Recommendations newsletter #7: Dr Charlie Teo, Australia’s parental leave culture, anxiety, and being ‘impressive for your age’
READING
Article: Brilliant, adored, flawed: Dr Charlie Teo unmasked (The Sydney Morning Herald)
What is it: An investigative article by Kate McClymont about neurosurgeon Dr Charlie Teo that details multiple sexual harassment claims and his arguably unethical approach to practicing medicine.
Thoughts: I’ve been fascinated by Dr Teo for some time, mainly because every article I see about him is always accompanied by dozens of comments from adoring fans. I therefore watched with interest when professor Henry Woo recently remarked on Twitter that there must be something wrong with Australia's health system when there were more than 100 GoFundMe campaigns to raise $100,000 for operations involving Dr Teo.
I’ve seen many people online dismiss this investigative piece as ‘gossip’ or ‘tabloid journalism’ – it is not. The use of anonymous sources in particular is what seems to put some readers off, but this is standard practice for an article this type, especially in Australia where defamation laws are among the toughest in the world. Given Dr Teo’s links to underworld figures that are also mentioned in this article, protecting the journalist’s sources is even more important.
I’ve also seen readers of this article who believe the sexual harassment claims, but do not agree that some of Dr Teo’s medical practices are questionable at best. As is stated in the article, there is more to neurosurgery than operating. It is also a surgeon’s responsibility to decide what's in the best interests of the patient.
Article excerpt:
The neurosurgeons said it irked them that the media perpetuates Dr Teo's claims that no one else would operate on them. "What they don't talk about is the people he does operate on and damage," said one.
One told of a terminally ill patient who had three or four months to live who had a reasonable quality of life. "Charlie operated on her and took out the recurrent tumour. But she was left hemiplegic [a form of paralysis affecting one side of the body], she was bedridden and lost half her vision … and she still died in three months."
Another said: "He's technically good with his hands but his ability to make judgments, to weigh up the pros and cons of different courses of action is defective … when a neurosurgeon says to you something is inoperable it doesn't mean that they can't operate on it, it means that if we do there's a very good chance that you're going to be sorry."
Yet another explained that Dr Teo's argument is that he has to do what the patient wants. "If the patient wants the tumour removed, then it's his obligation to do it. But that's not the way it works. Patients need to be counselled properly. They have to know what's in the best interest of their health.
Article: My family’s slave (The Atlantic)
What is it: A long-form piece written by Alex Tizon about the secret slave his Pilipino parents abused for decades upon moving to America. Eudocia Tomas Pulido, known as Lola, worked tirelessly for Tizon’s family without pay and without the resources or skills to leave. Her U.S. travel papers expired in 1969, and it was only after Ronald Reagan’s landmark immigration bill made millions of illegal immigrants eligible for amnesty that Lola eventually became an American citizen in 1998.
The piece talks about Tizon’s complex relationship with Lola, including how she came to live freely with him, later in life.
Tizon was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author who passed away just before the piece was published.
Thoughts: I had never read this piece, which was published in 2017, until this week. It is beautifully written and heartbreaking.
Excerpt:
Her name was Eudocia Tomas Pulido. We called her Lola. She was 4 foot 11, with mocha-brown skin and almond eyes that I can still see looking into mine—my first memory. She was 18 years old when my grandfather gave her to my mother as a gift, and when my family moved to the United States, we brought her with us. No other word but slave encompassed the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended after we went to bed. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house, waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and me. My parents never paid her, and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in leg irons, but she might as well have been. So many nights, on my way to the bathroom, I’d spot her sleeping in a corner, slumped against a mound of laundry, her fingers clutching a garment she was in the middle of folding.
To our American neighbors, we were model immigrants, a poster family. They told us so. My father had a law degree, my mother was on her way to becoming a doctor, and my siblings and I got good grades and always said “please” and “thank you.” We never talked about Lola. Our secret went to the core of who we were and, at least for us kids, who we wanted to be.
Article: What happens when I’m no longer “impressive for my age”? (Man Repeller)
What is it: A piece by 24-year-old writer Eliza Dumais about how about youth and success have become linked in her mind. She writes in the article, “As I saw it, age and success melded into misshapen, conjoined concepts, each one thoroughly dependent on the other.”
Thoughts: I very much relate to this piece. As someone who has always been the ‘baby’ of my friendship group and the places I’ve worked, being young has come to feel like a part of my identity. I realised this recently when I discovered someone the same age has become an editor at a publication I adore. Rather than being happy for this person or seeing them as an inspiration, I was overcome with jealously simply because of her age.
This of course such a trivial and eye-roll worthy problem that only a 20-something with nothing better to do could fixate on, but this article shows me I’m not only one who feels this way. The fact is, we live in a world where youth is constantly rewarded and praised, so it’s hard to shake the notion that in order to be ‘successful’ you have to achieve certain goals in a certain timeframe.
There’s some really great insights from sources quoted in this piece, for example, “Sometimes moving sideways will make you happier than moving forward.”
Excerpt:
Here is the age-accomplishment problem: When we stop evaluating personal successes in their own rite, and instead the age at which they were achieved, fulfillment becomes a measure of speed rather than depth. It becomes comparative rather than personal. We all wanted to be prodigious. But success and prodigy are not like terms, and we do ourselves a disservice in using them interchangeably. As we age, the whole territory of success will shapeshift—and that’s the metric that does matter, qualifiers aside.
Essay: Why Australia's culture around work and parental leave is trapping fathers (Good Weekend)
A graph composed by Jenny Baxter, a researcher at the Australian Institute of Family Studies, showing the difference in how mother’s and father’s workloads change upon parenthood.
What is it: An edited extract from journalist Annabel Crabb’s essay, ‘Men at work: Australia’s parenthood trap’ from the latest edition of Quarterly Essay. Crabb discusses in the essay how feminism has changed the role of women in Australia, but the role of men, especially when it comes to parenthood, remains much the same.
Crabb cites the example of New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern being increasingly asked (and often judged) about how she manages motherhood with work, while the same question is rarely asked of male politicians who have young children.
Thoughts: There’s a lot of great research in this essay around why parenting remains such a ‘women’s job’ in 2019, including points to suggest men are disadvantaged in the workplace with regards to parenting. For example, men who ask for flexible work (rightfully so under the Fair Work Act 2009) are twice as likely to have their request refused as women, according to a 2016 study.
Excerpt:
Working mothers are so used to comparing notes on how they manage it all that it’s practically a language. But what I realised quickly when talking to the Prime Minister and Treasurer was that they [and most men] are not fluent.
Here’s what the Treasurer said: “Whenever I am away, we use FaceTime a lot, and whenever I am at home I do stories, milk and bed, and try to play as much ball sports and Lego as possible. Running races at the park [is] also a regular. We always have Friday night together as a family meal, which is always special.”
And here’s the PM: “The first point is none of this would be possible without the kids having an amazing mum. That’s true for me and for Josh. But it’s about priorities. Little rituals are important. You’ve got to talk every day; we try to do it twice a day. We do FaceTime when we can. Little things, like: ‘Where are you today?’ You hold the camera phone up and you show them where you are. My kids have grown up while I was in politics and I think that’s a good thing, on balance, because life is more normal to them. Jen and the girls almost never come to Canberra. We have our friends and our family that we socialise with and they’re very disconnected from the world of politics. It means our kids are growing up in a normal environment and that’s very important to us.”
With both men, I had to rephrase the question several times to explain what I was getting at: “How does it work? How do you manage, day to day?” And what became clear was that both their models were about coping with, or compensating for, absence. FaceTiming every day or dining together once a week is an expression of parental love and devotion – and very important it is, too – but it doesn’t contribute much practical horsepower to the engine that keeps a family running. Who does school pick-ups? Who remembers to take them to the dentist? What happens when they’re sick? Their spouses do most of that stuff…
…Women’s surge into the workplace has been profound over the past century. But it hasn’t been matched by movement in the other direction: while the entrances have been opened to women, the exits are still significantly blocked to men. And if women have benefited from the sentiment that “girls can do anything”, then don’t we similarly owe it to the fathers, mothers and children of the future to ensure that “boys can do anything” means everything from home to work?
Article: Generation flake (Harper’s Bazaar Australia)
What is it: An article about how screen-based communication is negatively impacting user’s, particularly young people’s, social skills.
Thoughts: Sorry to be that person, but I wrote this and I’d like people to read it! It’s an article inspired by my experience with friends cancelling and/or not being able to commit to plans. In the article I speak to psychologists and other experts about why this behaviour is now a common phenomenon (spoiler: it’s mostly because of technology) and what can be done to reverse it. The article is in the October issue of Harper’s Bazaar Australia out now.
WATCHING
News video: Babies and toddlers bring joy to nursing home (ABC Life)
This six-minute video features an ‘intergenerational play group’ happening in Canberra. Every week, parents bring their babies to a local nursing home to engage with residents to the benefit of the children, parents and residents. I found it so very heartwarming.
A very similar social experiment is also the basis of a five-part series documentary series, Old People's Home For 4 Year Olds, currently showing on the ABC.
Documentary: The Great Hack (Netflix)
Like most people it seems, I recently watched The Great Hack – a documentary about the Cambridge Analytica hacking scandal and the very worrying ways our online data is being used for political gain.
It’s obviously a good and important documentary, but in saying that, I still use Facebook. The thing I was actually most struck by was Brittany Kaiser’s (Cambridge Analytica’s former business development director) ever-changing political views and sense of style.
LISTENING
Podcast episode: Aahh it’s the anxiety episode ahhhh by The Cut on Tuesdays
The Cut on Tuesdays podcast shows a return to form in this episode that provides a decent snapchat of anxiety in under 30 minutes.
I particularly loved this explanation of what anxiety feels like that’s in the episode: “It is your brain trying to be helpful because I think it’s scanning for perceived danger. It’s like [anxiety is] someone you hired to look out for any danger, and they’re just really overexcited and want to do a good job, so it starts picking up things where you’re like, ‘I didn’t even think that was a problem until you made me think of it 15 times, so now I guess it is a problem.’”
SUPPORTING
(In this new section of the newsletter, I’ll be sharing things I like or endorse that don’t neatly fit into other categories.)
Taking your recycling to a sorting centre like this person if you live somewhere recycling gets sent to landfill. (Reminder – that’s currently happening in 15 Melbourne councils.)
Following comedian and writer Eva Victor on Twitter. I am obsessed with her remake of this iconic film scene.
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