Between staring down the October deadline for my book and a last flurry of freelance assignments before I put my nose to the grind to finish the first draft of said book, I have let this newsletter fall to the wayside.
I meant to write about the excellent news that the Supreme Court upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in Haaland v. Brackeen. I meant to write about the frenzy surrounding the Netflix documentary Take Care of Maya, which follows a family wrongly accused of medical child abuse and their horrific interactions with CPS. But my bandwidth is limited!
Instead, on ICWA, I recommend this excellent episode of the Strict Scrutiny podcast featuring Rebecca Nagle, host of This Land, which cogently unpacks the SCOTUS opinion and what it means for Indigenous rights and sovereignty. There’s also an update episode on This Land itself. As for Take Care of Maya, physician and author Mical Raz wrote a brilliant take for Slate.
Freelance-wise, yesterday The Washington Post published an essay of mine that was years in the making, on The Body Keeps the Score and the popularity of genre of neuroscience-based self-help books for general reads. Right now it’s the second most-read story in the Arts & Entertainment section, which is wild and cool!
When I first read The Body Keeps the Score a few years ago, I wondered about why so many people had slogged through its dense descriptions of brain science to turn it into a best-seller and a meme. Then I noticed an uptick in publishers scooping up other books that traffic in neuroscience, like The Grieving Brain and Oprah and Bruce Perry’s What Happened to You?
I wanted to investigate why these books were having a moment, and I felt that the ideas they spread were quickly calcifying into received wisdom about how our brains work that may be seriously oversimplified. But when I started researching the field of neuroscience, what I actually found was not just that books like The Body Keeps the Score spread oversimplified brain science, but that they oversell what science currently knows about the brain to a shocking degree. Read the essay for more.
Obviously this topic is outside the world of my book, but my approach as a cultural critic is largely the same: I’m digging into the stories we tell ourselves about a societal issue, asking why they appeal to us, and investigating the gap between those stories and reality.
In the child welfare world, I have a couple more reading recs!
Emi Nietfeld wrote this excellent piece for The Nation on popular and prominent books (like Pulitzer winner Demon Copperhead) that traffic in the orphan plot, asking what kind of awareness they raise about child welfare. It’s all baked into a larger review of Roxanna Asgarian’s We Were Once a Family (which I also wrote about!)
Emi’s memoir Acceptance is out in paperback this week! Read my NPR review here.
And Roxanna has an article over at Texas Monthly about how Texas has recently passed policy changes aimed at reducing the number of children and families who come into contact with CPS. New York had similar laws proposed this session that went nowhere in the legislature—ProPublica has the scoop on why that was.
and here I am, with a copy of The Body Keeps Score, that I bought a couple of years ago and haven't cracked open yet, debating whether to read it or not. I have a trauma counsellor, btw, for help with past family trauma, so I can ask her all the questions. :) I now have to ask her about the certainty of the science when she sends me a video on Polyvagal Theory. Great essay for getting me to think some more....