Bad Girl by Viña Delmar was a bestseller in 1928. My copy is from its fifteenth printing that year. (Sales were probably not hurt when the novel was banned in Boston.) In the novel, Dot is a working-class, New York City woman who does the unthinkable and has premarital sex. She gets pregnant and marries her lover. She fears childbirth, about which she knows little, and the book has a frank discussion of her attempts to terminate the pregnancy.

Even though it is against the law, she gets a concoction from a pharmacist. Although she takes it “religiously,” it fails to work. Dot then turns to a more upper-class friend, Maude, who urges Dot not to have the baby and tells her that only an operation, not any medicine, will work. Dot asks whether the operation hurts, and Maude says it does “the first time, because most girls are crazy enough to try it without ether.” With the anesthetic, however, “you don’t feel a damn thing.” The friend gives Dot an address and tells her not to pay more than fifty dollars, an enormous sum to Dot. Maude states that the hospitals are open to the woman giving birth, but not to the one who doesn’t want a baby. “High prices, fresh doctors. It’s a man’s world, Dot. To the woman who knows her place they will give their charity, but the woman who wants to keep her body from pain and her mind from worry is an object of contempt.” Dot, not having fifty dollars, goes for a preliminary visit to the doctor, who determines she is pregnant, molests her, charges her five dollars, settles for the only two dollars she has, and tells her to make an appointment soon because she is in the second month.

Dot and her husband Eddie cannot talk freely with each other about what they are feeling. Eddie thinks that a pregnancy termination would be murder, but he also thinks a man “would have a hell of a nerve” to tell a woman to have a baby. “What right had a man to say what she should do?”

Dot talks with other friends. Edna says a woman has the baby whether she wants it or not. “Abortion” is never uttered. Instead, in a different way from the way we use the term now, it is referred to as “birth control.” Thus, Dot “was not anxious to debate the pro and con of birth control” with Edna, and Edna to herself was trying to figure out, “Who was the birth-control advocate, Eddie or Dot?”

Edna urges Eddie to oppose the abortion, but he replies, “It’s her business.” Edna then indicates that “nine-tenths” of young married women are ignorant about childbirth and also abortion. She states that there are only a half-dozen New York City doctors who do abortions without serious complications such as blood poisoning. For a birth, Edna maintains, a woman can find a good doctor, but “the other way you’ve got a guy who couldn’t make a living the way other doctors do. . . , and in case you have religion, you’ve sinned against it.”

Finally, Dot decides. “After all, it was her body that was to be the battle-field. She had been wrong. It was her place to do what she pleased, not to stand by and wait for Eddie to pass judgment.” The thought of the horrid abortionist was repulsive, and she feels happy and peaceful as she announces that she will have the baby.

Kate Simon’s memoir Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, like Bad Girl, also describes working-class, 1920s New York, although Simon is narrating from the viewpoint of a young girl. She and her family were  then living in a Bronx neighborhood largely inhabited by immigrant Jews and Italians, and she was struggling to understand the world she was encountering, including the visits of Dr. James. He was seldom seen by the kids because he came when school was in session. No explanation was given for the appearance of this tall, fair “American” in a neighborhood of short, dark “foreigners.” However, Simon noticed, the mothers he visited, who were fine in the morning, were in bed when school let out.

Years later Simon’s medical relatives told her that Dr. James had had a prestigious and lucrative medical practice and came from the prosperous New England family that produced the writers and intellectuals William and Henry. After his children were raised, Dr. James dedicated himself to poor immigrant women who had “no sex information, no birth-control clinics, nothing but knitting needles, hat pins, lengths of wire, the drinking of noxious mixtures while they sat in scalding baths to prevent the birth of yet another child. Some of these women died of infections, and often when these procedures did not work, the women went to term and then let the infant die of exposure or suffocation.“

To prevent such suicides and murders, Dr. James went from one immigrant neighborhood to another, performing abortions. Often charging nothing but never more than a dollar or two, James performed thousands of the procedures. All the adults knew what he did, and according to Simon, so did the police and the Board of Health who generally let him be. Periodically, however, when there was some change in officialdom, he was arrested. He wouldn’t post bail but contacted colleagues. Doctors then thronged the courthouse where “they pleaded, they argued, they shouted, they accused the police and the court of ignorance and inhumanity,” and each time Dr. James was released.

James was a skillful and careful practitioner and would not perform an abortion if it would be too dangerous. Simon had a much younger sister, and when Kate was an adult, her mother told Simon that the sister was unwanted. James, however, would not perform an abortion because Simon’s mother already had had too many and another would be hazardous. Shortly before she died, Simon’s mother told Kate that she had had thirteen abortions (as well as three children) and that other women in the neighborhood had had even more. Why do you think, the mother continued, that the Italian women urged to have large families by the Catholic Church had only two or three kids? “Certainly it wasn’t the abstinence of Italian husbands, no more controlled than Jewish husbands. It was the work of the blessed hands of that wonderful old goy.”

Bad Girl and Bronx Primitive indicate that abortion was prevalent in this country a hundred years ago, as were willful infant deaths. (We tend not to think about infanticide, but the concern in our colonial days over it were so great the special evidentiary and other rules were applied when a mother reported a stillbirth or that a baby died shortly after birth.) One of the reasons for the number of abortions was ignorance about sex. In Bad Girls, Dot’s husband has no idea why she is making monthly marks on their calendar.  In our colonial history, and beyond, men, at least, believed that a woman could only get pregnant if she had an orgasm and that a woman could only have an orgasm if the intercourse were consensual. Thus, a raped woman could not get pregnant. Surely this ignorance led to abortions. But abortions and infanticides also occurred because of lack or knowledge of birth control in our modern sense of that term so that the only meaningful “birth control” available then was abortion.

Perhaps illegal abortions decreased after the 1920s, but that is unknowable. I knew a couple women who had abortions before they were legal in this country. These were what most would see as ordinary women. Only because I was close to them did I find out about the illegal terminations of their pregnancies. I can assume that of the many older women I have known less well, some, maybe many, also had illegal abortions.

If the abortion rate dropped from Kate Simon’s youth, it is not because laws against abortion had more effect, or that sex drives changed, or that women came to follow church proscriptions more faithfully, but primarily because of the increase in the availability and knowledge of birth control that occurred in the twentieth century. Margaret Sanger’s movement was in its infancy when Simon’s mother had abortions and when Delmar wrote, and the spread of birth control was hard work that took years to have any widespread effect. Four decades after Simon and Delmar, in many circles there was still limited discussion of birth control. In a senior class when I was in high school, ten percent of the girls got pregnant, or at least ten percent were known to have gotten pregnant. Of course, the odds are high that others got pregnant without its becoming public knowledge and had abortions.

Sanger had to overcome not only the reticence to talk about sex that prevented education about birth control, practices kept contraception as much out of sight as possible. Condoms were hidden away in the drug store, and the pharmacist had to be asked for them, an embarrassing and deterring encounter for many. But Sanger and her followers also had to fight laws that actually prohibited birth control.

Many states at one time proscribed birth control, but by 1960, only a couple still had such laws, including Connecticut which made illegal “any drug, medicinal article, or instrument for the purpose of preventing contraception.” The law applied to the married and the unmarried, and we should remember such laws when we hear complaints about how our present government has gotten too big. What could be more big brotherish than to regulate what married couples can do in their bedroom (or on their kitchen table or their washing machine)? I wonder how many people who complain about the intrusiveness of government even know that government once prohibited the use of birth control.

The United States Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), found the Connecticut law to be unconstitutional as a violation of “marital privacy.” The decision was controversial because nothing in the Constitution explicitly protects privacy, and the seven justices who voted to invalidate the law relied on different constitutional provisions to find this privacy right. Even so, the right to access birth control was extended to non-married couples by the Supreme Court in 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird.

It was settled, then. All had access to birth control, and many, most, nearly all of us thought that was good. Pleasure and passion and love can increase because of birth control.  Stable, non-abusive families are more likely with birth control. Abortion decreases with birth control. But we now live in a new age that once again may make birth-control availability more difficult.

The present administration plans to change the health-care rules to make getting contraception more difficult. Under Obama, the Affordable Care Act made birth control a regular benefit of health insurance without any co-pay. In 2014, however, the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby case ruled that a “closely held corporation” could be exempt from the Health care contraception mandate on religious grounds. The proposal now is to extend that exemption to both for-profit and non-profit entities and to all companies including publicly held ones, not just closely held ones. In addition, the exemption would extend beyond religious beliefs to sincerely held “moral convictions.”

That corporations could have religious beliefs came as a surprise to me. I did not know that if you make it to heaven, you might see Shell Oil, Amazon, and Morgan Stanley ringing the Father. I certainly was not aware of Jesus preaching in any boardrooms. I wondered how the religious beliefs of a corporation are determined. Will the shareholders be polled? Would we count the votes by individuals or by the number of shares held? If by shares, as must be done for other corporate purposes, the rich person’s religious views will count for more than the less affluent shareholder’s. What if I have religious views or moral convictions for or against contraception but I am in the minority; aren’t my religious beliefs or moral convictions then violated?

And what are the non-religious moral convictions about birth control? I have enough difficulty understanding the religious beliefs about contraception. I don’t pretend that I can recall every word of the Bible, but I don’t remember any mention of IUDs, the pill, condoms, or even latex. Did anything even like our notions of contraception exist back in biblical times?

On top of this, a person who has spoken out against not only abortion but also against contraception has been appointed to the position in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Title X program which oversees family planning funding for poor Americans. Add to this the attacks on Planned Parenthood. Remember that federal money cannot be used for abortions so that a federal defunding of Planned Parenthood will have little effect on those procedures, but it will affect  the availability of contraception. (And, of course, the latest healthcare bill was put forward without a single woman on the drafting group.)

We are on a dangerous path. Many states and the federal government have put such onerous restrictions on abortion that, although a constitutional right, it is not in fact available for many women. That is a step back to Delmar and Simon’s time of knitting needles and goop to be prayerfully drunk. And now we will make obtaining birth control more difficult with the result being that many women, generally poor women, will not have contraception. I suppose the good news is that we will be giving a new generation of novelists and memoirists like Delmar and Simon something to write about.

I know many families with only one, two, or three kids. Perhaps it is because in this age many couples have finally learned what previous generations did not, to use the rhythm method successfully. Or perhaps it is because passion or tenderness or intimacy dies out with modern couples as it did not a hundred years ago. But I am guessing that the prime reason is that these couples use birth control. They have found that birth control makes their lives, their relationships, their families better. Birth control should be available to all in our society.

Something I heard in a rural Pennsylvania grocery store that I have never heard in New York City: “Where do you keep your Miracle Whip?”

The painter on the eaves painting a window was singing. The painter on a nearby ladder said, “What is that song?” An answer was given. “Is that from Beauty and the Beast?” “No, it’s from Aladdin.”

Driving is never easy in New York City. There is always the normal, heavy traffic and construction sites closing lanes or even streets, and now there are many street festivals and parades causing even more re-routings. And, with all of that, concentration on driving is even more difficult because of the women crossing the streets and on the sidewalks in their marvelous arrays of summer dress and undress demanding attention.

“No one on earth—none that I had ever seen—is more polite than a person at a gun show: more eager to smile, more accommodating, less likely to step on your toe.” Paul Theroux, Deep South.

What did couples differ over before there were dishwashers to load?

The graduate students at the house for Thanksgiving dinner included some from India who were comparing notes. In your part of India, when do you celebrate this holiday? What language is predominant for the upper and lower classes? I asked some questions and learned that there are many, many official languages in India as well as many more that are not official and that Indian Hindus celebrate holy days at different times of the year in different parts of the country and in different ways. The students went on to explain more and more differences around the country. I finally asked, “What, then, unites India as a country?” The students simultaneously answered, “Cricket!”

Is it true, as I just read, that you have to play polo righthanded?

President Trump does not have laugh lines. Isn’t that sad?

Are you one of those people who think that they are eating adventurously when they have a spicy tuna roll?

“None of us is pure, and purity is a dreary pursuit best left to Puritans.” Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness.

We were driving from Phoenix to the Grand Canyon. The daughter, who had never really gambled, had a fascination with it. On some level, this was out of character since she is thrifty and little concerned with the status and trappings of money. We stopped at an Indian casino where she was just old enough for the slots and blackjack. I gave her some money. She quickly lost it. I was pleased. I am not a gambler and would not like it if the daughter were to become a regular gambler. The money’s quick disappearance I thought might end her gambling fascination, but as we were leaving, somebody near the exit got a payoff in a slot machine, and one of the coins fell on the floor.  The daughter picked it up to return it to the winner. He indicated that she could keep it. She put it in a machine. She won. And I thought, Damn!

A few weeks ago, Scooter Gennett, a major league baseball player, hit four home runs in one game. If you are like me, you asked, “Who?” A guy named after a Muppet is in the major leagues? But even if you don’t know who Gennett is, you are still impressed with the what. The total number of major league baseball games played is not something I know, but surely it is north of 200,000, and only seventeen times has a player homered four times in a game. Rare, very rare.

Only one of these four-homer games has stuck in my mind, and that is as much as for what happened in the game after the one with four home runs. The Milwaukee Braves were playing at the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1954. The New York Giants would win the World Series that year, but it was a three-way pennant race when the Braves and Dodgers played at the end of July. (Even though it was a weekend, Ebbets Field was about half filled. Many Brooklynites bitched about the Dodgers moving to Los Angeles for decades after it happened, often stating how well the Dodgers were supported in Brooklyn. If support was meant to mean actual attendance at games, the moaners may have overstated matters.)

In that game, Joe Adcock, the Braves’ first baseman, hit four home runs and a double, which meant he had eighteen total bases. (Four for each of the homers, and two for the double.) Eighteen set a record for total bases that stood for over a generation.

A memorable day, but Adcock continued on the next day—a double in his first at bat. But then it ended. He did not get any kind of hit in his next time up; instead he got hit. I believe it was a fast ball from Clem Labine, not thrown at the small of the back, but hitting Adcock in the head. Back in those days, baseball was the same game, but it was also different. Get some hits and expect to get thrown at. The opponent did not want the hot hitter to be too comfortable in the batter’s box.  Newspaper pictures the day after Adcock was hit showed him on a stretcher with concerned players from both teams huddled around.

In one sense, Adcock was lucky. Few ballplayers back then wore helmets. They might have said that the head protection was uncomfortable and could have affected their swing, but surely a main reason is that it was considered unmanly to have a helmet. (Football players did not then have face masks and surely part of the reason is that they were not manly. Hockey players did not wear helmets and the goalie went maskless for the same reason. As far as I know, however, all wore jock strops, and baseball catchers wore even more groin protection. There were unwanted images of unmanliness from a helmet or a face mask, and then there is protecting your manhood.) The Braves, however, defying convention, wore helmets, and Adcock had one on.

Years later I heard a Dodger who was on the field for that game—I think Pee Wee Reese—discuss the beaning. He said that the sound of the ball hitting Adcock was chilling. He went over to the prone Adcock and saw the helmet. It was cracked at the temple. The Dodger said that he decided to wear a helmet after that, as did his teammates.

Now, of course, it is routine for athletes in many sports to wear protective head gear, and the men don’t seem less manly to me.

There weren’t books in my house growing up. There was reading material, however. Two newspapers were delivered daily, and a third came once a week. There were magazines. I think the parents subscribed to Reader’s Digest. I read some of its articles, but mostly I went to the anecdotes and jokes. There were many other magazines that came from friends of my mother’s who passed them on to her when they were through with them—Life, Look, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal. And I exaggerate when I say no books were in the house. There was an encyclopedia and a few textbooks that seemed as if they came from my father’s high school days, but there were not the kind of books a second grader who discovered he liked reading wanted.

I soon found the public library. It may have been a mile from the house, but in those days, a mile was nothing. A two-story building with the adult section on the entrance floor and the youth books upstairs. I fell in love with two series: Freddy the Pig books and what I thought of as orange biographies. I don’t remember much about the Freddy tales, but the biographies were so labeled in my mind because they all had orange covers. Of appropriate length for a third grader, they were hero books with an emphasis on the childhoods of Thomas Edison or Andrew Jackson, but they also contained enough about the subject’s adulthoods for me to learn much about history. I believe that these books have stayed with me, forming much of my background knowledge about various personages and historical eras.

Perhaps because I was shy, I read constantly, even while walking to and from school. It was not long before I felt I had exhausted the offerings of the children’s section of the local public library.  Luck befell me in the person of Miss Dahlberg, my sixth-grade teacher. She recognized my dilemma and went with me to the public library. I don’t remember at what age one qualified to take books out of the adult section, but it certainly was not the sixth grade. Miss Dahlberg talked with library directors, and then some higher-up  library directors. She knew how to hold her ground. (None of us kids would have been surprised. We all knew she had been a WAC during WWII and had even parachuted out of a plane!) What had been rigid rules for the library were no match for her, and I walked out with a library card that granted me adult privileges.  (Actually, inked on it was “Adult Priviledges.” Miss Dahlberg knew how to be gracious in victory. She noted the misspelling and told me that it would not matter, and we left the library.)

This golden card allowed me to enter a new stage in my reading. There was no one to tell me what were good books or what books they had enjoyed. I certainly did not then read book reviews. Instead, I would walk the stacks, read jacket copy, read a few paragraphs or pages and then used gut intuition to take out books. Thus, the reading at this stage was random. Only years later did I gain direction and would perhaps read one Hemingway or Fitzgerald after the other.  Well, there was one direction that came before that. I was soon at the age where there was an interest in male-female relationships, and I would spend many hours skimming books back in the shelves looking for some sort of sex scene, but I seldom checked such books out.

I remember little of what I read from these directionless days except, perhaps, for The Mouse that Roared, and its sequels, by Leonard Wibberley. The Cold War satire was a delight, a precursor in my mind to Dr. Strangelove, but like that movie, it also hit my emerging views that the powerful– whether the military, political, corporate, or social–were to be distrusted. If I had then talked about books with others, I would have insisted that all read it.

The other book I remember from that period was different in that I did not stumble across it—From Here to Eternity by James Jones. I am not sure how I became aware of the book; even if I had read about books, I would have been too young when the book was published, or even when the movie of it came out, for it to have registered with me. But somehow a half dozen years or so after its publication, I decided I wanted to read it, and I went looking for it on the shelves of the Mead Public Library. I did not find it, and then I learned that in that staid period the book was too explosive or controversial to be allowed on the shelves. A potential reader had to ask for it at the front desk. I did, and this caused consternation. No one apparently wanted to be the one responsible for corrupting this youth by giving him this book, but I insisted that the library had granted me “adult priviledges.” After much discussion behind closed doors, the book was produced, and I was allowed to check it out. Perhaps the library staff did not want to take on Miss Dahlberg again.

This was the first adult book that mesmerized me. The beach scene famous from the movie was not the real draw. The sprawling narrative was captivating, but it was the character of Robert E. Lee Prewitt that totally grabbed me—a Hamlet, a Tony Zale, a Miles Davis, a Kierkegaardian zen figure, a lover, a friend, an anti-authoritarian, a patriot. Of course I was not alone in these reactions, but I did feel that the character talked especially to me.

Life moved on, and I went off to college. Now a library was different. It was a research institution, not a place for browsing to find material to fill up my idle hours. I said good-bye to the kind of library that had helped form me. Now I did what had once been a radical act for me; I bought books and rather than checking them out of libraries.

That pattern remained for decades. It only got altered when I started spending summers in the Poconos and finally became a regular patron of the Barrett Friendly Library. It is smaller than my hometown one, but it has a similar feel. Of course, libraries have changed since my youth. Many still go to that library for its books, but now many also come to use the computers,  but even this latter group really come to the library for the reasons I did. I didn’t have books at home, and they do not have books and computers at their home.  Recently I read about a county out West that had slashed its already low taxes more and as a result was closing its public library. I felt a despair for the place and a grief for all the kids there who did not have access to books and computers.

Owning computers, I am one who goes to the library for the books, and the library has brought back some of my old browsing ways. I don’t wander the general fiction and nonfiction shelves as I would have in olden days. Instead, I browse the bookcases of “new releases,” an often generous ascription in this small library because a volume can remain “new” for over a year. At the beginning of summer, I concentrate on the nonfiction and biography sections. While on occasion I spot a title that I have heard about from elsewhere, most of the books are previously unknown to me. I just look for topics that I might find interesting, and since the collections are diverse, this has led to varied subjects. Last year from the library I read about class and poverty in America, a North Korean pilot who defected, the CIA, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the connection between corporate America and a form of Christianity, surfing, modern China, and a Jesuit traveling in the Holy Land.

I feel like this library has returned me full circle to reading habits I had when still in Wisconsin public schools, but more important, it has reminded me of how important the library was in my formation and how important it must still be for the many who are raised in homes without the resources that too many of us just take for granted. A long time ago I had vowed that if I ever published a book, I would make a donation to my childhood library, and both events eventually happened. Now the wife and I have given money to the Friendly Library, and of course, I urge you to support a local library—volunteer or donate money, or both.

“When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night.” The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

“There was once a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always.” Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth.

“Some good cooks frankly admit that they have never baked a really successful loaf of yeast bread.” Editors of Sunset Magazine, Sunset Cook Book of Breads. “

“When I was young, my mother read me a story about a wicked little girl.” Mary Gaitskell, Veronica.

“I was asleep when he died.” Patti Smith, Just Kids.

“I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground.

“The blood is still rolling off my flak jacket from the hole in my shoulder and there are bullets cracking into the sand all around me.” Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July.

“So the theory has it that the universe expanded exponentially from a point, a singular space/time point, a moment/thing, some original particular event or quantum substantive happenstance, to an extent that the word explosion is inadequate, though the theory is known as the Big Bang.” E.L. Doctorow, City of God.

“Among the historically most satisfying complexities of baseball is this: The form of the playing area is both in principle indeterminate and in actuality frequently subject to deformation by external constraints.” Philip Bess, Preface to Philip J. Lowry, Green Cathedrals.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in superlative degrees of comparison only.” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

“Westward along the high Eurasian Steppe, from the border of China across Turkestan and beyond it, there flowed through it continuous centuries of nomad peoples.” Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empires.

“In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.” Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

We have heard much over the last year about the proper handling of classified information—think Hillary Clinton—and the disclosure of government secrets—think President Trump’s complaining tweets. During this time, much has been said about government secrets, but much of importance does not get discussed. The recent arrest of Reality Lee Winner is a case in point.

Winner has been charged with leaking classified information to a news source. The leaked information indicates that last year Russian military intelligence cyberattacked an American voting software supplier.  What has generally followed her arrest are the expected expressions of shock that government secrets have been released. But there also should be some other, fundamental questions. Should the fact that Russian intelligence attacked an American company be secret? We do not treat it as a secret if Russia attacks Crimea. We should not treat it as a secret if Russia dropped a bomb on Anchorage. We did not treat it as a secret when burglars tried to break in to Democratic offices in the Watergate in 1972.  It should not be a secret when a foreign government attacks an American citizen. Why is this different?

I am guessing that the answer is that disclosing the cyberattack will inform the Russians of how our intelligence agencies learned about the attack, which the Russians presumably meant to be kept secret, and this disclosure will make it easier for Russia to evade our intelligence efforts in the future. I can see why “sources and methods” of the intelligence community might need to be confidential. On the other hand, a foreign attack on an American company, a foreign attack on our voting system are not facts that by themselves harm our national security. Instead, this is information we should know.

Democracy, the functioning of our economy, and the proper operation of our government depend upon open information. Government secrecy, while sometimes necessary, conflicts with that, and we should be having regular conversations about how our secrecy system works and how well it actually serves us.  We should be asking: Who determines what is secret? How is secrecy determined? What are the procedures for determining when the need for secrecy is no longer necessary, and how well do those procedures work? How often does the unauthorized disclosure of what the government claims should be secret harm our national security? Certainly with Winner the question should be raised whether she disclosed what should remain secret or material that should be public. Instead, the assumption just seems to be that if it was classified it is a horror that it was disclosed. Perhaps we ought to question our government more than that.

The Reality Winner situation, as did Edward Snowden’s, however, raises other issues than just the ones when a government employee discloses classified information. Winner and Snowden were not government employees. They worked for private entities that had been contracted by government security agencies to do intelligence work.

Private companies have always worked for the government, but “privatization” seems to be increasing. Businesses with names like Blackhawk or Blackstone or Blackhole or Blackballs seem to have been everywhere in all our recent Mideast wars, incursion, actions, or whatever they are called, and in some places historic government functions like operating prisons, turnpikes, and parking meters have been ceded to private enterprises. There should be more analysis of privatization in general. What are the data that show when companies can do functions better than the government, or does privatization primarily result just from unexamined ideology and campaign contributions? (When private companies are involved with turnpikes or parking meters, for example, do they do it more efficiently causing tolls and fees to decrease?)

With the Winner situation, however, the privatization discussion should go well beyond the issues of whether a private company or the Army can better run a mess hall. Isn’t there a whole lot of difference between privatizing food service and privatizing national security information? After all, if you believe in our free enterprise system, these private intelligence companies should seek to do a good job for the government in order to earn their fees and to get new contracts when available, but their first loyalty is not to the United States. Instead, as it is for any private company in our system, the company’s primary goal is to make a profit; to maximize shareholder wealth; to serve the owners of the entity—however you want to phrase it. That first loyalty may not matter or matter much when the company builds a highway or operates a trash service, but does it matter when the product is national security intelligence? Am I the only one who thinks this ought to be discussed?

I don’t remember telling any, but I would not be surprised if I had. Surely I heard gay jokes, although back then they might have been homo, or possibly fag or pansy jokes.  I do remember being with a group yelling what I am sure many thought were witty remarks at an effeminate boy in our high school. I was mute. If they would have been anti-Semitic or racial comments, I might have objected, but I did not try to stop the not-completely-understood homophobic remarks.

Mostly, however, in my childhood and beyond, as far as I knew, gays did not exist. George radically changed this.

George was my office mate when I was twenty-nine years old. We got friendly by talking across our desks about cases, defendants, prosecutors, judges, and our colleagues. Comfortable with each other, we became friends outside the office. For several Thanksgivings we went to his mother’s house. There was a lot of scotch and new traditions. George was Lebanese-American. We did have turkey, but only after many Middle-Eastern dishes. The most memorable was beautiful raw lamb drizzled with olive oil.  This took me back to my childhood.  We had no idea what steak tartare was, but a regular treat growing up was what we un-euphemistically called raw hamburger.  I loved it on rye bread, topped with raw onion and much black pepper.  And I found that I loved raw, ground lamb, too.

After a couple years of friendship, George told me that he was gay.  Back then, this was a huge deal.  George, who was nearing forty, said that I was the first straight person that he had come out to, and he was the first person I knew who acknowledged being gay other than some clients whose sexuality sometimes mattered in their cases.

We joined George again at his mother’s for Thanksgiving a few weeks later. He picked that time to tell his mother and brother about his sexuality.  The tension was incredible that holiday.  His mother eventually came to some sort of acceptance, but not his brother. I am not sure that he eve talked to George again.

Through George, I got a glimpse into a certain gay culture.  I hung out with him at various Greenwich Village gay spots, which early in the evening were like any neighborhood restaurant or bars. Later at night, however, sexual images that made me uncomfortable and drugs were prevalent. (Once or twice, the spouse went to these spots, too.  She found the slide shows of good looking men sucking each other’s dicks of much more interest than I did.)

I had a fair number of dinners with his gay friends. They were perfectly nice, but It was all somewhat sad.  George was not part of a chic or sophisticated gay life. The talk was basically about drugs and who was hot (which required being young), but still a fear came through. Even the fifty-year-olds were scared that their parents might find out about their lives.

George, I was convinced, wanted something more. He also wished to talk about politics or baseball or TV or movies or anything other than always sex and drugs. But that was not his group, and he was trapped in it. He had no way of finding new gay friends in a world where few could openly acknowledge that they were gay.

When I left the job, I did not see George regularly. He was the kind of friend that needed the shared stimulus of work for the friendship to continue. When I did see him then, I entered a darker world.  The AIDS epidemic had hit. As we walked down the Village streets, he would see someone and say, “His lover died last month.” “His lover died six months ago.”  George had been to about 30 funerals in the last year.  He told me about the AIDS death of former colleagues of ours, people whose sexuality I had never thought about.

And then George got the disease.  We had dinners a few times after that.  He was quite accepting even though he knew he was dying and knew from the bedsides he had attended how awful the death from AIDS was. He almost seemed grateful for what awaited him. He accepted that he was gay, but growing up when he did, he also seemed to accept a certain self-hatred because he was gay. But he wanted that self-hatred over. As death approached, George’s one true concern was that he had had unprotected sex with someone, and he kept trying to convince himself that it had happened before he had been diagnosed.

I hope that today, George’s story would not happen, but, while the world has become more understanding, I do believe that it still has a long way to go. I just wish that George had had the chance to experience the better parts of today’s world.

At the beginning of the second act of a performance by a Swedish circus, an acrobat asked the audience members to stand up, put their feet together, and close their eyes. She then said that whenever she does this she feels her body moving. “To be still, you have to move.” She was right.

“I learned from my mother, the retired beauty queen, that how well a woman speaks with her eyes is what separates the amateurs from the pros.” Patricia Engel, Vida.

It was a typical Brooklyn supermarket—narrow aisles with small shopping carts and a limited selection. I was surprised to see ping pong balls. Brooklyn homes don’t have basement rec rooms or other places for table tennis. When I mentioned this to the daughter, she gave me an interesting look and said only a bit condescendingly, “The balls aren’t for ping pong. They are for beer pong.” Yet another time for me to feel my ignorance.

I was twenty-five before I realized stockings were sexy.” Don DeLillo, The Names.

A giraffe died in an Allentown, Pennsylvania, zoo after sustaining a neck injury. Makeup your own jokes.

“In that moment, silently, we agreed that we were indeed in the presence of an exceptionally delusional white man—which is, of course, one of the most dangerous things in the world.” Mat Jonson, Pym.

I don’t think our president ever sang along on the car radio with Buddy Holly, the Rascals, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, the Stones, or any other performers from his youth. If so, isn’t that sad?

“Racism is pervasive. The pretense that it belongs solely to poor people who talk slow lets the rest of us off the hook.” Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness.

The man with the clipboard and distinctive vest approached me and said, “Do you like puppies?” Already late for an appointment and not wanting to be trapped by another fundraiser, I shook my head, kept moving and then, to my surprise, said, “I hate ‘em.” As I went by the clipboard man, he said, “You would be perfect for this.” I kept walking out of the subway.

“He also said that no creature in nature jogs.” Jim Harrison, The English Major.

The wife was working in the college textbook division of a major publishing house. As an incredibly smart woman armed only with liberal arts degrees, the business did what it did with most women back then. She was a secretary. Oh, they may have called her an administrative assistant, but she was a secretary.

She sought more and after a while said that she wanted a starting editorial position. She was told that she could not have that. “Why not?” The reply was that beginning editors were promoted out of the ranks of travelers. Travelers were akin to salesmen who went to college bookstores to assess not only what was selling but what books might be needed in the future. Thus, the traveler could gain the knowledge valuable to an editor as to what manuscripts should be acquired and what books developed.

Fine, the wife said. “I’d like to be a traveler.” “You can’t be,” came the reply. “Why not?” “We could never, as we do with travelers, send a young woman on the road all alone.” In case you needed any more reasons to understand why Ctach-22 had become such a big book.

The persistent wife, taken aback, then pointed out that her boss was an editor, and he had never been a traveler. “John,” the reply came, “has a master’s in English from Harvard.” “But,” came the wife’s surrebuttal, “I have a master’s in English from the University of Chicago,” then on the forefront of literary criticism. To which no reply came. And no editorial job. In case you needed any more reasons for why there was a feminist movement.

This situation would flash through my mind decades later when a young woman in one of my classes would start a comment, “I am not a feminist, but . . .” Often I would interrupt. I might simply point that she was training to be an advocate, and it was seldom good advocacy to start your position with a negative. And seldom did it matter for the woman’s point whether or not she was a feminist.

Sometimes, however, I might go further and ask her if she thought women should get paid the same as men for doing the same job, or whether women should have the same chance at getting a job as a man. The answer was always yes. Sometimes I might go on and ask whether good childcare should be more readily available, but then I generally just saw complete confusion because few of these women yet understood the difficulties of combining a career with motherhood. Finally, I might ask what it meant to be a feminist, and I seldom got a coherent answer.  It was more on the lines of, “Oh come on, you know.” This kind of discussion was a digression to the subject matter of the class, and I would move on. But it was clear that on some level important to these young, educated women, they wanted to separate themselves from the group of people called “feminists.”

I once thought I had a reasonable understanding of what “feminism” meant, but now I am baffled.  What does it mean to the young woman who identifies as a feminist? To the young woman who is not a feminist? To the young men of today?

We had ignored the invitation from the mainland Chinese mission to the UN. It was Spring 1989, and the Dean of the law school and I had gone to other dinners at the Chinese mission. They were large affairs with steam-tray food and had not been particularly enjoyable. We assumed that the latest invitation was to another similar open house and did not respond. Then an urgent message came from my student. He was a translator for the Chinese diplomats at the UN, and because of his urging, the law school was planning to put on a program with the Chinese mission. The translator told us the day before the scheduled dinner that the dinner was a private one because of our joint program, and it would be a huge insult if we did not go (and perhaps a blow to the translator’s career). The Dean and I started scrambling to get sufficient attendees.

I implored the spouse to go. She mentioned this to her associate, a Chinese citizen with an American green card, trained in China as a medical doctor, now helping the spouse to do biological research. He was one of those forced into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, an experience about which he did not want to speak. Chinese students were at the time holding Tiananmen Square, and no one knew what was going to happen there. The spouse’s associate quietly said that we should not go to the Chinese mission because it would be an act of support for a regime that did not deserve support. But we did.

It was a memorable evening on many fronts.  We had our images of Chinese officials spouting a party line, but the diplomats were professionals, not political appointees.  The ambassador and his wife got into an argument about her work for women’s rights at the UN.  A number of the diplomats talked quietly against their government.  One of them had a son who was in Tiananmen Square. That father had not had contact with his son for days and was clearly scared. I realized that my views of Chinese government officials were simplistic.

And then there was the food.   It was unlike anything I had eaten before or since.  This was not a Chinese restaurant meal.  It was prepared by the ambassador’s personal chef, and it was dish after dish of exquisite things presented at a round table where we were served lazy-susan style.  One course consisted of only a single, hard-boiled quail egg.  The spouse was proud that she got the slippery little morsel into her mouth with chopsticks, while the Chinese diplomat next to her failed.

A few days later the slaughter in the square occurred. The translator came to me almost crying and asked that we call off our program.  The program was to be about how China was operating under the norms of international commercial law and was entitled something like “China under Law.”  The translator choked out that we could not have a program like that because we had all seen that China was a lawless place.  (We did eventually have the program.) Tiananmen Square was not mentioned, and we never learned what happened to the diplomat’s son.