Illustration by Radio 19Tip By Malia Wollanthat way, I am channeling my late father,
who was highly skeptical of many things.
A hypochondriac, my father often
played his many worries for laughs, but
they were real. He worried about jaun-
dice. (His feet would turn yellow from
wearing loafers without socks.) He wor-
ried about cholesterol. He worried about
skin cancer — justifi ably, as it turned out.
He worried that his beloved martinis
would lead to a fatty liver. He quit them
on a regular basis, usually at year’s end;
they always reunited by Valentine’s Day.
Most of all, my father worried about
radiation. He ordered my sister and me to
sit 10 feet from our black-and-white tele-
vision. He fought the dentist over X-rays,
instructing his daughters to do the same.
The most famous story about my father’s
anti-radiation stance involved a waterproof
watch, a Christmas gift. Toweling off after a
shower, he recalled reading that luminous
watch dials might emit radiation. He had to
know immediately if his new watch glowed
in the dark. But it was a weekday morning,
bright and sunny. He tried to check the dial
while standing in his closet, but the door
would not latch. He went into my mother’s
closet. The good news was that his watch
did not shine. The bad news was that the
closet door had locked behind him and
there was no one else in the house. A clean-
ing lady would arrive soon. Bad news: He
would have to greet her naked or wearing
his wife’s clothes. Naked or in a dress, naked
or in a dress, naked or in a dress? My father,
born in 1929, was an exceedingly modest
man. He kicked the door down.
When microwaves became ubiquitous
in the 1970s, it was understood that the
Lippman household would continue to
make stovetop popcorn. Do microwaves
release harmful radiation? Only if they’re
improperly sealed or leaking, according
to the Food and Drug Administration. But
I don’t actually care anymore.
None of the things my father feared —
radiation, cancer — killed him; he died
after a sudden stroke in 2014. The death
of an 85-year-old man who has suff ered
two falls in less than 12 months can never
be said to be unexpected, but what hap-
pened next was: I took over his neuroses
the way I took the never-worn socks my
mother had knitted for him a few weeks
before his death.
When airport travel, a big part of
my life, requires me to use the screen-
ing booths, I now request pat-downs,
knowing full well I would be exposed to
more radiation on the fl ight. At the den-
tist, I am perversely proud when I glimpse
my dental chart: Refused X-rays. I would
probably worry about my cellphone if
my father had ever owned one, but that
technology never became part of his life.
Doesn’t everyone do this? Assume a habit
or an everyday item that keeps a loved one
close? My father’s quirks are my inheri-
tance, the way I keep his memory alive.
I never use my double boiler without
thinking about him. I even like to use
it to make popcorn as he taught me —
just the bottom part, three ‘‘testers’’ in a
tablespoon of oil, then a half cup of ker-
nels, shaking the covered pan constantly,letting a little steam escape, bringing the
heat down steadily, removing the pan as
soon as there’s a long lull between pops.
My popcorn has been eerily perfect as
of late: no hulls, no burned bits. What I
don’t know is if I love all double boilers
as much as I love this one in particular.
Although neither my sister nor my mother
can confi rm it, I believe that mine is the
castoff double boiler bequeathed to me
when I moved into my fi rst apartment,
one that has now moved with me eight
times over 40 years. A cheap thing, a pot
no one would envy. But if I’m right, then
the handle I hold as I shake the popcorn
is one my father held, too.
I’m just going to say that I’m right.How to Thwart
Facial Recognition‘‘Why not give the camera what it wants,
which is a face?’’ says Leonardo Selvaggio,
an interdisciplinary artist. Just don’t give
it your face. To enable people to obfuscate
facial-recognition software programs,
Selvaggio, who is 34 and white, made
available 3-D, photo-realistic prosthetic
masks of his own face to anyone who
wants one. He tested the masks by asking
people connected to him on Facebook
to upload pictures of themselves in the
prosthetic: It didn’t matter if they were
skinny women or barrel-chested men;
short or tall; black, brown, Asian or white
— the social network’s facial-recognition
software recognized them as Selvaggio.
‘‘There’s nothing more invisible to sur-
veillance and security technology than a
white man,’’ he says.
Selvaggio thought up the project,
which he calls URME Surveillance,when he was living in Chicago, where
law- enforcement offi cials have access to
more than 30,000 interlinked video cam-
eras across the city. He wanted to start
conversations about surveillance and
what technology does with our identity.
He knew that researchers have found that
facial-recognition software exhibits racial
biases. The programs are often best at
identifying white and male faces, because
they have been trained on data sets that
include disproportionate numbers of
them, and particularly bad at identifying
black faces. In law-enforcement contexts,
these errors can potentially implicate
people in crimes they didn’t commit.
Selvaggio sees two routes to elude
facial-recognition programs. The fi rst is
to disappear: go off line and off the grid.
Selvaggio prefers the second option,
which is to fl ood the system with weird,
incongruous data. Wear someone else’s
likeness or lend out your own. (Before
donning a prosthetic mask, check to see
whether your city or state has anti-mask
laws, which may make wearing one ille-
gal.) Even without a mask, though, you
can confuse some facial-recognition
programs by obscuring parts of your
face with makeup, costuming, hairdos
and infrared light. Artifi cial-intelligence
programs look for elliptical, symmetrical
faces, so obscure an eye, cover the bridge
of your nose, wear something that makes
your head look unheadlike. ‘‘They have all
of our information,’’ Selvaggio says. ‘‘So
then let’s make more information that
isn’t even true, and then let’s make more
information on top of that.’’Mine is the
castoff
double boiler
bequeathed
to me when
I moved
into my fi rst
apartment,
one that has
moved with
me eight times
in 40 years.Laura Lippman
is a novelist and essayist.
Her most recent book
is ‘‘Lady in the Lake.’’