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Holocaust Insight: An Interview with John K. Roth ’62

Holocaust Insight: An Interview with John K. Roth ’62

Holocaust Insight: An Interview with John K. Roth ’62

Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide

Sources of Holocaust Insight By John K. Roth ’62 Cascade Books 2020 304 pages | $35

“More than 50,” describes both the years of academic inquiry about the Holocaust and the number of books by John K. Roth ’62, Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. Undoubtedly one of the preeminent scholars in the field of Holocaust studies, he recently added a new book to his collection. Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide reflects on the people, the texts, the events and places that have informed and influenced his understanding of that atrocity.

Roth is founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights (now the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights) at Claremont McKenna. He was named the U.S. National Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1988. Roth is also the recipient of the Holocaust Educational Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award for Holocaust Studies and Research.

Pomona College Magazine’s Sneha Abraham, a former student of Roth’s, talked to him about his academic formation, his new book, questions of the human condition, God, and what the Holocaust requires of us.

This interview has been condensed and edited for space and clarity.

PCM: How was your Pomona experience formative for you as a philosopher? What was that experience like?

Roth: When I came to Pomona College in the autumn of 1958, I didn’t know what philosophy was. I had some experience with religion, and my father was a Presbyterian minister, so I grew up in a home where the Bible and ideas about God were important. I was aware that there was something called philosophy, but I really didn’t know very much about it. I didn’t take a course in philosophy at Pomona until I was a sophomore. When I got into it, I thought, “This is interesting. Maybe I’ll get some answers to my questions by studying philosophy.”

But I rather quickly found out that that wasn’t going to happen because philosophy is much more about questions than it is about answers. Philosophers always come up with answers, and philosophers are salespeople in some ways. They want you to accept what they say. But the power of the discipline goes back to Socrates and the use of questions to produce dialogue and develop the wonder about things that Plato and Aristotle thought was the origin of philosophy. Philosophy begins in wonder.

Over time, I grew to love that part of philosophy. Philosophy is the discipline that persists in asking questions. That can be very frustrating if your goal is to get answers. Philosophy tries to do that, but unavoidably, the questions keep coming back.

By the time I had finished my sophomore year, I was committed to majoring in philosophy. And then something else happened. And this is a tribute to Pomona College. I just loved being in college. Pomona accounts for that. I fell in love with college because of Pomona. My experience there made a huge impact on me. I’ve spent most of my life in the culture of small liberal arts colleges, which I just think are national treasures, and as I think about the condition of our country right now, I think the contributions that small liberal arts colleges make are increasingly important. And probably endangered a bit too.

PCM: You’ve been working in this field of Holocaust studies for more than 50 years.

Roth: Yes. It’s added up to be that long. And it wasn’t where I planned to work. I didn’t go to the counseling center and say, “How do you become a Holocaust scholar?” I like to say that the Holocaust found me. It did so partly through [the late Philosophy Professor] Frederick Sontag, who is a legend at Pomona and became a close, close friend of mine—we taught and wrote together. When I was his student, he was very interested in what philosophers call “the problem of evil.”

Several of the courses that I took from Fred Sontag took me into that problem—that is, how and why does massive destruction of human life take place? And what sense, if any, can be made of it? How do we deal with those questions?

But the Holocaust was not yet where I was. Getting my attention focused on that took a while. It wasn’t until I was on the faculty of Claremont McKenna, which I joined in 1966, that the Holocaust found me and changed my life.

In the early 1970s, I followed the lead of my teacher, Fred Sontag, who said one day, “I think you might be interested in reading some of Elie Wiesel’s writings.” I read Wiesel and was captivated and compelled to find out more about what I was reading. This is why I say that the Holocaust found me more than I found it. And it changed my life. I became a different person, professionally and existentially. My life reoriented because as I found out more about what had happened to people like Elie Wiesel and his family. I discovered that a host of important questions were embedded in that experience and history. I had to follow where they led.

PCM: Why did you write this book? What was the impetus?

Roth: I was inspired to write the book because of another book that has meant a lot to me over the years. It is called Sources of Holocaust Research and was written early in the current century by a very important Holocaust scholar named Raul Hilberg. I used that book in teaching because it provides a good way for students to see how a scholar goes about studying that massive event.

Hilberg’s book made me realize that I have Holocaust sources too, and that led to seeing the book that I might write. My sources are documents sometimes, but more often, my sources are people, texts, testimonies, places, experiences. So, I thought to myself, “Well, what if I write about sources of my understanding of the Holocaust?” Or as I like to phrase it, my sources of Holocaust insight.

PCM: You mentioned that you’re the son of a Presbyterian minister. How does being an American and a Christian affect your study of the Holocaust?

Roth: When I read Elie Wiesel and I began to feel the need to learn more about what had happened to him and why it happened to his family, my study made me realize that my own tradition, Christianity, was deeply implicated in the genocide. This led me to grapple with the dark underside of Christianity. It created a personal dilemma I still wrestle with.

I put the dilemma this way. For me, Christianity has been something good, but as some of my Jewish friends would remind me from time to time, and I knew this from study too, “Well, Christianity hasn’t been so good for us.” The Holocaust remains a big, big problem for Christians. You have a good example of that right now because, after many, many years, the Vatican archives have been opened to allow scholars—once we get the COVID-19 pandemic under control—to explore the controversial history of Pope Pius XII, who reigned during the Nazi period. He’s been a controversial figure. Did he do what he should have done during that period with regard to the plight of the Jewish people?

So debate about the Holocaust and Christianity is ongoing. For me, it’s existential, because Christianity is my tradition. What do I do as I keep learning that my tradition has a dark and destructive side? My study and teaching about the Holocaust is a continuing way to cope with that. And maybe in some ways, to try to make some amends, if I can, for that terrible shortcoming.

On the American side, the role of the United States during the Holocaust also raises questions. It does so about immigration; it raises questions about action that was taken or not taken. And it certainly involves issues about racism. Black Americans fought against Nazi racism but experienced American racism nonetheless. I’ve found that my identity as an American, as well as a Christian and a philosopher, continues to have points of contact with the Holocaust, which was primarily European in its geography but had international dimensions and implications too. Some of those connections and reverberations are reflected in the fact that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has become such an important place in our national capital. There’s a long story about that: Why do we have a museum about the Holocaust situated close by the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.? That’s an intriguing and significant question.

What I’ve found is that all of these identity questions drove me further and deeper in understanding that it was important to spend time teaching, learning and writing about the Holocaust.

PCM: You write about Richard Rubenstein, Elie Wiesel and Franklin Littell and how they encourage you to tell the story in your own way and to carry on the dialogue as best you can in your prayers and quarrels with God. I really liked the way you put that. What does that mean for you?

Roth: Unlike some people who confront the Holocaust, my encounters with that catastrophe have not turned me into an atheist. I resonated much more with the approach that Wiesel took in his writings. People who really fall in love with Elie Wiesel’s writings are probably people who have some deep interest in things religious because it’s hard to read Wiesel without finding, over and over again, that he’s writing about questions that have to do with God and religious practices and traditions. In particular, Wiesel is constantly carrying on a quarrel with God.

One of the things I learned as a Christian that was very helpful to me is that, in the Jewish tradition, quarreling and arguing with God and protesting against God are part of the spirituality of that tradition. Christianity tends to play down such themes because of the strong emphasis that Christianity puts on the idea of God as love. But if God is more ambiguous and mixed than that, then the Jewish tradition of carrying on arguments and protest as part of a relationship with God has a bigger role. I found I really liked that about the approach that I was discovering as I studied Wiesel, Rubenstein and other post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers.

So, I have a quarrelsome relationship with God. For me, that’s valuable just to the extent that it underscores the insight that God isn’t going to fix everything. Whether it’s fair or not, it’s up to us to try to do that as much as we can. But I hold onto a relationship with God because it helps me to maintain my conviction that history is not all that is. Reality is more than history. And I’m hopeful that, in some way, that means that what the Nazis did to the Jews doesn’t have the last word. That’s my hope. I don’t want injustice and suffering and murder to have the last word. They may have it. I don’t know for sure that they won’t, but my hope is that they don’t. My teaching and writing about the Holocaust seek to encourage and support that hope.

PCM: What is your take on the human condition? Are we basically good?

Roth: I wax and wane between hope and pessimism. I often say that my study of the Holocaust, overall, has made me more melancholy than I was as a young person. That mood isn’t the same as despair, but it includes aspects of that darkness. Melancholy isn’t paralyzing. It can combine with and even produce resistance against destructive powers.

PCM: Do you believe in moral progress?

Roth: Not in any simple way. No, I don’t. I think Albert Camus was insightful in his book The Rebel when he said that human beings can only arithmetically reduce the amount of suffering in the world. What he meant by that, I think, is that we can and must do everything we can to reduce suffering and injustice, but, unfortunately, we aren’t capable of doing away with those things. So, according to Camus, you resist, you try your best to thwart and curb and reduce these things, but if your sensibility is that you’re going to continue to make progress until such time as suffering and injustice are inconsequential, you’re misguided.

I think that the ongoing struggle against anti-semitism fits what Camus saw. Many of us who began a long time ago to teach about the Holocaust hoped that such work would curb if not eliminate anti-semitism. But we learned that this plague is more endemic and virulent than we wanted to believe.

So, I don’t believe in moral progress in any simple kind of way, but I do hope that Martin Luther King Jr. was right when he said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. That will happen, though, only if people make it happen. [During this time of pandemic,] we keep talking about the “curve” and flattening it. That curve isn’t going to bend or flatten unless people act in ways that serve the common good. Even then, as we’re learning, we’re probably not going to eradicate the novel coronavirus or the disease of racism and injustice, at least not completely.

PCM: Does the Holocaust call moral relativism on the carpet?

Roth: Yes. I have a friend, Michael Berenbaum, who wisely refers to the Holocaust as a negative absolute. We may disagree about moral values, but probably, we can come closer to agreement if we look at what we think is absolutely wrong. Even there, drastic differences may persist. The Nazis did not think that destroying Jewish life and tradition was wrong. For the Nazis, that was right and good. So it’s complicated, but as I like to say, the Holocaust was wrong, or nothing could be. If we don’t say that, then we really do open the door to the pernicious view that might makes right. Earlier this year, Attorney General William Barr emphasized that the victors write history. Even if he wasn’t incorrect factually, that proposition is morally wrong because it is the ally of might makes right, a view that cannot withstand scrutiny.

The Holocaust and events like it had better be the end of moral relativism, or we’re in more trouble than we need to be. But the dilemma is that this case of one of those where argument may not settle the matter. This is a place where my concept of insight comes in. We have to recognize that there may always be people, powerful people, who act as if might makes right and who think they will win and get to write history their way. Study of the Holocaust alerts us to have our eyes open about what to do in that case.

PCM: You say that through writer and Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo you understand the importance of taking nothing good for granted. That’s the title of your epilogue as well. So, what good do you not take for granted?

Roth: The Holocaust destroyed so much that was good. So, of all my Holocaust insights, none is more important than take nothing good for granted. Over and over again, especially privileged Americans like me do take good things for granted, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Study of the Holocaust helps to drive that point home, but nowadays the COVID-19 pandemic and the renewed awareness of systemic racism in American life lift up that awareness too.

PCM: Delbo essentially says, I’m paraphrasing, but: “Do something useful with your life. Don’t let everything be useless knowledge or senseless.”

Roth: Delbo’s moving writing about Auschwitz emphasizes how her experience there was full of what she called useless knowledge. She saw torture, and she knew about murder. None of this was edifying, let alone helpful. Such knowledge was destructive and degrading. So as she works to show her readers such things, she hopes that they won’t end up saying, “So what? You know, I’ll just put this on the shelf and go on about my life.” She was looking for somebody who would read her writing and maybe, in some good way, be changed by it. Writings that come out of Holocaust experiences are sometimes so powerful that if you let them into your life, they have a way of reorienting you and changing you. Charlotte Delbo’s writings have been that way for me

PCM: I’m not sure if this was your comment in the book or if you were quoting someone, but you wrote that “Our calling is not to be perfect, but to do what we can to make room for caring help and compassionate respect in a world that is often cruelly cold and indifferent.”

Roth: When I wrote those words, I saw them—and still do see them—as a way of putting one of the most insightful teachings from the Jewish tradition—that it is not our task to complete the work of justice, but neither is it our right to refuse to take up that work. We can’t complete the work of justice, but it’s our task to do what we can, to the best of our abilities. More than 50 years of learning and teaching about the Holocaust make that insight imperative and inescapable.

9 Lessons in Criminal Justice

9 Lessons in Criminal Justice pane

A couple of summers ago, I was invited to speak to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference, a gathering of federal judges from the Western states, about the state of criminal justice and the campaign to reform it. I thought I had learned some lessons as editor of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on our troubled system of crime and punishment, but I’m not a lawyer. As if addressing a ballroom full of judges was not intimidating enough, I was scheduled to speak after Bryan Stevenson, the charismatic lawyer and champion of social justice. Anyone who saw his 2016 talk to a packed Bridges Auditorium at Pomona will know this is like having your cello recital follow Yo Yo Ma. I complained to my audience that this was a clear violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. I think that’s the only laugh I got. With a bit of updating, however, the lessons stand up pretty well.

IN NOVEMBER 2016, a kind of fatalistic gloom settled over the advocates of reforming the criminal justice system. With a chest-beating president, a show-no-mercy attorney general and a Congress that has become even more polarized than it was in President Obama’s time, reform advocates said any serious fixes to the federal system were unlikely. So reformers consoled themselves by looking to the states.

After all, most of law enforcement, most of criminal jurisprudence and most incarceration takes place at the state or local level. My assignment today is to survey reform efforts at the state level and draw some tentative lessons from their experience.

“Reform” is one of those ambiguous words that mean different things to different people. For our purposes, I think of reform as something that aims to REDUCE the numbers of Americans who are removed from society and deprived of their freedom, and to do it WITHOUT making us less safe. In 1972, when I was near the beginning of my newspaper life a little north of here at The Oregonian, 93 out of 100,000 Americans were in state or federal prisons. By 2008 the incarceration rate had grown nearly six-fold, from 93 to 536, and it has hovered in that vicinity ever since. That’s not counting the hundreds of thousands held in county jails on any given day—or those confined in the juvenile justice system or immigrant detention. We are world leaders in locking people up.

Every year about 650,000 of those prisoners are released back into the world. We know that most of them will be unemployed a year later and that two-thirds of them will be rearrested within three years. As a strategy for keeping us safe, mass incarceration has not been a roaring success.

Prison guards stroll down a corridor at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, Calif.

AP Photo/Ben Margot

LESSON #1 from the experience of the states is this: It is possible to reduce incarceration and crime at the same time. Between 2010 and 2015, 31 states reduced both crime and imprisonment. In the 10 states with the largest declines in imprisonment, the crime rate fell an average of more than 14 percent.

New York City, where I live, has slashed the crime rate while, simultaneously, sharply reducing arrests, incarceration—in particular the jailing of juveniles—and misdemeanor summonses. Stop-and-frisk is no longer routine. The city is a safer place and seems to have found the virtues of a lighter touch: New Yorkers who do not accumulate arrest records and jail time are more likely to stay employed, in families and out of trouble.

This does not mean that reducing incarceration necessarily leads to a drop in crime. Correlation is not causality. The question of why the crime rate declined is a subject of heated debate among social scientists. One of my colleagues at The Marshall Project wrote a piece we called “Ten Not Entirely Crazy Theories Explaining the Great Crime Decline.” One thesis our writer examined is that after Roe v. Wade the legalization of abortion meant fewer unwanted children who were more likely to become delinquents. Other researchers have surmised that removing lead from paint and fuel has made for a less criminogenic environment. Another theory credits technology: Anti-theft devices in cars and the spread of online banking made it harder for criminals to profit. Yet another theory is that the baby boomers just aged out of crime, which tends to be a young person’s game. Most experts give some credit to  w  the increased deployment and improved equipping of police. And, of course, some of the decline is a result of the fact that more bad guys were locked up, though that is a very expensive way to keep communities safe.

Whatever the factors responsible for the relatively low crime rate, the evidence from the states is that reducing incarceration is compatible with reducing crime. Obviously, a lot depends on HOW you reduce prison populations, which is where the states have much to teach us.

LESSON #2: The embrace of criminal justice reforms is bipartisan. This is one of those rare issues in our polarized country where activists on the left and right have found a patch of common ground.

On the left, criminal justice has become an obligatory plank in the platforms of virtually every candidate to be the Democratic presidential nominee. On the right, we have fiscal conservatives who see our prisons as wasteful, liber­tarians who see our handling of crime as another manifestation of oppressive big government, evangelical conservatives who see aspects of the system as inhumane.

There are of course issues where left and right still part company. Controlling the proliferation of guns remains a political third rail. The left wants to talk about race, and the right mostly does not. But on issues like pre-trial diversion, indigent defense, sentencing, parole, rehabilitation, solitary confinement, voting rights for the formerly incarcerated and bail and asset forfeiture, you found the Koch brothers arm-in-arm with the ACLU. In 2018, the First Step Act, a package of modest fixes to mandatory sentencing and prison conditions, passed Congress with huge bipartisan majorities. The iniquities and unintended consequences of American punishment have so captured public concern that even President Donald Trump voices an occasional platitude about “giving our fellow citizens a chance at redemption.” Trump signed the First Step Act into law, though his administration has shown little enthusiasm for enacting it.

Conservatives rightly boast that red states have often led the way, starting with Texas during the governorship of Rick Perry. In the past decade, that state has closed four prisons, reduced its incarceration rate by 20 percent and invested $240 million in alternatives such as drug treatment. The Texas experience is often cited as evidence that politicians can support so-called smart-on-crime reforms and live to tell about it.

The key to success in Texas was money. The state invested in alternatives, which meant judges had greater confidence that when they diverted someone to drug treatment, there would actually be drug treatment.

Two caveats regarding the Texas Story: First, Texas started out with one of the highest incarceration rates in the United States, so it had a long way to go; it is still the seventh most incarcerated state. Second, Texas accomplished its reductions by redirecting money, not by changing the legal infrastructure. Other conservative states—Georgia, South Carolina, Utah to name a few—have tackled the structure of criminal justice—reducing some felonies to misdemeanors, revising mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws, funding community-based alternatives to incarceration, expanding eligibility for parole and removing barriers to reentry.

The most recent convert is Louisiana, a state long known among criminal justice reformers as a contender in every race to the bottom. Louisiana passed a remarkably comprehensive legislative overhaul. That feat was a product of strong leadership, intense lobbying by reform groups across the political spectrum and a corrections system bursting at the seams.

Inmates rest and exercise by walking laps in adjacent cells at the Campbell County Jail in Jacksboro, Tenn.

AP Photo/David Goldman

LESSON #3: Probably the most effective way to reduce incarceration is not to lock people up in the first place—at least not so many, and not for so long. In the last decade, 23 states have relaxed their sentencing laws—something Congress has so far been unable to do for the federal system. But I want to note a few other front-end measures that have been employed by states to keep people out of prison.

One is less reliance on money bail. The people most likely to spend time in jail awaiting trial are not the worst offenders but the poorest offenders; and even a short stint in jail increases the odds that an offender will ultimately end up in prison. A number of jurisdictions have curtailed the use of cash bail—most notably New Jersey, which now requires judges to hold hearings shortly after arrest to determine whether a defendant can be safely released before trial. Since the new procedure began, the average daily jail population has dropped 19 percent. [A referendum to replace bail with risk assessments in California will be on the ballot in November 2020.]

A second measure aimed at reducing prison intake is raising the age at which juveniles are thrown into the adult system, which too often subjects them to predators and leads many to careers in crime. In the last few years, Louisiana, South Carolina, New York and North Carolina have raised the age to what is now the national norm—18. There’s been talk of Connecticut becoming the first state to raise the cap to 21. In March 2018, Gov. Dannel Malloy announced the opening of a special corrections unit for young adults as old as 25.

A third way to slow the traffic into prisons is to provide better—and earlier—indigent defense. And a fourth is to elect prosecutors who don’t regard maximum prison sentences as the main measure of job performance. In recent years several jurisdictions—including Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, Denver, Tampa and Orlando—have elected prosecutors who campaigned on reform platforms.

LESSON #4: Don’t neglect the back end. There is abundant evidence of the effectiveness of college and vocational programs behind bars, regular contacts with family, reentry and parole and probation programs that have the resources and the mandate to land their clients safely back in society. A RAND Corporation study in 2014 concluded that “inmates who participated in correctional education programs had 43 percent lower odds of recidivating”—a verb that makes my inner English major cringe, but suggests a pretty good return on investment.

LESSON #5: Be wary of reformers who suggest you can cut incarceration drastically by setting free low-level, nonviolent offenders—in particular, low-level drug offenders. More than half of those incarcerated in state prisons are there for violent crimes. Only 16 percent are in for drug crimes, not all of them nonviolent. Decriminalizing marijuana will reduce incarceration, but to have any hope of restoring the incarceration rates of the 1990s means reducing sentences and stepping up rehabilitation for people convicted of violent crimes. The reality is: The reduction of incarceration is likely to happen incrementally. After all, the state that has been downsizing its prison population longest and most aggressively—California—has cut a bit more than 25 percent, and no other state has come close.

A shackled defendant stands next to his attorney in a Coupeville, Wash., courtroom.

AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

LESSON #6: Be wary of reformers who suggest that prison reform inevitably means a huge windfall for taxpayers—10 billions of dollars back in our pockets. That remains to be seen, for two reasons: First, the alternatives to prison aren’t free. To keep crime in check, money not spent on actually confining offenders has to be spent on mental health and addiction treatment, more hands-on probation and, ideally, education, job training and housing support. Moreover, some states have found that the beneficiaries of prison—the corrections staff, the contractors, the politicians, the unions—are ferocious defenders of corrections budgets.

Here’s another way of looking at the cost of mass incarceration, though. The most commonly cited estimate of how much it costs to maintain the country’s prisons and jails is $80 billion a year. If you throw in things like health and pension benefits for prison staff, the cost to governments is more like $90 billion. But a 2016 report by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis attempted to add up the “social costs” of criminal justice as we practice it, a toll that includes lost wages, the cost of visitation, the higher mortality rates of both former inmates and their infant children, child welfare payments, evictions and relocations, divorces, diminished property values and the increased criminality of children with incarcerated parents. The bottom line they came up with was one trillion dollars a year, nearly six percent of GDP.

A guard looks on as prisoners move through the state prison in Jackson, Ga.

AP Photo/ David Goldman

LESSON #7:  Metrics matter. It’s impossible to know what works and what doesn’t without reliable data, and reliable data is often in short supply. Our data guru at The Marshall Project, Tom Meigher, wrote a piece entitled “13 Important Questions About Criminal Justice We Can’t Answer”—can’t answer because the data is unreliable or unavailable. They include such questions as how many juvenile offenders graduate to become adult offenders, how many people have served time in prison or jail, how many people in America own guns and what percentage of inmates eligible for parole are actually granted release from prison. The Washington Post and the Guardian set out separately to count the number of civilians killed each year by police in the line of duty. The number they came up with was about 1,000. That is about double the official estimates from the Department of Justice—an astonishing margin of error.

As important as having good data is knowing what to do with it. That brings us to the debate underway in many states over the use of risk-assessment tools, basically tests aimed at helping make wise judgments at critical moments in the handling of the accused or convicted. Risk assessment tools are algorithms that examine a subject’s history to mitigate the chances of re-arrest. There are various tools for various applications: to help determine whether a defendant is a flight risk, how severe a sentence should be, whether an inmate is a fit candidate for parole and what kind of supervision an offender requires upon release. The left generally hates risk assessment, because the inputs may include factors like employment stability and past encounters with the law that weigh more heavily against communities of color. Advocates of risk assessment tests respond that a) they are getting better, both more accurate and less biased; b) they are meant to assist judges and parole boards, not preempt professional judgment; and c) properly used, risk assessment tools can assure people in the system get the support they need to stay out of prison.

I’m not a worshipper at the shrine of technology, but if I were in your robes, I think I’d rather have a sense of the odds.

LESSON #8: Many states are finding that incentives work better than mandates. A good example is an approach being used in about a dozen states. Take a defendant who is probably not a threat, who would do fine returned to the community under proper supervision. But the judge knows “proper supervision” is unlikely because the local probation system is threadbare. Suppose the state agrees that for every dollar it doesn’t have to spend locking people up, it will send 40 cents to the county to pay for more robust supervision? The state saves money, the county improves its oversight of former inmates, and the judge has greater assurance that the subject will be supervised.

And finally…

LESSON #9:  The states have wide latitude to experiment, and they are seizing it, but the federal government sets a tone, and you will hear complaints from several states that the new administration has had a chilling effect on state legislatures. When the attorney general instructs federal prosecutors to charge the maximum, as Jeff Sessions did early in the Trump administration, when his response to a national opioid epidemic is to yearn for a revival of a discredited 1980s anti-drug program, that sends a message to state legislators contemplating new approaches.

Moreover, federal programs, especially Medicaid, which was expanded to include former inmates under the Affordable Care Act, can be essential to getting released offenders up on their feet.

In other words: What happens in Washington doesn’t always stay in Washington.

For the Defense

For the Defense pane
Emi Young ’13

Photos by Robert Durell

COURT STREET IN MARTINEZ, California, lives up to its name. On a gray morning in December, four imposing stone courthouses in a row loom out of the cold fog, steamy glass doors accepting the occasional be-suited prosecutor or latecomer for jury duty.

Inside one of those courthouses this morning, Emi Young ’13 is waiting in a dimly lit courtroom gallery for a restitution conference to begin. Young, who works as a deputy public defender for Contra Costa County, will be representing a client who pleaded guilty to possession of a stolen vehicle. As part of the conviction process, she is participating in discussions about how much money will be awarded to the victim to help with damages—discussions that are often, but not always, straightforward, since both sides need to agree that the restitution requested is sufficiently related to the crime. (“I had a vandalism case where the city requested compensation for all of the tagging or graffiti that they thought were similar from the preceding year,” Young notes.)

The beige-carpet-on-beige-wood courtroom is crowded with cases, and the judge moves swiftly through the docket. Normally the prosecutor would have conferred with the victim’s assigned restitution specialist by now, but this time that hasn’t happened. So, a few minutes before the conference begins, Young hands him her copy of the handwritten list, which totals $126,000. Along with the value of the stolen vehicle, the victim is requesting restitution for multiple other vehicles, several marine batteries and damage to a barn door—all seemingly unrelated to the crime for which her client was convicted.

“That… is a lot of money,” the prosecutor says, running his eyes down the list. When the judge has turned her attention to the case, she agrees, noting with raised eyebrows that the request would make for an “interesting” hearing. “What do you want to do, Ms. Young?” she asks. A pause, then Young and the prosecutor agree to delay the conference, giving more time to talk to all parties and perhaps find a solution.

“It’s frustrating that he didn’t have more time to look at the request before,” Young says as she walks through the fog back to her office a few blocks from the courthouse. Under normal circumstances, these things can take as little as 20 minutes—that is, when the prosecutor is prepared and when victims limit themselves to amounts directly related to the crime and provide adequate documentation.

It’s lucky, she notes, that her office had not yet closed the case file, leaving her client without representation. Then, the court might just have sent a letter instructing him to request a hearing or agree to pay the full amount—and many of her clients are transient, with no fixed addresses and unreliable mail service.

But such frustrations are an inherent part of a job with limited time, limited funding, limited attention. “I talk about the system I work in as the ‘criminal legal system,’” she says. “The term ‘criminal justice system’ is aspirational. It’s not the reality for many people.”

Emi Young ’13AT 28, YOUNG, WHO favors bold colored scarves, long sweaters and a silver hoop in her nose, is, well, young for her profession. She was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and her parents divorced in her early childhood. Growing up with a single, Japanese mother profoundly shaped her— especially in a school district that had been created by conservative white parents who were trying to skirt anti-segregation laws. “It felt like our family was very different,” she says. “I know my mom also really struggled sometimes.”

As part of continued efforts to support her family, Young’s mother went back to school to become a paralegal. She sometimes brought home articles about important Supreme Court cases and news from the legal system to share with her daughter, who at the time aspired to be a musician. It wasn’t until Young attended Pomona, graduating in 2013, that she changed her mind.

Her experience at Pomona was profoundly “consciousness raising,” she says. Conversations happening on campus helped her understand earlier experiences from her own life in a new light—her experience as a biracial person in a school district with segregationist roots, for example. And it was at Pomona that she first learned about what she calls the “disparate impacts of our legal system on certain communities.”

That nascent interest prompted Young to major in political science and philosophy; her Pomona education “helped me have a vocabulary for certain ways in which people are systemically disenfranchised,” she says. She volunteered for a semester at the Camp Afflerbaugh-Paige juvenile detention facility near campus, producing Othello with some of the students. While she was there, one of the teenaged boys disappeared for a week. When he returned, she was struck by how dramatically different he was: subdued where he had been animated, depressed where he had been bright and playful, cracking jokes.

It turned out that he had gotten in trouble and been kept in isolation for some time as a disciplinary measure. “This doesn’t seem fair or good for a person who we hope will turn out to be happy and productive,” she remembers thinking. “I feel like I can’t advocate on his behalf right now, but it’s something I’d like to be able to do someday.” In pursuit of that goal, she attended law school at Stanford and spent her first summer interning at the New York Civil Liberties Union—but was surprised to find herself unhappy with the experience, which felt too divorced from the people she hoped to help. “I realized I should be trying to come at it from a different angle,” she says.

Young is aware that public defender stereotypes paint a picture of a harried, overburdened lawyer who doesn’t fight for her clients, “interested in trying to plead you out as quickly as possible because we don’t have the time or resources to defend you adequately.” But Contra Costa’s public defenders maintain one of the highest trial rates in California, part of the reason she applied for a job here. Encouraging plea bargains “does not lend itself towards keeping the system accountable or ensuring accurate or fair results,” she says.

Emi Young ’13THE ROLE OF PUBLIC DEFENDER doesn’t come with much of a runway. Once she graduated from law school, Young clerked for several months at the Contra Costa Public Defenders Office—then began representing a full load of clients on misdemeanor charges soon after she passed the bar in January 2017. “When I got hired, I quite literally had three days’ transition to begin representing 110 clients, some of whom had trials set,” she remembers with a shudder and smile.

These days, she works instead with clients facing felony charges, which run the gamut from evading the police to gun possession to attempted murder—around 40 at a time and between 50 and 60 hours a week. It’s a more manageable load than she had in misdemeanors: the cases move slower because there’s more at stake, so there’s more time to work on them. That creates opportunities to occasionally play her violin; take a bread-making class; or go on walks with her mother (who moved to the Bay Area several years ago) and the family dog, Teeter.

Beyond the frantic pace, Young has slowly adjusted to a professional life that can demand a difficult balancing act between practicality and justice. Some clients with immigration concerns prioritize protecting that status, even beyond proving their innocence; some clients value the chance to have the proverbial “day in court” and tell a judge what happened over the safety of a plea bargain. There have been cases where she believed her clients were innocent but struggled with how to advise them, because their prior history put them at deep risk if they were to be convicted of a serious crime. And when her clients are kept in custody as they await trial, she must decide how to ask to schedule their hearings, keeping in mind that the longer she spends preparing their cases, the longer they’ll spend away from their families, friends, worlds.

“There’s an older philosophy that as attorney you’re the person who is educated and knows the law, and you should be the person responsible for making decisions about best outcomes,” she says. Instead, “our duty is to learn about and understand our client’s perspective.”

It’s also a professional life that melds stereotypical courtroom drama with the ordinary, obligatory mechanics of the justice system: jail visits, written motions, the series of hearings that precede a jury trial. The fabric of Young’s daily routine is threaded with the half-hour drives between courtrooms in various towns; the waits to get into jails; the police officers who are late to give testimony; the judges trying to sort out the daily docket. In the week that I shadowed her, she had three separate hearings delayed at the last minute. That week featured pockets of the pursuit of justice, yes—but they were glued together with pauses during which judges took bathroom breaks and bailiffs watched pet videos on the phones of district attorneys.

The stops, starts and delays can be “really frustrating,” she says, but they have had a surprising benefit: teaching her adaptability, honing her capacity to adjust and respond to new tasks at a moment’s notice. Before this work, “I was very good at planning for something, preparing a lot for something and doing it,” she says. “But the thing you learn with this job is that you can’t prepare for all the possibilities. You have to be okay with the unexpected sometimes.”

AFTER THE CANCELED RESTITUTION HEARING, Young settles in at her office to spend the rest of the day wading through the seas of mundane justice: drafting motions, reviewing new evidence, preparing for an upcoming trial. The room is small but friendly, featuring a coffee machine tucked into a corner and an assortment of button-down shirts hanging off the doorknob for clients to try on. The walls are decorated with photos of Teeter and a few pieces of art.

Beside a selection of client thank you notes hangs a Ta-Nahesi Coates quote on a note card that reads, in part: a society that “can only protect you with a club of criminal justice has failed at enforcing its good intention or has succeeded at something much darker.” It’s a reminder of the losses and disappointments: the young man who was prevented by his co-defendant from taking a probation plea deal and ended up in prison; the client whose immigration status she worked to protect during a DUI case but who ended up in ICE custody later, anyway.

Even victory, when it comes, has been bittersweet. Young remembers one client who was charged with elder abuse of his own mother. During the trial, it became clear that the mother’s mental state was deteriorating, especially as her reports of abuse were not corroborated by evidence; she died soon after the verdict. Although Young’s client was cleared of wrongdoing, she struggles to find vindication when thinking about how he must have felt—accused of a cruel and violent act, separated from a beloved parent during the last weeks of her life. “There’s nothing that the acquittal in and of itself can do to repair the damage,” she says, sighing.

A victory is “gratifying,” she adds, but “just because a case was ultimately dismissed, or was acquitted, it doesn’t mean the experience hasn’t taken a toll.” Even with positive outcomes, her clients still deal with negative impacts: the costs of bail, missed work and immigration risks.

Taking a moment to celebrate the work that’s done can be difficult when there’s always another seven things to do. Yes, today’s delayed restitution hearing was a small victory. In this case, she hadn’t been reassigned, so she was able to continue to represent her client in a quest for a fairer outcome. She’ll likely be able to renegotiate that request, saving him money and helping him start fresh.

Tomorrow will bring another hearing, another jail visit, another trial. More new clients will arrive, more new evidence will be unearthed, as the American penal organism churns on. But today, she added a little justice to that system. That has to be enough.

Defy the Odds

Defy the Odds pane
Entrepreneurs in Training (EITs) welcome Glazier and other volunteers at a prison event in Lancaster, Calif.

Entrepreneurs in Training (EITs) welcome Glazier and other volunteers at a prison event in Lancaster, Calif.

GAMES AND ICEBREAKERS are often used at business conferences to create some fun and make strangers comfortable with each other. But at a recent meeting of Defy Ventures, which helps people from prisons prepare for life on the outside, one empathy-building exercise quickly turns dead serious. It’s called Step to the Line, and though not a word is spoken, much is revealed.

On a sunny Saturday in mid-January, about a dozen former inmates from two Los Angeles halfway houses gather for the event at a modern downtown office complex. They are met there by a group of volunteers, men and women from the business world recruited to lend their expertise on writing résumés, polishing personal statements and perfecting business plans.

Defy calls the event a Business Coaching Day, and it’s led by Andrew Glazier ’97, the nonprofit’s national president and CEO. It’s part of the organization’s overall prison rehabilitation program called CEO of Your New Life, which aims to build self-confidence as well as skills.

At Defy, the group exercises are meant to be healing. They help participants develop a healthy self-image and positive attitudes. The organizers provide a well-studied set of aphorisms to live by.

Shame is destructive. Learn to forgive, not judge. You are not defined by your mistakes. You deserve a second chance. Foreswear negative labels. You are not criminals, convicts or felons. You are EITs— Entrepreneurs In Training.

Above all, realize that the solution is already inside you. Many of the same skills that brought you success as, say, a drug dealer can be applied to any legal enterprise.

In short, to quote Defy’s main motto: Transform the Hustle.

Glazier listening to an EIT share his personal statement during a coaching day.

Glazier listening to an EIT share his personal statement during a coaching day.

GLAZIER HIMSELF COMES from a privileged background that could not be more remote from the life experience of his incarcerated clientele. For the public face of Defy Ventures and its chief fundraiser, that disparity can be a handicap, he concedes. Sometimes he finds himself forced to answer questions of class and race when pitching new potential donors.

“In the funding community now there’s a lot of interest in seeing people who have ‘lived experience’ running organizations and working in the nonprofit space,” he explains. “I think part of it comes from the idea that, look, for a long time it’s been just a bunch of well-meaning white people who come and work in communities of color. So sometimes I find I still battle this credibility stuff: What are you doing here?”

Glazier understands why people perceive a disconnect between his upbringing and his prison work and why they might challenge his street cred, so to speak. But he bristles at being “on the receiving end” of that mistrust. “It can be an uncomfortable spot to be in,” he says. “Look, I can’t change who I am. I do know that it’s critical to have people with lived experience within our organization, informing our work. And we do.”

If you’re looking for personal information on Glazier, you won’t find much on social media. He’s not one to overshare; so he keeps a light digital footprint, mostly on LinkedIn and all about business. But Glazier opened up during a casual lunch recently at the Wasabi Japanese Noodle House, a five-minute walk from his Wilshire Boulevard offices in Koreatown. He talked easily about his evolving life goals, his family, education and the circuitous career path that brought him to the transformative prison work he never dreamed he’d be doing.

Unlike many other Angelenos, Glazier’s roots in the city run deep. His mother descended from immigrants with a long history in Los Angeles. Her maternal relatives arrived from Italy, just in time for his great-grandmother to be “born off the boat from Sicily” in 1908.

Glazier’s father was a doctor who worked for the Veteran’s Administration, where he met his mother, who worked as a secretary for the agency. They married, had three children and settled in Studio City, a well-to-do neighborhood in the eastern San Fernando Valley.

Glazier attended Harvard-Westlake, a college prep he calls “the most elite private school in Los Angeles.” Today, he concedes that his exclusive education had put him in a protective bubble, cloistered from the social ills mushrooming all around him.

But all that changed on April 29, 1992, the day the Los Angeles Riots erupted over the verdict in the Rodney King case.

One of Defy’s entrepreneurs in training, referred to as EIPs.

One of Defy’s entrepreneurs in training, referred to as EIPs.

GLAZIER WAS 16. “I had lived my whole childhood in the valley, and I had no idea what was going on eight miles away,” he says. “Then the riots happened. I remember seeing Rodney King getting beaten on TV. Then the city burning. And even in the valley, where it wasn’t nearly as intense, you could still see all the smoke coming over the hill.

“That was really a moment for me of waking up: Oh, my life is not their life. There are things happening that are really close-by that I’m really not aware of. And when I suddenly had greater awareness of my opportunity and privilege, it felt all the more extreme, which in part, I think, drives me to do this work.”

Yet, Glazier never actually planned to work in prison reform. Until recently, if you had told this classically trained cellist with an MBA and a medium build that he would someday wind up working with hard-core prison inmates, he would have scoffed at the notion.

Nothing was further from his mind when he applied to college. He picked Pomona because he wanted a small school, and his parents wanted him to stay close-by.

The Claremont campus also had a strong academic appeal. “I’m a huge fan of the liberal arts,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what you get a degree in, because you’re learning critical thinking and writing. And that’s the education I came out with—a degree in critical thinking and knowing how to write, both important skills that are hard to find.”

Glazier majored in international relations, studied Spanish and Japanese, and spent a semester in Pomona’s program at Tokyo’s International Christian University.  At first, he considered joining the foreign service, but that plan never materialized. (Fun fact: his suitemate during junior year was David Holmes ’97, a U.S. State Department employee based in Ukraine who recently testified during the impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump.)

After graduation, Glazier took time to explore. He returned to Japan and taught English for a year. He travelled, settled down and started a family. From 2001 to 2004, he was chief of staff to Marlene Canter, then a newly elected member of the Los Angeles City Board of Education.

“Originally, I wanted to be an elected official,” he recalls, “but five years of working in local and state government sort of cured me of that impulse.”

Nevertheless, the experience continued to stoke a civic calling. The problems he saw in L.A. schools opened his eyes to new realities—kids who are afraid to go to school, who can’t read, who smoke weed in the hallways.

“This is where you really start to see inequities in the system, to see more of the injustices that exist in society,” he says. “I spent my life in private education; now suddenly I have this front-row seat in public schools, and you think, ‘How is this even possible?’”

Glazier then switched gears and joined a small real estate development team, managing an award-winning restoration of historic bungalows in Silverlake. On that job, he recalls, he met and interacted with people with criminal histories for the first time, giving him a glimpse into the challenges they face after prison.

EITs welcoming a volunteer at the start of a Defy coaching day

EITs welcoming a volunteer at the start of a Defy coaching day.

Meanwhile, Glazier also went back to school, earning his master’s in business administration from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management in 2006.

Two years later, he decided he’d had enough of real estate, which “didn’t feel meaningful to me.” In October of 2009, he took a job with City Year Los Angeles, a nonprofit that plunged him back into those vexing education problems. The agency works with AmeriCorps volunteers to serve as tutors, mentors, and role models for students in Los Angeles, grades three through 10.

The job gave Glazier his entrée into nonprofit work, where he finally found his mission. He stayed eight years with the education agency, having ascended to second in command in the Los Angeles chapter.  When he decided to leave—again with no job lined up—a friend referred him to the opening at Defy, which had recently launched a new Southern California branch.

Glazier has come to see parallels between the problems in public schools and those in public prisons. “They are both large bureau­cracies within the state government that are dealing with large numbers of people who are in need of intervention and education,” he explains. “So some of the basic reform ideas that apply to public education apply to prisons too.”

In either system, steering an organization in a new direction can be a herculean task. Glazier was well aware of the enormous challenge when he entered the criminal justice reform world three years ago, full of optimism and ambition. But he had no idea of the organizational landmines that awaited him at Defy Ventures, where a scandal was about to shake the nonprofit to its foundation while abruptly catapulting Glazier to the top job.

DEFY VENTURES WAS FOUNDED in 2010 in New York by a charismatic woman named Catherine Hoke, a UC Berkeley graduate and former Wall Street executive. But in 2018, she was forced to resign in the midst of accusations of sexual harassment, misuse of funds and misleading donors with inflated performance reports.

Glazier said the controversial leader had come to personify the organization. She had a golden touch for fundraising and promotion; she courted powerful people in politics and Silicon Valley and had a knack for drawing high-profile media coverage. When she stepped down, Glazier says, Defy seemed doomed, as donors rapidly retreated.

Hoke has denied the allegations, though she previously admitted having sex with ex-prisoners participating in a similar program she had established in Houston in 2004. After being banned from Texas prisons in 2009, she resurfaced in New York where she later faced the new allegations from former Defy employees. An internal investigation, conducted by an outside law firm, found evidence of personal impropriety, but no proof that program results were embellished, donors misled or funds misused.

Glazier joined Defy in May of 2017, charged with building the new L.A. chapter. But before he had completed his first year on the job, the scandal hit, and he was suddenly promoted to president and CEO as the organization ran out of money.

Glazier recalls how he perceived the promotion: “You’re in charge. Here’s a dumpster fire.”

The newcomer scrambled to keep the sinking agency afloat. He was forced to lay off two thirds of the staff, then proceeded “to engineer a turnaround.” Today, the agency is back on solid footing.

A Defy Ventures volunteer giving résumé feedback.Defy’s top goal, says Glazier, is cutting the rate of recidivism, the all-important measure that tracks the proportion of released offenders who return to prison over time. Nationwide, the rate has remained stubbornly high for decades. According to the most recent study released in 2018 by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 83 percent of inmates released in 2005 had been re-arrested at least once within nine years. Most, 68 percent, were re-arrested within the first three years. The study followed a random sample of 67,966 prisoners from 30 states, including California, Colorado and New York, all places where Defy programs operate.

Defy’s strategy is essentially simple: Help men and women inside prisons prepare for a successful re-entry by teaching them business and career skills and personal development. Once they’re released, the agency provides continued support through a structured program to help them get a job or start a business.

While still in prison, participants engage in a seven-month curriculum that culminates in a Shark Tank-style competition, in which they pitch their ideas to a panel of business leaders and investors. After graduation and release, winners can bring their ideas to fruition through Defy’s Business Incubator.

ON ITS WEBSITE, Defy tracks results by the numbers: More than 5,200 prison participants, 4,800 volunteers, a one-year recidivism rate of 7.2 percent, an 84 percent employment rate and 143 businesses incorporated over the past eight years.

Like Defy itself, several of these small enterprises go on to employ former prisoners. Two Defy graduates work for Glazier at the agency’s spare and utilitarian offices, where the décor is corkboards and calendars.

Quan Huynh, the organization’s post-release program manager, joined the Defy program as a participant in 2015 while serving a life sentence for murder. He had been convicted in connection with a car-to-car shootout on the Santa Ana Freeway between his Vietnamese gang and members of a rival gang in the other car. He did time in some of the state’s toughest prisons, including Soledad and Pelican Bay.

“For the first 10 or 12 years, I never thought I was going to go home,” says Quan, whose parents fled the Vietnam War when he was an infant. At his parole hearing, he gambled on telling the truth, admitting he had lied in court and coached witnesses. His honesty paid off.

After his release, Defy helped him start his own cleaning company in Fountain Valley. Today, he is founder and CEO of Jade Janitors, currently with six employees, including five who were formerly incarcerated. He was Glazier’s first hire at Defy in 2017.

Another volunteer offering feedback to an EIT at a California prison.

Another volunteer offering feedback to an EIT at a California prison.

When asked, Quan thinks before offering a job assessment on his boss. “He’s very strategic and organized,” he says. “He’s all about systems and processes. He does not micromanage me at all. He empowers me. He sets the goal and sets high expectations, and we follow through with it.”

For Quan, that management style says, “I trust you.”

PRIVATELY, GLAZIER CAN “sometimes seem a little socially awkward,” Quan says, but he’s confident in the spotlight as Defy’s workshop leader. “He’s right in his comfort zone right there, actually connecting with the participants.”

During the recent Business Coaching Day, Glazier is clearly comfortable leading the icebreakers. In one, he asks people to introduce themselves by dancing their way from their seats to the front of the large hall.

“Quan, have you got some good dance music ready?”

There is no room to be bashful in this exercise. The participants, both budding entrepreneurs and volunteer counselors, make their way to the front, displaying individuality in their step. They strut, stroll, glide, vamp and slow-walk their way to the front, announcing the nicknames they gave themselves. There is Graceful Grace, Fantastic Frank, Kind Kyra and Bashful Benny. And here come Musical Michele, Ambitious Albert, Incredible Ian and Resilient Raul.

In the role of moderator, Glazier as Awesome Andrew is a cross between a motivational speaker, group therapy leader and game-show host. By the time these icebreakers work their wonder, the room is buzzing with laughter and chatter like a nightclub at midnight.

But when it comes time for Step to the Line, Glazier asks for silence. He instructs the group to form two lines along blue tape laid on the floor a few feet apart. Volunteers stand shoulder-to-shoulder on one side facing the Entrepreneurs in Training on the other. Then they all take two steps back from their respective lines, making the distance greater between them.

Glazier ’97 leading one of Defy's signature exercises, Step to the Line.

Glazier ’97 leading one of Defy’s signature exercises, Step to the Line.

Glazier then reads a series of questions. For each one, participants must step forward to their line if they feel the statement is “true for you.” As the exercise goes along, people on both sides of the divide step forward and back with each question, revealing both differences and commonalities.

Soothing guitar and piano music start playing, relaxing as a spa. Glazier’s words float over the room like spiritual meditations. “We don’t do shame at Defy,” he says, speaking slowly with deliberate pauses. “We’re forward-looking. We do empathy. Now, empathy is not pity. Nobody is asking for anybody to feel sorry for them. Feeling sorry for someone isn’t built on respect. But empathy is built on respect and shared humanity. Empathy says that I see you. I hear you. And I understand.”

The first few questions are for fun.

I like scary movies.

I know who Billie Eilish is.

I was the class clown.

As the statements get more probing, responses reveal social divisions. Only two of the EITs, but half of the volunteers, indicate their parents paid for private schools. Only one former prisoner earned a four-year college degree; most dropped out of high school.

Yet people on both sides share sad experiences, with random movements back and forth from the line of truth.

I struggle with my self-confidence to this day.

My mother or father have been to jail or prison.

My parents split up and their divorce deeply wounded me.

I’ve lost someone I love to violence.

An EIT hugs members of his family during an emotional Defy Ventures graduation exercise.

An EIT hugs members of his family during an emotional Defy Ventures graduation exercise.

When the questions turn to crime, the results are both surprising and shocking. Surprising to learn that many of the mostly white mentors have been stopped or questioned by police for no reason, and almost all have been arrested. Shocking to see what the EITs have endured in prison. The majority have spent more than four years behind bars, a few more than 20. The visual of men stepping back or remaining on the line as the number of years are called out makes for a powerful moment. Even more so when Glazier asks about a harsh psychological punishment.

I’ve spent time in solitary confinement. (All but two step foward.)

More than two years. (Two men step back.)

Three years. (Three men remain.)

Five years. (Two left.)

Seven. (One man still on the line.)

Ten years. (Finally, all have stepped back.)

The exercise has succeeded. It has stirred passion and compassion, even from this casual observer. And it has forged strong bonds among this unlikely team of strangers, as indicated by their collective shared movement when Glazier delivers the final statements.

I feel proud of the person I am becoming.

Everybody steps up to the lines, and a couple give high fives across the quickly closing gap.

Okay, last one. If it’s true for you, let me hear it. I love being part of the Defy community.

The session ends with cheers, laughter, spontaneous hugs all around.

Inside Out

Inside Out thumbnail

fences topped with razor-sharp wireBEHIND FENCES TOPPED with razor-sharp wire, students from the 5Cs sit next to incarcerated students each semester in classes taught by Claremont Colleges professors at the California state prison in Norco.

They are part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange program, an international effort introduced locally by Pitzer College in 2014 and expanded in 2018 to include courses from Pomona College and the other 5Cs. The classes inside the 3,600-inmate California Rehabilitation Center (CRC) are part of the groundbreaking Inside-Out program created by Temple University Professor Lori Pompa in 1997—an effort that took ‘outside’ undergraduate students into classes with ‘inside’ students serving sentences in Pennsylvania prisons. Since then, it has expanded to more than 150 colleges and universities at some 200 jails and prisons.

Education isn’t the only goal of the college-credit classes; it’s also an attempt to create dialogue between groups with profound social differences. But the inside and outside students are equals in the classroom: They read the same materials, complete the same assignments, earn the same college credit and in small ways start to echo each other. As one incarcerated student in Professor Jo Hardin’s Math 57 class, Thinking with Data, writes:

In the future I hope to organize communities that focus on sustainable, environmentally beneficial practices. With the skills I learned in this class I feel prepared to communicate and interpret complex scientific data in ways that are easily understood and enjoyable to contemplate. Also by broadening my interactions with young scholars I’m exposed to the issues pertinent to the change makers of tomorrow.

Ultimately, the differences are stark. The outside students get to leave after class and return to a bus where their cell phones and lives await. The inside students at the medium-security men’s facility will eventually be eligible for release, but for now their lives are confined by both fences and regulations. They answered questions about the program in anonymous handwritten responses, including this one from a student in Linguistics 114, a course on language and discrimination taught by Nicole Holliday, an assistant professor of linguistics at Pomona:

I thought I would just be an outcast for the rest of my life, but my interactions with the outside students showed me that not everyone will judge me, and maybe I’ll get to find a place I fit into society after all.

And another student:

Being part of an “inside-out” class also makes me feel like a regular person, not an inmate. It is a welcome reprieve from the highly punitive correctional environment that I live in.

And another:

Being treated like a human and not a monster.

The buses leave The Claremont Colleges at 12:30 p.m. on the days of classes at the prison. Six courses were offered in fall 2019 and another half-dozen this spring, each meeting once a week. The students and professors must be cleared by prison security and undergo orientation, as well as being tested for tuberculosis before classes begin. They invest a full afternoon for one class, often returning to campus as late as 5:30. “Walking into the prison for the first time, it felt incredibly surreal,” says Pomona student Sarah Sundermeyer ’21. “But I think that feeling of trepidation dissipated as soon as we were inside the classroom with the other students. They were so warm and friendly and just open and willing to share in a way that I don’t know that I expected.”

An experience different from what they expected is a common refrain. “I guess it’s been more striking how unremarkable it is,” Hardin says. “You think, ’Oh, this is a really big deal.’ Everybody says it’s really impactful, and in some ways it has been. But in terms of the class structure and the class dynamics, it’s really just a class.”

“And that’s what you’re actually trying to do, right?” interjects Holliday. “Part of the innovation is treating people who are incarcerated like people—and that means treating them like students, for us.”

The courses are partly tailored for the setting, with Hardin’s data class focused on interpreting such information as census statistics and medical research, but also on the probabilities involved in DNA analysis of the sort used in criminal investigations and trials. Discussion is also an integral part of the model. “The topic was statistics and right off the bat people were saying, ‘I feel I’m reduced to a number in the system,’” says Ahana Ganguly ’21.

Holliday’s class examines linguistic prejudice in the educational system as well as the criminal justice system. “Every single inside student had a story about being told that they talked ‘ghetto’ or literally having the Spanish beaten out of them in school,” she says. “When people tell you your language doesn’t work because of their racism, you don’t use your language. And then what happens to you in school? It’s really, really powerful. And maybe in some small way, you know, what the program is trying to do is just restore a little bit of the dignity that they lost through the way they were treated in the educational system to begin with.”

Inside students earn course credits and a small amount of time off their sentences. Outside students earn credit and a first-person experience of a system most had considered only in theory.

“I think the greatest benefit actually—I hope—accrues to the larger society,” Holliday says. “What does a world look like when every judge, every lawyer, every politician has had a real human connection with someone that’s incarcerated? And we know our students go on to do wonderful things. They’re going to grad school; they’re going to law school; they’re going to be important and powerful. I want a generation of people that have had that experience and seen how fundamentally unfair our system is, that have the power to change it when they get out.”

Involvement in research or activism involving the criminal justice system is nothing new at The Claremont Colleges, with a decades-long tradition among many faculty, particularly at Pitzer. Pomona Professor of Religious Studies Erin Runions has facilitated writing workshops inside a women’s prison and teaches a popular course on Religion, Punishment and Restoration that is now part of the Inside-Out program.

But it was Pitzer’s Tessa Hicks Peterson—an associate professor of urban studies and assistant vice president of community engagement who also heads the Office of Consortial Academic Collaboration—who piloted the first Inside-Out course, Healing Arts and Social Change, which took place at CRC in the spring of 2014. Since then she has worked to spread this model to the other Claremont Colleges, with the support from the 7C Deans and many engaged faculty.

The expansion came with the support of a $1.1 million grant Pitzer received from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2018 and is now run by Pitzer’s Tyee Griffith, founding manager of the Justice Education Initiative. In fall 2020, Pitzer will become the first Inside-Out program in the nation to offer a pathway to a bachelor’s degree for incarcerated students, who previously only have been able to earn associate’s degrees. The first class of incarcerated students to earn bachelor’s degrees in organizational studies from Pitzer would be in 2022.

All of these are complex issues, of course, involved in crime and punishment. Even on the Claremont campuses, a club called the 5C Prison Abolition Collective staged a panel last fall examining the ethics of Inside-Out that included formerly incarcerated speakers as well as Pomona’s Runions, a longtime activist and Inside-Out professor. Some who support the dismantling or reduction of the prison system over traditional reform contend that the Inside-Out program makes participants complicit with the system itself.

“There’s an idea that this ‘makes the prison look good,’” Peterson says. “But the prison is not necessarily pushing for this: We are really advocating for it on behalf of those inside who have asked us to do it. We’re there because we’re invited; we’re there because it’s their right to education, just like anyone else’s. And the educational experience is really transformative and does often provide a level of agency, like any educational experience does. That in and of itself is what we hope will change the system—both girding the folks inside with that sense of agency and education but also girding our 5C undergraduates with knowledge about this system, that for many people they have a luxury to not have to know and care what’s happening in these facilities that are state-run, that our tax dollars are going to. So we’re complicit with these institutions, regardless of whether we’re teaching inside or sitting here ignoring them. Those of us involved feel like we’d much rather be complicit with a solution of educating ourselves about these institutions so that we can become better advocates. Because certainly, you can’t teach inside without having resulting very strong feelings about the prison-industrial complex. It’s just impossible.”

The ideas a professor or student comes in with are not often the ones they leave with, says Darryl Yong, a professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd who serves as faculty liaison for Inside-Out.

“It’s so black and white at first for many students,” he says. “Then when they see it and experience it, they realize it’s way more complicated than they could have possibly imagined. I think that complication is part of the learning. You learn by feeling squeezed in both worlds. Even the experience of having to walk through the gate, walk to our classroom, just being in the space, understanding what people are subjected to, it opens your eyes.”

Pomona students and others say they walk away changed.

“I love that idea that learning could provide an escape, and education could provide a kind of inner freedom for them and for us as well, as Claremont students,” Sundermeyer says.

Talking While Black

Talking While Black

Talking While BlackSIMPLE TRAFFIC STOPS escalate, ending in unnecessary deaths. In courtrooms, justice is not always served. And in prisons, the voices of many of the incarcerated sound alike.

As a sociolinguist, Assistant Professor of Linguistics Nicole Holliday specializes in the study of how language and identity interact. More specifically, she focuses on the many implications of a central question: What does it mean to sound Black?

Holliday’s research on race and intonational variation examines wide aspects of society, including political speech. Yet there are few areas where the impact of race and linguistic differences is more stark than in the criminal justice system.

In just one example, in 2015 a college-educated African American woman named Sandra Bland was arrested in Texas after a minor traffic stop turned into a confrontation. Three days later, Bland died in jail in a suspicious death that was ruled a suicide.

After hearing the dash-cam audio of the incident, Holliday and fellow linguists Rachel Burdin and Joseph Tyler analyzed it and wrote an article, “Sandra Bland: Talking While Black,” that was published by Language Log, a linguistics blog hosted by the University of Pennsylvania.

With the help of linguistics tools such as the software program Praat and spectrograms that provide visual representations of variation in pitch, the researchers argued that the state trooper and Bland were, in essence, speaking different languages.

“What we did is we went through and used this annotation system, and we coded where the phrases are broken up and where the pitch moves up and down, the voice moves up and down, for each of them,” Holliday says.

“What we came to was she is using an identifiably African American tone pattern and he is not really matching her. So she starts in one place. He starts in another place. And it’s clear that as the situation escalates, he’s increasingly interpreting her as disrespectful, hostile, something like that. She does a few things in particular where she uses these kinds of tones, where her voice falls and rises on the same syllable. This is a pattern that we see more frequently with African American speakers.

“With the officer, he doesn’t really do that at first, but as he moves through the interaction with her, he starts to be more like that. So we think there is a mismatch in his expectations of what she was supposed to sound like as a respectful citizen. But this mismatch is fundamentally about the fact that she speaks African American English and he doesn’t.”

Bland died in jail after an incident that appeared to start with no more than a failure to signal. Her family ultimately sued, settling a wrongful death suit for $1.9 million. A misdemeanor perjury charge against the state trooper, Brian Encinia, was dismissed after he surrendered his law enforcement license and agreed not to work in the field again.

Another prominent case examined by linguists is the outcome of the trial in the shooting death of unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012. George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter in Martin’s death.

In a paper titled “Language and Linguistics on Trial,” Stanford University Professor John Rickford, now retired, and co-author Sharese King, now an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, argued that the testimony of key prosecution witness Rachel Jeantel, a 19-year-old Black teenager, was dismissed as not credible because she spoke in African American English, contributing to the not-guilty verdicts. Jeantel was on the phone with Martin as the incident unfolded.

“They lay out all of these moments where she’s using these features of African American English that could clearly be misinterpreted by people unfamiliar with the variety,” Holliday says. “So basically, she’s speaking really differently than the lawyers, than the jury, than the public.

“There are a number of features of African American English that Jeantel employs that may be unfamiliar to mainstream listeners. For example, Rickford and King point out the use of ‘zero copula’, or the omission of the overt ‘is’ or ‘are’ verb in a sentence. Jeantel also uses differences in use of plural and possessive forms, which are also forms that may distinguish African American English from mainstream varieties.”

Jeantel’s testimony included phrases incorporating those styles, and some listeners may be unable or unwilling to hear beyond a highly socially stigmatized way of speaking.

“So when you hear somebody speak this way and you have these biases, you might just say, ‘Oh, this person is not educated and I’m going to stop listening,’” Holliday says.

“People attach a lot of judgments about morality and character to the way that people talk. And these biases that we have are almost always racist, classist, sexist, problematic in some other way, but it’s not the fault of the language. The language just varies. And that’s a natural part of what language does. But the variation gets interpreted as a problem.

“It’s very transparent that people’s ideas about language aren’t really about language,” she says. “They’re about other sociological phenomena.”

A Journey of Faith and Inquiry

A Journey of Faith and Inquiry
Paul Kiefer '20 outside the Shabazz Restaurant

Paul Kiefer ’20 outside the Shabazz Restaurant in Durham, N.C., adjacent to the state’s oldest mosque.

PAUL KIEFER’S JOURNEY of faith and inquiry already has taken him great distances. An American Muslim from Seattle who converted as a teenager, Kiefer ’20 studied abroad in Morocco during his junior year to experience the Arabic-speaking Muslim world. Back home in the United States, he looked toward the American South as he prepared to write his senior thesis in history.

There, he was an outsider of a different sort, a white Muslim gathering oral histories and conducting research on the Southern Black Muslim community that emerged in North Carolina in the 1950s and has grown deep roots in the Tar Heel State—a place where the festival of Eid is sometimes celebrated with fried fish and grits.

“They’re doing it right, the whole Southern thing,” says Kiefer, who was partly drawn to the region because of his family’s history there, though his relatives were not Muslim.

The Black Muslim community in North Carolina that was first planted by the Nation of Islam and later gravitated toward the teachings of W. Deen Muhammad is the subject of Kiefer’s thesis, “A Crescent Moon Rises in Dixie: The Foundation and Development of a Southern Black Muslim Community, 1955-1985.”

“Paul is writing about a topic few historians have investigated. So his work is filling a gap in our collective understanding of the Nation of Islam in the South,” says Tomás Summers Sandoval, associate professor of history and Chicana/o-Latina/o studies. “The archival work he’s done so far is already helping to write that history.”

Kiefer’s research weaves source material such as mosque records and contemporary newspaper reports with oral history interviews he conducted in North Carolina during a Summer Undergraduate Research Program project before his senior year.

“We often think of Islam in the U.S. as a present-day story but Paul’s work is a reminder of the importance of both Islam and Muslims to the U.S. past,” Summers Sandoval says. “At the same time, his work helps us better understand the roles various congregations and faiths played in the mid-century quest for Black liberation and autonomy in the South.”

Islam was not truly new to the South when it was imported from Northern cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore in the second half of the 20th century. Kiefer found records of Black mosques in the South as early as 1928 and a Black Muslim farm by 1943, though those groups were members of the Moorish Science Temple of America, not the Nation of Islam.

Even less widely known: Islam’s original roots in the South preceded the Civil War.

“About 15 to 20 percent of enslaved people in what became the United States were Muslims,” Kiefer says. “There are many well-documented examples of Muslims who practiced openly, who ran Friday prayers on plantations, who wrote letters home. At least three actually wound up going back to West Africa thanks to letters they wrote home in Arabic.”

The history of Muslims in the South is a story worth telling, and Kiefer plans to tell many more. He has applied for a Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship and the NPR Kroc Fellowship, both designed to develop journalists as well as storytellers in other mediums. While awaiting fellowship announcements in the spring, Kiefer also plans to apply for public radio jobs, pursuing his determination to uncover little-known stories and histories.

Slightly Out of Tune

Slightly Out of Tune
Mrs. Miller performs on TV’s The Hollywood Palace.

Mrs. Miller performs on TV’s The Hollywood Palace.

Hear for Yourself


If you’ve never heard Mrs. Miller, or even if you haven’t heard her lately, go to YouTube, and then get back to us …

FEW POP SONGS are as delicate, lovely and sophisticated as Antônio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova classic, “The Girl from Ipanema.” Most know it from the version recorded by Stan Getz and João Gilberto with vocals by Gilberto’s wife, Astrud. She is neither a trained nor technically proficient singer, which lends the song its magic. Her soft, shy sibilance fits the song’s irresistible sway, the perfect marriage of dreamy soundscape and insouciant delivery. “And when she passes, each one she passes goes, ‘Ah!’”

This, then, is the setup for one of the greatest jokes in pop music history. Mrs. Miller’s trip to “Ipanema” is a master class in her art. The track opens with 34 seconds of what may be the lushest, most sweeping treatment the song has ever known.

And then at 0:35—to adapt a phrase from today’s electronic dance music scene—Mrs. Miller delivers the drop. “AhhhOHH, but I watch her so saaAAad­-le-EE-ee….” If Astrud is the voice of the seductive Rio beauty, then Mrs. Miller is a rogue elephant stampeding down the beach, trumpeting away without a care in the world. It’s not that Mrs. Miller can’t sing; it’s how she can’t sing. She proclaims each syllable as grand opera—the kind that’s shouted above thunderous tympani—and her vibrato is seismic. Pitch is of no concern; that she often comes close, in fact, renders her delivery even more maddening. And she never met a downbeat she couldn’t miss.

If this sounds vicious, please know that a handful of music nuts—myself included—adore Mrs. Miller, and being objective isn’t easy, especially about an artist—an alumna of the College—whose notoriety came seemingly as the butt of an extremely cruel joke.

Because this issue of PCM is dedicated to humor, I felt I had to check to see if her music is still potent nearly 50 years on. Is the joke funny? Was it ever? An uninitiated friend was driving us to dinner. “Mind if I play something?” I asked, slipping in a CD. Thirty-four seconds of instrumental intro. My friend smiled and nodded. This is good! Then it happened. He started laughing so hard, he had to pull over. “Oh my god!” he said, gasping to contain himself. “What is she … ? MAKE IT STOP!”

Meet Mrs. Miller

Mrs. Miller’s Greatest HitsShe had a first name. It was Elva. The fact that she didn’t use it professionally is a clue for understanding the joke and determining if Elva Ruby Connes Miller ’39 was in on it or not. More clues in unraveling the mystery: She released three albums—Mrs. Miller’s Greatest Hits, Will Success Spoil Mrs. Miller?, and The Country Soul of Mrs. Miller, covering everyone from the Beatles to Buck Owens—in under two years (1966–67) on entertainment industry behemoth Capitol Records. A fourth album, Mrs. Miller Does Her Thing, was released in 1968 on a tiny label out of Hollywood. That Mrs. Miller disowned this effort is the strongest evidence we have that she wasn’t fully in on but later caught on to what was happening. We’ll get to all of that soon enough, but first we have to meet Mrs. Miller.

She was born and raised in mid-American cattle country, where she met and married John Richardson Miller, a man nearly 40 years her senior. They survived the Depression and retired to Claremont (as people do) in 1935. As a housewife with time on her hands, Elva studied music at Pomona, where, she told a Life magazine reporter, the students warmed up to a more mature classmate. “They liked the idea of an older woman there,” she said. “And within three weeks they were coming to my house, to copy my notes or listen to my records.”

And by records, she meant the ones she’d recorded. Mrs. Miller booked time at local studios (paid for by Mr. Miller) to indulge her love of singing. She told the Progress Bulletin, “[Making Greatest Hits] certainly wasn’t my idea. It was just a series of coincidences that could happen to anyone. Everyone has a hobby. Some people take pictures and file them in albums. Others paint pictures and store them in the garage. I’ve made records of sacred or classical songs for my own amusement. A closet at home is filled with them.”

Some of them found their way out of that closet: She would give records to churches and day care centers. Along the way she met three men who would steer her toward becoming a reluctant recording star. Gary Owens was a deejay at Los Angeles radio station KMPC who, following Mrs. Miller’s success, became a regular on ’60s TV comedy sketch show Laugh-In. He heard one of her records and sought her out to record comic jingles and station IDs. In his tongue-in-cheek Greatest Hits liner notes, Owens claimed to have discovered Mrs. Miller. That honor actually belonged to Fred Bock, a church musician whom Mr. and Mrs. Miller hired to accompany Elva on her hobby recordings. Bock, in turn, introduced the Millers to Lex de Azevedo, a novice record producer who had industry “connections” thanks to being the son of one of the King Sisters.

With that, the stage was set.

A Capitol Idea

The Country Soul of Mrs. MillerSo why would a leading record label—home to the Beatles and the Beach Boys, to Frank Sinatra’s imperial period and Peggy Lee’s renaissancewant to have anything to do with Mrs. Miller? Maybe because Jonathan and Darlene Edwards won a Grammy.

Cocktail club singer Darlene Edwards sang sharp—distressingly so—and her pianist husband Jonathan had the unique ability to play different keys and separate time signatures simultaneously. As illustrated by the cover to their debut album (on Columbia, Capitol’s main rival), he was born freakishly with two right hands.

It was a funny joke perpetrated by jazz vocal great Jo Stafford and her big band–leader husband Paul Weston. Stafford was known to have stunningly perfect pitch; so sure was her instrument that she could sustain the Herculean feat of intentionally singing above pitch. And he was so nimble on the 88s that he could accompany in fitting style by throwing in extra beats per measure and flying off into impossibly inept cadenzas. They used these dubious talents to personify two ditzy, dreadful lounge lizards—Jonathan and Darlene Edwards—to entertain their friends at parties. The gag was so popular among jazzbo hipsters that Stafford and Weston released The Piano Artistry of Jonathan Edwards just for kicks.

Imagine their surprise when its follow-up brought home the 1961 Grammy for Best Comedy Album and revved up the market for musical comedy albums in general. With the industry’s need to give the people more of the same, record company halls soon resounded with, “Get me the next Jonathan and Darlene Edwards!” At Capitol, Mrs. Miller’s do-it-yourself 45s ended up in some talent screener’s inbox; by that time Bock had convinced her to record a couple of the day’s pop hits. The pitch was made: Rather than find someone talented to play dumb like Stafford—someone who would expect to be paid—why not go with someone actually untalented?

Mrs. Miller was signed. De Azevedo was tapped to produce. Bock helped with the arrangements and recording. Owens came on board to add industry cred. And this juicy bonus: Rumors persisted, once the album was a hit, that Mr. Miller had footed the bill for the whole enterprise, as he had done for all of his wife’s hobbies. (Confronted with this by the Progress Bulletin’s Vonne Robertson, Mrs. Miller reportedly snapped, “He didn’t buy me a career!”)

There was a significant and telling departure from the Edwards formula—a ready-for-pasture lounge act massacring yesterday’s moldy oldies much to the delight of the hipper-than-thou cool school. (Stafford and Weston enjoyed a stupendously long career and would eventually have the Edwards record hits of the day as well, including the Bee Gees’ falsetto-driven disco smash “Stayin’ Alive” in a parody so wicked and on-the-nose that Barry Gibb allegedly was not amused.)

Capitol’s grand plan for Mrs. Miller drew inspiration from the nascent Silent Majority v. Hippie Freak culture wars. The joke was funny because she was someone on the wrong side of cultural history, proving how far behind Mom and Pop had been left by the rock ’n’ roll revolution. Not that she would be brought in on the joke; that might ruin its purity. They told her she would be presenting rock ’n’ roll as opera.

What follows is Mrs. Miller’s recounting of how Greatest Hits was made, assembled from several chronological news sources spanning a two-year period, a period where what had happened to her slowly dawned on Mrs. Miller: “[Recording] it was easy. We didn’t even have rehearsals. If there ever was a square, I’m it. I’d never attempted popular songs [before]. The studio men just popped the music in my hands—sorta sneaky like—and I started. I don’t sing off-key and I don’t sing off-rhythm. They got me to do so by waiting until I was tired and then making the record. Or they would cut the record before I could become familiar with the song. [I suspected something was up] when they printed [my worst performance of] ‘The Shadow of Your Smile.’ They told me it was an experiment. I am naïve, and I am somewhat lacking in musicianship, but I really [didn’t think it was] a gag. At first I didn’t understand what was going on. But later I did, and I resented it.

“I don’t like to be used.”

The Hits Just Keep on Coming

Capitol released Mrs. Miller’s cover of Petula Clark’s “Downtown” as a single along with the album. What happened next was well captured by Joe Cappo writing in the April 21 Chicago Daily News: “Wally Phillips, WGN’s zany morning disk jockey, premiered the LP on air last Friday. [He reports] the first batch of people who called said, ‘Get that nut off the air.’ Then after a few more plays, the listeners said, ‘We want more Mrs. Miller. She’s better than the rest of the junk you play.’ Phillips says he has received hundreds of telephone calls since the first playing and is scheduling at least one Mrs. Miller tune every day. Phillips said, ‘I play her records when I want to work off my hostilities against the world.’”

Greatest Hits sold out of its initial run of 50,000 in a matter of days. Another 150,000 were quickly pressed. They sold in a matter of weeks. Reports vary on how many finally were sold, ranging from 250,000 to 600,000.

Will Success Spoil Mrs. Miller?Mrs. Miller Mania had hit. This was her itinerary for 1966–68: She was whisked to New York to be on the Ed Sullivan Show. She would also be a guest of Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas and Art Linkletter. There was The Joey Bishop Show. There was an appearance on TV’s Hollywood Palace where she sat atop a piano to sing “Inka Dinka Doo” with Jimmy Durante. There was an appearance at Carnegie Hall with Red Skelton. Hollywood came calling. She played a version of herself in a low-budget film called The Cool Ones with Roddy McDowell.

A nightclub act was quickly pulled together with a backing band and chorus. (An ad in the trades may or may not have read, “Wanted: musicians who can keep a straight face.) Mrs. Miller’s first appearance was in Ontario at the Royal Tahitian. (A review had positive things to say … about the “good chicken stuffed with almonds and apples.”) Two more albums were made, each selling significantly fewer copies than the previous. A fourth appeared on a small independent label, Amaret Records. It disappeared without a trace, despite a promotional appearance with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.

And then it was over.

Reports also vary on profits. Capitol is said to have made millions off of the Mrs. Miller phenomenon. She is reported to have earned less than $40,000 from Greatest Hits and not more than $100,000 in total earnings from royalties, fees and personal appearances.

The May 13, 1966, issue of Time magazine mentioned in what amounted to a parenthetical aside that Mrs. Miller had put her earnings into a medical-care trust fund. Likely over the course of Mrs. Miller Mania and certainly by its end, Mr. Miller had needed round-the-clock nursing care. He died at age 96 in December 1968.

I Don’t Get It

Mrs. Miller Does Her ThingHow do you explain Mrs. Miller Mania? She was interviewed by The Collegian after her initial success and said, “I just don’t know what to think about it, because I have never done anything which has brought any attention of any kind whatsoever, and I just don’t know what to say. Now the boys in Vietnam, they want me to come, but I have to go back East first. I will go there because I think the service boys come first.” On further reflection, she told reporter Bob Thomas, “I don’t understand [my record sales], but teenagers seem to be buying them. As I see it, there are two kinds of teenagers. There are the sophisticated ones, who dress like Sonny and Cher. They don’t buy my album. Then there are the teenagers who dress neatly; they are the ones who do buy my records.”

This points to the 1960s culture wars, but in her admitted naïveté, Mrs. Miller overlooked something crucial. Like the boys in Vietnam or the hippies in their freaky frippery, her “character” embodies a sign of the times. As she warbles opera in her fusty frock and Sunday hat, she is the priggish society matron, the antithesis of all things with-it and groovy, practically begging for our smug derision. Think Margaret Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbillies, Mrs. Stephens on Bewitched, or, more benignly, even dear Aunt Bee and neighbor Clara on The Andy Griffith Show. Humor in those shows was often generated by letting the air out of such old gas bags. She’s singing rock ’n’ roll! But she can’t! It’s hilarious!

Recall as well that during Mrs. Miller Mania, America had its love affair with camp. We watched Batman on TV and listened to Tiny Tim (a hippie with talent who nevertheless warbled the hoariest of musical chestnuts while coyly strumming a ukulele). Even the Beatles got into the act with the likes of “When I’m 64” and “Yellow Submarine.” (Mrs. Miller took a ride on the latter.)

Capitol Records—home to polar opposites like “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Dear Heart,” both songs scaled by Mrs. Miller—had its fingers on that pulse. Ultimately, Mrs. Miller wised up as well. In a review of her February 1967 appearance at L.A.’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub, John L. Scott noted that Mrs. Miller was playing the show as pure comedy, noting that she delivered very deliberate one-liners with great comic timing. And she was very aware that she had the audience in stitches. She knows’cause when she passes, each one she passes goes, “Ha!”

But that didn’t mean she gave in or pretended to be anything she wasn’t. She went by “Mrs. Miller” for a reason, and it wasn’t because it had a marketing ring to it. It was polite that wives were properly identified in public as their husband’s property. Interviewed by Skip Heller in an article in Cool and Strange Music Magazine, Mrs. Fred Bock—to sustain a trope—recalled when, after a gig, she, her husband and Mrs. Miller met actress Natalie Schafer (Mrs. Thurston Howell III, the Gilligan’s Island version of the blue-blooded old biddy). The actress said to Mrs. Miller, “You can call me Natalie.” To which Mrs. Miller replied, “And you can call me Mrs. Miller.”

Desafinado

Antônio Carlos Jobim, who gave us “The Girl from Ipanema,” penned another classic, “Desafinado” (translation: slightly out of tune). Its English lyrics speak of love gone sour; the original Portuguese gets at something deeper, suggesting that only privileged ears can hear things perfectly, that bossa nova can’t help but be out of tune. It chides, “What you don’t know and cannot feel is that those out of tune also have a heart.”

Mrs. Miller wasn’t the first pop sensation to have been lauded for singing poorly. In her day she was compared to the Cherry Sisters, a 19th-century vaudeville act popular although—no, probably because—it was said “they couldn’t speak, sing or act. They were simply awful.” And then there was Florence Foster Jenkins, the grossly untalented opera singer who rented grand opera halls to torture her friends. (In a 2016 film, Jenkins was played by no less than Meryl Streep, who proclaims, “People may say I couldn’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.”) Susan Alexander Kane’s atrocious public screeching is a central plot point of Citizen Kane. And try as you might, you cannot forget William Hung, can you?

Music is a particularly prickly muse. We are very quick to accept, even champion, foibles and faux pas in other art forms. We celebrate primitive painters. We keep Norman Mailer in the pantheon despite his having opened Harlot’s Ghost with an egregious dangling participle. And Nicolas Cage keeps getting acting gigs, for crying out loud. But stray one iota off key….

It’s often said visionaries are ahead of their time. In 2019 we have a word for the Mrs. Millers of the world—disrupters—and it’s the hot thing to be. So isn’t it odd that the chaotic disrupter of the music industry’s professional norms and expectations—the joyous elephant stampeding down that Ipanema beach—was none other than the persona of the stuffy establishment matron whose comeuppance we so deeply desired? And if you’re having trouble wrapping your head around that double irony, here’s the mindblower. When it comes to cooler-than-thou, competence isn’t spared, either.

Nearly concurrently, 30 miles to the southwest, another transplant from the East who blossomed in a college music department was about to become a thousand times more famous than Mrs. Miller and come crashing down a hundred times harder. Only she was the best voice of her generation. Karen Carpenter came out of Downey, Calif., and the music department of California State University, Long Beach, to sell more than 90 million records. Carpenters records dramatically changed popular music—yes, even rock ’n’ roll. The duo invented the guitar-driven power ballad, and their recording, performing and marketing techniques set standards throughout the industry. But they could not break the critical determination that they were unhip and square—okay, they were unhip and square—and that disservice lingers. Riots likely will break out should they ever be inducted into Cleveland’s Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

Karen now is regarded as a preeminent interpretive pop singer, yet frustrations with the duo’s inability to shake their negative image, coupled with her own personal demons, led her to die of anorexia at age 32. Elva couldn’t sing a good note. Karen couldn’t sing a bad one. And both were out of tune with their times. Which just goes to show you that the arbiters of taste in their indifferent and often unfounded dismissals can be truly heartless monsters.

One for the Boys

Mrs. Miller and Jimmy Durante sing a duet on TV’s The Hollywood Palace.

Mrs. Miller and Jimmy Durante sing a duet on TV’s The Hollywood Palace.

Two postscripts. One bitten, twice shy? Hardly. It seems Mrs. Miller could not catch a break. After she was dropped by Capitol, news articles appeared noting that she was going to change her image. In April of 1968, she released Mrs. Miller Does Her Own Thing, working with noted L.A. producer Mike Curb. (He would go on to produce the Osmonds, date Karen Carpenter and serve as California’s lieutenant governor.) Scattered among the usual pop hits that anyone but her should be singing, were suggestive, trippy titles such as “The Roach,” “Mary Jane,” “Granny Bopper” and “Renaissance of Smut,” that would have been better if the pot and porno references had at least been dressed up with coy double entendre. The cover was psychedelic and garish. Mrs. Miller is winking knowingly and offering a salver of brownies presumably enhanced with what we now call “edibles.”

Her new image was a pusher? Yet again, she had been hornswoggled. She didn’t get the sex and drug references. The cover art had been manipulated. She didn’t even get it when a winking Johnny Carson asked how the weeds were in her garden. (Was there ever a time when male entertainment honchos didn’t exploit their power differential with women? MAKE IT STOP!)

When she was woke to this new betrayal, Mrs. Miller said “Enough!” She lived quietly in Claremont but remained engaged in her community. She was the grand marshal for the Fourth of July parade, and she judged The Claremont Colleges’ Spring Sing. She moved to Hollywood, where she enjoyed classical concerts and theatre. She later moved to an apartment in Northridge that was destroyed in the 1994 quake. She was relocated to an elder-care facility, where she died in 1997. She was 90.

She did keep her promise to the boys in Nam. In 1967 she joined Bob Hope’s annual USO tour. Life magazine’s Jordan Bonfante covered it, noting of her performance, “In Vietnam, clad in jungle boots and a muumuu, she chatted with audiences about the 15 years she spent studying music, lopped five years off at each burst of laughter, and finally offered, ‘Would you believe one?’ When that was howled down, she confessed she was starting lessons ‘tomorrow.’”

She had timing. She had one-liners. And—as captured in photos of her among the adoring troops—she had the time of her life.

“And when she passes, each one she passes goes, ‘Ah!’”

This Is Your Brain on Humor

This Is Your Brain on Humor

Ori AmirON A RANDOM weeknight at a comedy club in Burbank, Pomona College Professor Ori Amir bounds onto the stage.

“Hello, party people!”

By day, the bearded redhead with perpetually tousled hair is a visiting professor of psychology who has taught at Pomona since 2017.  By night? An amateur stand-up comic.

“As you can tell by my accent, I am a neuroscientist,” the native Israeli says, drawing titters from an audience that doesn’t quite know what to believe. “Sorry, I forgot I’m in Hollywood: I’m a neuroscientist-slash-model,” he says.

“I did get a new haircut. I went to Floyd’s and I told them I work at a college, so could you just give me the haircut of whatever celebrity is most popular among college students these days? So they gave me the Bernie Sanders.”

This time, the laughter is in full.

To Amir, stand-up comedy is like a scientific experiment that provides immediate results. You test the hypothesis that your joke is funny: They either laugh or they don’t. There are variables such as word choice, delivery and audience demographics, but the feedback is instant—sometimes painfully so.

His academic research is a far more sophisticated inquiry. Other researchers have used fMRI analysis, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, to study the brain’s responses to humor. Amir’s work with fMRIs and eye-tracking technology is groundbreaking: He studies the workings of the brain during the actual creation of humor.

Comedy, it turns out, is a nearly perfect subject for exploring the creative process.

“It’s a cognitive process that under the right setting could take 15 seconds, and you can replicate it many times. Anybody can at least try to do it,” Amir says. “It’s hard to ask a novelist to come up with a novel while you’re watching.”

Ori AmirAmir’s research has been featured by Forbes, and the journal Nature reported on his work last fall in an article about how neuroscience is breaking out of the lab, citing his doctoral research at the University of Southern California with Irving Biederman on the neural correlates of humor creativity. The Guardian, Reader’s Digest and the website Live Science also have featured Amir’s work.

For his research at USC, Amir recruited professional comedians—including some from the Groundlings, the famed Los Angeles improv troupe that helped spark the careers of Melissa McCarthy and Will Ferrell—along with amateur comedians and a control group of students and faculty. He then showed them examples of the classically quirky cartoons from The New Yorker with the original captions removed and asked the subjects to come up with their own captions—some humorous, some mundane and sometimes no caption at all—as he recorded which areas of the brain were activated.

What Amir found was somewhat unexpected: The regions of the brain lit up by the creation of the funniest jokes by the most experienced comedians weren’t so much in the medial prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain associated with cognitive control, but in the temporal lobes, the regions of the brain connected to more-spontaneous association. The findings fit perfectly, he says, with the classic but decidedly unscientific advice by improv comedy coaches to “get out of your head.”

Amir has expanded his work at Pomona, where he teaches such courses as Psychology of Humor, Data Mining for Psychologists and fMRI Explorations into Cognition. His current work uses eye-tracking technology to examine the relationship between visual attention and the creation of humor.

That study has given undergraduate students who are headed toward entirely different careers an opportunity to contribute to research that Amir expects to publish in a scientific journal next year. Recent cognitive graduates Konrad Utterback ’19, who is beginning his career as a financial analyst, and Justin Lee ’19, who plans to go to law school, will be among the paper’s coauthors. Other collaborators include Alexandra Papoutsaki—a computer science professor at Pomona whose expertise in the emerging uses and potential of eye tracking has been featured in Fortune and Fast Company—and students Sue Hyun Kwon ’18 and Kevin Lee ’20, who wrote computer code for the project.

Konrad Utterback ’19 models the use of the Tobii eye tracker to track eye movements as subjects try to create a punchline for an uncaptioned New Yorker cartoon.

Konrad Utterback ’19 models the use of the Tobii eye tracker to track eye movements as subjects try to create a punchline for an uncaptioned New Yorker cartoon.

Once again using uncaptioned New Yorker cartoons as prompts, Utterback and Justin Lee conducted experiments using a similar assortment of professional comedians that included comics from the Groundlings and Second City, along with amateur comedians and students.

The eye-tracking device—a low-end model by Tobii that costs about $170 and looks like a narrow black bar attached to the bottom of a standard computer monitor—allowed the researchers to chart the movement of the subjects’ eyes on an X-Y coordinate plane over the 30 seconds they were given to look at each cartoon.

Konrad Utterback ’19 models the use of the Tobii eye tracker to track eye movements as subjects try to create a punchline for an uncaptioned New Yorker cartoon.The results were then compared to something called a saliency map of the cartoon image.

“It’s this algorithm that basically determines which part of the cartoon is the most visually salient; it defines visual saliency in terms of things like edges and contrast and light—factors which are likely to attract low-level, primitive visual attention,” Utterback explains.

Once again, the results were surprising. The expert comedians focused most closely on the salient or conspicuous features of the cartoon, including faces.

“It’s actually a little counterintuitive because you would think, well, you have all this experience doing comedy and then you end up looking at those features that the low-level algorithm has determined to be the most salient ones,” Amir says. “Our interpretation was that it has to do with them actually using the image to generate the captions, using the input to generate associations to come up with something funny, as opposed to trying to sort of top-down impose their ideas.”

That made sense to Utterback.

“The fact that these were improv comedians in particular is relevant because that’s consistent with how comedians do improv comedy,” he says. “They’re basically trained to listen to what other people are saying first and not ruminate internally too much trying to think of something funny on their own, and sort of just be reactive. It makes perfect sense with these results because they were focusing much more on the actual content of the image to create the joke rather than trying to generate it themselves and forcing it to fit the cartoon, which is what we would expect people with no comedy experience to do.”

Justin Lee’s part of the study built on those results, adding the captions the subjects produced to the original cartoons and then asking three different people to rate the funniness of the cartoons and their captions. “We were able to use the data to determine that this fixation on the salient parts of the image directly correlates with how funny the caption actually ends up being,” Lee says.

The students’ findings support Amir’s earlier results. “We basically proved the same thing that he did using a different modality (eye tracking versus fMRI),” Utterback says. “In a nutshell, both experiments show that people with more comedy experience display a higher level of bottom-up, automatic control and less top-down, intentional influence on the humor creation process.”

Growing up in Israel, Amir watched his father “joke all the time” around the house and even do some comedic appearances on Israeli television.He tried his own hand at stand-up for the first time about seven years ago while still in graduate school at USC, telling a couple of jokes at a campus comedy event. Later, he started showing up around L.A. for open-mic nights. He has appeared at some famous L.A. comedy clubs and can even be seen on TV’s Comedy Central and CMT—“assuming you watch those channels 24-7 on a split screen, without blinking,” Amir writes on his comedy website.

His mainstay is performing at smaller clubs, joints still dotted with appearances by famous or once-famous comics, where he can continue to hone his craft. The life of most comedians, he quickly learned, is not what he saw on TV growing up, somebody telling jokes for an hour in a big arena.

Ori Amir“You don’t know the path,” he says. “The path is—you’re going to end up performing for a long time in front of three apathetic strangers at an open mic, and you’re going to wait two hours to do that and have to buy something from the place. Especially in Los Angeles, it’s an extremely competitive sort of thing. But obviously if it wasn’t so rewarding, people would not be working with so much effort.”

Amir’s influences include George Carlin, the late comedian remembered for his HBO specials and his sharp political and social commentary, as well as British comedians Eddie Izzard and Bill Bailey.

As a foreigner and an academic, Amir has an uncommon perspective for a comic. Audiences don’t always believe he is who he says he is. “I had a couple of times when people said, ‘You’re not really a neuroscientist, and your accent is so fake,’” he says with a laugh. Amir also likes to needle Americans with the insight of an outsider.

“I do like being a foreigner, but sometimes I’m a little concerned that Trump is going to deport me now to Mexico,” he says onstage. “I’m trying to seem more like an American by walking around saying American things, like, ‘Hey, this is America—speak English. Jesus loves you. Sign here.’

“I love the American English,” he goes on. “I love how rich your vocabulary is. You have words like communist, socialist, Marxist, anti-American—and these are only just the synonyms for poor.”

Social and political commentary and the typical off-color comedy club fare can be a little dicey for an academic, particularly one without tenure, Amir knows. He doesn’t invite students to his gigs, but his act was squeaky clean the night PCM visited.

“I do actually have a reporter from my college here,” he told the crowd, “so I can’t say any jokes that could be offensive or construed as prejudiced or sexist or dirty in any way, so … Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen!”

That one, he says later, would have worked better if he had led with it. His comedy is part improv and partly always being refined. He doesn’t expect to give up his day job any time soon, nor does he plan to quit performing.

“I do want to see how far I can get with it,” he says. “Very few people actually make money doing it—and also, my visa doesn’t allow me to do that for money anyway.”

Ba-dum-bump.

Back in the lab, Amir plans to turn his gaze to the potential for artificial intelligence to produce comedy.

His initial instinct is that comedy is an “AI-complete problem”—one of the few things robots are not soon going to be able to do better than humans. There are types of humor, however, that computers should be able to excel at—such as puns, the proverbial lowest form of humor.

“That’s the first type of humor computers are able to do,” he says.

By the way, Amir—who performs around Los Angeles maybe a couple of times a week—already has had the distinction of being the opening act for a joke-telling robot.

The electronic novice of the stand-up circuit was pretty funny, he admits. However, there was a catch.

“The robot told jokes written by a good comedy writer.”

The World According to Bob’s Burgers

The World According to Bob’s Burgers
Wendy Molyneux holds a stuffed version of the mysterious Kuchi Kopi character from Bob’s Burgers.

Wendy Molyneux holds a stuffed version of the mysterious Kuchi Kopi character from Bob’s Burgers.

TV FANS MIGHT get their notions of a comedy writer’s workplace from the sitcom 30 Rock, with its gaggle of unkempt guys tossing around food and sexist jokes. But reality is the polar opposite at the gleaming new offices of Fox’s long-running animated series Bob’s Burgers, where Wendy Molyneux ’97 works as a writer and an executive producer.

Molyneux’s private office is colorful and comfortable, but also tidy and sunny. Artwork by fans, depicting the show’s goofy but lovable characters, adorns the walls, attractively framed and carefully aligned. Beyond her door, the common areas provide roomy and serene spaces where colleagues can convene for group writing sessions or have a bite at a working lunch counter, a replica of the one on the show.

The offices reflect a designer’s orderly touch, not the unruly, chaotically creative mind of a comedy writer.

Tidiness, Molyneux will admit, is not her strong suit. She once hired a professional organizer to help get her life in order, as she explained to podcast host and fellow Pomona alumna Alison Rosen ’97. During that assisted cleanup, Molyneux rummaged through boxes of her old college stuff and got a glimpse of herself more than 20 years ago as an aspiring scribe. She didn’t like what she saw.

“I looked at some of the things I had written and thought, ‘Oh God, how did I have a single friend?’” Molyneux said on the episode of Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend. “Some people are better than I was at that age, but I think I was really pretentious.”

If so, Molyneux, now 43 and expecting her fourth child in just a few weeks, certainly seems to have grown out of it. Dressed casually with hair uncoiffed, she takes a seat on a cozy couch. At times, she seems self-effacing. Interrupted by the reporter, she apologizes: “Sorry, I ramble.” Asked a follow-up question for clarification, she takes the blame for the confusion: “This is, like, the least-clean bio of all times.” But she says it with a friendly laugh. Not a belly laugh or knee slapper, but a natural, spontaneous laugh that punctuates and ripples through her sentences, as if what she hears herself say just struck her funny.

That lighthearted quality hasn’t changed since her college years.

“I remember Wendy vividly and fondly,” says Thomas G. Leabhart, resident artist and professor of theatre at Pomona. “The mischievous twinkle in her eye and her love of a good hearty laugh did not prevent her taking her studies seriously. She performed classic roles with as much authority and ease as contemporary ones and seemed perfectly at home on stage.”

For Molyneux, the road from college theatre to professional comedy would be long and winding, with more than its share of potholes, detours and dead ends.

Wendy Molyneux (left) and her sister Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin chat in a working replica of the diner in Bob’s Burgers.

Wendy Molyneux (left) and her sister Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin chat in a working replica of the diner in Bob’s Burgers.

Molyneux  was born in New York and grew up in Indiana, the second child in a family of four girls and one boy. Asking if her family name is French elicits another laugh. “Our last name sounds a lot more sophisticated than we are,” she says. “We’re like 80 percent Irish, or more. We’re actually potato people.”

She attended Franklin Central High School on the outskirts of Indianapolis, an area that was, at the time, primarily white, staunchly conservative and stubbornly bent on maintaining its rural lifestyle. She calls it “very proto-Trump country.” Her parents, Richard and Susan Molyneaux, were “Democrats in a sea of Republicans.”

The kids, however, did not see the world in political reds and blues. For them, it was a fascinating playland of childhood adventures and sibling shenanigans. They were “free-range kids,” recalls Molyneux, out of the house in the morning, back at night. There were no fences, and no adult supervision.

It smacks of the idyllic suburban life nostalgically portrayed in Steven Spielberg movies. “We literally had a cornfield at the end of our street,” recalls Molyneux. There was also a creek running through their backyard, and endless open space where they could run wild, along with their imaginations.

That carefree lifestyle is still a source of inspiration for story lines on Bob’s Burgers, focused on the off-kilter but loveable Belcher family: owner Bob, his wife Linda, and their three rascals, Tina, Gene and little Louise with her perennial pink rabbit ears. Molyneux does not rely on her children for ideas; she draws on her own childhood experience to animate the episodes she co-writes with her sister and longtime collaborator, Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin. To them, the cartoon Belchers share much in common with the real-life Molyneux family of a bygone era.

That era came to an end when Wendy was 15. Her father, an engineer, got a new job with Mattel, the corporate toymaker based in El Segundo, and the family moved nearby to the tony suburb of Manhattan Beach. Wendy enrolled at Mira Costa High School, among the best in the country. Lizzie, who is eight and a half years younger, was barely starting grade school.

California real estate prices gave her parents sticker shock. But the political climate on the left coast gave them a new sense of belonging. “It was a revelation,” Molyneux recalls, “like, ‘Oh my God, not everyone is conservative!’”

Despite their age difference, Wendy and Lizzie were great friends. They went to the movies and joked around together. It would be another 15 years before they would start writing together too.

After graduating from Mira Costa in 1993, Molyneux started weighing her college options, though not too rigorously.  All she needed to make her choice was a casual glance through a promotional booklet for Pomona College that belonged to her sister Jenny, older by a year and a half, who had preceded her at Pomona.

Wendy zeroed in on a small boxed feature in the booklet, and there it was—her mission in life. “I literally can remember where it was on the page: bottom right-hand corner, somewhere in the middle of the book. A little box says, ‘Pomona College has an improv comedy group called Without a Box,’ and I was like, ‘Well, I have to go here,’” Molyneux recalls. “Literally, I didn’t care about anything else. I didn’t understand that most colleges have improv groups. I thought this was incredibly special.”

At Pomona, Wendy and her older sister took different tracks. Jenny majored in economics and sang in the Glee Club. After graduating, she worked in Pomona’s admissions office.

Wendy Molyneux works on a script with some of her colleagues at Bob’s Burgers.

Wendy Molyneux works on a script with some of her colleagues at Bob’s Burgers.

Meanwhile, Molyneux was performing leading roles in classical theatre(Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière) as well as contemporary theatre(Sam Shepard, María Irene Fornés). When not on stage, she was immersed in the study of English literature and poetry, informed at times by her passion for feminist issues. Mixing the two did not always please her professors.

In her junior year, Molyneux took a course on modernist poetry, a seminar led by then English Professor Cristanne Miller, a foremost authority on Emily Dickinson with a strong interest in women’s studies.

“Only seven students were in the class, and Wendy was among the strongest, although I recall that we had a few conversations about the need to moderate her tone in her papers,” recalls Miller, now a SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. “A note in my grade book indicates that I handed Wendy’s first paper back ungraded, asking her to rewrite it, since it mostly raved about a single idea rather than developing an argument. The idea was in essence feminist and I was sympathetic to it, but expressing anger about T. S. Eliot’s portrayal of women is not sufficient for a literary critical paper—even a short one. Her second essay in the class was much better.”

Nowadays, Molyneux is not restrained by academic rigor in expressing her strong opinions on a host of topics, from feminism and gun control to motherhood, women’s rights and her none-too-subtle feelings about President Trump. Her Twitter feed (@WendyMolyneux) is peppered with F-bombs and other profane put-downs aimed at trolls, bots and other critics.

Some of her tweets are funny. Others are deadly serious.

“It’s going to be funny right until I get murdered,” she says, still laughing. “I did attract NRA trolls for a while. They send you pictures of guns and basically be like, ‘I hope you lock your doors at night.’ And then you report it to Twitter, and Twitter does absolutely nothing.”

Molyneux decided she would not be intimidated or back down. They want people to be afraid, she says, as a way to silence the opposition.

Recently, Molyneux spoke out against the diet industry as harmful to women’s self-image. She was particularly critical of a weight-loss app for kids called Kurbo from Weight Watchers. She tweeted a link and a deeply personal observation: “The first time I was told my body wasn’t okay, I was 4 or 5. Sad, right?!

Molyneux graduated from college with an English    degree and a lack of direction. “I think a lot of people came out of Pomona being like, ‘I’m gonna be a doctor. I’m going to be on Wall Street.’ And I was like, ‘I’m going to move to San Francisco and work at a crepe restaurant. It was not a good plan. But now I work on a show about a restaurant, so I guess in a way, I was being incredibly smart.”

For a few years after college, Molyneux “floundered around” in search of a clear career path in comedy, but with no map.

“I had literally no idea how to make anything happen,” she says. “I didn’t have any family in the business, and I didn’t know how you were supposed to get started. It’s not like jobs are on LinkedIn. It’s more like a room that you want to be in, but nobody’s ever seen the door, and you don’t know where the door is. So you kind of, like, have to feel your way into it.”

Molyneux “flamed out” in San Francisco after a year. She moved back to L.A., waited tables, took temp jobs, worked for an answering service. Through trial and error, she eventually “stumbled sideways” into comedy as a life-sustaining endeavor.

She got a day job selling group tickets for the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, “a little troll that they kept in the basement … and no one checked on me all day.” In her downtime, she started writing short humor pieces for the website McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, “which is still a great place for young people to get their humor-writing published.” After hours, Molyneux pursued her passion at the legendary ImprovOlympic West in Hollywood (later the iO West), a training ground and cultural hub for comedians in L.A. until it closed last year.

But there’s one thing that Molyneux, a self-described introvert, would never, ever even try—stand-up comedy.

“I was too intimidated to do stand-up,” she says, recoiling at the thought. “Oh, no, no, no. I found it frightening to be on stage by myself.”

Improv, on the other hand, has been very, very good to Wendy Molyneux. It not only put her on a career path, but also on a path to starting her own family. She met her husband, fellow writer Jeff Drake, through the improv world, and their career paths merged along with their personal lives. At one point, Drake had a job writing promotional pitches for shows on NBC, and she joined him on the in-house staff when another job opened up.

They’ve worked closely together ever since.

In 2006, they were both hired as writers for a new NBC talk show featuring Megan Mullally, of Will and Grace fame. Though short-lived (less than five months), the show marked Molyneux’s first break into the TV-writing business.

During that time, Molyneux also started working for the first time with her sister Lizzie, who was still in college and doing a summer internship in entertainment. When Lizzie pitched a script idea to a producer, he liked it. With no experience, she turned to her older sister for advice. They worked on the script together, and though it didn’t go anywhere, a successful sibling writing team was born.

Theirs was no overnight success. They continued to work on pilots that didn’t get picked up and specs (or sample scripts) in hopes someone would like their ideas. They’re not sure how, but one of those specs made it to the desk of Bob’s Burgers creator Loren Bouchard. Suddenly—miraculously, they still think—they were hired for the show’s very first season in 2009.

“That’s the thing with entertainment,” Molyneux said on the podcast. “You have to keep throwing stuff at the wall until something sticks.”

The Burbank offices of Bento Box, the animation studio behind Bob’s Burgers, has been home to Wendy and Lizzie Molyneux for the past 10 years. Wendy’s husband Jeff (@hatethedrake, for all you Seinfeld fans) works on a different show in the same building, with offices just upstairs. Molyneux also thinks of her colleagues as family, all pitching in ideas, punching up jokes, putting final touches on scripts.

Fans are part of the family, too. They not only contribute artwork, but also fanatically keep track of episodes, minor characters, and running gags. One website ranked the show’s 149 special burgers by pun (no. 5: the Poblano Picasso Burger). Other fans intently try to catch all the punny names on neighboring storefronts (a pottery shop called “Welcome Back Potter,” or one of Wendy’s favorites, “Maxi Pads: Large Apartment Rentals.”)

The Molyneux sisters have become their own brand in the business, racking up writing awards together and getting hired as a team for new projects. Last month, they began work as showrunners and executive producers on a show they created themselves, along with Regular Show alumna Minty Lewis, called The Great North, about a single father in Alaska and his weird bunch of kids.

Molyneux is at the top of her game. But like many adults, she’s astounded how fast time passes. At heart, she admits, she’s “super sentimental and nostalgic,” especially when thinking back on those seemingly endless days of her childhood.

“I think that’s one of the reasons it’s good to work on an animated show,” she said on the podcast. “You get to stop time with these characters sort of permanently, which is maybe what all of us want to do at certain points in our lives. Like, ‘Oh, this is good right here. Let’s stop! Like everything’s fine right now. Let’s just stay here, getting to live in the eternal present.”

 

Photos by Iris Schneider