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Rufo wants to be certain that he gets credit. That is a lot of ego talking, but he may have a point. Despite his broadcasting his plans on X, laying out his strategy like a cartoon villain and claiming victory to anyone who will listen, some people still want to find more genteel explanations. Conservative commentators... |
It is a popular idea. Some scholars believe it. A lot of the alt-right believes it. Regular people complaining about someone getting into college when they did not “deserve” to, they believe it. The underlying belief is noxious. It presumes diversity and merit are mutually exclusive. Beyond that, whether higher educati... |
That is because merit, itself, cannot be defined. That is why the concept is so useful for slippery slopes. It cannot be proved or disproved. It can only be argued. |
Academicians and practitioners know that you cannot operationalize merit. But historians know that there is powerful evidence about merit in the archives of our nation’s elite institutions. Whenever politicians, activists and investors agree that there is a merit crisis at Harvard, it signals that a battle rages, not o... |
In the 1880s, Harvard was willing to train a small group of women in art, literature and philosophy. But there were limits. Class and race, obviously. But also a limit on just how legitimate this training was when pursued by the female sex. Some worried that educating women could corrupt their natural talents and that ... |
In the 1920s, Harvard (along with Yale and Princeton) were dismayed that so many Jewish students were passing its carefully designed admissions tests. The institutions set out to revise those tests to account for all manner of cultural and physical attributes to filter out those Jewish students. The tests included ques... |
Wave after wave of immigrants, minorities and other socially mobile groups of people in the United States have experienced a similar story with Harvard. Each successive fight for the university’s soul was cloaked in language about merit. Well-meaning scolds worried about immigrants’ test scores or poor students’ cultur... |
All of this dichotomous thinking forgets one thing: Academics are not born; they’re made. More broadly, administrators of Harvard, or anywhere else for that matter, are not born; they are made. They are promoted and trained. Surely, Harvard can train a bureaucrat. |
Of course Harvard can train a bureaucrat. It trains the world’s leaders. It also runs the Harvard Seminar for New Presidents, which trains university presidents. It is part of academic leadership culture and the administrative industry that has grown around higher education. |
What I have found particularly interesting (if not a little shocking) about this whole affair is that Dr. Gay’s promotion to president is so utterly normal. Rufo has described her scholarship record as “thin,” but university leadership has been professionalized for at least two decades. Competitive programs recruit and... |
As has happened historically, Dr. Gay’s detractors redefined merit to mean whatever they wanted it to mean, in practice turning bureaucratic minutiae into a political bomb. Joseph McCarthy could only have wished for the networked media power that today’s reactionary power-seekers possess. The speed, scale and amplifica... |
I don’t like to argue about the human resources problems of rich private colleges. But love them or hate them, the Ivies set the Overton window for a lot of higher education. Colleges without Harvard’s media spotlight and billions of dollars are more vulnerable. Countless mobilized reactionary groups have more media at... |
If you like Rufo’s vision of a status hierarchy, in which merit is whatever the winner says it is, then he’s your man. In his vision for the New College of Florida, liberal arts has been diminished, gender studies has been marginalized and merit — whatever that means — trumps social justice. Harvard can buttress the co... |
Under the handle Tanner Leatherstein, Volkan Yilmaz rips, burns and slices apart luxury goods to show how much he thinks they are really worth. |
One video opens with a large white leather handbag covered in the signature LV logo of Louis Vuitton. Within milliseconds, a hand with a switchblade swoops in and slashes a huge gash in the side of the bag before tearing it apart at its seams. In another, the distinctive red sole of Christian Louboutin is loudly ripped... |
You’ve entered the TikTok world of Tanner Leatherstein, which has more than 950,000 followers. Leatherstein, whose real name is Volkan Yilmaz, has attracted a cult following on the social media platform — as well as on YouTube and Instagram — for his butchering of exorbitantly expensive items. The reason, he says, is t... |
“In many cases,” Mr. Yilmaz said from his Dallas workshop in December, “my estimates come in at about a tenth of what the price tag says. The markups that underpin the luxury business still shock a lot of people.” |
In the edited interview below, Mr. Yilmaz, 37, discussed his lifelong obsession with leather, how much he spends on luxury products for his platform and what people should look for when buying new leather items. |
When did your love of leather goods begin? |
My family owned a tannery in Turkey, so I was born into the business. Around 11, I tanned five sheepskins to make my first leather jacket. While at college in Istanbul, I worked at the tannery, then went to China to learn about leather imports and exports and then to Turkmenistan. |
In 2009, I won the U.S. green card lottery and moved to Chicago. I drove a cab while I got an MBA from the University of Illinois, then worked as a management consultant, which made me feel like I was dying inside. I was still obsessed with leather, so I started my own leather brand called Pegai, teaching myself about ... |
Why did you start creating social media content? |
Friends and even friends of friends have always asked me to check their leather purchases. What do I think of the quality? Have they paid too much? |
It made me realize that people don’t actually know that much about how leather is sourced or used and are suspicious about the markups on luxury leather products. So I started making some videos to answer their questions. I didn’t expect them to blow up the way they have. |
More than anything else, you are known for slicing up bags. Why do you do that? |
When I started dissecting bags, I wanted to show that price really wasn’t about the leather or the materials used — that it was mostly about the status associated with a label. So many people automatically assume that if it’s expensive, it must be good. |
What was the first bag you ever cut up? |
It was a Louis Vuitton briefcase. Louis Vuitton is one of the most famous leather brands in the world, but many people don’t know that the iconic LV monogram material is actually canvas. The first video that went viral was a little $1,200 wallet from Chanel. From then on, requests to feature different brands have been ... |
What are you looking for when you slash a bag? |
The leather quality, of course. How it has been tanned. I use acetone to remove the finish, and I can see how much plastic makeup has been applied to the leather. I burn the leather to assess what tanning process has been used. Then I look at the craftsmanship, which is reflected in the stitching, hardware and construc... |
A big part of what I do is assessing the brand’s claims. A bag might look good from the outside, but when you rip it open and look inside, it tells another story. |
Who are the almost two million followers you have on social media? |
There is definitely a demographic who hate luxury brands, full stop, who think the pricing is a scam and that people who pay for them are stupid. Then there are people who just love the entertainment value of chopping up expensive products. But many people are watching the videos because they love luxury and want a bet... |
Which brands are worth the money? |
Bottega Veneta uses incredible leathers, and I’ve done three or four videos on their beautiful products. Though in one video — on a $650 wallet — I cut it up, and the lining was made from a lower quality leather than the one described on the label. (Bottega did not respond to a request for comment). |
I really like a Scottish label called Strathberry. They make their products in Ubrique, which is this small town in Spain where brands like Loewe and Dior make their goods. But Strathberry is a fraction of the cost — more like $500 instead of $3,000. Polene is another great label made by people who really know what the... |
Are you ever shocked by what you find? |
I don’t get positively shocked — I’m paying a lot of money. Great if we can show a bag to be great material and design, but that should be the standard. |
Do brands reach out to you now? |
Not really, and especially not from the luxury space. I don’t accept free items or advertising opportunities. People will trust me only if I stay totally independent. |
Lots of people will have given or received leather goods during the holidays. Any tips for them? |
Trust your senses. Feel it. If it feels plasticky, that’s not a good sign. Smell it. There isn’t only one leather smell, but there is a pleasant, slightly earthy aroma to quality leather. It should not smell like chemicals. |
Look at it. Leather is an animal-sourced product. It has variations to its grain and fiber structure. The more variations you see in the fabric, the more natural and untreated it is. If it’s overdone with a heavy finish, leather becomes very standardized and lower quality hides can be hidden.Treatment wasn’t helping he... |
The doctors told Naomi that she could not leave the hospital. She was lying in a narrow bed at Denver Health Medical Center. Someone said something about a judge and a court order. Someone used the phrase “gravely disabled.” Naomi did not think she was gravely disabled. Still, she decided not to fight it. She could den... |
It was early 2018. She had come to the hospital voluntarily, because she was getting so thin. In the days before, she had felt her electrolyte levels dip toward the danger zone — and she had decided that, even after everything, she did not want to be dead. By then, Naomi was 37 and had been starving herself for 26 year... |
“Well, here I am,” Naomi said in a video message that she recorded for her parents. “I am alive, but am I happy? I don’t know. … It’s pretty pathetic. I don’t know how I feel about the fact that I would have died had I not come.” In the video, she was wearing a hot pink tank top, even though it was cool in the hospital... |
A few days later, when she was not imminently dying anymore, Naomi announced that she was going home — and the hospital responded by placing her on a 72-hour mental-health hold. Clinicians then obtained what Colorado calls a short-term certification, which required, by judicial order, that Naomi be detained and treated... |
“I’m so mad, I’m so mad,” Naomi said in another video message, her voice dull and impassive. “I was completely disrespected. I was tricked.” Naomi could feel that her mind was diminished — it was too slow, too slack — but she found that she could think in a straight line. She could reason. So why did the doctors claim ... |
When she was a teenager, Naomi believed that treatment programs might save her. She ate supervised meals and attended group-therapy sessions where, among other things, patients discussed the origins and possible psychic functions of their eating disorders. Sometimes Naomi told the story of how she stopped eating becaus... |
As the years passed, Naomi found it harder to be “compliant” with standard treatment. She refused to participate in group sessions. Or she disengaged during therapy, which she found infantile and pointless. She sometimes tampered with her intravenous lines, because it was too awful to watch those plastic bags of liquid... |
In between treatment programs and emergency hospitalizations, Naomi, at 18, went to college. She wanted to study psychology, but all she could really do was exercise for hours a day after eating almost nothing, maybe an apple. In her final year, she dropped out. Later she found jobs that she cared about — a certified n... |
As she moved through adulthood, Naomi acquired new diagnoses: anorexia binge-purge type, osteoporosis, hypotension, gastroparesis, superior mesenteric artery syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder. She took mood stabilizers and antidepressants and antipsychotics. Her b... |
She collapsed into her 30s. She had no hobbies and no friends. She had become a kind of professional patient: her whole life whittled down to the airless world of her diseases, the logistical management of her self-denial. Everything was epic drama, but also staggeringly boring. To Naomi, her doomed attempts to get wel... |
After her admission to the Eating Recovery Center, Naomi spent a few days lying in bed, being fed by a nasogastric tube, which pushed fluids and nutrients down her throat and into her stomach. Some days, she put plastic flowers in her hair and took selfies, just frowning at the camera. She made conversation with her ro... |
The field of palliative care was developed in the 1960s and ’70s, as a way to minister to dying cancer patients. Palliative care offered “comfort measures,” like symptom management and spiritual guidance, as opposed to curative treatment, for people who were in pain and would never get better. Later, the field expanded... |
Naomi’s therapist had printed out an article for her to read. It was called “Medical Futility and Psychiatry: Palliative Care and Hospice Care as a Last Resort in the Treatment of Refractory Anorexia Nervosa,” published in 2010 in The International Journal of Eating Disorders. The paper’s authors argued that psychiatry... |
These patients, the paper proposed, should not be coerced into treatment but offered an approach that aimed to palliate their psychological pain — until, maybe, they died of their eating disorders. The authors acknowledged that the idea of letting a mentally ill person withdraw from treatment was uncomfortable, even ra... |
When Naomi looked up the paper’s authors, she was surprised to find that one of them, Dr. Joel Yager, was based in Denver. He was a psychiatrist at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital and had been working with anorexia nervosa patients since the 1970s. Back then, psychiatrists were just beginning to understand ano... |
Of course, there were the ones who didn’t. Within the treatment community, anorexia had always been described as an acute condition, something with an adolescent onset and relatively short duration. It was only in the mid-1980s that a small number of academic articles began to refer to a “protracted” or “long-term cour... |
Yet when Yager, who was then working at the University of California, Los Angeles, looked for guidance on what to do for such a person, he found almost nothing. All he could see were articles instructing him on how to exert his will over recalcitrant patients, how to give them more standard treatment aimed at full weig... |
He came to think that he had been impelled by a kind of professional hubris — a hubris particular to psychiatrists, who never seemed to acknowledge that some patients just could not get better. That psychiatry had actual therapeutic limits. Yager wanted to find a different path. In academic journals, he came across a s... |
Yager believed that a certain kind of patient — maybe 1 or 2 percent of them — would benefit from entirely letting go of standard recovery-oriented care. Yager would want to know that such a patient had insight into her condition and her options. He would want to know that she had been in treatment in the past, not jus... |
If the patient had a comorbidity, like depression, Yager would want to know that it was being treated. Maybe, for some patients, treating their depression would be enough to let them keep fighting. But he wouldn’t insist that a person be depression-free before she left standard treatment. Not all depression can be cure... |
Most of the patients who asked for palliative care, Yager thought, probably wouldn’t want to die but would be open to dying if it meant that they could stop trying to get better in the same old ways. Yager imagined that his practice would, in large part, be defined by absence. No coercive care. No obligatory weekly wei... |
From Denver, Yager started publishing papers about his ideas, and other doctors started contacting him, clinicians who had, in the quiet context of their own practices, invented a kind of palliative psychiatry of their own. Once in a while, Yager heard directly from a patient. |
“Dear Dr. Yager,” Naomi wrote in an email in February 2018. “After 20 years of trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, I am tired of fighting the system.” |
After he read Naomi’s email, Yager called her. “Come in,” he said. “Let’s see.” With her tangle of disorders, Naomi presented as a complex patient — but only in the way that many other patients were complex. She was depressed and bipolar, but both conditions were being managed with drugs. Naomi told Yager that her curr... |
Yager agreed to help Naomi put together a palliative-care team at UCHealth and to oversee her psychiatric care. It was obvious that, in many ways, Naomi’s thinking was deeply distorted — but when she expressed her desire to stop fighting, Yager thought she seemed “as clear as a bell.” |
Contrary to what medicine had recognized for most of its history, Yager knew that a substantial number of patients with psychiatric disorders were, in fact, medically and legally capable of making decisions on their own. When given a standard “capacity test” — which measures a patient’s ability to understand informatio... |
If a patient is found capable, her physician is meant to respect her choice, whether or not it seems rational or circumspect. The test is always whether a person is able to reason, not whether she seems reasonable to her doctors. |
After their initial meeting, Naomi was told that she could set the rules. Point 1: no more residential programs, ever. “It only accelerates the suffering,” she said. “And I refuse to encounter it ever again.” Point 2: no involuntary heroic measures from her doctors, no mandatory weigh-ins, no behavioral therapy. Naomi ... |
Naomi told her new palliative-care physician, Jonathan Treem, that she could not increase her weight, at least not without something bad happening. She believed that whenever she relaxed a bit on the anorexia front, her bipolar disorder got worse; whenever she gained a few pounds, it threw her mood way off kilter — and... |
Naomi was willing to accept the odd temporary measure, like an infusion of electrolytes to lift her energy, but she wouldn’t treat her underlying physical disorders: her osteoporosis or her gastrointestinal issues or whatever else set in. Fixing those things would do nothing for her mood. Besides, at some point her bod... |
When Treem sat with Naomi, he could feel “an incredible agony that was internalized and unremitting and, to a certain degree, barely endurable” — a depression that was “likely perennial and unlikely to be subject to change.” In Treem’s view, Naomi’s anorexia was both a cause of pain and a symptom of a larger hurt. “She... |
Treem was an internal-medicine doctor by training, and most of his work involved palliating patients who were dying of typical somatic ailments: cancer, heart failure. Working with Naomi, he found, required him to undertake some “philosophical groundwork.” He thought about how he might protect his patient from her most... |
To Treem, it felt as if Naomi was asking for something more than his nonintervention; she wanted his mercy. His permission to let go, his compassion. It made him think about the other doctors who had treated her. “This is where it gets into a passionate discussion,” he told me. “If you are going to accept responsibilit... |
Yet Treem had his limits. He told Naomi that he could not look away if she was actively suicidal. Several times, after an especially unsettling appointment, Treem walked her down to the emergency room, where she was put on a 72-hour mental-health hold. |
Naomi also met regularly with Yager, who sometimes wondered whether, paradoxically, giving up recovery-focused treatment could steer his patient back to health. Palliative care, Yager reasoned, might give Naomi the cognitive space to reset. It would eliminate the classic power struggle between flailing eating-disorder ... |
Besides, what did the alternative look like? Would he be better off to declare Naomi incompetent? Sedate her? Restrain her physically or chemically? Get court orders for involuntary medications and involuntary tube feeds — which wouldn’t “cure” her anyway but would keep her alive for more treatment? Lock her on a ward?... |
Yager had always been suspicious of psychiatry’s affinity for hope, of the hopefulness that many doctors deliberately exhibited for their patients. “I’m full of hope,” he told me. “I’m one of the most hopeful guys you’re going to find. But I’m also a realist.” |
Many psychiatrists, Yager knew, believed that they must hold hope for their hopeless patients, that a projection of hope, by a clinician, mattered — that it was even essential — because the hope could be absorbed by a patient and, in turn, change the course or constitution of her disease. In this way, psychiatry was fu... |
But couldn’t a doctor’s hope also be a kind of harm? Yager could see that some of his patients benefited from his cheerleading. Others, though, were propelled into unwanted treatment by somebody else’s hope for them — and then left to feel defeated when it didn’t work. So couldn’t it also be argued that a doctor had a ... |
Yager knew that the evidence base for many recovery-oriented therapies — some of which had been in existence for decades — was weak. For instance, he had never found a single randomized control study proving, with any certainty, that the by-then-ubiquitous residential eating-disorder program worked better than other ki... |
And there was certainly no evidence at all that a fourth, or fifth or 10th attempt at the same kind of program was likely to be helpful, especially if the patient didn’t want it. The same was true of involuntary care. There was some evidence that forced treatment could be life-sustaining in the short term, but its long... |
Within the rest of medicine, “medical futility” had become a subject of contention in the 1980s, after relatively new interventions like cardiac life support and mechanical ventilation allowed the nearly dead to be resuscitated and sustained. Sometimes, patients’ families demanded that their loved ones be treated aggre... |
But the idea of futility remained “relatively unknown in the world of psychiatry,” according to a 2023 paper in Frontiers in Psychiatry. When I asked a psychiatrist with expertise in severe and persistent mental illness how much time had been devoted, during her more than a decade of medical training and residency, to ... |
After all, in psychiatry, there were always more drugs and drug combinations to try. More behavioral interventions and therapeutic modalities to employ. More clinicians who believed that they alone had the special therapeutic touch. It seemed to Yager that despite what every honest psychiatrist should know, psychiatris... |
In one 2023 study, published in The American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience, 174 U.S. psychiatrists completed a survey on “their attitudes about the management of suicidal ideation in patients with severely treatment-refractory illness.” The doctors were given one of two case studies: the first, about a patient with... |
The conclusion of the study was stunning: “Sizable minorities of participants said they were likely to recommend interventions they thought were unhelpful.” The authors identified several potential reasons. Perhaps the doctors were trying to meet expectations: the patient’s, her family’s, their colleagues’, the system’... |
But maybe there was another explanation. Maybe this was just the logic of a profession that saw death as the absolute worst outcome, regardless of what living might look like. |
Some physicians in the field had heard the emerging calls for palliative psychiatry with alarm. The idea that certain patients would be better off if they gave up on cure-focused treatment was, as Dr. Agnes Ayton of Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatry told me, “dangerous nonsense.” For many of these doctors, Yager’s ... |
Some physicians had doubts about the premise — core to Yager’s thinking — that patients who were very sick could still have the mental capacity to make decisions as grave as the one to stop recovery-oriented care. A typical anorexic patient had cognitive distortions and pathological values. She was intransigent, fearfu... |
Other psychiatrists took issue with the way Yager conceptualized futility. With anorexia nervosa, it was almost always impossible to say that a given treatment would be physiologically futile, because there was virtually no point at which an eating disorder became physically resistant to healing. If a patient ate, near... |
For the anorexic patient, any conclusions about “futility” would have to be based on fuzzier judgments about how a treatment might affect her quality of life. To critics, this was insufficiently rigorous. “Medical futility,” the psychiatrist Cynthia Geppert warned in a 2019 handbook, “can only be tentatively and tenuou... |
In Yager’s model, decisions about futility seemed to rest a lot on what the patient believed the effect of a treatment would be. But many people with chronic mental illness are ambivalent about recovery and resistant to treatment. They “know” that they will never get better. They “know” that a treatment will fail. Thes... |
“What many in the profession would say,” Thomas Strouse, a psychiatrist and palliative-care physician at U.C.L.A., explained, “is that anorexia leading to death is a form of protracted suicide.” In this view (which Strouse does not endorse), accepting a patient’s slow death by starvation and choosing not to medically i... |
Already, research showed that some patients with eating disorders who were involuntarily treated did well. In the short term, their rate of weight restoration was the same as that of voluntarily treated patients. One paper noted that among those admitted to hospital, “nearly half of patients with eating disorders who d... |
Other physicians emphasized the current inadequacies in American mental-health care as a reason any futility judgment would be ethically tenuous. A decision that further treatment was “futile,” they argued, would be meaningless if the patient had never received high-quality care in the past. In the case of eating disor... |
And the sickest of patients can still get better — even after decades of failed treatment. One study of adult patients with anorexia, published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 2017, found that nine years after the start of their illness, only 31.4 percent had recovered — but that by 22 years, the recovery rate... |
Angela Guarda, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, told me that palliative measures can sometimes be useful — but only alongside curative care and never instead of it. Guarda said she has treated several thousand patients with anorexia and still “cannot predict who... |
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