4/29/2023

 What have I been listening to?: Smartless Podcast

What have I been watching?: Better Call Saul

I can't keep up with all the books I'm reading! This post covers my first batch of books from 2023.

• We Were Never Here - Andrea Bartz

This was my first book of 2023, and I really liked it. I was really hooked on it, always very eager to get back to reading. It is a very anxiety-inducing read, in ways that I can't really describe without spoiling. I could vicariously feel the stress of the characters while I was reading this, particularly as an already-anxious person, I could physically feel the anxiety as I was reading these tense passages. Basically the main character and her "best friend" get into a couple of horrible, life-altering experiences that they can't get out of their heads afterwards, and they have to figure out how to move forward without essentially destroying their futures. Bonus for me was that the main character lives in MKE and a decent portion of the book takes place there. I rated this 9.5/10. 

• The Midcoast - Adam White

This was clearly well written, and I thought it was good, although I knew at the time that it wouldn't end up being a favorite. The plot is fairly intricate in terms of character perspective and timelines, so I found it difficult at times to keep track of where I was in the story and what was going on. The story centers around a lobster fishing family in Maine and an intertwined criminal enterprise that eventually unravels. I thought the setting was very interesting and fun to read about. I have never been to Maine or anywhere close, and I enjoy reading about the coastal-town vibe. I rated this 8/10.

• Hester - Laurie Lico Albanese

This was an enjoyable piece of historical fiction. The story is set in 1800's Salem and features a woman who has to hide her synesthesia so that she is not suspected of witchcraft. Synesthesia runs in the women's family through its women, and an ancestor of hers was persecuted on suspicion of witchcraft because of it. I don't know the precise definition of synesthesia, but I know the gist of it is that your senses are kind of intertwined--for example, some people associate colors with certain voices or personas. It manifests differently for each person.

The main character here finds an outlet in sewing and tailoring, and she strives to build a business as a seamstress. I found this particularly interesting to read about as I have recently purchased a sewing machine and begun the practice of quilting. 

I rated this one 9/10.

• The Maid - Nita Prose

I loved this read and rated it 9.5/10. I'm not sure that others would enjoy it quite as much as I did, but I found the main character relatable in a lot of ways that others probably wouldn't. The main character is a hotel maid with what I suspect is autism of some form. She is fantastic at her job and takes tremendous pride in her work. She takes it very seriously and is extremely attentive to the details. I personally love cleaning and the feeling of getting everything tidy and organized, so I can relate to the feeling of satisfaction associated with cleaning. The main character is extremely sharp and witty, and she takes everything very literally. 

Her tendency to take things literally and at face value, plus her dedication to her "craft" of housekeeping, gets her into a bit of trouble with some folks at the hotel where she works. People try to take advantage of her, but luckily it doesn't work out for them in the end. She is aided by some good people who, with her help, turn the tables. This was a really fun read. It made me smile and laugh. P.S., the main character's favorite restaurant is Olive Garden, and I loooove Olive Garden. I was like "oh ok twin!"

• The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Oh my gosh, this read is so heavy. The setting is post-apocalyptic. There are no institutions or stability of any kind. Just some folks who have managed to survive whatever it is that happened and are essentially roaming aimlessly until their inevitable deaths. Some just kill themselves instead. 

The main character and his young son are trekking across the desolate, largely abandoned landscape in hopes that where they end up will be better than where they began. But it is all so hopeless and desolate. You cannot trust anyone. Some of the remaining humans have banded together to take advantage of others in horrific, horrific ways. There is trafficking of humans for their flesh and as slaves. You can barely sleep at night for fear that someone will stumble upon you in the night and steal everything you have--or worse. There is no hope for salvation or relief.

My favorite line that I read in this book was: "By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp." I rated the book 9/10.

• A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology - Mike Rinder

This was a very interesting read, but it was also intensely detail-heavy about the illogical intricacies of Scientology, to a point that I found off-putting. Because it was just too much to keep track of and made no sense. This book--and, I assume, any other that describes the truth of Scientology--reads like terrible science fiction. The basis of Scientology is, truly, a fictionalized plot involving aliens. Scientology basically has its own language--they have words and phrases for unique concepts in Scientology, and it is difficult as an outsider to keep up with what means what. 

The main character was born into a Scientology family, and as a teenager he signed a literal billion-year contract committing himself to Scientology. He worked on a ship of Scientology's for a while--apparently Scientology confined itself largely to a big ship for a while, literally because they were essentially on the run from the governments of various countries, and being at sea was like an escape.

You can't question anything in Scientology. If you question its origins or validity even slightly, there may be consequences. The main character--and many others--were essentially imprisoned in a building at one point for "misconduct." You could be put there for seemingly any arbitrary reason. While imprisoned there, they are forced to perform intense manual labor and live in terrible conditions.

In Scientology, apparently the goal is to basically continue "educating" yourself on the various levels of Scientology, to continue to move upward. This is an extremely costly endeavor--Scientology is basically a huge money-making scheme. The founder of Scientology basically created its dogma and created these "levels" which Scientologists are expected to complete. They are like courses. But there is no actual end in sight--it is not entirely clear when, if ever, these "levels" stop. 

Eventually, the author, as an adult with a family in Scientology, managed to escape. In doing so, however, he lost his whole family. He also was subject to harassment and stalking from Scientologists who wanted to ruin his life for committing the ultimate sin--leaving Scientology and questioning its validity.

I honestly didn't particularly enjoy reading this, just because it's so utterly bizarre and oftentimes makes no sense. I rated it 5/10.

• The School for Good Mothers - Jessamine Chan

This was an interesting commentary on society's expectations of mothers and the lesser expectations of fathers. In this story, neglectful or abusive parents are presented with two legal options: have your parental rights flatly terminated, or attend (and excel in) a new, futuristic training camp/correctional institution for parents. Mere attendance and participation at the training camp, however, is not in itself sufficient to get your kid back. You have to not only participate and do well, but you have to be among the best.

After being deemed neglectful of her daughter, the main character is forced to decide between these two options. She chooses the latter, and is bussed off with many other mothers to the facility (the fathers are at a separate facility). Unbeknownst to them, their "training" will involve a futuristic, technological advancement. The mothers are watched at all times and criticized for every misstep. They are ranked in their exercises and only the most successful will receive the opportunity to get their children back. The training and evaluating are intense and emotional. Some mothers can't handle it. I rated this 7.5/10.

• Dopesick - Beth Macy

This is a non-fiction book about the serious and pervasive opioid epidemic in the United States. I found it repetitive at times, but the subject matter is very important and timely. The epidemic seemed to take hold most strongly, originally, in Appalachia. The book had so much good information and statistics. I took down a ton of quotes, which I will provide here:

"The culprit was fentanyl, once a popularly diverted opioid prescribed in patch form for advanced-cancer patients that was now being illicitly imported from China and mixed with heroin or manufactured into pills."

"In June 2017, the DEA recommended that first responders wear safety goggles, masks, and even hazmat suits to avoid skin contact with fentanyl and other powerful synthetics after reports of officers having to be Narcanned when they inadvertently brushed up against them on calls."

"[T]he doctors were increasingly aware of studies showing that long-term opioids in fact created more pain in many patients, a condition known as opioid-induced hyperalgesia."

"In The Odyssey, Homer described a drug that would 'lull all pain and anger and bring forgetfulness of every sorrow.' A Victorian poet said taking opium felt as if his soul was 'being rubbed down with silk.'"

"Doctors didn't trust people of color not to abuse opioids, so they prescribed them painkillers at far lower rates than they did whites. 'It's a case where racial stereotyping actually seems to be having a protective effect . . . .'"

"Some dealers encouraged underlings to 'hot pack' their product, giving superhigh potencies to new users to hook them quicker. Once the user is hooked, the product gets titrated back, forcing the person to buy more."

"[T]he same way four out of five heroin addicts come to the drugs: through prescribed opioids."

"Americans, representing 4.4% of the world's population, consume roughly 30 percent of its opioids."

"The prosecutor's Obama-era marching orders, according to a road map written by then attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr., was to use discretion in filing criminal charges, preserving the harshest penalties for serious, high-level, and/or violent drug traffickers. Responding to a nearly sixfold increase in the national prison population between 1972 and 2008, Holder wrote: 'Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for truly no good law enforcement reason.'"

"Across the nation, police chiefs and sheriffs were beginning to lament, 'We can't arrest our way out of this epidemic.' That sentiment illuminated the folly of the decades-long War on Drugs, in which users were arrested four times more often than those who sell the drugs."

"People whose parents or grandparents were drug- or alcohol-addicted have dramatically increased odds of becoming addicted themselves, with genetics accounting for 50 to 60 percent of that risk . . . she noted that the correlation between family history and depression is much lower, 30 percent."

"Diacetylmorphine--aka, heroine--was more than twice as powerful as morphine, which was already ten times stronger than opium."

"Bickel went on to scientifically quantify the indifference of the typical opioid user, comparing the average nonaddicted person's perception of the future--calculated to be 4.7 years--against an addicted user's idea of the future, which is just nine days."

"[H]e touted the makers of the painkiller Talwin, who in a 1982 reformulation had added a narcotic blocker, or antagonist, called naloxone, to the mix--and immediately reduced the drug's diversion and misuse."

"Forty to 60 percent of addicted opioid users can achieve remission with medication-assisted treatment, according to 2017 statistics, but sustained remission can take as long as ten or more years. Meanwhile, about 4 percent of the opioid-addicted die annually of overdose."

This is critical, critical information. So many people are affected by opioid addiction. And to know that pharmaceutical companies could remedy the problem by adding the narcotic blocker to their products, but choose not to do so, is extremely upsetting.

I rated this 7.5/10. I think I would have rated it higher except that I was conscious of the repetitiveness at times.

I think this book was particularly important for me to read in light of my work in the judiciary. The vast majority of the criminal cases that come before us are drug and/or gun related. They are often drug trafficking + felon in possession of firearm charges. Some defendants are charged with distributing products that, unbeknownst to them, contained fentanyl. To see, alternatively, a white collar crime, is less common. Those that work in criminal justice and in the justice system need to better understand the realities of drug addiction. 

• Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout

I did not really love this, and I apparently didn't even bother to rate it. It is apparently a Pulitzer Prize winner, which, again, I hypothesize means little. I feel that reading this book put me in/extended a bit of a reading rut.

I did copy down one quote from this book:

"She said over her shoulder, 'At least I'm not prejudiced against homosexuals.'"

"No," he called. "Just white men with money."

Damn right, she thought.

• The Passenger - Chaney Kwak

I described this as "[l]ow key a little boring, nothing to write home about." The author writes about his experience on a cruise ship that nearly goes down. He is there on a writing assignment--a younger passenger compared to the largely middle- and older-aged folks on board. I rated this 5/10.

• Insane - Alisa Roth

This was another really important book to read as someone working in the judiciary. This book discusses the concerning prevalence of mental illness in the justice system. I rated it 9/10.

"The mental health crisis is especially pronounced among women prisoners: one study by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 75 percent of women incarcerated in jails and prisons had a mental illness, as compared with just over 60 and 55 percent of men, respectively."

"[T]he average length of stay on death row is now at least twenty years . . . ."

"We are also a country that is willing to send people with mental illness to their death but insists on restoring them to competency first; a person on death row who attempts suicide will be patched up before he is killed by the state."

"Indeed, about half of the people executed between 2000 and 2015 have been diagnosed with a mental illness or substance use disorder at some time in their adult lives."

"[P]people with mental illness are less likely to make bail--according to one study done in New York CIty, only 12 percent of those with mental illness versus 21 percent of those without. And for those 12 percent who do manage to make bail, it takes much longer--forty-eight days versus nine days for those without mental illness."

"More than half of all prison suicides occur in solitary confinement."

Being afflicted with mental illness as a person incarcerated worsens the experience in almost every possible respect. And the number of people who are charged with crimes who are mentally ill--and whose mental illness, oftentimes, contributed to the commission of those crimes--is concerning. I see this firsthand in the court. Many of the criminal defendants who come before the court suffer from depression, anxiety, substance abuse disorders, and schizophrenia. They often have traumatic histories and suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. 

I recently dealt with an issue of competence at work for the first time a few weeks ago. There is Supreme Court precedent that not only says that defendants can't be tried or sentenced while incompetent, but also that if a court has a bona fide reason to suspect that the defendant is incompetent, the court has to sua sponte (spontaneously, without prompting) inquire into the defendant's competence. The difficulty, as noted here, is that many, many defendants suffer from mental illness, and a line must be drawn between those whose mental illness renders them incompetent and those for whom it does not.

• Lady Justice - Dahlia Lithwick

I loved this book, and I learned a lot. I found it very powerful and relatable and inspiring. I rated it 9.5/10 and I took down, again, a lot of quotes. But before I get to them, I will admit that reading this book was the first time I heard of Anita Hill. Anita Hill, I learned, testified against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. She alleged that he engaged in inappropriate behavior against her when she worked for him. I was honestly embarrassed to discover so late in my life that this happened. I am a female lawyer, how could I not have known? I hadn't realized that history was essentially repeating itself when Dr. Ford testified against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. To be fair, this happened well before I was born, in Anita Hill's case. But still, I was shocked that I had not been familiar with it.

I think this book touched on such important topics. I find myself becoming more and more of a feminist with each passing year, and I found validation of that in this book. Everyone can benefit from reading this book. A thought that has been prominent in my mind recently, and which I felt reflected in this book, is that those who insist on universal tolerance and understanding and not rocking the boat often do so from a place of security and privilege and do not always understand that an issue or policy may be so peripheral and hypothetical to them that it is easy to merely be tolerant of it. But for others, that issue affects them directly and negatively, and to suggest that people should be tolerant of it is to encourage complacency and is offensive and sometimes dangerous. In other words, as Anita Hill says, we do not all live under the same sky, and to insist that we do is ignorant.

"'When you've never had to think about the hardship of voting, then yes, these conversations on voter suppression seem absurd to you. When you have never spent more than seven minutes in line, it is nearly impossible to imagine that there are poor Black people who stand in line for eight hours, miss an entire day's wages, risk losing their jobs simply to cast a ballot in an election that may or may not have any benefit in their lives.'"

"There is no widespread crisis of in-person vote fraud in America. None. There is also no widespread crisis of mail-in vote fraud or early voting fraud. None. Based on the most generous set of data collected by the Heritage Foundation, the incidence of voter fraud in the two decades before the 2020 election was about 0.00006 percent of total ballots cast. That's about twelve hundred cases dating back to the 1980s. The nonpartisan Brennan Center's massive study from 2007 put that number at somewhere between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. THat same study famously concluded that it's more likely an American will be 'struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.'"

"Hill's formulation--that we don't all live under the same sky--is an elegant encapsulation of what the Trump era, the COVID pandemic, and the #MeToo movement unpeeled for millions of women who believed that the American system of justice was forever changing along on its own steam to a more perfect, just union: that despite claims of fundamental and foundational equality and access to justice, the sky was cloudless and blue for many Americans from 2016 onward, and for many others it wasn't just bucketing down endless suffering and misery, but they were also being told, over and over again, that they weren't actually getting wet."

"Those who persistently demanded that Judge Kavanaugh receive 'due process' didn't understand that he wasn't being deprived of any rights; he was interviewing for a job."

"[T]here is virtue in screaming into the face of deafening indifference, if only because the sound of my voice reminds me that I have not yet succumbed to it."

"Christine Blasey Ford, in a 2021 podcast with Anita Hill, disputed the utility of telling victims of sexual harassment and abuse that you 'believe' them. As she explained, when you tell someone your name, the correct response isn't usually 'I believe you.'"

"Two sitting Supreme COurt justices have been credibly accused of harassment and assault in episodes that have never been thoroughly investigated or adjudicated beyond background checks and a Senate hearing."

"In 2001, Kozinski and another judge jerry-rigged an internet security system the federal courts had erected in the wake of a review of the court's use of bandwidth after it was determined that judges were downloading porn on government servers. Nearly 4 percent of the sites visited had included images of sexual abuse. The work-around allowed hackers to beach the court's security. The then director of the Administrative Office of the US Courts described the results as prompting 'the unfettered ability of all judges and court employees to illegally download pornography and view it in federal courts.'"

"[I]n late November 2020, the Senate confirmed a thirty-three-year-old woman to a lifetime appellate judgeship. The Trump nominee had taken part in only two one-day trials in her career, both conducted while she was an intern."

"It probably won't surprise you to learn that of the top feeder judges to the Supreme Court virtually all are white men. It probably also won't surprise you to hear that male clerks outnumber female clerks two to one at that court and that--as of the most recent study, done in 2018 by the Supreme Court reporter Tony Mauro--'since 2005, 85% of all Supreme Court law clerks have been white.' Women, representing 50% of law school graduates, still constitute a third of all Supreme Court clerks. This, too, should surprise nobody. As of August 2019, 73 percent of all sitting federal judges were men."

"Of that day in 2018, when Dr. Ford testified about being assaulted, so many of us who sat in the hearing room felt something I have since heard from hundreds of women. They believed her. They saw her. And when Kavanaugh began to shout, they started to feel the prickling of genuine fear. Some sheathed violence or threat of it was in that room. And watching Dr. Ford testify, followed by Kavanaugh's angry response, changed everything, both because Brett Kavanaugh would take a seat on the Supreme Court as Trump followers chanted "Lock her up" about his accuser, and because we all saw something in that dynamic that we had recognized in our own lives."

"[F]or many women in America, the right to control their own body was always merely a paper right, dependent on geography, income, race, and the courts. It could be taken away by judges in due time. In 2022, it was."

"An extensive review undertaken by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law showed the Trump administration's win rate at about 17 percent in federal courts, in the summer of 2019. The usual win rate for the government stands at about 70 percent. Why all the losses? Shambolic, hasty legal work, indefensible new rules, attempts to fast-track lawsuits that ended up backfiring, failures to comply with basic administrative demands of the federal Administrative Procedure Act. Trump's own tweets and statements had been the basis for adverse rulings in multiple lawsuits."

"I mean, to me, getting a law degree is just about using the master's tools to destroy the master's house."

"Women make up just 35 percent of all lawyers, but 60 percent of public interest attorneys are women."

"Researchers have been studying the data on women judges for several decades, trying to ascertain whether women make different kinds of judicial decisions from men. The bulk of this research suggests that having women on the bench leads to different results in cases that have to do with gender; that when appellate judges sit together on three-judge panels, a single woman can impact the opinions of her male colleagues on cases about gender discrimination or sexual harassment."

"At the end of his presidency, Trump's federal judicial nominees were 76 percent male. Barack Obama's judicial nominees were 58% male."

"In the asylum context, the General Accounting Office has found that having a lawyer makes you 400% more likely to be given refugee status."

"Women are sometimes better than men at recognizing that the law isn't an immutable, timeless cathedral and at recognizing that just because it travels with a yellow pad doesn't mean it's doing justice. We know that because until relatively recently, the law insisted that women couldn't have their own credit cards."

"Yates showed us that the best government lawyers do it for the sake of the law itself, and not for personal glory or for some other guy's personal glory. The best government lawyers don't serve as yes-men ensuring that the president gets whatever the president wants. Attorneys must answer not just to the client but to the law itself, as abstract and old-fashioned as that may seem."

"None of our legal and constitutional progress happened in a straight path from dark to light, although that is the narrative we favor. It is and has always been a ciaroscuro journey through a legal system designed chiefly by men, for men, for the principal purpose of advancing the lot of men."

"If you're a woman who went to law school, or if you are a woman at all, or know one, or respect one, of it you are anyone with any conception of what the rule of law means, a rabid crowd screaming for the incarceration of a woman for imaginary 'crimes' ranging from a terorrist attack in Benghazi, to the misuse of a private email server, to the management of a fictional pizza-parlor-based child-sex-slave ring is chilling."

• The Way From Here - Jane Cockram

I rated this book 7.5/10. We alternate back and forth between a woman's past and her sister's present. The book switches between these two womens' perspective. The main setting is cool--a small coastal town in France. The gist of the story is that a woman passes away and her sister discovers that she left her letters instructing her to visit places from her past. One such place is the French town where the woman had spent a summer as a teenager.

• Code of Silence - Lise Olsen

This was a highly relevant book for me as an employee in the federal courts. I found this super interesting and rated it 9.5/10. The book talks about the problems that arise when federal judges--largely male--are appointed lifetime positions in the judiciary, from which they cannot be removed except in extremely narrow, exceptional circumstances. The book focuses on a couple of particular male federal judges who came to be known for their inappropriate, harassing behavior inside the federal courts. Their appointment for life, with little risk of removal even for serious misconduct, lends itself to an environment in which the judge is essentially a monarch, an all-powerful authoritarian of his court and chambers. His employees retain their tenure at his will. 

"In a law review article called 'Bullying from the Bench,' Lubet wrote that Kent had used the word 'asinine' at least thirteen times, while all thousand other US judges combined had used it only twenty-three times in the same period."

"The diversity numbers were so low that if the federal courts had been a private employer subject to Title VI of the 1964 Civil RIghts Act, the Supreme Court justices could have been sued for discrimination in the hiring of their clerks 'based on the statistics alone,' Stetson University law professor Mark Brown told Mauro in 1998."

"At the hearing, the only percipient witness that Judge Scirica wanted to hear from was Judge Kozinski. Thus, in a judicial misconduct proceeding brought by Alex Kozinski against Alex Kozinski, the sole witness for the prosecution and defense was Alex Kozinski. Not surprisingly, Alex Kozinski was largely vindicated."

"Discrimination on the basis of 'race, color, religion, sex and national origin' had already been banned in 1964 under Title VII. Under that law, employment could not be denied on the basis of gender alone. But that protection had first been extended to ban sexual harassment in the workplace in 1977, in an opinion issued by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, only after Paulette Barnes, a former employee of the federal government, sued the Environmental Protection Agency. Barnes presented proof that her EPA position was eliminated after she repeatedly refused to grant sexual favors to her boss, who happened to be the head of the agency's office of Equal Employment Opportunity and thus its point man for running antidiscrimination and hiring programs."

"In March 1804, John Pickering became the nation's first judge to be found guilty of impeachment charges an removed by the Senate."

"Indeed, there's no way for the press or the public to 'follow the money' to learn about the judicial misconduct system, which generally covers legal fees for accused judges but not for complainants, even when the alleged victim is a federal court employee."

"The Houston Chronicle later found that Kent was one of only seven judges to receive any formal disciplinary action in response to more than six thousand complaints filed from 1999 to 2009."

"Porteous filled a post vacated by US District Judge Robert Collins, who was convicted of bribery in 1991 after a dope dealer paid cash to win a lighter sentence. Collins collected his $133,600 annual pay as a prisoner until 1993, when he resigned under threat of impeachment."

"On June 9, 2009, a few weeks after Kent's sentencing in Texas, he and other members of the House of Representatives introduced a resolution to launch impeachment proceedings. In all of American history, only thirteen federal judges had ever been impeached, but in 2009, the House had two impeachments in the works. Members of Congress had already established a task force to consider impeaching Porteous. Now they would look at Kent too."