PHOTOS THAT ROCK | FASHION WEEK | COOL COCKTAILS
THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE
SEPTEMBER 16, 2012
HOW THE MOVEMENT LOST TRACTION
09.16.12 #14 CONTENTS
Enter POINTERS: Obama Gets Picked Up, Injured Gymnasts, Hillary Watches Bill MOVING IMAGE DATA: The Ultimate Penalty Q&A: Kate White
Voices HOWARD FINEMAN: Our Slow-Motion Civil War MARK B. KRISTAL: Placenta: To Eat or Not to Eat?
WHAT HAPPENED? BY SAKI KNAFO
TOM O’NEIL: Has The Daily Show’s Emmy Dominance Gone Too Far? QUOTED
Exit STYLE: The Fashion Gods Have Spoken FOOD: Instant Chemistry
FROM TOP: PETER YANG; ADAM EWING
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK: Zach Lederer TFU
BEATING THE CLOCK BY KURT HEINE
FROM THE EDITOR: Assessing the Occupation ON THE COVER: Bryan Maygers
for Huffington by Peter Yang
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Assessing the Occupation NE YEAR AGO, a small group of activists sat down in an out-of-theway little park in downtown Manhattan. And then they refused to leave. By the time they were forcibly evicted from Zuccotti Park one month and 29 days later, the Occupy Wall Street movement had changed the national conversation and spawned dozens of affiliated groups around the country. On September 17, an unknown number of activists will converge on downtown Manhattan to mark the oneyear anniversary of the movement. So where have they been over the last year? What have they been doing? What are their plans for the future? In this week’s issue of Huffington, Saki Knafo answers those questions and many more, as he takes us inside what’s left of
ART STREIBER
O
the movement. Even before Occupy was unmoored from its physical home base, writes Saki, it had already split into two very different factions: the college-educated “middle class idealists,” and the “inveterate social outcasts.” While in the park the two groups formed a mutually beneficial though uneasy coexistence, one they saw as “a testament to the movement’s unifying power and as an essential attribute of an ideal society.” But once they were evicted from Zuccotti Park, the two groups went their separate ways and now “barely communicate with each other.” Saki visits both sides of the movement, and introduces us to those still carrying the flame. At its peak, estimates Professor Todd Git-
Join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
lin, a former SDS leader, the movement had around 50,000 followers, and had the attention of hundreds of thousands more. But many of those once excited by Occupy’s potential are now, as Gitlin says, “politically unemployed.” To be sure, there are plenty of affiliated groups around the country tackling important issues. In Minneapolis and other cities, for instance, groups are “occupying” foreclosed homes and fighting back—sometimes successfully— against the banks. In Vermont, Ben Cohen, of Ben & Jerry’s, is pushing an amendment to ban “money in politics.” In Brooklyn, activists are “liberating” abandoned properties. But as the one-year anniversary approaches, can the spirit that once had the attention of the entire nation be rekindled? Saki finds members of the college-educated faction in a midtown Manhattan office, laying plans for what they say are “big things.” On the other side, he spends a few nights with the group of die-hards still sleeping on a sidewalk outside Trinity Church in lower Manhattan. “The two classes of Occupy movement, meanwhile, have come
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
to resemble two much larger segments of American society,” writes Saki. “The people on the street are increasingly like street people everywhere. And the people in the offices are increasingly like traditional leftwing activists.” But it was only a Many of year ago that a small, those once determined collection excited by of idealists changed Occupy’s the focus of the napotential tional discourse from are now, as austerity to inequalGitlin says, ity and introduced ‘politically terms like 99 percent unemployed.’” into the vocabulary. They may not have had much of a physical presence at the recent conventions, but their principles were there. In Zuccotti Park, “we were trying to build a different kind of culture,” says Max Bean, a tutor who spent much time there a year ago. “It was a dysfunctional community, it was a f***ing mess, but I think that was a worthwhile and interesting goal.”
ARIANNA
AP PHOTO/PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS
Enter
1 OBAMA GETS PICKED UP
POINTERS
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
President Obama was swept off his feet when he made a surprise stop at a Florida restaurant on Sunday. Scott Van Duzer, the owner of Big Apple Pizza in Ft. Pierce, lifted the president off the ground as he gave him a hug. “Look at that!” Obama responded. “Man are you a powerlifter or what?” Although Van Duzer is a registered Republican, he told reporters he voted for Obama in 2008 and will do so again. “I don’t vote party line, I vote who I feel comfortable with, and I do feel extremely comfortable with him,” he said. Big Apple Pizza soon suffered a slew of one-star Yelp reviews from presumed Romney supporters.
Enter
FROM TOP: MIKE MARSLAND/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; AP PHOTO/BRENNAN LINSLEY; AP PHOTO/JULIE JACOBSON
2
3
4
POINTERS
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
HOLLISTER AWFUL TO CUSTOMERS OVERSEAS Hollister has fired at least two employees after they went racial at a store opening in Yeouido, South Korea. According to the English Korean news site koreaBANG, “Images of models making ‘squinty eyes’ faces, flipping their middle finger to photographers, and mocking Asian pronunciation of English appeared on their Twitter accounts.” The surfer brand was quick to release a statement apologizing “for the offense caused by these unauthorized, ill-considered actions.”
ANOTHER DEATH AT GUANTANAMO
One more prisoner has died at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, bringing the prisoner death toll to nine since the facility opened in 2002. The prisoner, whose name was not immediately released, had been on disciplinary status for splashing a guard with what may have been a mixture of food and bodily fluids. He was found unconscious in his cell. A medical examiner will help determine the cause of death.
WOMEN’S GYMNASTICS CHAMPS INJURED After bringing home the gold for Team USA, two members of the Fierce Five aren’t feeling quite on top of their game. Aly Raisman and McKayla Maroney were both hurt on the uneven bars Sunday night during a tour stop in California. Maroney, who won the individual silver in the women’s vault at the London Games, had to be carried out by medics when she fell landing a dismount. Raisman, a gold medalist in the floor exercise, hit her knee on the concrete floor during her routine. It was just the second stop of a 40-city gymnastics tour.
Enter
5
POINTERS
WANDA SYKES COURTS GOP HATRED
Actress-comedian Wanda Sykes is getting personal with Republicans on her new Logo special, NewNowNext Vote with Wanda Sykes. “I’m a black, gay woman,” she said in one clip. “I think the only way to make the GOP hate me more is if I sent them a video of me rolling around on a pile of welfare checks.” The one-hour special premiered on Tuesday and will return Election Night.
6 FROM TOP: PAUL DRINKWATER/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK VIA GETTY IMAGES; US DEPARTMENT OF STATE
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
HILLARY CLINTON ENJOYS BILL’S SPEECH FROM ASIA
THAT’S VIRAL MADONNA HAS AN “OBAMA” TATTOO?!
Hillary Clinton missed the Democratic National Convention for the first time since 1968 while she was visiting East Timor, but she still managed to watch her husband deliver his big speech. A photo of Hillary smiling into her computer monitor as she watched a recording of the speech quickly went viral. Even if she had been in the country, Hillary may not have attended the convention— by federal law, secretaries of state are not allowed.
A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories. HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES
JAY LENO TAKES ONE FOR THE TEAM
DO WE REALLY NEED AN AVATAR SEQUEL?
SOMETIMES CAR REPAIR REQUIRES A BIT MORE THAN INGENUITY
EMMA WATSON IS NOW THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS CELEBRITY
CHUCK PULIN
It’s Still Rock & Roll Before the naked baby appeared floating on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind album, Dave Grohl posed underwater, cross-legged in his swim trunks. Rock Paper Photo has curated a mix of great rock photos you’ve never seen before, including that cover shoot outtake, candid photos and performance snapshots from the past several decades. We’re pleased to share their collection here. In this photo, blues singer Muddy Waters takes a smoke break backstage at the Gaslight Cafe in New York, 1971. PHOTOGRAPHS PROVIDED BY ROCKPAPERPHOTO.COM
STEPHEN PALEY
Enter
Cher poses for photographer Stephen Paley across the street from the studio where she was recording her solo album in Muscle Shoales, AL, 1969.
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
RON POWNALL
Steven Tyler is perched on the fifth floor ledge of Air Studios in London during Aerosmith’s 1977 tour.
JIM BRITT
Enter
Michael Jackson is curious about the photographer’s lens during a shoot for Motown in the Jacksons’ home in Encino, Calif., in 1973.
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
DEBORAH FEINGOLD
Cyndi Lauper strolls around on Crosby Street in New York during a photoshoot for Ms.Magazine in 1988.
JOHN MACKENZIE
Enter
John Lennon and Yoko Ono in London in front of a piece by George Maciunas, head of a community of artists called Fluxus, and a good friend of the couple.
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
ROBERT WHITMAN
This photo is from one of the earliest known shoots of Prince, taken in his home in Minneapolis in 1978.
KIRK WEDDIE
Enter
David Grohl replaces the iconic floating baby during one of the cover shoots for Nirvana’s Nevermind taken by Kirk Weddle in 1991.
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
ANGUS SMYTHE
Before she was Lady Gaga, Stefani Germanotta performed at nightclubs in downtown New York.
RYSZARD HOROWITZ
Enter
Aretha Franklin performs as a guest artist at the 1962 Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island by invitation from composer Duke Ellington.
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
KENT ANDREW
David Bowie enjoys a cigar in the lobby of the Hotel Metropol in Moscow in 1976, during his “Station to Station” tour.
Enter
ILLUSTRATION BY TROY DUNHAM: PHOTOS SHUTTERSTOCK
The Ultimate Penalty
DATA
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
CATASTROPHIC FOOTBALL INJURIES 1977-2011 TAP FOR POSITION BREAKDOWN
Football, at every level, is a game of big hits and big risks. While the media has focused primarily on the long-term effects of head trauma at the professional level, no less troubling is the number of younger athletes who are killed or catastrophically injured every year. As recently as Sept. 9, Devon Walker, a Tulane defenseman, suffered a fractured spine while making a tackle. After a three-hour surgery, it’s unclear whether Walker will be paralyzed as a result of the injury. — Victor Brand
Graphic based on data from the Annual Survey Of Football Injury Research, 1931–2011 and Catastrophic Football Injuries Annual Reports (2008 to 2011), Frederick O. Mueller and Bob Colgate, for The American Football Coaches Association, The National Collegiate Athletic Association and The National Federation of State High School Associations.
Enter
Q&A
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Kate White Begins Her Next Chapter
PHOTOGRAPHS BY VICTORIA WILL
Enter
A
Q&A
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
FTER 14 YEARS as the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, the world’s best selling young women’s magazine, Kate White is uniquely positioned to talk to women about success. When we met in her office at Cosmo to discuss the latest of her four books, I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This, she exuded both industry and fun. She is disarmingly warm and inquisitive, and gives you the sense of being taken into the confidence of someone on top of the world—someone who knows how to (graciously) quit while she’s ahead. On September 4, White, 61, announced that she is leaving Cosmo. Huffington caught her in time to talk about the challenges women still face at work and what her legacy at the magazine will be. –Margaret Johnson
What’s the biggest challenge women face in the workplace now? What scares me is just how much people are expected to be “on” 24/7. That’s really hard for women who are mothers. Not long ago somebody called a 7 o’clock meeting at [Hearst]. And I said to the person later, “How can you do that in a company of working moms?” Do you feel like working motherhood was easier in the pre-Blackberry, pre-iPhone age? I do. I left at 5 every day until I got to Cosmo, and then I left at 5:30. And as soon as the kids were in bed, I worked for several more hours. I had to deal with a stack of work, but I didn’t have to deal with 30 emails that came
in after. That was also a time where I could really think. What I brought to Cosmo early on were the hours I spent just daydreaming about the magazine. What it could be? How I could evolve it? I think now it gets harder and
I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This comes out Sept. 18.
Enter harder for anyone to block out that time to say, “No one’s in touch with me right now. This is my time to just create.” In a recent New York Times Magazine profile, Edith Zimmerman quoted a young woman in her 20s—a member of Cosmo’s target demographic—pronouncing the magazine “mindless.” How do you respond to that? There are definitely people who would feel that the magazine isn’t for them, but I think if you haven’t read it cover to cover, you’re missing a lot of what we do. Yes we have beauty tips. Maybe that seems mindless. But I feel like we’ve covered a lot of important issues: sexually transmitted diseases, a number of articles on binge drinking and driving under the influence of alcohol, five characteristics of male students who date rape. I just don’t find that mindless. Even the sex stuff. [As a culture] I think what we haven’t done a lot for women in terms of helping them understand their sexuality, and know that they are entitled to have orgasms, and that, yes, as part of a sexual relationship you want to please your partner, but you deserve to be pleased equally yourself. All of that’s in a package
Q&A
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
that’s pretty frothy and fun. We’re not meant to help you pass the law boards. It’s about entertainment and enjoyment and getting some information that you can use in your life, too. What is the biggest career lesson you learned from your tenure at the magazine? “Fun fearless female” is our whole motto at Cosmo, but I love that expression I talked about in
Every day at Cosmo reinforced the notion that you gotta go big or go home, and it helped me do that more in life.” the book, “Go big or go home.” There have been times in life where I’ve had a tendency to be a little tentative. Every day Cosmo reinforced the notion that you gotta go big or go home, and it helped me do that more in life. Why did you decide to step down? It’s always bittersweet to leave a great job, but I had a window of opportunity where I could leave with the magazine at number one. We outsell our nearest competitor on
Enter
Q&A
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
White in her office in NYC.
the newsstand by over a million, and we’re poised nicely for the digital age. I’ve had a great run, and I want to really focus on my life as an author. I am not dying with my boots on here. What will your legacy be at Cosmo? What I feel most proud about is
that I took a magazine that had been successful at another time, and I made it relevant in the 21st century for a new generation of women and kept it number one for 14 years. I think there are lots of mature brands that don’t make it after a certain point in time. To take a strong brand but one that needed revitalization and [make it successful]—it was fun and exciting to pull that off.
Voices
HOWARD FINEMAN
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Our SlowMotion Civil War LINCOLN IS BACK (Spielberg’s Lincoln opens in November), and with him urgent questions: Are we locked in a new form of Civil War in our time? If so, why and what is it about? And where is our own Father Abraham? President Obama, an Illinoisan and Lincoln devotee who launched his own candidacy at the Old State House in Springfield, invoked his hero at the Democratic Convention in Charlotte, saying that he, like Lincoln, had learned from his own failings. Of course we are not in a fratri-
ILLUSTRATION BY THOMAS FUCHS
cidal war, but much of our politics is eerily reminiscent of Lincoln’s time, when the country split in two. Now, as then, the party system is broken and achingly in need of upheaval. As the Civil War approached, the two parties of the era were powerless to resolve the fundamental issue of slavery. Only the rise of a new Republican Party broke the gridlock. We may be reaching a similar point again.
Howard Fineman is the editorial director of The Huffington Post Media Group.
Voices At the Republican convention in Tampa and the Democratic one in Charlotte, profound issues were left unaddressed or merely nodded at. There was barely a mention of the war in Afghanistan and the rise of the security state, the threat to civil liberties arising from it, the dangerous, widening and anti-democratic gap between the richest and the rest, or the obvious outlines of compromise necessary to avoid bankrupting government at all levels. Congress is paralyzed by partisan division in a way it has not been since the years after the Civil War. Back then “crossing the aisle” grew rare; after the war bipartisanship was an act of betrayal. The media is divided, too, as it was in Lincoln’s day. The pamphleteers and editorialists of that time are the bloggers now; FOX and MSNBC are equivalent to the great partisan newspapers. The conventions were living evidence of the divide: The nice little old ladies in Tampa who hailed from a Richmond suburb had nothing in common with the urban hipsters and big-city union bosses I saw on the floor in Charlotte. In Lincoln’s time, politics was paralyzed and the country di-
HOWARD FINEMAN
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
vided over slavery, secession and the transition from agrarian to industrial society—issues that were not just difficult, but apparently irresolvable. What are the profoundly divisive issues now? Sad to say, race—or rather the idea of government induced strategies to expand diversity—remains one of them. The GOP, formerly the party of Lincoln, recoils from the idea, and the result, at least Congress in Tampa, was shockis paralyzed ingly obvious. There by partisan were as many people division in a of color on the speakway it has not ing list as there were been since the people of color among years after the the delegates and Civil War.” guests in the hall. Charlotte, by contrast, was the second largest multihued political gathering I have ever seen. (The biggest, of course, was President Obama’s Inauguration in 2009.) The barbeque-scented streets were packed with every ethnicity, race and sexual orientation. At a dinner hosted by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, my table consisted mostly of pols from the African-American, Latino and Asian-American communities.
Voices But beyond race, even more central today is the divisive argument over the “traditional” family’s role in society and in the genetic destiny of humanity itself. That battle, in turn, is tied to one between science and faith over public policy. Decibel levels prove the point. The abortion issue elicited the loudest cheers in both Tampa and Charlotte alike. And this issue is deeper than abortion. In his new book, All in the Family, Brown University historian Robert O. Self frames the modern political era as an ongoing argument over gender roles—manhood, womanhood, fathers and mothers, sex and family structures—suddenly made malleable by new social mores and science. The Republican Party of today, decades in the making, is a faithbased crusade to preserve the man-woman family, and to protect the primacy of faith in deciding the reproductive and genetic destiny of mankind by banning abortion and most fetal research. The GOP faithful think that God, in Marxist terms, should control the means of production and distribution of the human gene pool. They see the Democrats as ushering
HOWARD FINEMAN
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
in a Huxley-like Brave New World. The Democrats are just as vehemently devoted to a woman’s right to choose, and to the widest possible variation of—and constitutional protection for—sexual and family identities, Self writes. Finally, there is a mostly unspoken and utterly unresolved battle between generations over the social welfare state. Young Americans stand to be crushed by the tens-oftrillion-dollar bill for Medicare, disability payments, Social SeBeyond curity and other prorace, even grams and promises more central made by politicians of today is BOTH parties over the the divisive decades, not to menargument tion by the governover the ment bureaucracy and ‘traditional’ public employees necfamily’s role essary to administer in society.” those programs. Neither party, nor President Obama or Mitt Romney, has directly and honestly offered a full response to the fiscal nightmare that lies ahead. All we need now, as we needed a century and a half ago, is leadership and, as Lincoln said, the triumph of the “better angels of our nature.”
MARK B. KRISTAL
Voices
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Placenta: To Eat or Not to Eat?
W
OMEN, MAINLY IN the United States, are lately announcing that they will eat placenta as part of their childbirth experience. They expect to experience major health benefits like prevented or reduced postpartum depression. A couple of celebrities mentioned it and that brought placentophagia into the spotlight. What’s going on? ¶“Placentophagia” pertains to ingestion of placenta, fluids and tissues by mothers during delivery. The behavior, which is almost universal among nonhuman mammals (whales and dolphins are exceptions), is virtually absent in human cultures. There are occasionally individuals or groups who do it, but they are an exception and not the rule. Eventually someone will do anything conceivable to the human mind; for instance, search the ILLUSTRATION BY THOMAS FUCHS
Mark B. Kristal is a behavioral neuroscientist and professor in the Department of Psychology at the University at Buffalo
Voices web for “man eats airplane.” Human cultures have actually shown a strong aversion to placentophagia, and some have even imposed taboos against the practice. Yet there was a bit of a fad in the hippie era when some nature-oriented communes were reported to have cooked up a placenta or two. Today we are in the midst of another placentophagia fad. Women, reporting encouragement by doulas and midwives and aided by unverified web information, are deciding to ingest placenta at delivery. They eat it raw, cooked, blended into smoothies, or dried and encapsulated, in order to prevent or reduce negative aspects of childbirth, such as postpartum depression, “baby blues,” fatigue, lactational insufficiency and hormone deficiencies. Unfortunately, there is no evidence showing that placentophagia by humans medically or physiologically ameliorates any of these problems. However, websites of doulas, midwives and commercial placenta encapsulators often assert that placentophagia at delivery is useful because, for instance, dried human placenta has been used for centuries in Chinese herbal medicine. Actually, Zi He Che, as it is known, is used on
MARK B. KRISTAL
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
rare occasions to treat a variety of ailments from impotence and infertility to tinnitus and chronic cough. First, its specific effects, if any, cannot be isolated because it is always blended with many other herbs or medicines. Second, there are no scientific studies showing that it is effective at all. The same can be said for treatments like hornet nest or turtle shell for cancer, Chinese dates for ADD/ ADHD and pearl, anThey eat telope horn, or earthit raw, cooked, worm for epilepsy. blended into There are documentsmoothies, ed benefits of placenor dried and tophagia in animals, encapsulated, relating primarily to in order to enhancing pain relief prevent or during labor and delivreduce negative ery, and helping to proaspects of duce immediate materchildbirth.” nal behavior at delivery because of the mother’s attraction to afterbirth material on the young. Nonhuman mothers find afterbirth irresistibly attractive at delivery, but clearly human mothers do not. Furthermore, for animals, the methods of preparing and administering afterbirth material are essential. For women engaging in placentophagia
Voices these parameters are irrelevant. The urban legends, anecdotes and testimonials all indicate positive results regardless of method of preparation, time of ingestion relative to birth, and amount ingested. What only seems to matter is that they expected it to work before they did it. This is a classic formula for a placebo effect — an improvement based on expectation, not on pharmacological mechanisms. Even though human afterbirth contains the same analgesia-enhancing component as that of other species, we do not yet know whether this component, or others, has an effect on human problems. Actually, placebo effects can occur even when beneficial components are present. About 100 years ago, Brown-Sequard developed a treatment for impotence consisting of injections of extracts of ground testes from other species; French surgeon Serge Voronoff developed a method of grafting pieces of testes from other species onto the testicles of his impotent patients. Both were successful; many patients experienced a return of potency. The fact that testes secrete testosterone was not yet known. However, Brown-Sequard’s extract did not contain testosterone; and Voronoff’s
MARK B. KRISTAL
grafts were rejected and could not have secreted testosterone. Why then did so many of their patients experience positive effects on potency? Because they expected to. Are placebos necessarily bad? Many experts say no, as long as the placebo is not harmful, and as long as taking it does not delay or replace needed scientifically validated medical help. So, can placentophagia be harmful to humans? The near absence of placentophagia among humans, when compared to the near universality of the behavior in other mammals, has to be considered seriously. The contrast suggests that it may have been occasionally harmful to humans, or otherwise evolutionarily maladaptive. Afterbirth can be contaminated by microorganisms, can contain toxins filtered from blood, or even have negative immunological consequences for the mother. Even a tiny adaptive disadvantage can have evolutionary significance over thousands of generations. So, until beneficial components of afterbirth have been isolated and until scientific studies are conducted on the effects of ingested afterbirth on humans, I suppose placentophagia will unfortunately remain a case of chacun à son goût.
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Voices
TOM O’NEIL
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Has The Daily Show’s Emmy Dominance Gone Too Far? MOST PEOPLE ARE SICK and tired of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show romping through the Emmys, according to a recent GoldDerby.com poll. The Daily Show has won Best Variety Series for the past nine years in a row and many predict that it will prevail again on Sept. 23. Should The Daily Show step aside and let another deserving program win? In the Emmy game, that would be called “pulling an Oprah” because that’s what the Queen of Talk did at
ILLUSTRATION BY THOMAS FUCHS
the Daytime Emmys after she won Best Talk Show nine times. Winfrey didn’t bow out entirely—she just yanked her TV show from the program race and herself from the separate contest for Best Host (which she had won seven times). Meanwhile, she encouraged her staff to continue to compete for Emmys in other categories like music, art direction, sound editing, etc. Ellen DeGeneres, Candice Bergen and Bill Cosby, who each removed themselves from the competition after a string of repeat
Tom O’Neil is founder of Gold Derby and author of Movie Awards, The Emmys and The Grammys
Voices victories, also displayed such graciousness at past Emmys. As one web commentator summed it up: “On the one hand, it’s not The Daily Show’s fault the Emmys keep voting for them. They enter the race and enough voters pick them over the other contenders, period. It’s not on them to force Emmy voters to consider another show. On the other hand, it’s a classy thing to say, “We’ve been richly rewarded by our peers, thank you,” and bow out of the race.” What’s interesting is that last year it actually looked like Jon Stewart himself might agree that it was time he should lose. Some Emmy-watchers like me believe he tried to throw the match by submitting a blatantly lousy episode to the Emmy judging panel as a sample of his best work. In it, he mocked the ascot worn by CNN commentator Roland Martin —and that was pretty much the highlight. Nonetheless, that episode beat Conan O’Brien’s heartbreaking farewell to the Tonight Show and a special telecast of The Colbert Report featuring Stephen Colbert entertaining troops in Iraq while U.S. President Barack Obama beamed in via satellite.
TOM O’NEIL
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
This year it looks like Stewart submitted another dud—the Feb. 16 snoozefest with a dull guest appearance by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. It includes a painfully long and witless shtick by Larry Wilmore who accuses Asian American basketball star Jeremy Lin of getting too much media attention during Black History Month. If Stewart wins for this, it’ll be clear to me that The Daily Show can win for anything. I believe the best episode in the catWhat’s egory was submitinteresting is ted by Emmy host that last year Jimmy Kimmel, who it actually entered his special looked like post-Oscars show of Jon Stewart Jimmy Kimmel Live himself might featuring...Oprah agree that it Winfrey, of all peowas time he ple. Since Stewart should lose.” refuses to “pull an Oprah” at the Emmys, maybe Oprah can intervene to pull victory away (graciously, of course) for Kimmel? And if Stewart ends up losing to The Colbert Report, there’s a further irony to ponder. Since Stewart is a producer of that show too, he’ll still win an Emmy statuette if his Daily Show flops.
Voices
QUOTED
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ERIC CHARBONNEAU/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; ARAM BOGHOSIAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES; AP PHOTO/ JOHN STILLWELL; SHUTTERSTOCK
“ The only people who should celebrate a Hollywood marriage are divorce lawyers!”
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
“ Well, I’m not getting rid of all of health care reform. Of course there are a number of things that I like in health care reform that I’m going to put in place.”
—Mitt Romney to Meet the Press
—HuffPost commenter Jetsfanindenver
on reports of Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds getting married
“ If an airline is going to be ballsy enough to call themselves the American Airlines, they better be prepared to take care of ALL of their fellow Americans.”
—HuffPost commenter Getchatissuesready on a teen with Down Syndrome who was not allowed to fly first class
“ We are using all our strength to get rid of him, either by killing or kidnapping.”
—Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid to Reuters via telephone from an undisclosed location about their plans to kidnap or assassinate Prince Harry
FROM TOP: HARRY E. WALKER/MCT VIA GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES/FLICKR OPEN; BILL MCCAY/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES
Voices
QUOTED
It’s a good thing the GOP convention was so early this year. Any later and we seriously could have been looking at a new nominee with the way this thing is going. —HuffPost commenter WestSeattle8
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
“ Never in modern American history has a presidential candidate tried so hard to hide himself from the people he hopes to serve.”
—Harry Reid
during his speech at the DNC
“ Before I was pushing, I put bronzer on and [false] eyelashes. I wanted to look pretty for him!”
—Snooki
to People on how she prepared for baby Lorenzo’s arrival
“ I’m going to print this up and show it to my cat.”
—HuffPost commenter ScottishScript
on a study claiming that dogs really do feel our pain
09.16.12 #14 FEATURES
ADAM EWING
WHAT HAPPENED? BEATING THE CLOCK
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
y the time the police kicked the protesters out of Zuccotti Park last November, the Occupy Wall Street movement had already split into at least two distinct factions. There were the mostly college educated activists and intellectuals who essentially made up the government of the park, and the drifters who slept in the park and relied on donations mostly allocated by the first group for food, clothes and other basic necessities.Âś After the eviction, some members of the first group tried to portray the raid as an unintended gift from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the NYPD to the movement. The 22,000 square-feet village of tents and tarps had garnered
OCCUPY WALL STREET
incredible attention and hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, but maintaining the space had come with significant challenges. In addition to feeding, clothing, and caring for the hundreds of people living there, the activists had to contend with the hazards of drug use and mental illness, reports of crime and the imminent approach of winter. Some saw the eviction as an opportunity to focus more of their energy on bigger things, like pushing for reforms to the financial system and to the United States government. Members of the second group, many of whom had lived on the streets long before anyone pitched a tent in the name of “the 99 percent,� went in search of a new place to stay. Most eventually disappeared from the scene, but a few hung on, trying to find a spot where they could continue to live together in solidar-
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
I.B. has been camped out at Trinity Church for a month, and says he built one of the first tents back at Zuccotti Park.
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
OCCUPY WALL STREET
“We’ve become professionalized in a way. People don’t identify with that. If we become just another left movement, we will suck the life out of it.”– MARISA HOLMES, AN ACTIVIST LEADER ity with the larger movement and in accordance with its communal values. For a time they found shelter in churches around Manhattan, but by the end of two months they had worn out their welcome. Their clergy hosts, many of whom had been happy to speak up for the protesters when they did not have to deal with them on a daily basis, balked at the difficulties of providing free housing to an unorganized group of indigents and turned them back out onto the streets. There was an unsuccessful attempt to set up camp in Union Square, followed by an occupa-
tion of the steps of the Federal Reserve Building that lasted all of two weeks. Eventually the few remaining holdouts began to sleep on a section of sidewalk in front of Trinity Church, at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, where they remain. By September 17th, exactly one year after the first protesters camped in Zuccotti, this encampment will have been there for more than three months. The occupation of Zuccotti lasted for one month and 29 days. Last fall, as cracks began to appear in the united façade of the Occupy movement, a protester and marriage counselor named Robert Adams told a reporter for The Huffington Post that the
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
OCCUPY WALL STREET
two groups needed each other to succeed. Referring to the “nomadic” types who lived in the park, he said, “They’re probably tough enough to survive whatever comes at us.” Although Adam’s professional life may have given him some extra insight into the strained relationship between the two parties, his perspective was hardly unique. Many protesters saw the uneasy coexistence of college professors and chronically homeless people as a testament to the movement’s unifying power and as an essential attribute of an ideal society, one which every person, no matter how marginal or poor, recieved an equal say in the decisions that affected their lives. Today, as the movement approaches its first year anniversary, members of both factions are trying to recapture the lost energy of that time. Some in the first group are forming what they call a “debtors’ movement”, and are calling for the creation of agricultural communities where people can live off the grid and gain independence from the government. Some in the second group are “liberating” abandoned properties in Brooklyn, breaking into them in an attempt to con-
vert them into new places where they can organize and live. As it stands, though, without a common space to keep them together, the two groups barely communicate with each other. Distrust and disdain are pervasive, and it’s uncommon to hear anyone still making the case for greater unity between the movement’s middle-class idealists and its inveterate social outcasts.
ON A MONDAY EVENING in August, I
dropped by an office in Midtown Manhattan where members of the first group were meeting to talk about their plans for the movement’s birthday party. I’d heard that the protestors were working on “big things” and I wanted to see whether they still possessed any of the vigor and idealism that seemed so prevalent last fall. At the height of the demonstrations, information about the occupation was unavoidable, and the way that it swept through social media was unprecedented for a grassroots political movement, at least for one that started outside of Egypt, Tunisia or Iran. By the time the activists began planning their anniversary this summer, the Internet presence had grown
OCCUPY WALL STREET
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
Amanda and Anthony Verde got married months after meeting each other at Zuccotti Park. Anthony was finishing a jail sentence while Amanda continued to protest at Trinity Church.
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
OCCUPY WALL STREET
much quieter. Maybe 100 people attended the Midtown meeting. Many of the old Zuccotti Park regulars were there — Ray Lewis, the retired police captain who was arrested in October; Marisa Holmes, the Hunter College grad student who seemed to be in the middle of every general assembly; Bill Dobbs, the deep-voiced communications specialist who got his start in the AIDS activism movement of the 1980s. The drab space was tucked away on the sixth floor of a nondescript office building, and it had a dull blue carpet, metal folding chairs, and boxes stacked on top of beige file cabinets. Everything about it was unremarkable and unattractive. Last fall, encampments around the country transformed unexceptional public spaces into extraordinary wellsprings of debate, discussion and messy life. Nowhere was this truer than Zuccotti Park, an unloved square of granite benches that morphed almost overnight into a miniature village with bicycle-powered generators, a silkscreen, street signs, and a kitchen that served thousands. The spectacle attracted all sorts of people, including many who might not have normally showed
The “People’s Kitchen” in Zuccotti served hot meals; the Trinity occupiers get most of their food from the trash. up to a protest or a meeting on economic inequality. By contrast, the people who attend the meetings that make up most of the movement’s activities these days tend to belong to a core of dedicated insiders. As the meeting in Midtown began, everyone took turns introducing themselves by name and preferred gender pronoun. “Either she or he is fine,” said one protestor. The activists
seemed as intent as ever on changing the world, but now that the world had stopped taking them seriously, their insistence on details like gender pronouns seemed more out of sync with the concerns of the majority of people. After the introductions, people offered various proposals for anniversary stunts. Someone suggested wearing balaclavas in homage to the Russian punk band Pussy Riot. A man proposed holding
“an open workshop to build giant puppets.” Several people argued over whether or not it would violate Occupy doctrine to apply for a permit so that an amplified band could perform. Another activist stood up in the back of the room and identified herself as a professional public relations consultant. “I feel like we’re speaking to ourselves and there’s not a 99 percent we’re talking to,” she said. “When we were designing the posters, a lot of people rejected the use of the word ‘country’!” There was a murmur in the
Today, the protestors camping out in the name of the Occupy Wall Street movement have dwindled in number and moved to a stretch of sidewalk outside of Trinity Church.
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
OCCUPY WALL STREET
crowd, and some people twinkled their fingers, a gesture of affirmation that most of the 99 percent have never made. Todd Gitlin, a former leader of Students for a Democratic Society and the author of “Occupy Nation,” estimated that, at the start, Occupy consisted of a movement of about 50,000 people in the country. At its peak, the movement was able to mobilize many hundreds of thousands nationally, he said. Most of those people, he said, are now “politically unemployed.” One of them, Max Bean, a talkative New York City teacher given to the sorts of in-depth cultural analyses you might expect of a Brown graduate, which he is, says he spent 12 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week, doing work for the movement last fall. This winter he sent a letter to about 60 other occupiers announcing his departure. A few days after the Midtown meeting, he locked up his bike and sat down on the steps of Union Square to talk about his reasons for dropping out. He was initially drawn to movement, he said, when he saw a few people having a heated discussion about OWS right there
on the steps of Union Square, and came to the conclusion that the movement could help people like these really listen to each other, something he hadn’t seen very often in the streets of New York. In the park, “we were trying to build a different kind of culture,” he said. “It was a dysfunctional community, it was a fucking mess, but I think that was a worthwhile and interesting goal.” After the park was cleared out, many activists shifted their energies to conventional protest tactics like rallies and sit-ins. “If you want to be very focused and organized, then those tactics might make sense,” he said, “but we weren’t any of those things.” Some recent efforts carried out under the auspices of Occupy do go beyond sit-ins and marches. In Minneapolis and a few other cities, activists have been camping out in the homes of foreclosure victims and resisting arrest, and some of the homeowners have gotten their homes back. In Vermont, Ben Cohen, of the famous ice cream company, is funding a non-profit organization aimed at raising support for a constitutional amendment that would ban “money in politics.” He and his
OCCUPY WALL STREET This protestor, simply known as Envy, flashes a peace sign at the camera.
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
OCCUPY WALL STREET
staff of Occupy activists are trying to get people to use rubber stamps to mark bills with messages like “Not to be used for bribing politicians,” an effort that he likened to selling Cherry Garcia. “To appeal to a broad swath of the population,” he said, “you need to communicate in simple, easy-tounderstand terms and you need to have a really good product, and you need to do it with a sense of joy and fun and whimsy.” So far these efforts haven’t come close to generating anything like the support and interest that made Zuccotti Park a front-page news story. Priscilla Grimm, who helped run the Occupied Wall Street Journal, a print newspaper that published more than 70,000 copies of its first issue last September, told me that she had parted ways with Cohen over his opposition to the use of the word “revolution” on her website. Wealthy donors like Cohen don’t “have skin in the game,” she said; if there really were a revolution, it would “affect their lives not in a good way.” Meanwhile, the Occupied Wall Street Journal has run out of money and will publish its last edition this month. When I asked Grimm why, she replied
Distrust and disdain are widespread, and it’s rare to hear anyone still making the case for greater unity between the movement’s middle-class idealists and its inveterate social outcasts. with a two-word history of the radical left. “Capitalism won.”
WHILE SOME OF THE protesters
huddle in out-of-the-way offices debating the wording of their posters, the drifters who make up the second faction of OWS sit at one of the busiest intersections in the world, displaying their own hand-scrawled protest signs to the
OCCUPY WALL STREET These men are some of the few camped out in front of Trinity Church after the mass eviction at Zuccotti Park.
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
OCCUPY WALL STREET
thousands of tourists, businessmen and office workers who pass them each day. When they’re not shouting slogans at passersby, they talk with each other, smoke cigarettes, nap, flirt, engage in occasional spicy banter with the cops and sometimes get arrested. At night they sleep on sheets of cardboard and bedrolls spanning about 50 feet of sidewalk. At times, their numbers climb as high as 40 or 50; some nights they drop to the single digits. A little ways back from the sidewalk, behind an iron gate, stands Trinity Church, an 18th century structure with a 281-foot Gothic spire. The protesters chose this location because of a conflict that arose last winter when several Occupy activists and a priest were arrested while trying to set up a new encampment on a Trinity-owned piece of land several miles uptown. In a recent letter to his parish, Trinity’s leader, Rev. Dr. James Cooper, wrote that he didn’t wish to have the police remove the protesters from the Broadway site, but noted that even if he did, “we are being advised that it is lawful for people to camp there.” What the police don’t consider lawful, the protesters say, is anything that gives the encampment the
appearance of permanency. Over the past few weeks, the police have confiscated boxes of books, bags of donated food, and any cardboard signs that the protesters have left lying around. “They’re afraid we’ll start another Zuccotti,” one protester told me. If that happens, it would be an incredible transformation. While Zuccotti had a library of thousands of volumes and a staff of professional librarians and professors, the Trinity camp has six books that someone spotted on the sidewalk in Brooklyn. Zuccotti had a funding pool of nearly half a million dollars and a group of bookkeepers to manage it; Trinity has a water cooler bottle where passersby drop maybe 20 or 30 bucks a day. The “People’s Kitchen” in Zuccotti served hot meals; the Trinity occupiers get most of their food from the trash. A week after the midtown meeting I spent a few evenings at the Trinity encampment. One night, a 24-year-old girl named Amanda stood up in front of everyone with a huge smile and announced her husband was getting out of jail. As it turned out, she and her husband had met in Zuccotti Park and got married a few months later in
MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES
a Brooklyn squat. They were both arrested this spring for drinking in public, and the husband was now finishing a four-month sentence for violating parole. Sitting back down on the sidewalk, she talked about her hopes for the movement. “We need to get our park back,” she said. “Our park is everything.” For many of the people who lived in the park, the makeshift village there was a welcome reprieve from hard lives on the streets. Amanda had made her way there from a cheap hotel in Brooklyn, after losing her job at a restaurant and deciding to “sell my ass on
the street. A man raped me and knocked my teeth out, and someone told me to go to Zuccotti: it was safe there. People cared about each other there,” she said. So why did it fall apart? “Because of money and infiltration,” she replied. The anxiety over money goes back to the earliest days of the movement. The people who lived in the park, in particular, suspected the mostly better-off and better-educated bookkeepers of incompetence and greed, mirroring the attitude of the movement as a whole towards the American ruling class and Wall Street. By April, the savings had dwindled to several thousand dollars, and the protesters put a freeze on spend-
Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are shown here staging a sit-in outside of One Police Plaza on Sept. 30, 2011, at the height of the Occupy movement.
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
OCCUPY WALL STREET
ing. Although there’s no longer much money to fight over, people are still paranoid about spying. Some of the Trinity crowd think that federal agents are watching them through binoculars from the second-story window of a building across the street, some describe their most dedicated members as informants, and I heard a number of conspiracy theories that reach back to the very founding of the country. There is a persistent rumor about Alexander Hamilton, for instance; they say he isn’t actually buried in the Trinity churchyard where flocks of tourists come to take pictures of the tombstone bearing his name. Some of the Trinity occupiers are more paranoid than others. Of all the people I talked to, none seemed more reasonable and thoughtful than I.B., a 27-yearold man who says he built one of the first tents in Zuccotti Park and has been sleeping at the Trinity encampment for more than a month. I.B. speaks very slowly, pausing after every two or three words, as though to make sure that he is saying exactly what he means. Others at the camp respect him. Once, an aging hippy with wild gray hair came by holding
up a sign and shouting something about Obama, and as he passed I.B. he slapped his back and said, “You never know, he might be the next president!” I.B. smirked at the absurdity of this, but you could understand the guy’s thinking. Tall, thin and black, I.B. bears a vague resemblance to the president, and he usually wears a grey or black suit and sometimes a tie. Most days, I.B. stands over the tarp on the ground that serves as the equivalent of an information booth. Once, when I greeted him there, he told me that a woman had just stopped and exhorted him to vote in the election. When I asked how he replied, he laughed. Like many protesters throughout the movement, I.B. has no interest in electoral politics. He mentioned the National Defense Resources Preparedness act, an executive order signed by Obama this spring that gave the president unprecedented powers to appropriate national resources in the event of a national emergency. Many leftists saw this as an attempt at some sort of fascist power grab. “That convinced me that I’ll never support Obama and he’s not good for this country,” said I.B. Like many of the people at
OCCUPY WALL STREET
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
Protester Sean Gomez is photographed here with his heavily decorated guitar, covered in emblems of the Occupy movement.
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
OCCUPY WALL STREET
the camp, I.B. gets most of his information about the world from websites and blogs and from other protesters. He scoffs at the mainstream press, and although his unofficial role as the camp’s information officer requires him to talk to all sorts of people, he describes his life until now as one of extreme isolation. His father was a Muslim leader in Harlem who had five wives and 30 children, and I.B. never got along with any of them, he said. He’s never dated, and he’s never had any close friends. Until he learned about Occupy Wall Street, his main interest was the Swedish heavy metal band Opeth. At one point in his 20s he ran an online forum for fans of the band, but he never had a face-to-face conversation with any fellow enthusiasts. When I asked if he’d seen the band play, he replied, very slowly, “I’ve never been to a concert.”
AT THE PEAK of the movement,
many celebrities of the left came by Zuccotti to rally the masses: Cornel West, Naomi Klein, Joseph Stiglitz. I reached out to about a half dozen people who could be described as influential liberals, but only one, Ben Cohen, agreed to talk about
Occupy Wall Street. As the election approaches, lefties have a new cause to rally around. Although it’s still unclear whether Obama will be able to win over the disaffected young voters who took to Facebook and Twitter to share their excitement about Occupy Wall Street last fall, the argument that there’s no significant difference between the two major parties seems increasingly feeble, especially now that the Republicans have nominated a billionaire venture capitalist who has selected as his running mate a congressional leader accused of seeking to dismantle nearly all of the major liberal legislative achievements since FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s. The two classes of Occupy movement, meanwhile, have come to resemble two much larger segments of American society. The people on the street are increasingly like street people everywhere. And the people in the offices are increasingly like traditional left-wing activists. “We’ve become professionalized in a way,” said Marisa Holmes, the Hunter grad student leader who attended the Midtown meeting. “People don’t identify with that. If we become just another left movement, we will suck the life out of it.”
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
OCCUPY WALL STREET
In the last few weeks, perhaps a hundred occupiers from around the country have gathered in Tampa and Charlotte to protest the political conventions of both parties. Some protesters came from the Trinity encampment, some from the office contingent. The 15,000 reporters at the conventions barely acknowledged them. On September 17th, an indeterminate number of protesters will arrive in downtown Manhattan, the media capital of the country, hoping to capture the world’s attention once again. I.B. and the others on the corner of Wall Street and Broadway will be there to greet them — if they don’t first get arrested, that is. The afternoon of Romney’s speech to the Republican delegates in Tampa, a police captain in a white shirt and a blue-uniformed beat cop strolled up to the Trinity protesters, snatched up some of their signs and continued down Broadway. One of the protesters, a young man wearing dirty cargo shorts, ran after them. “Why are you doing this?” he shouted. “Why are you violating my constitutional rights?” The cops ignored him and crossed the street. The pro-
Zuccotti had a funding pool of nearly half a million dollars and a group of bookkeepers to manage it; Trinity has a water cooler bottle into which passersby drop 20 or 30 bucks a day. .
tester stood on the sidewalk, screaming hoarsely into the traffic while a family waiting at a nearby hotdog stand stared at him and giggled. After a minute or two the protester walked back to the camp, picked up a fresh piece of cardboard, sat back down on the sidewalk and started working on a new sign.
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
BEATING THE CLOCK PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
FEATURE_TITLE
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Faster, Stronger... Older? BY KURT HEINE PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADAM EWING
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
ome bicyclists talk about the pain cave — where the mind pushes the body beyond the normal limits of exhaustion. Lynn Bradshaw was there. ¶ Her skinny tires hit a rough patch of pavement 93 miles into a grueling, 103-mile challenge called Mountains of Misery, which she had been riding ahead of her pace from the year before. Now, as she lay sprawled next to her bike with her elbow bleeding and starting to swell, she considered what lay ahead — a murderous, 3.5-mile climb from a riverside low spot to the mountaintop finish.¶“What would you have done?” she asks, bristling at the notion that the crash — which cracked her elbow, and left her with two bone chips she still feels un-
der her skin — stymied her. “I got back on and I finished.” At 56 years old, Bradshaw — an amateur, late-in-life, competitive biker — is a statistical anomaly. The number of physically active Americans has steadily dropped since the 1950s, with less than a quarter of adults now getting the government recommendation of two and a half hours of moderate activity each week, and fewer than 5 percent doing anything vigorous enough to work up a sweat in a given day. For people ages 35 and older, even fewer get enough exercise
— a statistic that reads prophetically as the over-35 population swells from 162 million in 2010 to an estimated 229 million in 2030. But a minority of those middle-aged and beyond have found an open secret to aging well — regular activity. Within that healthy slice of the population are a growing number of people like Lynn Bradshaw, who defies the stereotype of a slow-walking old person by getting faster with age. That’s right. Bradshaw is faster now than she was in her 20s. She can outride, outswim and outrun most of the people she knows, even those much younger. A dozen women, all younger, beat her up that same southwest Vir-
FEATURE_TITLE
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Lynn Bradshaw, 56, and Andrew Thacker, 36, took part in a 56-mile ride this past summer.
ginia mountain in 2010. But hundreds of men and women — many half her age or less — didn’t. Science can’t fully explain Bradshaw’s achievement. Though some professional cyclists keep racing into their 40s, even the strongest can’t keep up with pros in their 20s and 30s. For most professionals, their performance in endurance sports begins declining at around age 35, then gradually drops until about age 60, when the speed graph nosedives. For baseball players and runners, the age of peak performance is 28. For tennis, 24. Golf, 31. Women’s gymnastics, 16.
But Bradshaw, and a cross-section of active, older people, seem to be performing outside the bounds of the professional athlete’s timeline. As America’s population gets older and heavier, Bradshaw and her kind present a scientific conundrum. How does one get faster and stronger with age? There is no exact data on how many of these middle-aged achievers exist, but one need only look around a triathlon or Iron Man competition to see them in the flesh. At the annual Hawaii Ironman, more than half of those who successfully swam, ran and biked their way to the finish line in recent years have been older than 40. The USA Triathlon registered 147,000 athletes in 2011, and their records show more
BEATING THE CLOCK
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
t the annual Hawaii Ironman, A more than half of those who successfully swam, ran and biked their way to the finish line in recent years have been older than 40. than half were older than 35. Then there’s the World Masters Games, an international endurance competition for athletes 35 and older. Far from fading away as a novelty item, the Games now draw triple the number of competitors since 1987. Thirty thousand are expected to compete in 2013. It’s no coincidence that older athletes are succeeding competitively in sports like swimming and biking. Take basketball, a sport where wear and tear and injury can slow performance over time far more than for swimmers and cyclists, according to a 2009 study published in the Journal of Exercise Science & Fitness. Though older athletes also are swelling membership in senior leagues for baseball and basketball, the low-impact nature of cycling lends itself to aging speedsters. Dozens of mountainous, 100-mile bike rides similar to Mountains of Misery — called challenge rides because participants typically challenge them-
selves with a time goal, rather than race against one another — are held annually by local bike clubs and charity groups, with names like the Savage Century, Mountain Mama and Blood, Sweat and Gears. Many are crowded with gray-haired riders, who often outride young racers. In this year’s Mountains of Misery, 13 of the top 20 finishers were older than 40. The game they’re playing, of course, has risks. Older athletes tempt a range of mishaps, from common sprains and muscle tears to crashes and heart attacks. And older athletes who go allout face longer recovery times between workouts and a class of exercise-induced strain injuries that orthopedists call boomeritis, named after hardcharging baby boomers. Still, Bradshaw’s story — and the untold others — suggest the American narrative of the primacy of youth can perhaps be rewritten. By maintaining a decent level of health and steady training, you too might be able to run a marathon, ride a bike 100 miles, or swim 3,000 meters. You might beat others
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
FEATURE_TITLE
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Bradshaw takes the lead.
BEATING THE CLOCK
your age at the same game. You might even humble those much younger.
TURNING BACK TIME
Hirofumi Tanaka, a physiologist who directs the University of Texas at Austin’s cardiovascular aging research lab, has spent decades fascinated by masters athletes, hoping to discover secrets of aging that will allow him to avoid taking drugs as he gets older. He’s 46 now, so far so good, and spends most of his time researching the subject that pays his bills — the vascular system. There’s not much funding available for studying aging athletes, he says. Still, Tanaka has made revelations that correlate with others’ research, and with the anecdotal evidence of older athletes performing at higher and higher levels. His breakthrough came in the realm of VO2 max — the scientific shorthand for the amount of oxygen a person consumes at her highest level of performance. The biggest indicator of a person’s capabilities in an athletic endurance sport, VO2 max drops roughly 10 percent a decade after about age 30 in healthy but sedentary adults. It was long believed that rule held no matter how active one was. This belief in inevitable decline went unquestioned until 2007, when Tanaka and a fellow researcher dis-
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
covered why some people can improve with time.The researchers found that exercising harder and longer as one gets older delays the decline in VO2 max. This simple discovery also helps explain why most people do get slower with age. Family and job responsibilities, injuries and a loss of enthusiasm can cut into training time, yielding a performance slowdown. Baby boomers, the 78 million Americans born from 1946 to 1964, are partly responsible for the fast track. Physical activity has been a lifelong part of many boomers’ lives. As they become emptynesters and their working careers wind down, some throw themselves into sports. The 30-somethings are watching their kids play Little League. The 50-somethings are training for Ironman and Mountains of Misery. Improvements in nutrition, training regimens and injury care also have helped increase performance, according to Tanaka. A broken collarbone, for example, a common bicycling injury that takes an average of 28 weeks to heal on its own, will only briefly sideline determined cyclists who opt for a new surgical technique. There are also some intangibles outside the realm of pure science. Tanaka cites an abstract quality as a factor in the success of older athletes: the determination to win. Why, for example, was the four-minute mile elusive for so long to runners? Once Roger Bannister smashed the milestone in 1954,
FEATURE_TITLE
AFP/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Japanese runner Kozo Haraguchi, 95, celebrates after setting the new world record of the 100m dash, 95-99 year-old class in 2005.
others routinely broke the mark. “It was a change in paradigm,” Tanaka says. “People began to think it as possible and they began to do it.” Hunter Allen, a former pro bike racer who has coached thousands of cyclists, sees determination in most of the older cyclists he trains. They’re from a generation of highly motivated achievers, and understand what he calls “the principles of success.” Some want to recapture athletic glory from their school years. Others are search-
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Sernat quo et harum quat esciet volo consecero ium et most quis dolorio natio omniet entet ut a dolumet occae voluptates vit imet quatio et qui cus unt pelliqu aeriorum.
ing for a fountain of youth, or at least a way to stay healthy, look good and feel strong. A few discovered cycling late in life and want to test their limits. “It’s a hard sport and you have to be willing to suffer,” Allen says. “That comes from a desire to win and from pushing yourself harder.” That includes the wind-in-the-face thrill of pedaling away from someone half your age. It’s also just a lot of fun. “When I ride my bike, all I’m thinking about is riding my bike,” Bradshaw says. “It’s like being a kid again. That’s what it feels like.” Bradshaw’s husband, a devoted cy-
BEATING THE CLOCK
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
clist for most of his life, convinced her to join him on her 50th birthday, around the time her son graduated high school. Now, like others who devote free time to sports, they find camaraderie, competition and much of their social life in their town’s bicycle and triathlon clubs. For Bradshaw, another strong motivator is her job. As a pharmaceutical sales representative, she has a depressing ringside view of doctors’ waiting rooms filled with people struggling with illness and weight problems. “Americans are in terrible shape,” she says. “I see that a lot.” She’s not about to let that happen to her.
TIMOTHY HIATT/GETTY IMAGES
BEYOND THE PAIN
Nor is Bernie Sanders. He was working too many hours, seven days a week, managing two restaurants and carrying almost 50 pounds of flab. His dad died at age 62, the day Sanders graduated high school. “I can’t keep this up,” he remembers thinking. He was 40 years old and he bought a bike. Sanders is now 62 himself. He’s 5-feet-9, 155 pounds and looks like a slab of metal. He won the world cycling championship for his age group in 2010, he’s still getting faster by the day, partly because of genetic luck and partly because of determination. Sanders has a hard attitude about
Iconic runner Frank Shorter at the 2012 Rock ‘n Roll Chicago Half Marathon.
training, holding a fierce pace for miles of steady, sustained hill climbing. He keeps a sticky note on his car dashboard that says, “WIN.” To Sanders, the word defines his identity. “You either are the winner or you aren’t,” he says. “Are you a whiner and do you fold up when there’s resistance, or are you the man in the mirror?” Dealing with pain, too, is a test of character to Sanders. “Some people have a very shallow pain threshold and some people can take it,” he said. “The good news is you can train for that. What’s the problem? You pass out before you die.”
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
BEATING THE CLOCK
A cross-section of active, older people seem to be performing outside the bounds of the professional athlete’s timeline. Mark Sommers, a 56-year-old Washington lawyer, races on weekends, often with cyclists half his age. Though his overall speed is no longer increasing, he remains one of the city’s fastest riders. And he’s a wizened veteran with a bag of winning tricks. He knows that staying in the game is not just a matter of physical ability and training but of strategy and determination as well. His racing team assignment is leadout man, the hardest job. He sets the race pace, keeping his team’s fastest sprinter on his back wheel, in his draft, until almost the end, when the sprinter breaks out of Sommers’ slipstream and powers past everyone. Sommers is done
before he sees the finish line. “I know my job,” he says. “I’m a domestique. I’m not going to win. But I am going to change the outcome of the race.” His body is like a pack of matches, he says. In his youth, he could recklessly competitors with ill-conceived sprints and showmanship. Plenty of matches left in the pack. Now he only has a few. “But I will burn them all,” he says. And if the day comes when he can’t lead his team to victory, he’ll stick to competing against riders his own age. Staying in winning condition, of course, takes time. Bradshaw keeps a six-day-a-week workout schedule.
“AGE CATCHES UP, EVENTUALLY”
Even people with Bradshaw’s devotion live no longer, on average, than couchsitters. They are, however, healthier. Exercise helps prevent premature death. Science can’t yet explain why. What that means in dollars is profound. A 2004 study published in Chest, the journal of the American College of Chest Physicians, proved the link between exercise and health care costs. Not surprisingly, exercisers spent less time in doctors offices — and less money on care. The study blamed 9.4 percent of the nation’s health care spending — $244 billion in 2010 — on inactivity and obesity. Of course if everyone exercised, there’d be more sports injuries. The Consumer Product Safety Commission
Neither Andrew nor Lynn could claim victory when they went head to head earlier this summer.
BEATING THE CLOCK
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
“ You either are the winner or you aren’t. Are you a whiner and do you fold up when there’s resistance, or are you the man in the mirror?” calculated the cost of baby boomers’ sports-related injuries in 1998 at $18.7 billion — a figure many times larger by now. These daredevils still don’t tax the health care system in the way of those on the couch, beset by obesity, diabetes and heart failure. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the health risks of being sedentary far outweigh those of exercise. Andrew Thacker, 36, never forgot the childhood thrill of going really fast on a bike. Thacker, a high school teacher in Roanoke, fell in love with his Trek racing bike the first time he rode it. Though he loves basketball, the steady pounding up and down the court was wearing hard on his body. Which is not surprising. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, participation in team sports like basketball drops sharply after 25, while activities such as cycling gain new followers. “I was looking for something different,” Thacker remembers. The year after he got his racing bike, somebody
stuck a flyer for a bike race under his car windshield wiper. “I thought, ‘Why not?’” He finished second. “I was hooked,” he says. By last summer, he was racing as often as he could, usually every week. He, too, was getting faster, improving on regular rides with Bradshaw and her husband, Dick. But then came September. His job and his two young daughters interrupted his training and racing schedule. By then, his shoulder had been nagging him for a month, a golf ball-sized knot reminding him of the crash in Turn 1 at the weekly parking lot. By February, when Bradshaw challenged him to sign up for this year’s Mountains of Misery, he knew he wouldn’t be able to get in shape for the Memorial Day weekend event. They settled on a 56-mile challenge later in the summer. Bradshaw beat him climbing the hills. Thacker beat her coming down. Neither was able to claim decisive victory, though Bradshaw says she held back. Thacker is now back to getting faster by the day. And if he’d lost that challenge to someone old enough to be his mom?
FEATURE_TITLE
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Training and a healthy lifestyle have led to the success of older athletes and defied common notions about old age.
“I’d have asked for a rematch,” he says. The coach Hunter Allen tells the story of a 65-year-old with a competitive dream. The guy was 40 pounds overweight and hadn’t ridden a bike since childhood. Allen set him on an exercise program. By the end of his first season, he was tagging along with his bike club on local rides. The second year, he rode in a 100-mile ride and in a local race. The
third year, he was finishing near the top of his age group in races. And in the fourth year, by then 68, the man raced in the Masters national competition in his age group. He finished 12th of 30 racers. That doesn’t prove it’s never too late. But it does show what’s possible. “There’s no question that exercise is an essential component for older age health,” says Tanaka, the University of Texas physiologist. There’s also no question of this, he says: “Age catches up eventually,” no matter what.
ADVERTISEMENT
Live.HuffingtonPost.com
|
Facebook.com/HuffPostLive
|
@HuffPostLive
Exit
STYLE
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
The Fashion Gods Have Spoken BY ELLIE KRUPNICK
HE START OF New York Fashion Week is like the first day of school for the stylish set, complete with the excitement of seeing old friends... and the fear of judgment from the cool kids. So it’s no surprise that this September as designers presented their visions for Spring 2013, the overwhelming theme was uniforms. Slick two-piece suits reigned, collars were primly buttoned to the top and the skirts were pleated,
JOE KOHEN/GETTY IMAGES
T
swingy and girlish. But designers didn’t forget to have some fun, too, splashing graphic prints in electric hues and hair streaked with neon down New York’s many runways. So we did our homework and took diligent notes, scouring more than 100 shows for the most intriguing, beautiful and boundary-pushing styles of the season. Ahead, a primer on what you’ll be seeing in spring of next year. Study it closely, kids — school is now back in session.
A model walks the runway at the Sophie Theallet show at Milk Studios on Sept. 11.
W F Y N
Exit
STYLE
• s d n e • Tr
TAP FOR DETAILS
BRIAN KILLIAN/GETTY IMAGES
BLACK LEATHER
LADYLIKE SKIRTS
Take a closer look at five trends to watch for next spring by tapping on the buttons to the left.
THE BUTTONED-UP WHITE SHIRT TWOPIECE SUITS
NEW YORK SPRING 2013
SEAFOAM BLUE
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
SPRING 2
013
W F Y N Exit
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
STYLE
• e l y t S • Street
Derek Lam show at St. John’s Center, 330 West St.
SOMETIMES THE BEST fashion happens off the runway. Check out the most stylish Fashion Week attendees we spotted while heading to and from the shows. Notice any trends?
Thakoon show at Dia Gallery, 545 W. 22 St.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RAYDENE SALINAS
Carolina Herrera show at The Theatre, Lincoln Center
Carolina Herrera show at The Theatre, Lincoln Center
Derek Lam show at St. John’s Center, 330 West St.
Derek Lam show at St. John’s Center, 330 West St.
Derek Lam show at St. John’s Center, 330 West St.
013
W F Y N
HENRY S. DZIEKAN III/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES (BECKHAM); GILBERT CARRASQUILLO/FILMMAGIC/GETTY IMAGES (OSBOURNE); CHELSEA LAUREN/GETTY IMAGES (KEYS); PAUL MORIGI/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES (GYLLENHAAL); CHELSEA LAUREN/GETTY IMAGES (CHASTAIN); STEPHEN LOVEKIN/GETTY IMAGES FOR MERCEDESBENZ FASHION WEEK (LOCHTE); JASON KEMPIN/GETTY IMAGES (BOSWORTH); DARIO CANTATORE/GETTY IMAGES FOR MERCEDES-BENZ FASHION WEEK (SHIELDS)
gs n i t h g i S ow • Front R
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
STYLE
SPRING 2
Exit
•
Alicia Keys (right) at Edun
Alexa Chung and Kelly Osbourne at Zac Posen
David Beckham at Y-3
WHEN WE’RE FAMOUS, we’re totally going to sit front row at every single fashion show. In the meantime, here are the celebs who’ve already earned their prime viewing spots.
Brooke Shields at Son Jung Wan
Maggie Gyllenhaal at Rag & Bone
Jessica Chastain (second from left) at Altuzarra Kate Bosworth at Cushnie et Ochs
Ryan Lochte at Rebecca Minkoff
Exit
FOOD
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Instant Chemistry: 6 Cocktails You’ll Love at First Sip BY RACHEL TEPPER
OCKTAILS ARE A sort of living history, many enduring from the early days of recorded drinking. More are morphed by inventive mixologists into new libations as the decades pass, creating an ever-expanding inventory of cocktails with seemingly endless combinations and possibilities. Our favorites tend to be those that build on old traditions and incorporate newly introduced trends, like the Aztec’s Mark with its fiery Tabasco punch. We also love revivals of cocktails once thought lost, like the Bliz’s Rickey and the Soyer au Champagne. But most of all, we crave cocktails that make us smack
ALAMY (NAPKIN)
C
Vieux Carré
The Vieux Carré, French for “Old Square,” originates from 1930s New Orleans and is meant to be sipped – we don’t advise drinking this heavy a cocktail quickly. Despite the sweetness from Bénédictine, it packs a wallop. It’s best consumed at a calm, steady pace, so take care not to over-dilute with too much ice.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMES WORRELL
our lips and ask for another. Of the numerous drinks we could have chosen – and there are many – we’ve selected six of the most interesting ones you may have never heard of. Some were at one point mainstream and others remain obscure, but all have a proven track record of deliciousness.
Vieux Carré
Exit
FOOD
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
The Bliz’s Rickey s ’ z i l B e h T y Ricke 2 lime or
in ice in a th f o s p m Place 3 lu ne class. Pour in up, Champagmon, raspberry syr e or le d gin. Fill to the m li / 1 mouth anger ale and stir. r Juice of on e v 1/4 lem raspberry syrup p with ginh fruit and serve. o t s it 4 dashe ermouth Garnish w v y 1 pon er gin 3/4 jigg le Ginger agarnish Fruit to hampagne flute Glass: C
The Rickey, an oft-overlooked classic cocktail with roots in 1880s Washington, D.C., was first introduced in Tom Bullock’s 1917 cocktail recipe book, The Ideal Bartender. It’s been making a resurgence thanks to some historically-minded mixologists in the capital, like The Passenger bar’s Derek Brown. Brown and his cohorts at the D.C. Craft Bartenders Guild managed to get it designated as the District’s official native cocktail. The Bliz’s Rickey is a play on the famously simple drink. The Bliz version swaps out soda water for ginger ale and adds vermouth and raspberry into the mix. The resulting concoction is sweeter than its predecessor, and a classic in its own right.
SHUTTERSTOCK (SOYER AU CHAMPAGNE); ALAMY (THE AZTEC’S MARK)
Soyer au Champagne Ice cream floats are usually relegated
The Bliz’s Rickey
as the stuff of a child’s soda fountain fantasy, but this whimsical cocktail steers them into decidedly adultsonly territory. The drink, which was first imagined in 1888 according to Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails, tempers the ice cream with brandy, Maraschino liqueur, Curacao and, most importantly, Champagne.
The Aztec’s Mark
San Francisco mixologist Neyah White created a new classic in 2007 with the Aztec Mark, a curious combination of creme de cacao, Tabasco sauce, Benedictine and bourbon. The seemingly odd slew of ingredients come together miraculously, though. A bourbon base makes for familiar territory, while the creme de cacao and herby Benedictine provide a creamy and interesting flavor profile. The Tabasco finishes it off with some mild heat.
Exit
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
FOOD
Burning Mandarin
The slow-building heat of the Burning Mandarin comes courtesy of serrano chile, which, although used sparingly in this vodka-based cocktail, packs a punch. Invented at uber-trendy Los Angeles eatery Katsuya, it’s actually one of the easiest ways for an at-home cocktail enthusiast to get on the popular spicycocktail trend.
SHUTTERSTOCK (ANGOSTURA PHOSPHATE)
Angostura Phosphate
If ever you were to take a drink with a mad scientist, the Angostura Phosphate is a fitting selection. The classic drink began its life as a tonic to cure a wide range of ailments like hangovers, upset stomachs and headaches, hence its star ingredient: acid phosphate. It was originally produced by chemical manufacturers and became a standby in pharmacies, but it quickly crossed over from lab to soda fountain to saloon. The enduring drink — now imbibed solely for pleasure — has a balanced taste with a pleasant cinnamon flavoring from the Angostura bitters.
Burning Mandarin
Exit
APPROVAL
BIANCA BOSKER
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Let’s Get Graphic
iTUNES TOP GROSSING APPS / BOOKS
FORGET STREAMING AND MULTI-TOUCH. I say the iPad is best used to appreciate the scratches of a pen. Graphic novels, a sub-genre of comics with a more literary bent, are being reinvented as they shift from shelf to screen. Handmade meets the digital age, and it never felt so good. See for yourself:
1
COMICS COMIXOLOGY FREE
2
MARVEL COMICS MARVEL ENTERTAINMENT FREE
3
COMICS
CIA: OPERATION AJAX
TOP SHELF
Comics – despite the name – is chock full of graphic novels. The app’s trademark is “guided view”: read one panel at a time in a flow manually composed by the company’s filmstudent staff.
A ballet of a book: words, images and music dance together to tell the transfixing tale of a CIAbacked coup in 1950s Iran. Always dynamic, never distracting. “Kerpow” has come into its own.
Devour work from graphic novel greats like Harvey Pekar, Alan Moore and Craig Thompson with this well-stocked e-bookstore from one of the book biz’s top indie comics imprints. Bonus: lots of free samples. Yum!
CHART SOURCE: APPLE; DATA AS OF 09/12/12
PRICE: FREE
PRICE: $4.99
BOTTOM OF THE NINTH
DARK HORSE
Two years after its debut, Apple’s iBookstore has finally carved out a “Comics & Graphic Novels” section. Reading the books can be a pain — tiny fonts require lots of zooming — but downloading is a breeze.
Graphic novel purists, avert your eyes. This self-proclaimed “first animated graphic novel” about a baseball underdog mixes animation and illustration for a sublime sensory overload in a sepiasteampunk style.
One-stop-shopping for titles from indie comics publisher Dark Horse. With series like Star Wars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you’ll find more superheroes, and fewer morose strangers graphic novels are known for.
PRICE: FREE
PRICE: $3.99
Batman and Swamp Thing and Watchmen, oh my! Never miss an issue again.
PRICE: FREE
IBOOKS
PRICE: FREE
DC COMICS DC ENTERTAINMENT FREE
4
JESUS CALLING DEVOTIONAL NELSON MEDIA, INC. $9.99
5
IPHONE SECRETS INTELLIGENTI LTD $0.99
6
STARTING YOUR DAY RIGHT DEVOTIONAL HACHETTE BOOK GROUP $9.99
7
FREE AUDIOBOOKS SPREADSONG, INC. $1.99
8
VIZ MANGA VIZ MEDIA, LLC FREE
9
THE WALKING DEAD COMIXOLOGY FREE
10
BIBLE+ OLIVE TREE BIBLE, INC FREE
I’m truly blessed to have the opportunity to beat cancer for the second time.”
Exit
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
Zach Lederer
The Undefeated Champ
BY EMMA DIAB
IF HOSPITAL-CENTRIC TV shows have taught audiences anything, it’s how to envision a recovery room: the standard whitewashed walls commonly described as “sterile,” a get-wellsoon balloon floating around, and of course, the patient laying prone in bed, groggy and hooked up to a bunch of ambiguous tubes. There may even be a PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANIEL BEDELL
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Exit relative attached to the patient’s hand, grasping, white-knuckled. But then again, there’s Hollywood, and there’s Zach Lederer. The Maryland resident, then 18, had just finished undergoing a biopsy for his second brain tumor in six years — as in, his head had been cut open while doctors worked to detach 80 to 90 percent of the growth. Friends lamented the unfairness of Lederer undergoing this ordeal again, but he wanted to showcase his triumph, beating cancer a second time. “Everybody felt really terrible I had cancer, and there I was perfectly okay with it,” he says. “Cancer could happen to anybody so it may as well be me. I’m truly blessed… to have the opportunity to beat cancer for the second time.” His silent message was a picture posted on Facebook in his hospital bed while flexing his biceps, a stoic look on his face. “Zaching,” as it came to be known, went viral as pictures came in from all over the world of people assuming the same pose in support of Lederer and the fight against cancer.
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Lederer manages the Terrapins, the University of Maryland’s basketball team.
AN ONGOING ORDEAL Lederer was not a sickly child. But at 12 years old, the sixth grader started having bouts of searing headaches and vomiting, describing the ordeal as a violent pain most people will never experience. A trip to the pediatrician re-
Exit
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
‘ZACHING’ Lederer, left, in the original viral photo taken
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF ZACH LEDERER
after his surgery last January, inspiring countless others to submit their own “Zaching” photos in solidarity. His favorites are of children undergoing treatment who submit their photos to “show how strong they are.” And yes, that is Justin Bieber in the top right corner.
vealed that it was a brain tumor, and he was rushed to Johns Hopkins University, where he was not expected to live through the night. Dr. Ben Carson, an internationally known neurosurgeon, heard about
Lederer and took on his case. In the next week, Lederer underwent five surgeries, followed by a failed biopsy. Part of his skull had to be removed while he was under an induced coma to accommodate the swelling in his brain caused by stimulation from the procedures. “The first time I realized [it was
Exit serious] was when I woke up from the coma and looked at my legs — my knee was the widest part of my leg,” he says. He even had to learn how to walk again, but none of that really got him down. “Bet you thought I was going to say I was upset and feeling sorry for myself, right?” Lederer said. “I was just loving life because I was walking again. I was vertical. I had been in a bed for probably two months.” Later, as a student at Centennial High School, Lederer, an avid sports lover, became the manager of both the football and basketball teams. He was advised to avoid participation in contact sports because of the ventricular shunt implanted into his head to drain all the fluid the tumor had blocked from flowing. A rough hit would require another surgery. But come senior year, Lederer insisted. “There was certainly a risk. I don’t want to live in a bubble,” he says. “It was so important to me that I got to play, that I got to prove myself to all my buddies.” After playing cornerback during his senior year and heading off to college that fall, where he manages the university basketball team,
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
he took another blow. As a freshman at the University of Maryland, Lederer discovered he had a brain tumor — again. “I was telling doctors that I’m way too healthy to have a brain tumor,” he says. “I kept asking ‘do you want me to do pushups, do you want me to run?’ I could do anything, yet I had a brain tumor.”
‘ZACHING’ After the biopsy and the photo that started it all, Zach underwent five chemotherapy treatments and six weeks of radiation to make sure any remnants of the tumor were killed off.
The first time I realized [it was serious] was when I woke up from the coma and looked at my legs — my knee was the widest part of my leg.” In the meantime, he was inundated with pictures of well-wishers ‘Zaching’. “The very best ones were the ones of the kids in the hospital who were taking the time to show everybody how strong they were,” he says.
Exit
The air of defiance in the pose resonated not only with Lederer’s local community, but an international audience. He was surprised to receive friend requests from strangers in Greece and Russia, who told him they saw his story in their local papers. People are Zaching in the desert, infants are Zaching (with some help), sorority girls, Justin Bieber, ESPN Analyst Michael Wilbon, a guy on a camel, Governor of Maryland Martin O’Malley, high school and university
GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK
sports teams — the list goes on. There’s even a Tumblr site set up called Zaching Against Cancer for photo submissions. For Lederer, now 19 and in remission, the future consists of returning to the University of Maryland for this upcoming semester where he will be majoring in broadcast journalism. He hopes to become an inspirational speaker in the future. “I think the best way I can use my life effectively is to become an inspirational speaker,” he says. “There’d nothing I’d love to do more than give speeches and affect other’s lives.”
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
Lederer played on his high school’s football team during his senior year, despite the health risks involved.
Exit
01
TFU
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
DONALD MIRALLE/GETTY IMAGES (AYANBADEJO); AP PHOTO/DAMIAN DOVARGANES (FAIREY); MICHAEL SMITH/NEWSMAKERS/GETTY IMAGES; SHUTTERSTOCK (HOUSE, AXE)
Politician Tries to Silence NFL Player on Gay Marriage
2
Shepard Fairey Destroyed, Fabricated Evidence in Copyright Case
3
Pat Robertson Tells Man to Become Muslim So He Can Beat His Wife
4
WOMAN TRIES TO SELL HOME, ONLY TO FIND IT’D BEEN FORECLOSED
05
Worker Asks for TINY Amount of Money, Gets His Hand Chopped Off
Exit
HUFFINGTON 09.16.12
TFU
06
SHUTTERSTOCK (BAD DREAM, TAMPONS, PELICAN); AP PHOTO/DAVID ZALUBOWSKI (STARBUCKS)
Teen Calls 9/11 Twice Over Bad Dream
7
Racist Image Drawn on Starbucks Customer’s Drink
8
DEFECTIVE, STOLEN TAMPONS SOLD TO THE PUBLIC
Man Jailed for Strangling Pelican
9
Student Tries to Start White Pride Group
10
Editor-in-Chief:
Arianna Huffington Executive Editor: Timothy L. O’Brien Executive Features Editor: John Montorio Managing Editor: Katy Hall Senior Culture Editor: Gazelle Emami Senior Politics Editor: Sasha Belenky Senior Voices Editor: Stuart Whatley Quoted Editor: MacGregor Thomson Viral Editor: Dean Praetorius Social Editor: Mia Aquino Editorial Assistant: Jenny Macksamie Editorial Intern: Emma Diab Creative Director: Josh Klenert Art Director: Andrea Nasca Photography Director: Anna Dickson Associate Photo Editor: Wendy George Designers: Eve Binder, Troy Dunham, Greg Grabowy, Gloria Pantell, Susana Soares Production Director: Peter K. Niceberg AOL Mobile SVP Mail & Mobile: David Temkin Mobile UX and Design Director: Jeremy LaCroix Product Managers: Mimmie Huang, Luan Tran Developers: Scott Tury, Mike Levine, Carl Haines, Terence Worley, Sudheer Agrawal, Jacob Knobel, Eisuke Arai Tech Leadership: Umesh Rao QA: Scott Basham, Eileen Miller Sales: Mandar Shinde, Jami Lawrence AOL, Inc. Chairman & CEO:
Tim Armstrong
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK