Why her

2022 - 6 - 4

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Image courtesy of "The New York Times"

Asked to Adapt a Classic Play, This Writer Rethought Her Life (The New York Times)

As she sought the truth for her characters on the page, Mara Vélez Meléndez's real self began to emerge. Now she's making her Off Broadway debut.

“It kept clicking through the play,” she explained, recalling the effect this had on Lolita’s agency as well. “Seeing myself in one of those women I was attracted to I knew that I could love myself,” she said. “This was a case where the play was just writing itself. Jacobs-Jenkins then introduced her to the director David Mendizábal, overseeing the Soho Rep production, who helped the play take a turn by asking, “what if it was Lolita who was trans instead?” One day at the post office, when a clerk referred to her as “ma’am” everything clicked. Suddenly, as Vélez Meléndez was able to identify more with her lead character and her pleas, the play took on a life of its own. When she started writing the play, Vélez Meléndez had not yet begun to transition and identified as “cis, queer, question mark,” believing she didn’t have the right label to give herself. Growing up in Puerto Rico, she had learned that being queer meant she had to like men, “but I never wanted to be around them,” she says laughing. “Here I was telling this trans character they have to decolonize themselves when they had done it years ago.” She chose “John Gabriel Borkman,” a rarely revived late Ibsen play about an ambitious banker, and in her reworking, the characters became members of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, created in 2016 by the U.S. federal government to resolve the island’s debt crisis. The play takes place in the office reception of “la junta,” a liminal space that conveys the timeless vacuousness of bureaucratic hellscapes. “We’re always going back to the same thing,” she added.

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Image courtesy of "Livemint"

Stock Trading And Travelling The World: How A Kolkata Girl Is ... (Livemint)

Rajarshita Sur quit her job as a technical analyst in a private bank and chose to become an independent stock trader in 2014..So far, her passport has been ...

Rajarshita said she sets her monthly target gain to 3%-4%, and as soon as she hits her target, she closes her trading terminal and jets off to a 'well-deserved' vacation. One is to rejuvenate me from the market drawdown and another to celebrate that I have made it," she quips. Calling Futures and Options a deadly combination, Rajarshita says she lost 70-80% of profits in just a trade or two. She acknowledges that her biggest ever loss in the stock market happened when she tried her hands in Futures and Option (F&O) trading. After resigning from the banking job, Rajarshita joined a corporate firm for three years as a Proprietary Equity trader and simultaneously started trading independently in the stock market. "I took the risk as I was confident about my knowledge of stock markets.

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Image courtesy of "The Guardian"

She was jailed for losing a pregnancy. Her nightmare could become ... (The Guardian)

Chelsea Becker, prosecuted for murder after her stillbirth, spent 16 months in jail: 'Why did the hospital call police?'

When Becker’s case was dismissed last year, she was in the middle of completing a drug treatment program. Becker said women who are addicted and pregnant are afraid to seek help, whether in the form of drug treatment or prenatal care. Two physician experts testified that Becker’s arrest was rooted in “medical misinformation” and that the claims that meth use causes stillbirths were unfounded. Becker was prosecuted under Section 187 of the California penal code, which defines murder as “the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought”. Lawmakers added “fetus” to the statute in 1970 in response to the case of a man who had attacked a pregnant woman, causing a stillbirth. The King’s county prosecutor in the central valley charged her with “murder of a human fetus,” alleging she had acted with “malice” because she had been struggling with drug addiction and the hospital reported meth in her system. But NAPW has tracked more than 1,700 cases between 1973 and 2020 in which pregnant people have been criminalized often based on the notion of “fetal personhood” – that a fetus is, in effect, a person with rights. A coalition of major medical associations, public health and reproductive rights groups also filed a brief supporting Becker, noting the research consensus that the threat of prosecutions does not protect pregnancies, but rather endangers them by leading people to avoid care. That estimate, likely an undercount, includes a wide range of cases in which pregnant people faced arrest, prosecution or other criminal or civil consequences based on some action or behavior that law enforcement claimed caused harm to the fetus. That image of me lying in the hospital bed with my deceased son left on a table, seemingly abandoned, is an image I will never forget,” she said. Becker was prosecuted by Kings county district attorney Keith Fagundes, the only prosecutor in California who has filed charges for a stillbirth in the last three decades. The police recommended she be prosecuted for murder, and weeks later, took her to jail. “These prosecutions will escalate at an extremely rapid clip if Roe is reversed,” said Emma Roth, staff attorney with the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), a nonprofit group that supported Becker in her legal battle.

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Image courtesy of "The New York Times"

Ann Turner Cook Dies at 95; Her Face Sold Baby Food by the Billions (The New York Times)

Her likeness as an infant has graced the labels on jars of Gerber baby food for more than 90 years, though for decades her identity was not disclosed.

She gave just such an answer when The Globe and Mail, the Canadian newspaper, put the question to her in a 1987 interview: As a young teacher, Ms. Cook, fearful of the exquisite brand of disdain at which adolescents excel, chose never to disclose her infantile identity. The long anonymity of the Gerber baby also ensured that there was at least one pretender to the throne. Ms. Cook’s long-ago likeness remains a cultural touchstone to this day. Only in the late 1970s, with Gerber’s commemoration of the drawing’s 50th anniversary, did she publicly reveal herself as its subject. Her survivors include three daughters, Jan Cook, Carol Legarreta and Kathy Cook; a son, Clifford; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. Ms. Cook, who had been aware of her role since early childhood, kept her own counsel. “I have to credit Dorothy with everything,” Ms. Cook told The St. Petersburg Times in 1992. Gerber trademarked the image in the early 1930s. (Ms. Smith, who died in 1955, also colored scores of New Yorker covers drawn by her husband, the artist Perry Barlow, who was partly colorblind.) Ann was about 2 by then, but Ms. Smith submitted a simple sketch she had made in early 1927, when Ann was 4 or 5 months old. Ms. Cook, who received no royalties for the use of her image, profited from it by precisely $5,000 over some 90 years.

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