My favorite part of rules is breaking them and here comes Anna Dorn, equipped with a Law Degree and a minor in “not giving” a shit to tell us all how My favorite part of rules is breaking them and here comes Anna Dorn, equipped with a Law Degree and a minor in “not giving” a shit to tell us all how the rules of the US legal system is less justice and just vibes constantly reconfiguring to benefit the wealthy, the white, and the men. Bad Lawyer, the lawyer-turned-author’s memoir and expose of the legal field puts the whole system on blast with scathing scrutiny. Revealing the inherent rot and corruption of a system specifically designed to serve its own interests and intentionally ensuring others will be trampled underfoot or locked in an endless cycle of debt and desperation, and exposing the misogynistic and other unseemly behaviors of the ‘revolting old men’ insiders from sexual assaults to judges doing online shopping instead of listening to murder testimonies. ‘I’d started to feel that the system was broken beyond repair, and that continued to depress me,’ Dorn writes and eventually left the field to pursue a career in writing and spotlighting the pandering to the privileged and performativeness of the legal system. Luckily for us, Dorn delivers her memoir with with enough sharp wit and dark humor to make the whole enterprise feel like a surrealistic horror show that only a bitter satirist could envision and the memoir reads like a breeze. Bad Lawyer is a satisfying if frightening first-hand look at corrupt power structures and the privilege and perverse patriarchal posturing that enables it and Anna Dorn makes good use of her insider insights in order to cast a scathing spotlight on the whole affair.
‘Law just feels really stuck in another era. Two of my bosses were accused of sexual misconduct. Another boss bought me $500 worth of makeup and said I had to wear it if I wanted to be taken seriously…At Berkeley Law, they circulated a leaflet about appropriate interview attire that said curly hair was ‘unacceptable’; women had to straighten their hair, and the only acceptable jewelry was a pearl necklace. In Virginia, there’s a strict dress code to take the bar. You have to wear a skirt suit and heels — just to take the test!’
Anna Dorn assures us that her earning the title of Bad Lawyer has nothing to do with any lack of competence or insight into navigating the legal rules and regulations but quite simply a lack of any fucks to give about those rules. Which I can truly respect. Especially when the realization strikes that those rules mostly only serve as a barrier to anyone not already fixed in an elite circle. Not that Dorn isn’t self aware that her own privileges allowed her access to this world and she openly admits to being ‘an overprivileged blonde lesbian addicted to collecting degrees,’ though despite having felt the constraints of golden handcuff guiding her into the legal field fully paid for, it is exactly this financial security that allows her to be able to reject the system and critique it instead. She acknowledges how the cycle of debt and duty keeps people locked in even against their own moral convictions because they, too, have to survive.
‘People in my class wanted to save the environment, find housing for the homeless, and provide fair, adequate representation for people with disabilities or those seeking US citizenship. But, for the most part, they all moved on to associate positions in Big Law, defending major corporations accused of poisoning children and things like that. I do not fault them for this. You cannot pay off a $200K debt if your clients are homeless.’
Dorn spends a good deal of time with self-effacing humor that really keeps the story light and endears you to her. It’s very in keeping with the tone of her novels seeing her own life story also opens avenues of insight into other works in fascinating ways. She’s the sort of person who must bend everything towards a sardonic joke and I respect that. ‘My favorite thing about being at Berkeley Law was telling people that I was at Berkeley Law,’ she quips, for instance, ‘no matter how messy my hair was or how socially bizarre I acted, people assumed I had my shit together.’ That facade, however, extends to the entire legal system which, under Dorn’s gaze, is revealed to be mere smoke and mirrors pantomiming justice while the actual mechanisms of law gnashes up society and enforces racial inequities through rather blatant bias. ‘I saw the way the judges favored educated white people who spoke the way lawyers are taught to speak’ Dorn writes, ‘whenever a witness revealed a poor grasp of white English, the judge tended to find him or her less credible. I don’t think they were aware they were doing it, but it was painfully obvious as an outsider.’ Her admission that the judges and lawyers were likely unaware of their biases and behaviors only makes it all the more damning that they have successfully spun even open racism into a back-pat and paycheck for legal services.
Dorn really leans into the human element here as well. Sure, there is a lot about her own writing—which I loved and while, sure, I’ve seen the critiques of it as being rather self-serving but I did quite literally pick this up to hear Anna Dorn insights and having read one of her novels alongside this made her thoughts on writing all the more engaging for me. Many of her literary themes are explored in the memoir as well, from the absurdity of life, championing the tenets of feminism in real-world applications, and transforming systemic suffering into a humorously poignant discourse.
She also humanizes the defendants that she serves, reminding us that systemic social conditions are holding them down and leaving them with little opportunity to walk the “straight and narrow” paths of “legal” living. She shows how these are people trapped in a system designed to keep them from climbing out while juggling poverty, generational trauma, addiction or recovery, depression, and the crushing weight of the legal process in general. These are people, she tells us, that ‘didn't stand a chance of being functional, law-abiding members of society,’ and are being held to standards their livelihoods simply don’t have the headroom for. It’s all part of how society hurts the already hurting and then steers social opinion and language to demonize them and act as a buffer against empathy from those who would help.
‘I’ve seen prosecutors lie and file briefs so lazy their reasoning is, ‘The defendant is guilty because he is not innocent…I’ve seen judges sipping on bourbon in chambers and perusing auctions on eBay instead of listening to homicide testimony.’
Anna Dorn’s Bad Lawyer is a fascinating and funny as it is existentially damning and socially horrifying. A cutting critique of the legal system and all the inequities, bigotry, toxic masculinity, and self-serving that goes on within to ensure the gates are locked to outsiders. Dorn has such a delightful way with words and a rich humor that made this hard to put down and wow do I love me some Anna Dorn right now. Highly recommended.
Turns out everything is also capitalism and that is why a preventable and curable disease still kills more a million people worldwide each year and reTurns out everything is also capitalism and that is why a preventable and curable disease still kills more a million people worldwide each year and remains the deadliest infectious disease. If you are also reminded of how the US intentionally fumbled the response to another recent pandemic, good work, you picked up on the underlying theme. John Green, beloved author, podcaster, global health initiative advocate and just genuinely empathetic Nice Guy of the literary world returns for his second non-fiction work with Everything is Tuberculosis, an endlessly engaging read that blends heartbreak with hope as he examines the notorious disease. Diving into the history of tuberculosis, Green explores how it is truly “everywhere,” having had long-lasting cultural effects on society, the arts (it was often called the “poets disease”, Stetson hats and even Adirondack chairs that were popularized in tuberculosis sanatoriums. It even shows up in stamp collections, such as this 1978 Finnish postage stamp, depicting the 1933 Paimio tuberculosis sanatorium:
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The problem with tuberculosis being everywhere is that it definitely shouldn’t be and if pharmaceutical companies valued people over profits the world’s deadliest disease could be a thing of the past. Because, to be honest, until I read this book, I thought it was a thing of the past though, as Green states ‘nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past,’ so I need to check my privilege there and after all the discourse of 2020 I should have known disease prevention was at the bottom of the list for many people. Especially when that disease is far away though, as Green points out, allowing the problem to continue to fester will only create larger problems and will inevitably affect us as well such as the higher possibility of treatment resistant cases making its way to the US. Which is why Everything is Tuberculosis is such a great book as it is raising awareness while also being wildly accessible to deliver the wealth of research through personal memoir, testimonies, journalism, and delivered with a heavy dose of empathy.
‘And so we have entered a strange era of human history: A preventable, curable infectious disease remains our deadliest. That's the world we are currently choosing.’
I’ve known about John Green for years but have never really been on the “inside” of the fandom. Having read this, I get it. He comes across so well and does seem genuinely interested in helping and excited to educate. I like the guy based on this and I really appreciated the way he centers humanity and empathy. It is also a very quick read, surprisingly so considering the subject matter but this was almost impossible to put down. Green covers such an excellent array of topics and their intersections to show the systemic damage of issues such as profiteering and the troubled history of medical racism and misogyny. The big problem we see is that the disease isn’t something we can’t fix, its just something we choose not to as well as the issue that ‘the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.’ Green does a good job of showing us why we should care about a disease that might not currently threaten the reader and his stories about his friend, 17 year old Henry who Green met in a hospital in Sierra Leone, add a heartbreaking human element. Green doesn't eschew stats and medical jargon (though he does make it quite straightforward in layperson’s terminology) but he definitely transcends facts on paper into an impassioned account of the disease and plea for better global health initiatives to stymie the suffering and death.
‘What's different now from 1804 or 1904 is that tuberculosis is curable, and has been since the mid-1950s. We know how to live in a world without tuberculosis. But we choose not to live in that world.’
This book will certainly infuriate you and remind you that treating a disease isn’t really that profitable leading to a lack of resources in doing so. We may all remember Goldman Sachs asking ‘is curing patients a sustainable business model?’ and then juxtaposing it with Jonas Salk, the virologist who developed a vaccine for polio and refused to patent the vaccine and felt it was unethical to profit from it. Add to this the issue that the current US government officials are slashing foreign aid, disease prevention, the CDC, and basically anything beneficial to tax payers and this will only increase the issue of tuberculosis worldwide. There is currently an issue worldwide with tuberculosis patients unable to get treatment or tests, and the U.S. Agency for International Development has projected a 30% increase in cases worldwide as a direct result of the unemployable hotel chain mascot turned US president cutting medical funding. NOT AWESOME. But this also makes raising awareness all the more important.
‘People are not just their economic productivity. We do not exist primarily to be plugged into cost-benefit analyses. We are here to love and be loved, to understand and be understood.’
I really appreciated the heart and humanity here and Green standing up for victims of disease and attempting to curb the stereotypes about them. He discusses on how people who are‘ ill are treated as fundamentally other because the social order is frightened by what their frailty reveals about everyone else's,’ and that this sort of Othering only leads to perpetuating the spread of disease (such as the stigma around AIDs in the 80s and Reagan’s refusal to take action).
‘Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good. Stigma is a way of saying, “You deserved to have this happen,” but implied within the stigma is also, “And I don’t deserve it, so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me.’
The lack of funding and lack of efforts to cure disease is largely a lack of humanity. This is also frustrating in an era where distrust in medicine is a political weapon as well, though pharmaceutical companies and the utter horror that is the US health insurance system that openly price gouges and allows people to die of curable diseases aren’t doing themselves any favors either. ‘Survival is not primarily an act of individual will, of course. It's an act of collective will,’ he tells us, and we must all rally together to help humanity instead of stocks flourish and be healthy.
‘We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth's atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it- the story of the organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.’
I greatly enjoyed John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis and certainly learned a LOT here. Its very engaging and accessible without sacrificing depth, which is really wonderful and I’m glad to see him advocating for something so important. A quick read, but one I’m going to think about forever.
4.5/5
‘We cannot address TB only with vaccines and medications. We cannot address it only with comprehensive STP programs. We must also address the root cause of tuberculosis, which is injustice. In a world where everyone can eat, and access healthcare, and be treated humanely, tuberculosis has no chance. Ultimately, we are the cause. We must also be the cure.’...more
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