★★★★ The half moon in the daytime sky pointed toward the Atlantic. The early day was almost cool but damp. If the shock of first stepping into the pale green waves had been any milder, it wouldn’t have been a shock. After that, there was only the slowest ebbing of warmth while bobbing in the water. The ten-year-old let himself be carried out into the swells, while the five-year-old planted himself in the surf zone, striking defensive poses and yelling challenges at the waves. A stranger’s wayward boogie board tethered itself around an ankle. The clear sky became framed with cumulus around the edges for a while, then was brushed with cirrus overhead. In the back yard, the sun never stopped shining on the swim things hung on the pulley line. The hibiscus flowers on the east side of the yard caught the late rays, while the ones on the west side drooped in the shape of resting butterflies. The boys went quietly to the fence line to see the rabbit in the neighboring yard, then played a brief but intense game of tag on the spongy lawn. The lower clouds, stretched like veins in marble, turned pink, while through them the higher ones had become pale blue.

And stop playing yourself with scary-sounding pseudoscience.

The actual activist-spawned report says nothing of the sort. First, it is not peer-reviewed, but if you dig through the report it does show replicates and statistics, and describes the methods used to measure the target compounds. They used appropriate negative controls. The numbers are likely reliable.

But this is not how we publish data, as the tiny amounts found are biologically inconsequential. The approach here mirrors that used by food fear mongers everywhere, as they try to push a political agenda by scaring you away from your safe food. They do it by detecting trace amounts, parts per billion (that’s seconds in 32 years) amounts of a scary-sounding chemical in a common food item.

A Heaping Helping of Macaroni and Chemophobia

Yes, you are going to die, but not from your Kraft intake, much as the New York Times might have frightened you last week. Please don’t get me started on tampons.

What’s the real significance of a harmless physical malformation?

Around 117 years ago, a thirty-something anthropologist named William Curtis Farabee heard about members of a family, the Davys, who shared an intriguing trait. Thirty-seven people in this family had malformations of the hands and feet with shortening of the fingers and toes. They otherwise appeared normal, and suffered no problems from their condition, other than some difficulty in knitting and playing the piano. They thrived as farmers, homemakers, teachers, mechanics, and weekend baseball players.

Farabee, who had been one of the first people in the U.S. to go for a Ph.D. in the field of physical anthropology, headed from Harvard to Pennsylvania to examine and interview the Davys. He measured their digits, traced the outlines and took photos of their feet and hands, detailed their family tree, and made plaster casts and x-rays of the malformed parts. Farabee noticed that the shortening of the digits always resulted from one or more unusually small phalanges, or the segments between the joints.

After spending time with this family, Farabee completed his dissertation in 1903, giving the first genetic analysis of people afflicted with this condition that now bears the awkward name of brachydactyly. The Davys, of course, weren’t the first people to have it. They inherited it from their ancestors, and fossil evidence has since turned up showing that people even had it in prehistoric times.

Today, brachydactyly is categorized into five types. I know one of them, type D (or BDD), intimately. When my daughter was about 13 years old, she matter-of-factly informed me that she had deformed hands. My puzzled expression prompted her to present her thumbs. They are small and stubby, and her thumbnails are short and wide. Maybe I’m a somewhat unmindful parent, but I had never before noticed how her thumbs looked. Then she showed me her big toes, which are shaped the same way.

She told me not to worry, though, because the actor Megan Fox has the same condition, and she’s doing fine. Also, there was a Facebook group devoted to her malformation.

Not completely reassured, I did some research on brachydactyly. People with types A, B, C, and E have misplaced or missing digits, fingers and toes of wildly varying lengths, and other easily noticeable differences. Those with BDD only have shortened terminal phalanges on the thumbs or toes, resulting in irregularities that aren’t very obvious. One researcher called it a trait “of minor clinical importance” that persists at a low level in the genetic makeup of our species because people who have it experience no particular harm or benefit.

Minor or not, BDD occurs in enough people — 1 to 1.5 percent of the world population, more prevalent among some ethnicities — to have acquired nicknames. Those nicknames are not all nice. “Stub thumb” and “potter’s thumb” seem not too bad. “Dutch thumb” sounds bigoted, and “clubbed thumb” suggests a disability more debilitating than it really is. But the most common nickname, “murderer’s thumb,” is especially nasty.

I blame the popularity of that last nickname on palm readers, who for more than a hundred years have shouted alarm and assigned brutish qualities to the people who present their adorable thumbs for examination. The palmists spout all kinds of nonsense about BDD — for instance, that thumbs are the receptacles of our will, and someone with a wide and stubby thumb must be bottling up that will at the risk of it suddenly exploding out in violence. Or that BDD identifies people prone to uncontrollable rages because they’re crippled by coarseness and stubbornness. “Their brutal instincts being strong,” wrote palmist William George Benham in his 1901 manual The Laws of Scientific Hand Reading, “jealousy most often has led them to fits of violent rage, and the terrible qualities of the clubbed thumb have given them passion and determination strong enough to take human life.” The good news was that the palm-readers also thought criminals with short thumbs lacked the reason and forethought to actually plan out a violent act.

For years, fortune-tellers and pseudo-scientific criminologists, riding a wave of century-old thinking that connected physical attributes with aberrant behavior, insisted that our prisons were full of violent felons tellingly afflicted with brachydactyly. That wasn’t true, of course, but the belief in the criminal significance of the condition trickled into pop culture. A 1916 silent film titled The Spatulate Thumb, co-written by the celebrity actor Lionel Barrymore, told the story of a murderer whose incriminating thumb leads to his identification as a killer by an observant lawyer. Four years later, a story by the pulp novelist J. Allan Dunn, published in the popular magazine The Argosy, featured a villain whose opened hand revealed “a narrow palm, a clubbed thumb.…He was stamped as evil from his birth!”

While few people other than palm readers still think of BDD as inherently evil, the condition continues to have a shady reputation, even among those who have it. When I’ve brought up BDD on social media and blogs, the number of people who reply with shame or embarrassment is striking. “I have these ‘hammer thumbs,’ as my grandfather used to call them,” one wrote, “Ha hah, well I inherited these thumbs which at times I feel have ruined my life. No, but seriously I’m a nail tech, and at times I would love to make nail videos, but with these thumbs I’d probably scare people away!” Another said, “I have thumbs like this on both hands, and I used to be bullied because of it. It’s frustrating when it comes to nail videos, because I wanted to make videos like nail tutorials, but I was worried that my thumbs would be made fun of. I can’t even get acrylics at a nail salon.”

That discomfort goes beyond feeling stymied in making nail videos. “I just have one clubbed thumb on my left hand,” another commenter wrote. “It sucks when u get labeled as an evil murderer just for inheriting a genetic mutation. I get really down about it. No one in my family that I know of has this. I hate looking at it. I hide it all the time. I seriously just want to chop it off. It looks so disgusting to me.”

It made me sad to read that response. One of Farabee’s findings more than a century ago was that the forms of brachydactyly he studied passed from one generation to the next in accordance with the laws of heredity that Gregor Mendel had theorized some 50 years earlier — and in fact Farabee’s research offered the first confirmation that the principles of heredity applied to humans as well as to other animals and plants. So there should be no stigma or self-recrimination attached to short thumbs or toes, and there’s absolutely no reason to think that their presence signifies anything other than the result of a genetic toss of the dice.

My daughter has never harmed anyone and rarely loses her temper. She’s not a violent offender, and she doesn’t pack her stored will into her digits to the point of explosion. I look at her thumbs and toes and think they’re cute — and more. They tell an engrossing story of human variety and genetics. Without them, she’d be someone else. This dad is proud that his kid has murderer’s thumbs.

Jack El-Hai (@Jack_ElHai on Twitter) writes about the history of medicine. He is the author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WW2.

And other answers to questions you didn’t ask.

“I don’t think a lady should be ‘Doctor Who.’ Does that make me a bad person?” — Sci Fi Steve

Science fiction used to be a Fortress of Solitude for sad little white guys to play Dungeons and Dragons with each other and not feel bad that they had no lives at all and could never get laid. But, it turns out that being a sad little white guy is not required to enjoy science fiction. With the dawn of the age of computer special effects, now the worlds of comic books and space ships can be enjoyed by a mass audience, thrilled with stories of heroes and villains. It’s better than reading excel spreadsheets all day.

Sadly, whenever their little boys’ club gets invaded by the lady folk, sad little white guys sulk. These days they do their sulking on the internet. And social media has given us all the illusion that all our opinions matter equally. They don’t. Many people have terrible opinions. Before computers they used to just die inside their brains unspoken.

I used to play basketball in my driveway every day. I had long giant games against Jeff Weinstock that really should have their own “ESPN: 30 for 30.” One day when Jeff wasn’t home Shirah Weinstock wanted to play me in basketball. She beat me like 21–2. I learned a few things that day, like I am not good at basketball, and Shirah was better at basketball than me.

As much as you and your buddies would like to live in a Mommy-only Universe, women are out there. They are smart and brave and have good ideas and can do stuff. You will fundamentally have to deal with this, or you will die alone in your mother’s basement, with only your action figures to attend your funeral. So deal with it!

So, yes, it does make you a bad person. It’s also fundamentally against most of the things that the Doctor on “Doctor Who” represents. The show is about outsmarting people and getting your way without using weapons. The Doctor is wise and good, driven by altruism and thoughtfulness. Surely a lady could pull this off even better than a man.

Most men I know, if they had access to a time machine, would not waste time using it to save people for no reason. They would probably use it to pick up players on their fantasy baseball teams they knew would hit a bunch of home runs. Or go back in time and buy up all the copies of X-Men #1. Sure, they would also use it the same way that the regular Doctor used it: to impress ladies. You just pick them up in your time machine and drag them all over the galaxy so they can risk their lives with you.

Perhaps you are attracted to Doctor Who’s need to mansplain. That’s mostly just a necessity of the exposition, not a life choice. The Doctor’s companion generally stands in for the TV-watching audience, so when the Doctor explains the “timey-whimey” aspects of space and time travel, he can explain it to someone. Surely a lady can do this as well as a man? Plus, he has joked about being a lady before. So you can’t say you weren’t warned, broflakes. If the conceit is that if the character can completely regenerate its body, why has he already regenerated 13 times in a row as a white British dude?

When I first started watching “Doctor Who” it was a tall British guy with a scarf. The most important thing about him wasn’t his gender, it was that damned scarf. Why was it so long? And he wore it year-round. Indoors, outdoors. He was as mysterious a figure as the Monkee who never took off his hat. Also, I could barely understand a word Doctor Who said. Because he was British and on PBS. The episodes were frequently shown not in order, he generally spoke about stuff that had happened in episodes I’d never seen. And that accent—no wonder we had an American Revolution. All I knew was that he had a time machine and scarf that he should have tripped over every day (and that probably contributed to his death).

Maybe you grew up in a world where only Uhura and Princess Leia were allowed into the Science Fiction Boy’s Club. But there are way more women in the universe than just one per Sci Fi series. This way you don’t accidentally make out with your sister, like Luke Skywalker. If we’ve learned anything it’s that women can be captains, jedis, ninjas, assassins, cops, lawyers, queens, whatever it takes to make a TV show or movie good.

This was the rule with “Doctor Who” Doctors, too. Whenever a new one comes along you’re like ??? but when you give them a chance, they are all kind of great in their own ways. Why can’t you give the new Doctor Who a chance, nerds? If you really like Doctor Who there’s still the Tardis and the Daleks and everything. If she’s anything like my mom, she can probably beat those daleks to death with a wooden spoon. I lived in fear of that spoon! Ow! I can still feel it, Mom!

If you watch Doctor Who for the hulking masculinity of David Tennant or Matt Smith, ah, OK. You probably wanted Wonder Woman to be cast as a man, too. And the Ghostbusters forever and ever. If the appearance of a lady lead in your favorite TV series is enough to send you into a tizzy, you probably don’t like the series all that much. What are you going to do? Give up TV? I don’t think so. Grumble a little softer and give Rey, Doctor Who, Thor, Wonder Woman and the Ghostbusters a chance. Watching them is way more fun than reading.

Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City, NJ and works at a bookstore.

Notes on life

by Liana Finck

You’re going nowhere.

Weren’t we just here? Wasn’t it moments ago that we were waking up to a new week, full of dread and barely able to drag ourselves to the starting line? Didn’t we just complain about how exhausted we were and wonder how much more we could take? I guess the good news is I can copy and paste this exact block of text over and over again until it finally all comes down, because we live in a world where it’s always like this now. Here’s some music. Enjoy.

★★ The sun held back nothing in either heat or glare. The air above the sidewalk smelled like a pet store. A busy flower-print dress flickered wildly in a sustained gust of breeze. Even after the clouds arrived to shut off the excess of light, the hot air squeezed the ears. “I’m sweating!” the five-year-old announced, on the way into the 18th Street station. His brother had already declared it hard to breathe. What appeared to have been ice cream was spilled and baked into the floor of the turnstile. Uptown a strong wind blew as if it meant something, but nothing came beyond a few desultory drops. After dinner, the smoke from a burning manhole stuck to the haze; a beer later, the fire was still sending out fumes to fill the roadway. All that was coming out of the clouds was the excess white light from spilling up out of midtown.

SECRET SERVICE AGENTS are escorting JARED to the White House where IVANKA is maintaining her snack drawer, with her daughter. STEVE BANNON is consolidating power, again, and screaming, via megaphone, about how even though MITCH MCCONNELL kept Justice Scalia’s seat open for an entire year, what has he done for him lately. He is also lighting a hibachi grill he has pilfered from CLARENCE THOMAS. SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS is sitting at her desk, wearing noise-canceling headphones so she doesn’t hear anything and therefore, even accidentally, know what she is talking about.

SECRET SERVICE AGENTS [in unison]: We found him in a Cabela’s on the Eastern Shore, eating freeze-dried chili mac with beef.

IVANKA [sternly]: Jared. Corey. Kushner.

SECRET SERVICE AGENTS [in unison]: And using a file share over an unsecured network.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [precociously showing off knowledge she has acquired because of her Spanish-immersion summer camp]: What’s cabellas? Like, female hair?

IVANKA [powerfully]: It’s a gun store.

JARED [misremembering how he ended up at a sporting goods store on the Eastern Shore]: I was looking for a tent.

IVANKA [calmly]: Thank you, officers. We — [IVANKA snaps her fingers at her private security detail.] — will take him from here.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [tugging at JARED’s shirt]: Daddy, what’s a gun store?

STEVE BANNON [placing non-kosher hot dogs on CLARENCE THOMAS’s grill]: A gun store is what will save Western civilization.

IVANKA [to JARED]: Go sit over there with Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I need to figure out what I’m going to do with you.

[JARED complies with IVANKA and finds a seat across from SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS, who is not doing anything. STEVE BANNON asks JARED, in Dothraki, whether he wants a non-kosher hot dog and then laughs hysterically when JARED looks to IVANKA and then SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS for a translation. SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS points to her headphones and mimes that she can’t understand either STEVE BANNON or JARED.]

JARED [pleadingly, to IVANKA]: I would’ve come back. It’s exhausting scanning the crowds to make sure there’s no one from camp or college or law school or business school who can run into me.

IVANKA: At a gun store? [IVANKA chucks food whose sell-by date is tomorrow into the garbage.] Jared, you’ll only be attending low-level meetings until we know whether you also responded to the Russian oligarchs. Don Junior is only trying to impress Daddy. I can’t think of why you’d be — [IVANKA’s phone buzzes.] — Ugh, it’s KAC. Are you butt-dialing her again, Steve?

[STEVE BANNON paws for his phone, in one of the left pockets of his cargo shorts, and scrolls through his recent calls.]

STEVE BANNON [in Dothraki and in English]: No.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [sensibly]: Don’t answer, Mommy.

IVANKA [proud that her daughter has learned how to manage up, but ultimately ignoring her advice]: The American people wanted a television show and that’s what we’re giving them. [Answering her phone] Hello Kellyanne. Your bitmoji looks nothing like you.

[STEVE BANNON mimes to IVANKA that he needs to tell KELLYANNE CONWAY something. He grabs her phone.]

STEVE BANNON [charring his disgusting hot dogs]: KAC, it’s Steve. Tell Mitch McConnell that when he repeals Obamacare, to replace it with air conditioners. [STEVE BANNON mimes a noose.] Yes, just fucking air conditioners. We’ve already seized the Carrier factory to manufacture the most energy-inefficient ones possible.

[STEPHEN MILLER emerges from the bathroom off of the Oval Office and writes on a white board, “TRUMP = dismantle admin. state + dismantle Antarctica”. He says nothing and then exits.]

STEVE BANNON [skewering a hot dog onto a bun and slathering it with ketchup]: Look, I don’t give a shit about heroin addicts in Maine. I’m not going to be lectured by someone whose tits are as fake as the Clinton News Network. [STEVE BANNON eats the hot dog, hoovering it so quickly that he nearly chokes to death.] That’s not her? [STEVE BANNON coughs until the pork product dislodges from his throat.] Huh. I guess I don’t know who Susan Collins is.

[STEVE BANNON mimes to no one that he needs a drink. Meanwhile, the KUSHNER DAUGHTER begins building a diorama depicting a scene from The House on Mango Street. JARED thumbs through the accompanying paperback, and is baffled his daughter is reading at this grade level. He shows the book to SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS who finally removes her headphones.]

SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS [hearing her voice for the first time today]: The Steves said I should wear noise-canceling headphones so that way I have no clue what’s happening around me. The other day I had to Google what smoking gun means.

JARED [flipping through his DAUGHTER’s book]: Yeah, same. Can you believe she’s reading a chapter book already? We’d be so lost without Ivanka.

[STEVE BANNON tosses a burnt hot dog in JARED’s direction. JARED flinches so theatrically that he knocks over the table his DAUGHTER is working on.]

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [precociously]: This is why we can’t have nice things.

IVANKA [writing a lawyer phone tree onto the white board, and then triple underlining the phrase Do Not Erase]: Baby doll, what did I say about making victim noises like that?

[GARY COHN jogs into the West Wing, triggering STEVE BANNON because he reminds him of BILL CLINTON running to McDonald’s during his heady first term. GARY COHN beelines to JARED, who has begun to read The House on Mango Street. STEVE BANNON sits, wondering if his chest pains are phantom.]

JARED [letting his guard down because he considers GARY COHN his mentor]: Ivanka says that even though our voters don’t read books, we still should.

GARY COHN [rewriting the tax code on his phone]: What’s the last book you actually finished?

JARED [confidently, for him]: American Pastoral. My senior year of high school.

GARY COHN [sending his changes to MITCH MCCONNELL who replies immediately, “air conditioners??”]: Bullshit.

JARED: I swear.

GARY COHN [responding to MITCH MCCONNELL that he has no clue what he is talking about]: Okay, so what, that was five years ago? I’ve read the first page of Moneyball on my last fourteen summer vacations. Page 1. And I’m the most powerful person in America without Ivanka’s last name. Your father-in-law’s voters read books. Just check a bestseller list, if you doubt me. [He looks for a New York Times but then remembers where he is.] Come on, let’s go for a run, Jared.

STEVE BANNON [his breathing moderating enough to mock]: Let’s go for a run, Jared.

GARY COHN [rifling through his briefcase]: Here, use these. [GARY COHN tosses JARED gym shorts emblazoned with the Goldman Sachs corporate logo.] Ivanka, I know he’s on punishment, as we discussed, but we’re only going for a run. [GARY COHN nudges JARED to stand up.] I read in one of the Bannon profiles that he used to run five miles every day at lunch. If that sea cow caught in a commercial fisherman’s net ever was able to do that, we certainly can today.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [channeling Wikipedia]: Manatees inhabit marshy coastal rivers. Commercial fishermen would never —

STEVE BANNON [scrubbing clean CLARENCE THOMAS’s grill]: Enjoy your run, Democrats.

GARY COHN [hedging]: Steve, I’d be doing the same thing with Bill Clinton, if Hillary won. Money is bipartisan. Right, Jared?

[JARED, GARY COHN and the SECRET SERVICE AGENTS leave for their run. STEVE BANNON then reads aloud from JARED’s SF86 and literally pisses himself, as IVANKA and her DAUGHTER buy things together from IVANKA’s phone and SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS Googles to figure out what a moneyball is.]

Tamara Shopsin, ‘Arbitrary Stupid Goal’

“That’s just roasted potatoes and zucchini,” the artist, writer, and cook Tamara Shopsin said, cheerfully, as screechy feedback interrupted our phone call, signaling, presumably, that her dinner was ready. She joked about the priority the meal took over talking about her book, echoing her press-averse father, Kenny, who’s been called Buddha and compared to the Soup Nazi.

The book is Arbitrary Stupid Goal, Shopsin’s second memoir, and it chronicles her life growing up at her family’s general store-turned-restaurant in New York City’s West Village, with her parents, four siblings, and one larger-than-life family friend, Willy, who should unquestionably have his own biopic by 2020.

It reads like you how dream that telegraphs once functioned, or wish text messages worked today. Every anecdote is a taut, warm, fully immersive plunge into the West Village of the ’80s and ’90s that returns you to the surface well before you ever require oxygen.

You’re in a boiler room apartment, feeding an old man or giving him a bath. You open the store to find regular John Belushi (who had his own set of keys) passed out in a chair. Your neighbor earns cash on the side by tying up dudes in his mirror-ceilinged fuck pad. Your dad Kenny is telling a customer to get the fuck out because they threw off the balance of the store.

It all happens in a world post–Etan Patz and pre–Find My iPhone. The Shopsin parents trusted that their kids wouldn’t mess things up too bad, and empowered them to be whoever the hell they wanted. Shopsin’s 8-year-old brother survived a solo subway mission to the Museum of Natural History, thanks to his resourcefulness and access to a payphone. Another brother was gifted an early Apple computer when the family couldn’t afford it, because their parents could see how passionate he was.

“I don’t know what the reverse of a helicopter parent is, but that’s what my parents were,” Shopsin explained, letting her dinner get cold. “We were allowed to wander by ourselves. It was heaven on earth. My parents were very Zen.”

The neighborhood could be dangerous. The shop got stuck up, a lot. The AIDS epidemic bewildered everyone. And there were “lowlifes” on the block. Once, after a neighbor expressed interest in a little girl, he was kept at arm’s length, but the police weren’t called. People had conversations and (sometimes reluctantly) helped each other out.

Arbitrary Stupid Goal never feels gauzy or nostalgic—no one pines for an era when a neighbor made sure to call you a fat Jewish bastard every time you came home. The reader is left realizing that it’s pretty weird to live in a city of eight million people whom we mostly successfully ignore now, even when we’re wedged together in a failed subway car.

Shopsin’s sketches end when they need to. As in her previous memoir, Mumbai, Scranton, New York, the book’s layout reflects this efficiency. And the rhythm she establishes in the process, both rewards attention-challenged minds and leaves them wondering, “Then what happened?”

To Shopsin, “What happened,” is all in the book. And if it’s not, you don’t need to know. Especially if you’re some creep calling her up asking about her life. I learned as much when we set out in her new neighborhood — which she’d prefer no one knows about—to hunt for a good spot to film the napkin-folding video above (a customer taught her these tricks when she was little). She was amiable, but reluctant to talk much about herself. So much so that I said to her, “Treat it like a game show. Just say ‘skip’ or ‘pass’ when I ask you something you don’t wanna talk about.”

Later that day we spoke on the phone. In advance of many “skips,” she laughed and told me I created a monster. She talked at length about the best kitchen burn cream — Silvadene, but not much else, and the interview was put out of its misery, leaving the book to do what it was intended to do.

‘Arbitrary Stupid Goal’ is out July 18 from MCD/FSG Books.

From Everything Changes, the Awl’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

I got an email recently from a reader named Dakota:

Have you ever done an edition asking readers how they knew that they were with the partner they wanted to be with forever? I’ve been doing some serious thinking about that question in my own life, and it occurred to me that you might have done, or be interested in doing, a readers’ answer edition based on that question.

Why thank you, Dakota, I would.

Let’s expand this to friendship, too. To put it in Shondaland terms, how did you know your person was your person?

Let me know here.