“When a Plague Outbreak Threatened to Overrun San Francisco - The Daily Beast” plus 3 more

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• When a Plague Outbreak Threatened to Overrun San Francisco - The Daily Beast
• Rat infestation plagues New Zealand town - CNN
• 26 Amazing Books by LGBTQ+ Authors You Should Add to Your Bookshelf - Mental Floss
• How not to unfriend your grandmother on Facebook - Washington Examiner

When a Plague Outbreak Threatened to Overrun San Francisco - The Daily Beast Posted: 26 May 2019 12:00 AM PDT Wong Chut King knew that to live in San Francisco was to remain in the shadows. At the age of 41, he had passed the majority of the last two decades of his life in dank, dark rooms, spending as little as he could to ensure his survival. Whatever money he did manage to keep from his job at a rat-infested lumberyard on Pacific Street he sent back to his wife and parents in his native village of Bei Keng, a tiny hamlet located in the southwest corner of China's Guangdong province. He had arrived in California—known in his native Cantonese as Gum Shan, or the Gold Mountain—in the mid-1880s, most likely having been recruited from his village by a labor broker who covered the cost of the long trip across the Pacific to Canada. Once there, he made his way across the unguarded border and headed south toward San Francisco. He traveled by foot and wagon along the coast, unnerved by the towering redwoods—taller than any structure he had ever seen—rising above him, and felt the chill of the Pacific seep into his bones as he lay alone at night, trying to remember the warm, humid air flowing off the rivers at home. He expected a hard life once he reached the city, and he soon found it. The first known Chinese immigrants had reached California during the frenzy of the Gold Rush in 1849, and within five years there were forty thousand Chinese living in the state. The influx of newcomers, with foreign habits and their foreign tongues, prompted lawmakers in some of the first sessions of California's new state legislature to pass a series of discriminatory acts targeting Asians. The Chinese Exclusion Act—the first major federal law to restrict immigration into the United States— passed in 1882, prompted by fears among white Americans that Chinese labor was pushing wages down. Ten years later, California congressman Thomas Geary introduced the Geary Act, which when passed extended the Chinese Exclusion Act by ten years and required Chinese residents to carry a certificate of residence with them at all times under penalty of deportation or a year of hard labor. With even those who had once entered the country legally banned from becoming citizens or owning property, Chinese residents of San Francisco crammed into 12 blocks surrounding Portsmouth Square, a plaza which stood at the center of the original Spanish settlement of Yerba Buena. There, within yards of the site where the first American flag in the city had been raised, Chinese immigrants created a self-contained neighborhood that seemed transported from the other side of the world. Chinese characters painted in black and gold hung from buildings, sharing space with lanterns dangling from slanting wooden balconies. Gates decorated with dragons or lions designed to ward off ghosts and other evil spirits enclosed makeshift courtyards. Second-floor brothels and opium dens run by tongs—secret societies that often overlapped with the underworld— catered to the weaknesses of a population that was almost entirely male and became a draw for white tourists and sailors. For many, their adventure to California was meant to be short-lived, a chance to strike it rich and then return to their villages wealthy men. Wong walked the streets of San Francisco with the top of his head shaved and a long, braided ponytail known as a queue trailing down his back, a symbol of loyalty to the emperor and a necessity for any man wishing to return to China. With only enough money on hand to keep him from starvation, he faced most days clad in a long, flowing black shirt and black pants, the darkness of the cloth hiding its grime. He could neither read nor write, leaving him reliant on his imagination to keep up with the daily life of his family as it unspooled back at home. On days when his loneliness seemed more than he could bear, he spent hours in cramped theaters watching long-winded reenactments of traditional Chinese dramas, aching for anything that offered a sense of familiarity while he was exiled across the Pacific. He lived in the Globe Hotel, located at the corner of Dupont and Jackson, a ramshackle building known throughout the city for the illegal gambling which took place within its narrow rooms. Nearly three hundred people packed into the four-story structure, creating a notorious tenement that, upon a tour of the establishment, left the San Francisco Chronicle to report, "like rats in a barrel, poor, unwashed heathens crowd together in little cubby-holes." Even in a place known for its filth, Wong's quarters were repellent. His room was located beneath the sidewalk in a space dug out from the original cellar. Liquid from an underground cesspool leaked through the wooden boards lining the room, creating a smell so pungent as to make visitors gag upon entry. A small open pit functioned as his only toilet. He shared his bed with two or three roommates, each man sleeping on the wooden mattress in turn. A solid block of wood served as his pillow. Sticks of burning incense and an untouched glass of wine—meant to curry favor with the gods of health and medicine—sat on a dirty crate in the middle of the room. Above it ran the pipe of an unused sewer line, home to a nest of rats that scampered in the shadows cast by a flickering oil lamp. Dreams, when they did come, allowed Wong to gaze upon the face of his wife and family as they praised him for his sacrifices, a thought that broke the misery of his life. He continued to work and send remittances to his village until late February 1900, when he noticed a lump in his right groin that was painful to the touch. It soon became difficult to move his leg or urinate without agony. Fearful that he had contracted a venereal disease that would bring him shame, he consulted a prominent physician, Wong Woo, in his office at 766 Clay Street. The doctor confirmed his suspicions and recommended salty foods and cooling herbs to drain the lump, following the traditional Chinese medical approach that regarded illness as a sign of disharmony in the body. Wong returned to his subterranean room and prayed, hoping that his indiscretions would be forgiven. Over the next few days, his temperature climbed, and he began to lose control of his body, spending his few waking moments alternating between vomiting, diarrhea, and delusions. As it became clear that Wong would not recover, the men sharing his living quarters grew more distant. Cantonese tradition carried a marked aversion to death, lest one become tainted by so-called killing airs that led to bad luck. The practice dated back to the biblical-era Han dynasty and confounded native-born Americans. "Nearly every week the police discover some wretched unfortunate that has been left to die in an underground den by unnatural relatives or friends," wrote Cosmopolitan magazine. "Medical attention or proper care he will get none. Slow starvation in a noisome cellar, in the hour of thick darkness, with vermin swarming over the helpless sufferer—such is the fate that has befallen many a poor creature in Chinatown." Wong's roommates carried his still-breathing body to a coffin shop two blocks away. Once he was brought inside, he was placed in one of the "halls of tranquility" that Chinese funeral homes maintained for the gravely ill, pungent rooms in which the dying were often placed next to open coffins and the bodies of unburied dead as they waited for the inevitable. There Wong lay until he died on the afternoon of March 6, 1900, a passing altogether unremarkable in a city that had never noticed his existence. The shop's owner, Wing Sun, wrapped the body in canvas and prepared a simple pine coffin for burial and eventual retrieval. Funeral home directors were responsible for maintaining the custom of shipping the bones of Chinese immigrants back to their native villages following total decomposition of the flesh. Once back in China, their remains would be reburied in a family plot, allowing the dead to take their place among their ancestors and be worshiped by the living. "In a new era of steamships and global trade, it seemed only a matter of time before a plague-infected passenger would step off a dock and into a new city." An assistant city health officer by the name of Frank Wilson entered the coffin shop later that evening as part of his normal rounds, during which he issued burial permits for a fee of three dollars each. Wilson had recently drawn the ire of the acting police chief for signing death certificates that even he admitted were mostly guesswork, and with the help of an interpreter examined Wong's body with a thoroughness that was unusual for a man who routinely chalked up benign deaths to nonexistent bullet and knife wounds. He soon discovered an egg-shaped black lump on the right groin that he would have never found if he had not been afraid of losing his job. Alarmed by what he saw, Wilson called in his supervisor, Aloysius O'Brien. O'Brien was a surgeon and graduate of the University of California who had been recently reinstated to his position after an argument with his superiors at the Board of Health and, like Wilson, was eager to prove his worth. He inspected the body and instinctively stepped back in fear. There, on the dead man's groin, was what appeared to be an infected lymph node swollen with blood—a textbook example of a bubo, which gives bubonic plague its name. Plague had emerged without warning in the rural province of Yunnan in south central China in the late 1870s, unleashing death on a scale not seen in centuries. In China, some ten million people died within a span of five years; by the end of 1910, another five million would perish as plague emerged in India, Australia, Scotland, and North Africa, sparking fears that the Black Death–a 14th-century worldwide outbreak of plague that in some areas killed 60 percent of the population–had returned. In a new era of steamships and global trade, it seemed only a matter of time before a plague-infected passenger would step off a dock and into a new city, unleashing a disease that could kill an otherwise-healthy victim within two days. Now, for the first time, it appeared that the disease had emerged in North America. Despite the late hour, the men summoned William Kellogg, who had become the city's first bacteriologist just two months before. Kellogg rushed to the coffin shop and took samples from the dead man's lymph nodes, taking care to disinfect every instrument that touched the body. Everything before him suggested that the disease had slipped into the city, yet he was hesitant to act. Six months before, an overly-zealous doctor had erroneously identified two Chinese men who had arrived in San Francisco aboard a ship called the Nippon Maru as plague victims, a misidentification which caused a citywide scandal and cost the doctor his job. Kellogg instead readied tissue samples to take across the bay to the Marine Hospital Service station on Angel Island, where Joseph Kinyoun–a man once known as among the most brilliant doctors in the federal health service until a clash of egos between him and the Surgeon General had led to his banishment to San Francisco–would have the responsibility of announcing to the world that plague had reached American shores. It was a moment that Kinyoun had feared ever since the first case of plague had been reported in Honolulu just three months before. All it would take was for one infected victim to board a train heading East to spread the disease across the continent, enveloping the country in a wave of death that would overwhelm any attempt at containment. At an emergency Board of Health meeting late that night, spooked health officials took the unprecedented step of imposing what they called a "precautionary" quarantine of Chinatown, essentially sealing a neighborhood that contained nearly 20 percent of the city's residents with ropes and bayonets. The best they could hope for was that Wong's death was just a fluke—one diseased man who had somehow bypassed Kinyoun's officers, not a harbinger of worse things to come. As Kellogg raced toward the dock, the still of the night was broken by dozens of policemen assembling around the borders of Chinatown. There, lit by moonlight and gas lamps, they unspooled rope and strung it around the district, hoping that it would help curtail the spread of a disease that no one knew how to defeat. San Francisco had long known that plague was a possibility; now it faced an outbreak that if it was not contained could kill millions. David K. Randall is a senior reporter at Reuters and The New York Times best-selling author of Black Death at the Golden Gate, Dreamland, and The King and Queen of Malibu. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

Rat infestation plagues New Zealand town - CNN Posted: 17 Jun 2019 12:17 AM PDT [unable to retrieve full-text content]Rat infestation plagues New Zealand town  CNN A beachside New Zealand suburb known for roaming chickens and yoga has become infested with hordes of unwelcome guests: large, writhing rats.

26 Amazing Books by LGBTQ+ Authors You Should Add to Your Bookshelf - Mental Floss Posted: 20 Jun 2019 09:00 AM PDT With the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots coming up on June 28, it seems like the entire country is celebrating LGBTQ+ Pride. But what happens on July 1, when all the rainbow logos and flags get put away for the year? Don't worry—we've got a list of incredible books by LGBTQ+ authors to keep you occupied all year long. Like the queer community itself, this reading list is diverse and exciting, representing a wide variety of genres, time periods, and identities. Here are 26 great books to add to your bookshelf. 1. Fingersmith // Sarah Waters Sarah Waters is the reigning queen of lesbian historical mysteries, and Fingersmith is her answer to Oliver Twist—only with more, well, twists. So-called "genre" stories rarely get recognized for major literary prizes, but Fingersmith not only won the Crime Writers Association's 2002 Historical Dagger award, and it was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize that year. Find it: Amazon 2. Eighty-Sixed // David Feinberg In the last few years, a host of historical novels have delved into the first wave of the AIDS crisis, from Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers to Joseph Cassara's House of Impossible Beauties. But no retrospective look captures the unknowability of the queer community's sudden descent into the plague years as well as David Feinberg's seminal Eighty-Sixed, which blends humor, fear, loss, and anger into a genuinely fun—if incredibly harrowing and sad—chronicle of the 1980s. Find it: Amazon 3. Stone Butch Blues // Leslie Feinberg Winner of the 1994 Stonewall Book Award, Stone Butch Blues is one of the earliest American novels told from the point of view of a genderqueer, trans-masculine person—a "stone butch," in the parlance of the 1970s (when the majority of the book is set). Leslie Feinberg's last words were "remember me as a revolutionary Communist," and in that spirit, the 20th-anniversary edition of the book is free to download on hir website. (Feinberg used the pronouns ze/hir.) Find it: Amazon 4. [insert] Boy // Danez Smith This first poetry collection from queer, black, nonbinary Midwesterner Danez Smith shows that the best spoken word poetry can also light up the page. Showing the true breadth of their talent and appeal, in the years since [insert] Boy (2015) was published, Smith has appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and won a number of awards, including a nomination for the National Book Award for their 2017 collection Don't Call Us Dead. Find it: Amazon 5. I've Got a Time Bomb // Sybil Lamb In this whacked-out road novel, Sybil Lamb borrows deeply from her own experiences as an underground, always-on-the-move, crust punk trans artist—including the time she was beaten and left for dead after a gay wedding in New Orleans, causing her permanent brain damage. The result is surreal and disturbing, yet somehow still hopeful. Find it: Amazon 6. The Color Purple // Alice Walker The Color Purple is a timeless American classic that has won accolades in print, on film, and on the Broadway stage. Yet it's not often recognized for the queer sexuality and unconventional family structures at its heart. If you haven't read this book since it was assigned to you in school, come back to it with adult eyes to find a beautiful story of queer resilience. Find it: Amazon 7. Sketchtasy // Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Young queer people might be prone to wax nostalgic about the 1990s (as many of us do). But Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's third novel, Sketchtasy, presents a different perspective on the decade, delving into the dangerous and confusing side of being a young queer outsider in Boston, America's most parochial city, in the mid-1990s. Find it: Amazon 8. I, the Divine // Rabih Alameddine Rabih Alameddine's sumptuous prose would make a to-do list mesmerizing, but the real delight of I, the Divine is its experimental structure: The book takes the form of a series of attempted first chapters of the memoir of its protagonist. Alameddine is a master of using nonlinear forms to build powerful and unexpected narratives, and I, the Divine is one of his best. Find it: Amazon 9. Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga // Michael McDowell Michael McDowell was only 49 years old when he died of AIDS in 1999, but he was already the "finest writer of paperback originals in America today," as Stephen King put it. Although you may not know his name, you almost certainly know some of his writing, such as the script for Beetlejuice. Blackwater is McDowell's six-part serial Southern gothic horror epic, which follows decades of one family's haunted life along the Perdido River in Alabama. Find it: Amazon 10. We the Animals // Justin Torres Justin Torres's loosely autobiographical first novel follows three brothers growing up in upstate New York in the 1980s in a family that is at turns loving and violent. A beautiful coming-of-age story about being queer, brown, and working class, Torres fills his pages with gorgeous sentences that linger in your mouth, like, "We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more." Find it: Amazon 11. Outline of My Lover // Douglas Martin Douglas Martin's exquisite, short, experimental roman a clef shines a queer light in an unexpected place: the indie music scene of Athens, Georgia, circa the late 1980s and early 1990s. Following a fey young man's limerent crush on a closeted rock star, Outline of My Lover was published by Soft Skull Press, a New York City underground institution whose earliest books were printed on pirated Kinko's copiers. Find it: Amazon 12. This Bridge Called My Back // Cherrie Moraga & Gloria Anzaldua If you love the concept of intersectionality, This Bridge Called My Back is the throwback read you need. Combining everything from poetry to memoir to theory, this slim anthology is one of the ur-texts that brought an explicitly anti-racist, women-of-color-centered, feminist lens to queer studies—without being so full of academic jargon you'll want to throw it across the room. Find it: Amazon 13. Conflict Is Not Abuse // Sarah Schulman Sarah Schulman is one of the queer community's fiercest public intellectuals, with a critical eye that has tackled topics as diverse as Palestinian liberation and American gentrification. With Conflict Is Not Abuse, she examines the "supremacist thinking" that undergirds everything from our current presidential administration to that Twitter fight you got in last week. Find it: Amazon 14. I'll Give You the Sun // Jandy Nelson This beautiful young adult novel proves that writing for teens can be as poetic and lyrical as writing for adults—without losing the unputdownable quality that animates the best YA books. In alternating chapters, Nelson's twin brother-sister narrators slowly circle the devastating secrets that transformed them from best friends into virtual strangers. We dare you not to cry at the end. Find it: Amazon 15. 7 Miles a Second // David Wojnarowicz Following his 2018 retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, the late artist and activist David Wojnarowicz has exploded back into cultural relevance. This posthumous graphic novel (illustrated by Wojnarowicz's friend, James Romberger, and originally published by DC Comics), turns his autobiographical stories of homelessness, sexual abuse, and AIDS into a fever dream of stream-of-consciousness prose and hallucinatory images. Find it: Amazon 16. Trash // Dorothy Allison Dorothy Allison is rightly famous for her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, which drew on her experiences growing up poor, Southern, queer, and sexually abused. But the novel's protagonists, Bone and Shannon, made their debut in this early collection of Allison's short stories, which won multiple Lambda Literary Awards in 1989. Find it: Amazon 17. Written on the Body // Jeanette Winterson The unnamed, ungendered protagonist of Jeanette Winterson's magical novel Written on the Body is both philosopher and seducer, approaching love as a conundrum to be sorted and a prize to be won. The result is a genderless eroticism that is both intellectual and physical. This one is best read with your lover(s). Find it: Amazon 18. Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls // T Kira Madden T Kira Madden's lush, wild, and disturbing memoir seems to take every insane "Florida woman" Internet meme and explode it, revealing the tenderness, love, fear, pain, anger, and joy that nestle within stories of crazy nights and lost days. But Madden's lyric prose and unique voice are what truly make this autobiography shine. Find it: Amazon 19. Go Tell It on the Mountain // James Baldwin James Baldwin is one of the lions of 20th-century literature, renowned for his gorgeous writing, his gripping narratives, and his ability to grapple with some of the major social issues of his time. Go Tell It On the Mountain is his first book, the one that years later he would call "the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." Start here, and then read everything Baldwin wrote after. Find it: Amazon 20. No Ashes in the Fire // Darnell Moore Darnell Moore's memoir of coming of age queer and black in Camden, New Jersey, is equal parts harrowing and beautiful. His ability to interweave his personal journey with the larger story of the structural racism and disenfranchisement faced by Camden residents makes No Ashes in the Fire fascinating on both a personal and political level. Find it: Amazon 21. Confessions of the Fox // Jordy Rosenberg Transgender writer Jordy Rosenberg's stunning debut novel ping-pongs back and forth between a lost 18th-century manuscript that purports to be the true autobiography of Jack Sheppard (an infamous historical figure and thief) and the story of the beleaguered academic who finds the book in a library sale at his second-rate university. Rosenberg himself teaches 18th-century literature as well as gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and for anyone who's spent too long in academic circles, the present-day parts of this book will feel all too realistic. Find it: Amazon 22. Dancer from the Dance // Andrew Holleran Nothing can recreate the hothouse nature of post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS urban gay male life, with its heady mix of liberation and oppression all set to a throbbing disco beat—but Dancer from the Dance certainly comes close. It's a portrait of shallow hedonism filled with unexpected depth and pathos. Find it: Amazon 23. Leaves of Grass // Walt Whitman If the last time you tried to read Leaves of Grass was in a high school English class, it deserves a second look. Whitman's poems are queer, erotic, sensual, sexual, and sometimes downright dirty. As the poet himself wrote, "I am for those who believe in loose delights—I share the midnight orgies of young men." Find it: Amazon 24. SCUM Manifesto // Valerie Solanas If you only know Valerie Solanas from her attempt to shoot Andy Warhol or her recent cameo on American Horror Story, you're missing out on one of the most outrageous feminist texts of the mid-20th century. Is SCUM Manifesto a Swiftian satire of Freudian misogyny, or actual propaganda for the violent overthrow of the patriarchy? Unclear. But either way, it's hard to put down a book that begins like this: "'Life' in this 'society' being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of 'society' being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex." Find it: Amazon 25. The Queen of the Night // Alexander Chee Like the arias sung by Alexander Chee's protagonist—a 19th-century opera diva with a hidden past—The Queen of the Night is lush, dramatic, passionate, and melodramatic (in the best way). This book is a confection for opera queens and Francophiles, but even tone-deaf readers will revel in its murders, affairs, intrigues, and mysteries. We've previously put Chee on our list of great Asian American authors to read, so suffice it to say we're big fans. Find it: Amazon 26. Complete Poems // Marianne Moore We might think of the terms asexual and aromantic as modern identity labels only recently recognized under the queer umbrella, but throughout history, there have been people who have lived queer lives very much in those modes—like the extraordinary poet Marianne Moore, one of the most talented (and longest lasting) of the Modernist poets of the early 20th century. Complete Poems gives readers a broad overview of her work, from her early, dense, Imagist pieces (often drawn from scientific sources, like 1936's "The Pangolin"), to her later, more accessible and popular work (like 1961's "Baseball and Writing"). Find it: Amazon Mental Floss has affiliate relationships with certain retailers and may receive a small percentage of any sale. But we choose all products independently and only get commission on items you buy and don't return, so we're only happy if you're happy. Thanks for helping us pay the bills!

How not to unfriend your grandmother on Facebook - Washington Examiner Posted: 20 Jun 2019 02:05 PM PDT I called Jeanne Safer to talk about her new book, I Love You, but I Hate Your Politics, because I needed advice. Safer, who is a liberal psychotherapist, has been married to conservative National Review senior editor Richard Brookhiser for almost 40 years. I'm not facing such a strong clash of ideologies, but I have unfollowed my grandmother on Facebook. No, I haven't unfriended her. And that's an important distinction. Because when I tell Safer, she gets a little concerned. "Uh oh. Do you want to know my advice about Facebook? Avoid it like the plague," she says. "Unfriending cannot be fixed very often. It's too great a wound. Why risk a loving relationship because of something like that? … This unfriending thing I think is the scourge of our time." I clarify to her that I still love my grandmother, and we are still friends on Facebook. I just don't want to see her political posts. "Oh," she concedes. "Well, that's not a bad idea." In case I ever do change my mind, she warns me that she's heard of many relationships destroyed by politics on social media. Two brothers unfriended each other over Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. An almost 80-year-old man lost his friend of 60 years after the guy unfriended him over President Trump. These kinds of rifts happen all the time, but people don't often talk about how to keep politics from ruining our closest relationships. "They don't talk about it at all," Safer says, laughing. "Really. You know? People are so busy fighting with each other that they never think, wait a minute, why are we doing this and how can we stop?" Safer interviewed 50 people to get that conversation going. In I Love You, but I Hate Your Politics: How to Protect Your Intimate Relationships in a Poisonous Partisan World, she shares tips for addressing a universal problem, one that has only grown since 2016. The reason people do fight with each other about issues like abortion and gun control and the person in the Oval Office, she explains, is that we're all believing the same delusion: that we can change other people's minds. "The thing that I discovered that was the most important mistake that people make — can't even say it's a mistake; it's an attitude — is that we go into these fights with the agenda of changing the other person's mind to feel like we do," she says. "Even if they disagree profoundly with you, they can have reasons that are moral reasons for their positions." And social media isn't the only problem. If you love someone whose politics you hate, Safer says, don't drink and argue. Don't raise your voice. Never start a sentence with "How could you possibly think … ?" Don't send someone a partisan article out of the blue when you know they'll disagree with it. And do remember that having the right political views won't make you a good person. How do you know which relationships are worth maintaining? Consider what the other person would do if you were in the hospital. "My criteria for core values is very simple and very specific. I call it the chemotherapy test. And actually, this was coined by my husband," she says. "When you're lying in the hospital bed, having chemotherapy, you do not ask the political affiliation of the person standing by your side getting you through it. That's what counts. That's love." She would know: Safer and Brookhiser have both overcome cancer. They may not agree on social policy, but they have agreed to support each other. But if you do find yourself away from the hospital bed, wondering why in the world that person could say such a thing, remember that politics isn't everything. "You don't have to be stuck forever in these awful fights. By thinking about this, by realizing it's a psychological issue ... and looking at your own behavior, you can really shift this," Safer says. "And you can save almost all of these relationships, if there's something really there. I think that's wonderful news. Because we're ready to be living in two different countries. But we really don't have to." When I call my grandmother to tell her I'm writing about unfollowing her on Facebook, she laughs. "Having a loving family is much more important," she says. "If that's what it takes, yeah, it's okay. Tell them that your granny loves you more than she loves politics."

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