Last weekend at a wedding, my partner leaned toward me and, with tears in his eyes, said, “We are seeing the future.”
And it’s a good future. Or, as some of us old folks like to say, “The kids are all right.”
Earlier at the wedding, I found myself thinking, “Fuck those people who want to destroy all this.” Because this wedding was the antithesis of all the horrific violence that is being done to our country (and in the name of our country) right now.
This was a wedding for our times. It was a queer wedding. The people in attendance were quite diverse — a mix of genders, races, ethnicities, ages, backgrounds, and home locations.
The couple – one woman, one nonbinary person – met at the orientation for the graduate program in public health at U.C. Berkeley in 2021. I mean, these are folks who chose to study public health during a pandemic, so you know already they are people who are out to make good trouble in the world.
As a rule, I’m a bit skeptical about marriage. I’ve spent most of my life single and while I’m now in a committed relationship, we aren’t planning to get married for reasons that range from philosophical to practical.
But I do like celebrations and I also like the people who got married, who are neighbors of ours. Their joy in each other is wonderful.
The wedding ceremony reflected that individual joy, the political awareness of the complexity of the times, and the vital importance of ritual in our lives, not to mention the joy that comes from gathering. Continue reading “Some Thoughts From a Wedding”…
These are not just devastating losses. When death is sudden, violent, or when a body is never recovered, grief gets tangled up with trauma.
In these situations, people don’t only grieve the death. They struggle with the terror of how it happened, the unanswered questions and the shock etched into their bodies.
I was widowed when I was 36. In July 2020, my husband, Brent, went missing after testing a small, flat-bottomed fishing boat called a Jon boat. His body was recovered two days later, but I never saw his remains.
Both my personal loss and professional work have shown me how trauma changes the grieving process and what kind of support actually helps.
To understand how trauma can complicate grief, it’s important to first understand how people typically respond to loss.
Grief isn’t a set of stages
Many people still think of grief through the lens of psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief, popularized in the early 1970s: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
But in fact, this model was originally designed for people facing their own deaths, not for mourners. In the absence of accessible grief research in the 1960s, it became a leading framework for understanding the grieving process – even though it wasn’t meant for that.
Despite this misapplication, the stages model has shaped cultural expectations: namely, that grief ends once people reach the “acceptance” stage. But research doesn’t support this idea. Trying to force grief into this model can cause real harm, leaving mourners feeling they’re grieving “wrong.”
In reality, mourning is often lifelong. Most people go through an acute period of overwhelming pain right after the loss. This is usually followed by integrated grief, where the pain softens but the loss is still part of everyday life, returning in waves.
Julia Mora embraces her granddaughter, Isla Meyer, during a vigil for Texas flood victims on July 11, 2025. AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
When grief and trauma collide
However, some losses carry an extra layer of pain, confusion and trauma.
Sudden, unexpected, accidental, violent or deeply tragic deaths – like those experienced during the recent floods – can lead to what researchers call traumatic bereavement: grief that is disrupted by the traumatic nature of the death.
People experiencing traumatic bereavement often endure a longer and more intense acute grief period. They may be haunted by disturbing images, nightmares or relentless thoughts about how their loved one died or suffered. Many wrestle with dread, spiritual disorientation and a shattered sense of safety in the world.
Some of these deaths are also considered “ambiguous” – unclear or unconfirmed loss – such as when a body is never recovered or is too damaged to view. Without physical confirmation, mourners often feel stuck in disbelief and helplessness.
This was true in my case. Not seeing my husband’s body left a part of me suspended between knowing and not knowing. I knew he had died but couldn’t fully believe it, no matter how much I lived with the reality of his absence. For a long time, I caught myself repeating these words every morning: “Brent is dead. Brent is dead.”
In many cases, these reactions aren’t short term. Many people affected by traumatic loss remain overwhelmed and sometimes physically and emotionally impaired for years. Symptoms may taper over time, but they rarely disappear entirely.
Supporting mourners
Traumatic bereavement can feel unbearable. Many mourners struggle with intense, long-lasting reactions that can leave them feeling helpless, altered or even unrecognizable to themselves. They may appear withdrawn, forgetful or emotionally drained because their systems are overwhelmed. Coping can look messy or self-destructive, but these are often survival strategies, not conscious choices. I’ve also seen how those same struggles become more survivable when mourners don’t have to carry them alone. If you’re supporting someone through traumatic loss, here are three ways to help.
Make space for the horror. Listen without flinching. Acknowledge the full weight of what happened and how terrifying and unjust the loss was. This means saying things like, “This should never have happened,” or “What you went through is beyond words.” It means staying present when the mourner speaks about what haunts them. Let them know they don’t have to carry this alone. You may feel the urge to say something hopeful such as, “At least the body was recovered,” but there is no silver lining in these cases. Instead, say: “There’s nothing I can say to fix this, but I’m not going anywhere.”
Help them find others who can understand. Trauma can be isolating. Mourners often feel uniquely overwhelmed or confused. Support groups, peer companions and therapists trained in treating grief and trauma can offer the kind of recognition and validation that even the most devoted friend may not be able to provide.
Take care of yourself, too. Being present for someone in deep grief takes energy, especially if you were personally affected by the loss. Stay connected to replenishing people, practices and routines. If you don’t, you may begin to experience trauma, too. Taking care of yourself will help you remain grounded so that you can show up.
I believe supporting someone through traumatic bereavement is one of the most meaningful things you can do. You don’t need perfect words or a plan. What sustains them won’t be advice or solutions, but your simple, powerful act of staying.
One of the less-talked about side effects of the current wave of antisemitism is that we simply don’t hear about Jewish writers. Some of us (Jewish writers) write for the wider world, some specifically for Jewish communities. The vast majority of us are less visible. I was chatting with other Jewish writers a few weeks ago, and I discovered that this was worse in Australia than in the US, but that there’s no place not infected by the hate.
What readers read is our choice. Finding out about books we’d like to read is far more difficult than it used to be. If a reader has a favourite author who happens to be Jewish, they might not have access to anything new by them because the book publicity trail ignores much of the new work by Jewish writers. At the other end of the spectrum, if a reader doesn’t want to read any book by Jews, they can simply not buy the books or not borrow them from the library. Losing public awareness of Jewish writing doesn’t change the situation for those who will never read a Jewish writer: it changes it for those who want to and have no idea what books to ask for.
What I shall do here is, on the Mondays when I have a group of writers who share being Jewish and who want to be introduced… I shall introduce them. It’s that simple.
I’ve gradually, over the years, found other ways of sharing news about writers, to make up for those essays I used to write, that looked at so many books that I’d read. I miss the parcels of books in the mail, and excitedly reading a dozen of them and finding three that would work together nicely.
My new way of finding books for other people (when I can’t obtain them all myself or read them all) is to ask writers, “Who would you like to be in a group with?” When I get answers to this question, I’ll write more posts like this. They won’t always be about Jewish writers, because there are other groups that are also less seen than they should be. That’s the thing about antisemitism (as most of Australia saw on Sunday, even if they had no idea what they were seeing): it spreads into distrust and silencing of other minority groups. It’s as if people discover permission to lose chunks of culture and the people who create that culture. I can’t tell you about the books or who their audience is unless they’re in the world of science fiction, fantasy or historical fiction, or unless they write history at my end of the history trail. I used to be able to! One of the side-effects of being unwell (and plodding towards blindness) is that I no longer read three books a day. I miss having read all the books and being able to say “Oh! I read that! I can talk about it!” This is not a review series, then, but a simple set of reports.
Call this a series on how writers see themselves and which books they see sitting nicely alongside theirs on the shelf.
If you know of writers who are missing from bookshelves and from essays and from talks, encourage them to contact me and to share with me some details of their work and that of several other writers. And now on to our first group of writers!
Part Two
Debbi Weinberg Lakritz writes children’s books. The US has its own labels, and there they’re called picture books. If there’s a pile of books and a child instantly sits down with it and will not budged until all pages have been turned, then her books may be in that pile. The writes she suggests belong with hers on that pile (shelves don’t work nearly as well as glorious stacks of books when we’re talking about picture books) are Liza Wiemer, Ann Koffsky and Erica Lyons.
When I was a child there was just one picture book for Jewish children in our home library and none at all in our local library. We read it and read it and read it. One of my sisters learned how to use the stepstool before it was actually safe, because this book talked to us in a way that other books didn’t. The book disappeared fifty years ago and I only half remember its title. It was published in the 1940s or 1950s, and was a beige hardback. I look back at my Melbourne childhood and wonder at it and am totally pleased that these days there are choices for picture books that talk to Jewish children.
If any of you explore those books, let me know about them? I would love to know how children read and enjoy books that reflect their own background. I was not one of those children and nor were any Jewish Australian children in the 1960s.
Tomorrow night I attend the launch of a book that discusses what it’s like to be a Jewish Australian right now. I shall raise a glass there to these four authors, and to every other writer who helps give children a sense that they belong in this world. Debbi explained her group of writers to me and told me how warm and supportive the Jewish kidlit world is. This is another excuse to support kidlit. We need that kind and generous world to expand, so very much.
WorldCon this year was great for me, despite being so huge that I never even saw many folks who I know were there. I did run into lots of other folks, had some good conversations, and heard some good panels.
The best thing I did was con-adjacent: Charlie Jane Anders put on a special Writers With Drinks before 700 people in Seattle’s Town Hall with Andrea Hairston, Annalee Newitz, Darcie Little Badger, Becky Chambers, and Cecilia Tan.
Not only were the readings great – no surprise with that line up – but the audience was fabulous and enthusiastic. I felt at home in a crowd for the first time in a long time.
I came away from the whole weekend inspired about getting on with my own writing and extremely aware of how important it is for people to get together in groups. And while smaller, local meetups are certainly good, large gatherings that don’t happen as often are also key.
People have been getting together in these ways for a very long time. It’s part of who we are as a species.
But of course, things being as they are, the aftermath of WorldCon was accompanied by posts on social media and notices from the convention about Covid and other contagious viruses among the attendees.
“Con crud” has always been a thing among those who spend time at science fiction conventions. And while I recall all too well the norovirus that went around WisCon one year, most con crud comes from contagious airborne viruses like colds and flu.
I saw one post that said these days people call Covid “spicy con crud.” It makes it sound like a joke. And really, we’ve always treated con crud as a joke.
Except it isn’t funny. The risks from Covid make things much worse, but the truth is we shouldn’t be so cavalier about other kinds of viruses. Far too many of them cause things similar to Long Covid, and of course, some people are at greater risk from respiratory viruses than others.
But somehow, despite the fact that we learned (or should have learned) from the Covid pandemic that there are a number of things as a society that we can do to stop the spread of contagious airborne disease, we are still running our society on the idea that everyone is just going to get these viruses and that’s OK.
It’s not OK. We should not accept getting sick – especially with the risk of ending up with major diseases later – as the price of getting together as a social species. Continue reading “WorldCon and “Con Crud””…
Once again, this week got away from me. Here’s a piece from 2018.
I read an article on Salon a few years ago: “Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig?” by a writer named Emily Matchar. The title is, of course, very tongue in cheek; the article is about the omnivore/ locavore/ femivore movements, and about the myths we make up about the past. In this case, the past in question is the good ol’ days of cookery from the writers’ childhoods, and how much better everything was in the days before feminism led us to processed food.
Now, all things being equal I like to make my food from scratch, I love the farmer’s market, I do read labels, and I attempt not to buy things that I can make myself. But I do these things because I’d just as soon know what I’m eating, because I have family members with nasty allergies. I don’t do them as a political statement. I’m fortunate that I can afford to buy organic at least some of the time, that I have the time and the leisure to cook the way I prefer to. And oh yeah: I like to cook. Not everyone does. Not everyone likes to eat, for that matter. There are people who regard food as fuel, something they have to be prodded to remember. (I know: bizarre, right?)
Full disclosure: for a potluck at the time I made a chocolate tart with gingersnap crust, and a jam tart, and (possibly) some truffles made with leftover ganache. Because I am insane, but also because doing this stuff is fun. For me. As it is for many people in the “femivore” movement, which started out about making food (or raising chickens, or gardening or baking bread) as craft or art. But an awful lot of the omnivore/locavore/femivore rhetoric is distinctly anti-Feminist (seriously, go read the article, particularly the quotes from the like of Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, and Marguerite Manteau-Rao). In looking for a more “authentic” diet are these writers valorizing a time that never was?
Look at many of the cookbooks from the 30s, 40s, and 50s (never mind the 60s, when I, and many of the writers, were kids) and they’re full of short-cuts: use canned soup, top your casserole with deep-fried onion strings, use prepared ketchup or mayonnaise or Jell-O™ or corn flakes or instant oats. Use instant pudding. Use frozen spinach (or, even scarier, canned spinach. Have you ever had canned spinach? It’s like eating soggy green tissues). A decade before Betty Friedan put pen to paper to discuss the feminine mystique, ads in womens’ magazines touted wash-day miracles and labor-saving devices and wonderful, wonderful processed food. Because doing this stuff wasn’t a creative outlet. It was work.
There used to be a rhyme that outlined a woman’s work week: Monday (when you were rested up from your day of rest and going to church on Sunday) was laundry day. Laundry was a brutal task, involving boiling and stirring or wringing and hanging of an entire household’s clothes and linens. Tuesday was ironing day (yes, you put the iron on the stove to heat it, or on the coals of your fire if you didn’t have a stove, and yes, those irons were made of iron and weighed a young ton). Wednesday: sewing day, making your own clothes and clothes for your family, repairing, darning, stitching new sheets (yes, women hemmed and darned their sheets). Thursday: marketing, getting all the things that you couldn’t make, to last you a week. Friday: cleaning. Scrubbing on your hands and knees, polishing, beating rugs, dusting, scouring. Finally, Saturday, baking–for the week. All those pies and cake and breads–which explains a lot of recipes using “stale bread,” since by the end of the week whatever bread was left was likely to be rock-hard. And Sunday, like every day, three times a day: feed the family.
Whatever the rhetoric of feminism, women didn’t want frozen food, store-bought bread, and labor-saving devices because feminism told them they were being oppressed. They wanted these things because their work was really, really difficult and time consuming and exhausting. If these things freed some women up to do other things–run Hewlett Packard or become Secretary of State or write science fiction, that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out from under all that backbreaking, repetitive work.
Valorization of a better, simpler, more wholesome time drives me nuts. Because it’s fantasy. I love the gorgeous, candy-colored rendition of small-town turn of the last century Iowa in The Music Man, but I don’t confuse that with real life, which included diptheria, weevil-ly flour, bedbugs, and food that often teetered on the edge of spoiled. Taking on some of the tasks of yesterday, while using some of the tools of today to avoid the nastier work, and disdaining people who cannot or don’t want to do the same, is a mug’s game. It makes it all about aesthetics, when what most people 100 years ago, and many people today, are worrying about is survival.
Eat what you love, eat what is healthy, eat what you can afford and what you feel good about. Cook or eat out or call for a pizza. Grow tomatoes, spin flax, make poetry or pottery or raise llamas for the wool. It’s all good. But don’t blame Betty Friedan if you don’t like what’s for dinner.
I spend a lot of time each week fighting hate. Some people don’t hate so much as think my whole life should be spent fighting the cause their heart is with, which is, in Australia right now, fighting everything about Israel, including its existence.
I am not Israeli (I fight the bad things it does and cheer on the good, just as I do with any other country), however most Australian Jews are dealing with unprecedented levels of antisemitism. This should leave me free of the need to articulate shibboleths, since I’m already one of the bad people in their eyes, right? Entirely wrong. Just over the weekend, these folks have been saying (if they’re nice) “You’re looking at this all wrong. I’ll explain to you how you should think.” If they’re not so nice I learn many things about myself I did not know.
Mostly the bad language and accusations fall into two categories: what I like to think of as new DoubleSpeak, or accusations. I asked someone if I could use their words here to illustrate the DoubleSpeak, as I wanted an example of the particular language they used – it was gloriously fake – and they disappeared from the discussion entirely. The insults can be mild, but they’re usually more dramatic. I’m learning how to handle them better. When someone calls me a child-killer I generally tell them to let the police know and to hand over all the evidence, for instance.
I’m trying to work out what kind of mind hates in this way. This is a marvellous opportunity to find out, because there’s so much hate directed at most Jews. In Australia, we’ve even got ‘good Jews’ and ‘bad Jews.’ I’ve seen people labelled this way three times in the last two days. Last week there were even more labels, because of a literary festival that went terribly awry.
I don’t know about you, but I need a break from this shambolic mess. This is why I’ll introduce books for the next few weeks.
Several groups of Jewish writers gave me details of their books to share (and I’m watching out for more!). The sadness is that I can’t read them until I’m caught up with all my backlog. I’ve been unwell again so the backlog is severe. My normal “Let me read everything first so that I can introduce it properly” will not work. If I’ve read and enjoyed something, I’ll let you know, I promise. Otherwise I’ll tell you what I can.
I’ll share books right up until Jewish New Year. If you want more books after that, I’ll happily continue. I might not be the only person who needs books to distract them from the rather scary everyday.
The “administration’s” war on “DEI” fills me with such rage.
It’s not just that it is intended to undermine all the civil rights laws that people fought and died for so that the country could, in fact, live up to its principles and give everyone here the rights and opportunities that rich white men (and a few of their select friends) wanted to keep for themselves.
Or that it’s being used to undermine our universities and even medical research. Or to remove highly qualified people from positions of authority so they can be replaced by incompetents who suck up to the grifter in chief.
It’s that so many of the news reports cover it as if it is a policy issue and use “DEI” and “woke” as if they actually mean what the grifter uses them to mean. And they so rarely mention that these policies are a direct violation of many of our laws — which have not been repealed or overturned by the courts — and a good chunk of our Constitution.
I am reminded of someone I knew years ago who ran a small nonprofit working on housing. He hired two women to work for him — one Black woman with substantial experience in housing finance (better, in fact, than his) and the other a white woman with excellent administrative skills, who ran the office.
He micromanaged both of them. It drove them nuts.
He was politically quite liberal, but I always figured that, in his heart, he didn’t think anybody who wasn’t white and male could really do the job — even when they were doing it incredibly well.
I think that’s the crux of the problem: that too many white men don’t think either women or people of color are competent. I don’t mean just white supremacists or blatant misogynists – I mean people like that guy I knew. Continue reading “Stop the Rampant Racism”…
Now, a new study that we conducted with a team of colleagues suggests that dogs might have a deeper and more biologically complex effect on humans than scientists previously believed. And this complexity may have profound implications for human health.
How stress works
The human response to stress is a finely tuned and coordinated set of various physiological pathways. Previous studies of the effects of dogs on human stress focused on just one pathway at a time. For our study, we zoomed out a bit and measured multiple biological indicators of the body’s state, or biomarkers, from both of the body’s major stress pathways. This allowed us to get a more complete picture of how a dog’s presence affects stress in the human body.
When a person experiences a stressful event, the SAM axis acts quickly, triggering a “fight or flight” response that includes a surge of adrenaline, leading to a burst of energy that helps us meet threats. This response can be measured through an enzyme called alpha-amylase.
At the same time, but a little more slowly, the HPA axis activates the adrenal glands to produce the hormone cortisol. This can help a person meet threats that might last for hours or even days. If everything goes well, when the danger ends, both axes settle down, and the body goes back to its calm state.
While stress can be an uncomfortable feeling, it has been important to human survival. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to respond effectively to acute stress events like an animal attack. In such instances, over-responding could be as ineffective as under-responding. Staying in an optimal stress response zone maximized humans’ chances of survival.
After cortisol is released by the adrenal glands, it eventually makes its way into your saliva, making it an easily accessible biomarker to track responses. Because of this, most research on dogs and stress has focused on salivary cortisol alone.
While these studies have shown that having a dog nearby can lower cortisol levels during a stressful event, suggesting the person is calmer, we suspected that was just part of the story.
What our study measured
For our study, we recruited about 40 dog owners to participate in a 15-minute gold standard laboratory stress test. This involves public speaking and oral math in front of a panel of expressionless people posing as behavioral specialists.
The participants were randomly assigned to bring their dogs to the lab with them or to leave their dogs at home. We measured cortisol in blood samples taken before, immediately after and about 45 minutes following the test as a biomarker of HPA axis activity. And unlike previous studies, we also measured the enzyme alpha-amylase in the same blood samples as a biomarker of the SAM axis.
As expected based on previous studies, the people who had their dog with them showed lower cortisol spikes. But we also found that people with their dog experienced a clear spike of alpha-amylase, while those without their dog showed almost no response.
No response may sound like a good thing, but in fact, a flat alpha-amylase response can be a sign of a dysregulated response to stress, often seen in people experiencing high stress responses, chronic stress or even PTSD. This lack of response is caused by chronic or overwhelming stress that can change how our nervous system responds to stressors.
In contrast, the participants with their dogs had a more balanced response: Their cortisol didn’t spike too high, but their alpha-amylase still activated. This shows that they were alert and engaged throughout the test, then able to return to normal within 45 minutes. That’s the sweet spot for handling stress effectively. Our research suggests that our canine companions keep us in a healthy zone of stress response.
Having a dog benefits humans’ physical and psychological health.
Dogs and human health
This more nuanced understanding of the biological effects of dogs on the human stress response opens up exciting possibilities. Based on the results of our study, our team has begun a new study using thousands of biomarkers to delve deeper into the biology of how psychiatric service dogs reduce PTSD in military veterans.
But one thing is already clear: Dogs aren’t just good company. They might just be one of the most accessible and effective tools for staying healthy in a stressful world.
I suspect that some of the stuff I experience everyday is about to go into my fiction. A part of this is intentional: how can I not use the hateful things people send my way because I’m Jewish and use them as triggers for vampire attacks? What vampire wouldn’t react to a really wrong insult that tells them who and what they are and gets it entirely wrong? What vampire wouldn’t get bloodlust and rage and remember how much, how very much they will always hate Bram Stoker?
And then there is the “If you don’t think like me, you do not belong.” This is hidden under other words, but it’s the useful subtext. And it explains why we do not clearly identity the vampires and werewolves in our midst, because why would they self-identity when we’ve already told them they don’t belong if we do?
The concept behind this is not new at all. It’s much easier to address the hate we experience everyday when we have vampires and werewolves and fae and other beings to act as a channel.
And that’s all I have to say this week, because this week is one of those weeks when I have a solid amount of despite targeted at me and, if I were a vampire, I would be both triggered and well-fed.
Fortunately, I am not a vampire. Why fortunately? I’m so glad you asked.
Have you ever wondered how a Jewish vampire would explain to a rabbi that they live on blood?
When I was a teenager, I wanted to go hang out in the pool hall like the “bad boys” did. I wanted to learn to shoot pool – and I also wanted to just be in that kind of space – but it was made pretty clear that girls weren’t allowed.
I didn’t want to hang out in the pool hall because I was sexually attracted to bad boys. I wasn’t. It wasn’t sex I was after; it was the freedom to do something like hanging out and shooting pool.
(Learning some years later that my father was something of a pool shark and could have taught me to play well made this fantasy more poignant. I could have worked my way through school shooting pool instead of making pizzas and loading trucks.)
In the chapter “Walking After Midnight” in Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, she quotes Sylvia Plath writing in her journal at 19:
Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars — to be part of a scene, synonymous, listening, recording — all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstructed as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.
That sums up exactly how I felt. While I read Plath back in the day, I don’t remember stumbling across this observation or realizing that she, too, understood this need, but I suspect this explains some of the tragedy of her life.
We didn’t want a romance with the likes of Jack Kerouac. We wanted to have adventures like he had. Of course, those adventures were all like the boys’ clubs in the funnies – “no girls allowed,” except, of course, as sex objects. Continue reading “Walking After Midnight”…
