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Reviews

Book Review: Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books

An engrossing look at Yevgeny Prighozin’s soldiers-for-hire.

Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos is a gripping, research-tome-sized account of the origins and ascent of Russia’s infamous private-military company, easily one of the world’s most notorious mercenary outfits (after Blackwater, of course). Aptly titled, the book makes the cogent argument that such “private” companies can be (and are) wielded by the state, as long as that collusion remains veiled in plausible deniability.

Author Candace Rondeaux, an award-winning journalist, public-policy scholar, and director of Future Frontlines at the New America Foundation, gives us in Putin’s Sledgehammer an expansive chronicle, making connections few have traced, some gained by analyzing 130,000 leaked files from the many shell companies of Yevgeny Prighozin, Wagner’s former head, who died in a suspicious 2023 plane crash. The detailed analysis reads more like a breathless spy thriller than an academic exploration, owing not only to Rondeaux’s brilliance but also to her personal connection to the material: She was a student in St. Petersburg around the time Prighozin first met Putin, then mayor of the city.

The narrative begins in 1991, after the collapse of Russia’s Communist Party-led government. The planned economy of the post-Soviet state is in freefall, and a new and violent market logic (aka neoliberalism) is wreaking financial havoc. Mafia rules the streets, and oligarchs form behemoth, Frankenstein-esque companies in the chaos of widespread privatization.

Following the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1991, the Kremlin cut its military roughly in half. Soldiers returning home found almost no services to help them transition back to civilian life. “The downsizing created a huge pool of disillusioned and unemployed men trained to kill,” explains Rondeaux. Many of Russia’s future mercenaries met in informal, non-state-created veterans unions. Some became security for oligarchs, some worked for the mafia, and some ended up in prison — all spaces which would become important vectors for Russia’s nascent mercenary industry. The intricate jockeying for power at the state and private level birthed the Wagner Group.

Putin’s Sledgehammer really stands apart from other books on Wagner in its thorough, nuanced take on Prighozin. The public perception of him comes in disparate, singular labels: a former small-time criminal; a wildly successful hotdog salesman; a restaurateur-turned-government-caterer fondly referred to as “Putin’s Chef”; an internet-disinformation maverick; and, finally, leader of a formidable global mercenary group that eventually marched to Moscow, posing a first-of-its-kind threat to Putin’s rule.

And, indeed, Prighozin was all those things, but Rondeaux truly fleshes out this complicated, mercurial character. We ultimately come to see Prighozin as a marketing and entrepreneurial master (a doggedly hardworking one, at that), an image that belies the brash, uniformed strongman seen most recently before his death.

For example, Prighozin’s culinary acumen is often overlooked, his success as “Putin’s Chef” chalked up to favoritism. But the book tells a different story. In writing about the now-famous Russian state dinner at the Peterhof Palace on May 31, 2003, that hosted George W. Bush and other G8 leaders, Rondeaux paints the scene in mouth-watering detail:

“Sumptuous blinis stuffed with caviar and cream were served. Prighozin had spent nearly two years planning the menus and training the waitstaff on the intricacies of silver-service catering for heads of state. It was all part of the artful diplomatic ballet that Putin and the Kremlin had choreographed as part of Russia’s bid to return to the center of the world stage.”

But that return came to a halt after Russia’s takeover of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014. Putin’s Sledgehammer’s argues that although this was a turning point in lifting the veil on the state’s global backstage-military maneuvers, Putin had begun to see Russia as pitted in a Cold War 2.0 against the U.S., and private military companies were the most expedient means of waging it.

“There is always a [mercenary-for-hire] middleman [like Wagner] in the US-Russia conflict,” Rondeaux writes. “The central tension had always been over who in Russia would reap the greatest share of profits and political rewards from Prigozhin’s successes and who would pay the price for his failures.”

In 2016, U.S. and E.U. sanctions began to bite at the Russian economy. Putin had long been fixated on the idea that oil and gas were his country’s pathway back to wealth and to a commanding place in the world order. As Rondeaux narrates in the cleverly titled chapter “Guns, Gas, and Oil” (a satirical nod to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, a 1997 book challenging notions of Eurasian superiority), the Wagner Group emerged as the perfect solution for evading sanctions. By embedding itself in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, and Mali, Wagner enabled the Russian oil-and-gas industry to expand outward. Similarly, Russia is a prime exporter of arms in the world, second only to America. Wagner, with its plausible-deniability cover of not being a state actor, made sure Russia had arms clients in the Middle East and Africa, sanctions be damned.

And once again, Prighozin, ever the diligent employee (and employer), ensured that natural resources kept flowing freely. When the group took over the Hayan gas plant in Syria, says Rondeaux, “Wagner didn’t just deploy fighters: they also flew in geologists, engineers, and fire control experts.” Prighozin also hired anthropologists and other “academic types” when he launched the now-infamous Internet Research Agency, the entity behind the 2016 U.S. election interference and a worldwide-disinformation campaigner of unrivaled sophistication and influence. To dismiss the IRA as a “troll farm” would be a gross mischaracterization; the book tells of Prighozin’s recruitment of bright young polyglots from Russia’s top schools, who had a keen understanding of the issues du jour and knew how to amplify prejudices.

With the war in Ukraine, Prighozin would become even more important: The Wagner Group was an expedient solution to Russia’s manpower problem. “For Putin to call for a full mobilization would have been tantamount to admitting failure, that the war was a war, not a special military operation, and that victory would not come as swiftly or cheaply as he had promised,” Rondeaux explains. Until its downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014 — which left 298 civilians dead — Wagner had been mostly a (fearsome) battlefield rumor. Soon after, it sledgehammered its way into notoriety, helped by Prighozin’s ability to deliver pithy, fiery speeches on social media.

Putin’s Sledgehammer is a seminal work of incisive insight not only about the Wagner Group and its late charismatic leader but also about modern mercenaryism and why we should care about it. Rondeaux draws parallels few others have, the kind that could only come from a Russophile like herself. The famous quote of sociologist Charles Tilly that “war made the state, and the state made war” is borne out in her riveting story of the murky, byzantine ties between the state and its mercenaries (or, perhaps, the mercenaries and their state).

 

Reporting

America’s Unaddressed Feminist Issues

My article for the School of International Service

Editor’s Note: Ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, SIS professor Antoaneta Tileva authored this piece reflecting on several of the feminist issues she feels are currently going unaddressed in America. At SIS, Tileva teaches courses on identity, gender, class, and culture. 

In her beautifully succinct yet expansive definition, bell hooks writes that feminism is “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” Her seminal book, Feminism is for Everybody (2000), establishes feminism as a movement for everybody and every body. Patriarchy—or institutionalized sexism—affects people of all genders. Feminist issues are not just “women’s issues.” Feminism today is concerned with intersectionality–looking at the intersections of class, gender, race, religion, and the way they shape people’s experiences.

Let’s look at abortion rights through this intersectional lens. While abortion access has been labeled the feminist issue of this election, with most Americans favoring abortion rights, a conversation centered strictly on bodily autonomy misses the wider impacts.

Increasingly restrictive laws majorly affect maternal and women’s healthcare outcomes. Maternity care “deserts”—defined as areas where access to maternity health care services is limited or absent—limit access to birthing services but also pose challenges in securing early and continuous prenatal and postnatal care.

A shortage in OB-GYNs means that mothers have to travel greater and greater distances to get treatment, but it also means that women can’t get preventative, routine healthcare and that infants can’t get postnatal care. States with more restrictive abortion policies have higher total maternal mortality, measured as death during pregnancy or within one year following the end of a pregnancy. This is within the wider context of the US maternal mortality rates which remain consistently higher than those of other wealthy countries.

For the second straight year, fewer students in MD-granting US medical schools are applying for OB-GYN residencies in abortion-restricted states. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, applicant numbers in those states decreased by more than 10 percent. The explanation for this is that residents know they will simply not be trained on how to offer comprehensive maternal care, which includes performing abortions in cases such as high-risk patients for whom pregnancy may be life-threatening, or patients who experience ectopic pregnancy or incomplete miscarriage.

Furthermore, maternal healthcare is not the same across class and racial lines—Black women are more than three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts.

Some other feminist issues of this election include affordable/universal childcare, the wage gap, and, yes, also the war in Gaza.

The US stands out among advanced economies for its lack of universal childcare. This has not always been the case. During World War II, the government successfully established Lanham Centers to provide childcare for working women. On December 9, 1971, President Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CDA), which would have created federally-funded public childcare centers across the US Influenced by Pat Buchanan’s trip to the Soviet Union and his resultant panic over childcare centers representing a communist turn, Nixon essentially stymied any progress on this issue. Funnily (or perhaps not so), even in his old age, Buchanan doubled down, stating, “Mothers should be home with ‘cake and pie’ at 3 p.m.”

The 2024 State of Parenting survey found that only approximately 40 percent of participants feel supported by their employer. A lack of affordable childcare costs the US economy $122 billion annually.

The wage gap remains, with women, on average, earning 84 cents on the dollar to what a man makes. For Latine, Native, and Black women, the gap is more like a chasm than a gap.

The war in Gaza is also a feminist issue. According to recent estimates, since October 7, 70 percent of civilians killed in Gaza have been women and children and nearly a million women and girls have been displaced.

Ultimately, these “feminist” issues are everybody’s issues. Feminism is not about representation alone—it is not enough to have people of certain identities in leadership roles.

Reviews

Book Review: You Just Need to Lose Weight by Aubrey Gordon

My book review for the Washington Independent Review of Books

Co-host of the “Maintenance Phase” podcast and Self magazine’s “Your Fat Friend” columnist, “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths about Fat People is an urgent, well-sourced fatifesto ready to be nailed to the door of our collective fridge. In 20 pithy chapters, Gordon offers historical background, current research, reflection questions, and “opportunities for action,” leading the reader toward meaningful allyship and advocacy.

Fatness is so feared in our culture that a Yale University study found 46 percent of 4,283 respondents would rather give up a year of life than be fat; 15 percent would prefer to be severely depressed. “You Just Need to Lose Weight” unflinchingly pushes back against those attitudes and dispels popular myths, laying bare the speciousness of “body and health” weight-loss arguments. Cloaked as prescriptive and factual, these arguments hide a dark underbelly: fat bias, one of the last socially accepted prejudices.

In her incisive, robustly sourced treatise, Gordon takes on everything from the influential “calories in, calories out” paradigm (based on a 1959 study), to the notion that losing weight is a choice, to the accusation that fat acceptance glorifies obesity. She rejects outright the idea that being fat is a failure of willpower. “According to the NIH,” she writes, “very fat women — like me — have a 0.8 percent chance of becoming thin in our lifetimes.”

The book takes a decisively intersectionalist stance. In tracing fat activism’s roots in the work of fat Black women during the civil- and welfare-rights movements, Gordon encourages the reader to connect fat discrimination with all the many isms: racism, classism, healthism, and ableism. She offers, too, an outstanding overview of the kinds of protest actions people have taken, including the first Fat-In (organized in 1967 by radio host Steve Post).

“You Just Need to Lose Weight” also deftly interrogates how body positivity essentially defanged the more “radical” fat-justice movement. The personal accounts in the book are especially poignant. Gordon shares a story of being called a “fat lady” by a kid whose mom gets furious when Gordon tells the kid that she is, in fact, a fat lady. Gordon eloquently explains how avoiding the word “fat” continues to “stigmatize my body and insist that describing my skin must be an insult.” She elaborates:

“For me, and for many, many fat people, reclaiming the word fat is about reclaiming our very bodies, starting with the right to name them. Fat isn’t a negative aspect of one’s body any more than tall or short is. It can, and should, be a neutral descriptor.”

Similarly, the oft-heard laments “I feel so fat” or “This dress makes me look fat” create the impression that fat is a feeling. Gordon has a helpful solution: Ask yourself for consent before engaging in negative body talk. Notice how you describe other people’s bodies and whether their size is relevant to your discussion of them. Stop treating thinness like an accomplishment and fatness like a failure. (The example of congratulating ill people on the “bright side” of now being thin is a glaring example of this sickening fixation.) And try to see food for what it is: a comfort, a celebration, a pleasure, or simply fuel.

Ultimately, “You Just Need to Lose Weight” lays bare Western society’s treatment of fatness as a moral failing. Gordon’s manifesto is essential reading in the intersectional conversation around fat acceptance and provides an excellent roadmap toward fat activism.

 

Reporting

Inflation Is Down. Why Aren’t Prices?

My article for the Kogod School of Business

Over the past several years, the economy has experienced unprecedented shifts driven by the pandemic, stimulus packages, and changing consumer behaviors. In July, inflation began to cool meaningfully after record increases during the previous two years. This year, the Consumer Price Index climbed 3 percent through June and less than 4 percent through May, after peaking at roughly 9 percent throughout the entire previous year in 2022. Unemployment remains historically low at 3.6 percent, due to robust hiring. Nonetheless, consumers continue to spend at a solid clip.  

There’s a lot to be said about living through a period with the highest inflation in four decades—and more than anything, it has been an ideal experimental setup for economists. While supply- and demand-related drivers frame the typical discussion of inflation, another idea that has gained attention is “greedflation.” Kogod finance professor David Stillerman offered his take on this phenomenon. 

“Inflation has been driven by both supply- and demand-side factors. During the pandemic, plant closures, supply-chain issues, and changes in labor-force participation put upward pressure on costs (and, therefore, prices),” Stillerman says. “This inflationary pressure was sustained or exacerbated by changes in demand for goods and services due to changing consumer preferences and pandemic-related fiscal policy. As supply chain issues resolve and the impact of interest rate hikes is felt, it is natural for inflation to decline.” 

Here’s how greedflation works:  

Inflation first rose because of factors like the pandemic and economic stimulus bills. But companies raised prices more than necessary to net higher profits because consumers no longer had a benchmark for what prices should be. When all prices are rising, consumers lose the sense of “reasonable” prices, creating room for companies to redefine that range. Dismissing greedflation as a “conspiracy theory” obscures the intricate relationships that characterize it.  

Greedflation could reflect corporate leverage and, in that sense, be more of a visible thumb on the scales if we believe corporations are supercharging inflation by increasing prices or not lowering them even as inflation declines.  

The greedflation argument is that higher firm markups (i.e., the ratio of price to marginal cost) have led to a rise in prices.  

“As someone who studies industrial organization, I take very seriously the idea that much of the time, markets are not perfectly competitive and that firms exercise their market power, raising prices and restricting output.”

However, the “greedflation” story suggests that a systematic change—unrelated to demand and marginal costs—occurred in the period following the onset of the pandemic that changed the way firms compete, allowing them to charge even higher prices (and earn higher markups). This could be, for example, that firms began colluding.  

The greedflation theory suggests that large companies can leverage their outsized market power to raise prices more than what should be possible in a truly competitive economy. But in some concentrated markets, that has not happened: hospitals are highly consolidated, yet healthcare prices have risen more slowly than overall inflation throughout the past year. 

In a greedflation scenario, we would expect that markets where prices increased the most also saw significant markup increases. But, recent empirical work and modeling find little relationship between industry-level changes in markups and price changes during the inflationary period. 

The conversation around “greedflation” underscores the intricacy of economic phenomena and the influence of corporate decisions in the broader economy. “In my view, this suggests that there is more going on than the ‘greedflation’ story implies,” says Stillerman. 

Reporting

Book Review: The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession by Kelsy Burke

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Pulling back the curtain on our nation’s dirty little secret.

If you don’t consume pornography, why should you concern yourself with the debates surrounding it? Sociologist Kelsy Burke’s comprehensive The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession makes a persuasive case that sex matters far beyond the private sphere and that pornography is ultimately about how we relate to one another. Based on five years of research and more than 90 interviews with people on both sides of the debate, the book is nuanced in its treatment of the topic and compelling in the way it situates the subject within broader society.

Burke is convincing in her argument that the crux of the matter is not simply or only pornography but “how to live an authentic and fulfilling life, which includes sexuality, in a modern world.” Porn’s ubiquity and accessibility in the internet age render it a topic that has to be addressed, and not just by feminists or sex-worker advocates.

The book begins with a history of pornography and obscenity laws. It then launches into an incredibly thorough section on the effects of porn-indexing sites. Started by the “geek king of smut,” Fabian Thylmann, who has since sold his share in the company for €73 million (yes, you read that correctly), MindGeek, by some estimates, owns 90 percent of all internet porn. Pornhub, one of its sites, draws a staggering 120 million visitors daily, placing it above Amazon and Netflix in online-traffic rankings. Generating revenue through banner ads, this behemoth is responsible for the prevailing and pernicious idea that porn should be free. But more on this later.

Burke then explores the passing of FOSTA-SESTA, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, in 2018. For anti-pornography activists, porn and sex trafficking are too intricately linked to be considered separate entities. Pro-porn activists challenge this conflation but nevertheless have to recognize that the sex-work industry poses some very real threats to its purveyors.

Sex workers, for their part, have sought to overturn such laws because they actually place them in greater peril by not allowing these workers to share information about dangerous clients or to form networks of cooperation online. Another unintended consequence of the laws meant to help sex-trafficking victims is that they strengthen the penal system and push sex work further underground, making it much more dangerous. These laws also make a life outside of sex work harder to achieve as banks refuse to open accounts for sex workers and employers can fire employees who do outside, part-time sex work.

The Pornography Wars explores the feminist take on pornography, too, especially the so-called Porn Wars in 1984, spearheaded by legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon and writer/activist Andrea Dworkin. Women Against Pornography, founded by the pair, believed that porn exploits women and is fundamentally damaging and misogynistic. The very term “sex work” is abhorrent because it elides the exploitation and coercion anti-porn advocates claim is inherent in the system.

Burke’s interviews with people struggling with pornography addiction, as well as with people in the industry, are especially insightful. As adult-film performer and author Stoya says, “My politics and I are feminist…my job is not.” There is a particularly jarring interview with a BDSM performer who has a sobering realization in therapy that the violent content she’s participating in is being watched by people so that “they don’t have to make their own memories.” This line may leave readers shaken.

The book goes on to explore whether feminist (or ethical) porn can exist and what it looks like, as well as how our society perceives “genuine pleasure” and whether we can — or should — concern ourselves with distinguishing between the real and the fake.

Burke allows the contradictions and complexities on both sides of the debate to shine. “People experience pornography differently based on their sexual identity, experiences, and beliefs about sex,” she writes. Sex workers, too, she acknowledges, have inconsistent feelings about its harm or harmlessness.

The Pornography Wars concludes that, polarizing rhetoric and the way in which both sides have defined themselves vis-à-vis a distinction from the other aside, the overlap between porn-positive and anti-porn factions is larger than we might think. Because pornography is connected to broader social systems — including capitalism, the criminal justice system, and the media — any analysis of it without considering those connections is incomplete.

Finally, Burke outlines three points both sides agree on. First, that it’s a bad idea to keep porn habits hidden. Second, that talking to kids about sex and porn is necessary, considering its ubiquity. And finally, that nobody should be watching free porn. The two factions also share concerns about safety and consent, the risk of violence, and sexual health for sex workers.

The Pornography Wars is truly one of most cogent and sophisticated deep dives into our collective dirty secret that I’ve ever read. Do yourself a favor and pick it up.

Reporting

Combatting Age Bias in the Workplace

My article for the Society of Human Resources Management Magazine

Millions of older Americans have re-entered the workforce in recent months. In fact, nearly 64 percent of adults between the ages of 55 and 64 were working in April.

Precipitous rises in the cost of living have forced many of them to return to work from retirement. Others have returned to work because they enjoy the engagement and camaraderie work provides.

That said, economists tend to believe that workers in their 50s and 60s have a harder time than their younger counterparts finding jobs, keeping them or moving ahead at a company, mostly due to ageism.

Beth Finkel, state director of the New York chapter of AARP, has been at the forefront of the organization’s fight at the state and national levels for laws and policies that protect older workers from age discrimination.

A recent AARP New York survey found that nearly half of voters age 50 years or older said they were subjected to or witnessed at least one type of workplace age discrimination. Twenty percent said they were passed over for a job because of their age, and almost 10 percent said they were fired due to their age. And a national AARP poll found that 78 percent  of workers age 50 or older said they’ve seen or experienced age discrimination in the workplace. Age discrimination against Americans ages 50 and over robbed the U.S. economy of $850 billion  in 2018 alone.

A large study of 5,000 workers and managers in seven countries by the global nonprofit Generation offers some rather grim statistics: People who are age 45 or older make up a high share of the long-term unemployed. Hiring managers tend to view job applicants who are 45 or older negatively, even though employers rate highly the job performance of the older people they do hire. The challenges and experiences of job seekers who are 45 or older, this study found, display striking consistency around the world.

One key insight from the survey is hugely positive, however. Yes, hiring managers express bias against applicants who are 45 or older. But those very same employers also acknowledge that once they hire people over 45, those workers perform on the job just as well as, or even better than, their peers who are a decade younger.

In New York, the state Senate passed a bill this year prohibiting employers from requiring or asking for job applicants’ age or birth and graduation dates unless clearly relevant to the job. In Washington, D.C., AARP is urging the U.S. Senate to follow the House by passing the Protect Older Workers Against Discrimination Act.

As older people seek work in a world where retirement ages are being pushed up by higher life expectancies and inadequate savings, they need employers and policymakers to take steps to counter rampant ageism, Finkel said.

“Advocacy with businesses is part of AARP’s ultimate goal—to protect people 45 [years or older] from age discrimination,” Finkel said. “At the end of the day, discrimination in any form is wrong, and multigenerational workforces are proven to be more productive.”

Tracey Gendron, author of Ageism Unmasked (Penguin Random House, 2022), wrote her book to “help myself and others understand how ageism (and ableism) have been silently yet pervasively embedded in society over the years. The book takes a journey through time to uncover the forces and events that shaped our understanding of what it means to age and be old. The book also describes the various expressions of ageism (e.g., internalized, externalized, relational) and how ageism manifests in different institutions (e.g., health care, workplace, technology).”

The book also offers the following points about ageism in the workplace:

  • Ageism in the workplace can be subtle and hard to recognize. It can be embedded into the recruitment process; for instance, when job descriptions use terms such as “cultural fit,” “energetic,” or “fast-paced.”
  • Ageism can be manifested in “over-the-hill” birthday celebrations or jokes.
  • Ageism can manifest itself in commonly held myths about older people, such as “older people are out of touch with technology and current trends.”

 

Reviews

Book Review: Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books

Melissa Febos’ latest essay collection, Body Work, is “not a craft book in the traditional sense,” she states. Nor is it a flowery ode to the writer’s life. Instead, it’s a practical, clear-eyed take on the intimate (and intricate) connection between our bodies and our bodies of work. Throughout, Febos beautifully narrates the ways in which writing is “integrated into the fundamental movements of life,” asking readers to go beyond writing about their lives to writing their lives.The author, whose previous works include Whip Smart, Abandon Me, and Girlhood, is a keen social critic, and she makes a cogent argument as to why women’s writing about trauma has been dismissed as unartistic, trite, and self-indulgent:

“Resistance to memoirs about trauma is always in part a resistance to movements of social justice.”

Indeed, while male navel-gazing has been valorized as the kindling for many a Great American Novel, when the introspection comes from women, it is scorned as so much whining no one wants to hear about yet again. (No wonder the words “histrionics” and “hysteria” sound so similar.) Febos makes an impassioned defense of self-reflection as a subversive act that personifies the notion “the personal is political.” Further, the freedom it creates benefits not just the writer but society. From it, we all wrest a bit more license to be honest about our truths.

Her essays are well researched, and much of the excitement here comes from the way in which she curates writing from Native and other non-mainstream voices. In “In Praise of Navel Gazing,” Febos discusses the work of social psychologist James Pennebaker, who found that writing about trauma is healing. She also examines how her “own internalized sexism” shaped her view of what a “real” writer does — craft fiction in the traditional American sense. This essay made me think about similar criticisms leveled against actors for “playing themselves” and thus “not acting.”

As you might guess, her chapter on how to write about sex is less about the mechanics and more about refusing to be shamed into silence. Her inclusion of an Audre Lorde essay on what sex actually is — and it’s not just sex — is especially well developed. When someone in an audience asks Febos if she feels any shame writing about the act, she responds, “I am shameless.” But shameless is not the same as vulgar or vacuous. Rather, writing about sex “might free me from shame and replace the onus of change onto the society in which we live.”

Even though Body Work is not meant to be a manual on memoir writing, it offers a useful, nuanced take on many issues that come up when tackling any sort of nonfiction. The third essay, “A Big Shitty Party,” explores writing about other people — a thorny subject faced by journalists and anthropologists alike. “It is profoundly unfair,” asserts Febos, “that a writer gets to author the public version of a story.” It is moments like this where her vulnerability and thoughtfulness are truly illuminating.

Febos also discusses ways in which writers can strengthen a story by taking a “casualties be damned, this is my artistic vision” approach or, conversely, by declining to add something “when a detail felt cruel.” She is never reckless in her own story-making; this is not slash-and-burn truth-telling. Rather, she explores how one can stay true to their recounting of an event while maintaining care for those woven into it.

The must-read Body Work is a captivating, eloquent paean to the power of working through a “pain that has been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.” In its pages, Melissa Febos posits self-appraisal as a brave act that is both intensely personal and also communal. “The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room,” she writes. “That’s how it gets bigger.”

 

Reporting

How to Douse Chronic Workplace Stress Before It Explodes into Full Burnout

My article for the Society of Human Resources Management
By Antoaneta Tileva June 1, 2021

If it’s true, according to a recent Gallup study, that nearly 8 in 10 workers experience burnout on the job at least sometimes—and more than 1 in 4 experience it “very often” or “always”—then it’s clear that “chronic workplace stress has not been successfully managed,” as the World Health Organization has said.

“Burnout is when people have been highly engaged for a long time, without the personal skills and organizational support to maintain their well-being,” said Lindsay Lagreid, senior advisor at the Limeade Institute, a Bellevue, Wash.-based institute that conducts research on employee well-being.

Unsurprisingly, employee burnout levels in 2020—the year of the pandemic—were high, with one major shift from previous years: Fully remote workers are now experiencing more burnout than onsite workers. Before the pandemic, the perks of working remotely—either part- or full-time—led to lower levels of burnout compared with employees who were onsite all the time.

Burnout has effects on the micro and macro levels. If employees’ well-being suffers, they may turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms. They may also become less productive and unfocused.

Managers play a significant role in employees’ mental health and can take several approaches to ease the effects of burnout:

Conduct regular and varied check-ins. Brandon Greiner is vice president of operations for MedExpress, a Morgantown, W.Va.-based urgent care provider. He emphasized the need for honesty and transparency from both managers and employees: “An important first step in keeping stress in check is for managers to regularly check in with employees and encourage them to provide honest feedback regarding their workload, work environment and responsibilities.” These discussions can take a variety of forms, including hosting group or individual talks, creating employee surveys, and reviewing employment data.

Lagreid advises managers to “start asking better questions.”

“Asking ‘How ya doing?’ and accepting answers like ‘I’m fine’ or ‘hanging in there’ aren’t going to cut it anymore.” Instead, try more specific questions like:
*Have you been able to complete your projects on time? If not, why do you think that is?

*Do you have the resources you need to get your work done? If not, what else would you need?

*What can I do to make your job easier?

Educate employees on what burnout is. Educate your team on what burnout is and how it shows up, so they have the right language to describe their experience to you.

Workplace burnout is not a medical condition. Rather, it is a sense of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a feeling of reduced accomplishment, Greiner said. He defines workplace burnout as “often characterized by feelings of exhaustion, depersonalization and inefficacy. Workplace stress can cause mental and physical reactions that make employees less effective. Prolonged stress, which results in severe mental, emotional and physical fatigue, can lead to burnout.”

Said Lagreid: “First is a deep feeling of exhaustion—almost a soul-level feeling of depletion, not just needing a good night of sleep. The second step is cynicism—being ‘fed up’ or negative. This cynicism is how the brain protects itself from the source of exhaustion. The final stage of burnout is inefficacy—feeling like there’s no point and having a loss of hope, optimism and purpose, [and asking] ‘Why do I even try.’ ”

Some potential signs of workplace burnout include:

*An increase in irritability or conflict.

*A pessimistic outlook or marked lack of interest.

*Decreased productivity or quality of work.

*Fatigue or exhaustion.

*Restlessness or insomnia.

*Increase in physical illness or discomfort.

*Mental health concerns such as anxiety and depression.

*Isolation or avoidance in the workplace.

*Decision fatigue.

*Concentration or memory issues.

Identifying the root causes of employee stress is the hard part, as is making successful organizational adjustments. “For instance, if employees find that long work hours contribute to stress, managers could consider accordingly adjusting work schedules,” Greiner advised.

“Evaluate workload, turnaround time expectations and support. Find things you can take off employees’ plates or find more efficient ways to get things done. All the burnout recovery in the world isn’t going to last long if an employee comes back to the exact same reality that caused the burnout in the first place,” Lagreid said.

Reflect on your management style. Managers should self-reflect. Are too many mandatory meetings getting in the way of completing work? Are assignments aligned with employees’ strengths? Managers can also do simple things that can make a big difference, such as not scheduling meetings during the lunch hour or late on a Friday.

“If you haven’t fostered that level of vulnerability and trust within your team, start by answering those check-in questions yourself,” Lagreid said. “Be honest with your team about your own challenges and stressors, so they feel safe doing the same with you.”

Encourage downtime and unplugging. People need time to recharge. Managers should encourage their employees to take time off. Lagreid advises managers to “model healthy boundaries for employees. Take walking meetings, don’t respond to e-mails outside of working hours, and take time away from work. Share the things you do to take care of your well-being, and ask them to share what works for them.”

Other tips include starting meetings by sharing fun trivia, holding a moment of mindful breathing or having workers share the things they’re grateful for.

Identify and encourage employee strengths. “Share specific and thoughtfully-worded gratitude often: Tell your people the specific skills and strengths they have and the value that brings to the team and the organization. Recognize contributions and celebrate wins,” Lagreid said.

Get familiar with resources for your employees. Make sure you, as a manager, are well-acquainted with your company’s employee assistance program or other mental health resources, how to contact them, and what the benefits are so that you can steer your workers to those resources when needed.

“Burnout has become commonplace in the modern workplace, and it doesn’t need to be this way,” Lagreid said. “The best strategy is an ever-present, strategic approach to employee well-being that is supported by the organization … from the top down and is integrated into daily work-life. … Creating a culture where well-being is a priority can provide the safety net needed to prevent and address employee burnout.”

Remember that everyone deals with stress differently, Greiner said. What’s stressful to one person might not affect another. Additionally, factors outside of work, such as taking care of children or elderly parents, health issues, or personal issues like loneliness or depression, can impact people’s ability to manage stress.

“It’s important to recommend resources that are appropriate for the individual employee,” Greiner said. “Promoting a meditation app may not be ideal, for instance, if the worker doesn’t enjoy using technology.”

Antoaneta Tileva, Ph.D., is a freelance writer based in the Washington, D.C. area. 

Reviews

Book Review: Still Mad by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books

Literary critics Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in this follow-up to their The Madwoman in the Attic, offer a comprehensive, sweeping engagement with voices from the tradition of second-wave feminism. Spanning the 1950s to the present, Still Mad contextualizes — historically and personally — the works of singers, poets, essayists, and prose writers while exploring the creativity that started on the page but moved far beyond it.

In their introduction, Gilbert and Gubar outline their intent to feature works which “they consider to be the ongoing second wave of feminism,” as they believe “the debate in which women continue to engage swirls around the issue of how many ‘waves’ of feminism there have been.” While that’s a questionable assertion (perhaps this debate is taking place in the rarefied halls of academia), parsing the conversations surrounding the feminist zeitgeist decades ago is important to understanding the choices the authors make regarding which writers to include here.

Still Mad is striking in its breadth and scope but especially in that selection of authors. Structurally, Gilbert and Gubar write chronologically, which enables them to trace the fluidity of the featured authors’ thinking. For example, the section on Audre Lorde follows her career from “lesbian biomythographer” to one who “dismantles the master’s house.”

Aside from a couple of questionable diversions, such as interludes on the (mis)education of Hillary Clinton and the Trump presidency, Gilbert and Gubar stay the course of weaving together passages from literary pieces, quotes from people in the writers’ lives, and keen sociocultural analysis. And while there is clearly a bias toward poetry, Still Mad impresses with the creativity of its selections (for example, Nina Simone is featured) and the compelling way it makes connections between seemingly disparate currents in the feminist movement.

The book’s deep dive into Adrienne Rich (including her tenuous-at-best link to Judaism) isn’t quite as interesting as the section on Audre Lorde, in which the authors capture the tension between vulnerability and anger that feminists felt and continue to feel. Lorde’s alienation as a “Black in a lesbian world and a lesbian in a Black world” drove her to ever more ardently seek out words that would rupture those boundaries. When she said that the master’s tools won’t dismantle the master’s house, she was referring to the inadequacy of existing language to disrupt this boundary-making.

So, new words and tools — a new vocabulary — must be forged to chip away at these walls. The title of Lorde’s “Sister Outsider,” Gilbert and Gubar write, reflects “her commitment to the sisterhood of the women’s movement as well as her insistence on positioning herself as an outsider questioning its boundaries.”

Still Mad also reveals the way in which activist anger was and is a part of the personal lives of these writers. Lorde, for one, from her position as a poet writing from the underpaid trenches, excoriated the economic injustices that her fellow academics were perhaps sheltered from.

Another especially compelling part of the book focuses on Andrea Dworkin and the sex wars. Few have written about the anti-pornography crusader, whom Gloria Steinem called “an Old Testament prophet.” Gilbert and Gubar capture the separatist movement that Dworkin is credited with starting — one that viewed men’s values as opposed to women’s and which created female-only spaces such as rural communes called “womyn’s lands.”

Still Mad explains the strategy behind Dworkin’s anti-pornography polemics: namely, to legally codify pornography as a civil-rights violation. Regardless of one’s opinion on sex work, there is little doubt that Dworkin was an effective, passionate advocate for elevating the testimony of women actually involved in the sex trade over that of commentary based on purely abstract or philosophical arguments.

A brilliant inclusion is that of Gloria Anzaldua, whose Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) is among the most seminal feminist/intersectional works (and one too often overlooked). Her “mestiza consciousness” is one of the best descriptions of those living in the borderlands of multiple identities. Because this experience is so unmooring and disorienting, Anzaldua uses both linguistic and spiritual-healing practice as a salve to suture the wounds wrought by white patriarchy. She refuses to “accommodate” English speakers, instead code-switching between slang, English, Spanish, Chicano Spanish, and Tex-Mex to build a creole reflective of this unrest and dispossession.

Still Mad is rich and carefully and creatively curated; it is madly in love with words, which remain some of the best tools we have for dismantling the master’s house. The way Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar wield them as weapons of personal and political redemption and healing will leave readers speechless.

Reviews

Book Review: Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books

Why the kids aren’t alright.

Put down your avocado toast and close that Zillow page — the latest salvo in the intergenerational war between boomers and millennials is here, and you don’t want to miss it. In Can’t Even, media scholar (and millennial) Anne Helen Petersen offers an insightful treatise on the “burnout generation” that is a far cry from the essentialist portrayals of both generations that dominate the current discourse.

Rather than dissect who is to blame for the plight (and it is a plight, histrionics aside) of millennials, Petersen offers a moving discourse on why the kids are not alright and, even more importantly, why they are not, despite how they’ve been characterized, the spoiled, lazy, feckless generation.

“Okay, boomer, sit down and read” is an apropos prescription for this book.

In 2019, Petersen published a Buzzfeed article titled “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” which drew millions of readers. Wry title aside, Can’t Even, an expansion of that earlier piece, is well researched and sobering in its findings. The book examines a variety of areas of millennial lives, including work, education, social-media culture, relationships, and parenthood, zeroing in on issues like student debt, workplace burnout, and millennials’ astronomical levels of anxiety and hopelessness.

The section on millennials’ childhood is especially engrossing. Petersen uses the concept of “concerted cultivation” to explain how the parenting style of the previous generation sowed the seeds of the thorny relationship between millennials and work. Dispelling the popular trope of millennials refusing “to adult,” the book illustrates the very opposite: that millennials have been adulting since they were kids:

“The child’s schedule takes precedence over parents’; the child’s well-being and future capacity for success is paramount; baby food should be homemade; toddler play should be enriching; private tutors should be enlisted if necessary…Every part of the child’s life should be optimized to better prepare them for their entry into the working world.”

And, of course, the first step toward that world is education. Here, too, Petersen is masterful in foreshadowing the inevitable burnout. She describes millennials as the “first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes.” Because — you guessed it — getting into college (let alone paying for it) isn’t as easy for them as it was for boomers.

Getting a job isn’t as easy, either. Can’t Even offers an excellent analysis of how millennials graduated into the “worst job market in 80 years,” one with an excessive list of demands:

“To be valued, you need plans, lengthy resumes, ease and confidence interacting with authority figures, and innate understanding of how the job ladder works. You need connections and a willingness to multitask, and an eagerness to overschedule.”

Not to mention that being groomed to find a job one is “passionate” about created a toxic mentality disconnected from the realities of the working world. Fracturing the cliché that millennials heedlessly hop from one job to another, Petersen shows how it was boomers who instilled the “one’s work is one’s identity” mantra into their children. With that conflation came the predictable — and incredible — stress millennials feel about their careers.

One thing missing in Can’t Even is a broad discussion of how class factors into the boomer/millennial dynamic; the author only briefly suggests that concerted cultivation is, in part, a reflection of class anxiety. That is, while only wealthy boomers may have been able to afford things like private tutors, less-affluent boomers could at least sacrifice all their time and limited resources in the name of their child’s future success.

Speaking of time, Can’t Even presents a thoughtful commentary on free time. Connecting it to the groan-inducing “unstructured free time” term from child psychology, Petersen’s conversations with adult millennials are moving and unsettling. These people can’t even have fun: “Any down time began to feel like I was being lazy and unproductive, which in turn made me question my self worth,” one subject shares. So much for the popular image of the carefree, brunchin’ millennial.

The moments when Can’t Even grapples with the burnout that has now become the hallmark of the millennial generation are insightful and leave the reader hungry for more. I, for one, would’ve been happier with fewer statistics and more of those first-person testimonials. Nevertheless, like a good millennial, Petersen has done her homework.

Can’t Even is a must-read both for millennials and the generation that made them. In the immortal words of Tupac, “I was given this world; I didn’t make it.” This book illustrates exactly that: that millennials are living in a world that’s a far cry from the one they were groomed to inhabit. And all that hard work they were taught would lead to a better life has led, instead, to nothing but a need to work even harder.