Gentrification may be the talk of the town (no matter which town), but Richard Florida highlights new research showing that most urban neighborhoods that were poor 40 years ago are still poor today. The study “compared neighborhood-level poverty rates in the country’s 51 largest metro areas in 1970 and 2010.” It found that “very few high-poverty neighborhoods in 1970 dramatically reversed their fortunes over the next four decades”:
Entrenched poverty was just about the most constant thing about these neighborhoods. By 2010, fully two-thirds of these poor neighborhoods, 750 tracts in all, were still beset by chronic and concentrated poverty in 2010. Overall, their populations shrunk 40 percent over those forty years, as many of those who were able to move out did. On the other hand, only a small fraction of neighborhoods had turned around in a way that approximates what we call gentrification. Just 105 tracts, or about 10 percent, saw their poverty rates fall below 15 percent, meaning a smaller proportion of their residents lived in poverty than in the nation as a whole. The populations of these tracts grew by about 30 percent over this same period.
But wait, it gets worse:
The authors traced the fate of what they call “fallen star” neighborhoods – tracts that had below-average poverty rates in 1970 (less than 15 percent), but more than 30 percent of their residents living below the poverty line by 2010. More than 1,200 of these tracts shifted from low to high poverty during this time, contributing to an overall increase in the number of neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. Today, 10.7 million Americans live in 3,100 extremely poor neighborhoods in and around America’s largest city centers.
In other words, for every single gentrified neighborhood, 12 once-stable neighborhoods have slipped into concentrated disadvantage.
Two intrepid high school students in Michigan, Madeline Halpert and Eva Rosenfeld, tried to combat some of the stigma against depression by using their positions as managing editors of their school paper to write about the struggles of others. They even went so far as to get consent forms signed by the parents whose names they would include in the piece. Yet their principal, like so many others, blocked them from publishing the article (NYT):
As we were putting the stories together, the head of our school called us into her office to tell us about a former college football player from our area who had struggled with depression and would be willing to let us interview him. We wondered why she was proposing this story to us since he wasn’t a current high school student. We declined her suggestion. We didn’t want to replace these deeply personal articles about our peers with a piece about someone removed from the students. After we asked her why she was suggesting this, she told us that she couldn’t support our moving forward with the articles.
From an administrative perspective, this made some sense. It is her job to protect the students to the best of her ability. She believed that the well-being of those who shared their experiences — and most important, their names — would be put at risk because of potential bullying. She also mentioned that she had consulted a mental health professional, who told her that reading about their own depression could trigger a recurrence in some of the students and that those who committed to telling their stories might regret it later.
Our school has a very tolerant atmosphere, and it even has a depression awareness group, so this response seemed uncharacteristic. We were surprised that the administration and the adults who advocated for mental health awareness were the ones standing in the way of it. By telling us that students could not talk openly about their struggles, they reinforced the very stigma we were trying to eliminate.
I’m not certain that this is any better than those who ban books from school libraries. To be sure — there’s a wide maturity and experience gap between a 14-year-old freshman and an 18-year-old senior. But high school students, in my experience, are remarkably capable of rising to the challenge and treating any number of sensitive topics with grace. Unfortunately, in my few years as a counselor at a summer camp for high school journalists, I’ve heard far too many stories of principals refusing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I only wish Halpert and Rosenfeld had named names.
Kathryn Schulz raves about Geoff Dyer’s writing prowess, calling him “one of our greatest living critics” and “one of our most original writers—always out there beyond literary Mach 1, breaking the how-things-usually-sound barrier“:
[T]he essential fact about Dyer’s nonfiction is that it works beautifully when it shouldn’t work at all. Some of that work gets done at the level of the sentence, where Dyer excels. Listen to him on a hot day in Algiers: “Even the ants out on the balcony drag a little sidecar of shadow.” On Roman ruins in Libya: “All around were the vestiges of nouns—columns, stones, trees. No verbs remained.” On a saxophone solo by John Coltrane: “It’s pretty and then dangerous as he reaches so high the sky blues into the darkness of space before reentering, everything burning up around him.”
What’s going on in these sentences is the fundamental business of nonfiction: the translation, at once exact and surprising, of world to word. Writers weight that ratio of exactitude and surprise differently; you can stay close or reach further, out toward the risky and weird. Dyer reaches. You can see it in those precise but strange sidecars, in that startling grammar of ruin, and finally in the sax solo, where, like Coltrane, he pushes so hard on his medium that it threatens to break. Note the word blues, pulling three times its weight—noun, adjective, verb, so much pivoting around it that all the referents go briefly haywire and it seems like the solo is still rising and what’s falling is the sky. And note, too, how the sentence itself is pretty and then dangerous: dangerous because it starts out too pretty (“pretty” is a pretty word; “so high the sky” is Hallmark stuff); beautiful because it ends in so much danger.
Schulz goes on to praise Another Day at Sea, Dyer’s new travelogue of two weeks aboard the USS George H.W. Bush. John McAlley reviews the book (somewhat spoiling its ending in the last paragraph):
Dyer’s tour of the boat (that’s right: boat, not ship) is as closely monitored as an F-18 sortie, even though it’s a relatively stress-free time on the Bush: October 2011, more than a year after President Obama announced the end of America’s combat mission in Iraq. Once Dyer inures himself to the ’round-the-clock “crash and thunder” of the in-transit jets and the “aftertaste of the big meats” served in the mess, he’s at ease to report on the daily encounters prearranged for him. Each brief chapter gives us a peek into another nook and cranny of the carrier’s teeming underworld, or the above-deck “island,” “the bridge and assorted flight-ops rooms rising in a stack from one side of the deck: an island on the island of the carrier.” …
For all the snap and snark in his prose, Dyer can’t tamp down his generosity of spirit forever. This unbeliever — in faith, in wayward military action, in bad food and the snorting of bath salts, even in mourning the death of his parents — ends the breezy Another Great Day at Sea with stunning economy and emotional force, and in the most unexpected way. He says a prayer for the men and women of the USS George H.W. Bush — and for all of us at sea.
Subscribers to The New Yorker can read an excerpt of the book here.
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, which Micah Mattix lauds as a love letter to New York City:
With its references to Park Avenue, Times Square, Pennsylvania Station, liver sausage sandwiches, the Five Spot, the Seagram Building, the opening of the American Folk Art Museum, and much more, it is a very New York book. O’Hara walks around the buzzing city, buys “a chocolate malted” or “a little Verlaine,” remembers a friend’s birthday, and talks to the Puerto Rican cabbies before rushing back to his desk at the MoMA with a copy of Reverdy’s poems in his pocket. Born in Baltimore and raised in Grafton, Massachusetts, O’Hara moved to New York in 1951 and stayed until his untimely death in 1966. The city offered freedom, possibility, movement, all of which O’Hara associated with life. “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass,” he once wrote, “unless I know there’s a subway handy.” It also offered him a community of fellow outcasts, poets, and artists who became, as Lytle Shaw notes, a surrogate family.
Lunch Poems is still popular with New Yorkers today: In 2012, when the Leonard Lopate Show asked listeners to vote on 10 objects that “best tell New York’s story,” it came in at number six—just above the Brooklyn Bridge.
Even more, Mattix finds the collection has “an appeal that reaches beyond the time and place it was written,” remaining popular, in part, because of the way O’Hara’s language resonates with our own:
Casual, sardonic, funny, and full of pop-culture references, Lunch Poems has all the brevity, informality, irony, and at times chatty pointlessness of modern discourse without having been influenced by it. The volume has never gone out of print, in part because O’Hara expresses himself in the same way modern Americans do: Like many of us, he tries to overcome the absurdity and loneliness of modern life by addressing an audience of anonymous others.
O’Hara’s Lunch Poems—like Facebook posts or tweets—shares, saves, and re-creates the poet’s experience of the world. He addresses others in order to combat a sense of loneliness, sharing his gossipy, sometimes snarky take of modern life, his unfiltered enthusiasm, and his boredom in a direct, conversational tone. In short, Lunch Poems, while 50 years old, is very a 21st-century book.
Last spring the Dish featured one of O’Hara’s poems here.
You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.
Richard Walker, a scientist who specializes in aging research, believes the key to ending human aging lies in a rare disease known as “syndrome X.” Babies afflicted with the condition grow older but not bigger, remaining physically “marked by what seems to be a permanent state of infancy.” Here’s an excerpt from Virginia Hughes’s arresting account of Walker’s quest for immortality:
Brooke’s body seemed to be developing not as a coordinated unit, [Walker] wrote, but rather as a collection of individual, out-of-sync parts. He used her feeding problems as a primary example. To feed normally, an infant must use mouth muscles to create suction, jaw muscles to open and close the mouth, and the tongue to move the food to the back of the throat. If these systems weren’t coordinated properly in Brooke, it could explain why she had such trouble feeding. Her motor development had gone similarly awry: she didn’t learn to sit up until she was six years old and never learned to walk. “She is not simply ‘frozen in time’,” Walker wrote. “Her development is continuing, albeit in a disorganised fashion.”
The big question remained: why was Brooke developmentally disorganised? It wasn’t nutritional and it wasn’t hormonal. The answer had to be in her genes. Walker suspected that she carried a glitch in a gene (or a set of genes, or some kind of complex genetic program) that directed healthy development. There must be some mechanism, after all, that allows us to develop from a single cell to a system of trillions of cells. This genetic program, Walker reasoned, would have two main functions: it would initiate and drive dramatic changes throughout the organism, and it would also coordinate these changes into a cohesive unit.
Ageing, he thought, comes about because this developmental program, this constant change, never turns off. From birth until puberty, change is crucial:
we need it to grow and mature. After we’ve matured, however, our adult bodies don’t need change, but rather maintenance. “If you’ve built the perfect house, you would want to stop adding bricks at a certain point,” Walker says. “When you’ve built a perfect body, you’d want to stop screwing around with it. But that’s not how evolution works.” Because natural selection cannot influence traits that show up after we have passed on our genes, we never evolved a “stop switch” for development, Walker says. So we keep adding bricks to the house. At first this doesn’t cause much damage – a sagging roof here, a broken window there. But eventually the foundation can’t sustain the additions, and the house topples. This, Walker says, is ageing.
Brooke was special because she seemed to have been born with a stop switch. The media were fascinated by her case. Walker appeared with the Greenberg family on television several times and explained why he was so interested in Brooke’s genes. “This is an opportunity for us to answer the question ‘Why are we mortal?’” he said on Good Morning America. “If we’re right, we’ve got the golden ring.”
John Hollander, who died in August 2013, published scores of books, including more than twenty collections of poetry and a superb book on poetic form entitled Rhyme’s Reason. He was an exemplary learned man—inexhaustibly inspiring, witty, charming, and dear. In the obituary in The New York Times, Margalit Fix quoted fellow poet J.D.McCLatchy (several of whose poems were posted on the Dish two weeks ago), “It is said of a man like John Hollander that when he dies it is like the burning of the library at Alexandria.”
Hollander was also a noted anthologist, and his volume War Poems, selected and arranged with great care for the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series, is the source for the poems we’ll post to commemorate Memorial Day this year. In his introduction, he wrote, “War poetry may express sorrow, hope, despair, prophetic vision, moral and philosophical reflection; it may even trespass upon Cupid’s own domain of love.” We’ll begin with a battlefield poem written by Emily Dickinson when she was twenty nine, surrounded by families in Amherst losing sons to both armies of the Civil War.
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory
As he defeated—dying—
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!
The HBO adaptation of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” an autobiographical tale of the onset of AIDS and the births of Act Up and GMHC, premieres this Monday. And Larry, visibly aged in the video seen above, was by all accounts as active on set with director Ryan Murphy as anywhere else. Patrick Healy looked into the making of the film (NYT):
Mr. Murphy said that he and Mr. Kramer, in the hospital, worked for months on the screenplay by email. They were determined, he said, to create a movie with “real immediacy” — visually graphic scenes that would pack a punch for New Yorkers who lived through the 1980s and that might motivate those continuing to fight for gay rights today. Harrowing monologues in the play, like the description of one character’s physical disintegration on a cross-country flight, have been opened up into fully rendered moments that show the agony of AIDS.
“I wrote the word ‘true’ on a notecard and put it on my computer,” Mr. Murphy said. “Larry was always trying to be on the right side of the angels, but he can be so abrasive, and he was so hurt by how he was treated by his friends and enemies in the ’80s. I wanted the movie to be true to all sides of him.”
After finding fault in so much, Mr. Kramer found little with the movie, and none with its depiction of his life’s work. “It’s about speaking up, being a buffalo if you have to, being mean if you have to,” Mr. Kramer said. “You do not get more with honey than with vinegar.”
Larry’s comments on Truvada in that interview, I’m sure, will get addressed by Andrew next week. But according to Richard Cohen, the original’s vinegar is still there:
The HBO movie is rough on Reagan and Koch.
They earned it. Reagan had gay friends and associates and was in no way a bigot. But he was clearly afraid of alienating his conservative base. The Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell characteristically said later that “AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals.” Reagan did not even mention the word AIDS until the disease was impossible to ignore and his friend Rock Hudson had died from it.
As for Koch, mayor of a city hugely impacted by the epidemic, the movie flat-out declares him to have been a closeted homosexual — afraid to acknowledge the reality of AIDS lest his own secret be revealed. Koch always put his private life off-limits. He was entitled to this — but not at the price of ignoring a public health menace that needed immediate attention. The tendency then and somewhat still today was to blame gay men for their plight. The proposed remedy was to deprive them of their sex life — a remedy some felt was worse than the disease.
Emily Nussbaum reflects on the importance of the movie:
There are grittier routes to the history of this period, including excellent documentaries such as “gay Sex in the 70s” and “How to Survive a Plague.” There are more expansive books, like Randy Shilts’s “And the Band Played On,” and more richly philosophical plays, like “Angels in America.” Yet there’s something implacable and pure about “The Normal Heart,” not despite but because of its message-in-a-bottle specificity. Not for nothing was a 1994 book by Kramer titled “Reports from the Holocaust”; as a gay Jew, he saw one identity as a metaphor for the other, with a built-in warning system. When people began dying, the choice was clear: you could be the Warsaw resistance or you could be the American Jewish Congress, beggars who stayed behind the scenes, lobbying for help that never came. Even in 1985, Kramer knew the effect of this obsession on others. “All analogies to the Holocaust are tired, overworked, boring, probably insulting, possibly true, and a major turnoff,” Felix says. “Are they?” Ned replies.
In 2014, AIDS and gay identity are no longer tied together in a three-legged race. The idea of making real change through the system is no pipe dream, either: each day, more Bens switch sides, now that gay rights has become a safe, default liberal perspective. But Murphy’s adaptation is a useful time machine. It’s a corrective to complacency, a reminder of a period when rage itself was a necessary tonic, a caustic application that could burn through the misery of shame and isolation. What’s the use of an alarm, after all, if it’s not loud enough to wake people up?
I remember sitting with a copy of And The Band Played On in high school, pairing Larry’s characters with their real-life counterparts. That interest must have, on some level, been triggered by growing up with my own stories of the Jewish Holocaust: To borrow Larry’s analogy, it made sense to remember this one, too.
And yet, a time machine may just be needed. The other day I asked a friend, a gay man in his mid-20s, whether he would watch the film version of the play with me. “Sure,” he replied. “What’s that about?” One of the film’s stars, Matthew Bomer, is just a decade older. It’s telling that his experience with the story is so different:
There’s a headline that keeps circulating from a quote that you gave, where you said, “Larry Kramer probably saved my life.”
Yeah. I’m sure he did. At the time I first read it, my first sexual relationships were with women. But even then he put the fear of God in me! (Laughs) He educated me in a lot of ways. It was a very useful fear. But it was also the education to be smart and be safe, and that carried over into my later relationships and also when I started to have relationships with men.
But I think he saved me on a more profound than practical level. Even at 14 when I still didn’t know who I was when I read this piece—I was still figuring out who my most authentic self was—to have this voice that was such a firebrand and so honest and so authentic, to know that that reality was out there, even though it was nowhere near my immediate experience in suburban Texas, to know that somewhere it was out there gave me a sense of hope. And I think I knew on some level that a part of me that hadn’t been acknowledged yet was going to be OK.
Read Andrew’s look back at Act Up here, and Larry’s response here.
The Dish 
