In a new blog post for The New York Times Timothy Egan explores the medical-industrial complex’s resistance to end-of-life palliative care. According to the article, close to a third of the money spent by Medicare goes towards the last two years of a person’s life desperately trying to stave off the end. Egan sites as an example Annabel Kitzhaber,¹ a terminally ill patient for whom Medicare “would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for endless hospital procedures and tests, but would not pay $18 an hour for a non-hospice care giver to come into her home and help her through her final days.”

We treat death as a pathology in this country, as something that needs to be kept away, battled, banished. So too do we disavow the aging process as we dye, peel, inject, lift, and bleach ourselves into eternal youth. As a woman in her thirties who is being introduced to the gradual loosening and graying of things, I look around for models of healthy aging to help me transition gracefully into midlife. But what I have found is that there aren’t any. As I look at our public figures, I see 50-year-old women without a line on their faces, dating twenty-year-old boys, running around as if to say “Seventy is the new fifteen!”

How are we to embrace the end if we cannot even face what the middle looks like?

We have been programmed to intervene in the aging and dying processes at every stage. If a gray hair sprouts up, pluck it out. If a crows foot appears, inject it away. If systems begin to fail, even at the end of a long meaningful life, do everything you can to ward off the inevitable. Nevermind that the quality of his or her life is diminished. I don’t believe, though, that this reflects our deepest desires as human beings. I think that most people want to die peacefully at home with as little intervention as possible. So where are we getting lost?

One such place is in the corridors of the medical-industrial complex. As the spouse of an emergency physician I have an interesting perspective on the matter, because I am able to see through the eyes of someone trained to save people’s lives without question. What I have learned is that because of Medicare’s willingness to pay for heroic life saving measures even when palliative care is indicated, much of the responsibility to navigate these hard decisions is shouldered by the health care provider. The hair in the soup though is that most health care providers do not want the responsibility. Far easier for them to say that they did everything they could to save a person’s life than it is it to sit down with that person’s family and talk about what it would mean to discontinue treatment, how it would feel to prepare themselves for the death of their loved one.

No one expects doctors to function as social workers or counselors, but we need to train our physicians that their job is not always to extend life. Months ago I asked my husband how his day went, in the way that I often do. “Save any lives today?” I said. “Nope,” he replied. “But I helped a family let someone go. And that felt just as good.”

In a post I wrote a few weeks ago about mercy, I commended the Scottish government for granting compassionate release to the Lockerbie Bomber, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, who is terminally ill. By doing so, they have allowed him to die at home in Libya with his family. After publishing the post, I got a note from a friend who always lets me know in a very kind and respectful way whenever he disagrees with my position. This is what he wrote in reference to the fact that al-Megrahi was essentially given a parade when he got back to Libya:

“You touch on cultural differences [of mercy], but omitted an obvious one…the Libyans. If you look at events in the Middle East over the last 60 years, you will see that power trumps compassion or discussion every time…
The reception of Megrahi orchestrated by the government and his meeting with Qaddafi only reinforces this notion. It may have been noble for the Scots to let him go, but it was a mistake. The reaction on the Arab street will be one of victory over the 270 innocents lost that day.”

His comment got me thinking about whether or not the Libyans’ behavior should matter when we decide if al-Megrahi’s compassionate release was the right thing to do. Should an action’s merit be judged by the way in which the action is received? I understand that it does not sit well for anyone that a convicted terrorist would be given a hero’s welcome upon his return to his homeland. I can see how anyone would take that as a slap in the face, as further evidence that this person is not worthy of our compassion. But if we draw this scenario out to another example, the answer seems clear to me: Imagine if you give someone a letter opener for his birthday and he turns around and stabs someone with it. Does his terrible behavior diminish the kindness of your gift? Does it make your gift a mistake? I believe that your responsibility ends when your friend takes possession of your gift. At that point, whatever he does with it becomes his responsibility. And I believe it is so with al-Megrahi and the Libyans.

It is a frightening position to take. I try to think about how I would feel if al-Megrahi committed another act of violence after his compassionate release. It would be devastating. But as hard as it would be to separate ourselves from it, I believe that such an action would be on al-Megrahi’s head, not ours. I feel strongly that we can only lead in this world by example. The only way to prove to others that compassion should trump power in their lives is by practicing it in ours.

New York Times ethicist Randy Cohen wrote a blog post about the “hideous subculture” of anonymous blog comments, in which he explores whether or not there is something we can do to improve the situation.

The argument for allowing readers to continue commenting without restriction is to preserve a free and healthy flow of ideas. But Cohen mentions that even the Times, a website with an ostensibly literate and thoughtful readership, censors its comments to exclude ‘personal attacks, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity (including expletives and letters followed by dashes), commercial promotion, impersonations, incoherence and SHOUTING.’ This seems to do nothing to compromise the healthy flow of ideas, as evidenced by the hundreds of comments which often accompany most Times articles and the spirited debates therein.

The first question for me is not What can we do about this?¹ but What is causing this?

In an attempt to promote interactivity in a way that is not too demanding of their readers, many websites have included quick and dirty polls, which say things like:

What do you think of Jessica Simpson’s new hair?
LOVE IT
HATE IT

Do you like Jennifer Aniston?
SHE’S MY FAVORITE
I HOPE SHE DROPS DEAD

This is the type of decision making and self-expression that most people on the internet are faced with every day. We have traded subtlety for directness, nuance for speed, and courtesy for unrestricted expression. As such, the majority of our population is losing the ability and the desire to contemplate the finer points of an issue, to seek out the grey.

We have grown accustomed to commenting about entities—a film, a book, a celebrity—not to the creators of those entities or to the entities themselves, but to a third party, which acts a buffer for our vitriol. When I tell People magazine that I hope a certain celebrity drops dead or that I think so-and-so’s new book is total crap, I am not expecting the celebrity or the author to ever see my remarks. In an environment where readers are often cut off from the objects of their preoccupation, readers are not encouraged to consider the full impact of their words. Anyone who writes online has experienced the pain of receiving hateful comments from readers who exist in this chronically disconnected state.

These explanations do not encapsulate the entire problem, but certainly if you put together a penchant for black and white thinking—something is either good or bad, someone should either be given an award or be killed—with a lack of consideration for the person about whom you are expressing your opinion, it creates a potentially destructive situation.

Further complicating the matter, Cohen includes a quote from the writer Katha Pollitt, almost as an aside, which states that ‘…women writers on the Internet receive vastly more hateful comments than male writers.’

This makes me wonder if vulnerability doesn’t play a part in people’s perceptions. Is it possible that we are drawn to online commenting because it is the one way in which we can get through to an otherwise impervious figure, someone whom we would otherwise have no means to contact? Is their online presence like the black joints of a Storm Trooper, the only place in their hard white shell that a bullet can penetrate? If that’s true than perhaps we are even more drawn to those we perceive as being the most vulnerable, which in this society includes women. Are they an easier target?

Does anyone have any insights into this they would like to share?
HELL, NO. I WOULDN’T COMMENT ON YOUR SITE IF IT WAS THE LAST SITE ON EARTH.
YES, READ MY COMMENT BELOW. THEN LET’S MOVE TO THE COUNTRY AND HAVE BABIES.

I read an AP article yesterday about Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland in the late 80s. The so-called Lockerbie Bomber, who is terminally ill with prostate cancer, was released from a Scottish prison on Thursday so that he could return to Libya to die at home with his family. The U.K. government granted al-Megrahi a compassionate release, after he served eight years of his life sentence, as “an expression of the Scottish people’s humanity.”

What interested me most about the article was the way in which it illuminated different cultures’ attitudes about punishment and compassion.

Obama released a statement that Scotland’s decision to release al-Megrahi was a mistake. Secretary Clinton is outraged. The American families of the victims are speaking out, saying things like, “‘I don’t understand how the Scots can show compassion. It’s an utter insult and utterly disgusting,’ said Kara Weipz, of Mount Laurel, New Jersey, whose 20-year-old brother Richard Monetti was on board Flight 103. ‘It’s horrible. I don’t show compassion for someone who showed no remorse.’”

On the other hand, “Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill said although al-Megrahi had not shown compassion to his victims – many of whom were American college students flying home to New York for Christmas – MacAskill was motivated by Scottish values to show mercy.” Likewise, a British man whose daughter was killed aboard flight 103, “welcomed the Libyan’s release, saying many questions remained about what led to the bomb that exploded in the cargo hold. ‘I think he should be able to go straight home to his family and spend his last days there…I don’t believe for a moment this man was involved in the way he was found to be involved.’”

Mercy and compassion seem to be part of the cultural landscape in the U.K., values that its citizens continually aspire to possess. In America we have confused mercy with weakness. When I looked up mercy in the dictionary it said, “compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm.” In fact, mercy is a show of great power. It is a grace offered to those who are weaker than we are. The greater the act of mercy, the greater the show of strength.

I am not advocating that we let all the criminals go; I think there should be consequences for people who break the law; but I believe that most people who do bad things are in need of help. I believe that violence and crime are a result of desperation, a lack of resources, and the exposure (and subsequent inurement) to violence over the course of one’s life. People who promote violence deserve our pity not our hatred.

But the American families of al-Megrahi’s victims feel that by granting him a compassionate release, we are not punishing him enough, and are thus forsaking their loved ones. Al-Megrahi has spent the last eight years in prison suffering for his crime and will spend the next three months–the last three months of his life–getting intimately acquainted with death. To those who think he is getting off easy, I would say that over the next three months he will be going through a process far more frightening than anything we could impose on him in prison.

The argument can be made that al-Megrahi’s victims did not have the opportunity to die in a loving environment surrounded by their families, so he should not be given that luxury. I understand that reasoning completely, but I think it reveals a lot about our beliefs in justice, retribution, and punishment. The conventional wisdom is that if someone does something bad to us or to a loved one, it will help set things straight if the perpetrator is made to suffer as much as possible for his crime, that his suffering will act as balm for our suffering and for the suffering of our loved one.

Is there another way to think about it? Might the death of a loved one be less in vain if the person who killed them was given a different view of humanity, a chance to retreat from violence and revenge, to make something of their life, to serve their community instead of rotting in a cell, a victim of continued violence and hatred, further reinforcing the negative belief system that caused them to commit the atrocity in the first place? Might we have more to gain by modeling compassion for our prisoners, by exposing them to a way of being they have not yet experienced?

It is too late for al-Megrahi to turn his life around and to be of service, but his release has given us the chance to look at our views on justice and punishment, and to re-examine the principles upon which our penal system is based.

Comment away, my sweets.

Years ago, when we were engaged, Joshua and I went to a party together in the suburbs. At one point we were dancing and kissing and minding our own business. Seeing this, the host yelled loudly in our direction so that everyone else could hear, “Enjoy it while it lasts! You won’t be doing that once you’re married!” All the other Babbitts chortled and elbowed each other in the ribs as if to say Don’t we know it! Welcome to the club! Marriage is the death of romance! Kiss your genitals and your will to live goodbye! Just kidding, we love being married! Not really! Just kidding! (Not really!)

Joshua and I were astonished. We couldn’t believe that people actually felt that way. And that they were willing to say it out loud. In front of other people. We grabbed a few handfuls of food and got the hell out of there, lest their marital mediocrity leak onto us.

I hadn’t thought of that evening until today when I read an NPR article about a man who has been selling wedding rings for over 60 years. When he sees a couple kissing on the street, “he likes to tap the man on the shoulder and hand him his card. ‘You know why?’ he asks mischievously. ‘Because married couples don’t kiss on the street.’”

How has this happened? Who has given us marrieds such a wretched reputation?¹ When did it become a cultural norm to lose all desire for your spouse as soon as the I Dos are out of the way?

Guys, please! Do me this solid: Right now, grab your husband or your wife. Take them to a public place and make out with them mercilessly. Really manhandle the shit out of them. Then when your faces are all red and chafed from kissing, say to each other at the top of your voice, “I’m so glad I married you! Isn’t marriage hot?!”

Thank you.

In Portland, Oregon, where I live, we are in the midst of a major mayoral scandal.¹ To bring you up to speed: Brand new mayor named Sam Adams. Openly gay. Everyone thrilled! Three weeks into term, a local paper prepares to expose him for having had sex with his 18-yr-old mentoree named Beau Breedlove² a few years back. Adams preemptively confesses. Local papers print headlines like Mayor Has Sex With Teen! Gay Mayor Likes Little Boys!³ People are at first upset about the sex. Then indignant about the fact that he denied the affair during his campaign. The sex! No, the lies! No, the sex! The lies! They launch an investigation to determine whether or not Adams and Breedlove consummated their relationship before Breedlove was of legal age. Adams apologizes to his constituents in a humiliating press conference during which he gives what I believe to be a reasonable explanation for why he lied about the affair:

He says, in essence, that during his campaign, his opponent was out to slander him by sensationalizing the details of his completely legal, completely consentual (albeit ill-advised) affair. He is acutely aware of the public’s lingering perceptions about gay men. He knows that some still think of them as pedophiles or hunters who pray on young men. He knew that once word got out about the relationship that the newspapers would print headlines like Mayor Has Sex With Teen! Gay Mayor Likes Little Boys! and that the burden of proof would rest entirely on him. He says that it is almost impossible to disprove a negative and that if he hadn’t lied, his chance at being Mayor and his career in public service would have been ruined.⁴

As with most political scandals, we are failing to look beyond the sensationalism to discuss more nuanced matters that profoundly affect our culture. Let’s start with the most obvious and work our way down:

The Sex
I think politicians need to agree to a new approach when asked questions about their sexual lives. It would look something like, “It’s none of your business. Next question.”⁵

By expecting our politicians to discuss their sex lives with us, we force them to lie. And when they do so, we unleash our fury upon them. If their sexual behavior falls within the bounds of legality, it should remain a private matter. If they are having sex with minors or with prostitutes who supply them with meth, than I am all for an investigation. But it should be clear in those instances that we are not investigating their sex lives per se, but their illegal activities.

Sam Adams did not have to apologize to us, which he did many times at the press conference, for having sex with an eighteen-year-old. He kept saying that he recognizes how inappropriate the relationship was given their two decade age difference. If it is true that he waited until Breedlove was eighteen, it is none of our business. And I find the need for a statement like that puritanical and hypocritical. Older men regularly court much younger women–often thirty or more years their junior–and as a society we look the other way because we see it as the natural order of things.

I understand that our statutory laws serve to protect our children. But the numbers are fairly arbitrary. If Adams had sex with Breedlove a day before his eighteenth birthday it would have been rape. One day later and it’s a fling. Also, a seventeen-year-old of today is much more savvy than a seventeen-year-old was when these laws were written. If Adams had slept with Breedlove while he was seventeen it doesn’t arouse any different feelings in me than if he’d slept with him when he was eighteen or nineteen.

The Lying
With the election of Obama we have reached a new era, one in which we demand transparency and authenticity from our leaders. I don’t like a lying politician any more than the next person. But I agree wholeheartedly with Adams that if he had not denied his relationship with Breedlove he would have lost the election because the media machine would have spun something sensationalist and torrid from something entirely legal.

The most salient thing Adams said in his press conference was how impossible it is to disprove a negative. That is the kernel we should be taking away from this debate, what we as a culture should be meditating on. We live in a world where people will believe anything. By the time it hits paper or LCD screens it is as good as gospel. No longer is it enough to be truthful and forthright. Public figures must wage constant offensives against the slander and liable hurled at them from every direction. Anyone can end anyone else’s career in the blink of an eye with a few well-chosen and well-placed lies. And this creates the need for public figures to lie even when they shouldn’t have to.

The Really Important Stuff
Adams is the mayor of the 30th largest city in the U.S., a city that has long lead the way in sustainability, green infrastructure, and energy independence. He has been elected during a watershed period for America when the country has the chance to make huge advancements in our energy policy and during which, hopefully, Portland can act like a beacon for cities that are reticent to adopt a new way of life.

That said, Adams’s most egregious crime–far worse than the sex or the lies–is his choice of Amy Ruiz as his sustainability and strategic planning advisor. Ruiz, 28, is a former reporter for one of Portland’s alternative weekly newspapers and “has no experience in sustainability, planning or government,” according to an article in the Willamette Week about her.

There are allegations against Adams that he offered her the job as hush employment so that she wouldn’t continue her reportage on the Breedlove scandal, which she says she put to rest years ago after being unable to mount sufficient evidence to write a story.

Frankly, I don’t care why he hired her. I care that he hired her, that he put an inexperienced person⁶ in arguably the most important position of his administration. It hearkens back to Bush’s misguided appointment of Sam Bodman to the post of energy secretary, his only previous experience having been as deputy secretary of commerce and deputy secretary of the treasury. This was at a time when the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation encouraged the administration to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.” Swap out “loyalty” for “enthusiasm” and we seem to have Adams’s model.

Maybe if we spent less time worrying about whom our politicians are screwing, we’d be better able to make sure it wasn’t us.

A friend of mine has been encouraging me for months to start marketing my writing. According to her, no one can find out about your work if you sit at home in your pajamas and never go outside or talk to anyone.

      ”But I don’t have anything to promote,” I told her. “The book’s not finished yet.”
      ”If you wait until you have something to promote, it will be too late. You need time to build up a following.”

I always wanted a following.

So I did what she told me. I signed up for Facebook. For Digg. For Red Room. For Twitter. ¹ And I have not done any writing since. It turns out that marketing your work is more time consuming than working on your work. But it has given me the chance to dip my toe in the sea of self promotion, a deep and terrifying place.

What I have seen is humbling. The world is awash in talented people who all seem to have more time to self promote and more moxie with which to do so than I. Some even have secondary blogs to promote their primary blogs, which in turn promote their radio show, which helps to keep their speaking engagement dance card full.

But I am just a writer, a person who can only figure out her place in the world by sitting in front of a typewriter for six hours a day. I am not particularly telegenic, my voice is not mellifluous, and I don’t thrive in a crowd. I have only one blog, and its sole purpose is to interest people in the things I find out while sitting in front of that typewriter.

So how does someone like me cut through the clutter? With so much content floating about it feels like a daunting task. I wonder if we aren’t approaching a state of supersaturation. I myself have become so consumed with building an audience that I sometimes find I have little energy to be a good audience for other interesting people I meet along the way.

It begs the question: Is our attempt to share our creative endeavors with as many people as possible having a paradoxical effect? Is the barrage of information numbing and narrowing all of our potential audiences? One can’t help but notice that in a time when it is easier to disseminate one’s work than ever, it is harder than ever to get people to notice it.

I just applied for a staggeringly large writer’s grant. The application was grueling and involved many essays, one of which was a response to the following quote by Virginia Woolf:

“Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time, the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.”

My response:

It is undeniable that women have emerged at the forefront of countless fields in the last decades, years, even months. We read articles in the newspaper about the glass ceiling being shattered into a million pieces. We now have women running multi-billion dollar corporations, receiving the most prestigious awards in the arts, and occupying high government office (who can forget the first time George Bush uttered the words, “Madame Speaker”?) Women enjoy more power now than in any other time in history. But if we look closely, we will see that theirs is a conditional power, one that has not reached full maturity.

First, it is such a salient event in our minds when a woman achieves unprecedented prominence that it gives the impression that equality is more a part of the culture than it truly is. In fact, women are woefully underrepresented in the highest echelons of most fields. According to National Census figures, women living in this country began to outnumber men as early as 1999. And yet an informal online search for the names of influential women in the field of postmodern architecture, for example, reveals something quite interesting: nothing. Not a single name. A similar search for influential postmodern artists and authors shows that women comprise about 15-20% of the names noted. In politics the numbers are similar: about 16% of U.S. political representatives are women.

Even more important than the numbers, though, are the qualities of the women whom we have anointed in this country. Politics is a good microcosm in which to examine this issue. Certainly women in politics are at the front of everyone’s minds and on the tips of everyone’s tongues at the time of this writing. The women who have emerged most recently—Hilary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin, Condoleezza Rice—are as divergent in their politics as they can possibly be from one another. But in the context of women’s roles in America, they are merely four faces on the same body. They wear the same suit, the same pearls—they are expected to look like ladies on the outside—but their feminine qualities are to remain in the aesthetic and superficial realms only. They have reputations for being “tough,” “fighters,” and “ballbusters.” They must be single-minded, unemotional, and unflinching (even better if they can appear somewhere carrying a gun). In short, they must behave like men. But isn’t this to deny the creative power of women? In her book A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf writes that “…[women’s] creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men. And one must conclude that it would be a thousand pities if it were hindered or wasted, for it was won by centuries of the most drastic discipline, and there is nothing to take its place.” Doesn’t the masculinization of our women in politics hinder and waste their true creative power, and so deny their contribution to society?

A woman’s strength lies in her ability to be intuitive, receptive, collaborative, and emotionally intelligent. But unfortunately, we have been conditioned to think of these traits as a crack in the armor of professionalism, power, and accomplishment. When Senator Clinton became teary eyed on the campaign trail speaking about how much she loved and respected her country, how passionate she was about helping people, some felt that it was her truest and most authentic moment. But the media eviscerated her for it, calling into question how fit she could be to govern (never mind that Joe Biden broke down more recently when speaking of his son’s death, and was perceived as sensitive and sympathetic).

Imagine if women were given the opportunity to rule in a way that was more aligned with their basic nature. Imagine a president who sat down with her country’s so-called enemies to find common ground, who brought people and nations together, who did not lead with her power but with her heart. Imagine a president who was allowed to become emotional, to be overcome by emotion, and to use those feelings to govern with empathy for those who are suffering.

We have not yet come to a collective reckoning about the value of what women have to offer the world. And our confusion is not limited to the sphere of politics.

Women in business face many of the same challenges as women in politics. And women in the arts, while given more latitude for expression by the nature of their pursuit, are still subject to the predilection of the critics who tend to give more attention to men. In writing and publishing—the facet of the art world I am most interested in and qualified to comment on—there is a prototypical author and a prototypical style of work that continues to be most lauded. Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers—post modern writers of the Literary Tome—are celebrated in a way that their female contemporaries are not. These men are the decendents of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, Faulkner, Miller.

When I think of the most decorated female authors of recent times, Joan Didion comes to mind. She is a writer of indescribable talent possessed of a clipped, surgical style highly revered in this country. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking about the time immediately following her husband’s sudden death won the 2005 National Book Award. It is a study in stark, dispassionate prose, as evidenced by her description of one of the worst moments of her life:

In outline.
It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004.
Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o’clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death.

Didion is a highly effective storyteller, but one cannot escape the masculine quality of her writing. If you were to compare her style to that of Mary Morris, for example, who wrote the memoir Nothing to Declare, you would be struck by Morris’s spectrum of expression. Her prose is round and full, soft and warm, but it is also strong and centered. It embodies, for this reader, the great strength of women:

Women remember. Our bodies remember. Every part of us remembers everything that has ever happened. Every touch, every feel, everything is there in our skin, ready to be awakened, revived. I swam in the sea. Salt water cradled me, washing over all I had ever felt. I swam without fear in the line of moonlight radiating on the surface of the sea. The water entered me and I could not tell where my body stopped and the sea began. My body was gone, but all the remembering was there.

Unfortunately this type of writing is not as well regarded as the lean, pragmatic prose of male authors. We tend to take the qualities of men more seriously than the qualities of women, perhaps because they fought or posed imminent threat over the course of history. But now that we are at a time when we have the luxury to honor women’s contributions, our appreciation is often misguided. When women captivate our attention in mainstream culture it is very often a prurient or dismissive attention. A feminine style of leading, like a feminine style of writing, is seen as impotent at best, and a liability at worst.

Women are not the cracks in the armor of this country, though they are often portrayed as such. They represent the possibility that perhaps we might be better off without armor in the first place, that we can value vulnerability over protection, creativity over destruction, and emotion over reason. And this possibility, this force, “has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.” And though women have begun to chip away at the glass in the ceiling they are, alas, still bound by bricks and mortar.