A Navy veteran and former pin-up model who lived on the streets for two years after escaping her abusive household at age 16 has revealed how joining the military saved her from homelessness.
Janae Sergio, now 40, from California, was raised by a single mom who would ‘beat’ her so hard that she said she sometimes thought she was going to ‘die’ if she didn’t stop.
At age 16, after she was sexually assaulted by one of her mother’s ‘various
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Every Monday, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
How do you perceive crime in your neighborhood? How about homelessness? Disorder? What’s your relationship to these things? How much do you think about them? How, if at all, do they affect where you live
SAN FRANCISCO—Michael Shellenberger was more excited to tour the Tenderloin than I was, even though it was my idea. I was nervous about provoking desperate people in various states of disrepair. Shellenberger, meanwhile, seemed intent on showing that many homeless people are addicted to drugs. (If that seems callous to you, Shellenberger would say you’re in thrall to liberal “victim ideology.”)
He told me not to worry. “You seem like a tough Russian chick, right?” he said as we walked
By the eighteen-seventies, the society pages of Scribner’s Monthly could no longer hide it: the “American pleasure-seeking public” had run out of places to seek their pleasure. Summer after summer, vacationers resigned themselves to “broiling in a roadside farm-house” among the “odor of piggery and soap-suds.” Or they visited costly resort towns, finding “more anxious swarming crowds than those left behind.” For solitude on a shoestring, Scribner’s suggested an exotic last recourse—a retreat into nature with only a tent and
