Reddit is finally slamming the banhammer on porn posted without the permission of the people it depicts. This means no more leaked nude photos, no more revenge porn, and no more creepshots. In an announcement, the Reddit team admitted that they’d “missed a chance to be a leader in social media when it comes to protecting your privacy” by allowing this sort of stuff to go down:
Last Christmas, I received one of the best gifts in years, one that I never could have anticipated, when my family and I participated in a University of Pittsburgh event that provided a hearty holiday meal to people in need. My job was to serve salad — clearly not the glamour job on a day when stomachs were vying for turkey, ham, potatoes, gravy and desserts. As I dished out the greens, I was also challenged in my thinking about how well we in business schools are preparing our students to serve their communities.
People had three options at my station: Italian dressing, ranch dressing or no dressing. I quickly realized the challenge of my task when two people walked by with plates full of meat and sides and two servings of cake. They had no room to hold a salad — either in hand or stomach.
How do you sell salads in such a setting? I chose to thank people, to talk with them, to wish them a Merry Christmas and to offer a salad. It was amazing how well my approach worked. Each person got a special salad. Some chose the one they wanted, some wanted me to choose. Yet, over the course of my three-hour shift, I gave out each and every one of the pre-made salads on the cart.
The most rewarding part of my day were the conversations. In each interaction I learned about interesting new perspectives and more. One woman said she hoped I would not take her comment the wrong way, but she knew I was with the business school, and her experience with business graduates, especially MBAs, was that they cared only for money and themselves. She said it seemed as if we didn’t do anything to show students that there was more to life than wealth seeking. She asked why we were like this.
I explained that we do provide students with opportunities to give back, that we tell students that with success comes the obligation to better the community. She listened politely, but I don’t think I sold her on the arguments nearly as well as I moved salads to people.
Upon reflection, I believe there are many reasons why business schools have not been as effective in teaching generosity over greed. One is that we rarely are placed in circumstances that cause us to change our thinking about people, problems or the cost of poverty and neglect. Second, because we are very busy and mostly connected with a certain type of person, it is easy to assume that everyone can do just as well if he or she only tries. Another reason is our assumption that some problems are too difficult for any one individual to correct, so we may as well use our time effectively (effective time management is one of the lessons we teach), and that means leaving such problems for others to solve. Finally, it’s possible that we are guilty of spending so much time looking in the mirror that we no longer see anything other than what we wish. We become blind to the people and things we wish to ignore.
These ruminations boil down to three important observations: First, any gaps in business school education exist purposely. They reflect choices made by leaders, faculty and staff. It does not have to be this way. Second, it’s our community and our world. I can’t singlehandedly solve our problems, and neither can you. But I guarantee that we’ll never solve our most pressing problems if the vast majority of successful people choose not to act and engage with them. You need to crawl before you can walk. Finally, I learned that it is enormously fulfilling to spend time giving to others.
The enjoyment of volunteering far outweighs the imposition it creates on your time. In a world where many people see few solutions to the problems we face, one simple answer is to be a friend. In so doing, you’ll make a difference and feel great. In my case, I learned these lessons last Christmas, where the simple act of passing out salads to people in my community was a profoundly enriching experience.
A little over a year ago, I was thrust into the national spotlight when I attended the College Opportunity Summit at the White House. During President Barack Obama’s speech, he pointed to me as an example for other students, noting that where we come from does not determine our ability to excel in school and beyond. From there, I was invited to sit with First Lady Michelle Obama during the 2014 State of the Union address; again, President Obama mentioned me — Estiven Rodriguez, born in the Dominican Republic, a non-native English speaker and about to become a first-generation college student.
For students like me, the pressure to succeed is high enough; my story already had been told before I even stepped onto the campus of Dickinson College last fall. My first weeks were a difficult transition. As a student who never needed to be organized in high school, and whose weakest skill was time management, I was not meeting my academic potential. So I reached out to my first-year mentor, Brooke Serra, for help.
Brooke, a senior English major, and I were part of a new mentoring program at Dickinson for all first-year students, and I had been assigned to her group. These First-Year Interest Groups (or FIGs, as they’re known on campus), would meet throughout the academic year. In addition to upper-level student mentors, we also had the support of staff and alumni.
Brooke was always there for me. She helped me create a weekly schedule including my classes and extracurricular activities. I sometimes texted her at midnight, 1 a.m., even 2 a.m., asking her to read one of my essays. In high school, I rarely used any planner for more than a day, but I started to realize this was no longer high school, and I could no longer rely on my inherent abilities. I knew that I needed to follow Brooke’s advice and stick to the schedule.
I remember worrying about an essay assignment in my First-Year Seminar: Latin American Short Stories, and was disappointed when I received a C+. After seeking help from Brooke, as well as from my professor, and following my study schedule — including 12-13 hours a week in the library — I achieved an A in my next paper.
Overall, my academic performance continued to improve. As the weeks progressed, I was no longer confused in class and began actively participating.
I had a mentor in high school but I wasn’t expecting to find that relationship in college. I had been part of a program in New York City called Blue Engine, which provided one-on-one instruction and helped to prepare students like me for college.
I saw in Brooke what I had seen in my high-school mentors and mentioned to her that she would make a great BETA (Blue Engine Teaching Assistant). So she applied, and this July she will be moving to New York City to join the Blue Engine team.
Looking back on my first semester as a college student, I know that having a mentor was important, because resources were available at all times. I became a more responsible student and a different, better version of myself. Brooke also learned how much of an impact one person can have on another. I had reinforced her passion to work with high-school students, preparing them for their college experiences and giving them the tools to succeed.
For students entering college in the fall, Brooke and I have one piece of advice: Find a mentor. Mentorship is mutually beneficial, and we would not be the people we are today without this experience. Thanks to our FIG program, we have learned from each other and established a friendship that will continue long after Brooke graduates from Dickinson. This mentorship-turned-friendship has helped both of us learn about ourselves, our passions and, most important, the ways in which we can become better students — and better citizens of the world.
Estiven Rodriguez is a first-year student and Posse Foundation Scholar at Dickinson College. A new TIME documentary follows his journey to the 2014 State of the Union address, where President Barack Obama shared Rodriguez’s story as the son of a Dominican factory worker who is now a first-generation college student. Estiven’s mentor, Brooke Serra, also contributed to this piece.
As a working therapist, I know that people visit me when they are feeling bad.
It’s those uncomfortable feelings and difficult emotions that make them pick up the phone and come in to see me.
Being human, we are capable of experiencing a range of emotions — both pleasant and unpleasant. It just comes with the territory.
So often, though, we treat our uncomfortable feelings and emotions as if they had no real right to exist, inconveniences to be anesthetized or bludgeoned into extinction.
But emotions aren’t really the enemy. They are feedback sent from within, messages sent from our deeper self that tell us how we are doing. As such, there really are no bad feelings — only comfortable or uncomfortable ones.
When we attempt to deny powerful feelings, we are refusing to listen to the language of our own subconscious; we are trying to silence our own wise inner voice. In so doing, we inevitably begin to build a potential tidal wave of trouble for ourselves.
Each denial may seem to be nothing special, a polite little compromise, a nod to civilization and past conditioning, but add the energy of all these little suppressions, repressions, and denials together, let it accumulate over the course of years, and what we are left with is an angry sea, a tempest of emotional, mental and even physical trouble.
Our troubled feelings are messages asking us to go to the source of that trouble and do something about it. The feeling part of our mind — the subconscious — is trying to tell us something important, and try as we might, we cannot ignore and deny our uncomfortable feelings and emotions forever.
It is when we stop our endless running, face our feelings and decide to do something about them that our healing begins.
That great psychologist Carl Jung believed that all neurosis was an attempt to flee from legitimate suffering. When we feel bad, there is always a reason, always a cause, and if we want to feel better then we would be wise to uncover that cause and then do something about it.
As a hypno-psychotherapist, I know that there are drug-free strategies that can take people to the cause of their disturbed emotions and actually do something about them and the distress they provoke.
Even our most difficult emotions are there to help us. They are a call to action that we would be wise to heed.
When we lose our fear of feelings and emotions; when we listen to and act on their message, then our emotions become much more balanced, and flow in a much easier, more comfortable way.
Peter Field is a UK registered psychotherapist and board certified hypnotherapist. His hypnotherapy Birmingham and London clinics provide hypno-psychotherapy services for a wide range of issues. His new book The Chi of Change focuses on the fascinating world of hypnotherapy.
I am a member of the recently formed Marriage Opportunity council. The founding Marriage Opportunity statement, penned by David Blankenhorn, William Galston, Jonathan Rauch, and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and signed by over a hundred public intellectuals, makes a case for expanding access to the rite of marriage for all those who seek it. I signed as a Lutheran clergy member who officiates at weddings and who cares deeply about the couples and families in the local congregation I serve who are or who would desire to be married.
The opening thesis of the document states its aim well: Make marriage achievable for all who seek it.
These words are key. First, not everyone will seek to be married, but for those who desire marriage, significant barriers stand in their way. For same-sex couples, the legal and societal barriers are well known and the shift to inclusion slow, but well documented. But other barriers exist, ones that show up in the statistics about the decline in marriage that can be traced to socio-economic class and education levels. The college-educated continue to marry and stay marry in relatively stable numbers, but for working class Americans, many of whom may cohabitate and/or have children together, marriage is viewed as an ideal but a liability. Instead of a safety net for the individuals and children involved, marriage has become a risk; a partnership that may create more financial upheaval than stability and that often ends in the heartbreak of divorce. The Marriage Opportunity statement seeks to unite all those, gay and straight, rich, poor and in-between, who believe marriage is a good that should be accessible to all people and who acknowledge that progressive work needs to be done to make that dream a reality.
As an ordained minister of a small Lutheran congregation, I am uniquely committed to the social and religious institution of marriage and the role it plays in raising children and in providing life-long companionship. I play a unique role in shepherding engaged couples to their wedding day and in the rituals that transition two singles into a new family. As a preacher and pastor, I talk about and to families about healthy relationships, economic and otherwise, every week.
However, in the last ten years, ecclesial conversations about marriage have been dominated by determining what the couple can look like who comes to the church sanctuary to get married. Can two men be the couple? Two women? Can our doors be open to all couples that seek the covenant of marriage? Much study, biblical and otherwise, prayer, conversation, and argument has led to major shifts in our inclusivity causing both great joy and schism. I am a clergyperson who has spent a great deal of time on this justice issue. I have grieved the departure of many colleagues and congregations from our denomination because of it, but it has been an important conversation to have not only for our brothers and sisters in Christ who have long felt that their identity and relationships have been negated, whether benignly ignored or actively persecuted, but for the church as a whole to clarify the importance of marriage for all individuals and families. It was time.
Because of the contentious tenor of these conversations about marriage, few clergy members or congregations want to talk about marriage anymore. The word “marriage” has become a four-letter word. One we rarely want to talk about in colleague gatherings let alone on Sunday mornings. This is a shame. My pastoral mentor, Don Browning, often stressed that the church is the custodian of the marriage tradition and thus should be a leader in supporting the institution over the life span of those we serve.
I read the Marriage Opportunity statement as a call to action to fellow clergy, stressing that this statement is merely a start of a fresh conversation that broadens our identification of those who are seeking to be married to include the economically disadvantaged. Faith communities may be one of the few places devoted to supporting marriage relationships and the economic needs of the members and the surrounding communities. Through word, sacraments, and service, the church proclaims an inclusive message that all individuals deserve opportunities for meaningful vocation, stewardship, healthy marriages and family stability. As one of the few intergenerational gathering places in society, the church offers a place where older couples can role model stable marriage and to those just starting out.
The church can play a critical role in helping those who get married grow in maturity personally but also serve as a community hub in creating educational and economic opportunities to increase the number of marriageable people. Churches can support both the value of marriage and the economic means that make getting married possible. We should remove obstacles, discriminatory and economic, that deter or prevent people who want to get married from being able to do so, and create practices and policies that help all people who want to be married, stay married.
The opportunity is now to begin the conversation. Don’t let marriage be a four-letter-word in your congregation!
Amy Ziettlow is an affiliate scholar with the Institute for American Values, the sponsoring organization for The Marriage Opportunity statement. She played no direct role in writing the document.
We told our parents we were spending the night at the other’s house, but in actuality we were making the two and a half hour drive to Nashville. It was all harmless. We would visit the store that sold Grateful Dead shirts and incense. So exotic. I bought a knitted Rastafarian cap meant for someone with dreadlocks. My friend acquired a day-glo Jane’s Addiction poster. We felt like badasses.
We spent the night on an overlook that I now know locals call Lover’s Circle. It’s a quaint, scenic spot with a skyline view where you might go to impregnate your unemployed girlfriend. Or get stabbed. Or both.
We talked until the sun came up. The grass was wet. Silvery sunlight started to spill over the hill. We were so star struck by that “big city” skyline. All we could talk about was the future.
I’ve now been in Nashville for 20 years. Nothing turned out like I thought it would, and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve lived an unconventional life full of probably questionable choices here in Music City. Today, I carry with me a sense of weathered hope, which is much different than youthful idealism.
I’m also entering an emerging group of healthy, middle-aged gay men. The daddy demographic, if you will. Match that with inevitable equal marriage rights even here in the Bible Belt; it’s a whole new world of possibilities.
I’m 40 and gay. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:
1. Don’t be apathetic. Be content. Be angry. Be full of ennui. Just be something. Don’t be nothing.
2. Have more sex. It’s instilled in us, especially gay men, that we should limit ourselves and be filled with guilt if we don’t. Don’t feel guilty. Do it. Perhaps just not in a trucker gang bang behind the service station with no condoms. Instead, do it with communicative and responsible partners. If the truckers are communicative and responsible? Well done.
3. Don’t get a tattoo. It’s going to look aesthetically weird and eventually not represent the real you, and instead end up an unfortunate reminder of what a drunken slut you once were in Daytona Beach (which I’ve already stated is fine, but it’s not worth the permanent bookmark.) Get many well designed and executed tattoos or none at all.
4. Drink a bottle of red wine most nights. Americans seem to think this is alcoholism. The French call it lunch. Be more French.
5. Sleep. It’s an unfortunate virtue of the Western world to be overworked and sleep deprived. If you need to sleep, sleep. Can’t sleep that much you say? Try drinking a bottle of wine before you go to bed.
6. Smoke pot. (I’m realizing why I sleep so much.)
7. Don’t get bent out of shape over fluctuating gas prices. It’s fucking liquid dinosaur.
8. The sooner you can embrace the path you have truly chosen, the better. Germans have the word “hintergedanken.” A hintergedanken is a thought way in the back of your mind. Something that you know deep down but can’t admit. I think most people know the path they are going to take very early on, then spend their 20s and 30s coming to terms with it. Artists are the most likely to do this. I knew as a teen that I was going to pursue the performing arts relentlessly until the day I died. I might be much further at this point had I not quit so many times.
9. Life is simultaneously heartbreakingly short and fantastically long. It’s seemingly short because we are inclined to do the same things day after day. We get into ruts. This is our nature simply because it’s less work for our brains. The unfortunate side effect is that days, months and years start to blur together. Time flies. Cure this by constantly giving yourself new experiences. With new and unique memories, your life will not slip away from you.
Life is also quite long. A while back I was sitting in a circle of stoned 20 year olds. They were all saying the annoying things stoned 20 year olds might. One of them was, “I know I’ll be dead before 40.”
I said nothing. But what I wanted to say was, “No you won’t. You’ll be very much alive with possibly four or more decades awaiting you. So start living like it. Do you realize how much a person can do in four decades? You can do all of it. Your youth is a blip on the timeline of your life.”
10. Every time you get out of bed and your foot hits the floor a billion possible paths launch out of your toes. Every. Single. Time. It may not feel that way, but it’s the truth. You are in charge of your life that hasn’t happened yet. The decades that haven’t happened yet. Limitations are only born from your disbelief.
You are always at the brink of a brand new life. You can’t not be.
Watch this short film about Kevin’s 20 year journey in Music City:
Beloved seed accelerator Y Combinator hosted its second annual Female Founders Conference this Saturday, gathering 800 startup-type women in hopes of jumpstarting future gender diversity in the technology sector.
Y Combinator partner and conference co-host Jessica Livingston expressed on stage that in encouraging more female founder applicants to the program, Y Combinator (YC) hopes to see more successful female founders running tech startups, “so that when a 15-year-old girl or a recent college graduate looks out there and says, ‘What do I want to do when I get older? Or ‘What do I want to do now?’, [she has] more role models of female, founding CEOs of tech companies.”
The conference, taking place at the California Masonic Memorial Temple in San Francisco, was headlined by all-female YC speakers, including founders and partners, offering biographical and advice-focused talks, capped off with tips on how to pen an eye-catching YC application. Speakers focused on how they found success as founders and how they overcame pitfalls along the way.
Mattermark co-founder and CEO Danielle Morrill shared personal stories from her Series A raise of $6.5 million, in which she pulled in a party round with 155 investors, all while running a 10-person startup out of her apartment until the building served her a cease and desist letter, forcing her employees to work from home for months until the round was closed. “Talk about impostor’s syndrome, I was an impostor,” Morrill exclaimed, noting that raising a Series A without an office, while trying to act like “a really rich tenant with a lot of contractors coming in and out” of your apartment is a handful.
An all-female audience at a tech conference is a rare occurrence.
While much of the talks were pragmatic and sometimes inspirational in nature, an unexpectedly touching moment came when Tracy Young, PlanGrid founder and director of operations, shared the best advice she has ever been given and the advice she wish she would have known before starting her founder’s journey. The best advice she had ever received came in the form of four sentences shared with her by PlanGrid co-founder and cancer victim Antoine Hersen while he was on his deathbed, “Life is short. Take care of Ralphie [the ones you love]. Don’t be afraid to try new things. Never do anything that makes you unhappy.” Young elaborated on each point, relaying personal stories as if she were having a heart-to-heart with a good friend.
Young captivated the audience with her stories, sending the audience into laughter at times and inspiring tears at others, showcasing what it means to be a true leader, not afraid to share her deepest, most painful lessons with those willing to listen and learn. The second portion of Young’s talk, equally insightful but comical and light-hearted, was based on the activity she says she spent the past 6 years doing when she wasn’t founding PlanGrid: “Watching a lot of BBC nature documentaries.” She implored attendees to always live their lives bringing out their inner beaver and honey badger. Beavers, she explained, are “just nice, vegetarian builders, just like me!” They’re half-blind and really small with a lot of predators, including humans who “try to trap them and skin them to make stupid hats out of them.” So, they build to protect themselves — they build massive dams out of massive trees to protect themselves and their families. In doing so, they choose only the best materials and continue to rebuild as their environments change, she explained. Sounds a lot like startup life, right? Young advises, inspired by the beaver, “Work hard, be patient. Don’t complain. Obsess about every stick. Iterate and improve.”
Clockwise from top: Founders Kimberly Bryant (Black Girls Code), Olga Vidisheva (Shoptiques), and Tracy Young (PlanGrid)
Honoring the honey badger, Young pointed to many brave acts of nature’s most courageous creature, including its ability to survive the bites of poisonous snakes. “If me and you get bitten by a poisonous snake, we will die, but if the honey badger gets bitten by a poisonous snake, it passes out for 8 to 10 hours — we don’t know why — and it will just wake up and eat that snake!” The honey badger teaches us to just survive, Young says. “Stand up for yourself, and be brave.” Last but not least, honey badgers support their families, Young says. When you’re an early-stage startup, you don’t have a lot of money, time or resources, but you have your founders. Support each other and that will be your unfair advantage to the giants in your industry, Young says.
While it’s tough to outline the lessons from all of the speakers, some of my favorite tidbits came in these tweetable nuggets:
As Y Combinator gets serious about diversity, it seems that events like Female Founders Conference may inspire more women founders to not only apply to the accelerator’s program, but also lead with greater confidence.
Dani Fankhauser, co-founder and CEO of ReadThisNext, a book recommendation platform, says her biggest takeaway from the conference was knowing her experiences were normal. “One of the women said she wakes up terrified every morning, another said she was a bad fit for a corporate job,” says Fankhauser. “Hearing this confirmed I am doing the right thing by pursuing my startup, fully knowing the cost.” Fankhauser, too, had planned on applying to YC prior to attending Female Founders Conference, but she says the event gave her “a better sense of how being part of the YC network would help my business and what types of ideas and people they are looking for.” She says that she hadn’t realized, for instance, how big cultural fit played a role in the application process.
The conference featured two panels: One composed of former YC founders addressing fundraising concerns (top) and another crowdsourced Q&A
with YC partners (bottom).
Another attendee, Jade Wang, co-founder and president of personal cloud platform Sandstorm, attended both last year’s and this year’s conferences and says that what she learned last year was “definitely a strong contributing factor to pushing me over the edge to pull the ripcord” on founding her company. If last year was about information gathering, this year was about building a relevant network. “I met some amazing female founders whose SaaS apps get requests for on-prem deployment that they turn down — startups who have a problem Sandstorm can solve,” says Wang.” Since last year’s conference, Sandstorm was not only funded, but it also “crowdfunded [nearly $59,000], raised a [$1.3 million] seed round, and started a community of passionate users,” says Wang. “I really look forward to what the next year holds for the other women I’ve befriended this year.”
As part of its diversity initiatives, Y Combinator began tracking female founder data on its most recent batch application, finding that 23% of applicant teams had a female co-founder and that 23% of accepted teams also had a female co-founder. This new data suggests, at the least, that its accepted batch is a reflection of its applicant pool. As YC is widely known as one of the premier breeding grounds for the world’s most successful startup founders, let’s hope its recent gender diversity initiatives lend way to more women founding and leading impactful companies.
Did you attend Female Founders Conference? If so, share your experiences in the comments below or tweet your takeaways with the hashtag #femalefounders.
Header image courtesy of Pretty Instant; other images courtesy of Erica Swallow
On Friday, February 27th, Netflix is unleashing every episode of the third season of their hit House of Cards on the world… so plan on calling in “sick” that day. The political thriller is groundbreaking in more ways than one; not only was it one of Netflix’s first original shows, its all-star cast has helped it scoop up plenty of awards and accolades, proving that a good TV show no longer even needs to (technically) come from a TV and paving the way for other webseries.
Once you’re done binge-watching the entire third season when it’s released on Friday (seriously, we won’t judge), haul your lazy butt off the couch and visit some of the show’s filming locations, from the show’s setting in D.C. to Baltimore (where a majority of the show is actually shot) to Frank’s hometown and congressional district in South Carolina… if you think you’ve got what it takes to hang with the likes of Frank and Claire Underwood.
Freddy’s BBQ Rib Joint: Unfortunately, this is really just an abandoned building that doesn’t serve BBQ…but if you’re craving something saucy while you’re in Baltimore, stop by Chaps Pit Beef (don’t let your political rival’s aide follow you there, though, since it’s in a strip club parking lot and you don’t want people getting the wrong idea). Or, if you’re in DC, visit Hill Country Barbecue Market.
The Washington Herald: Yet another instance of the crew craftily using an empty space! This is actually an out-of-use Baltimore Sun office, so it didn’t take too much tweaking to make it look like a bustling D.C. newspaper HQ.
Peachoid: Head to Gaffney, South Carolina to get an idea of how Francis Underwood became the man he is. Definitely don’t miss this infamous fruit-shaped watertower, which Frank keeps a picture of in his office– it’s actually real. It does sort of appear “as though the sun is shining where it shouldn’t”, to be subtle. If you do take a picture of it, be sure to pull over when you do!
The White House: It goes without saying that the White House plays a major role in House of Cards— it’s the ultimate goal in Frank’s conquest for power, and, not to spoil things for anyone who isn’t caught up, I think we can expect a lot of Season 3 to be set here.
Francis & Claire’s Home From House of Cards: Of course Washington’s ultimate power couple call a swanky mansion home! Even though the exterior shots are, like much of the show, filmed in Baltimore, other prominent politicians have called the Bolton Hill neighborhood (where the house used is located) home, including former President Woodrow Wilson!
Charles Center Metro Station: Let’s just say that if you’ve gotten yourself too deeply involved with a ruthless and power-hungry politician who may or may not be a psychopath, be super duper extra careful down here. And yes, we’re all aware that no other subway station can even come close to being as nice as the Washington Metro Transit!
Zoe’s Apartment : The home of ambitious Washington Herald reporter Zoe Barnes, who essentially makes a deal with the devil… aka Frank Underwood. The exteriors of it were shot in Baltimore on Preston Street, right next to a pizza joint.
John Marshall Place Park: A statue of John Marshall from this park appears in the opening credits of the show, and it’s actually more than just a somber image to match the credits– it’s a pretty good symbol of the corruption and scheming that happens in politics– according to Trivia Happy, John Marshall was a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who, among other things, ruled in favor of Aaron Burr, the political rival of Alexander Hamilton who Burr killed in a duel, when Burr was accused of treason. Other D.C. landmarks make appearances in the opening credits as well, including the Washington Monument, the United States Capitol (it always seems to be there in the background) the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Nationals Park, Union Station, the Grand Army of the Republic Monument and more.
Hotel Cotesworth: Scenes at this fictional hotel, like Claire’s glitzy charity event which was visited by teachers protesting Frank’s education bill, were filmed at the gorgeous Johns Hopkins Peabody Conservatory, which is actually a university music library.
Ronald Reagan Building : If you stop by Washington, D.C.’s largest building, keep your eyes peeled: you never know if you might spot Frank Underwood engaged in a top-secret meeting.
Tio Pepe and Wit & Wisdom: Tio Pepe is where Underwood’s aide Doug Stamper finds ex-prostitute Rachel Posner working, and Wit & Wisdom was the setting for yet another a meeting in episode two.
The Walters Art Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art: The locales for several more clandestine meetings, including ones between Zoe and Frank. Scandalamity!
Garrett-Jacobs Mansion: This gorgeous historic former private house serves as the home of the Baltimore Engineer’s Club, and it also serves as the Secretary of State’s office (and the lobby of a Pennsylvania hotel as well) in the show.
Almost exactly seven years ago, on February 28, 2008, Penn State Assistant Track Coach, Fritz Spence, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Five months after his diagnosis, following Fritz’s second failed round of chemotherapy, Wade Spence donated marrow to his brother. Statistically speaking, Fritz’s odds were about 50/50 that he’d make it five years cancer free. 25 days shy of the five-year mark, Fritz relapsed.
Wade matched Fritz for all eight of the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) markers – the genetic markers that are used to determine suitability for a bone marrow transplant. Now Wades’s cells appear to have matched too perfectly. The cancer that so readily plaqued Fritz, find’s his brother’s donated genetics equally hospitable.
Bone marrow transplants are unique from organ, bone or tissue transplants because the donor/recipient blood types don’t matter. Marrow from a donor who is genetically close enough to a patient replaces that of the sick person and takes over making his or her blood. When someone has leukemia, it’s the blood that’s cancerous. After chemotherapy and/or radiation kill off a patient’s disease bearing blood – and the marrow that created it – doctors use an IV drip to infuse the donor’s marrow. The new cells find their way into the bones, take over production, and – in many cases – the patient is cured.
In Fritz’s case, he needs a less close match: a donation from someone like him but not exactly like him. Fritz explains, “We’re hoping for a female, unrelated, with seven out of eight markers.” And while a cancer sufferer’s chances are better than ever of finding a match through the National Marrow Donor Program’s Be the Match Registry, Fritz’s odds aren’t as good as they should be, because he’s black.
Be the Match Registry Community Engagement Representative, Aimee Haskew, has been working with Fritz trying to get more people, especially African-Americans, to come forward and be tested. Haskew says that the demand for marrow matching the tissue types for people of color is quite high – not just because of leukemia – but because it’s the only treatment known to cure cycle cell anemia, a genetic blood disorder that is most common in persons of African descent.
So, for African-Americans, the need for marrow donors is high but only 7% of those screened are black. That’s about half of what it should be if folks like Fritz are going to find the match they so desperately need.
Haskew says that there are many reasons individuals don’t register, “They don’t know how easy it is. There’s no blood test, just a swab of the inside of a person’s mouth. And they think it’s going to hurt. But for about half the donations now, we can use a method similar to donating plasma, no surgery required.”
Fritz agrees. People need to be educated about bone marrow transplants. Fritz recalls, “When I go on marrow drives and I talk to individuals they aren’t aware of the process. A lot of what they understand they’ve heard from other people who haven’t donated. They think the marrow comes from their hip or their spine, but in many cases they can just spin off T-cells.”
But it’s not just the pain of donating that keeps culturally diverse people from having the marrow screenings, Fritz explained, “Black people remember Tuskegee. There is a preconceived idea that the system can’t be trusted…” Fritz has anecdotal evidence that a large percent of the people who vocalize some fear of donating to him, “speak of Tuskegee.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from 1932 until 1972, “the Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began a study to record the natural history of syphilis… The study initially involved 600 black men – 399 with syphilis, 201 who did not have the disease.” During the study, none of the infected patients were ever told that they had syphilis, and even after 1947 – when penicillin became the standard cure – none of the patients were ever treated for the disease.
In the minds those who recount the Tuskegee experiments, government agencies as well as private medical practitioners share the blame for this unethical treatment of black test subjects. As late as 1969, the American Medical Association supported continuing the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” even after unknowing men infected their wives and unknowing wives delivered babies with gestational syphilis.
On May 16, 1997, President Bill Clinton apologized to the victims, though only a handful of them were still alive to hear his words.
As Fritz considers the possibility of needing a new marrow donor he does so with a fair amount of bewilderment, “For me, I know a lot about it. So the fear frustrates me. It frustrates me that people don’t want to do it just because they don’t know how it really works.”
Fritz doesn’t let his angst stop him from organizing, even though he admits, “It’s not that easy,” to tackle ingrained suspicions or physical anxiety. Bone Marrow drives have been organized on his own Penn State campus and Fritz says he knows these campaigns are successful because, “My student athletes know me. I know they were afraid but they came forward because it was me.”
Fritz believes that the best way to reach the African American community is to do home visits, similar to the March of Dimes door-to-door campaigns. Fritz says it will take outreach to churches, organizations and community groups in the neighborhoods where people of color live in order to overturn what Haskew describes as, “the effects of hundreds of years of history.”
Still, Fritz wants everyone to know, regardless of ethnicity, “You could be the cure for somebody else. You could save a life.”
After our three great adventures in Uluru, Fraser Island and the Great Barrier Reef, we decided to go on a road trip for a few days and discover the roads and back roads of Australia. From Brisbane, we flew to Melbourne, skipping one more time the great city of Sydney, as we wanted to keep the dessert for last and spend our last week in Australia there. And since we were to fly back to California via Sydney, it made sense to save it for the end of the journey.
The intention was to pick up a camper in Melbourne and drive along the Great Ocean Road (GOR), sleeping at outposts whenever we felt like stopping and enjoying a life on the road. I am not a camping person but the idea to take my kitchen on my back for a week was quite appealing to me for some reason. I had never driven a RV in my life and the thought of doing this on the wrong side of the road, no less, made it even more attractive.
We will need to drive from Melbourne to Cape Jervis, at the very end of the Fleurieu Peninsula, so we can take the ferry to Kangaroo Island, where we rented a cottage for a week by the beach. Melbourne is a lovely city, very Victorian in style, with an amazing aquarium and some excellent Nepalese food. The second largest city in Australia, it has a great free tram system we used to tour the city without looking too much like tourists.
Off we go to pick up our camper outside of Melbourne. The local Britz company employee explains in details where every fork is and how to make the folding beds. Showed us where the gas goes, and how to call for help with the integrated cell phone in the cabin. It’s an automatic van and he stressed the importance of not driving with the parking brake on. The cute little camper supposingly sleeps six, but really I find it just right for two.
The Great Ocean Road technically starts after the port of Torquay and meanders along the mighty ocean for about 155 miles of slow driving on a two-way lane hugging the cliffs. The plan was to stop each night in one of the numerous camping parks along the way – Australians are very big on camping, barbequing, and all things outdoors in general. The view along the ocean road is magnificent, it reminds me a little of the highway alongside the coastline at Big Sur, wild and majestic, dangerous and unexpected.
The temperature is in the 90s. We stop every occasion we can to walk on a bit of beach or on flat rocks. The ocean here is furious and lashes at the rocks with force. We are so very hot in fact that we decide to stop in a hotel and have a nice air conditioned room with a cool shower for the night. Forget sleeping in the camper, it’s too hot. Our first stop is in Lorne, a ravishing town hanging by the ocean, high pitched on the cliffs, with a view to die for.
The Lorne hotel offers us a nice suite facing the beach and the ocean. We only drove 75 miles so far, but it took us some five hours with all the stops on the way. The receptionist informs us that even though there is a wedding ceremony in the restaurant, we are still welcome to have dinner there. The chef has prepared a special menu for the event’s guests and he will serve it to all diners that night. Which means us, the only non-wedding passer byes.
We feel very welcome in the packed dining room, all lit up in candles, with balloons and even a cracking fire in the fireplace. Everyone comes to say hello, and once we told one of the guests we were from Miami, an endless procession of friends and family stopped by to chit chat for a minute, we felt like we were invited to the happy reception.
The menu was definitely Australian, lots of meat and potatoes dishes, some Carpaccio-looking thin slices of dark red meat looked unfamiliar, and when our waitress said it was kangaroo meat, I said I’ll pass. My daughter shamed me into trying though, saying this was the local fare and I should not be picky. The server made me feel better by adding that they don’t kill the kangaroos for their meat, they only serve road kills.
Well, that made me feel a lot better, so out of respect, I tried. And it was quite good, I was kind of expecting some rough hard to chew meat, but the flesh was melting and savory in the mouth. My first meat in over 25 years! My guilt was a little tempered by the fact that the poor animal was not killed for the purpose of feeding me. Well, that’s what I convinced myself of anyways.
When we checked out the next morning, the hotel manager told us that the wedding party had taking care of our meal of the evening. Back to our little camper, we continued to follow the cliff road. Some weird flat rock formation, blue and green in color with perfectly round shapes carved in them looked like a film set on the Moon. The strange looking floor resembles something man-made in its perfection; the rounded holes seem cut out with perfect machines. And just like my daughter pointed out, it’s not like I know what the surface of the Moon looks like. Moving on, we reach the rock formation called the 12 Apostles, strange tall needles that separated from the coastline in what must have been centuries of slow erosion.
The Apostles look like sentinels guarding the continent. The landscape looked like the white eroded cliffs in Etretat off the coast of France. The savage force of the wind and the incessant burn of the high sun make it hard to walk on the rocks. We were now on the top of the high cliffs, and to try to descend onto the beach below seemed like a difficult enterprise. There is no reaching the tall broken parts though. The bridge of one of the Apostles broke free some 20 years ago while some tourists were trapped on it. They had to be rescued by helicopter, one by one in baskets, as the rock was too small and irregular for a chopper to land. I bet they remember their trip.
The road was originally built by returning WWI soldiers between 1919 and 1932 as a war memorial for those killed in the Great War. Winding through rough terrain along the limestone coast, the sparsely populated area was once only accessible by sea or via rough bush tracks. To this day it’s a very isolated region, very few people live here and the striking force of the ocean makes it quite inhospitable to develop. Hanging over the Great Australian Bight, part of the Indian Ocean, the road has very little traffic and we encountered only five people in three days on the road. Two were surfers attempting to break though the rough seas, hoping for big rollers and maybe spot a few whales. No swimming for us though, too rough, too wild, we only dipped our feet in the surprisingly cool water.
We reached our second evening on the GOR and decided to head to the end of the Fleurieu Peninsula to catch the ferry to Kangaroo Island. We did make it to the end of the road, we reached the dock, and saw the ferry ahead in the waters between the cape and the island on the horizon. We had just missed the last ferry of the day. Oh well, we’ll stay the night in our camper. We had to backtrack for about 50 miles to find a small town with food supplies, and by then we were so tired and discouraged, we stopped at the local B&B and asked for a room. Well then, one more night we won’t be using the camper.
I know now the perfect location to open a B&B for weary tourists: at the ferry landing, as nothing is there for people to sleep or to eat if awaiting for, and missing a ferry, like we did. It’s decided: this is where I will open a B&B one day, with perfect views and no competition, I’m sure it will do very well. I can already visualize the menu I will offer for breakfast. Tomorrow we’ll get to the island after leaving our camper on the continent side, as only residents can take their private cars to Kangaroo Island, a natural preserve for native animals such as koalas, seals, large birds and tiny penguins, and of course kangaroos.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
