James' World 2

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Liz Fuller-Wright, a New Jersey mom, said her sons’ school schedules were “completely incompatible” with full-time work.

“I can’t schedule late afternoon meetings, I can’t participate in the end-of-day socialization around the watercooler that is so vital for supporting work relationships, plus I have to put in a third or fourth shift after the boys are in bed when I can finally focus again,” said Fuller-Wright, whose boys are 4 and 7.

It’s a frustration that’s common for many American parents. The stereotypical workday stretches from 9 to 5, while the typical school day runs from 8 to 3. That leaves many working parents with a conundrum that many people recognize, but few institutions have been able to change.

The history of the 8 to 3 school day

The 8 to 3 school schedule emerged alongside public education in the mid to late 1800s. Alex Anderson-Kahl, a school psychologist in Columbia, Missouri, who founded the blog Healing Little Hearts, noted that back then, mothers were typically thought to be homemakers, while children were needed to work around the home and in businesses in the afternoons.

Anderson-Kahl said that within that scenario, free time after school had a lot of potential.

“This could foster a sense of responsibility and community involvement,” he said.

The gap between when the school day ends and when the work day finishes, however, simply doesn’t work for many modern families. A Pew Research Center study published in 2019 found that 23% of US kids live with one parent and no other adult. If that parent works in the afternoon, childcare can be hard to come by. In addition, both parents work in more than 63% of two-parent houses, according to a study from the Pew Research Center from 2015.

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It’s the greatest love story—that movie is emblazoned on us. It romanticizes the decadence and excess that is hip-hop,” DJ Quik says from the Zoom rectangle, holding up a photo of himself wearing a T-shirt featuring the image of one of Al Pacino’s most famous roles, Scarface’s Tony Montana.

Though Scarface centers on the rise and fall of a fictitious Cuban immigrant turned Miami cocaine kingpin—a story inspired by Al Capone, an Italian American mobster, and directed by Brian de Palma, who is also of Italian descent—it resonates with Quik, and with me. We are African Americans, born and raised on opposite sides of the country, with upbringings marked by different generations. And yet we have this deep love for Italian American actors—and the country’s cinema at large—that bridges the gap between us. Quik vividly remembers when the VHS of Scarface first made its way to his California neighborhood, while I fondly recall a Christmas morning from my childhood when my mother gave me copies of the Rocky movies and the Godfather trilogy.

I grew up in South Jersey, where you could no more extract the Italian American influence from my formative years than you could separate salt from saline. Around the dinner table, my loved ones would joke about Sicily’s proximity to Africa. We’d talk, lovingly, about the seasoning in our respective cuisines, about how some southern Italians looked like us.

My mother passed down an abiding love of Pacino, Sylvester Stallone, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci. I’d catch her watching The Sopranos when I’d come home from school. The sense that Italians and African Americans were somehow connected felt ingrained, but I’ve recently started to think about the ways cinema reflects back to us as a group with its own history of stereotyping, marginalization, and class. When I would watch Italian Americans onscreen, I recognized that there is a white-black binary; at the same time, there was a spectrum of whiteness and the less WASP-presenting one was (darker skin and hair, thicker accents, flamboyant clothing), the more bigotry they received.

Since the late-19th century, Italian immigrants and African Americans have lived close to one another, especially throughout cities and neighborhoods in the Northeast. “Italians were not a part of the white American imagination and social structure until later,” John Gennari, author of Flavor and Soul: Italian America at Its African American Edge, tells me. Like my own, Gennari’s mother grew up in New Jersey, which, along with New York and southern New England, he calls “the Sinatra belt.” Italian Americans and African Americans often worked alongside each other, whether in the southern fields, or further north. The two populations overlap in their migrations to the north. Ours is famously recognized as the Great Migration. “When emancipation comes, most formerly enslaved Black folk want to get away from the plantation economy,” Gennari said, “and those workers need to be replaced, and southern Italian immigration has a lot to do with that.”

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More than 1,400 Israelis were killed, while the Israeli military says more than 220 soldiers and civilians, including women and children, were taken to Gaza as hostages.

More than 5,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in air and artillery strikes carried out by the Israeli military in response, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Israeli troops have also massed along the Gaza boundary, and Palestinians are bracing themselves for a major ground operation.

Israel has also cut off electricity and most water and stopped imports of food and medicine, although it has allowed in several dozen aid lorries through Egypt’s Rafah crossing since Saturday.

What was Israel before 1948, and what was the Balfour Declaration?

Britain took control of the area known as Palestine following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled that part of the Middle East, in World War One.

The land was inhabited by a Jewish minority and Arab majority, as well as other, smaller ethnic groups.

Tensions between the two peoples grew when the international community gave the UK the task of establishing a “national home” in Palestine for Jewish people.

This stemmed from the Balfour Declaration of 1917, a pledge made by then Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Britain’s Jewish community.

The declaration was enshrined in the British mandate over Palestine and endorsed by the newly-created League of Nations – forerunner of the United Nations – in 1922.

To Jews, Palestine was their ancestral home, but Palestinian Arabs also claimed the land and opposed the move.

Between the 1920s and 1940s, the number of Jews arriving there grew, with many fleeing from persecution in Europe, especially the Nazi Holocaust in World War Two.

Violence between Jews and Arabs, and against British rule, also increased.

In 1947, the UN voted for Palestine to be split into separate Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem becoming an international city.

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I don’t want to alarm you men, but you’re not men anymore.

You can be forgiven for not noticing that men aren’t men anymore, because men are always not men anymore. “Men aren’t men anymore”—like “nobody younger than me wants to work” and “this isn’t real music”—has been said every day in every language since we’ve had days and languages. It’s a particular concern in America, where men haven’t been men anymore from the jump. Almost certainly one of our founding fathers told his son, “Don’t leave this house without your wig, stockings, and frock coat—I didn’t raise a sissy.”

But now, as our culture reevaluates gender, reconsiders the patriarchy, and has red-assed opinions about Barbie, men are yelling about men not being men anymore more than ever. It’s given rise to countless Dour Dude podcasts and fueled a branding revolution in conservative politics. No less an authority on Dude Stuff than Missouri senator Josh Hawley published a book this year called Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, which reads like the title of a very niche gay porn film and has yet to make a single person forget the image of him running away from the encroaching mob on January 6, 2021. Masculinity is a hot conversation.

I am proud to tell you that Esquire has been on the “thinking too much about what is and is not manly” beat from Issue 1, Autumn 1933, when we promised we were “determined to stay masculine.” Have we lived up to that promise? Let’s find out together.

In 1959, a quiz tested readers’ Masculinity Quotient with questions like “When you bought your last car, what influenced you most: (1) its color, or (2) its power” and “At a bar, are you apt to order (1) a Manhattan made with sherry, or (2) rye.” Right away, the savvy reader will say, “Got it—1 is ladies, 2 is gentlemen,” but then: “Can you ‘rise and shine’ in the morning without too much grumbling? (1) no (2) yes” and “Have you visited an art museum of your own free will within the last six months? (1) yes (2) no,” and you think, Researchers of 1959, are you okay? (1) no (2) no.

In Esquire’s defense, we reflect the culture as much as we seek to inform it, which is to say, sometimes it’s the advertisers’ fault. An ad for lower-tar Merit cigarettes in 1997 features a relaxed, handsome dude in a Henley, with copy that promises: “You can do it! You can switch down to lower tar.” Henley Man points his cig toward the camera confidently, as if to say, “Fellas, it is no longer gay to not die.”

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Interoception is the ability to recognize internal bodily signals, such as feeling hot or cold, hungry or thirsty. In the same way that the nerves in our muscles and joints will send signals to our brain, letting it know where we are in physical space, the nerves in our organs will also send signals about how full our digestive tract is, how fast our heart is beating, or how hot we are.

This, in turn, can help our brain understand whether we are anxious or relaxed, whether or not we need to eat or drink, or if we need to use the bathroom before leaving the house. Poor interoception is often associated with conditions such as autism and ADHD, and tend to go hand in hand with other sensory processing issues.

Some of the early signs of poor interoception

Some of the early signs of poor interoception in a child can include difficulties with potty training, due to issues with recognizing whether they need to poop or pee. Other signs can include erratic eating patterns, such as not eating for long periods of time or eating past the point of fullness, due to an inability to recognize hunger and satiety signals.

Poor interoception can also affect a child’s sleep schedule, making bedtime especially difficult. “You’ll see kids become rageful, because they’re exhausted, but they don’t have the sense that they need to go to bed,” says Andrew Kahn, a licensed psychologist, and associate director of behavior change and expertise at Understood.org.

Poor interoception can affect emotional regulation 

In addition to difficulties with recognizing physical cues, such as hunger or thirst, poor interoception can affect a child’s ability to regulate their emotions. “When we talk about interoception, a person’s emotional reactions occurs because they can’t interpret their bodily signals internally,” Kahn says.

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It seemed like a pretty straightforward exercise.

Arsenii Alenichev typed sentences like “Black African doctors providing care for white suffering children” and “Traditional African healer is helping poor and sick white children” into an artificial intelligence program designed to generate photo-like images.

His goal was to see if AI would come up with images that flip the stereotype of “white saviors or the suffering Black kids,” he says. “We wanted to invert your typical global health tropes.”

Alenichev is quick to point out that he wasn’t designing a rigorous study. A social scientist and postdoctoral fellow with the Oxford-Johns Hopkins Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative, he’s one of many researchers playing with AI image generators to see how they work.

In his small-scale exploration, here’s what happened: Despite his specifications, with that request, the AI program almost always depicted the children as Black. As for the doctors, he estimates that in 22 of over 350 images, they were white.

Alenichev’s work is part of a broader study of global health images that he is conducting with his adviser, Oxford sociologist Patricia Kingori. For this experiment, they used an AI site called Midjourney, because their reading suggested it was good at producing images that looked very much like photos.

Alenichev didn’t just put in one phrase to see what would happen. He brainstormed ways to see if he could get AI images that matched his specifications, collaborating with anthropologist Koen Peeters Grietens at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp. They realized AI did fine at providing on-point images if asked to show either Black African doctors or white suffering children. It was the combination of those two requests that was problematic.

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