Katie Herzog

Tuesday

Arabella Byrne

Against abstinence-based approaches to sobriety

It would be impossible for me to review Katie Herzog’s Drink Your Way Sober without disclosing the central fact of my adult life: I have been sober and in Alcoholics Anonymous for more than 15 years. And while I am not an out-and-out evangelist for AA and its notorious Twelve Step method, it is, nonetheless, the movement that I credit with my survival. Not so for journalist – and addict – Katie Herzog. Herzog has all the serial-relapser energy you would expect from the addict who has forsworn AA Part memoir, part guidebook, Drink Your Way Sober is an impassioned – and at times, angry – argument that abstinence-based approaches to sobriety are doomed to fail.

Sober

Sunday

Cockburn

NYT finally tackles gender therapy

Cockburn started his Sunday by spitting Darjeeling all over the pages of the New York Times magazine. The cause of alarm? A lengthy, nuanced, meaty analysis of gender therapy had found its way into the paper of record. In Pride month, no less! Feature writer Emily Bazelon spent eight months reporting out the story, speaking to “more than sixty clinicians, researchers, activists and historians, as well as more than two dozen young people and about the same number of parents.” Her over-10,000-word article is framed around the forthcoming release of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s new Standards of Care guidelines, which are likely to prove controversial among both the pro- and anti-trans lobbies. It’s well worth a read.

nyt gender therapy

Friday

Robert Jackman

Purple podcasters

You’re familiar, no doubt, with the term ‘red pill’, the Matrix-inspired metaphor that’s become a catch-all for the type of right-wing thinking that thrives in the dark corners of the internet. Now the journalist Katie Herzog, in an admittedly tongue-in-cheek comment, might well have given us a new term: the purple pill. To take the purple pill, inferring from Herzog’s outlook, is to oppose the dangerous excesses of identity politics, but also the reactionary extremes of the red-pillers. This is, simply, a compromise — or the kind of terminally sensible position that shouldn’t need corny movie metaphors in the first place. But you see her point.

purple pill katie herzog

Wednesday

Caroline McCarthy

Sorry Twitter, Susan Collins can win

Augusta, Maine Six weeks in Maine can’t make you an expert on the state, but it does teach you a few crucial things about living up here. Weather forecasts are rarely accurate (you’re better off just looking at the sky). Moose will not get out of the way of your car on the road. Rural broadband access, or the lack thereof, really is a big deal. It’s totally normal for your neighbors to construct elaborate displays of bloody skeletons or creepy old dolls in their front yards and keep them up year-round. Oh, and this: Sen. Susan Collins is going to be a tougher incumbent to unseat than the national media and Twitter pundit class would like to think. I currently live in Maine, sort of.

susan collins

Friday

Dominic Green

From letter to worse

It is a truth generally acknowledged that any statement of civil principles will now be met with pitchforks and personal attacks, insinuations of racism, sexism, classism and white privilege, not forgetting online guerrilla action by the army of the fashionably aggrieved, led by their crack troops, the transsexuals. Take this week’s letter to Harper’s magazine, ‘A Letter on Justice and Open Debate’.

letter