…

I’ll tell you who SOPHIE was - she provided me with the soundtrack to my existence.

SOPHIE - a futuristic goddess, an ingenious music producer, ethereal visionary, a trans icon.... just an icon generally speaking - tragically passed away at the age of 34 in Athens, Greece after falling off a rooftop whilst attempting to capture a picture of the full moon. Her gut wrenching death brought me to tears. This is the first time a famous person’s death has affected me so deeply. Her bold, hyperkinetic approach to producing musical art was so impeccable and refreshing considering so much of modern day’s music tends to sound incredibly predictable. Whilst alive, visionary SOPHIE generated a following of intensely adoring, dedicated fans. Honestly, don’t EVER mess with a SOPHIE fan. Trust me!

She worked with the biggest popstars, rappers, K Pop groups, rappers and upcoming artists but still remained so humble despite her enormous talent. However, she hadn’t reached household name status during her life. Sadly, many people only had heard of SOPHIE after her tragic and unexpected death. This motivated me to write a piece dedicated to this beautiful and timeless mastermind. I do acknowledge that its been exceptionally challenging to summarise how SOPHIE impacted my life onto only a few pieces of paper. However, its the least I can do. Therefore, I present to all of you my written tribute which shall focus on how her extraordinary music has featured during key moments of my lifetime and expanded my initially narrow knowledge of beauty, gender and identity like never before.

Let’s commence this written tribute by travelling back in time to when I had just turned 15. During that time period, my disposition was extremely introverted. In all honesty, like almost all teenagers suffering the displeasing side effects of bloody puberty, I was barely approachable. I adopted the entire persona of a full time punk kid wearing a thick leather jacket whilst applying extremely heavy kohl eyeliner and dying my hair jet black - which looked devastating. I would also scribble quotes associated with the punk ideology and act like some pretentious snob towards anything that was unrelated to punk, industrial or rap music. That was the most rebellion I exuded at the time (trying not to feel complete despair as much as possible for my former teenage self)

That captious mentality caused by teenage angst was erased the minute I listened to a snippet of the musical force of nature named ‘BIPP’ by SOPHIE on a Swiss MTV sponsored advert. The high pitched vocals singing ‘However you’re feeling, I can make you feel better’ provided by Marcella and overall catchy, hyperkinetic production mesmerised me like there’s no tomorrow. Nothing had captivated my imagination like the timeless ‘BIPP’ did so I typed aggressively and rapidly into the Google search engine straight away. I had to know who the mastermind lurking behind this masterpiece was. I had to know of the mastermind who provided me with this pivotal musical epiphany. Then the capitalised name ‘SOPHIE’ popped up right in front of my eyes.  

After listening to ‘BIPP’ in its entirety on repeat, I instantly began to read up on SOPHIE and stumbled upon her 2013 interview on BBC Radio 1 with SOPHIE where she concealed her identity by having her 5 year old niece respond to the host’s questions instead of herself. At the time, I assumed Sophie had implemented a voice changer to project the voice of an infant. SOPHIE’s dry humoured response, namely ,,I’ve got a cough!’’ to the host’s bewilderment over the child sounding voice stood out for me. Earlier in her career, SOPHIE’s anonymity prompted much speculation in the music industry and press. I always perceived this bizarre, hysterical act of Sophie’s as a ‘two middle fingers up’ to our environment fuelled by mainstream culture, especially how so many people obsess over notable figure’s personal business and public image instead of their artistic accomplishments far too often. This has to be the ultimate moment my own curiosity for Sophie’s ingenious musical productivity became insatiable. Later on, I would await the 2015 McDonalds commercial anxiously to have my ears blessed with her gratifying track ,Lemonade’ over and over. The synthesised sounds that fizz like pop rocks. Nabihah’s crisp vocals which repeat ‘Candy boys, c - c - candy boys’. The overall ear worm appeal of the track. Flawless!

In the meantime, I discovered that Sophie happened to be a very well known affiliate of the divisive,unique PC Music label based in London, England. During the time period, I was - to be quite frank - not an avid bubblegum bass or hyper-pop listener in the slightest. I worshipped bands such as The Clash, Dead Kennedys, Rammstein,Tool, The KLF and additionally adored rap music ranging from N.W.A to Eminem. They totally divert  from the hyperkinetic, exaggerated take on the pop genre embraced by the PC Music label. However, my teenage idols and SOPHIE objectively share something fundamental in common - Through their trailblazing musical output, they push every single barrier possible and deconstruct what constitutes as ,normal’ in modern day society. Even just after releasing her first full length album ‘Product’, SOPHIE embodied a bold form of rebellion against society’s conventionality and unforgiving temperament by incorporating lyrics alluding to a mostly genderless nature and sexual fetishes eg BDSM. As an extremely naive, self conscious teenager, all of this completely perplexed but intrigued me. Any glimpse of art connected with an attitude of non conformity resonated with me in practically seconds and continues to even at 22.

This longing for anything unorthodox traces back to my own childhood.  To explain some details about my background, I grew up in a rather small, very conservative village in Switzerland from the age of 9. Even uttering anything LGBT related would illicit responses ranging from loud gasps to shocked faces at my high school. As a non Swiss resident, the educational setting demonstrated to be more than challenging at times. One incident that stands out to me especially is when a classmate ranted about his disapproval of non Swiss inhabitants receiving Swiss pass and then continued with yelling ‘All my family voted for the SVP kick all of (you fucking foreign scum) out!’.Just to clarify, the SVP is the largest party in Switzerland and leans very far right politically.   As you can presume, I was utterly distraught by this disconcerting interaction and confess to losing any fragment of self confidence remaining in that moment. Luckily the Swiss MTV channel existed, which was far more on trend with the times and embraced marginalised communities. I will forever cherish Swiss MTV introducing me to SOPHIE’s impeccable, lawless music and being a form of escapism in my bedroom from the racist, homophobic climate prevailing in my village.

At the age of 17, Graduation finally arrived at the door which was an absolute relief. A few hours later, the celebration party took place in a secluded barn and my boyfriend immersed himself into the role as DJ for the night. Towards the end, he sneakily included Product era classics including ‘Vyzee’ and ‘Hard’. I could barely contain my excitement. We all almost choked on the horrendous party smoke, spilt our cheap beer on each other’s outfits and chanted ‘Shake it up and make it fizz!’ and ‘I get so hard.’ Ironically, I believe my Swiss colleagues didn’t exactly recognise the discernible sexual connotations exhibited throughout the song which causes me to giggle ever so slightly looking back. However, it felt liberating hearing SOPHIE’s fiercely electronic, transparent music and seeing my classmates enjoying it - especially as all you would hear on most music outlets there was either dreary Indie or Luka Haenni - the Swiss equivalent to Justin Bieber. That’s the most I’m able to recollect from that peculiar night - aside from a trampoline burning to the ground due to someone placing a candle on it. After all that jazz, a thrillingly new chapter for myself - and even for SOPHIE - would unfold.

At 17, I returned to my place of birth, England, and enrolled at Sixth Form in the South to complete my A Levels. I initially felt extremely elated to move back to England and finally entering the era of adulthood in my life. However, the atmosphere at Sixth Form and in the South of England seemed ... so unfamiliar to me which was heartbreaking. My mind had totally adjusted to a Swiss and my mind endured unsettling feelings of anxiety during the entire first year at British college. However, SOPHIE’s music once again presented itself as a form of therapy for me. She released the ethereal, stunning ballad ‘It’s Okay To Cry’ during this time period. After watching its music video and deciphering the lyrics I realised... Oh my goodness, SOPHIE just came out as a transgender woman! I recall being touched by the exquisite, idiosyncratic song featuring 80s style synthesised arrangements. SOPHIE’S bravery mesmerised me. I knew in that moment, Sophie would revolutionise the music industry, especially the habitat of music production dominated by cisgender, heterosexual men. She proved my initial predictions right - and on many occasions.

The day after SOPHIE released ‘Its Okay To Cry’, I overheard an energetic conversation carried out by a few of fellow openly gay and trans classmates who I’m still acquainted with to this day. They couldn’t contain their excitement about SOPHIE.

Despite the crippling anxiety having affected me so severely at that point, I intervened and expressed my admiration for everything SOPHIE. I felt blessed attending a sixth form alongside gay, non binary, trans classmates who took pride in their identity and sexuality. It put my mind at ease being surrounded in a more progressive environment compared to the intolerant ambience pervading my village in Switzerland. SOPHIE’s music had connected me with such a progressive, solicitous and just simply amazing group of friends. They agreed with me that SOPHIE’s courageous move will impact the music world in such a striking manner and encourage more LGBT people to pursue their goals no matter how extravagant, especially an acclaimed music producer igniting the music industry like SOPHIE. Then all of a sudden they mentioned the track ‘Yeah Right’ and how it blew their mind away due to SOPHIE’s ‘badass as hell instrumentals.’ With all the shame in the world, I confessed I hadn’t heard it yet. Their facial expressions conveyed so much disappointment. One of my classmates quickly plugged their Bluetooth speaker into his laptop and then pressed the play button. From a personal perspective, ‘Yeah Right’ featuring Vince Staples and Kendrick Lamar perfectly stands out to me despite SOPHIE’s extensive and majestic discography to her name.

I contemplate the masterpiece as a pivotal moment in rap music history. Even during 2017,  Sophie began exhibiting red lipstick, latex gloves, tight clothing corresponding  to a more feminine image which totally distances from the aggressively macho image attached to the rap industry. From the moment Vince Staples commences with his lyrically cutting verses to Kendrick Lamar proceeding with his gripping and more than memorable cameo - I realised that a 3 minute long but significant moment music history in general simply named ‘Yeah Right’, had occurred. Her production on the track astonishes me due to its avant grade and timeless edge. To me, it is a masterpiece that echoes the the extremely distant future of music. I reckon we’ll be dancing to ‘Yeah Right’ at the club in 2137. For 4 consecutive years, ‘Yeah Right’ has been reigning champion of most listened to song on my Spotify account and can express with all certainty... it’s my all time favourite song. In all honesty, it cured me of my severe feelings of apprehension and anxiety at Sixth Form.

After regaining my confidence and FINALLY passing the dreaded driving test - after failing three times in a row - the first song I blasted on my speakers in my cheap, run down car was ‘Yeah Right’ and rather fittingly, Sophie’s live version of the officially unreleased ‘Burn Rubber’ whilst driving to university I was about to attend. I genuinely cried all the lyrics to the song whilst driving on the mundane roads of Southern England and FINALLY felt like a free, independent adult. Even during brief chapters of my life such as passing my driving test, SOPHIE made a crucial and ravishing appearance.

The last three years of my life have played out in a rather turbulent style. Towards the middle of 2018, the year unravelled in a fashion that I certainly hadn’t anticipated. I’ll summarise it to the best of my ability even thought it is extremely difficult to. My longtime best friend, the closest person to me, sadly died to long term chronic illness. I couldn’t articulate my utter grief into words and sadly still struggle to this day. It was a sudden blow to the heart which couldn’t be paralleled to anything else I’ve felt in my short lifetime. A month prior to her untimely passing, SOPHIE had released her acclaimed, gallant debut album ‘Oil Of Every Person’s Un Insides.’ Although OOEPUI is a extravagant, historic work of art, I shall describe how the tracks ‘Is it Cold In the Water’ and ‘Faceshopping’ impacted me.

I perceive ‘Is It Cold In The Water?  as a hauntingly riveting piece of music, with vocals sung Cecile Believe that send shivers down my spine. The lyrics ‘Earth shaking, I feel alone’ encapsulated on a personal level how I couldn’t envision an existence without my best friend by my side mocking my naturally deep, monotone voice, her showing me a piece of clothing she had just designed herself as she was an aspiring designer and hurting with laughter whilst impersonating certain celebrities.  My raging anger against the world intensified. I placed my formerly devoted belief in a higher existence under the microscope - a belief system that I unfortunately haven’t revisited ever since. ,Is It cold in the water’ epitomises the dilemma and hardship of entering unknown depths without any inkling of what overcoming the ‘cold water’ and how its aftermath would materialise, metaphorically speaking. I realised I had to place my feet in the cold water in order to heal and adjust to coping with my best friend’s death despite how petrifying the concept as such seemed at the time.

And then there’s the outstanding ‘Faceshopping.’ I’ll confess... when I originally listened to this track, I was rather, dare I say, baffled afterwards. The experimentally electronic provided by Sophie galvanised me as usual. However, as a cisgender woman who has dated men right up to the present moment, I was initially under the very ill informed assumption that I couldn’t identify with a lot of the album’s content produced by an trans woman. That display of shambolic ignorance was quickly put to rest when I analysed the lyrics of ‘Faceshopping’ with an open eye. It clicked that the song could symbolise more than one meaning. It examines the age of the internet and the lengths modern day go to in order to pass as beautiful, especially in the name of personal branding. Furthermore, the powerful track demonstrates SOPHIE’s mesmerisingly fervent opposition against what traditional values regard as beauty which is unquestionably ingenious. I feel the lyric ‘My shop is the face I front’ denotes a person’s individual freedom of complementing their psychical appearance - whether through simply makeup or plastic surgery - and evolving their true gender identity shouldn’t be shunned. As someone who has been extremely self conscious about my appearance since the tender age of 12 caused by several factors eg bullying at school, ‘Faceshopping’ uplifted my spirits and enlightened me that no influence other than my personal self shall control how I beautify my own body.

Skipping to 2020, the world has been transformed to a severe extent due to the Coronavirus infecting and heartbreakingly taking millions of people’s lives. With this almost dystopian nightmare occurring, I felt extremely poorly - physically speaking -  which had been affecting me since October of the same year. Ultimately I was rushed into hospital in December. After countless physical evaluations and days passing by whilst lying in a lonesome hospital bed, my doctor informed me that due to the severity of my current condition, the likelihood of permanent infertility is extremely high. The news put me into a state of shock. After my doctor left the room, the tears couldn’t stop streaming down my face. I had always envisioned raising my own children. Forgive me for the hyperbolic language but in that moment I felt defeated.

With the prospect of my womanhood being affected forever, I put my headphones to shut out the continuous ambulance sirens blaring outside. I pressed Shuffle Play on my SoundCloud and the first song that appeared was SOPHIE’s ‘Heav3n Suspended Livestream’ version of ‘My Forever’. Cecile Believe reiterating ‘Everbody’s got to own their body’ so ethereally, and the song as a whole proved to be therapeutic in the moment. After pressing the repeat button 20 times - at the very least - I had ANOTHER epiphany: no establishment should dictate what constitutes as femininity or womanhood. Even in the modern day society, childless people continue to be stigmatised, often branded as ‘selfish’ or ‘undesirable’ in many communities. I applaud the progress we’ve made in terms of tackling stereotypes associated with infertility. However, more work still needs to be carried out on this matter.  Although it’s only my individual interpretation of the song given the circumstances of my poorly health at the time, the lyrics reassured me that everybody’s - without a doubt -  GOT to own their body. Gosh that sounds so rhetorical!

After this pivotal awakening, I was rushed into surgery which lasted about two hours. The next day - feeling extremely lethargic - I woke up to the fantastic news that the doctors saved my physical health from infertility. I will always be so grateful for their treatment of me and my painful condition. Two weeks into recuperation post surgery, I had no choice but to exercise to boost my mental state caused by inactivity and to get my blood circulation going. As a lifelong, passionate dancer I conceptualised and performed a dance routine to SOPHIE’s club inspired, sublime ‘Take Me To Dubai’. - in front of my cracked bedroom mirror, ironically. Still, dancing again and no physical illness bringing me down felt like a individual rebirth. I was anticipating how 2021 would spell out for me - despite Covid 19 still permeating globally. 2021 finally arrived and not even a full month into the ‘glorious new year’, SOPHIE died.

I recall waking up to numerous messages and notifications capitalising the words: SOPHIE HAS DIED!’. In all honesty ... I froze. It didn’t register for about an hour. Afterwards, I couldn’t disguise the heartbreak and shock that SOPHIE was no longer with us - especially given the cause of her death. It’s been two weeks and I’ll acknowledge that I haven’t overcome the sentiment of anger and upset yet because of her untimely passing .The soundtrack to my existence is gone.

Whether SOPHIE’s musical stylings resonate with you or not, you can’t underestimate her fearless disposition and overwhelming talent. She inspired so many fans to embrace their true identity even when their environment was striving to silence them. She challenged our establishment’s shallow interpretation of beauty, gender and identity. Despite coming out as an trans woman and transphobia still being prevalent globally, SOPHIE didn’t let this form of prejudice stand in her way of achieving her dreams. Her revolutionary mark she left on the industry shall never be underemphasised by so many of us.

SOPHIE,

Thank you for everything. I will never ever forget you,

ROBS.

My 10 All-time Fave Anime

I first wanna get it out there that there is still a lot of anime I plan to watch and have yet to finish. This current top 10 all-time fave list is based from anime I have completed. I am currently watching a lot of anime, so this list could potentially change!

Each synopsis comes from MyAnimeList. Here’s my profile if you’re interested, and feel free to send a friend request!

Anyway, onto the list! This is not in order btw, just 10 titles!

My 10 All-time Fave Anime

1. Given (2019)

Tightly clutching his Gibson guitar, Mafuyu Satou steps out of his dark apartment to begin another day of his high school life. While taking a nap in a quiet spot on the gymnasium staircase, he has a chance encounter with fellow student Ritsuka Uenoyama, who berates him for letting his guitar’s strings rust and break. Noticing Uenoyama’s knowledge of the instrument, Satou pleads for him to fix it and to teach him how to play. Uenoyama eventually agrees and invites him to sit in on a jam session with his two band mates: bassist Haruki Nakayama and drummer Akihiko Kaji.

Satou’s voice is strikingly beautiful, filling Uenoyama with the determination to make Satou the lead singer of the band. Though reticent at first, Satou takes the offer after an emotional meeting with an old friend. With the support of his new friends, Satou must not only learn how to play guitar, but also come to terms with the mysterious circumstances that led him to be its owner.

2. Rurouni Kenshin (1996)

In the final years of the Bakumatsu era lived a legendary assassin known as Hitokiri Battousai. Feared as a merciless killer, he was unmatched throughout the country, but mysteriously disappeared at the peak of the Japanese Revolution. It has been ten peaceful years since then, but the very mention of Battousai still strikes terror into the hearts of war veterans.

Unbeknownst to them, Battousai has abandoned his bloodstained lifestyle in an effort to repent for his sins, now living as Kenshin Himura, a wandering swordsman with a cheerful attitude and a strong will. Vowing never to kill again, Kenshin dedicates himself to protecting the weak. One day, he stumbles across Kaoru Kamiya at her kendo dojo, which is being threatened by an impostor claiming to be Battousai. After receiving help from Kenshin, Kaoru allows him to stay at the dojo, and so the former assassin temporarily ceases his travels.

Rurouni Kenshin: Meiji Kenkaku Romantan tells the story of Kenshin as he strives to save those in need of saving. However, as enemies from both past and present begin to emerge, will the reformed killer be able to uphold his new ideals?

3. Assassination Classroom (2015)

When a mysterious creature chops the moon down to a permanent crescent, the students of class 3-E of Kunugigaoka Middle School find themselves confronted with an enormous task: assassinate the creature responsible for the disaster before Earth suffers a similar fate. However, the monster, dubbed Koro-sensei (the indestructible teacher), is able to fly at speeds of up to Mach 20, which he demonstrates freely, leaving any attempt to subdue him in his extraterrestrial dust. Furthermore, the misfits of 3-E soon find that the strange, tentacled beast is more than just indomitable—he is the best teacher they have ever had.

Adapted from the humorous hit manga by Yuusei Matsui, Ansatsu Kyoushitsu tells the story of these junior high pupils as they polish their assassination skills and grow in order to stand strong against the oppressive school system, their own life problems, and one day, Koro-sensei.

4. My Hero Academia (2016)

The appearance of “quirks,” newly discovered super powers, has been steadily increasing over the years, with 80 percent of humanity possessing various abilities from manipulation of elements to shapeshifting. This leaves the remainder of the world completely powerless, and Izuku Midoriya is one such individual.

Since he was a child, the ambitious middle schooler has wanted nothing more than to be a hero. Izuku’s unfair fate leaves him admiring heroes and taking notes on them whenever he can. But it seems that his persistence has borne some fruit: Izuku meets the number one hero and his personal idol, All Might. All Might’s quirk is a unique ability that can be inherited, and he has chosen Izuku to be his successor!

Enduring many months of grueling training, Izuku enrolls in UA High, a prestigious high school famous for its excellent hero training program, and this year’s freshmen look especially promising. With his bizarre but talented classmates and the looming threat of a villainous organization, Izuku will soon learn what it really means to be a hero.

5. Attack on Titan (2013)

Centuries ago, mankind was slaughtered to near extinction by monstrous humanoid creatures called titans, forcing humans to hide in fear behind enormous concentric walls. What makes these giants truly terrifying is that their taste for human flesh is not born out of hunger but what appears to be out of pleasure. To ensure their survival, the remnants of humanity began living within defensive barriers, resulting in one hundred years without a single titan encounter. However, that fragile calm is soon shattered when a colossal titan manages to breach the supposedly impregnable outer wall, reigniting the fight for survival against the man-eating abominations.

After witnessing a horrific personal loss at the hands of the invading creatures, Eren Yeager dedicates his life to their eradication by enlisting into the Survey Corps, an elite military unit that combats the merciless humanoids outside the protection of the walls. Based on Hajime Isayama’s award-winning manga, Shingeki no Kyojin follows Eren, along with his adopted sister Mikasa Ackerman and his childhood friend Armin Arlert, as they join the brutal war against the titans and race to discover a way of defeating them before the last walls are breached.

6. Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica (2011)

Madoka Kaname and Sayaka Miki are regular middle school girls with regular lives, but all that changes when they encounter Kyuubey, a cat-like magical familiar, and Homura Akemi, the new transfer student.

Kyuubey offers them a proposition: he will grant any one of their wishes and in exchange, they will each become a magical girl, gaining enough power to fulfill their dreams. However, Homura Akemi, a magical girl herself, urges them not to accept the offer, stating that everything is not what it seems.

A story of hope, despair, and friendship, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica deals with the difficulties of being a magical girl and the price one has to pay to make a dream come true.

7. Hunter X Hunter (2011)

Hunter x Hunter is set in a world where Hunters exist to perform all manner of dangerous tasks like capturing criminals and bravely searching for lost treasures in uncharted territories. Twelve-year-old Gon Freecss is determined to become the best Hunter possible in hopes of finding his father, who was a Hunter himself and had long ago abandoned his young son. However, Gon soon realizes the path to achieving his goals is far more challenging than he could have ever imagined.

Along the way to becoming an official Hunter, Gon befriends the lively doctor-in-training Leorio, vengeful Kurapika, and rebellious ex-assassin Killua. To attain their own goals and desires, together the four of them take the Hunter Exam, notorious for its low success rate and high probability of death. Throughout their journey, Gon and his friends embark on an adventure that puts them through many hardships and struggles. They will meet a plethora of monsters, creatures, and characters—all while learning what being a Hunter truly means.

8. Ranma ½ (1989)

Ranma Saotome is a top-class martial artist and prodigy at the Saotome “Anything-Goes” school of martial arts. While training in China, he and his father meet a terrible fate when they accidentally fall into a cursed spring. Now, Ranma is cursed to turn into a girl when splashed with cold water, and only hot water can turn him back into a boy.

Things are only complicated further when Ranma discovers that his father has arranged for him to marry one of Soun Tendo’s three daughters in order to secure the future of the Tendo dojo. Though Soun learns of Ranma’s predicament, he is still determined to go ahead with the engagement, and chooses his youngest daughter Akane, who happens to be a skilled martial artist herself and is notorious for hating men.

Ranma ½ follows the hilarious adventures of Ranma and Akane as they encounter various opponents, meet new love interests, and find different ways to make each other angry, all while their engagement hangs over their head.

9. Love Live! School Idol Project (2013)

Otonokizaka High School is in a crisis! With the number of enrolling students dropping lower and lower every year, the school is set to shut down after its current first years graduate. However, second year Honoka Kousaka refuses to let it go without a fight. Searching for a solution, she comes across popular school idol group A-RISE and sets out to create a school idol group of her own. With the help of her childhood friends Umi Sonoda and Kotori Minami, Honoka forms μ’s (pronounced “muse”) to boost awareness and popularity of her school.

Unfortunately, it’s all easier said than done. Student council president Eri Ayase vehemently opposes the establishment of a school idol group and will do anything in her power to prevent its creation. Moreover, Honoka and her friends have trouble attracting any additional members. But the Love Live, a competition to determine the best and most beloved school idol groups in Japan, can help them gain the attention they desperately need. With the contest fast approaching, Honoka must act quickly and diligently to try and bring together a school idol group and win the Love Live in order to save Otonokizaka High School.

10. Demon Slayer (2019)

Ever since the death of his father, the burden of supporting the family has fallen upon Tanjirou Kamado’s shoulders. Though living impoverished on a remote mountain, the Kamado family are able to enjoy a relatively peaceful and happy life. One day, Tanjirou decides to go down to the local village to make a little money selling charcoal. On his way back, night falls, forcing Tanjirou to take shelter in the house of a strange man, who warns him of the existence of flesh-eating demons that lurk in the woods at night.

When he finally arrives back home the next day, he is met with a horrifying sight—his whole family has been slaughtered. Worse still, the sole survivor is his sister Nezuko, who has been turned into a bloodthirsty demon. Consumed by rage and hatred, Tanjirou swears to avenge his family and stay by his only remaining sibling. Alongside the mysterious group calling themselves the Demon Slayer Corps, Tanjirou will do whatever it takes to slay the demons and protect the remnants of his beloved sister’s humanity.

I hope you find something you like here and will check some of my faves out!! ❤️ Let me know if you do and what you think!!! x

797

What is your favorite thing to do on your phone? Fucking around on social media like a true Gen Z-er would, lmao. I have several games that I’d play occasionally, but most of the time I just check the same three apps – Messenger, Facebook, and Twitter. Do you know what you are going to be for Halloween this year? If so, what? I don’t even know if I have plans for the rest of the year. Do you still go trick-or-treating, and if so, how old are you? The last time we did was 2015, when we were 17. Nowadays we just have costume parties. Which Disney princess resembles you the most? At the moment it’s probably Moana, but I heard they’re making a Southeast Asian Disney princess so I’m waiting for her :) What color was your first phone? I’m not sure what the model’s actual color was because it was already in a Winnie the Pooh case when I got it as a present, but the case itself was red.

Was your first phone a flip phone? No, it was one of the Nokia ones with a slightly green screen and the Snake game on it. Have you ever butt dialed someone? I don’t think so. It’s normally the other way around. What is your favorite pizza parlor? We don’t have many of that around here; most places serve a little bit of everything with pizzas usually having its own section on the menu. That said, my favorite place to get pizza is Mama Lou’s if I have some cash on me and want to be fancy, and Yellow Cab if I want fast food pizza but still quality pizza. What is an old website that closed down that you miss? I’m pretty sure Tumblr shut down my old survey blog, the one I’ve had since 2012 or 2013, and I’m very bummed out by it. It’s also weird to me because I have a blog that’s been inactive for much longer and that one is still up... so I don’t know why they would shut down the blog that served as my journal during my teen years. I occasionally look back on it to see how I was doing then and compare it to who I am now, so it sucks that I can’t do that anymore. If you're a girl, have you ever had an embarrassing period story? I guess, but I’ve also reached a point where I’ve stopped seeing period mishaps as embarrassing. Stuff like that just happens sometimes, and I can’t be around people who are going to be babies about it. ...If so, what happened? The worst instance was leaking during a PE workout and my classmate pointing it out for me, and then having to change into denim jeans for the rest of the workout since that was the only other pair of bottoms I had.  What was your worst experience in high school? I can remember one but I don’t wanna relive my anxieties here by writing it in full detail so no thanks. What was your high school's mascot? We don’t have a mascot; we only had colors. Do you listen to Grace VanderWaal? Only if she’s on the radio. I don’t dislike her but I also don’t think I’ve ever looked up her music voluntarily. ...if yes, what's your favorite song of hers? I’m not familiar with her song titles. I’ve caught some songs that I liked but I wouldn’t be able to tell you which ones they were. Do you watch America's Got Talent? Only the compilation videos they’ve got on YouTube. Which country has the best accent? I don’t really rank accents lol Did you cry at your high school graduation? I cried the night before. I find that I don’t usually cry when an event that’s supposed to be emotional is happening, but I do cry before or after it. Did you cry at your college graduation (if applicable)? LOL if applicable, fucking same. I think I’ll mostly be relieved when it finally happens because I’m expecting it to keep getting postponed for now. Do your parents try to stop you from chasing your dreams? No, but they’re also realistic. I tried to court my dad about having an internship with WWE at Connecticut, and he was less than enthusiastic about it which I completely understood. What dreams have stuck with you since childhood? My dream house, to go to Wrestlemania, and to have a lot of money hahaha. Who is a former friend that you wish would come back into your life? Egh, I feel like the way life has turned out has been for the best and I’m currently not wishing any of my former friends back. I suppose it would be nice to have my relationship with Macy back, though. Have you ever been in a serious romantic relationship? Yes, like the one I’m in now. Who was your favorite Spice Girl? I didn’t have one but I did have a soft spot for Victoria Beckham since she’s always in fashion magazines and also because her family has always looked so happy. But I never really liked her as part of the group? because I knew about Victoria before I knew about the Spice Girls. Sorryyy please put your pitchforks down I was born in 1998 :(( <333 Did you ever want to be in a band or music group? No. What instrument did you play in the marching band? We don’t have a club like that here. If you could take any one type of dance class right now, what kind you take? Ballet. Who got kicked off of your favorite talent show that you were mad about? There were a gazillion unfair eliminations on American Idol but I remember being most pissed off over Scotty McCreery’s win and Pia Toscano’s elimination. Do you own the entire series on DVD of any TV show? If so, what? I have a bootleg box set of the 80s sitcom Perfect Strangers, but other than that I’ve been able to watch TV shows via torrent or Netflix, soooo. What show did you always want to be on when you were a kid? I wanted to be a part of the dancing audience on Hi-5, and to be dumped with slime at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards lol. Can you tell the difference between Mary-Kate and Ashley? No. Who is your favorite set of twins? Seoeon and Seojun from The Return of Superman. What is the stupidest baby name you have heard recently? Welp, nothing has beaten Covid Bryant yet... What is the grossest thing you have ever vomited up? Nothing too gross. Just alcohol. Have you ever thrown up in public, in front of someone else? Yes. The sensation of puking terrifies me so there’ve been a few times I asked Gabie to go to the Pop-Up washroom with me, enter a stall also with me, and to calm me down while I throw up D: ...If yes, was it embarrassing? I don’t find it embarrassing because she’s my girlfriend. I’d never ask anyone else to do the same thing for me though. Did you ever take your dog to school? Just once, for my graduation shoot. Name one person you know who had a baby in high school. No one in my batch had a baby while in high school, just shortly after. I’m not naming them but one of them already has three kids, one has a boy, and another one also has a boy. Do you keep a list of your favorite quotes? No. Describe your dream wedding in three words. Lots of food. What is your favorite Chinese restaurant? Tim Ho Wan or King Bee. Does Chinese food make you feel sick? No. Well Filipinos are kinda used to Chinese food, so it would be odd for us to get sick from it. Have you ever seen someone throw up on a plane? Fortunately no. But on a boat and a ship, yes. Do you get motion sickness? Yes, easily.

I’m just going to ignore the next seven questions because I’m tired of entertaining questions like these. Has God ever healed you of anything? If so, what? Do you believe in God? Do you pray, and if so, to whom? What is the most boring church you have ever attended? What is the most lively church you have ever attended? Do you find church fun or boring? When was the last time you went to a church service? When did you learn to ride a bike? I haven’t learned yet. I’ve had a few lucky rounds but they never lasted for more than five seconds. What do you hate the most about summer? The weather. Certainly not as fun when there’s no breeze from the beach complementing the heat. What is your favorite thing to do in a swimming pool? Stay away wherever most of the people are because it’s a little gross. Which part of your body is the most muscular? I don’t know. Do you like sugar skulls? No. Have you ever painted a sugar skull on your face? I probably had it done as a kid. Are you an artist? No. Did you ever take Latin in school? No but we were taught French very briefly because the foundress of my old school is from France. The lessons didn’t really catch on. What was the last race you ran called? I’ve never been in a race/marathon/walkathon before. Do you prefer to run in the street or on the sidewalk? Side of the street. Sidewalks are pretty inconsistent so I’m more likely to trip running on it. Which major holiday is closest to your birthday? Easter is always very near or exactly on my birthday.

A Day In LA With Deafheaven // Stereogum

Loud Love : A Day In LA With Deafheaven The California screamers open up about real life, baby ducks, and 'Ordinary Corrupt Human Love'

Full article by Larry Fitzmaurice via Stereogum

Everyone has to grow up eventually — even ducklings. “Look, dude — the baby ducklings!” Deafheaven guitarist Kerry McCoy stops as we’re mid-conversation, pointing out a plump of web-footed friends on a small rolling pitch alongside the walking path of Los Angeles’ Echo Park.

“I know! They’re getting big,” the band’s howling lead singer George Clarke marvels, as the two stop to briefly ponder the not-quite-grown, no-longer-young fowl squatting and waddling on the grass.

“I saw them the other day, too,” says McCoy.

“They were more yellow before,” Clarke explains with a level of attentiveness that would make one think he raised the ducklings himself.

I’m here to observe what Clarke describes to me as “what a normal day for us is like,” as Deafheaven luxuriate in the relative calm before the busyness of touring and promo that will accompany the release of their fourth album, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love (out July 13 via ANTI-). These days, Clarke and McCoy are sticklers for routine — and as they recount their regular goings-on to me, it’s slightly adorable that these longtime friends’ day-to-day approach bears close similarity: wake up around 7 in the morning, hit the gym, run some errands, meet up in the park for a bit, and watch a movie or an episode of Billions before crashing out. Both spend part of their day caring for others: Clarke for his grandfather who currently lives with him, and McCoy for a few persistently hungry cats. “I have to stay out until 6 or 7 PM, otherwise they meow until they get food,” he mock-complains with a grin.

Earlier in the day, Clarke and I hit up the Echo Lake outpost of crunchy Cali natural-food chain Lessen’s, as he dumps a variety of salad-bar ingredients — corn, beets, kale, shredded cabbage and peppers, and a heaping helping of steamed veggies, if you’re looking to take on the Deafheaven Diet — into a container. We walk over to the sprawling Echo Park and Clarke unfurls a sizable blanket, festooned with the album art for the band’s 2013 star-making LP Sunbather, before stripping to a white tank-top and laying out belly-down to nosh while we chat about the latest mixtape from Oakland rapper All Black. McCoy joins us soon after along with former member Stephen Clark, who stoically sips from a bottle of water and sucks down a few cigs while the trio are quite literally sunbathing under the LA rays.

All it takes is one listen to Ordinary Corrupt Human Love to deduct that this period of respite is well-earned. Since their alluring 2011 debut Roads To Judah, the band’s dark-arts alchemy of death metal’s frigid rush, shoegaze’s impressionistic swarm, and the emotional catharsis of post-rock has somehow only grown more epic with every release. That’s even more true with their latest record, which at times recalls Mellon Collie-era Smashing Pumpkins and Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary in its ultra-bright melodic sweep. There are female vocals present, courtesy of West Coast occult-rocker Chelsea Wolfe — as well as actual singing, as Clarke shows off a deeper vocal register beyond his signature burned-out bark.

The personal boundary-pushing and overall prettiness of Ordinary Corrupt Human Love doesn’t so much suggest a newer, shinier Deafheaven as it does a natural progression (or a full realization, even) of the genre-blending hard rock sound they’ve spent most of the decade refining. As tempting as it might be to refer to the album as Deafheaven’s “mature” turn, there’s still a youthful passion that courses through it like a lit match dropped into dry brush — but that doesn’t mean the quintet haven’t gone through some serious personal changes in the interim between 2015’s New Bermuda and now (which marks, to date, the longest gap between Deafheaven records).

“We were 24 when Sunbather came out,” Clarke reflects while discussing the intense emotions and personal strain the band’s been through since that record’s release. “We were still sleeping on floors when we were home, but the rest of the time we were on tour with idle hands and free cash.” He pauses for a second and chuckles ruefully. “Some people are smart — but we decided not to be.”

Before their current residence in LA (Clarke and McCoy have lived in the city for about four years now) and Deafheaven’s teeth-cutting Bay Area days, the pair spent their adolescence scrapping about in the central California suburbs of Modesto. “It was normal,” McCoy describes their respective upbringings, “but it’s all relative. I’m sure Bill Gates’ kids have seen some shit, too.” But he’s quick to note that the relative mundanity of their upbringing also made for a normalization of the intolerance the young punks experienced growing up, too: “I’d just accepted that the way the world went was seeing a giant truck with a Confederate flag drive by, calling me a fag.” (In the middle of this parkside recollection, Clarke interrupts to point out something decidedly not normal: a shirtless pedestrian sporting a full-chest Monster energy drink tattoo. “Check out how lit this tattoo is,” he giggles, as we briefly debate its authenticity.)

When he was 15, McCoy’s father took him to a protest against the Iraq War, and he wore a white armband to school afterwards, which resulted in him getting “destroyed” by his classmates. “We recently went to the March For Our Lives,” Clarke mentions, “and I think it’s really cool that kids these days — even if they’re not 100% informed on stuff — are really making an effort to be. Comparatively, there was no one [in high school] thinking about anything else other than the direct narrative you were given in this small town.”

Music had been in both of their lives from an early age — McCoy’s father once worked as a music journalist, and some of Clarke’s earliest memories include leafing through CD booklets with his mother — and the outsider feeling both of them shared only further deepened their sonic interests. “When you’re living in the Central Valley and you’re into ‘alternative’ things, it forces you further into the hole you’re digging for yourself,” Clarke explains. “You’re already a loser with acne, and now you’re painting your nails for a Misfits show,” McCoy follows up with a chuckle. His first band was a punky high school outfit called The Confused, which self-distributed a CD called What The Hell that everyone in his social circle thought “sucked.” Clarke’s inaugural musical foray was in a band called Fear And Faith Alike that, in his words, “was very 2002 metalcore.”

CREDIT: Frazer Harrison / Getty Images

Clarke and McCoy first became friends when the latter saw “this fool” (Clarke) sitting outside in the rain during high school, decked out in fishnet arm sleeves, a Slayer T-shirt, and a white backpack covered with pentagrams and band names scrawled in Bic. They stayed close as the former bounced around high schools, returning to Modesto after barely graduating in San Jose; after a few failed attempts at forming post-high school bands, the two formed Deafheaven in 2009 after McCoy joined Clarke to share a $500/month apartment in the Upper Haight area of San Francisco.

Deafheaven began as a pretty much anonymous project, to the point where the pair created a Facebook page for the band that essentially positioned it as a one-man act. “We didn’t tell anyone we grew up with about it,” Clarke explains. “We knew if we told people it was us, everyone would be like ‘Fuck off.'” In 2010, they recorded a demo with Bay Area producer Jack Shirley for the cost of $500, a sum which Clarke and McCoy (who were scrambling to even make monthly rent) struggled to pay back for six months.

“This man’s patience is endless,” Clarke speaks admirably about Shirley, whom McCoy refers to as “the Ian McKaye of the West Coast” and “like a straight-edge Marine”; he’s produced every Deafheaven record since. “They were broke beyond broke,” recalls Shirley, whose work with Deafheaven has led him to record acts like Wolves In The Throne Room and Jeff Rosenstock. “It wasn’t a huge deal, though. I try to be patient in those situations, and I’m glad I didn’t [let money get in the way], because it would’ve severed my ties with a band that I have a great relationship with now.”

After the demo made the rounds online, Deafheaven expanded to a full-band lineup and signed to Converge frontman Jacob Bannon’s Deathwish Inc. label, who released Roads To Judah and Sunbather — the latter of which received a profile-raising critical response that metal and “heavy” music in general typically doesn’t enjoy. “We went from a band that nobody really gave a fuck about, to … not the world’s biggest band, but a thing!” McCoy exclaims. “I had an apartment, I moved to LA, I got a girlfriend — life got kind of big.”

The success Deafheaven enjoyed following Sunbather’s release was, for a band on their level, a bit dizzying. Their fanbase spanned kindred spirits like Mono and Explosions In The Sky to rapper Danny Brown and Third Eye Blind’s Stephan Jenkins. On the other hand, the band found themselves unwittingly receiving the indie-TMZ treatment after a Swedish blogger spotted them hanging out at the VIP area of Gothenburg’s Way Out West festival with a Sub Pop representative (full disclosure: I was also present for said hang), ginning up a post shortly after speculating about the band’s potential next career moves — a surprise to the folks back at Deathwish. “I felt so bad,” Clarke says in a tone of sincerity about the accidental reveal.

CREDIT: Gari Askew II / Stereogum

Combined with the extensive post-Sunbather touring schedule, the increased attention on Deafheaven — as well as the pressures of writing and recording the band’s next album, which they’d committed to within a tight time frame under new label home ANTI- — was starting to take its toll on everyone involved. “All this touring and great stuff was fun and exciting, but it blows up your personality with regards to things you have when you become middle-class,” McCoy states. “And you have habits that blow up with that.”

As work on New Bermuda progressed, the pressure of following up their big breakthrough began to wear on the band — hard. Shirley states that, as a “habitually sober” person, he didn’t witness any dysfunction in the recording studio; but McCoy describes the ways in which Deafheaven’s members dealt with the situation as “unhealthy,” and he and Clarke started to literally lose sleep over the prospect of what would come next. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night thinking that everyone was mad at me because the record sucked,” says McCoy, “and we’d all have to go back to Whole Foods — everyone was laughing at us.”

Various substances were on-hand and frequently present during this time — a product of bad habits never dropped and exacerbated by the party-hardy temporary lifestyle that touring afforded. “You’d be like, ‘Well, I gotta be in the practice space for five hours today — better bring two 40’s,'” Clarke remembers. “When you’re touring for five years, your body degrades,” explains guitarist Shiv Mehra, who joined the band along with drummer Daniel Tracy while Sunbather was being recorded. “Drinking doesn’t help.”

Clarke recalls a show in Sao Paulo on the band’s first South American tour supporting New Bermuda as a colliding point for the band’s substance use and personal strain. “It should’ve been insane,” he recalls with a touch of regret, “But everyone was backstage burnt that the booze wasn’t there yet.”

“We were all just sitting there staring at our phones, waiting for whoever — or whatever — to show up,” McCoy adds. “Our entire world wants to come backstage and be the guy to hang out with you, and they know there’s a certain way to do that.”

“We were all still bothered by each other from touring,” Clark, who possesses a quiet yet thoughtful demeanor, states. “We didn’t have any time off from each other for years.” Following New Bermuda’s tour cycle — a period of time he says “quite literally ruined his life” — he chose to leave the band and was replaced by current bassist Chris Johnson, but still remains close with everyone.

“I didn’t handle having money well,” Clark asserts with straightforward conviction. “It was so easy to party, and I was never much of a partier — so I was all over the world having fun, with no longevity in mind. It all came crashing down.”

“It was a dark and bad experience,” McCoy states plainly on the time period surrounding New Bermuda. By the end of the album cycle, everyone was exhausted, and the mere act of being in the band had turned into drudgery.

“It stopped being fun,” Clarke states on his view towards the band at that point. “It became a chore.”

I ask if there was ever a point during this period of time in which he thought Deafheaven would cease to exist. Later, when I relay his answer to others in the band, they’re quick to note it was an exaggeration, but it’s a rough reply regardless: “I kind of thought someone would die,” says Clarke. We’re not gonna break up because we don’t have anything else, but something drastic or scary happening was within the realm of possibility. If anything would’ve taken us down, it would’ve been … tragic.”

When I press on if there were any specific close calls that took place, the three demur, nervously laugh, and murmur to themselves, “Maybe — not really,” declining to elaborate. “When you’re fuckin’ around, you’re fuckin’ around,” Clarke says with an uneasy chuckle.

Clarke quickly follows up: “When you have a problem, you have a problem.”

Work on Ordinary Corrupt Human Love informally began in late 2016 around a single piano riff McCoy had been toying around with, but much of the album was written and recorded from October of last year until this past February. Deafheaven camped out in a cluster of Oakland homes and, after an informal jam session during the first day of recording, found that the time off did them good.

“We finally dealt with all the stuff that made New Bermuda so dark — and when we did, we realized that all that other stuff was junk,” McCoy passionately describes. “When we all got in a room together, I was like, ‘This was the juice of life right here.'”

“It was like we’d been holding our breath for three years, finally let it out, took another one, and said ‘Everything’s gonna be OK,'” Clarke adds.

In truth, there was still a ways to go. To this day, Deafheaven’s members describe themselves as living “healthier” than before, but McCoy is the only band member who’s completely sober, a decision he made during recording late last year after an extended struggle with drug addiction. It’s a sensitive topic for him to discuss, and the details he’s willing to offer regarding his path to sobriety are scant — but he makes it unmistakably clear that things could not go on the way they were for much longer.

“I’d come to a point where I was done being out there,” he explains, “And I was willing to try anything to get off it.” McCoy reached out to a friend, who helped put him on the path to recovery; he’s been sober since late 2017. “My favorite thing in the world was to play guitar,” he states, “And for a long time, I forgot that. Ever since I made this decision, my life has gotten immeasurably better.”

Casting aside the past was essential for not just McCoy, but the entirety of Deafheaven to move forwards after the fraught period of time they were trying to leave behind. “I don’t think anyone who worked on New Bermuda wanted to make another record that sounded like New Bermuda,” Clarke states, who goes on to describe Ordinary Corrupt Human Love as the sound of “people enjoying what they’re doing.” If the aesthetic of the new album reflects the emotions of the people who recorded it, then the lyrical content zooms in on the world around them — the splendor and sameness of peoples’ everyday lives.

CREDIT: Gari Askew II / Stereogum

The universal, explicitly humanistic focus was developed after Clarke began collaborating with photographer Nick Steinhardt to, in his words, “photograph people in their natural habitat.” “I told him I didn’t want anything extraordinary — just people in their everyday routine, looking at a snapshot of someone in their day and just drinking it in,” he explains. The album’s cover features an anonymous woman in Los Angeles’ Civic Center area, her scarf blowing in front of her face; the inlay art features a child holding out his hand to his mother as he prepares to cross the street.

McCoy describes the album cover as “a potential alternate version” of the iconic album art for Radiohead’s The Bends, and Clarke cites the tinted-hue portraiture of Belle And Sebastian’s visual art as a parallel — both comparisons serving as reminders that, despite their roots in heavy music, their palettes span far beyond what genre purists might come to expect.

And if Deafheaven’s genre-agnostic approach seemed polarizing around the time of Sunbather, it seems weirdly prescient now. In a way, the 29-year-old McCoy and Clarke are indicative of the landscape-flattening streaming generation, in a good way. Sure, it’s easy to bemoan the age of the algorithm and the fluctuating state of discovery for budding music fans in the digital age. But it’s even easier to forget that discovering “good” music used to possess a distinct social element not far off from joining the football team in high school: Are the indie kids any different than the jocks if they still bristle at people joining their lunch table?

For Deafheaven’s and younger generations, discovering new music is easier than ever, and if you’re willing to turn discovery into creativity as they have been, the possibilities are endless. And anyway, even though Deafheaven’s earlier work was sometimes overshadowed by the band’s perpetual and ineffective battle with the metal scene, the band’s members have since learned to hang with the genre misconceptions. “My girlfriend sent me a screenshot about how ‘Honeycomb’ has a punk section — that’s textbook Oasis!” McCoy says with an easygoing laugh that speaks to a greater truth when it comes to getting older. Sometimes it’s easier to just let old grudges go.

Despite the cloudy forecast, it’s a bit brighter of a day than we’re expecting. With the threat of sunburn fast approaching, we pack up the blanket, take a leisurely walk around the park, and head to the 826 Time Travel Mart. The Mart’s a funky Sunset Blvd. spot funded by the Dave Eggers-founded nonprofit 826, featuring arch, kitschy items ranging from giant dinosaur eggs to a powdered concoction called “robot milk” — but McCoy’s less invested in the temporally-out-of-whack wares on display than he is in the tutoring courses being offered in the next room of the nonprofit-funded space.

An employee explains the programs offered as McCoy listens intently, and when Clarke returns from grabbing a coffee nearby he does similarly. At first blush, the thoughtfulness and social investment that the pair show during my time with them might seem too fitting of a narrative for a band trying to straighten up and fly right — but such character traits often come with growing up, too.

“Nikki Sixx was 27 when shit got really bad and he tried to clean up for the first time,” Clarke points out as our time comes to a close, before McCoy has to go check on the cats and Clarke’s grandfather needs help getting his computer fixed. “We reached that age too. We want to take what we do seriously and have a career — and to eliminate the things that get in the way of that. If you don’t die at 27, you can do a lotof shit.”

Reflecting back the last 25 years of my life.

Last July, I turned 25. Many things have changed since then. As many of you know, I was diagnosed with autism early on in my life. Life has been a difficult journey since then. I’ve been allergic to gluten and dairy for the most of my life, and while I’m still allergic to the latter, I choose to abstain from the former so I don’t feel or behave strange. I was only able to begin talking at the age of four, which is due to being given books to read by my parents. Most people don’t learn to read until they are at least five or six. When I was in senior kindergarten, the staff thought I was too good so they had me help the Grade 1 students with some of their lessons. I’ve also done some really stupid things during my early years, such as intentionally failing a math quiz, but one thing that made me snap is when I was accused of calling someone a jerk when I was complimenting the nature outside. This incident back in Grade 6 opened my eyes to the numerous bullsh*t that plagues this world to this day.

Things didn’t really take a turn until 2008-2010. Around this time, I began Grade 8 at All Saints Catholic High School, which was a very traumatizing year for me. It was here where I realized that the educational assistants (EA) were nothing but corrupt and abusive. It came to the point where I kicked an EA because I was being forced to study for Religion, which resulted in me getting suspended. I was suspended a total of five times during those years, 60% of which were EA-related. To this day, I still show no remorse for those EA-related incidents. Even then, I had more respect for the vice principals than the EAs since they actually had wisdom. In 2010, it was a hard time for my family as my grandmother had major surgery and my uncle was diagnosed with bladder cancer. It made me realize that death is a serious thing. In both cases, both survived and are still alive as of this writing.

The last three years of high school were easier than the first three, simply because I did not have EA support. As said in the previous paragraph, the EAs were the cause for most of my suspensions and removing their support undeniably did a lot of good for me. Whereas some people with special needs would stay behind after they graduated, I elected to leave immediately in 2013 simply because I could not deal with more EA abuse. However, one thing that came out of having to deal with this is that the schools knew my problems and accommodated them for me. In hindsight, my classmates and the VPs were not the issue. The high school EAs were since they were treating special needs children, teenagers I shall say, as five year olds. For some reason they thought games like Street Fighter or Tekken were the most violent thing ever; neither series has a Mature-Rated game and it shows the obvious mediocrity of the unionized OCSB staff.

After my graduation, my appreciation for fighting games grew, as I played the hell out of games like Guilty Gear Xrd, Street Fighter V, and Tekken 7, understanding the basics of the systems and learning advanced terminology like just frame, lag cancel, 8-way run, and advanced block. I would even practice for hours learning some really silly combos, even though I was nowhere near the tournament level. In 2017, I also started to really love metal music after listening to Sirius XM Liquid Metal for like eight months. I would listen to landmark albums like Heartwork by Carcass, Calculating Infinity by The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Angel and the Dark River by My Dying Bride, Through Silver in Blood by Neurosis, and even Painkiller by Judas Priest. I would even talk to a friend named Xigrame who’s a local black metal musician who worked at this video gaming night on Mondays during mid-2018 up until the COVID-19 pandemic began. He would give me band suggestions now and then. I have since took to the internet, discovering bands that I’ve never heard of like Havukruunu, Undeath, and even Wake who happens to be from Canada just like me.

Being autistic has been rather difficult for me, especially in the age of the internet. Folks that don’t know me too well know that I’m on the spectrum. It’s also hard because of my conservative views. Ever since 2015, I’ve learned that the Liberal party, doesn’t matter if it’s federal or provincial, continues to push for climate change but also increasingly adding to the federal debt. They also promote diversity, which is essentially including people based on their ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or even disability. I’m not against this personally, since autistic people are part of the diversity logic. I’m not a person who discriminates, I generally treat everybody as equal. Even with COVID-19 going on, there’s no excuse for everybody else’s bad behavior; online or offline, and regardless of political alignment.

As for me personally, I’ve had things that I could not stand back then, but now I either really enjoy. I wasn’t crazy for pasta or lamb when I was younger, but now I’m able to have them without even thinking about gagging. I didn’t have a lot of steak when I was 8 to 10, but now I eat it very frequently. Some people who complain about eating meat don’t seem to know that steak is VERY expensive. If you go to a restaurant, they generally charge you $20 or $30 on average for your favorite cut of steak. At places like Loblaws or Costco, it’s higher. So if you’re going to complain that veganism is the purest thing to man, understand that having steak for dinner is a privilege. I’m very much against veganism since a lot of people on the diet lose a ton of muscle/power and are generally faced with numerous health issues. Interestingly, I couldn’t tolerate onions or celery when I was younger because of the noise that it made in my head, but now they’re not really an issue. It’s weird because most children can’t stand broccoli or brussel sprouts but I’ve never really disliked them. With that in mind, broccoli, spinach, cauliflower and meat are all good for you since the former three induce testosterone and that meat gives you a lot of protein.

But the one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic has taught me is that exercise is very important for your health. During the pandemic, I would go in the workout shed every second day, eventually everyday, and exercise certain parts of my body. I would alter workout routines based on where I’m feeling sore. I’ve also learned that exercising regularly helps combat you from getting sick. As of this writing, I have not gotten sick since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic back in February 2020. I would also reduce my food consumption, basically skipping breakfast and lunch, but eating dinner which was usually meat and vegetables. The pandemic did a lot of good on my health since I’ve lost about 20-30 lbs from March to June 2020. I’ve been very cautious of what I consume, rarely consuming junk food. Whereas my brothers would eat junk food very often during COVID, I would use coffee and dark chocolate as my vices, which played rather well.

In July of 2020, I would turn 25 and I was grateful that I made it far in my life. The many hurdles I faced, whether it be from having autism, world issues, being a conservative voter, or even living through hardships like the COVID-19 pandemic has taught me that I’m only human. As a human, you’ve got to face hardships during your life. My grandparents had to live through World War II and my parents lived through the Reagan Era. You’re also built to make choices during your life, with each choice you make shaping your personality. For example, I really like video games (especially fighting games), metal music, working out, eating fine cooked steak, and believing in conservatism. When life gets rough, don’t let the world bring you down. People are made to adapt to situations and we just roll the dice. No matter what number shows up, we always win because we are warriors, able to get through anything. Stay strong.

R1A out!

On March 15, 2019, legions of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s admirers celebrated her 86th birthday by dropping to the ground and grinding out the Super Diva’s signature push-ups on the steps of courthouses around the country.

This unusual tribute to a Supreme Court justice was one of the many ways a new generation has shown the love to the five-foot tall legal giant who made the lives they live possible. But by Sept. 18, her iron will and gritty determination was no longer enough to propel her to court. Ginsburg died on Friday at the age of 87 of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, according to a statement released by the Supreme Court, per the Associated Press.

In the early ’70s—when Gloria Steinem was working underground as a Playboy Bunny to expose sexism, and Betty Friedan was writing a feminist manifesto about “the problem with no name”—Ginsburg named the problem, briefed it, and argued it before the Supreme Court of the United States.

She was 37 then, on the receiving end of so much of the discrimination she would work to end, and she was just undertaking her first job as a litigator—as co-director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. In her “very precise” way, as Justice Harry Blackmun put it, she studied title, chapter, clause, and footnote of the legal canon that kept women down and overturned those that discriminated on the basis of sex in five landmark cases that extended the 14th Amendment’s equal rights clause to women. In that long, hard slog, she employed some novel devices, using “gender” (so as not to distract male jurists with the word “sex”) and representing harmed male plaintiffs when she could find one (to show that discrimination hurts everyone). And she never raised her voice.

When she was done, a widower could get the same Social Security benefits as a woman and a woman could claim the same military housing allowance as a man. A woman could cut a man’s hair, buy a drink at the same age, administer an estate, and serve on a jury.

By the time she left the ACLU, and before she donned her first black robe, Ginsburg had brought about a small revolution in how women were treated, wiping close to 200 laws that discriminated off the books. Over the next decades, first as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and then as the second woman on the Supreme Court, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she would become to women what Thurgood Marshall was to African Americans. She employed the same clause in the 14th Amendment he used to free former slaves to extend protection to the mentally ill who wanted to live outside institutions, gays who wanted to marry, immigrants who lived in fear, and, of course, females: those who wanted to be cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, have access to abortion, and, when pregnant, not be fired if they couldn’t perform duties their condition made, temporarily, impossible.

Her fans’ courthouse celebration was also a plea for the bionic Ginsburg to carry on, at least until the 2020 election. There was high anxiety when she fell asleep at the State of the Union in 2015 (a case of enjoying a fine California wine brought by Justice Anthony Kennedy to the justices pre-speech dinner) and even more when she missed the court’s 2019 opening session in January, her first such absence in 26 years. She hadn’t fully recovered from surgery to remove three cancerous nodules from her lungs. But she took her seat as the senior justice next to Chief Justice John Roberts in mid-February, picking up her full caseload. That following summer, she went through radiation to treat a cancerous tumor on her pancreas, her fourth brush with cancer. In July 2020, she announced that cancer had returned yet again. Despite receiving chemotherapy for lesions on her liver, the 87-year-old reasserted that she was still “fully able” to continue serving on the Supreme Court.

Collection of the Supreme Court of the United StatesAugust 2, 1935 Childhood photograph of Ruth Bader taken when she was two years old.

Baton-twirling bookworm

Joan Ruth Bader was born in 1933 in Brooklyn and came of age during the Holocaust, “a first-generation American on my father’s side, barely second-generation on my mother’s … What has become of me could happen only in America,” she said at her confirmation hearing.

True enough, but what would become of her was a long time coming. In an enthralling biography, Jane Sherron De Hart describes schoolgirl Ruth, who twirled a baton but was such a bookworm she tripped and broke her nose reading while walking. Her mother, who convinced her she could do anything, died just before Ruth, the class valedictorian, graduated and headed off to Cornell. There she met the tall, handsome Martin Ginsburg, and married him the minute she graduated Phi Beta Kappa—the first person, she said, who “loved me for my brain.” She’d been accepted to Harvard Law, where Marty was already enrolled. She calls “meeting Marty by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me.”

What happened next is proof of her maxim that “a woman can have it all, just not all at once.” Marty was called up to active duty, so instead of studying torts in Cambridge, Ginsburg found herself working as a claims examiner at the Social Security Administration in Fort Sill, Oklahoma—that is, until she was demoted with a pay cut for working while pregnant.

Collection of the Supreme Court of the United StatesSummer 1958 Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Martin Ginsburg play with their three-year old daughter, Jane, in her bedroom at Martin’s parents’ home in Rockville Centre, N.Y

Life threw another wrench into the works when both were back at Harvard with a baby girl, and Marty was stricken with a rare testicular cancer. Ruth went to class for both of them, typing up his notes and papers as well as her own, getting along on even less sleep than your usual new mother, all while being scolded for taking up a man’s seat by Dean Erwin Grisold. When her husband graduated and was offered a prestigious job at a white shoe law firm in New York, she gave up her last year at Harvard to finish at Columbia.

Once again, she felt the sting of the discrimination. Despite being the first student ever to serve on both the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews and graduating at the top of her class, she couldn’t get a job at a premier law firm or one of the Supreme Court clerkships that went so easily to male classmates who ranked below her. According to DeHart, Judge Felix Frankfurter fretted a woman clerk might wear pants to chambers. Without bitterness, she calls anger a useless emotion; she noted that in the ’50s, “to be a woman, a Jew and a mother to boot—that combination was a bit too much.”

Librado Romero—The New York Times/Redux 1972 Ruth Bader Ginsburg in New York, when she was named a professor at Columbia Law School.

Battling discrimination

She didn’t get outwardly angry and only, after many years, got even. She took a lower court clerkship, researched civil procedure (and equality of the sexes in practice) in Sweden and wrote a book on the subject—in Swedish! She returned home to teach at the Newark campus of Rutgers Law, where she co-founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter. Despite being a progressive school, discrimination struck again. She learned she didn’t earn the same as a male colleague because, the dean explained, “he has a wife and two children to support. You have a husband with a good paying job in New York.” No wonder then, when she found herself surprisingly (given her husband’s medical history) but happily pregnant again, she took no chances and hid it.

After the birth of her son, James, she became a tenured professor at Columbia, co-authored the first case book on discrimination law, a work in progress as she changed much of it while litigating for the ACLU, until in 1980 she joined the Court of Appeals.

Then, in 1993, President Bill Clinton was elected and he wanted a Cabinet, and by extension a Supreme Court, that looked like America. Ginsburg was on the list, but so were a dozen others and she wasn’t at the top.

Even Clinton’s deliberations weren’t without a peculiar form of discrimination as he worried, “the women are against her.” He was right. To the feminists of the ’90s—who might be ignored by the White House if it weren’t for Ginsburg’s decades of opening doors—she was yesterday. The judge methodically chipping away at bias, without burning a bra or tossing a high heel, looked plodding and uninspiring; her friendship with her colleague on the district court, Scalia, looked suspect.

Enter Marty. “I wasn’t very good at promotion, but Marty was,” she told the late Gwen Ifill, a PBS anchor. “He was tireless”—and beloved among lawyers, professors, and politicians. Women came around, reminded that she was a pioneer in their fight to overcome the patriarchy and a steadfast supporter of abortion rights, despite acknowledging in an interview that the country might be politically better off if the states had continued to legalize abortion rather than have Roe v. Wade as a singular target of its foes. Ginsburg was confirmed 96 to 3.

Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States August 10, 1993 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. From left to right stand President Bill Clinton, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Martin Ginsburg, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

David Hume Kennerly—Getty Images March 2001 The only two female Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, pose for a portrait in Statuary Hall, surrounded by statues of men at the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. The two Justices were preparing to address a meeting of the Congressional Women’s Caucus.

The Great Dissenter

She didn’t disappoint. In one case after another, she asked the right questions (and usually the first one), cobbled together majorities and wrote elegantly reasoned opinions: striking down stricter requirements for abortion clinics designed to make the procedure extinct (Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt), and approving gay marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), making the point during oral argument that if you can’t refuse a 70-year-old couple marriage because they can’t procreate, how could you use that excuse to deprive a gay one.

But it was her minority — not her majority — opinions that made her beloved to a new generation of women. As the court tilted right in 2006 after the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, Ginsburg started to read, not just file, her dissents to explain to the majority why they were wrong in hopes that “if the court has a blind spot today, its eyes will be open tomorrow.”

Here was a shy, understated incrementalist suddenly becoming the Great Dissenter. In Shelby County v. Holder, she said that relieving errant states of the close scrutiny of the Voting Rights Act was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” In Hobby Lobby, she was aghast that the court would deny costly contraception coverage to working women “because of someone else’s religious beliefs.” In the Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber equal pay case, she asked how her brethren could penalize the plaintiff, who only got evidence of the disparity from an anonymous note, for missing a 180-day filing deadline given that salaries are kept secret. One person whose eyes were opened was Barack Obama. His first piece of legislation in 2009 was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Karsten Moran—ReduxA woman attending the New York City Women’s March wears a t-shirt ​featuring Supreme Court Justic​e Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Jan. 20, 2018.

Becoming the Notorious RBG

Ginsburg’s womansplaining caught the attention of New York University law student Shana Knizhnik, who uploaded Ginsburg’s dissents to Tumblr. Overnight, a younger generation of women, and their mothers and grandmothers, were reminded of what Ginsburg had done for them. Knizhnik joined with reporter Irin Carmon to write Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The justice was soon a recurring character on Saturday Night Live, with a hyperkinetic Kate McKinnon issuing blistering “Ginsburns.” The justice’s 2016 memoir, My Own Words, was a New York Times bestseller. There were more books — adult, children’s and coloring. In 2018, Hollywood released a major motion picture, On the Basis of Sex, and the documentary RBG, which won an Emmy. Store shelves groan with merch: mugs (you Bader believe it), onesies (The Ruth will set you free), tote bags, bobblehead dolls, and action figures, one of the latest from her cameo in Lego Movie 2, produced by none other than Trump Administration Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

All this late-arriving fame rested uneasily on the shoulders of Ginsburg, who accepted it with dignity and took some pleasure at grandchildren’s shock that “so many people want to take my picture.” She kept a large supply of Notorious RBG T-shirts as a party favor for visitors.

At the heart of Hollywood’s treatment of Ginsburg wasn’t only the case Marty and his wife worked on together—an appeal of an IRS ruling—but a marriage of extraordinary compatibility and mutual support. After he recovered from cancer and had become a sought-after lawyer, he eagerly took on his share of domestic duties, which included feeding the children since, according to former Solicitor General Ted Olson, “Ruth wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the kitchen.” Marty was the fun parent (Ginsburg joked at her confirmation hearing that the children kept a log called “Mommy Laughed”) and a big-hearted host who happily roasted “Bambi,” Ruth’s name for whatever Scalia, her opera buddy, bagged on his last hunting trip. The pair were the subject of an actual comic opera, Scalia/Ginsburg, in which one scene depicts the over-emoting Scalia, locked in a dark room for excessive dissenting, and Ginsburg descending through a glass ceiling to rescue him.

A fellow justice said that neither Ginsburg would be who they were without the other. Marty once joked about being second banana: “As a general rule, my wife does not give me any advice about cooking and I do not give her any advice about the law. This seems to work quite well on both sides.” De Hart reprints the letter Marty put in a drawer in the bedside table as he was dying from a recurrence of his cancer. He was the “most fortunate” part of her life.

Marty lived to see his wife recognized beyond what the two imagined when they agreed to marry and be lawyers together, but died just before a slight she suffered for following him to New York was righted. In 2011, she was awarded an honorary degree from Harvard Law that Dean Griswold had denied her for taking her last credits at Columbia.

The longer she lived, the wider her reach and the deeper the appreciation for her years on the bench. At the opening concert of the National Symphony Orchestra in Sept. 2019, Kennedy Center chair David Rubinstein introduced the dignitaries in the audience. When he got to the justice, women rose to applaud her. Then, the men quickly joined in until everyone in the hall was standing, looking up at the balcony, cheering and whistling, as if they’d come to tell her that they knew what she had done for them, not to hear Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto #2.

This wasn’t an audience of liberals, but a cross-section of the capital touched by a once-young lawyer who saw unfairness and quietly tried to end it during her 60 years of public service.

Throughout the decades, Ginsburg quietly persisted—through discrimination she would seek to end, through the death of Marty, through more illness and debilitating treatments than any one person should have to endure—without complaint, holding on and out, until sheer will was no longer enough.

from TIME https://ift.tt/2RHBzbQ

New top story from Time: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Has Died. She Leaves Behind a Vital Legacy for Women — and Men

On March 15, 2019, legions of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s admirers celebrated her 86th birthday by dropping to the ground and grinding out the Super Diva’s signature push-ups on the steps of courthouses around the country.

This unusual tribute to a Supreme Court justice was one of the many ways a new generation has shown the love to the five-foot tall legal giant who made the lives they live possible. But by Sept. 18, her iron will and gritty determination was no longer enough to propel her to court. Ginsburg died on Friday at the age of 87 of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, according to a statement released by the Supreme Court, per the Associated Press.

In the early ’70s—when Gloria Steinem was working underground as a Playboy Bunny to expose sexism, and Betty Friedan was writing a feminist manifesto about “the problem with no name”—Ginsburg named the problem, briefed it, and argued it before the Supreme Court of the United States.

She was 37 then, on the receiving end of so much of the discrimination she would work to end, and she was just undertaking her first job as a litigator—as co-director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. In her “very precise” way, as Justice Harry Blackmun put it, she studied title, chapter, clause, and footnote of the legal canon that kept women down and overturned those that discriminated on the basis of sex in five landmark cases that extended the 14th Amendment’s equal rights clause to women. In that long, hard slog, she employed some novel devices, using “gender” (so as not to distract male jurists with the word “sex”) and representing harmed male plaintiffs when she could find one (to show that discrimination hurts everyone). And she never raised her voice.

When she was done, a widower could get the same Social Security benefits as a woman and a woman could claim the same military housing allowance as a man. A woman could cut a man’s hair, buy a drink at the same age, administer an estate, and serve on a jury.

By the time she left the ACLU, and before she donned her first black robe, Ginsburg had brought about a small revolution in how women were treated, wiping close to 200 laws that discriminated off the books. Over the next decades, first as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and then as the second woman on the Supreme Court, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she would become to women what Thurgood Marshall was to African Americans. She employed the same clause in the 14th Amendment he used to free former slaves to extend protection to the mentally ill who wanted to live outside institutions, gays who wanted to marry, immigrants who lived in fear, and, of course, females: those who wanted to be cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, have access to abortion, and, when pregnant, not be fired if they couldn’t perform duties their condition made, temporarily, impossible.

Her fans’ courthouse celebration was also a plea for the bionic Ginsburg to carry on, at least until the 2020 election. There was high anxiety when she fell asleep at the State of the Union in 2015 (a case of enjoying a fine California wine brought by Justice Anthony Kennedy to the justices pre-speech dinner) and even more when she missed the court’s 2019 opening session in January, her first such absence in 26 years. She hadn’t fully recovered from surgery to remove three cancerous nodules from her lungs. But she took her seat as the senior justice next to Chief Justice John Roberts in mid-February, picking up her full caseload. That following summer, she went through radiation to treat a cancerous tumor on her pancreas, her fourth brush with cancer. In July 2020, she announced that cancer had returned yet again. Despite receiving chemotherapy for lesions on her liver, the 87-year-old reasserted that she was still “fully able” to continue serving on the Supreme Court.

Collection of the Supreme Court of the United StatesAugust 2, 1935 Childhood photograph of Ruth Bader taken when she was two years old.

Baton-twirling bookworm

Joan Ruth Bader was born in 1933 in Brooklyn and came of age during the Holocaust, “a first-generation American on my father’s side, barely second-generation on my mother’s … What has become of me could happen only in America,” she said at her confirmation hearing.

True enough, but what would become of her was a long time coming. In an enthralling biography, Jane Sherron De Hart describes schoolgirl Ruth, who twirled a baton but was such a bookworm she tripped and broke her nose reading while walking. Her mother, who convinced her she could do anything, died just before Ruth, the class valedictorian, graduated and headed off to Cornell. There she met the tall, handsome Martin Ginsburg, and married him the minute she graduated Phi Beta Kappa—the first person, she said, who “loved me for my brain.” She’d been accepted to Harvard Law, where Marty was already enrolled. She calls “meeting Marty by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me.”

What happened next is proof of her maxim that “a woman can have it all, just not all at once.” Marty was called up to active duty, so instead of studying torts in Cambridge, Ginsburg found herself working as a claims examiner at the Social Security Administration in Fort Sill, Oklahoma—that is, until she was demoted with a pay cut for working while pregnant.

Collection of the Supreme Court of the United StatesSummer 1958 Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Martin Ginsburg play with their three-year old daughter, Jane, in her bedroom at Martin’s parents’ home in Rockville Centre, N.Y

Life threw another wrench into the works when both were back at Harvard with a baby girl, and Marty was stricken with a rare testicular cancer. Ruth went to class for both of them, typing up his notes and papers as well as her own, getting along on even less sleep than your usual new mother, all while being scolded for taking up a man’s seat by Dean Erwin Grisold. When her husband graduated and was offered a prestigious job at a white shoe law firm in New York, she gave up her last year at Harvard to finish at Columbia.

Once again, she felt the sting of the discrimination. Despite being the first student ever to serve on both the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews and graduating at the top of her class, she couldn’t get a job at a premier law firm or one of the Supreme Court clerkships that went so easily to male classmates who ranked below her. According to DeHart, Judge Felix Frankfurter fretted a woman clerk might wear pants to chambers. Without bitterness, she calls anger a useless emotion; she noted that in the ’50s, “to be a woman, a Jew and a mother to boot—that combination was a bit too much.”

Librado Romero—The New York Times/Redux 1972 Ruth Bader Ginsburg in New York, when she was named a professor at Columbia Law School.

Battling discrimination

She didn’t get outwardly angry and only, after many years, got even. She took a lower court clerkship, researched civil procedure (and equality of the sexes in practice) in Sweden and wrote a book on the subject—in Swedish! She returned home to teach at the Newark campus of Rutgers Law, where she co-founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter. Despite being a progressive school, discrimination struck again. She learned she didn’t earn the same as a male colleague because, the dean explained, “he has a wife and two children to support. You have a husband with a good paying job in New York.” No wonder then, when she found herself surprisingly (given her husband’s medical history) but happily pregnant again, she took no chances and hid it.

After the birth of her son, James, she became a tenured professor at Columbia, co-authored the first case book on discrimination law, a work in progress as she changed much of it while litigating for the ACLU, until in 1980 she joined the Court of Appeals.

Then, in 1993, President Bill Clinton was elected and he wanted a Cabinet, and by extension a Supreme Court, that looked like America. Ginsburg was on the list, but so were a dozen others and she wasn’t at the top.

Even Clinton’s deliberations weren’t without a peculiar form of discrimination as he worried, “the women are against her.” He was right. To the feminists of the ’90s—who might be ignored by the White House if it weren’t for Ginsburg’s decades of opening doors—she was yesterday. The judge methodically chipping away at bias, without burning a bra or tossing a high heel, looked plodding and uninspiring; her friendship with her colleague on the district court, Scalia, looked suspect.

Enter Marty. “I wasn’t very good at promotion, but Marty was,” she told the late Gwen Ifill, a PBS anchor. “He was tireless”—and beloved among lawyers, professors, and politicians. Women came around, reminded that she was a pioneer in their fight to overcome the patriarchy and a steadfast supporter of abortion rights, despite acknowledging in an interview that the country might be politically better off if the states had continued to legalize abortion rather than have Roe v. Wade as a singular target of its foes. Ginsburg was confirmed 96 to 3.

Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States August 10, 1993 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. From left to right stand President Bill Clinton, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Martin Ginsburg, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

David Hume Kennerly—Getty Images March 2001 The only two female Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, pose for a portrait in Statuary Hall, surrounded by statues of men at the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. The two Justices were preparing to address a meeting of the Congressional Women’s Caucus.

The Great Dissenter

She didn’t disappoint. In one case after another, she asked the right questions (and usually the first one), cobbled together majorities and wrote elegantly reasoned opinions: striking down stricter requirements for abortion clinics designed to make the procedure extinct (Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt), and approving gay marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), making the point during oral argument that if you can’t refuse a 70-year-old couple marriage because they can’t procreate, how could you use that excuse to deprive a gay one.

But it was her minority — not her majority — opinions that made her beloved to a new generation of women. As the court tilted right in 2006 after the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, Ginsburg started to read, not just file, her dissents to explain to the majority why they were wrong in hopes that “if the court has a blind spot today, its eyes will be open tomorrow.”

Here was a shy, understated incrementalist suddenly becoming the Great Dissenter. In Shelby County v. Holder, she said that relieving errant states of the close scrutiny of the Voting Rights Act was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” In Hobby Lobby, she was aghast that the court would deny costly contraception coverage to working women “because of someone else’s religious beliefs.” In the Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber equal pay case, she asked how her brethren could penalize the plaintiff, who only got evidence of the disparity from an anonymous note, for missing a 180-day filing deadline given that salaries are kept secret. One person whose eyes were opened was Barack Obama. His first piece of legislation in 2009 was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Karsten Moran—ReduxA woman attending the New York City Women’s March wears a t-shirt ​featuring Supreme Court Justic​e Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Jan. 20, 2018.

Becoming the Notorious RBG

Ginsburg’s womansplaining caught the attention of New York University law student Shana Knizhnik, who uploaded Ginsburg’s dissents to Tumblr. Overnight, a younger generation of women, and their mothers and grandmothers, were reminded of what Ginsburg had done for them. Knizhnik joined with reporter Irin Carmon to write Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The justice was soon a recurring character on Saturday Night Live, with a hyperkinetic Kate McKinnon issuing blistering “Ginsburns.” The justice’s 2016 memoir, My Own Words, was a New York Times bestseller. There were more books — adult, children’s and coloring. In 2018, Hollywood released a major motion picture, On the Basis of Sex, and the documentary RBG, which won an Emmy. Store shelves groan with merch: mugs (you Bader believe it), onesies (The Ruth will set you free), tote bags, bobblehead dolls, and action figures, one of the latest from her cameo in Lego Movie 2, produced by none other than Trump Administration Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

All this late-arriving fame rested uneasily on the shoulders of Ginsburg, who accepted it with dignity and took some pleasure at grandchildren’s shock that “so many people want to take my picture.” She kept a large supply of Notorious RBG T-shirts as a party favor for visitors.

At the heart of Hollywood’s treatment of Ginsburg wasn’t only the case Marty and his wife worked on together—an appeal of an IRS ruling—but a marriage of extraordinary compatibility and mutual support. After he recovered from cancer and had become a sought-after lawyer, he eagerly took on his share of domestic duties, which included feeding the children since, according to former Solicitor General Ted Olson, “Ruth wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the kitchen.” Marty was the fun parent (Ginsburg joked at her confirmation hearing that the children kept a log called “Mommy Laughed”) and a big-hearted host who happily roasted “Bambi,” Ruth’s name for whatever Scalia, her opera buddy, bagged on his last hunting trip. The pair were the subject of an actual comic opera, Scalia/Ginsburg, in which one scene depicts the over-emoting Scalia, locked in a dark room for excessive dissenting, and Ginsburg descending through a glass ceiling to rescue him.

A fellow justice said that neither Ginsburg would be who they were without the other. Marty once joked about being second banana: “As a general rule, my wife does not give me any advice about cooking and I do not give her any advice about the law. This seems to work quite well on both sides.” De Hart reprints the letter Marty put in a drawer in the bedside table as he was dying from a recurrence of his cancer. He was the “most fortunate” part of her life.

Marty lived to see his wife recognized beyond what the two imagined when they agreed to marry and be lawyers together, but died just before a slight she suffered for following him to New York was righted. In 2011, she was awarded an honorary degree from Harvard Law that Dean Griswold had denied her for taking her last credits at Columbia.

The longer she lived, the wider her reach and the deeper the appreciation for her years on the bench. At the opening concert of the National Symphony Orchestra in Sept. 2019, Kennedy Center chair David Rubinstein introduced the dignitaries in the audience. When he got to the justice, women rose to applaud her. Then, the men quickly joined in until everyone in the hall was standing, looking up at the balcony, cheering and whistling, as if they’d come to tell her that they knew what she had done for them, not to hear Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto #2.

This wasn’t an audience of liberals, but a cross-section of the capital touched by a once-young lawyer who saw unfairness and quietly tried to end it during her 60 years of public service.

Throughout the decades, Ginsburg quietly persisted—through discrimination she would seek to end, through the death of Marty, through more illness and debilitating treatments than any one person should have to endure—without complaint, holding on and out, until sheer will was no longer enough.

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

‘Techlash’ Hits College Campuses - The New York Times

In 2006, Google bought YouTube for more than $1 billion, Apple was preparing to announce the first iPhone, and the American housing bubble began to deflate. Claire Stapleton, then a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, faced the same question over and over: What did she plan to do with that English degree? She flirted, noncommittally, with Teach for America.Then, a Google recruiter came to campus and, Ms. Stapleton said, she “won ‘American Idol.’” The company flew her out to Mountain View, Calif., which felt to her “like the promised land” — 15 cafeterias, beach volleyball courts, Zumba classes, haircuts and laundry on-site.But for Ms. Stapleton, now 34, the real appeal in a job at Google was what seemed to be a perfect balance of working for income and according to one’s conscience. Naturally, she said yes to an offer in the corporate communications department.“There was this ambient glow of being part of a company that was changing the world,” Ms. Stapleton said. “I was totally googly-eyed about it.”More than a decade later, college seniors and recent graduates looking for jobs that are both principled and high-paying are doing so in a world that has soured on Big Tech. The positive perceptions of Google, Facebook and other large tech firms are crumbling. Many students still see employment in tech as a ticket to prosperity, but for job seekers who can afford to be choosy, there is a growing sentiment that Silicon Valley’s most lucrative positions aren’t worth the ethical quandaries.“Working at Google or Facebook seemed like the coolest thing ever my freshman year, because you’d get paid a ton of money but it was socially responsible,” said Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, 21, a senior at the University of Michigan. “It was like a utopian workplace.”Now, he said, “there’s more hesitation about the moral qualities of these jobs. It’s like how people look at Wall Street.”

Investment Banking, but Worse

The growing skepticism of Silicon Valley, sometimes referred to as the “techlash,” has spared few of technology’s major players. In 2019, Facebook was fined nearly $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for mishandling user data. Amazon canceled its plans for a New York City headquarters after residents, union leaders and local legislators contested the idea that the behemoth should receive $3 billion from the state to set up shop. Google, in 2018, faced internal protests over its plans for a censored search engine in China and handling of sexual harassment. (High-ranking Google employees have stated that the company never planned to expand search into China, but also that plans for a China project had been “terminated.”)The share of Americans who believe that technology companies have a positive impact on society has dropped from 71 percent in 2015 to 50 percent in 2019, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. At this year’s Golden Globes, Sacha Baron Cohen compared Mark Zuckerberg to the main character in “JoJo Rabbit”: a “naïve, misguided child who spreads Nazi propaganda and only has imaginary friends.”That these attitudes are shared by undergraduates and graduate students — who are supposed to be imbued with high-minded idealism — is no surprise. In August, the reporter April Glaser wrote about campus techlash for Slate. She found that at Stanford, known for its competitive computer science program, some students said they had no interest in working for a major tech company, while others sought “to push for change from within.”Belce Dogru, who graduated from Stanford with a degree in computer science last year and is completing a master’s program at the university, said: “There has definitely been a shift in conversation on campus.”Stanford is the second-biggest feeder school for jobs in Silicon Valley, according to data from HiringSolved, a software company focused on recruiting. Some companies pay as much as $12,000 to advertise at the university’s computer science job fairs; recruiters at those events didn’t always have to make a hard sell. “It felt like in my freshman year Google, Palantir and Facebook were these shiny places everyone wanted to be. It was like, ‘Wow, you work at Facebook. You must be really smart,’” said Ms. Dogru, 23. “Now if a classmate tells me they’re joining Palantir or Facebook, there’s an awkward gap where they feel like they have to justify themselves.” Palantir, in particular, has drawn the ire of students at Stanford for providing services to U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (also known as ICE). Last summer, a campus activist group, Students for the Liberation of All People, visited the company’s office, a 15-minute walk from campus, and hung a banner nearby that read: “Our software is so powerful it separates families.” Similar protests took place at the University of California, Berkeley, Brown and Yale, according to Recode. The protests, and the attitudes they reflected, were also covered in The Los Angeles Times.Audrey Steinkamp, a 19-year-old sophomore at Yale, which sends about 10 percent of each graduating class into tech, said that taking a job in Silicon Valley is seen as “selling out,” no different from the economics majors going into consulting who are “lovingly and not-so-lovingly called ‘snakes.’”That is especially true, some of the students said, when a classmate chooses to work for Facebook, whose products have spread disinformation and helped influence a presidential election.“The work you do at a place like Facebook could be harmful at a much larger scale than an investment bank,” Ms. Dogru said. “It’s in the pockets of millions of people, and it’s a source of news for millions of people. It’s working at a scary scale.”Many students still believe that technology can help change the world for good. As Ms. Glaser put it for Slate, some of them are opting out of the Big Tech pipeline and trying, instead, “to use technical skills as an insurance policy against dystopia.”“Students have an opportunity to look at where they can have the most impact that’s in line with their values,” said Leslie Miley, a former director of engineering at Google and Slack. “The fact of the matter is Google, Facebook, Twitter are not in line with those values because they’re huge companies beholden to a lot of different masters.”

Still Got That College Spirit

Anna Geiduschek, a software engineer who graduated from Stanford in 2014, was working at Dropbox last year when she received an email from an Amazon Web Services recruiter. She replied that she wouldn’t consider a job with the company unless Amazon cut its contract with Palantir.“These companies go out of their way to try and woo software engineers, and I realized it would send a powerful message for me as a potential employee to tell them no,” Ms. Geiduschek, 27, said, noting that top tech companies sometimes spend roughly $20,000 to recruit a single engineer. “You could basically cut them off at their supply.”Her recruiter responded: “Wow I honestly had no idea. I will run this up to leadership.” Days later, Ms. Geiduschek received another template email from an Amazon hiring manager, so she scheduled a call and aired her grievances by phone. Some engineers are sharing screenshots of their protest emails on Twitter with the hashtag #TechWontBuildIt. Jackie Luo, an engineer, sent an email to Google saying that she wouldn’t consider a job there given its plans to re-enter China with a censored search engine. Kelly Carter, a web developer, emailed a Tesla recruiter with her concerns about the company’s anti-union tactics. Craig Chasseur, a software engineer, emailed the H.R. department at Salesforce to critique the company’s contract with ICE.These protests echo mounting public concerns about the power of these corporations. But it’s not clear whether they have moved the needle for prospective hires. Former recruiters for Facebook told CNBC in May that the acceptance rate for full-time engineering job offers at the company had dropped precipitously, as much as 40 percent. After the article’s publication, Facebook disputed the figure; the company “regularly ranks high on industry lists of most attractive employers,” a spokesman said. Data published the same month by LinkedIn showed that tech firms continued to hire at high rates, especially for entry-level employees.But at campus career centers, students are struggling with the dual, and sometimes dueling, desires for prestige and purpose. “It started with millennials, but now Gen Z-ers are getting educated because they want to do good in the world,” said Sue Harbour, the senior associate director of the career center at the University of California, Berkeley, which is Silicon Valley’s top feeder, according to HiringSolved. “And as we’ve seen tech companies grow, we’ve also seen the need for more tech oriented to social responsibility.” Some recent graduates are taking their technical skills to smaller social impact groups instead of the biggest firms. Ms. Dogru said that some of her peers are pursuing jobs at start-ups focused on health, education and privacy. Ms. Harbour said Berkeley offers a networking event called Tech for Good, where alumni from purpose-driven groups like Code for America and Khan Academy share career opportunities. Ms. Geiduschek said she recently left Dropbox for Recidiviz, a nonprofit that builds technological tools for criminal justice reform.But those so-called passion jobs are more challenging to come by, according to Amy Binder, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, and the lead author of a 2015 paper about elite colleges “funneling” graduates into certain kinds of “prestigious” careers.“For other sectors like tech it’s easier to get on the conveyor belt and fill these positions,” Dr. Binder said. “I graduated from Stanford in the ’80s, and even back then there was talk on campus about people selling out and going to investment banks, but those jobs are still getting filled. The self-incrimination hasn’t stopped the juggernaut.”Dr. Binder said elite schools have long steered students toward certain “high-status” industries — the C.I.A. in the 1950s, finance and consulting in the aughts and tech today. It’s a “prestige system,” she said, that universities enable. “As tech firms get more negative reviews in the media and it becomes clear what their political toll can be, students may have more circumspection about taking these jobs,” she said. “At the same time, they’ll continue taking these jobs because of the security and reputation that comes with them. And universities will keep sponsoring all this recruitment.”

Good Luck Changing the Culture

For years, students were told they could tackle ethical concerns about technology from the inside, working within the mammoth structures of companies like Google. Ms. Stapleton said that was part of the company’s allure: its ostensible commitment to empowering even its youngest employees to weigh in on critical problems.She spent 12 years at Google and YouTube on various teams, including internal communications, where she wrote company talking points. Her weekly emails to staff, she said, were the stuff of corporate legend. At a 2012 all-hands, Larry Page, one of the company’s founders, called her onstage to celebrate her work as colleagues presented her with a wooden plaque that read: “The Bard of Google.”Then, in 2018, Ms. Stapleton helped organize a Google walkout, after reporting in The New York Times revealed that the company gave a $90 million severance package to the Android creator Andy Rubin, who was accused of sexual misconduct. Twenty-thousand workers left their desks in protest. Within six months, Ms. Stapleton said, she was demoted and pushed to resign. In December, she wrote about her experience in an essay for Elle. Google maintained that Ms. Stapleton was not sidelined for her role in the walkout. “We thank Claire for her work at Google and wish her all the best,” a Google spokesperson responded. “To reiterate, we don’t tolerate retaliation. Our employee relations team did a thorough investigation of her claims and found no evidence of retaliation. They found that Claire’s management team supported her contributions to our workplace, including awarding her their team Culture Award for her role in the Walkout.”But Ms. Stapleton said her story should give bright-eyed students pause about whether Big Tech and altruism are aligned.“I don’t know if Google can credibly sell young people on the promise of doing good in the world anymore,” she said. “That’s not to say there aren’t wonderful people there and interesting things to work on. But if you care about a company’s values, ethics and contributions to society, you should take your talents elsewhere.”Mr. Miley, who left Google in 2019, echoed her sentiment: “It’s hard to change a system from within when the system doesn’t think it needs to be changed.”A spokeswoman for Google said the company continues to see job application numbers grow annually, and noted that the practice of having employees raise concerns about policies, whether on data privacy or human rights reviews, is part of the corporate culture. The outside attention those concerns may draw is a reflection of Google’s growth and evolution from a search company to a larger entity with many products and services, the spokeswoman said. But even companies with a market cap of over $970 billion (Google’s parent company, Alphabet) or over $614 billion (Facebook) aren’t immune to the punches of potential talent. John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University who also advises companies on recruitment, estimated that criticisms of Uber’s sexual harassment and discrimination policies cost the company roughly $100 million, largely because of talent lost to competitors.Sarah Soule, a professor and senior associate dean at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, said in an email that there is a long history of students protesting questionable corporate ethics, with several cases of protest directed toward recruiters, yielding powerful effects.Take the case of Dow Chemical Company, which in 1965 accepted a $5 million Department of Defense contract to manufacture the flammable gel napalm during the Vietnam War. When recruiters turned up at New York University, they were met with hundreds of angry student demonstrators, The Times reported.Brendon Sexton, the student government president at N.Y.U. at the time, demanded a moratorium on Dow’s campus recruitment efforts in 1968. “They don’t care that a sin is being committed here,” he told protesters near the job interview site. Public pressure continued to mount, fueled largely by young activists. The company halted its production of napalm a year later.Ms. Geiduschek said the behavior of tech companies is especially difficult to challenge because their products are ubiquitous.“It’s hard to avoid spending your money at Amazon. I sometimes do it, especially in that Christmas-season binge,” she said. “If you want to sway this company to do the right thing, you have to attack it at places that are higher leverage, where it hurts.” Read the full article

THE BEST DAYS OF MY LIFE

2003 Every child’s treasure is their little achievements in life. It may be little things or not be important to others but as long as it helps you grow as a person it is consider as your unforgettable moments in your life.  Mine started when I was in my kindergarten years when I danced in front of everybody. My mom was there shouting and cheering me up. Even though I’m not a good dancer now, it helps me to overcome stage fright. That day was also my recognition day when I received my first medal and ribbon as a sign of being a little achiever of my first year in education. My mom was so proud of me that time to the point that she captured every moment of it. I will never forget how happy I am that day and thought how brave I am to overcome such thing which to dance in front of many people. Also, I was awarded as the most neat and clean of the class and received a bronze medal. 

2004 17th of March, I will never forget that day. It’s the day where I started to dream and realize that there is a bigger world for my little dreams. I started to realize that there are huge opportunities waiting for me outside the classroom. The time when reality hits me that life is not about “My toes, my knees” life is all about how courageous you are to take another step of your journey in this life. That day was my graduation day and received another medal that symbolizes my efforts and failures. When I saw my father on that stage smiling at me I felt happiness because I know for sure that I did something that made him proud. Graduation day is not just about singing farewell song to your teachers and classmates, it is about opening new opportunities to learn something new, to meet another set of amazing people and of course to discover the  world.

2005 City Central School taught me about embracing my failures and learn something from it. It was my recognition day as a grade 1 student and I am proud to tell you that I received another medal. I was given a bronze medal and I was sad about it because supposed to be it should be a silver medal but for the reason that I get sick easily and my school was far from our house and it became a hard time for me to cop up with the lessons. Nevertheless, my parents were proud of me because in spite of those challenges that I’ve encounter I still had an award that mean so much to them. My grade 1 adviser was Mrs. Vallero I will never forget her name for she became my best friend and I met someone who understands me same as my mom. I felt comfortable towards her and learning was really visible. I am proud to say that I finished grade 1 because of those amazing people around me. 

2007 First Communion is a ceremony in some Christian traditions during which a person first receives the Eucharist. When I accepted the body and the blood of my savior Jesus Christ. It was my first communion day and we are tasked to wear something white and bring some candles. I felt happiness of the thought that I am already grown up. This day, I whole heartedly accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior. This memory really molds me to become the person I am today. I started to pray with all my heart since after your prayer you will swallow the bread that represents the body of the Christ. My mom and grandmother were there to support me and guide me on that day. I am waiting for this moment for a very long time since I got jealous to other people who had their communion already. I consider this as one of my achievements in life since this will strengthen my beliefs as a Christian.

2008 I join girls scout way back when I was still in my 4th grade in elementary. It is my first time to join such organization and I was able to meet new friends. This is one of my greatest achievements since I was assign to be the patrol leader of my group. I was able to experience handling such circumstances. This photo was captured while I was reciting our patrol objectives. I experienced to serve my school mates by helping them in little ways. To be a girls scout is one thing that I could be proud of since it is not just about meeting new people but it is about helping other people without asking for something. I learned that being responsible and independent are was to become successful in life. Teamwork will always be essential in terms of achieving success in life.

2014 I always consider the moments were I got to mingle with other set of friends. As you know I am the only child of my parents and it is always a great achievement for me to get along with other people and be close to them. Joining volleyball for intramural on my 1st year in college was amazing. Knowing someone and adjusting just to understand them is truly an achievement for me. Being brave enough to conquer my fear playing in front of everybody is truly a unforgettable moment for me. We didn’t make it to the finals but it doesn’t matter just standing there and presenting our college was a great moment for me. I always thank God for letting me experience new things with great people.

2015 Basketball is one of the sports I never thought of playing. It’s hard and when I was a child I always thought that it is only for men not until my school introduced it to me. When I knew that it was only a subject I thought of it as a compulsory just to have high grades. When my instructor asked me to play with other team I immediately said yes because I have my friends playing also. I started to love it and started to get interested about basketball. I started to practice together with my friends. I learned how to dribble with the help of my instructor in P.E. I also learn how to shoot from the 3 points lane and it was truly amazing because I thought only boys had the ability to do that. Hearing people cheer for you and shout your name whenever you score was really music in my heart. My life change not just plainly because I learn to play basketball but it changes my perspective that there are limitations on the things that you can do. I started to believe that you can do all things if you believe in yourself.

2016 To represent the College of Education was one of my dreams and I am proud to say that I did it. We won a bronze medal from a chain story telling contest in our school. I was chosen to represent the college since I got the highest score in storytelling in one of my subject in English. I was so happy about it because I am not expecting it to happen. All I did was to give my very best and enjoy while doing it. My team mates were great on making stories in good way. I am with my fellow classmates Nap Caruz, Meagan Borromeo, Daisy Ronquillo and Joyce Pacuma. Even though we didn’t get the first place, I am still proud of myself for experiencing it.

2016 Talking in front of many people was astonishing on my part especially if these people are future educators. Last year I experienced to host in our Manux X Machina Acquaintance party together with my fellow schoolmates. At first it was against my will to accept the offer of the former SBO officer at that time because I was afraid because it will be my first time if I am going to accept it but eventually my friends and classmates convinced me to accept it since it will be new experience to me and can be helpful to me since I am a future educator. It was an amazing experience working with them because they were so versatile and confident. I learned so many things about this experience and to conquer it was very overwhelming.

You Get One

Fandom: Supergirl (TV 2015)

Relationships: Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer, former Kate Kane/Maggie Sawyer

Characters: Alex Danvers, Maggie Sawyer, Kate Kane

Additional Tags: minor depictions of violence, Child Abuse, it's in the beginning and brief but it is there, Canon-Typical Violence, Alternate Canon, Maggie gets a backstory and it's painful I'm sorry, not really sorry but

Dedicating this to: @sanjunipero1987, @murdershegoat, @the-laughing-wolf and @themaggiesawyer because y’all deserve it for putting up with me.

AO3 Link Here

Maggie Sawyer was five years old the first time she remembered it happening. If she really thought about it, the memory became crystal clear. A dirty dress, a cuff to the head heavier than to be just reprimanding. Her mother slipping in after her father had left the room, whispering soft words in Spanish. Apologies that, in the end, held no weight. Instead she learned to bear it, to take the blows when they came, -- never too often, never enough for her to think to call it abuse. Not till much later. -- to accept the empty apologies as a barely soothing balm. The smallest possibility that her mother might stand up for her next time. Or the next time. Or the next. At least he never touched her younger siblings. Maybe that was enough. Or maybe she just deserved them. But even so, there were reasons she only stayed in contact with her mother and brother. Reasons she rarely went back to Blue Springs.

Her home life wasn’t the only one.

She’s thirteen and it isn’t the first time she’s heard the slur. A few parents of kids she’d played with at the park had hissed it as they tugged their children away, never to play with her again. One time someone had shouted it at her father as she went with him to pick up groceries, though asking him what it meant had only resulted in another, if slightly gentler cuff and mutter to never use the word again. Her mother had later explained that it was a bad word, one that ignorant people used for them. Because of their heritage, because they’re different. Yes, she’s heard it more times than she could count on both hands. But this is the first time one of her classmates felt full of himself enough to spit it directly at her. To sneer at her and call her a fucking wetback. Maggie remembers the anger she’d felt, righteous and heated. An anger that made her lunge forward and sink her fist into the older kid’s cheek. It hurt like hell, she hadn’t learned how to punch properly yet, but felt all too satisfying.

That is, until she got hauled to the principal’s office. Until she told the man what happened and still ended up being the one suspended, while the kid who’d hurled the slur at her got an ice pack and not even a smack on the wrist for his actions. Until she got home and was yelled at for over an hour, followed by her mother telling her to ‘be the better person, mija.’ After that, she mostly learned to hold it in. And when she came out, Maggie learned to hold it in against those slurs as well. She’d hoped one day ‘being the better person’ might actually make her actually feel better. It never did.

At nineteen, Maggie gets her first girlfriend. She’d left her hometown of three hundred and some change in population behind, for the more than eight million of New York City. It was a huge change for the small town girl, but a welcome one. Sure, some people still sneered at the queer, non-white girl, but others welcomed her with open arms. It was a feeling she’d only ever gotten in the tiny gay bar miles from her hometown, which she’d sneak away to on the rare nights she could afford to back then. The fact that she’d gotten into one of the top three best school for Criminal Justice in the United States only added to the euphoria. Maybe she was riding too high and the universe decided she needed another reality check.

The first time she walked in on her girlfriend with another woman’s head between her thighs was two months into their relationship. The last time was on their one year anniversary. Maggie knew, she knew she should’ve never allowed it to get that far. That the pleading words leaving her girlfriend’s lips were lies. But she’d fallen so hard, for the first girl to ever openly show her affection and raw want. The first girl to kiss her and not care who might see, to hold her hands and flip off the guys that catcalled them. So Maggie took it, she took the lies and pleading and cheating until she absolutely couldn’t anymore. And then they fought. Then her, now ex, girlfriend didn’t plead, she screamed. All of Maggie’s faults pouring from the girl’s mouth, not caring how deep they cut. All the reasons those women were better, the reason she’d fallen into bed with them instead of Maggie. Every insecurity Maggie could think of having in a relationship was picked over, until she couldn’t take it anymore. With a handful of her own clothes, the microbiology book for her minor and the last shreds of dignity she could gather up, the girl turned and left the apartment. She didn’t see her former girlfriend again after that. It took another three years for Maggie to even attempt anything more than the casual one night stand.

At twenty-two, she graduated top of her class and jumped straight into the NYPD Police Academy. The work was hard and the new trainee was looked down on by peers and trainers alike, but she was determined and stubborn. No one walked over her, she gave as good as she got. This was her career on the line and Maggie Sawyer would be damned if she lost out on it because of a handful of cocky, white guys that continuously underestimated her. This drive lasted her as far as two weeks into her transfer to the Gotham Police Department after graduation.

The move wasn’t far, but the gritty, dark atmosphere of Gotham definitely made Maggie feel like she’d ended up a thousand miles from the brightness of New York City. It was a move that Maggie hoped would help her reach detective status, the end goal she had in her life right now. The academy advisor (of sorts) may have been skeptical about offering up information, but she did state that, “the quickest way to do what you want, is to go to the city where you’ll see more in a month than a lot of cops get in a year. Gotham.” The woman wasn’t wrong. Maggie saw more bodies, violence, robberies and hostage situations than she thought could be performed in a month. It was eye opening and ground away the shine of the police work ideal. Thinking you can save everyone, do everything. It didn’t help that Gotham’s vigilantes took it upon themselves to interject in many of the cases. But, if she had to guess, she never would’ve met Kate Kane if they stayed away.

Maggie was twenty-four when she reached detective status and about eight months into her relationship -- if it could be called that when nothing was official -- with one of Gotham’s most wealthy and notorious female socialites, also known as Batwoman. The youngest detective that the precinct had seen in a long time, that’s what Commissioner Gordon had told her, explaining that it might be a good idea if she kept her head ducked for a little bit while everyone got used to it. Better that than ending up on the wrong side of a pistol. That warning burrowed its way into the newly minted detective. Sure, everyone knew there was corruption all over Gotham, but the fact that they were doing nothing at this point? Or seemed to be doing nothing at least. It didn’t sit right.

Kate and Maggie were officially together for two and a half years when Maggie made the breakthrough that got her shot five blocks from GCPD. The detective was much more cautious, this time around, when things started getting serious, but they fell into a routine that was comfortable and loving. The only hitch was her girlfriend’s tendency to take matters into her own hands when it came to Maggie’s cases, as if the vigilante thought Maggie would be unable to handle it on her own. That had led to more than a few fights. That’s what she expected would be the argument, when she woke up to the too bright white walls of a hospital and her girlfriend staring at her from the chair in the corner. Maggie wasn’t wrong. Even the throbbing pain in her leg and torso wouldn’t stop her giving as good as she got in the argument of vigilante versus cop.

“This is police corruption, Maggie. Did you expect them to just let you turn on your own ranks? This is why I told you to let me and the Bat handle it.”

“I’m a detective, part of my job is to root out the killers in this city. Just because they’re fellow boys in blue doesn’t put them outside of my jurisdiction. It’s a lot harder to book a guy and keep him booked when he’s had half his teeth knocked out by a vigilante rather than properly arrested with all evidence and by the book rules.”

“I knew it. I knew I never should’ve gotten involved with a stubborn, righteous cop. This was such a mistake.”

“You calling me a mistake, Kate?”

The pause made Maggie swallow hard, not expecting her girlfriend to actually be thinking about the question. Even in the heat of the moment, she’d asked it more out of an attempt to go back to banter rather than anything else.

“You know, Sawyer? I think you might be.”

Before she could ask more about what Kate meant, Maggie’s police captain had stepped into the room, a piece of paper in his hands. Mandatory transfer. It seemed even the Commissioner had thought it best to get Maggie out rather than let her do any more detective work in their city. He was probably just looking out for her, keeping her away from more back alley shootings, but that didn’t soften the sting of dual rejection.

When she finally got released from the hospital, Maggie was greeted with a box of her things that had ended up in Kate’s possession over the years, just inside the door of her apartment. The apartment itself was equally cleaned out of her girlfriend’s things. A mistake, that’s what she was, what this had been. Not the time in Gotham itself. She’d grown and toughed even more than she had as a lesbian, non-white teen in a town of less than four hundred people. It was a learning experience that she was grateful for, even if it nearly cost the detective her life. But the relationship… Well Kate had made it clear about that.

National City was a massive change, not the least because as soon as Maggie stepped off the plane she was shown sunlight like she hadn’t seen in a few years. The warmth was soothing in its own way, temporarily. This was a chance to start over yet again. No vigilantes. Nothing as corrupt as Gotham. Not that anything could be as corrupt as Gotham City, with a precinct that sent a detective who dug into that corruption all the way to the opposite side of the country. Stepping out of the airport, Maggie pushed away thoughts of the other city. This was her fresh start. A new precinct, experimental department to take part in, new city to learn. That’s what mattered. That night a Roltikkon woman Maggie met -- at the first gay bar she wandered into -- showed her another bar. It was a back alley bar and, as she took a look around, she could see why. The funny thing though? For the first time since her first year in New York City, Maggie felt a sense of comfort.

The NCPD Science Division detective was barely a few weeks into being twenty-eight years old when she got called to the site of an alien attack on the President of the United States. She’d settled into the city pretty well in the last four months, learning about the alien population there and the sapphic population as well. Being half married to work and serial dating didn’t exactly leave the detective with many real connections to other people in the city, but she’d learned to keep her distance anyway. So it came as a surprise to the woman, that she clicked so easily with the DEO agent she’d bashed personalities with at first. Alex definitely stood out from other people she knew. They worked in similar ways and, after the initial introduction to the bar, relaxed in a similar manner as well. The agent hadn’t even batted much of an eye at the fact that Maggie was gay or that she’d dated aliens. Alex was even there for her the day after she’d gotten broken up with again.

Honestly, Maggie wasn’t even sure why she bothered trying for anything serious anymore. It had become more clear with every break up in her life, that she was either a horrible girlfriend or had horrible judgement. Since she was still a high ranking detective with excellent judgement skills there, the woman was fairly sure that the former option was the truthful one. Still, it stung to have all her faults laid out again, so similar to her first girlfriend. Apparently she hadn’t changed much. Hard-headed, insensitive, obsessed with work and borderline sociopathic. The last one was new, but her now ex was a psychologist, so it made some sense. Alex’s disbelief at the fact that Maggie was the one being dumped was almost sweet, but not enough to make the woman not want to lose her cool, as she’d told the agent. After all, once again Maggie had thought maybe this one would be… different. Yet, as has been the case every time now, she was wrong. Meaning harder liquor, a broken glass and a few rounds with the heavy bag she’d had in every apartment since she moved out of the dorms.

Alex was still there the next day, surprisingly. Offering support and checking in, attentive and… oh, there came the one thought Maggie hadn’t considered. Sure they’d kind of seemed to flirt a little, but Alex was straight. Until Maggie really thought about it. Until she said something and the flash of instant denial showed in the other woman’s eyes, mixed with just a little confusion and uncertainty. Maggie had been there before. She knew that look, given that look, seen it on the faces of quite a few women new to considering the idea that they might not be so straight. It didn’t hit Maggie till later, when she was drinking to forget a series of dead bodies dropping at her feet, that she’d made an unconscious demand of herself in the moment she saw that look. Maggie was going to help Alex, if that’s what Alex wanted, because coming out alone and with no one to back you sucked. It really did. The brunette, of all people, deserved much better than that. And then Alex is in front of her, saying that maybe, just maybe Maggie was right. Yes, the detective is definitely going to stand by Alex through this.

The kiss was more than she’d expected, however. Of course Maggie had seen the signs of a burgeoning crush on Alex’s end, but she’d kept a tight cap on her own developing feelings, not wanting to lead Alex on. It was far better to keep things friendly than for them to try something and Alex finding out what all her exes did, that Maggie wasn’t worth it. She would take friendship only over losing Alex entirely every time and that’s what she tried to tell the woman. The look on Alex’s face as she turned away and walked out told Maggie she probably fucked that up as well. The silence was even more telling and then there was the parking garage. The agent spilling words like Maggie had somehow been the one to hang the moon in the sky just for Alex with the simple descriptor ‘ amazing ’, only to snatch it away again in just as quick a breath as it took to be seen. Or kiss and pull away rather. And no, Maggie didn’t owe Alex a relationship, but she could understand the disappointment. If only she didn’t know it would be secondary to how Alex would be disappointed by a relationship.

Maggie is two months past twenty-eight years old when she has her heart broken a second time by something entirely outside her romantic life. The crunch of broken glass under her boots seems to echo in the empty space as she surveys the bar. Bodies are scattered everywhere, like a massacre. She recognizes almost all of them, knows families she will have to contact. Darla was among the victims. She’d been the only one of Maggie’s exes to try and inflict as little damage as possible when they broke up. The glassy eyes that stared up at her held none of the amused spark they always had when the Roltikkon waitress was alive. A few silent tears slid down the woman’s cheeks as she stood in the middle of her safe space, the safe space for so many outsiders, that had now been raided and destroyed. The sound of at least four vehicles pulling up in the alley had Maggie roughly scrubbing the tears off her cheeks. She knew that only one group of people could’ve gotten wind of this so quickly.

“Freeze! Hands where I can see them.”

And there it was. Maggie put her hands up and turned around, watching Alex with tired eyes. “Not as fancy firepower this time around, I see.” Her voice was low and gravelly with emotion, but at least there was no crack as she attempted to inject her normal sarcasm into the situation. It fell flat, but she couldn’t really find it in herself to care. As long as she was kept in the loop about the murderers who had done this to her bar companions, she would probably stay numb instead of angry for awhile. “Looks like this is out of my jurisdiction again, right?” She spoke again, when it became obvious Alex wasn’t going to.

“Maggie, I-”

“Don’t, Alex.” The ‘please’ was kept in her eyes instead of her voice, a plea meant for Alex alone. “There’s a device stuck under the bar top. I have,” she swept her eyes around the room, taking in each face. “I’ve got eighteen families to inform and six other rites to see if I can start arranging myself. Just… Should I tell them to come to our coroner or what?”

“We’ll have them brought to the NCPD.”

Nodding, Maggie moved to each body. She closed their eyes, stumbled her way through the few rites she knew in languages her tongue could barely shape and whispered her own quiet farewells. That done she stood again, not daring to see if the worry was still there in Alex’s eyes as she started to walk towards the door, glass crunching once more.

“Let me know when you find them.” The words were quiet as she walked past the agent, the quick nod she received being all she needed in answer. They would catch these bastards. Whatever was still sparking between them, it didn’t change how well they functioned together while working. CADMUS would see that soon enough.

There is a point where fear and self deprecation aren’t good enough excuses. When feelings override even self preservation. Even what appears to be good judgement. For Maggie, it started with a laser to the shoulder and ended with Alex admitting she’d realized coming out should and was for herself, not for Maggie. Maybe she was too drugged on painkillers to react in the moment, maybe she needed to catch the woman who was responsible for killing all her friends in that bar first, but the feeling of warmth and need never left Maggie from the minute she told Alex, “anytime.” And alright, she hasn’t gotten more than a couple hours of sleep in the last three days. She could’ve waited until she at least got some rest and more time to think. But honestly, Maggie is running on adrenaline now and she’s tired of waiting. Of holding herself back. Yes, she’s terrified of everything this could lead to, but Alex is different. She’s different in ways Maggie couldn’t explain if she tried and in other ways she could talk about for hours on end.

So Maggie Sawyer shows up at Alex’s door with pizza and beer, nervous but determined. She paces and explains, part of her screaming at herself that she’s setting herself up for a fall, but for once she feels better shutting that voice up. And then she’s kissing Alex, carefully, slowly. Waiting to see what happens, which is Alex kissing her back, grabbing her arms and keeping her close. Saying Maggie likes her, that’s what she got and drawing a tender grin across Maggie’s lips. Because yes, of course Maggie likes Alex. She likes her so much, almost too much. Which is just scary enough for her to ask whether Alex is going to go crazy on her, jokingly but with a need to know. She’s expecting a denial, but honestly the quiet ‘probably’ is more reassuring than a promise it won’t happen. And then Alex is kissing her again and that’s all that matters.

Waking up in Alex Danvers’ bed two weeks later was quite possibly one of the best things Maggie had ever experienced, and not just because the bed was one of the single most comfortable things Maggie had ever slept on before. No, the best part was probably the fact that Alex was in her arms, peaceful looking as she continued to sleep, a smile on her face. It made Maggie’s own lips curl upwards at the corners. She could get used to this. It was different. Where in other relationships she’d stumbled into their beds before feelings were even a matter on the table, with Alex it was a building friendship before feelings developed. Perhaps that changed things. Certainly how ecstatic Alex was with every new little thing she experienced with Maggie was new. The wonder when Maggie took her on dates, when they kissed, even the first time Maggie had brought her girlfriend coffee and lunch at work. Simple things that had the other woman smiling giddily and rambling in the most adorable manner. Though later that morning particularly took the cake, as it were.

She really hated having to get out of bed, but a glance at the clock on Alex’s nightstand told her they needed to get ready for work. Carefully waking the girl in her arms with soft words and gentle kisses, Maggie directed the woman towards her own bathroom, before getting out of bed herself and looking around for something to wear. Her own shirt was somewhere back in the living room section of the open apartment, so Maggie instead grabbed the first piece of clothing at the top of the clean laundry basket in the corner. Alex’s reaction to her being in the shirt was even better than the fact that she was surrounded by her girlfriend’s scent. It had words slipping out that she hadn’t used to describe a relationship she’d been in, in quite a quite a while.

“It’s called being happy. Get used to it, Danvers.” She definitely didn’t mind allowing herself the chance to get used to it as well. Maybe she should’ve found that more worrying than comforting, after all, this is the kind of thing that usually came before she was given a reality check. Still, calling in sick and spending the morning with her girlfriend sounded exactly like a kind of happiness she could get used to.

The first few texts after an abrupt lack of reply didn’t worry Maggie, Alex was probably busy. The next few had her checking in to see if they’d received word at the NCPD about any incidents involving Supergirl or anything else alien. Getting a head shake from their dispatchers, she decided to call. Once, then again an hour later. The complete lack of response had anxiety prickling at the back of Maggie’s neck. Figuring it wouldn’t hurt to check on her girlfriend and set her mind at ease, she decided to take her lunch break early. The irony in that figure of speech wasn’t lost on her when she walked out of the DEO thirty minutes later. It did hurt, very much so.

The strain in Alex’s voice had Maggie tensing up, worried for her girlfriend. Knowing as soon as ‘Supergirl is missing’ was spoken, that she must be going out of her mind. Really the glasses did nothing for hiding the fact that Alex’s sister, Kara Danvers, was obviously the woman in blue and red. That fact didn’t stop the drop in her stomach as soon as the words “this was a mistake” left Alex’s lips. The familiarity of those words, flashing her back to a hospital bed in Gotham City briefly, had Maggie swallowing hard and stepping back. She should’ve known better than to take that happy morning without a grain of salt, something to prepare herself. It never lasted. But breaking up, she was used to that. She’d learned never to break in front of them, not after the first time. Instead she offered a press of lips, a knowing, pained smile. Accepted the words with a “got it” and a “see you, Danvers” because what else could she do? Once again she was the mistake, there’s no getting around that. Bowing out gracefully was the one comfort to herself that she could give. The one comfort to Alex too, who obviously had far more important things to concentrate on than Maggie’s tattered heart.

Calling into work for the second time that day was surprisingly easier to do than Maggie thought it would be. Then again, in her near full year mark at the NCPD, she had yet to call in before that day. Things had been quiet too, obviously with the DEO not wanting word about Supergirl’s disappearance getting out they’d put no request for help out to the precinct. So now Maggie was free to spend the rest of the day beating herself up for letting her guard down one more time. One last time. She was tired of being the mistake. Being the problem. Why keep trying when she knew the outcome? It was time to work the last of the pain and grief out of her system, build her walls back up and keep them there.

This time the entire whiskey bottle was in smashed pieces across the floor of her kitchen, while both the heavy bag and her knuckles had split open with the force of her blows against it. She didn’t really care about the sand falling as the tear grew with subsequent punches and kicks. In fact, the only thing that snapped her out of it was her music cutting out as the bluetooth speaker rang out her text tone instead, four times. The possibility of it being work was the only reason she checked, at least that’s what she told herself. Seeing Alex’s name instead had Maggie considering putting the phone back right then and there, ignoring it and going back to her work out.

She clicked on the messages anyway. The request for Maggie to come over, the request to apologize in person, to explain. Hoping to talk. She almost chucked the device against the wall, because, in that instance, all she wanted to do was tell Alex that she’d be there soon. If there’s one thing Maggie’s first girlfriend taught her, it’s that she couldn’t keep crawling back to a person who hurt her and never intended to change. If Kate showed her anything, it was that mistakes were meant to be cut off immediately. And her last girlfriend? Well she made it obvious that Maggie had too many issues to make her worth trying for.

Another text came through as she was thinking. ‘I understand if I’ve ruined things. I’m sorry.’

Maggie swallowed. She sighed. Alex was different, but did that matter? Would it make a difference in the long run? Was Maggie going to be able to take it if this happened again or would she finally shatter?

‘I’ll be there in an hour’

A small hiss is drawn from her lips as she knocks at Alex’s door. She’d showered, then washed and re-wrapped the knuckles of her right hand with proper bandages before making her way over, but the sting was still there. It was a good sting though, grounding. She’d need to stay grounded to make it through this. Especially when the door opened and, for the briefest moment, she lost herself a little in Alex’s sad, hopeful eyes. She couldn’t just let that happen. Not again. So she braced herself and took a breath, replying to Alex’s ‘thank you for coming’ with honesty.

“I almost didn’t. I just… I don’t- I don’t think you’re ready for this.” Which was admittedly also true. The first sign of danger had sent Alex running, if she did it in another relationship (a better one), well Alex could really lose out. As much as Maggie had.

“No. Nonono. I am. I am. Hey. I’m- I just- I just kinda went crazy.” Crazy. Maggie had asked her about that and Alex had been honest. Still, she couldn’t let that be enough. “I just- I- I- I feel like the- the universe is just magically smacking me down from being happy.” As much as Maggie could understand that sentiment, had seemingly lived through it most of her life, she had to sigh.

“That’s it? You gotta give me more than that.” She can’t just go crawling back, she won’t. Not again.

“I have always felt so responsible, like weight of the world responsible…” Maggie’s eyes searched Alex’s face as she opened up, explained, gave Maggie a glimpse into Alex’s life that she hadn’t gotten before. It was familiar sounding in a way, especially when Alex spoke to anything done for herself going badly. Maggie could empathize on a very deep level with that. She could empathize because she’d felt it that afternoon too, when Alex’s words had seared into her. The detective had to wonder if Alex knew that’s what it felt like for her girlfriend. Like another thing going wrong.

In the moment though, she would let it slide, because the reason Alex was upset was something she understood. Because if her little brother had disappeared, Maggie would’ve been a mess and really she couldn’t keep it a secret that she knew any longer because Alex need to know Maggie understood that part.

“Because Supergirl is your sister.”

The surprise, suspicion and immediate questioning that followed her statement forced a smile onto Maggie’s lips, even if she wanted to stay stern. Because really.“Come on. Look, I- I know you.” And she did, if these couple of months of friendship, weeks of relationship, had taught her anything. It was about Alex and she’d studied and remembered all she could in that time. “The only person you get that torn up over is Kara. Plus the glasses don’t help.”

Alex’s agreement drew another smile, a soft laugh. It really was so different with her, she struggled to stay mad. Especially when the woman in front of her continued and said she was glad Maggie knew. That she didn’t want secrets between them. In that moment all Maggie wanted to do was say okay, was forgive Alex and move on. But she swallowed and hesitated. Because this didn’t fix everything. Because what if it happened again?

“Bad stuff happens. In our line of work it happens all the time. How do I know you’re not going to run next time it does?”

The answer is an immediate “I won’t” and Maggie want to believe it’s true without hesitation. She really does. This is a chance, a chance at repairing things, not just slapping a bandaid over the wound or ignoring it completely as she’d done in the past. Still, Maggie’s not sure she can believe it at a word and Alex must see that in her face because she continues quickly.

“I’m sorry. I jus- I just- I wanna be happy.” And in that split second Maggie has to look away, because the words that immediately rise up are ones to admit Alex should look elsewhere if that’s true. The self-deprecating line that’s been beaten into her brain by past experience. Happiness should be found anywhere else. A thought interrupted abruptly by two more words that fall from Alex’s lips. “With you.” It makes the breath catch in Maggie’s throat and her eyes have to meet Alex’s again. For the first time she believed those words weren’t hollow. That the person in front of her wanted her and not just a girlfriend, not something better.

Yet the word ‘mistake’ crept back up and the smile that had twitched at Alex’s words faded. Because for once, self worth decided to kick in. Because if Alex saw that much in her, she needed to see at least something in herself.

“You get one, Alex.”

Not one mistake or misstep. But one chance to break her. This one opportunity to have left Maggie broken and asked for her back. Because honestly, if it happens again, she’s not sure there’ll be any pieces big enough to put back together again.

But Alex is telling her she understood and there’s a hope in her face that has Maggie breathing out a little of the tension into the hug they share.

She’s given too many chances in the past, has lived through a lot of pain. But this one? This one feels worth giving.

‘Techlash’ Hits College Campuses – The New York Times

In 2006, Google bought YouTube for more than $1 billion, Apple was preparing to announce the first iPhone, and the American housing bubble began to deflate. Claire Stapleton, then a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, faced the same question over and over: What did she plan to do with that English degree? She flirted, noncommittally, with Teach for America.

Then, a Google recruiter came to campus and, Ms. Stapleton said, she “won ‘American Idol.’” The company flew her out to Mountain View, Calif., which felt to her “like the promised land” — 15 cafeterias, beach volleyball courts, Zumba classes, haircuts and laundry on-site.

But for Ms. Stapleton, now 34, the real appeal in a job at Google was what seemed to be a perfect balance of working for income and according to one’s conscience. Naturally, she said yes to an offer in the corporate communications department.

“There was this ambient glow of being part of a company that was changing the world,” Ms. Stapleton said. “I was totally googly-eyed about it.”

More than a decade later, college seniors and recent graduates looking for jobs that are both principled and high-paying are doing so in a world that has soured on Big Tech. The positive perceptions of Google, Facebook and other large tech firms are crumbling.

Many students still see employment in tech as a ticket to prosperity, but for job seekers who can afford to be choosy, there is a growing sentiment that Silicon Valley’s most lucrative positions aren’t worth the ethical quandaries.

“Working at Google or Facebook seemed like the coolest thing ever my freshman year, because you’d get paid a ton of money but it was socially responsible,” said Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, 21, a senior at the University of Michigan. “It was like a utopian workplace.”

Now, he said, “there’s more hesitation about the moral qualities of these jobs. It’s like how people look at Wall Street.”

Investment Banking, but Worse

The growing skepticism of Silicon Valley, sometimes referred to as the “techlash,” has spared few of technology’s major players.

In 2019, Facebook was fined nearly $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for mishandling user data. Amazon canceled its plans for a New York City headquarters after residents, union leaders and local legislators contested the idea that the behemoth should receive $3 billion from the state to set up shop. Google, in 2018, faced internal protests over its plans for a censored search engine in China and handling of sexual harassment. (High-ranking Google employees have stated that the company never planned to expand search into China, but also that plans for a China project had been “terminated.”)

The share of Americans who believe that technology companies have a positive impact on society has dropped from 71 percent in 2015 to 50 percent in 2019, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey.

At this year’s Golden Globes, Sacha Baron Cohen compared Mark Zuckerberg to the main character in “JoJo Rabbit”: a “naïve, misguided child who spreads Nazi propaganda and only has imaginary friends.”

That these attitudes are shared by undergraduates and graduate students — who are supposed to be imbued with high-minded idealism — is no surprise. In August, the reporter April Glaser wrote about campus techlash for Slate. She found that at Stanford, known for its competitive computer science program, some students said they had no interest in working for a major tech company, while others sought “to push for change from within.”

Belce Dogru, who graduated from Stanford with a degree in computer science last year and is completing a master’s program at the university, said: “There has definitely been a shift in conversation on campus.”

Stanford is the second-biggest feeder school for jobs in Silicon Valley, according to data from HiringSolved, a software company focused on recruiting. Some companies pay as much as $12,000 to advertise at the university’s computer science job fairs; recruiters at those events didn’t always have to make a hard sell.

“It felt like in my freshman year Google, Palantir and Facebook were these shiny places everyone wanted to be. It was like, ‘Wow, you work at Facebook. You must be really smart,’” said Ms. Dogru, 23. “Now if a classmate tells me they’re joining Palantir or Facebook, there’s an awkward gap where they feel like they have to justify themselves.”

Palantir, in particular, has drawn the ire of students at Stanford for providing services to U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (also known as ICE).

Last summer, a campus activist group, Students for the Liberation of All People, visited the company’s office, a 15-minute walk from campus, and hung a banner nearby that read: “Our software is so powerful it separates families.” Similar protests took place at the University of California, Berkeley, Brown and Yale, according to Recode. The protests, and the attitudes they reflected, were also covered in The Los Angeles Times.

Audrey Steinkamp, a 19-year-old sophomore at Yale, which sends about 10 percent of each graduating class into tech, said that taking a job in Silicon Valley is seen as “selling out,” no different from the economics majors going into consulting who are “lovingly and not-so-lovingly called ‘snakes.’”

That is especially true, some of the students said, when a classmate chooses to work for Facebook, whose products have spread disinformation and helped influence a presidential election.

“The work you do at a place like Facebook could be harmful at a much larger scale than an investment bank,” Ms. Dogru said. “It’s in the pockets of millions of people, and it’s a source of news for millions of people. It’s working at a scary scale.”

Many students still believe that technology can help change the world for good. As Ms. Glaser put it for Slate, some of them are opting out of the Big Tech pipeline and trying, instead, “to use technical skills as an insurance policy against dystopia.”

“Students have an opportunity to look at where they can have the most impact that’s in line with their values,” said Leslie Miley, a former director of engineering at Google and Slack. “The fact of the matter is Google, Facebook, Twitter are not in line with those values because they’re huge companies beholden to a lot of different masters.”

Still Got That College Spirit

Anna Geiduschek, a software engineer who graduated from Stanford in 2014, was working at Dropbox last year when she received an email from an Amazon Web Services recruiter. She replied that she wouldn’t consider a job with the company unless Amazon cut its contract with Palantir.

“These companies go out of their way to try and woo software engineers, and I realized it would send a powerful message for me as a potential employee to tell them no,” Ms. Geiduschek, 27, said, noting that top tech companies sometimes spend roughly $20,000 to recruit a single engineer. “You could basically cut them off at their supply.”

Her recruiter responded: “Wow I honestly had no idea. I will run this up to leadership.” Days later, Ms. Geiduschek received another template email from an Amazon hiring manager, so she scheduled a call and aired her grievances by phone.

Some engineers are sharing screenshots of their protest emails on Twitter with the hashtag #TechWontBuildIt. Jackie Luo, an engineer, sent an email to Google saying that she wouldn’t consider a job there given its plans to re-enter China with a censored search engine.

Kelly Carter, a web developer, emailed a Tesla recruiter with her concerns about the company’s anti-union tactics. Craig Chasseur, a software engineer, emailed the H.R. department at Salesforce to critique the company’s contract with ICE.

These protests echo mounting public concerns about the power of these corporations. But it’s not clear whether they have moved the needle for prospective hires.

Former recruiters for Facebook told CNBC in May that the acceptance rate for full-time engineering job offers at the company had dropped precipitously, as much as 40 percent.

After the article’s publication, Facebook disputed the figure; the company “regularly ranks high on industry lists of most attractive employers,” a spokesman said. Data published the same month by LinkedIn showed that tech firms continued to hire at high rates, especially for entry-level employees.

But at campus career centers, students are struggling with the dual, and sometimes dueling, desires for prestige and purpose.

“It started with millennials, but now Gen Z-ers are getting educated because they want to do good in the world,” said Sue Harbour, the senior associate director of the career center at the University of California, Berkeley, which is Silicon Valley’s top feeder, according to HiringSolved. “And as we’ve seen tech companies grow, we’ve also seen the need for more tech oriented to social responsibility.”

Some recent graduates are taking their technical skills to smaller social impact groups instead of the biggest firms. Ms. Dogru said that some of her peers are pursuing jobs at start-ups focused on health, education and privacy. Ms. Harbour said Berkeley offers a networking event called Tech for Good, where alumni from purpose-driven groups like Code for America and Khan Academy share career opportunities.

Ms. Geiduschek said she recently left Dropbox for Recidiviz, a nonprofit that builds technological tools for criminal justice reform.

But those so-called passion jobs are more challenging to come by, according to Amy Binder, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, and the lead author of a 2015 paper about elite colleges “funneling” graduates into certain kinds of “prestigious” careers.

“For other sectors like tech it’s easier to get on the conveyor belt and fill these positions,” Dr. Binder said. “I graduated from Stanford in the ’80s, and even back then there was talk on campus about people selling out and going to investment banks, but those jobs are still getting filled. The self-incrimination hasn’t stopped the juggernaut.”

Dr. Binder said elite schools have long steered students toward certain “high-status” industries — the C.I.A. in the 1950s, finance and consulting in the aughts and tech today. It’s a “prestige system,” she said, that universities enable.

“As tech firms get more negative reviews in the media and it becomes clear what their political toll can be, students may have more circumspection about taking these jobs,” she said. “At the same time, they’ll continue taking these jobs because of the security and reputation that comes with them. And universities will keep sponsoring all this recruitment.”

Good Luck Changing the Culture

For years, students were told they could tackle ethical concerns about technology from the inside, working within the mammoth structures of companies like Google. Ms. Stapleton said that was part of the company’s allure: its ostensible commitment to empowering even its youngest employees to weigh in on critical problems.

She spent 12 years at Google and YouTube on various teams, including internal communications, where she wrote company talking points. Her weekly emails to staff, she said, were the stuff of corporate legend. At a 2012 all-hands, Larry Page, one of the company’s founders, called her onstage to celebrate her work as colleagues presented her with a wooden plaque that read: “The Bard of Google.”

Then, in 2018, Ms. Stapleton helped organize a Google walkout, after reporting in The New York Times revealed that the company gave a $90 million severance package to the Android creator Andy Rubin, who was accused of sexual misconduct.

Twenty-thousand workers left their desks in protest. Within six months, Ms. Stapleton said, she was demoted and pushed to resign. In December, she wrote about her experience in an essay for Elle.

Google maintained that Ms. Stapleton was not sidelined for her role in the walkout. “We thank Claire for her work at Google and wish her all the best,” a Google spokesperson responded. “To reiterate, we don’t tolerate retaliation. Our employee relations team did a thorough investigation of her claims and found no evidence of retaliation. They found that Claire’s management team supported her contributions to our workplace, including awarding her their team Culture Award for her role in the Walkout.”

But Ms. Stapleton said her story should give bright-eyed students pause about whether Big Tech and altruism are aligned.

“I don’t know if Google can credibly sell young people on the promise of doing good in the world anymore,” she said. “That’s not to say there aren’t wonderful people there and interesting things to work on. But if you care about a company’s values, ethics and contributions to society, you should take your talents elsewhere.”

Mr. Miley, who left Google in 2019, echoed her sentiment: “It’s hard to change a system from within when the system doesn’t think it needs to be changed.”

A spokeswoman for Google said the company continues to see job application numbers grow annually, and noted that the practice of having employees raise concerns about policies, whether on data privacy or human rights reviews, is part of the corporate culture.

The outside attention those concerns may draw is a reflection of Google’s growth and evolution from a search company to a larger entity with many products and services, the spokeswoman said.

But even companies with a market cap of over $970 billion (Google’s parent company, Alphabet) or over $614 billion (Facebook) aren’t immune to the punches of potential talent. John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University who also advises companies on recruitment, estimated that criticisms of Uber’s sexual harassment and discrimination policies cost the company roughly $100 million, largely because of talent lost to competitors.

Sarah Soule, a professor and senior associate dean at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, said in an email that there is a long history of students protesting questionable corporate ethics, with several cases of protest directed toward recruiters, yielding powerful effects.

Take the case of Dow Chemical Company, which in 1965 accepted a $5 million Department of Defense contract to manufacture the flammable gel napalm during the Vietnam War. When recruiters turned up at New York University, they were met with hundreds of angry student demonstrators, The Times reported.

Brendon Sexton, the student government president at N.Y.U. at the time, demanded a moratorium on Dow’s campus recruitment efforts in 1968. “They don’t care that a sin is being committed here,” he told protesters near the job interview site.

Public pressure continued to mount, fueled largely by young activists. The company halted its production of napalm a year later.

Ms. Geiduschek said the behavior of tech companies is especially difficult to challenge because their products are ubiquitous.

“It’s hard to avoid spending your money at Amazon. I sometimes do it, especially in that Christmas-season binge,” she said. “If you want to sway this company to do the right thing, you have to attack it at places that are higher leverage, where it hurts.”

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The American Dream Leads to Canada

The American Dream leads to Canada: Why some of the most highly prized immigrant tech workers in the US are ditching their visas and moving north to Canada.

Vikram Rangnekar grew up in Mumbai, studied computer science at the University of Delaware, and by the waning days of the Obama administration had been working in Silicon Valley for almost six years. Through his job as a software engineer at LinkedIn Corp., Rangnekar secured an H-1B, the temporary visa for high-skilled workers, and the company began the process of sponsoring his green card way back in 2012. But he had dozens of senior colleagues from India who’d been waiting a decade or more for their green cards and still didn’t have them. “Some said it’d take 20 years for my turn,” Rangnekar remembers. “Others calculated 50 years—which is basically never.” As a young man with a global sensibility and an in-­demand set of skills, Rangnekar had no reason to let the uncertainty of a green card application define his family’s life. In the early fall of 2016, he, his wife, and their two young boys made the move north, to Canada.

Their first few months in Toronto were mostly spent settling in and scouting out decent tacos. Then Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election. Rangnekar’s inbox blew up with messages from friends and colleagues in the U.S. on H-1Bs asking for advice on how to migrate. Rather than deal with each one individually, he registered a website, MOVNorth.com—a reference to MOV, a classic coding command for copying data from one location to another—and wrote everything down there. He shared the URL on LinkedIn—of course—hoping it would help a few people. Sitting in a light-filled coffee shop in his hip Toronto neighbourhood less than a year later, Rangnekar pulls up the website on his MacBook. “That’s me,” he laughs, pointing to a selfie of him in a parka and wool beanie, both dusted with snow, smiling broadly and “freezing away.”

In its first two days online last July, MOVNorth.com got 20,000 views. He quickly set up a forum where people could ask and answer each other’s questions, and early last fall added a paywall to encourage people to commit to the community. Today, the site gets as many as 100,000 views per month—Rangnekar can track Trump’s rhetoric just by the spikes in traffic. Roughly 250 people pay $99 a year for access to the forum, almost all of whom are actively pursuing a move. He knows of at least a dozen other engineers who took his advice and have already arrived in Toronto.

Rangnekar still gets email queries daily, mostly from engineers with Indian surnames, all looking for the same information. Then there are the other emails, the ones Rangnekar calls “nastygrams.” He pulls up a sample with the subject line “Ignorant Idiot.” “You’re going to ruin your own country’s economy by making it harder for Canadians to find jobs, so for that reason we here in the US stopped foreign visas,” he reads. “We are becoming a proud independent nation again.”

There are anti-immigrant and so-called alt-right groups in Canada, but they haven’t gained the same traction as in the U.S. and Europe. The country has historically courted immigrants to propel economic growth. Now, at least 1 in 5 Canadian residents was born abroad; in Toronto, which has a thriving Indian community, more than half are foreign-born. “Canadians don’t send me any of this,” Rangnekar says, waving a hand at the screen.

Sometimes Canadians—always polite—write wondering whether an invasion of engineers will hurt the country. He writes back explaining what to him is an obvious, pragmatic reality­­: that tech is growing in its importance to culture and economies, and the benefits in terms of jobs and wealth are increasingly concentrated in global cities like Toronto. In short, as he sees it, the influx of migrants to Canada helps everyone.

The H-1B was created in 1990, part of an immigration overhaul signed into law by President George H.W. Bush that also created the EB-5 investor visa—the subject of a fracas involving Kushner Cos. seeking Chinese investment—and the diversity lottery, which Trump has attacked. Today, an estimated half a million H-1B holders live in the U.S. No one tracks exactly how many ditch their skilled visas for the permanent residency Canada offers, but during the first year of Trump’s presidency, the number of tech professionals globally who got permanent residency in Canada ticked up almost 40 percent from 2016, to more than 11,000.

Almost from the beginning, the H-1B system had obvious flaws. Outsourcing companies flood the application pool with jobs that barely qualify as high-skill, taking visas that could go to full-time employees at advanced technology companies. The cap on the number of H-1B visas fluctuates, but in the five-day annual application window in early April, about 190,000 people petitioned for just 85,000 spots—in Obama’s last year, 236,000 applied for the same number of visas. The lucky winners are chosen in a lottery. H-1Bs cost employers from $1,710 to $7,700, depending on factors such as their size and how much they depend on foreign staff. A chunk of those fees is earmarked for training U.S. workers in science and technology, but an analysis by the Brookings Institution found that, on balance, the money isn’t going to the areas with the highest demand for tech workers, i.e., where the greatest number of Americans could benefit.

Rangnekar received his H-1B in 2010, but his history with employment visas dates to 2005, when he graduated from the University of Delaware and wanted to start a company with two of his former classmates. The U.S. didn’t have an entrepreneur visa, so they moved to Singapore, returning four years later to present their product—Socialwok, a pre-Slack social platform for professional collaboration—to investors at the TechCrunch50 startup conference in San Francisco. They didn’t attract new cash, but all three walked away with the next best thing: a promising job offer.

Rangnekar had met his wife, Deepa Chaudhary, in Mumbai, and they married before moving to Singapore. Once they settled near San Jose, “I was seduced by the Californian lifestyle,” Rangnekar says. “The work environment, the free food, the state-of-the-art gym, a home in the Santa Cruz mountains.” Yet there were things preventing them from committing for the long haul. In Singapore, Chaudhary worked for Salesforce.com Inc.’s philanthropic foundation, but the spousal visa that comes with the H-1B, the H-4, at the time forbade her from holding a job. (Guidelines issued in early 2015 allowed certain H-4 holders to apply for work permits, but the Trump administration is reconsidering that policy.) Immigration law limits how many people from any given country can be granted green cards, and because Indians get about three-quarters of all H-1Bs, their backlog has grown. The couple began considering where they might go: to Singapore, to a European tech hub such as Berlin, or even to India. Then a friend of a friend mentioned Toronto.

In 1967, Canada became the first country to adopt a points-based immigration system. The country regularly tweaks how it rates applicants based on national goals and research into what makes for successful integration: A job offer used to come with 600 points, but now it’s worth just 200. Other factors like speaking fluent English or French—or, even better, both—have been given more weight over the years. Country of origin is irrelevant.

In 2016, Canada increased national immigration levels to 300,000 new permanent residents annually. Last year, in consultation with trade groups, it created a program called the Global Skills Strategy to issue temporary work permits to people with job offers in certain categories, including senior software engineers, in as little as two weeks. Since the program started in June, more than 5,600 people have been granted permits, from the U.S., India, Pakistan, Brazil, and elsewhere.

When he and Chaudhary decided to move, Rangnekar had an idea for a startup aimed at helping developers use advanced programming interfaces, or APIs, to build apps, but neither of them had a job offer. Still, for Canada at least, they were desirable applicants. Standing in the bright kitchen of their rented row house, their 3-year-old son slurping strawberry ice cream, they explain how simple it was to go online back in San Jose and, using a calculator provided by the Canadian government, determine with relative certainty that they would qualify for permanent residency. The hardest part about applying was taking a photo that met Canada’s specifications. “She sent them to me, and I was like, ‘This looks OK,’ ” Rangnekar says. Chaudhary cuts him off: “I was like, ‘No! It has to be centred like this!’ ” Once Trump was elected, Canadians would cautiously ask Rangnekar, “What do you think about him?” “I make it clear what side I’m on,” he says. Rangnekar watched as the travel ban triggered sweeping protests, legal challenges, and, among many in Trump’s base, red-blooded exultation. The nationalist wave hit home for many H-1B workers that February when a white man walked into a bar in Olathe, Kansas, shouted “Get out of my country!” and shot two Indian engineers.

Trump has since called for broad cuts to legal immigration and accused the H-1B system in particular of stealing jobs from American workers. He’s also advocated adopting a points-based system similar to Canada’s, but since Congress has to approve any changes to immigration law, it’s hard to see the U.S. replicating the flexibility of the Canadian system.

At first, after Rangnekar started MOV North, “People’s questions were like, ‘Tell us about Canada,’ ” he says. “That was really it.” They wanted to know the basics—jobs, schools, snow. Over time, as people began seriously considering a move, they asked detailed questions about the immigration process. “I was like one of them on the other side,” he says. Topics of interest now range from how to get fingerprinted for the FBI background check Canada requires to tips for getting letters from former employers detailing work experience.

Anand Iyer was living near San Jose when he stumbled on a post about MOV North that Rangnekar had put on the Q&A platform Quora. Iyer had an H-1B visa through his work for a cloud-services company and a house in Silicon Valley where he lived with his wife, but the uncertainty of waiting in the green card line was getting to him. “Friends in the same boat would constantly remind us that we might have to leave the country in weeks if our H-1B extension did not come through,” he says.

The couple eventually sold their home and moved to Mississauga, outside of Toronto, with their 2-year-old. Iyer still works remotely for the same company, but he took a pay cut to reflect the lower cost of living. Taxes are higher, but the government provides more, including health care and preschool. List prices for single-family homes in Iyer’s suburb and row houses in Rangnekar’s hipper neighbourhood have risen to around $900,000 (roughly C$1.1 million)—not cheap, but not Bay Area. All told, Iyer finds his quality of life has improved. “Silicon Valley is way more competitive,” he says. He’s remained active on the MOV North forums, answering questions rather than asking them. His responses have already persuaded some friends of his wife’s who were caught in green card paralysis to apply for passage into Canada.

In MOV North’s early days, Rangnekar tended to the site at night after working on his startup all day. But as the volume of questions coming in increased, so did the amount of time the site demanded. People would email to thank him—then ask for more help. “That motivated me because it tells you you’re kinda doing something right,” he says. “Very few people wrote to me about my APIs.” He began wondering if MOV North could became his primary business.

As recently as a few years ago, the kind of jobs that might interest a top engineer weren’t plentiful in Toronto, but that’s changing. Google, Uber, and Amazon are expanding their engineering outposts, and the Canadian government is pouring money into artificial intelligence research and facilities such as the MaRS Discovery District, a tech incubator whose startups have employed more than 6,000 people as of the end of 2016. There’s work to be found in other Canadian cities, too. Montreal is home to Google’s AI research lab, the e-commerce giant Shopify Inc. is based in Ottawa, and the social media manager Hootsuite Inc. is Vancouver’s hometown darling, though most people Rangnekar talks with are interested in Toronto.

For now, the differences between U.S. and Canadian immigration policies are creating major opportunities for Canadian entrepreneurs to lure workers who otherwise would have looked south. Bob Vaez was raised in Toronto, and in the 2000s, Vaez worked for Silicon Valley chipmaker Nvidia Corp. on a TN work permit, a provision under the North American Free Trade Agreement that makes it easy for Canadian professionals to work in the U.S. The TN, like the H-1B, is tied to employment, so when Vaez decided to start his own company, that was that. “To me it was, ‘This is the land of opportunity,’ ” he says. “And the next thing, I got a call from the company’s lawyers, like, ‘You know, you have to leave the U.S. in five days.’ ” He knew Canada could be more welcoming. Vaez’s engineer parents immigrated from Iran, but his aunts came over as refugees during the Cultural Revolution. “We’ve got the point system, but there is also a different situation when there is humanity at stake,” he says.

Vaez returned to Toronto and co-founded EventMobi, which builds apps for conventions and corporate training sessions. He hopes to take advantage of the uncertainty in the U.S., in part, by working with MOV North on a new hiring platform Rangnekar is building. Once it’s up and running, companies will be able to search for applicants, which his algorithm ranks based on their relevant skills and experience. “I’m a software guy. I just look for any excuse to automate something,” Rangnekar says. He knows the business well—after all, he spent years at LinkedIn. One advantage he has over traditional recruiters, as he sees it, is that people who sign up for his site have already expressed interest in Canada. So far thousands of people have registered, all saying they want to move. <BW>

The post The American Dream Leads to Canada appeared first on Bloomberg Businessweek Middle East.

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A Young American Dies in Paraguay: Mushroom Tea, Murder, Rape, and a Cover-Up

ASUNCIÓN, Paraguay—Luis Villamayor’s sleepless night began like so many do for parents worrying about a child.

Hours earlier, he had spoken to his son by phone. Sixteen-year-old Alex Villamayor was spending the weekend at the family ranch of one of his best friends, 400 miles away in Obligado, when things got rowdy. Alex, René Hofstetter, 18, and Alain Jacks Díaz de Bedoya, 16, were drinking mushroom tea alone in the house. René's mother and father had promised to be at the ranch, but they were six hours away.

Luis offered to pick him up but Alex assured his father everything was fine. Then, the line got cut off. Luis called him back.

No answer.

He added minutes to Alex’s phone and called him again.

No answer.

He called René’s mother, who assured him everything was fine. Their ranch hand, Matthias Wilbs, was sent to check on the boys in the main house.

Then, the call came at 7:55 the next morning. René was crying.

“Tio, Alex shot himself,” he said.

“Wait, what? What do you mean?” said Luis.

Luis dropped the phone and ran barefoot down the street to the house of his ex-wife, Alex’s mother. He made it only as far as the gate before he collapsed and a neighbor came to help.

Puning Luk, Alex’s mother, was not there. She was teaching English that Saturday morning when she heard about her son’s death. She was so distraught, her student had to drive her home. When she arrived, Alex’s younger brother Daniel, 11, was sprawled on the stairs crying. He clung to his mother. Another child, 21-year-old Milagros, was in tears as well. She couldn’t shake the image of her father, who made his reputation as a tough criminal lawyer and former Paraguayan congressman, weak at the knees outside their gate.

“That was a horrible moment,” Luis told The Daily Beast.

By the time Puning and Luis got to their son, he was already in a body bag.

“I so badly wanted to hold him, I couldn’t believe it was my son lying on the table,” she said. Then, she asked the nurse to turn on the air-conditioning “to keep the flies away from my son.”

“Puning is the best mother I have met,” said Luis, her ex-husband. “She always had energy, enthusiasm, and patience for all of them. And yet they took her boy away in such a horrible way. May the Lord forgive them.”

It’s been over two and a half years since Puning and Luis lost their son and still there has been no trial, but the story has captivated the nation of Paraguay. Just this past Thursday, the trial date was postponed to February 19, 2018, a third time. The last time it was postponed was in June 2017.

Much has transpired since Alex’s death in a land known for its social inequality and judicial corruption and impunity. The suspected suicide was changed to a murder probe; the first district attorney on the case was removed and charged with obstruction of justice; René was arrested and jailed after fleeing to Germany; Alain was indicted and quickly acquitted; Paraguay has twice declined to have the FBI involved in the investigation—and new evidence has revealed for the first time the brutality of Alex’s murder.

Friends and family said Alex was kind, intelligent, thoughtful, and social. His favorite U.S. president was Abraham Lincoln and he loved to cook, learn languages, play video games, dress well, and make people feel comfortable.

“Alex was the kind of person you call to fix a problem or just to talk,” said Humberto del Valle, 20, a high school friend from Pan American International School (PAIS) in Paraguay. “He was a guy you could talk to for hours.”

Carlos Pedroza, 20, met Alex at PAIS where they became fast friends. “Alex wasn’t hated by anyone. He was so fun to talk with, always ending every conversation making us laugh,” he said.

“He had a thirst for history, trivial information, and jokes,” said Puning. “He possessed a high level of emotional intelligence.”

When René needed a mechanic, Alex was the first to find him one. When Alain needed help studying, Alex was ready to share his knowledge.

Schoolmate Renato Rolon, 20, remembers that Alex had a funny obsession with the number 23. They began to notice the number everywhere they looked and exchanged photos of it. Alex had a file devoted to it called “23.”

“It was like the magic number of our group,” he said, referring the clique of boys from school that included René and Alain.

On his way home from Alex’s memorial, Rolon said he noticed the number 23 in his father’s car. The clock read 10:23 p.m., the thermometer read 23 Celsius, and the odometer’s last two numbers read 23. “In that second, the moment I saw all that, I started crying because for me, it was like a message from him saying, ‘I’m in heaven, I’m okay.’”

Alex’s favorite song was “How To Save a Life” by The Fray, a band he went to see with his aunt, Kim Luk.

Kim, who lives in Maryland and is spearheading efforts to bring justice to Alex, said he was a gentle soul who was the light of everyone’s life.

“Alex and I were so close. He was such an amazing kid, I can’t even tell you,” said Kim. “We miss him every single day.”

But Luis Villamayor recalls there were times that Alex was the butt of some cruel jokes by some friends of his, including René and Alain. One time, Alex went to a house party and left with a shaved head. He had passed out after drinking beer for the first time, said Luis, and they shaved off all his hair. “That really hurt Alex,” he said. Another time, some friends put Alex on top of a Volkswagen bug and recorded it. Luis found it abusive.

Two weeks before Alex was murdered, Kim put his tie over the shirt they bought together and shined his shoes for his high school commencement. He graduated with honors. That night she waltzed with him. A couple of days later, she said to Alex, “I’ll see you back in the U.S.”

Alex was going to live with her while he attended Montgomery College to study business management. His brother Antonio also studied there and his parents were graduates. His brother was so excited about his arrival to in the U.S., he had posted a long message about it online.

That was the last time Kim saw Alex.

While Alex’s graduating class made plans to go to Cancun that summer in 2015, a trip he and his mother decided against because it was costly, Alex went to René’s ranch instead.

On Thursday, June 25, 2015, Alex took a bus with Alain from the Paraguayan capital, Asuncion, to Obligado.

“I thought it would be good for him to go to the ranch and have some fun,” said Puning Luk. “I never imagined in a million years he was going to be beaten, raped and killed by his friends.”

The family was skeptical from the onset about Alex’s alleged suicide on Saturday, June 27. Alex was an emotionally mature young man without any signs of psychological issues. He loved his family and was equally loved, they say. There were no signs he was contemplating taking his own life.

His friends shared the sentiment.

Rolon’s initial reaction to the news was that it couldn’t be possible. “Imagine a happy person you know with a good, happy life. You can’t process the idea of a suicide or a homicide,” he said.

“I couldn’t understand it at first,” said Pedroza. When he gathered with classmates at a house where they heard Alex had committed suicide, he immediately became suspicious. “I think there are friends who aren’t talking.”

Then, the cracks in the case began to appear.

That Saturday night, the DA, Olga Araujo, told the Villamayor family that she concluded it was a suicide, without conducting any standard investigative procedures. That same night at the morgue, Andy Fernandez, the Villamayor’s family friend and lawyer who identified Alex’s body, was told by a forensic photographer that the wound patterns weren’t consistent with suicide.

Then came some of the most compelling evidence. Photos from the crime scene showed a gunshot wound to the right of Alex’s head while the gun was in his left hand.

“That’s physically impossible to shoot yourself in the right side of your head with your left hand,” says Fernandez, who is now on the Villamayor’s legal team.

The first thing Puning noticed in the photos were Alex’s clothes. “Those aren’t his clothes,” she said. “Why is he wearing someone else’s clothes?” In the photos, Alex had a black pair of sweatpants on that were too big on him.

The tallest boy there that night was Alain, Fernandez said.

“This case was so botched up from the very beginning,” said Kim.

When law enforcement tested the clothes and skin of Alex, René, Alain, and Matthias it revealed there was no gunshot residue.

“That’s proof he didn’t kill himself,” said Fernandez. “If he killed himself, it would be everywhere. In his hair, on his skin.” But the discovery raises other questions.

Alex’s friend Pedroza says the weekend Alex was at the ranch, he shared videos with him of Alex, René, and Alain shooting at eggs and other things. Fernandez said that it was impossible for there to be no traces of gunshot residue on Alain and René if they were shooting guns the day before.

“Someone taught them how to create a suicide scene,” he said, and before authorities got there. “They washed up.”

In fact, phone records belonging to René and his ranch hand Wilbs reveal that René called his father over 50 times starting at 3:00 a.m., even though in their testimony, René and Alain said they both woke up at 6:00 a.m. to find that Alex had taken his life outside on the deck near the pool.

The records also reveal that just before 6:00 a.m., a call was made to a former police officer who, Fernandez believed, helped them create the scene and clean up.

A ballistic test showed that the gun in Alex’s hand had not been fired in a long time.

Armed with the puzzling new evidence, authorities approached the ranch hand Wilbs who eventually confessed to tampering with the crime scene. He told authorities he moved Alex’s body and put another gun in his hand.

But he also added something else: he said he did all this to protect René. When authorities revisited the phone records, they saw that Wilbs had also spoken to René’s father that night. René’s father, in hiding, is currently indicted on charges related to the alleged coverup and illegal gun possession.

When a second autopsy report was conducted, it revealed additional evidence that hadn’t been reported earlier. Alex had been brutally physically abused. The medical examiner found deep bruising all over his body, including his genital area. Marks on his body made by an object like a stick revealed the possibility of torture. The autopsy report also revealed that semen was found in his anus.

DNA results often take weeks, but this time they took seven months, Fernandez says, and the result was surprising–the semen was Alex’s own.

“There’s no record in this world that shows someone had semen in his own body,” Fernandez said.

In February, the prosecution will argue that that sometime between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m., Alex was murdered. Prior to that, he was raped and tortured.

“I’m not sure when or why they tortured him. That’s the part of the story I can’t understand,” said Fernandez.

Although Alain was indicted for murder over two years ago, he was acquitted less than a month later before the investigation had been completed. René and Wilbs are currently in prison awaiting trial for premeditated murder.

“I am shell-shocked,” says Luis about what happened. “I never thought that such a thing would happen in René and Alain’s company. Alex was like a kid-brother to them. They were supposed to take care of him, not hurt him.”

Alex has not been properly buried. Kim said they were hoping the FBI could still assist them in the investigation.

“I have two objectives. One is to bring justice to our family,” said Kim. Four months after she came home following Alex’s death, Kim began working with Maryland Congressman (now Senator) Chris Van Hollen and Sen. Ben Cardin to see what can be done.

Her other objective is to change the laws in the United States so that no American citizen can be murdered without the FBI getting involved. “More people have to understand what happens to you when you travel overseas,” Kim told The Daily Beast.“We’re in an administration right now that is seeking Americans first. This is a perfect time for us to change laws.”

Kim says she and the family can forgive in order to move on, but she needs to know what happened… but, then, she thinks she may never know.

“I have to put away the thought that we’re going to know what truly happened. It’s the truth and the lies and you meet somewhere in the middle,” said Kim.

source http://allofbeer.com/a-young-american-dies-in-paraguay-mushroom-tea-murder-rape-and-a-cover-up/ from All of Beer http://allofbeer.blogspot.com/2018/01/a-young-american-dies-in-paraguay.html

A Young American Dies in Paraguay: Mushroom Tea, Murder, Rape, and a Cover-Up

ASUNCIÓN, Paraguay—Luis Villamayor’s sleepless night began like so many do for parents worrying about a child.

Hours earlier, he had spoken to his son by phone. Sixteen-year-old Alex Villamayor was spending the weekend at the family ranch of one of his best friends, 400 miles away in Obligado, when things got rowdy. Alex, René Hofstetter, 18, and Alain Jacks Díaz de Bedoya, 16, were drinking mushroom tea alone in the house. René's mother and father had promised to be at the ranch, but they were six hours away.

Luis offered to pick him up but Alex assured his father everything was fine. Then, the line got cut off. Luis called him back.

No answer.

He added minutes to Alex’s phone and called him again.

No answer.

He called René’s mother, who assured him everything was fine. Their ranch hand, Matthias Wilbs, was sent to check on the boys in the main house.

Then, the call came at 7:55 the next morning. René was crying.

“Tio, Alex shot himself,” he said.

“Wait, what? What do you mean?” said Luis.

Luis dropped the phone and ran barefoot down the street to the house of his ex-wife, Alex’s mother. He made it only as far as the gate before he collapsed and a neighbor came to help.

Puning Luk, Alex’s mother, was not there. She was teaching English that Saturday morning when she heard about her son’s death. She was so distraught, her student had to drive her home. When she arrived, Alex’s younger brother Daniel, 11, was sprawled on the stairs crying. He clung to his mother. Another child, 21-year-old Milagros, was in tears as well. She couldn’t shake the image of her father, who made his reputation as a tough criminal lawyer and former Paraguayan congressman, weak at the knees outside their gate.

“That was a horrible moment,” Luis told The Daily Beast.

By the time Puning and Luis got to their son, he was already in a body bag.

“I so badly wanted to hold him, I couldn’t believe it was my son lying on the table,” she said. Then, she asked the nurse to turn on the air-conditioning “to keep the flies away from my son.”

“Puning is the best mother I have met,” said Luis, her ex-husband. “She always had energy, enthusiasm, and patience for all of them. And yet they took her boy away in such a horrible way. May the Lord forgive them.”

It’s been over two and a half years since Puning and Luis lost their son and still there has been no trial, but the story has captivated the nation of Paraguay. Just this past Thursday, the trial date was postponed to February 19, 2018, a third time. The last time it was postponed was in June 2017.

Much has transpired since Alex’s death in a land known for its social inequality and judicial corruption and impunity. The suspected suicide was changed to a murder probe; the first district attorney on the case was removed and charged with obstruction of justice; René was arrested and jailed after fleeing to Germany; Alain was indicted and quickly acquitted; Paraguay has twice declined to have the FBI involved in the investigation—and new evidence has revealed for the first time the brutality of Alex’s murder.

Friends and family said Alex was kind, intelligent, thoughtful, and social. His favorite U.S. president was Abraham Lincoln and he loved to cook, learn languages, play video games, dress well, and make people feel comfortable.

“Alex was the kind of person you call to fix a problem or just to talk,” said Humberto del Valle, 20, a high school friend from Pan American International School (PAIS) in Paraguay. “He was a guy you could talk to for hours.”

Carlos Pedroza, 20, met Alex at PAIS where they became fast friends. “Alex wasn’t hated by anyone. He was so fun to talk with, always ending every conversation making us laugh,” he said.

“He had a thirst for history, trivial information, and jokes,” said Puning. “He possessed a high level of emotional intelligence.”

When René needed a mechanic, Alex was the first to find him one. When Alain needed help studying, Alex was ready to share his knowledge.

Schoolmate Renato Rolon, 20, remembers that Alex had a funny obsession with the number 23. They began to notice the number everywhere they looked and exchanged photos of it. Alex had a file devoted to it called “23.”

“It was like the magic number of our group,” he said, referring the clique of boys from school that included René and Alain.

On his way home from Alex’s memorial, Rolon said he noticed the number 23 in his father’s car. The clock read 10:23 p.m., the thermometer read 23 Celsius, and the odometer’s last two numbers read 23. “In that second, the moment I saw all that, I started crying because for me, it was like a message from him saying, ‘I’m in heaven, I’m okay.’”

Alex’s favorite song was “How To Save a Life” by The Fray, a band he went to see with his aunt, Kim Luk.

Kim, who lives in Maryland and is spearheading efforts to bring justice to Alex, said he was a gentle soul who was the light of everyone’s life.

“Alex and I were so close. He was such an amazing kid, I can’t even tell you,” said Kim. “We miss him every single day.”

But Luis Villamayor recalls there were times that Alex was the butt of some cruel jokes by some friends of his, including René and Alain. One time, Alex went to a house party and left with a shaved head. He had passed out after drinking beer for the first time, said Luis, and they shaved off all his hair. “That really hurt Alex,” he said. Another time, some friends put Alex on top of a Volkswagen bug and recorded it. Luis found it abusive.

Two weeks before Alex was murdered, Kim put his tie over the shirt they bought together and shined his shoes for his high school commencement. He graduated with honors. That night she waltzed with him. A couple of days later, she said to Alex, “I’ll see you back in the U.S.”

Alex was going to live with her while he attended Montgomery College to study business management. His brother Antonio also studied there and his parents were graduates. His brother was so excited about his arrival to in the U.S., he had posted a long message about it online.

That was the last time Kim saw Alex.

While Alex’s graduating class made plans to go to Cancun that summer in 2015, a trip he and his mother decided against because it was costly, Alex went to René’s ranch instead.

On Thursday, June 25, 2015, Alex took a bus with Alain from the Paraguayan capital, Asuncion, to Obligado.

“I thought it would be good for him to go to the ranch and have some fun,” said Puning Luk. “I never imagined in a million years he was going to be beaten, raped and killed by his friends.”

The family was skeptical from the onset about Alex’s alleged suicide on Saturday, June 27. Alex was an emotionally mature young man without any signs of psychological issues. He loved his family and was equally loved, they say. There were no signs he was contemplating taking his own life.

His friends shared the sentiment.

Rolon’s initial reaction to the news was that it couldn’t be possible. “Imagine a happy person you know with a good, happy life. You can’t process the idea of a suicide or a homicide,” he said.

“I couldn’t understand it at first,” said Pedroza. When he gathered with classmates at a house where they heard Alex had committed suicide, he immediately became suspicious. “I think there are friends who aren’t talking.”

Then, the cracks in the case began to appear.

That Saturday night, the DA, Olga Araujo, told the Villamayor family that she concluded it was a suicide, without conducting any standard investigative procedures. That same night at the morgue, Andy Fernandez, the Villamayor’s family friend and lawyer who identified Alex’s body, was told by a forensic photographer that the wound patterns weren’t consistent with suicide.

Then came some of the most compelling evidence. Photos from the crime scene showed a gunshot wound to the right of Alex’s head while the gun was in his left hand.

“That’s physically impossible to shoot yourself in the right side of your head with your left hand,” says Fernandez, who is now on the Villamayor’s legal team.

The first thing Puning noticed in the photos were Alex’s clothes. “Those aren’t his clothes,” she said. “Why is he wearing someone else’s clothes?” In the photos, Alex had a black pair of sweatpants on that were too big on him.

The tallest boy there that night was Alain, Fernandez said.

“This case was so botched up from the very beginning,” said Kim.

When law enforcement tested the clothes and skin of Alex, René, Alain, and Matthias it revealed there was no gunshot residue.

“That’s proof he didn’t kill himself,” said Fernandez. “If he killed himself, it would be everywhere. In his hair, on his skin.” But the discovery raises other questions.

Alex’s friend Pedroza says the weekend Alex was at the ranch, he shared videos with him of Alex, René, and Alain shooting at eggs and other things. Fernandez said that it was impossible for there to be no traces of gunshot residue on Alain and René if they were shooting guns the day before.

“Someone taught them how to create a suicide scene,” he said, and before authorities got there. “They washed up.”

In fact, phone records belonging to René and his ranch hand Wilbs reveal that René called his father over 50 times starting at 3:00 a.m., even though in their testimony, René and Alain said they both woke up at 6:00 a.m. to find that Alex had taken his life outside on the deck near the pool.

The records also reveal that just before 6:00 a.m., a call was made to a former police officer who, Fernandez believed, helped them create the scene and clean up.

A ballistic test showed that the gun in Alex’s hand had not been fired in a long time.

Armed with the puzzling new evidence, authorities approached the ranch hand Wilbs who eventually confessed to tampering with the crime scene. He told authorities he moved Alex’s body and put another gun in his hand.

But he also added something else: he said he did all this to protect René. When authorities revisited the phone records, they saw that Wilbs had also spoken to René’s father that night. René’s father, in hiding, is currently indicted on charges related to the alleged coverup and illegal gun possession.

When a second autopsy report was conducted, it revealed additional evidence that hadn’t been reported earlier. Alex had been brutally physically abused. The medical examiner found deep bruising all over his body, including his genital area. Marks on his body made by an object like a stick revealed the possibility of torture. The autopsy report also revealed that semen was found in his anus.

DNA results often take weeks, but this time they took seven months, Fernandez says, and the result was surprising–the semen was Alex’s own.

“There’s no record in this world that shows someone had semen in his own body,” Fernandez said.

In February, the prosecution will argue that that sometime between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m., Alex was murdered. Prior to that, he was raped and tortured.

“I’m not sure when or why they tortured him. That’s the part of the story I can’t understand,” said Fernandez.

Although Alain was indicted for murder over two years ago, he was acquitted less than a month later before the investigation had been completed. René and Wilbs are currently in prison awaiting trial for premeditated murder.

“I am shell-shocked,” says Luis about what happened. “I never thought that such a thing would happen in René and Alain’s company. Alex was like a kid-brother to them. They were supposed to take care of him, not hurt him.”

Alex has not been properly buried. Kim said they were hoping the FBI could still assist them in the investigation.

“I have two objectives. One is to bring justice to our family,” said Kim. Four months after she came home following Alex’s death, Kim began working with Maryland Congressman (now Senator) Chris Van Hollen and Sen. Ben Cardin to see what can be done.

Her other objective is to change the laws in the United States so that no American citizen can be murdered without the FBI getting involved. “More people have to understand what happens to you when you travel overseas,” Kim told The Daily Beast.“We’re in an administration right now that is seeking Americans first. This is a perfect time for us to change laws.”

Kim says she and the family can forgive in order to move on, but she needs to know what happened… but, then, she thinks she may never know.

“I have to put away the thought that we’re going to know what truly happened. It’s the truth and the lies and you meet somewhere in the middle,” said Kim.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/a-young-american-dies-in-paraguay-mushroom-tea-murder-rape-and-a-cover-up/

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