This short anonymous essay about misconduct involving patients in the Annals of Internal Medicine is rough, and I’m glad it’s out there:
Someone gasped. I stared at David. He shifted in his seat and crossed his arms on his chest. A splotchy red rash appeared on his neck. Staring down at the table, he murmured, “Man, I was just standing there trying to learn. The guy was a dirtball. It still pisses me off.”
David glanced at me. I asked, “When your attending said that and laughed, did you laugh, too?”
My question touched a nerve; perhaps my tone was accusatory. David snapped back, “Yeah, I laughed, but what was I supposed to do? Have you ever been in a situation like that?”
I looked down at the table in front of me and saw my black ballpoint pen. I focused on its gold clip for a moment. I placed my index finger and thumb beside the pen and spun it in place. It twirled and clicked as it spun around and around. I stared at the rotating pen and remembered. I felt my face flush. The spinning pen slowed, and then the clicking stopped. I looked up at David. “Yes, I have.”
*
Who won the Hugos, and why does it matter? (Here is a Storify that points out some missing deets.)
The mainstream press first started reporting on the gaming of the Hugos’ nomination system back in April, when fan-favorite authors who were women and people of color had been largely edged out of the final ballot. But few outside the field really cared. They treated it like nerd-on-nerd violence—unfortunate and ugly, but confined to one of literature’s crummier neighborhoods.
It’s not inconsequential, though. Not by a longshot. The Puppies’ revolt did not merely push back against the gains traditionally underrepresented people have made in a maligned literary sub-genre. It was a backlash against gains they’ve made everywhere. Like the sound of starship engines, the Hugos don’t exist in a vacuum.
*
Six Feet Under, the oral history:
After they read it, they invited me in, and I went in and met with Carolyn and with Chris Albrecht, who was running HBO at the time, and they said, “We really like this, but we have a main note for the whole thing: It feels kind of safe. Could you make it more fucked up?”
And I told them, “Well, yeah… I would be very happy to fuck it up for you. I mean, I don’t want to just fuck it up arbitrarily, but if we can make the characters messier and weirder, yeah, absolutely.”
*
On Saturday afternoon, I received my copy of Nichelle Nichols’ out of print memoir, Beyond Uhura, and proceeded to livetweet it until Sunday morning. It is the greatest thing of all time, you can peruse my timeline for the exhaustive details, but I wanted to share just a sampling of my favourite moments here:
IT HAS ARRIVED pic.twitter.com/7I4qTMtgJs
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) August 22, 2015
Nichelle had an affair with Roddenberry, but when she found out he was ALSO cheating on his wife with Majel Barrett, she peaced out. — Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) August 22, 2015
From when Nichelle Nichols was studying Afro-Cuban dance. This is the best anyone has ever looked in the world. pic.twitter.com/F1rsBVhxQu
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) August 22, 2015
At the part in the memoir when a guy tries to rape her and she yells “I’VE MADE UP MY MIND: YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO KILL ME” like a LIONESS. — Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) August 22, 2015
(She scares him off with her ferocity and the cops ignore her but she keeps going until she gets this rich influential rapist CONVICTED.)
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) August 22, 2015
The producers refused to put Nichelle on contract for Star Trek bc they didn’t want a black woman on the bridge, so she was a day player. — Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) August 23, 2015
But Roddenberry jammed her into every episode so she wound up making MORE than she would have under contract. SUCK IT.
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) August 23, 2015
Nichelle’s teeth were so perfect that DeForest Kelley demanded to know “who did her work” and REFUSED to believe she just woke up like that. — Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) August 23, 2015
But the mailroom guys tipped her off and she went down and saw CRATES of undelivered letters from adults and kids who loved her.
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) August 23, 2015
Everyone knew it was the last season of Trek and she would be free but he refused to let her go and ruined what would have been a 7 yr gig. — Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) August 23, 2015
“This was not the last time Gene would let me know that I could never really leave him.” BADLY DONE, Gene. BADLY DONE.
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) August 23, 2015
She’d never seen Sulu, the world’s biggest Anglophile, so happy as at high tea w the royals, crooking his little finger. — Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) August 23, 2015
My friend Carrie’s new puppy went for a walk with some big dogs:
Serving food to the superrich:
NOT everyone can do this kind of work well. Captains joked that it wasn’t worth learning a person’s name until he got promoted at least once. But get promoted and suddenly you were admitted into an inner circle of people who excelled at this sort of thing. Most members of the service staff shared one thing in common — a quiet alliance against our betters: the guests, and our managers. When someone spoke about the “swan” in lineup, a metaphor for the ideal server, churning tirelessly beneath the surface while maintaining the impression of absolute poise to the casual observer, there was never a hint from management that, like us, they understood the psychological dividedness their favorite symbol suggested. But as captains or servers or sommeliers, our job wasn’t just serving food, it was playing a part, and we did it with a degree of self-conscious irony that our bosses seemed incapable of.
Deleted comment of the day:
