprint for novel-writing. The book and the baby can come with you as you move around. You can fill the story with things you find, odds and ends and what have you, and that can be enough. And Wilde questioned the staying still that we call the family by offering a story about a baby who was interchangeable with a book, born in a handbag, rooted to nothing but movement. Outside fixed place or paternity, kinship still appears, in ancient, unfamiliar shapes. There is no lack of selves or sentences in that realm, among the gatherers. You can fill a whole life with what you find there.

Audrey Wollen is a writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Bookforum, The Nation, and others.

The Vatican’s Latinist - Cecily

2025-03-13T20:01:02.000Z

John Byron Kuhner | New Criterion | 7th March 2017 | U

In 1970, the Procurator General of the Discalced Carmelite Order, Finian Monahan, was summoned to the Vatican for a meeting. The subject of the meeting was a promising young American priest by the name of Reginald Foster. The head Latinist of the Vatican’s State Department had tapped Foster to write papal correspondence, which was at the time composed entirely in Latin. Foster wanted the job but was bound by a vow of obedience, and the decision would be made by his superiors. Monahan intended to resist. Foster, thirty years of age, had proven himself to be both supremely intellectually gifted and utterly reliable—a precious thing at a time when the Catholic Church’s religious orders were hemorrhaging priests. Monahan thought Latin was a dead end. He didn’t want to lose one of his best to a Vatican department that would only get less and less important every year. He said Foster would go to the Vatican “over my dead body.”

Foster remembers the meeting vividly. “So we arrive there, and we’re ushered into this office, and who do we find there but Ioannes Benelli,” Foster says, using Benelli’s Latin name, as was customary at the Vatican at that time. He continues:

Benelli was Paul VI’s hatchet man—whenever he wanted something to get done, he called on Benelli. He was very energetic—got things done, and no nonsense. Everyone was terrified of him. I was too, and now here we were in the room with him, and he turns to Monahan and says, “This is Foster?” The General said yes. Then Benelli said, “Thank you very much, we won’t be needing you anymore.” And he took me by the hand and brought me down to the State Department and that was the end of that. Monahan didn’t say a word. I was now working for the Pope, and it was like I was more or less out of the Carmelite Order. A lot of the time the Order didn’t even really know what I was doing.

Foster would spend the next forty years at the Vatican, part of a small team of scribes who composed the pope’s correspondence, translated his encyclicals, and wrote copy for internal church documents. His somewhat unique position between the Carmelite Order and the Vatican bureaucracy meant that in fact he had a great deal of freedom for a priest. Later in his career his loose tongue—some in the church called it a loose cannon—would attract the notice of journalists looking for interesting copy. “Sacred language?” he said when asked about Latin as the “sacred language” of the church. “In the first century every prostitute in Rome spoke it fluently—and much better than most people in the Roman Curia.” The Minnesota Star Tribune quoted him as saying “I like to say mass in the nude,” which caused a small Curial kerfuffle (Foster claims he was misquoted). He appeared in Bill Maher’s movie Religulous, which featured him agreeing with the proposition that the Vatican itself was at odds with the message of Jesus, that the pope should not be living in a palace, and that hell and “that Old Catholic stuff” was “finished” and “gone.” Foster says the pope received complaints from bishops and cardinals about his appearance. “They said ‘Who is this Latinist of yours and what the hell is he doing?’ They would have fired me for sure. But by the time the film came out I was sick and a few months away from retirement anyway. So they just waited it out and let me go quietly.” He had already been fired from his post at the pontifical Gregorian University for allowing dozens of students to take his classes without paying for them.

Besides being the Pope’s Latinist and “one of the Vatican’s most colorful characters” (as the Catholic News Service called him), Foster has been a tireless champion of Latin in the classroom. Indeed, Foster’s greatest legacy may be as a teacher. “The most influential Latin teacher in the last half-century is Reggie Foster,” says Dr. Nancy Llewellyn, professor of Latin at Wyoming Catholic College. “That’s not just my opinion—that’s a fact. For decades, he had the power to change lives like no other teacher in our field. I saw him for an hour in Rome in 1985 and that one hour completely changed my life. His approach was completely different from every other Latin teacher out there, and it was totally transformative.”

A humanist par excellence.

A humanist par excellence, Latin for Foster was not something to be dissected by linguistic analysis or serve as the raw data for a theory of gender or poetics: it was a language, a medium of human connection. I first met Foster in 1995, at his summer school, and couldn’t get enough: I returned seven times. No one on Earth was reading as much Latin as he and his students were, but he was more like an old-school newspaper editor than an academic: he wanted the story. But for that you actually had to know Latin, and know it well. Foster was ruthless about ignorance, and equally ruthless about anything that to him looked like mere academic posturing. “I don’t care about your garbage literary theory!” he barked at his students one day. “I can tell in about ten seconds if you know the Latin or if you are making it all up.” “Latin is the best thing that ever happened to humanity. It leaves you zero room for nonsense. You don’t have to be a genius. But it requires laser-sharp concentration and total maturity. If you don’t know what time of day it is, or what your name is, or where you are, don’t try Latin because it will smear you on the wall like an oil spot.” The number of Foster’s students runs into the thousands, and many of them are now themselves some of the most dedicated teachers in the field. “When I was in college I asked people, ‘Hey, we all know Latin is a language. Does anybody actually speak it anymore?’ And they told me there was one guy, some guy at the Vatican, who still spoke the language, and that was Fr. Foster,” says Dr. Michael Fontaine, a professor of Classics at Cornell University. “I said to myself, ‘I have to study with this guy.’ And that changed everything for me.” Dr. Paul Gwynne, professor of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the American University of Rome, said of Foster, “He is not just the best Latin teacher I’ve ever seen, he’s simply the best teacher I’ve ever seen. Studying Latin with the Pope’s apostolic secretary, for whom the language is alive, using the city of Rome as a classroom . . . it changed my whole outlook on life, really.”

Time seems to bend around Foster, and past and present intertwine. When I wrote to Fr. Antonio Salvi, the current head of the Vatican’s Latin department, for comment about Foster, he responded entirely in Latin, beginning with four words that sounded like an old soldier praising Cato—“Probus vir, parvo contentus.” An upright man. Content with little. And in many ways Foster’s resembles the life of a medieval saint: at the age of six, he would play priest, ripping up old sheets as vestments. He entered seminary at thirteen. He said he wanted only three things in life: to be a priest, to be a Carmelite, and to do Latin. He has spent his entire life in great personal poverty. His cell had no mattress: he slept on the tile floor with a thin blanket. His clothes were notorious in Rome: believing that the religious habit no longer reflected the simple garb of the people as it once had, he gave up his cassock and bought his clothes at Sears: blue pants and a blue shirt, with brandless black sneakers. When it was cold he added a zip-up blue polyester jacket. The Vatican’s Swiss guards called him “il benzinaio,” the gas-station attendant. Reporting for work at the Vatican, he looked like someone called to fix one of the washing-machines in the laundry room. His outfit was more like something his own father, a plumber in Milwaukee, would have worn. When people would give him gifts, he would give them to the poor. He owned almost nothing, and his Vatican office was legendarily spare: a typewriter, pens and paper, one chair, one desk, and a Latin dictionary. Nothing mattered to him except Latin.

But through the Latin language and his work, Foster might just as well have been living during the Italian Renaissance. He made two exceptions to his no-gifts policy: books, because he loved them, and music, because he could not resist. He covered all his books in brown packing paper, and treated them as precious relics. The solitary pleasures of his cell were the words of Cicero and Leo Magnus, and the music of Handel and Haydn. And outside his cell he reveled in the artistic treasures of Rome. He would show visitors around the Vatican with evident pride, to Raphael’s loggia, a private balcony overlooking Bernini’s colonnade, or the Pauline Chapel (like the Sistine Chapel painted by Michelangelo, but closed to the public and reserved only for Vatican employees).

The papal Latin secretaries have a storied history: the first to hold the office was St. Jerome, Latin secretary to Pope Damasus. During the Renaissance such Humanist luminaries as Lorenzo Valla and Poggio Bracciolini held the post. Foster was the first American so honored. “When I first started, there were two people in the Latin office,” Foster explained to me when I interviewed him for this profile. “They had traditional names, which they got rid of after Vatican II. One was the Secretarius Brevium ad Principes, the Secretary of Briefs to Princes. That was all the diplomatic correspondence. That was Cardinal Amleto Tondini, and it was his death that opened up a position for me. The other was the Secretarius Ab Epistolis Latinis, the secretary for the pope’s letters. That was Carlo Egger. It was Egger who was my teacher in Rome, and he was the one who wanted me to work with him. I remember the day like it was yesterday. He came into the classroom where I was studying and said ‘Foster, would you like to be the pope’s Latinist?’ and I said ‘Certissime.’ ”

Foster’s Latin abilities turned out to be truly extraordinary. Fr. Salvi wrote to me: “He was at the Vatican for forty years. In that time he developed a reputation for being one of the greatest masters of the Latin language since the Renaissance.” He was a master of both types of tasks assigned the pope’s Latin secretaries: free composition and faithful translation. The papal correspondence is mostly freely composed, in a particular style known as the Curial style. Highly formulaic and traditional, it is laden with scriptural metaphors and classical flourishes. “He had such an incredible command of the language that he could work quickly and flawlessly,” says Monsignor Daniel Gallagher, who worked in the Latin office of the Vatican after Foster. “Whenever there was an urgent document that needed to be composed within minutes, everyone would turn to him.” Foster drafted acceptance speeches for three popes, each with an immediate deadline. The other part of the work consisted of official papal pronouncements, such as encyclicals. These are accepted as authoritative and translations into Latin must be extremely faithful and precise. “That’s the hard part,” Foster concedes. “Paul VI’s writing was very concrete, and avoided jargon. John Paul II—not so much. So how are we going to say ‘the economic consequences of globalization’ in Latin? That stuff doesn’t mean anything in Latin. You need to think.”

While Foster was adapting the Latin language to modern concepts, the general decline of the language his superior Monahan had foreseen picked up speed. Foster had first arrived in Rome in 1962, the year the Second Vatican Council opened. The entire Council was conducted in Latin: speeches, debates, drafting and editing and finalizing documents, everything was in Latin. “In those days they would play games where one bishop would recite a line of Vergil and the next guy had to give the next line and on they would go, until someone couldn’t remember a line. That’s all gone now.” The destruction of the Church’s Latin culture would remain the abiding sorrow of Foster’s life. But it was also an opportunity. By 1974 Foster was asked to start teaching a remedial Latin course. In 1977 he started teaching at the Pontifical Gregorian University, where he would teach for the next thirty years.

Foster wanted only people who loved Latin for its own sake.

During that time he may well have undertaken the most strenuous teaching schedule ever attempted by a university professor. Rising every day at 3:58 A.M., he said mass in Latin, graded papers, and then headed to his full-time job as papal Latin secretary. By 2:oo P.M. he would complete his day’s work at the Vatican and be ready to teach. Every year he taught ten semester-long courses at the Gregorian, from Latin rudiments to the most difficult authors. Beginning in 1985 he began a summer school, at the request of some students, to fill up his time in between semesters. Here, unconstrained by university policies and scheduling, he could teach as he desired: he hired space at his own expense, and taught six to eight hours every day, seven days a week for eight consecutive weeks. Sundays were not off days but day-long excursions into the countryside with twenty-page packets of Latin texts: to Cicero’s birthplace, Tiberius’s cave at Sperlonga, Horace’s villa in the Sabine mountains, and many other locations. The course was free and no one received any official credit for taking it—Foster wanted only people who loved Latin for its own sake. “Summer school” became a kind of legend in Rome, particularly within the American expatriate community (it was taught in English and attracted mostly Americans). By the late 1990s a hundred people were passing through every summer. He also tutored, kept up a vast correspondence, recorded a weekly radio program for Vatican Radio called “The Latin Lover,” did any interviews he could, and kept up his priestly duties, saying mass and hearing confessions. All this while serving as the pope’s Latin secretary.

This Herculean effort led to Alexander Stille calling him “a one-man Audubon Society for the Latin language, determined to save it from extinction.” Stille, a journalism professor at Columbia University, wrote a lengthy profile of Foster—still the best in print—which appeared in The American Scholar in 1994 and was later gathered into his book The Future of the Past. Stille had doubts as to how much success Foster would have with his attempts to save Latin—he found his work “quixotic but compelling.”

Foster is now approaching his eighties but is still teaching, now in the basement of the Milwaukee nursing home where he lives. Physically reduced—he can no longer walk—but still mentally fit, Foster has reduced his teaching load to six hours a week to work on consolidating his legacy. During his last years in Rome the signs of wear were evident—he would sometimes teach with a beer in hand, or lapse into angry tirades embarrassing to students and visitors. In 2008 he collapsed while teaching and nearly died in the hospital. Since his move to Milwaukee, he has grown healthier and more productive. October 2016 saw the publication of his first book, The Mere Bones of Latin (Ossa Latinitatis Sola), from The Catholic University of America Press. A second volume is nearly ready to go to press, though Foster, ever intent on doing things his own way, has been squabbling about fonts and covers.

In the meantime, Foster’s students have become the teachers, and the decades he spent dedicated to his students are now showing signs of paying off. “You have to understand that many if not most of the people who went through Foster’s classes were Latin teachers when they got there, or became Latin teachers later,” says Matthew McGowan, professor of Classics at Fordham. “That has had a ripple effect through the entire discipline. People know that there’s a way to do Latin the way Foster did it—with passion and pleasure. And with real human connection. And it’s starting to take off.”

Second-generation efforts by Foster’s students—known as “Reginaldians”—are becoming respectable enterprises in their own right. Anthony Grafton, professor of history at Princeton, wrote a piece in The Nation in 2015 where he confessed that the single most dramatic change during his forty years in academia had occurred in the past four or five years, when suddenly he began seeing “an infestation of undergraduate genius” and “an outbreak of inspired work,” which he traced back to a cadre of Foster’s students. In 2008 Foster was too sick to finish his summer school; in 2009 none was held. But by 2010 a pair of Reginaldians, Jason Pedicone and Eric Hewett, reconceived Foster’s school as their “Living Latin in Rome” program for college students, and started a not-for-profit called the Paideia Institute to keep it going. Since its founding, Paideia has moved from success to success, growing as quickly as a Humanities start-up possibly could, now running Latin programs in Rome, Paris, Provence, and New York, a Greek program in Greece, an online Classics journal called Eidolon, as well as elementary-school Classics enrichment programs at fifteen different sites throughout the United States. Last summer Paideia had more than a hundred people involved in its programs in Rome alone. In 2016, Paideia’s founders were presented with the President’s Award from the Society for Classical Studies, the highest honor in the field of Classics, a kind of capture-the-castle moment for Foster alumni. In Grafton’s glowing panegyric for the Institute he writes:

Reginaldus’s method remains the groundwork of their teaching, and he himself is present in the conversation every day, as the ruling spirit. They celebrate him with inspiring loyalty. But they have also found ways to build an infrastructure—something Reginaldus’s courses lacked. . . . Paideia has five universities as institutional members—Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard and Princeton. They support Paideia by sending students to study and faculty members to teach in its programs.

That was in 2015. By the end of 2016, Paideia counted nineteen universities among its institutional members.

Paideia isn’t even the only not-for-profit inspired by Foster. In 1997, Nancy Llewellyn founded the Septentrionale Americanum Latinitatis Vivae Institutum, the North American Institute of Living Latin Studies, or salvi for short. salvi promotes the use of active-language pedagogy in the teaching of Latin—the kind of speaking and hearing that Llewellyn first saw when she met Foster. More than two hundred people are expected to pass through salvi’s programs in 2017, which will take place not only in New York and California, but also West Virginia and South Africa.

What is most exciting about these developments is these programs are generating the same kind of enthusiasm as the Foster classes that inspired them: “I’ve not looked at Latin the same way since.” “An initiation.” “Without a doubt the most valuable course I have ever attended in my academic career.” “Transformative.” “Mindbending.” “All people that want the classical languages to survive should really be doing these courses.” Foster’s model has proven to be imitable (though his energy and expertise is not—Paideia last year used six teachers to cover what Reginaldus would do alone).

Foster ended up teaching an entire generation of church leaders.

And Foster taught innumerable other teachers, who have been at work in schools from Santa Monica High School to Harvard University. And the fact that the Catholic Church sends its most promising young priests to Rome means that Foster ended up teaching an entire generation of church leaders. “His alumni are filling ecclesiastical offices, tribunals, and episcopal cathedrae throughout the world right now,” says Fr. Daniel Gallagher from his Vatican office. “And because of that, things are much better off for Church Latin than they were forty years ago.” Foster confirms this: “I don’t keep up on what’s going on all over the world, but I can go through almost every episcopal see in the Midwest and the bishop now is a former student of mine.”

What was it that was so revolutionary in Foster’s approach? Some sense of what the experience was like can be found in his new book, the Ossa Latinitatis. The book is divided not into chapters or lessons but “experiences” and “encounters.” The language is significant. Foster’s method was primarily to be present in the room when exposing students to real Latin. He would settle on one particular thing he wanted students to look for, cold-call, and then correct mistakes publicly. About this method he said, “You don’t need a hydrology course to learn to swim. You don’t point at the water and say, ‘This is water, this is how water works.’ you just throw the babies in.”

As with throwing babies into swimming pools, the method depends on the presence of a teacher, and is not for autodidacts. But as a template for trained teachers, the book is priceless. And a glance at the readings shows what kind of intellectual experience Foster’s students got. The book is more or less a transcript of Foster’s 2010–11 Latin classes in Milwaukee. The vast majority of students who study Latin study five or fewer authors (Caesar, Cicero, Vergil, Ovid, and Catullus), and take four or more years to see even those five. A select percentage of students may read as many as half a dozen more. But students who studied with Foster in 2011 read what can be found in Ossa: all of those five authors, plus Roger Bacon’s Compendium of Philosophy, Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, the correspondence of Marcus Aurelius with his teacher Fronto, Seneca’s Consolation to Helvia, Raphael’s epitaph, the personal letters of Anselm of Canterbury, the dedicatory plaque of the cathedral of Milwaukee, Boccaccio’s On Famous Women, Tacitus on the Germans, Clement XIV on the suppression of the Jesuits, Kepler’s Commentary on Galileo’s Starry Messenger, Walter of Chatillon’s twelfth-century Satire Against the Curia, Antonius Galateus’s Hermit, Giovanni Pietro Maffei’s sixteenth-century description of China, documents from the Councils of Constance, Trent, Vatican I and II, and dozens more texts by dozens more authors: Livy, Raymond Lull, Ambrose, Bede, John Paul II, Thomas More, Tibullus, Plautus. Foster’s method put back together what language courses generally separate: the experience of learning a language and the cultural value of knowing it.

What the book cannot give, of course, is the experience of not only reading these texts with Foster but strolling through the streets of Rome with him. For that we will need his like—or to wait for the Reginaldians to start writing memoirs. Alexander Stille writes of him:

Seeing Rome with Reginald Foster is somewhat like hearing music for the first time. The city is threaded with a vast web of Latin inscriptions. They line the cornices of buildings, the base of statues and monuments, the tops of fountains and gates. The biographies of tens of thousands of dead souls are carved onto tombs and sarcofagi. They provide a running commentary on all you see, although virtually all of Rome’s three million inhabitants walk by without noticing them. To see Rome without having access to this Latin subtext is like going to the opera without a libretto—you can love the music, the singing, and the spectacle but you miss a lot of the drama.

Foster has lived his life immersed in the river of recorded human experience that is the Latin language. “It’s as if the whole Latin tradition—Classical, Medieval, Renaissance—came down to just one man,” Michael Fontaine says. “He was like the funnel-point for all that culture. And he worked tirelessly to bring it to people—hundreds, thousands of people. And now it comes down to the rest of us to carry it on.”

People With Parents With Money - Cecily

2025-03-13T20:01:02.000Z

Paula Aceves & Julia Edelstein | Intelligencer | 10th February 2025 | M

Photo-Illustration: Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

When you live in the wealthiest city in the world, it’s not hard to come up with people you suspect have access to their parents’ money. But when we set out to put faces to the generational wealth that sustains — and inflates — New York’s economy (and which is projected to be in the trillions over the next few decades), finding people who would be willing to talk about it in minute detail was a very different project.

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The rejections were swift and often vague. DMs went unanswered or, worse, “liked.” We broadened our search again and again, drafting dozens of uncomfortable emails and texts to friends, co-workers, family friends, family of friends, former bosses, exes, people we met once and vaguely kept up with on Instagram. We dropped uninvited into Facebook groups (and, in some cases, were just as quickly ushered out of them). When we brought it up at drinks and holiday parties, conversations ended with a gauzy look of confusion or a sudden beeline to the bathroom. “I’ll ask around!” they would often say, followed by a prompt “Sounds fascinating, though!” Spending your parents’ money, we realized, may be the very last taboo in polite society.

These 14 people range from those whose grandparents ran multimillion-dollar media empires to those whose teacher-parents made decent stock returns. In awkward conversations that occasionally became therapy sessions, they answered our questions candidly: How much, how often, for what? Several admitted they weren’t even sure how to label their own class status in a city of extreme wealth. Nearly all of them remarked that they hadn’t ever talked about this with anyone else — ever.

• The Psychologist Crippled By Guilt Over Her Privilege
• The Divorced Dad Cashing His Mother’s Social Security Checks
• The Teacher Who Buffers Her Lifestyle With a Monthly Allowance
• The Woman Whose Parents Control Her Love Life
• The Banker Whose Parents Wire Money From China
• The Social Worker Living in Her Grandparents’ Sprawling Apartment
• The Upper West Sider Whose Parents Subsidized His Community Organizing
• The Filmmaker Whose Family Pays for Her Keratin Treatments
• The Mom Whose Parents Cover Two Private-School Tuitions
• The Musician Who Keeps His Wealth a Secret
• The Upper East Sider Who Traded Privacy for IVF
• The Fashion Designer Who Worries Taking Money Might Make Him Less of a Man
• The Doctor Whose Parents Helped Her Open Her Own Practice
• The Millennial Who Pretended to Be Straight to Get Their Dad’s Help

Age: 39
Location: Brooklyn
The Money: Just over a million dollars

I thought I was middle class most of my life. My parents were frugal. My dad was a teacher and my mom was a mathematician, but she was very sick for most of my childhood and didn’t work for long. They told me I had to go to a public university for college because a private college was out of the question. After I graduated, I let them know I wanted to go to grad school and expected to hear the same response, but instead they said, “We can pay for that.”

My parents wound up covering eight years of my Ph.D. program in New York City, including my rent, food, and tuition. I didn’t live exorbitantly. I didn’t want to overspend and put them into debt — at that time, I still did not understand what we were dealing with as far as their wealth. My family gave me the money for rent, which I then gave to my roommate. We did that for appearances. Their financial support was so embarrassing to me. And it still is, honestly.

I think if I had said, “Dad, I want to try to be an influencer, and I need you to fund my lifestyle,” he would have been like, “You won’t be seeing a dime from me.” But because I was in school and doing things that he considered worthwhile, he was happy to support me.

While I was in graduate school, my mother was dying. She really wanted to see my husband and me settled in a home, so we bought a condo in Brooklyn and my parents gave us all the money for the down payment. We closed right as COVID hit. Then, after I graduated, we sold it and did well with the sale. We recently used that money to buy a house. Now my dad is helping us pay to renovate it and pay a nanny. At this point, he has given me over a million dollars — he made it with a small investment in the stock market — and there’s over a million left for me.

I often feel that if my colleagues found out that I don’t have Ph.D. debt, they would be like, “How do you relate to your patients? And are you really working hard?” They might think I don’t love the work as much as they do because there’s just not as much on the line for me. I feel fortunate, but I have so much guilt. In fact, I have had so much guilt for so long that I developed an anxiety disorder I’ve had to treat and manage. There were periods when I didn’t function well because it bothered me so much.

Age: 47
Location: Westchester
The Money: $1,000 per month

It didn’t take much for my mother to see that I was sort of broken after my divorce in 2019. I had been laid off a few years earlier from a career in marketing, and I had lost about half the money I entered my marriage with to the settlement.

I didn’t say, “Hey, Mom, I’m desperate here.” But she felt it. At a certain point, she became eligible for Social Security, and my dad was like, “We are going to give you Mom’s Social Security checks.” So I get a thousand bucks from them a month, which, honestly, still isn’t enough. I had to move from the Upper East Side to the Bronx two summers ago, then last summer I moved to Westchester. My son is enrolled in a $94,000-a-year private school; I took the tuition out of my 401(k).

I don’t tell most people about the help. I have pride. I’m an Ivy League graduate. I’m a published author. There’s a stigma. A lot of people, especially of an older generation, might say I should be punished in some way for not living up to the success that I portray.

Age: 34
Location: Murray Hill
The Money: $335,000

The gifting started when I was 24 and single and my parents — they’re in real estate — bought me a studio in Forest Hills. Both my name and my dad’s were on the deed. I lived in that apartment and then eight years ago, when my now-husband and I got serious, my dad bought me out of my share (which he had originally paid for anyway) and I used that couple hundred-thousand dollars for the down payment on a two-bedroom in a doorman building in Murray Hill.

Had my parents not helped us, we would have had to rent and would be in a worse apartment — maybe in Jackson Heights — or we’d have had to move out of the city because rents keep going up. Instead, we’ve been able to live a stable life. Our maintenance hasn’t increased, and our mortgage is a golden 2 percent.

When I bought the Murray Hill apartment, I told everyone, “My parents gave us money.” I’m pretty open about the help my parents give me because I don’t want anyone to think that this lifestyle is attainable on just my and my husband’s incomes. Before the first apartment, I drove an Infiniti, and I would tell people, “Guys, my dad is clearly paying for this. A 24-year-old should not be driving this car.”

Now I have a daughter, and my parents and my grandma send me about $2,400 for her every month. I call it an allowance. It’s funny to be so grown up and calling it that, but that’s what it is. It started before I had a baby, but it has gotten larger since she arrived. It helps pay for day care. I could go and spend it at Bloomingdale’s, but I don’t.

For me, this money is the answer to Can I eat out as often as I want to? Can we go on this vacation? But our day-to-day life wouldn’t be affected if we didn’t have it. I mean, my husband’s in finance. I’m a teacher. Together, we’re pulling in six figures, but in Manhattan it just never seems like enough.

I sometimes think to myself, Am I a trust-fund baby, or are we middle class? I can’t even tell what middle class means in Manhattan. I know parents who bought their kids $4 million apartments in Tribeca or Hamptons homes. My parents are not giving me anything like that, so I’m conditioned to think this is kind of the bare minimum. But I also know it’s not, because I have friends in Philadelphia and Buffalo who bought their houses with the money in their savings accounts.

At the end of the day, we have more money than we should, and that’s pretty nice.

Age: 29
Location: Manhattan
The Money: The full price of a Manhattan condo and funds for travel, $200,000 per year in spending money

My parents have always been very particular about the kind of friends I have. Growing up, I was always in private schools, where the community was preselected. Everyone came from a lot of wealth. Many of my friendships were “family friends.” My parents put in a lot of effort to make sure I remained close to those kids because they had already been vetted.

Right out of college, I had a group of friends I made through work. A lot of us were new grads. Everyone wanted to live in a house together, and they asked if I wanted to join. My parents were like, “You need your own space. You need your privacy. What if we want to come visit?” And so I lived by myself in an apartment that my parents helped to pay for. With my work friends, I felt like, Oh, we’re not living with the same struggles. I’m not scrambling to make rent. I can’t really relate to you. My parents also gave me money for travel and other discretionary expenses, and I’ve always had the autonomy to spend as needed without any restrictions. I had another group of friends from college who were like me (all still being helped by their parents), so we could plan quarterly trips to Europe or down to the Caribbean. Not being able to do that with these new friends strained the relationships. It was always kind of unsaid.

I met someone around then. He didn’t come from a bad background; he grew up in a very loving family and was an attorney making good money. But when I told my parents about him, their first question was, “Well, where did he go to law school?” And it was a state school. I still remember my parents making a face. At first, I thought they’d come around. But the more questions they asked that I couldn’t produce the right answer to — “Which law firm is he working for?” “What do his parents do?” “What did his grandparents do?” “Whose wedding are you guys going to?” — the more hopeless I felt. At some point, their questions became more of a critique, and anytime I talked to my mom, she’d be like, “Oh, so-and-so’s kid is dating this person who went to this school and works at this firm.”

During the pandemic, this partner and I moved in together for a little while. We’d been serious for three years at that point. My parents’ reactions were like, “Okay, it seems like you probably don’t need any support from us anymore. Good luck.” We obviously managed, but it was definitely jarring. Like, all of a sudden, the income that I made was the only money I had. At the start of the pandemic, it wasn’t that big a deal, but as the world opened up again, it became a lot more noticeable. My friends were traveling again, and we were going out more, and I was suddenly having to be super-money-conscious. It was really the first time where it was like, “Oh, shit. We’re going to have to look at some cheaper Airbnb options. We’re going to have to fly basic economy.” And it just got in the way of me being able to be fully present.

I also felt pressure seeing a lot of the partners my friends were ending up with and seeing the lifestyles they were able to build because of their parents’ support. There was a part of me that started realizing, I don’t have access to this anymore because of the person I’m with.

A big thing was seeing their partners being embraced as part of the family. The partners were always invited to their annual ski trips or their summer trips to Europe. I kept doing all of those things with my own family but never with my partner. I met his family early on, and they were extremely welcoming. He kept asking, “Am I going to get to meet your parents soon?” And the answer was, unfortunately, “no.” I think the acceptance was what I was most envious of, more so than the houses and travel.

I could just tell that the longer I stayed in the relationship, the more I might be made to feel less than. And it was really hard because, to this day, the kind of banter the two of us had, the deep understanding and acceptance of who we were as people — that was really special. But it was a lifestyle thing. Like, This is someone who is okay with an average lifestyle or an upper-middle-class lifestyle. His mentality was “I don’t need to send my kids to private school. I didn’t go to private school, and I turned out fine.” And my thought process was obviously very different from that.

Now, I’m engaged to someone I met through mutual friends. He also went to the same group of private schools we all attended and graduated from an Ivy. Immediately, my parents were pleased. We also share a lot of the same friends; everyone is very career driven and likes living lavishly. We’re fulfilled from a social perspective and a work perspective, but I would say there’s a lot less focus on, like, “How do we enrich our relationship?” Which I felt was a core pillar of my previous one.

After we got engaged last year, my parents were like, “We’re buying this condo in Manhattan. Go and see if you like it.” It was the first big point of tension in my relationship. I think he kind of took it as a message, like, “Do they not trust that I can sustain this kind of lifestyle?”

They also shared details about our family trust, not necessarily how much was in it but the fact that we won’t have to worry about paying for our kids’ education or our future home. Their intent was basically “Enjoy your life without feeling like all of these things are going to be your responsibility.”

My fiancé wasn’t super-happy about that, either. Those were a rocky few weeks while he came to terms with it. I think he was feeling a bit deflated, and it was hard for me to relate. I was like, “Why are you unhappy?” I assume that for 99 percent of people, if you were like, “Hey, you never have to think about paying for your kids’ education or a home,” they’d be like, “Hell, yeah.”

We both had to see things from each other’s perspectives, but also he just had to accept that he gets some of these perks, even if it doesn’t sit well with him right now. I think he’ll come around to it in the long run.

Age: 26
Location: Jersey City
The Money: $10,000 per year

My parents back in China always worry that I don’t know how to take care of myself, even though my salary is good — I make around $200,000 a year. My mom regularly asks me on WeChat if I have enough money. She’ll offer to wire me money without me having to ask. There are only very limited vendors that accept WeChat, but if she wants to send me money, sure, I’ll find a way to spend it. It’s usually at my discretion. It probably amounts to around $10,000 a year. Other times, they’ll buy me gifts, like a designer bag or some piece of jewelry.

I think it all stems from me being their only child because of the one-child policy that was in effect when I was born. They want to make sure I’m taken care of, and I think this is one way they know they can take care of me — making sure that I have enough money to spend.

Age: 38
Location: Upper West Side
The Money: Luxury housing, about $80,000 in private nursery-school tuition, $1,000 per month for groceries and takeout, $350 a week for therapy

I definitely did not grow up thinking that this was a likely place I would be in my late 30s — married with two kids, living with my grandparents in their very big apartment overlooking Central Park.

I grew up out west, and by the time I was in my mid-20s, I decided I wanted to give New York a try. I knew I could stay in my grandparents’ extra room. That’s what it was: I’ll stay in the extra room, and I’ll figure it out. Then I decided to go to grad school, and it was like, Why am I going to move out during grad school? I have no income. Then I got a job, lost the job, got super-depressed, ran away, got married, and came back with my husband. Then I had a kid. And then I had another kid. And it’s like, When is the right moment to kneecap yourself financially?

Most of the food in the apartment is Fresh Direct, and that account is not billed to me. I’m also an authorized user on one of my grandparents’ credit cards. My parents cover my therapy, which costs $350 a week. They also pay tens of thousands of dollars for my son’s child care. My husband makes minimum wage; I’m a social worker. So all of those family members are making it possible for me to live the life I do — but they are also aging. My grandfather has Alzheimer’s. My dad is ravaged by neuropathy. So the cost of my privilege is managing their health care and finances wisely, ethically, with some kind of competence.

The families at school know about my living situation only because of the birthday-party circuit. Their reaction is usually “Oh my God, this is amazing.” They see the support I receive but not the other side, which is finding ice cream in the cupboard because the person you live with has Alzheimer’s. I mean, if you polled New Yorkers and told them, “You’ll live rent free, and your kids can go to whatever school you want, but the price is you’ll have to manage all of it — the bodies, accounts, appointments,” I don’t know how many would take the deal. Sometimes, in the conversations I have with clients in my role as a social worker — whether big-picture discussions of structural oppression, racism, and privilege or individual conversations — there are moments when I say to myself, Who am I to look at them with a straight face when they’re going to lose their housing or their kids are getting the shit beat out of them at a school they have no choice in sending them to?

Right now, my son is in free UPK4. He was able to get into the center I wanted because my family paid for the 1’s and 2’s program, which gives you priority admission. It’s an equity nightmare, and I did it because I could. I’m waiting to see if he gets into one of those K–12 schools that charges $65,000 a year for a 5-year-old. I applied for financial aid on the basis of my income, even though I will get help from a support system that’s ready to foot the bill for, let’s call it, $1.5 million of K–12 education for both children. I beat myself up about this stuff and I do it anyway, and then I beat myself up about it again, and then I do it again.

Personal wealth is not what you’re worth — it’s what you can activate. That’s the word I use. If you have the button, what does it matter who installed it? If you have access to it, you have access to it. And if the people who put the button there give you the green light to push it whenever you want, it becomes harder to tell the difference between a want and a need.

Age: 31
Location: Upper West Side
The Money: Almost $100,000 over his first five years in New York, up to $20,000 in donations to charities

After college, I tried unionizing at my publishing job, and I got fired in part for that. My parents took over my rent for a period and gave me an allowance. Because of that, I didn’t immediately jump back into work; I got really involved with community organizing.

I won’t pretend that we didn’t have lots of fights where my parents were really confused about why I wasn’t more focused on maximizing my income or saving up for a home. They were like, “You haven’t put away a ton of money for retirement, and you’re committing to giving thousands of dollars to these political causes.” I think they were just concerned about my ability to sustain myself.

I get where they’re coming from. Both of my parents grew up poor, and they have a much greater appreciation for material lack than I do. For them, it’s like, “You could afford, in all senses, to do whatever you want, so why are you choosing this?” As I got older, I became more aware of the fact that there was a lot of incarceration in our family that, as Black Americans, we didn’t really talk about. My mom dropped out of college to support her side of the family after my cousins were arrested in the war on drugs. I can’t think of a period when my parents haven’t given out thousands of dollars in loans to a cousin or a nephew. So it’s not that I don’t understand why they prioritize financial stability; it’s that I feel there should be a more robust social safety net. And I think they’re coming around to the fact that their money could play a role in making that happen.

Age: 39
Location: Carroll Gardens
The Money: $20,000

I’m a mother of three, and my parents still pay for my keratin hair treatments, and they also paid for my body waxing until my wedding because they thought I needed to get waxed to get married.

The money is largely coming from my mom because she has guilt that we have a lot of unruly hair, and I inherited that from her!

She uses cash my grandmother left her when she died — literally old $100 bills. So I’ll pay for it on my credit card — it’s about $700 because I’ll sneak in some color, too — then I’ll tell my mom, “I got keratin this month.” And she’s like, “Next time I see you, I’ll give you the cash. Don’t tell your father.”

They’ve helped me with other financial situations, but it comes with a heavy hand. It comes with responsibility. So as much as I would love for them to pay for after-school activities and tutoring and private-school tuition, I know that it’ll just come with a lot. The keratin has no emotional ramifications.

They also throw us a bone here and there … Like, we owed $10,000 in taxes. My dad happened to be at our house when we received that letter from the IRS, and he wrote us a check on the spot.

I wish they didn’t have to help me, ever, so I do feel guilty about it. Or maybe I just wish I didn’t need it. I have a little bit of an ego. I wish it was like, Of course I can afford my lifestyle. My parents think it’s crazy to live in Carroll Gardens with three kids. So I wish I could own up to it financially, saying, “Why do you care? I can afford it.” But actually, I can’t.

Age: 46
Location: Manhattan
The Money: $130,000 per year

Since my kids started preschool, my parents have offered to pay for their schooling. We didn’t have to ask.

Currently, they’re enrolled in an uptown independent school, which my husband and I would not be able to afford otherwise. The tuition bill of about $130,000 comes to me, and I pass it to my parents with a very big “Thank you.” Still, city life is sometimes just on the edge of uncomfortably expensive for us. We do this funny parenting dance of helping our children understand their privilege among a peer group that has them feeling decidedly middle class. The wealth we witnessed on playdates when they were younger was eye-popping. I picked my older kid up from one at a billionaire’s full-floor apartment in kindergarten, and the mom reported that he requested a tour of each room and admired her millwork.

Age: 37
Location: Park Slope
The Money: Almost $500,000 per year

My grandparents sold a massive media conglomerate in the ’90s, and my grandmother put a lot of that money into investment funds, which have grown to be worth north of $300 million or so. My siblings and I are the only three beneficiaries. That is where the bulk of my income — about $500,000 annually — comes from.

I moved to New York to go to music school in 2007. My mom insisted on getting me this insane apartment in Union Square. She paid six months’ rent up front. It was basically a dorm room with a bunch of people getting fucked up all the time. At that point, my access to the money was completely dependent on my mom, and she was chronically unreliable but also insisted that I depend on her. I remember us having conversations where I told her I wanted to drop out and get a job, and she was very insistent: “I do not want you to get a job.”

I only lived there for a year, but I was a hot mess until I got sober. My brother has been an active heroin addict for 25 years. At some point in family therapy, he told my mom, “I’m never going to get clean if you don’t stop giving me money.” And she never stopped giving him money. She just didn’t know what to do, or she felt guilty. I really don’t know.

Most of my friends are broke musicians who tour to survive, which is becoming harder and harder to do. There has always been this unspoken dynamic where they can see that the life I have doesn’t align with what I do. I mean, the work I’ve been involved with is not raking in the kind of money that would allow me to buy a three-bedroom apartment in Park Slope or have the studios I’ve worked in. For a long time, I was unwilling to acknowledge that.

Family money sets you apart in a way that you don’t decide. If people know you have money, they’re going to think about you differently. And at some point, you start to think, Well, maybe that is who I am. For a long time, I felt my money was the only thing about me that had value. So I was using it kind of as a buffer to prevent people from actually knowing me. I’d just pay for everything. Especially in a creative field, when people see someone who has the ability to do what they want, they’ll latch on to that. They’re not always operating out of malice, but because of my experience with addiction and the people who go along with that, I can be very guarded. I often feel like I’m waiting for something to go wrong in a relationship. A lot of that is rooted in this big secret I’ve kept for a long time.

I still never tell anyone details, but I’m working on not lying about it. If you make music and you come into my studio, you’d be like, “Holy shit, this place costs a fortune.” And I’m not going to deny that — I’m going to be like, “Yes, clearly I have a million dollars’ worth of equipment.” But I can still be dismissive. I’ll say something like, “Yeah, I have investments.” In the past, I would really shrink and not be able to acknowledge it at all. Now, I know that stems from guilt as much as anger. When I was younger, I’d see people I love not being able to pay their rent, and that would leave me feeling angry and guilty. I had a couple friends who were struggling for a long time, and we had a kind of a blowup about it. At some point, one friend got super-drunk and told me that I don’t know what it’s like to be a person and that my experience of the world was not real and that I don’t know how to relate to people because I’m rich. These things are objectively kind of nasty to say but maybe not untrue.

Age: 37
Location: Upper East Side
The Money: $15,000 and a Subaru

When I need money, I typically call my dad — it’s literally the only time I call him. I’ll have a nice chat with him and then I’ll ask him for what I need. When I was diagnosed with infertility, I wanted to keep that information between my husband and me — I’m a very private person — but we had only $10,000 of insurance coverage. I felt I had no choice but to ask my parents for help. They contributed $15,000 and as a result were more looped into the process than I would have liked. For my mom, their financial contribution created this expectation that I would tell her how it was going as it happened. My dad also bought us a car. He was like, “You need a Subaru. I found a dealership. We’ll go there when you’re in town.” He bought it to ensure we always have a way to come back to the Midwest. We can never use the excuse “Sorry, flights are too expensive. Guess we won’t be seeing you.”

Age: 34
Location: Brooklyn
The Money: $100,000

My parents are Indian; they are very traditional. The way things work in India is that there’s a lot of deference to the opinions of older family members. My parents felt like they could tell me how to live my life. They paid for undergrad, but I took on loans for medical school in order to avoid feeling like they had control over me.

Deciding to take out loans was definitely a point of contention. My dad was like, “I’m the provider. I can take care of you.” I think immigrant parents have this mentality of “We moved to this country for you. The wealth we’re building is for you to have the opportunities we didn’t.” Even now, my dad is in his late 60s yet constantly talks about wanting to earn more so that when he dies, my sibling and I will be well protected.

Ultimately, I think I realized that it didn’t matter whether or not I took money from them; they were always going to be opinionated about my life. There was a period when I decided I didn’t want to work in medicine anymore, and I started making less money. At that point, my parents took over paying my loans and then ended up paying them off for me. When I went back into medicine, they helped me start my own practice here in New York. Now, my husband wants to open a business and we’re going to go ask my parents for money, even though his parents are also really wealthy; they’re just white and don’t function the same way my parents do.

I don’t think my in-laws ever talked to their kids about money. I think they always shielded them from those conversations. They both work in finance; they’ve done really well for themselves. They’re very willing to take us out to really nice dinners and buy us expensive bottles of wine. But it’s because those are the things they like to do and that’s how they like to spend their money. It’s not necessarily like, “How can we support you?” My husband, when he was younger, started his own bookstore, which required a lot of up-front capital. His parents gave him only $5,000. My parents, like lots of immigrants, are very entrepreneurial. One of the things they have always pushed is that we should work for ourselves. And they’ve been very open about the fact that however we want to go about that, they’ll pay for it.

Age: 52
Location: Upper East Side
The Money: $60,000

My grandparents’ money played a big role in my life. It’s funny, I kind of feel like we have gone in reverse as far as generational wealth is concerned—we’re downwardly mobile, in other words.

Their money allowed me to go to private school and move to New York to attend art school. I knew if I failed, I had someplace to go. I could experiment with my life in ways that some of my peers back home in Philly couldn’t. I think I always felt a bit guilty about that.

When my ex got pregnant with my son in 2011, it was a surprise to me. I wasn’t working steadily at the time, and my grandparents ended up giving us a down payment for an apartment.

I struggled accepting it. I viewed it as a last resort. I don’t know if it’s toxic masculinity or something, but you feel like this is your family, so you have to be the one to make it happen. That’s the American male perspective, I guess. I don’t tell people this, but I definitely wouldn’t have been able to stay in New York had I not gotten their help. I might have come back eventually, but I couldn’t have stayed.

Age: 34
Location: Manhattan
The Money: $30,000 over two years, up to $6,000 annually for travel

My parents divorced when I was really young. My dad has been CEO of a plastics business in Morocco my entire life. He is a conservative-orthodox Muslim, which was the tradition I was raised in. My mom is trans, and I’m queer myself. But I’ve never come out to my dad.

I graduated in 2012. The economy was shit. I took an unpaid internship, and my dad supported me through that year and then through another very underpaid fellowship. I knew I was making a trade-off. I convinced myself that I had a relatively high-paying job, which was to go to visit my dad for two weeks and be an obedient child. I’d pray with him five times a day. I had an entire wardrobe of clothes that were my Morocco clothes — boring-man clothes. I felt a little bit like a ghost when I stepped off the airplane.

I make good money now, but when I go to Morocco with my spouse, I still ask my dad to pay for our flights. I don’t know if he knows I’m queer. I’m read as a man in the world, and my partner is read as a woman, so that’s good enough for him.

King Of Fruits - Cecily

2025-03-13T20:01:02.000Z

Étienne Fortier-Dubois | Works In Progress | 13th March 2025 | U

In 2020, an odd food product hit the shelves of North American supermarkets, courtesy of the agrofood company Del Monte.

It was a new type of pineapple, called the ‘Pinkglow’, notable for the color of its flesh: not the typical yellow, but a striking pink. It retailed for $49, ten or twenty times as much as a regular pineapple.

The hefty price tag was justified by the Pinkglow’s long development time. Del Monte claims it spent 16 years genetically engineering it. As a 2012 patent describes, the unusual color comes from overexpressing one enzyme and suppressing others so that the naturally occurring red pigment lycopene (think of tomatoes, watermelons, or pink grapefruit) accumulates in the pineapple flesh instead of being converted to yellower substances like beta-carotene, lutein, and zeaxanthin.

A Pinkglow next to a typical yellow pineapple.

Image

Source: Author’s collection.

But mostly, the Pinkglow is expensive because it is a luxury product. Del Monte’s marketing makes this abundantly clear: the product’s website calls it ‘the jewel of the jungle’ and explicitly encourages consumers to post pictures of it on social media.

The Pinkglow logo is reminiscent of a coat of arms, harking back to a sort of nostalgic tropical elegance that may or may not exist in Costa Rica, where Del Monte grows it at a secret location.

It seems silly, doesn’t it? Nobody needed a pink pineapple. Whatever resources Del Monte poured into its development bought precious little for the welfare of humanity: a mere curiosity. Couldn’t we have just gone on enjoying regular yellow pineapples indefinitely?

Perhaps. But it may be useful to remember that the yellow pineapple that we can buy in any supermarket is, itself, the product of many careers’ worth of work. In fact, for centuries, the ‘ordinary’ pineapple was a supremely expensive luxury item in Europe, fit for the early modern equivalent of posting social media pictures (displaying the fruit at dinner parties among aristocrats). It is only because its prestige drove many technical and commercial innovations that the pineapple became commonplace. Del Monte’s pink pineapple is only the latest in a long series of experimentations to make the fruit as tasty and widely available as possible.

A brief history of the pineapple’s rise to fame

The bromeliads are a family of plants native to the tropical and subtropical Americas. Only one is of agricultural importance: Ananas comosus, the pineapple, which still grows today in its original habitat, the tropical forests of what is now Paraguay and southern Brazil. The wild type is small and full of seeds, but that did not prevent the local Tupi-Guarani peoples from domesticating it starting perhaps 6,000 years ago.

A wild pineapple from the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.

The innovations that allowed for this process are poorly understood but would have involved selection for low fiber content, fewer seeds (and, therefore, the asexual vegetative propagation necessary today), and lower production of the bromelain enzyme, which degrades protein (and is why pineapple can be used to tenderize meat). We do know that the pineapple spread far and wide across indigenous America, possibly all the way north to the Maya and Aztec homelands in Mexico. Notably, it was cultivated by the Caribs on the island of Guadeloupe, which is where Christopher Columbus was to land near the beginning of his second voyage in 1493, making him and his men the first Europeans to encounter the fruit.

With its unique appearance and extremely sweet taste, the pineapple was an immediate sensation among the crew. At the end of his expedition, Columbus stopped at Guadeloupe again and stocked up on pineapples to bring back to Spain. Sadly, over the seven-week-long trip back, all of his specimens rotted, save one. Columbus hastened to court to present it to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. As told by the chronicler Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, the king declared that he preferred this fruit ‘to all others’. The pineapple had received a glowing royal endorsement within days of its arrival in Europe.

Over the next couple of centuries, as Europeans conquered and settled the Americas, a variety of people wrote of the pineapple, almost always in eulogistic terms. In his 1535 book on New Spain, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdes interrupts his sober analysis with a six page hagiography to the pineapple with passages such as ‘My pen and my words cannot depict such exceptional qualities’, or ‘To taste it is so appetizing a thing, so delicate, that words fail to give it its true praise for this.’

Oviedo’s Historia is also notable for containing the first known depiction of a pineapple. Held in the Huntington Library, Los Angeles.

Given that this was a typical reaction to tasting the fruit, it is unsurprising that the pineapple soon piqued the interest of wealthy aristocrats. There was, however, a major problem. Pineapples are non-climacteric: they do not ripen after harvest. They must be picked when perfectly mature, which means right before they start to decay. Before the development of steam-powered transport in the nineteenth century, ships were too slow to import ripe pineapples, so the only option for the curious aristocrat was to travel to the colonies – or to try to grow the fruit at home since fruitless live plants could survive a transatlantic trip.

But pineapple is a demanding crop. It takes two to three years for a plant to yield a single fruit, and those two to three years must be spent in constant tropical temperatures – quite the challenge in early modern Europe.

Many tried anyway. The first person to succeed may have been Agnes Block, a horticulturist and art collector in the Netherlands, in around 1685. To commemorate her achievement, she commissioned a medal saying: ‘Fert arsque laborque quod natura negat’, meaning ‘art and labor bring about what nature cannot’.

Agnes Block’s medal was made in 1700. Note the pineapple in a pot to the right and the Latin inscription at the bottom.

Mirroring this competition with Nature itself, there was also a competition among the gardening-inclined rich. It soon became a must for an English gentleman to build, at great expense, a ‘pineapple pit’ on his estate. For the professional gardener, to succeed at maturing a pineapple was a top sign of competence. In France, the pineapple became a court favorite at Versailles after the first homegrown pineapples were presented to Louis XV in 1733.

All this competitive pressure spurred on technological innovation. Perhaps starting with Amsterdam’s botanical gardens in 1682, hothouses (heated greenhouses) began to appear in Europe during the 1680s to grow exotic plants from the colonies. Improvements in glass manufacturing, thermometers (mercury-in-glass thermometers were invented by Gabriel Fahrenheit in the 1710s), heat sources (such as tanner’s bark, a powder made from tree bark in the tanning industry that slowly releases heat as it decomposes), and hothouse design (for instance, the addition of chimney flues) appeared in a steady trickle throughout this period.

By the late eighteenth century, ‘pineries’, as pineapple gardens were called, had become a regular feature of large European estates. The fruit had gone from being a rare curiosity to become an expensive but attainable luxury, at least for the wealthy. It became common practice to display a fresh pineapple at dinner parties to impress guests. This led to delightfully absurd situations: the pineapple became valued more for showing than for eating, and some people, who wanted to show their wealth but couldn’t afford multiple specimens, reused the same one again and again for weeks until it began to rot. A rental industry of pineapples arose to meet this demand. A pineapple was one of the riskiest items a maid could carry around since it presented a particularly attractive target for thieves.

At the height of this pineapple mania, it became a symbol of decadence and excess as shown by satirical cartoons.

Cartoon from 1786.

One can still notice the fruit’s nineteenth century legacy in architectural and decorative elements from that period, most strikingly at the Dunmore Pineapple hothouse in Scotland. It would take several more innovations to turn the king of fruits into an ordinary commodity.

The Pineapple in Dunmore, Scotland.

Steamships, cans, and refrigerators: how the pineapple went from aristocratic to mundane

The engineer George Stephenson was a key figure in the Industrial Revolution. Hailed as ‘the father of railways’, he built the first locomotive that hauled a passenger train on a public railway in 1825 with his son Robert. Twenty years later, he retired and devoted himself to his other passion: gardening. To compete with his friend, the renowned gardener Joseph Paxton, he built himself a 68-foot-long pine house and a separate 140-foot-long pine pit at his home.

Design for a pinery from the mid-nineteenth century.

But Stephenson’s efforts came during the last stages of the pineapple mania era. As standards of living rose, buoyed by new technology, farmers and merchants saw the money-making potential of bringing the aristocratic pineapple to a wider audience.

Thus, in 1764, at the peak of pineapple mania in England, it is estimated that the average cost to cultivate a pineapple – taking into account the construction of the pinery, the import of pineapple plants from the Caribbean, and the gardening labor for three or four years – was approximately £80. This translates to about £12,000, or $16,000, today. By the time of Stephenson’s retirement in the 1840s, cartoons show that in London even the lower classes could try a pineapple slice for a mere penny, about the price of a large loaf of bread.

An 1845 drawing from Illustrated London News. The accompanying newspaper text reads, ‘The attempt made last year to import into this country Pine-apples, from the West Indies, was attended with such success as to induce speculators to improve the culture . . . This is certainly another step in the ladder of luxury – ‘Pine apples a penny a slice!’

What happened? First and foremost, imports. While the British, Dutch, and French elites obsessed over hothouse designs for their pineries, the pineapple had, of course, been growing easily in tropical regions. The West Indies, in particular, became a large provider to North America, to the delight of gentlemen like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Starting in the 1820s, and even more so in the 1830s, steamship transport finally allowed transatlantic imports to reach Europe after a mere two to four weeks of travel – fast enough for ripe pineapples to survive the voyage. A company named Keeling and Hunt shipped 1,000 pineapples from the Bahamas to Liverpool in 1842. Most of the shipment was then transferred to London by rail, thanks to Stephenson’s work.

Less than a decade later, in 1850, ‘200,000 pineapples had been imported in the space of just three months’. The Bahamas was the main source, along with other West Indian islands like Antigua and St. Bartholomew, and farther afield corners of the Empire like Sierra Leone. In the 1870s, the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores would become the main pineapple exporter to Europe.

There was still a major limitation: even in the tropics, pineapples ripen only in summer. European-grown pineapples, since they were planted indoors, were available year-round. So for a time, English pineapples, by then cultivated as a cottage industry of pineries all over the country, kept a competitive advantage. In 1845, they became even cheaper when the glass tax was repealed, making greenhouses less costly. Caribbean pineapples were also deemed cheap, small, and ‘mostly ill-grown’.

But this couldn’t and didn’t last. A chance discovery in the Azores in 1874 – that burning dead leaves in a greenhouse releases ethylene gas, which makes pineapples flower – allowed farmers to induce pineapple flowering on demand and ‘provide fruits for the high-value holidays of Christmas, New Year and Easter’.

Then came refrigerated transport. In 1881, the Dunedin served as a proof of concept for refrigerated ships, successfully transporting a full cargo of meat from New Zealand to England. Refrigerated train cars appeared a bit earlier. Within a few years, fresh produce from all over the world could reach Britain and Europe, and the pineapple market was quickly flooded.

Greenhouse pineapple cultivation continues in the Azores today.

Concurrently, another innovation greatly facilitated access to pineapples: cans. By the second half of the century, pineapple canning factories began to spring up in cultivation locales like the Bahamas and Southeast Asia. In the 1890s, with the invention of George Zastrow’s ‘machine for treating pineapples’, the premier pineapple canning location moved to Baltimore. The city produced hundreds of thousands of cases, and the fruit was ‘gradually being looked upon more as a necessity than, as heretofore, a luxury’.

1892 patent drawing for Zastrow’s machine.

A sign of the wide availability of pineapples was the multiplication of recipes for preparing it. Initially, the proper way to eat a pineapple was to cut it into slices and serve it plain so that diners could savor the fruit – like it was a fine wine or cheese. But as pineapples reached the middle and lower classes, recipe books began providing instructions for preserved pineapple, pineapple pies, pineapple fritters, or pineapple chips.

Recipe for pineapple fritters Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. ‘An elegant dish’, but one that is less extravagant than you might think since ‘we receive them now in such large quantities from the West Indies, that at times they may be purchased at an exceedingly low rate’.

Meanwhile, gardening publications stopped treating growing pineapples as an impressive feat of skill. According to an expert in an 1866 issue of the Journal of Horticulture, ‘no secret was involved in the matter [of growing pineapples], and no extraordinary management was necessary to attain a moderate degree of success; but that the whole affair was one of pocket’.

The great twentieth-century cheapening of the pineapple

Around the turn of the twentieth century entrepreneurs realized that steamship transport, refrigeration, and canning could be combined into a new business opportunity.

The first person to understand this was a young man named James Dole. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in agriculture, Dole moved to Honolulu in 1899 (it helped that his cousin, Sanford D. Dole, had been president of the short-lived Republic of Hawaii and now held the position of the first governor of the US territory of Hawaii). He bought a farm, experimented with some crops, and settled on the pineapple. In 1901, he formed the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (today known as Dole), and by 1903, he was shipping canned pineapple to the mainland US. His success was quickly imitated by other businesses, notably by the California Packing Corporation, now known as Del Monte.

In the next three decades Hawaiian pineapple production skyrocketed. This was due in part to Hawaii’s climate, where the pineapple plantations grew to be the largest in the world. Famously, the island of Lanai, the sixth-largest of the archipelago, was turned into an island-wide plantation for Dole in the 1920s.

Then came technical innovations in processing. In 1911, James Dole hired the engineer Henry Gabriel Ginaca to build a machine that would ‘automatically center the pineapple on the core, cut out a fruit cylinder, eradicate the crushed and juice material from the outer skin, cut off the ends and remove the central fibrous core’. This allowed the processing of pineapples for canning to rise from 10–15 fruits per minute to about 50. Further improvements to the Ginaca machine during the twentieth century increased that number to 75 per minute, and Ginaca’s design is still the main way we process pineapples today.

In this 1928 ad, the Ginaca machine is referred to as ‘the perfect servant’, and ‘a servant that does what human hands can do, faster than human eyes can follow’. As an online article by Shana Klein points out, there were racist undertones against Asian workers, who constituted the majority of Dole’s Hawaiian workforce.

But the most notable innovation of the period was not technical: it was cultural. The pineapple in the early twentieth century was in somewhat of an ambiguous cultural spot. It still carried a bit of its erstwhile prestige, which limited sales to housewives who couldn’t justify it as an everyday expense (especially when the Great Depression hit). At the same time, it was mostly available in canned form, which was the object of elite prejudice: an 1884 author complained of ‘piles of gaudy canisters that embalm every constituent of a dinner, from the soup to the pineapple’.

To counter these problems of perception, the Hawaiian pineapple companies spared no effort at marketing their product to the masses, capitalizing on images of tropical paradise. They also benefited from both world wars, when the militaries of the Allied powers bought enormous quantities of canned pineapple to send as rations to soldiers. Suddenly, many more people had become acquainted with the king of fruits.

Examples of an advert for canned pineapple, from the Hawaiian Pineapple Packers’ Association (1914).

Propelled by these marketing successes, the Hawaiian production of canned pineapple rose steadily before and after the Great Depression until it peaked in 1957. After this, the archipelago’s industry experienced a decline as production relocated to countries such as Thailand or the Philippines. The last Hawaiian cannery closed in 2007. Yet Hawaiian pineapple left an enduring legacy in the form of companies like Dole and Del Monte as well as cultural associations. Pizza with pineapple as a topping is called ‘Hawaiian’, despite having nothing to do with Hawaii.

Today we produce about 30 million tons of pineapple worldwide every year, especially in Costa Rica, Southeast Asia, and the pineapple’s homeland of Brazil – and very little in the places that served as the main settings of its history, including Hawaii, the Bahamas, the Azores, and northern Europe.

And innovation has not stopped. Before it created the Pinkglow, Del Monte released the Gold variety (also known as MD-2) in 1996. The Gold, being sweeter, yellower, and easier to grow, replaced the Smooth Cayenne as the most common cultivar and is credited for more than doubling fresh pineapple consumption in both the US and the UK.

Progress and the uses of luxury

While it is obviously a good thing that the pineapple is now widely accessible, people still feel something has been lost with its fall from grace. Such conflicting attitudes have accompanied the pineapple throughout its history. In the nineteenth century, it was still a recognizable luxury and an object of desire, and yet it couldn’t quite fulfill this role now that anyone could get a slice of the tropics for one penny. O’Connor writes of the Victorian paradox of progress: ‘The aim of scientific and economic progress was the betterment of the human condition, but any gains challenged established social hierarchies . . . The elite felt threatened by the new middle class, which in turn felt threatened by the rising working poor’. The pineapple was the perfect luxury good to illustrate this, and indeed, Victorian authors sometimes used it as a direct metaphor for social and technological progress.

In this cartoon from the Londonian magazine Punch, dated 25 October 1873, a prosperous working-class man buys a pineapple just as a lady of higher birth deems it too expensive. But, being from a lower class background, the coal miner has to ask the grocer how to cook it – he is buying the fruit merely for its cachet.

To understand what happened, it’s useful to think about what luxury even is. Most luxury goods have intrinsic desirable qualities, like the pineapple’s sweet taste. But often, they are luxuries primarily because they are positional goods: their value comes from showing off status. When procuring a pineapple is difficult or costly, displaying one is a strong, unfakeable ‘signal’ of wealth. This, however, increases demand, which gives entrepreneurs like Keeling and Hunt or James Dole an incentive to provide pineapples at a lower price. For a time, the poorer people who can now afford them may benefit from the lingering prestige, but eventually, society catches on, and the prestige vanishes.

Thus luxury is self-defeating: any particular luxury good, unless inherently limited in supply (like historical artifacts or real estate near Central Park), can eventually become mundane. Aluminum used to be more precious than gold and is now common enough to be used in disposable packaging. Purple dye used to be reserved for Roman emperors; now we have cheap ways of manufacturing pigments in any color. Spices, mirrors, ice, citrus fruit, and even celery are all examples of items that used to attract the attention of the wealthiest but have now become widely available at very little cost. All of them are victories for our quality of life.

If the Pinkglow pineapple seems mildly absurd, its cousin, Del Monte’s Rubyglow pineapple – available in China and North America for a mere $395.99! – seems downright preposterous. It is difficult to imagine how the rise of a new, luxury red-skinned pineapple could benefit the masses.

Del Monte’s Rubyglow webpage. To be clear, its flesh is yellow, but the skin is red.

But who knows? Perhaps the future will grant us dozens of pineapple colors to choose from, just as we now can select tomatoes, grapes, and citrus fruit in a variety of shapes, flavors, and hues. Small improvements to the taste and appearance of specialty crops are certainly not the most pressing problem in the world, but they make life a little nicer, and cumulatively, that’s worth a lot. After all, the typical eighteenth-century aristocrat was willing to spend a fortune to access the tiniest fraction of the food diversity we take for granted today. They would surely be delighted by the idea of posting pictures of a pink pineapple on their Instagram for everyone to envy.

Post on Longreads - Longreads

2025-03-13T19:30:16.000Z

"And then in 2011, my first year out of college, I happened upon a piece in the New York Times which described a poorly understood condition some scientists had begun to call misophonia.1 For its sufferers, certain sounds — often chewing — evoked what seemed an uncontrollable and disproportionate reaction of anger and disgust." —Jake Eaton for Asterisk Magazine

https://longreads.com/2025/03/13/the-unbearable-loudness-of-chewing/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Post on Longreads - Longreads

2025-03-13T18:45:03.000Z

When the world shifts, so must our words.

In an excerpt of her new book MY OCEANS: ESSAYS OF WATER, WHALES, AND WOMEN, Christina Rivera explores the sea of language, nature, intelligence, and the power of naming the ineffable.

(Publisher: Northwestern University Press)

https://longreads.com/2025/03/13/language-words-climate-crisis/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

#Longreads #Books #Sea #Ocean #Whales #Nature #ClimateCrisis #Language #Linguistics #Words #Loss

Post on Longreads - Longreads

2025-03-13T17:10:03.000Z

"Each season brings its own chance of furthering that dream, rendering devastation, or usually, delivering a dose of both." —Lindsey Liles for Garden & Gun

https://longreads.com/2025/03/13/inside-the-fight-to-save-theworlds-most-endangered-wolf/

#longreads #writing #nonfiction #reading

More PG&E water problems - Some Bits: Nelson's Linkblog

2025-03-13T15:29:56.000Z

Second year in a row that Nevada County will be without an important water source because PG&E failed to maintain water infrastructure

Post on Longreads - Longreads

2025-03-13T15:20:09.000Z

"Call it vigilante justice or guerrilla tactics, but there’s a sense of stalwart duty as the lab attempts to dismantle generative AI."

Kelley Engelbrecht for Chicago Magazine: https://longreads.com/2025/03/13/the-great-ai-art-heist/

#Longreads #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology #Art #Artists #GenerativeAI #Copyright #Theft #MachineLearning

Two tone chloropleth - Some Bits: Nelson's Linkblog

2025-03-13T13:59:50.000Z

Bonkers visualization technique trying to use 2 colors per country on a map. It sort of works?

Netgear R7800 "hnyman" firmware - Pinboard (jm)

2025-03-13T12:18:18.000Z

OpenWRT-derived firmware for the (venerable but now classic) Netgear R7800 router/AP, which supports high bandwidth rates via hardware offload, with the addition of bufferbloat-defeating SQM traffic shaping (which the stock firmware can't handle). Also includes Adblock, wireguard, 6in4/6to4/6rd IPv6 NAT, and the LuCi GUI. Might have to give this a go if I'm feeling brave... More on SQM: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm

Ars Technica: Pocket Casts makes its web player free, takes shots at Spotify and AI - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-03-13T10:25:26.000Z

Ars Technica: Pocket Casts makes its web player free, takes shots at Spotify and AI. “Previously available only to logged-in Pocket Casts users paying $4 per month, Pocket Casts now offers nearly any public-facing podcast feed for streaming, along with controls like playback speed and playlist queueing. If you create an account, you can also sync your playback progress, manage your queue, bookmark episode moments, and save your subscription list and listening preferences.”

The post Ars Technica: Pocket Casts makes its web player free, takes shots at Spotify and AI first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Ana Rodrigues: In defense of unpolished personal websites - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-03-13T10:22:06.000Z

Ana Rodrigues: In defense of unpolished personal websites. “My imperfect and unpolished code on my personal website isn’t the full reflection on my technical abilities or knowledge of web development standards. It’s a constant draft where my handwriting is legible and where I want optimization takes a backseat. It’s where I use the little free time I have to actually write on it and prioritise the experiments I want. Is it okay to prioritize readability and learning over cutting-edge optimization on personal websites? I believe so.”

The post Ana Rodrigues: In defense of unpolished personal websites first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Gizmodo: FCC Chair Asks YouTube TV Why It Hates God - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-03-13T10:04:52.000Z

Gizmodo: FCC Chair Asks YouTube TV Why It Hates God. “Brendan Carr has some questions about God. Mainly, why isn’t he getting more air time? Donald Trump’s pick to head the Federal Communications Commission sent a letter last week to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan asking if YouTube TV has any policies that discriminate against faith-based programming—an ask prompted by a complaint from Great American Media, which claims the streaming TV provider refuses to carry its cable networks.”

The post Gizmodo: FCC Chair Asks YouTube TV Why It Hates God first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

AI Search Has A Citation Problem - Pinboard (jm)

2025-03-13T10:03:05.000Z

LOL, these are terrible results.

We randomly selected ten articles from each publisher, then manually selected direct excerpts from those articles for use in our queries. After providing each chatbot with the selected excerpts, we asked it to identify the corresponding article’s headline, original publisher, publication date, and URL [...] We deliberately chose excerpts that, if pasted into a traditional Google search, returned the original source within the first three results. We ran sixteen hundred queries (twenty publishers times ten articles times eight chatbots) in total.

Results:

Overall, the chatbots often failed to retrieve the correct articles. Collectively, they provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries. Across different platforms, the level of inaccuracy varied, with Perplexity answering 37 percent of the queries incorrectly, while Grok 3 had a much higher error rate, answering 94 percent of the queries incorrectly. Most of the tools we tested presented inaccurate answers with alarming confidence, rarely using qualifying phrases [...] With the exception of Copilot — which declined more questions than it answered — all of the tools were consistently more likely to provide an incorrect answer than to acknowledge limitations.

Comically, the premium for-pay models "answered more prompts correctly than their corresponding free equivalents, [but] paradoxically also demonstrated higher error rates. This contradiction stems primarily from their tendency to provide definitive, but wrong, answers rather than declining to answer the question directly." Bottom line -- don't let an LLM attribute citations...

As AI scraping surges, AI search traffic fails to follow: Report (Search Engine Land) - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-03-13T10:02:49.000Z

Search Engine Land: As AI scraping surges, AI search traffic fails to follow: Report. “Google’s average search click-through rate (CTR) was 8.63%, according to the report. However, the CTR for AI search engines was 0.74% and 0.33% CTR for AI chatbots. That means AI search sends 91% fewer referrals and chatbots send 96% less than traditional search.”

The post As AI scraping surges, AI search traffic fails to follow: Report (Search Engine Land) first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

CBS News: Project aims to digitize 2.3 million plants at California Academy of Sciences - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-03-13T09:56:29.000Z

CBS News: Project aims to digitize 2.3 million plants at California Academy of Sciences. “There is quite the photo shoot happening right now in Golden Gate Park, but instead of models, the muse of choice is a collection of leaves, branches, and dried flowers. This year, the California Academy of Sciences hopes to digitize its entire global botany collection that stretches back to the 17th century and includes to 2.3 million specimens.”

The post CBS News: Project aims to digitize 2.3 million plants at California Academy of Sciences first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Tubefilter: Substack passes 5 million paid subscribers. Welcome to the new world of journalism - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

2025-03-13T09:49:11.000Z

Tubefilter: Substack passes 5 million paid subscribers. Welcome to the new world of journalism. “Newsletter platforms are changing the face of journalism and achieving subscriber milestones along the way. Substack, the home of more than 50,000 moneymaking publications, now has more than five million paying subscribers.”

The post Tubefilter: Substack passes 5 million paid subscribers. Welcome to the new world of journalism first appeared on ResearchBuzz: Firehose.

Skye's Curator Corner - BlogFlock

National Security Archive: DON’T SHRED ON ME! USAID documents destruction breaks the law, according to National Security Archive - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

On Troubleshooting - Cecily

Step 1: step back

Make sure you’re tuning the right string

Determine the flows

Observe the symptoms

Isolate the problem

Disconnect the subsystem

Or not

Find good cut points

Balance getting informed, and attempting fixes

Know the stakes

Don’t overthink it

Be patient

Find information about the system.

Knowing what search engine to use for what kind of information

Knowing how to narrow the search space with advanced search criteria

Knowing how to widen the search space & tune out irrelevant information

Learning to fish

Get information from the system

Intuit the tolerances of the system

Have a good relation to the system

Make do with what’s available

Shorten the feedback loop

Reduce noise

Write it down

Look inside black boxes by dropping weirdly-specific things into them and watching what comes out

Understanding the problem

Fixing the problem

Can troubleshooting be taught?

Conclusion

A Unified Theory Of The Handbag - Cecily

Was an accessory the secret to evolution?

Announcing the Yale Review Festival 2025

The Vatican’s Latinist - Cecily

A humanist par excellence.

Foster wanted only people who loved Latin for its own sake.

Foster ended up teaching an entire generation of church leaders.

People With Parents With Money - Cecily

Your Parents’ Money

King Of Fruits - Cecily

A brief history of the pineapple’s rise to fame

Steamships, cans, and refrigerators: how the pineapple went from aristocratic to mundane

The great twentieth-century cheapening of the pineapple

Progress and the uses of luxury

Post on Longreads - Longreads

Post on Longreads - Longreads

Post on Longreads - Longreads

More PG&E water problems - Some Bits: Nelson's Linkblog

Post on Longreads - Longreads

Two tone chloropleth - Some Bits: Nelson's Linkblog

Netgear R7800 "hnyman" firmware - Pinboard (jm)

Ars Technica: Pocket Casts makes its web player free, takes shots at Spotify and AI - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

Ana Rodrigues: In defense of unpolished personal websites - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

Gizmodo: FCC Chair Asks YouTube TV Why It Hates God - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

AI Search Has A Citation Problem - Pinboard (jm)

As AI scraping surges, AI search traffic fails to follow: Report (Search Engine Land) - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

CBS News: Project aims to digitize 2.3 million plants at California Academy of Sciences - ResearchBuzz: Firehose

Tubefilter: Substack passes 5 million paid subscribers. Welcome to the new world of journalism - ResearchBuzz: Firehose