Why Must You Talk To Me While I'm Reading?

Short story writer Lindsay Merbaum, writing last week on women-centered website Bustle, asked a very valid question: Why Won't Men Leave Me Alone When I'm Trying To Read In Public? She describes men accosting her, practically cross-examining her behavior, challenging the validity of actually reading in public. She quotes friends who have faced everything from rude rebuffs to sexual propositions while reading, alone, in bars and restaurants.

Merbaum makes many excellent points, which anybody who’s tried to read in public places will find painfully familiar. But she makes one fundamental error: she assumes the challenges she faces reflect her gender. She assumes these men wouldn’t treat her thusly without her gender. She even equates book-based boorishness with leering and sexual harassment. I disagree. In my experience, the operant challenge here isn’t Merbaum’s gender; it’s her book.

Speaking as a dude who reads significantly, I’ve observed people—mostly indeed men—see my book as public invitation for conversation. Some are dedicated readers too, and want to share that experience. Others see my book as threatening them for reasons buried inside subtextual strata. Some just talk. But somehow, my book’s physical presence invites certain people, a small but vocal minority, to start talking, while I’m trying to read.

This week at work, I’ve been reading Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, about the rediscovery of Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura, a pivotal moment in the Italian Renaissance. On Tuesday, a goateed electrician asked the title, then began holding forth, at length, about something he’d read recently about Tipler cylinders. In fairness, the topic sounds fascinating; but I had thirty minutes to eat my sandwich and read, and didn’t solicit this conversation.

On Wednesday, a plumber noticed me reading, and began asking about the book. Who was Lucretius? Why is one poem so important? Why would Lucretius write about physics in verse? The plumber’s engagement was gratifying, I confess, but again, lunch break is brief, and I read partly to separate myself from the constant chatter around the workplace. Then on Thursday, the same electrician wanted to know more about the book.

Holy schlamoly.

Partly, I suspect, people notice the contrast between an essentially private, internal activity, reading, and my public venue. Like napping or changing clothes, reading publically isn’t necessarily offensive, but does make people feel awkward. Should I keep silent? Why would someone read in this noisy, cluttered environment? Is this person judging me because I’m not reading? My book creates cognitive dissonance they reconcile by trying to talk.

The fact that men mainly engage me at work proves little, since my workplace is overwhelmingly male. Of over a hundred workers, only four are women, and one speaks little English. But reading in other environments merits comments too, mostly from men. Reading in bars, as Merbaum notes, elicits male comments. Women leave me alone—even when I’d rather they spoke. Men feel compelled to talk about my book.

Restaurants, with seating turned inward, are somewhat better. Strangers don’t intrude. Except waiters. When women take my order, they respect my privacy, offering only whatever conversation is necessary to keep me fed. Male waiters talk. And not just waiters. Anneli Rufus recommends introverts eating alone dine at the bar, as it elicits fewer comments and judgmental stares. I say, don’t bring a book. Your bartender will try to converse.

This realization, that others plague me with unwanted conversation, makes things awkward when I see women reading publically. As an aging bachelor, I still hope someday to marry and start a family. And since I got unceremoniously ejected from my university job, I have vanishingly few opportunities to meet erudite women. Women reading in public are advertising their cerebral tendencies, their intellectual curiosity, their willingness to encounter new ideas.

They’re also advertising that they’d like to read their book. Watching the collision between reading, a private activity, and the public milieu, gives me pause. Are they open to approach because we’re amid people, or should I respect their solitude while reading? I usually give them their seclusion, because there’s no simple answer. But my trade-off, for respecting women’s privacy, is that I’m unmarried in my forties.

Unfortunately, there’s no etiquette for handling public readers. There’s no out-and-out censure like for clearly undesirable behavior, like fighting or groping. Neither is there a clearly acceptable test of willingness. Sighting a beautiful woman, I can sound her out by buying her next drink… unless she’s reading. So I understand Merbaum’s complaint, from both sides. I lack any suitable solution.

The Last Gasp Of 40-Hour Weeks

As we approach the final stretch in building the city’s new high school, many subcontractors have realized they’re behind schedule. The site must close by July 31st, and most subs must complete their responsibilities before that. As deadline-induced panic sets in, bosses have begun redoubling demands on workers. This involves common annoying activities, like micromanaging and exhaustive checklists. It also includes slave-driving practices guaranteed to create new problems.

Chief among these counterproductive procedures: the twelve-hour workday. Though I haven’t asked every subcontractor, the electricians, plumbers, and window hangers I’ve spoken to complain about mandatory ultra-long workdays. These aren’t just some days, either. Workers are skipping scheduled activities, like bowling leagues, their kids’ softball games, and religious observances, to work twelve hours a day, six and seven days per week. The hours show in their drawn, colorless faces.

Nearly everyone affects cheerful demeanors, when discussing their twelve-hour days. “I’m rolling in the overtime,” they say. “That’s my kids’ college fund,” one drywaller boasted. But they speak with manic, Joker-like grins, desperate to convince themselves. Most roll home around sundown, exhausted, to catch a reheated dinner and collapse into deep, comatose sleep, only to arrive at sunrise tomorrow and try again. Incipient problem drinking is epidemic.

I ran the math. Assuming the workers pull the Bernie Sanders wage of $15 hourly—which few do—then a forty-hour workweek comes to $600 before taxes. But working twelve hours a day, six days per week, makes workers entitled to 32 hours’ overtime pay, or $22.50. That’s $720 for the overtime, or $1,320 combined, more than doubling workers’ wages without doubling time worked. Does this return justify the investment?

Probably not. Besides the increased wages, longer hours involve other added costs. Tired, bored workers are more likely to commit function errors in their jobs, errors that require them to redo tasks until they’re done correctly. Having watched electricians rip out previously installed wiring, plumbers re-hang cockeyed roof drains, and concrete workers jackhammering out mislaid sidewalks, I can’t help wondering: how much did that run up their overall costs?

Nerves are fraying around the jobsite. For many subcontractors, finishing this project will mean not just ending the present task, but relocating to pursue the next job. Many of my co-workers are functionally absentee husbands and fathers, regardless whether their families live nearby. Well-paid but tired, with nothing in their lives but more work, these employees shuffle around, looking uncannily like reanimated corpses. There have been fistfights.

Some problems are unavoidable when you jam a hundred men together in a confined space with little autonomy and low wages. Let’s not kid ourselves, men drawn to careers in construction probably aren’t big-spirited yoga practitioners in their off hours. But the long hours under high-pressure conditions, redoing tasks well-rested men could’ve done better the first time, makes problems more likely. These explosions, real or embryonic, are completely avoidable.

Imagine if subcontractors offered forty hours’ wages for thirty hours’ work. A thirty-hour workweek averages to five six-hour days. Given the length of daylight in Nebraska in summer, subcontractors could easily manage two six-hour shifts daily, getting workers in, getting their most productive hours, then sending them home before fatigue and boredom begin causing significant problems. Less stress, fewer do-overs, and less overtime pay. Sounds like a winner to me.

Under these conditions, even if subcontractors needed to pull six-day workweeks (which they might not if they don’t need to repair botched jobs), workers still have plenty of time for family, community activities, and rest. Employers save on overtime, OSHA-reportable injuries, and rework. Budgets go down, schedules get streamlined, and tempers don’t fray. This idea isn’t new to me. Senator Henry Black pushed a thirty-hour workweek over eighty years ago.

But then as now, management would rather pay more for tired, bored workers. We’ve accepted the idea of work as a moral good in its own right, separate from the worker’s outside life, and think there’s nothing unusual about requiring America’s poorest-paid workers to pull hours so long, the ASPCA would burst if we inflicted them on a horse. Then we judge them morally for widespread class-specific alcohol abuse problems.

This contradicts the entire conservative attitude regarding wages and regulation. If we’d rather pay more for tired workers to redo mistakes, than hire enough workers initially, the entire supply-side argument goes down. But perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps, below the surface, capitalists realize they need workers more than workers need them. And they’d rather fatigue their workers than face the consequences.

When Bread Could Kill You

Paul Graham, In Memory of Bread: a Memoir

Paul Graham, an upstate New York English professor and gastronome, established elaborate rules for himself: Cook your own food. Use local ingredients. Keep fat, sugar, and glycemic index low. Cooking for his wife, eating the bread she baked, and home-brewing beer with his best friend were staples of building a sustainable, locovore lifestyle. Everything food hipsters say will keep us, and the land, healthy. So he couldn’t understand the sudden, shooting bursts of abdominal pain.

Diagnosed with celiac disease at age 36, Graham found himself in an increasingly common situation. Diagnosis rates worldwide have skyrocketed. But are celiac, and other gluten intolerance disorders, really more common today? Or have people previously misdiagnosed now being recognized? (This isn’t academic. I have two gluten-intolerant friends, one who was tested for everything from cancer to lupus for over a decade.) Graham resolved to do what scholars everywhere do: research the situation, and report.

This volume starts with Graham’s own situation. It’s a memoir primarily, of Graham’s own struggle as he goes wholly gluten-free. Fortunately, his wife joins him on the journey. I wish I’d been that brave; when my then-girlfriend was diagnosed gluten-intolerant, I selfishly hoarded coffee cakes and cinnamon rolls. But Graham and his wife, Bec, find they’re not just giving up one ingredient. They’re walking away from buffet spreads, pub nights, and food’s historic social implications.

Wheat agriculture, it appears, helped form Western civilization. As Graham’s investigation expands into the history and science of gluten, he finds wheat so basic to Western history that to abjure eating bread (Graham loves the phrase “wheaten loaf”) means to not participate in our culture. Food-sharing rituals, from pot-luck brunches to Catholic communion, underpin Euro-American culture, and eating bread looms large. Maybe that’s why humorists and hipsters treat gluten-free dieters as mere figures of ridicule.

Since Graham, an award-winning food writer besides his professorship, cooked for himself, and his wife baked, food wasn’t just bodily sustenance; it bolstered the intimacy of his marriage. Thus, for him, the macro-scale and the micro intertwined. Many recipes, and many prepared ingredients, involve wheat where you’d never look for it, especially as a stabilizer. As he abandoned the cultural history of eating wheat, he also lost the personal history of preparing his own dinner.

Our isolated, private society today often loses the community aspect of food. But the simple act of sharing conversation around the table has historically underpinned our society. When he had to walk away from that history—not just the cultural history of shared food, but the personal history of knowing how to prepare his own dinner—Graham had to relearn everything he knew. Not just about food, but about himself, and his place in society.

For one, he has to rediscover how to be Paul Graham, in a world where hobbies like baking and brewing were now off-limits. He needed to relearn cooking. Many store-bought gluten-free (GF) foods simply substitute rice, tapioca, or sorghum flours for wheat, assuming the process remains unchanged. Not so, as Graham discovers in actually preparing edible GF bread. His mentors, though meaning well, taught him concepts that no longer apply. Cooking is an adventure again.

Is bread even really necessary? Graham suggests many deeply ingrained expectations regarding food are learned, not innate, though impossible to discard, the centrality of bread among them. With time, he internalizes the systems necessary for understanding the new world he found himself thrust into. Though by the end, he returns to home-baking his own GF bread, he acknowledges that even then, it means unlearning habits he’s previously mastered. Embrace everything teachers told you to avoid.

By his own admission, Graham set himself many food-related rules well before onset of celiac disease. His “locovore” proselytizing sometimes gets intrusive, and his quest for celiac-friendly foods at farmers’ markets seems quixotic. But everything he says sounds familiar to anyone forced, by health or circumstance, to abandon wheat. The discomfort at public food gatherings (can I eat off this buffet? How do I know what’s safe for me?). The mockery one faces for eating.

If it’s true that only the intimately personal is truly universal, Graham achieves that here. No two gluten-sensitivity sufferers have identical symptoms; that’s what makes diagnosis so difficult. However, everyone who abandons gluten endures the same isolation: the same withdrawal from easy carbohydrates, the same alienation from bread-eating friends, the same journey through dietary blandness. His memoir of struggle can inform all readers, and offer hope that leaving gluten doesn’t mean leaving good food forever.

Are Vitamin Supplements Bad For You?

Let me begin by answering my title question bluntly: yes. The overwhelming scientific preponderance concurs that consuming high-dose vitamin supplements has negative long-term health effects for most people. If, like me, you find perusing scientific literature sleep-inducing, the findings have been condensed by everyone from The Atlantic to The Daily Mail to comedian Adam Conover (see above). Only the vitamin industry’s well-funded trade association disagrees anymore.

That said, I only recently discontinued my daily vitamin regimen. Despite having read the relevant reports; despite understanding the health risks associated with throwing my natural bodily harmonies out of balance; despite the fact that they’re so damn expensive, I continued taking daily multivitamins for years. If even an educated individual like me, someone who takes pride in staying abreast of facts, continues doing something harmful, we should ask: why?

Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t believe I’m representative of humanity in general, even considering the well-documented tendency all people have to consider themselves normative. Rather, I only wonder, when the preponderance of evidence holds so heavily with one position, and the known history of the debate is, at best, weird, why anybody who reads would continue consuming something known to cause harm. I suggest the alternative simply feels worse.

In my case, having been pressured by people I considered trustworthy to consider a daily multivitamin regimen, I purchased an inexpensive supplement, gave it a try—and immediately felt better. Not in some abstract psychological sense, either. (Warning: grossness follows.) The second day of the regimen, I passed a massive bowel movement. Also the third day, fourth day, fifth day… massive, soul-shakingly cleansing bowel movements, every day for over two weeks.

Whatever revolting toxins my body had been stockpiling, the vitamin apparently helped purge. The improvement was immediate. I had energy to begin a moderate exercise program, spent more time engaged in creative activities and less watching television, and returned better productive outputs at work. With that waste gone, I had more energy, better moods, and greater mental acuity. Simply put,  took vitamins and felt well.

Reasonably speaking, I know that consequence accrued from the supplement’s probiotic content. Having eaten a diet rich in starches, sugar, and fat, and light on fiber, green vegetables, and roughage, my intestinal fauna was unbalanced and weak. The probiotics, which I probably needed in small doses for short times, pushed long-held waste from my body. From there, I should’ve adjusted my diet, embraced healthier living, and moved on.

But we’re all human, subject to the same anchoring biases and post hoc reasoning as anybody. I took multivitamins and felt well; therefore, I reasoned, the multivitamins caused my discernible improvement. Intellectually speaking, I know they didn’t. Having restored my health by simple, brief interventions, I had an opportunity to adjust my lifestyle for improved health. Instead, I latched onto the one visible change that preceded my palpable bodily improvement.

In today’s fast-paced world, most Americans eat badly. Nine out of every ten Americans don’t get their complete nutritional needs from food alone, a popular advertising campaign warns, before urging us to purchase supplements. They never question the common American diet of restaurants and processed foods, overloaded in red meat, sugar, and heavy starch. If Americans can’t get their nutrition from food, maybe the problem isn’t us, it’s our food.

Admittedly, we face complex restrictions. Our work lives are increasingly performed indoors, seated, without needed exercise, sun, and human companionship. Sweet, fatty foods fill the resulting psychological hole… deeply, but briefly. Busy two- and three-income families have little time for home cooking. And the US Recommended Daily Allowance (USRDA), little changed in two generations, measures nutrients enough to prevent starvation, not to thrive abundantly.

Nevertheless, multivitamins, like drugs, alcohol, and television, provide the promise that we’ll feel better, healthier, restored. People embrace fad diets, like gluten-free or macrobiotic, without considering their individual health needs, because they hope to feel better. Some do: many people going gluten-free experience rapid weight loss. This happens mainly because they stop eating processed foods, but like with my multivitamins, they embrace what immediately precedes their improvement.

Maybe, faced with massive dietary shortfalls and unsupportable lifestyles, Americans should consider the forces making them feel bleak. Reaching for superficial solutions feels good, but does nothing. And multiple magazine articles scolding vitamin buyers has produced little effect. The problems underlying lopsided lifestyles, like basic poverty and little autonomy, loom so large, they’ve become invisible. If vitamin buyers hope to feel good, let’s investigate why they feel bad anyway.

Wild Weeds and the End of the City

David Seiter with Future Green Studio, Spontaneous Urban Plants: Weeds In NYC

The very name “weed” implies a plant doesn’t belong. We use it to describe dandelions in a manicured lawn, or crabgrass in a tomato patch, or sunflowers in somebody’s cornfield. We rip them up by their roots, spray them with noxious chemicals, and otherwise seek to destroy them whenever they appear. But what if our conception of weeds is all wrong? What if weeds represent the future of nature, and hope for our changing cities?

“Spontaneous Urban Plants” began as an Instagram hashtag specifically spotlighting New York’s thriving untended gardens. Red Hook-based landscape designer David Seiter became interested in how plants flourish without human attention, even despite human opposition, in the midst of humankind’s vast built environments. This book mixes the best elements of policy manifesto, wildlife identification guide, and and coffee table art book, for a product that could have implications, and consequences, far beyond Seiter’s Brooklyn home base.

Despite being one of Earth’s most densely populated places, Seiter writes in his introduction, New York dedicates approximately one-fifth its land area to parks, greenbelt, and other dedicated nature. (Compare two percent of Shanghai.) But nature doesn’t remain politely confined to cultivated spaces. Sidewalk cracks, untended lawns, abandoned factories, and other disturbed soils provide sustenance for massive arrays of plant life. New York’s wild and untended plants, under Seiter’s camera, have a lush, edenic abundance.

Aided by his Future Green Studio collective, Seiter has made a dedicated study of the way plants refuse to obey human limitations. He makes a persuasive argument that, for many city children, untended weeds are the first, sometimes the only, nature they’ll ever see. Goose grass and pokeweed may annoy urbanites who believe sidewalks should remain flat, grey and lifeless. But many city kids discover nature through weed growth—and discover how nature remains uncontrollable.

But this isn’t some romantic paean to nature’s abhorrence of vacuums. Weeds aren’t only good for their own sake; Seiter argues that unintended weeds contribute materially to city life. Some control stormwater runoff and prevent soil erosion. Others make good food for wildlife, and even for humans. Some weeds have medicinal properties. Some weeds even restore soil seemingly irredeemably damaged by human callousness. A thriving urban landscape has measurable human benefits beyond their superficial annoyance.

Ailanthus Altissima (Tree of Heaven) in its common urban environment

But to receive these benefits, we must reëvaluate what makes plants weeds. Many landscape designers have a romantic attachment to “native” species, and expunge plants imported globally, like red clover or Tree of Heaven. But Seiter contends, with substantial evidence, that many “native” plants are ill-suited for urban environments. Frequently, plants categorized as “invasive” and treated with massive sprayings of Roundup (a chemical so dangerous, it requires hazardous waste disposal) are better-suited for city soils.

Following his reasonably brief, but informationally dense, introduction, Seiter transitions into two-page spreads on individual plant species. This includes three photographs of common weeds in their urban habitats, with detailed descriptions of their foremost benefits and liabilities, identifying characteristics, and most common growing conditions. This includes the ecological benefits individual plants provide, and their human benefits, like how edible or medicinal they are. Seiter makes an engaging introduction for urban foragers, amateur botanists, and others.

He also makes a charming art book. He takes pains to show plants in their most beautiful conditions, though those conditions aren’t always pretty. When he shows us Virginia pepperweed growing through a sidewalk pothole, flowering silk trees reaching long branches over a concrete wall topped with razor wire, or Queen Anne’s Lace in the shadow of a Coney Island roller coaster, we understand nature and man-made space exist in tension. Hint: nature always wins.

Seiter isn’t naïve regarding nature. He realizes many plants aren’t always beneficial. He acknowledges when weeds provide what he calls “ecological disservice,” like spreading allergens or choking out other plants. For most weeds, this means acknowledging a mixed nature: milk thistle can quickly overtake urban meadows, but it also provides the only sustaining food for monarch butterfly larvae. Some plants aren’t mixed. Seiter has an entire chapter on plants like ragweed, which just need uprooted.

This book focuses on plants of New York specifically, and the American Northeast more generally. Don’t use this book to forage edible weeds in Minneapolis or Fresno. But it isn’t just about one narrow area. Seiter exhorts readers, regardless of their place, to reconsider their relationship with weeds, and with untended urban nature. Because humankind, and our spaces, don’t exist alone. We’re part of nature, and someday, if we’re lucky, we’ll return whence we came.