# 823: The Question Trap  ## Episode metadata - Episode title: 823: The Question Trap - Show: This American Life - Owner / Host: This American Life - Guests: [Janelle Taylor](https://share.snipd.com/person/c335f371-617f-4d4b-be43-9fcb8e964c5a), [Tobin Low](https://share.snipd.com/person/9365eaea-0b67-4f23-970a-0f2d9e64e6f5), [Milo Kramer](https://share.snipd.com/person/3e570558-82c6-4b39-b39f-ccd5375678cd) - Episode publish date: 2025-01-26 - Episode AI description: Tobin Low, a producer known for his poignant storytelling, shares how loaded questions can reveal deeper meanings. Janelle Taylor, an anthropologist, delves into the sensitive implications behind asking if a loved one with dementia recognizes you. Milo Kramer, a dedicated tutor, brings light to the pressures students face with unorthodox essay questions. The conversation navigates the complexities of identity, societal expectations, and the emotional weight of seemingly innocent inquiries that often mask hidden anxieties. - Duration: 57:29 - Episode URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/episode/b32a0227-d857-476c-b35e-c0e46984fd41) - Show URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/show/99b1bb40-40fd-4737-93e6-fc587ea9b7ed) - Export date: 2026-02-17T23:33:06 ## Snips ### [Handy Question Reveals Masculinity](https://share.snipd.com/snip/56ecc2c1-1328-401a-8030-dcc0a98f75d2) 🎧 00:42 - 04:23 (03:40) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/263103a5-0b65-45ff-9a1f-4c888a70ecab" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Tobin Low shares how being asked "Which one of you is handy?" felt like a proxy question about masculinity in his relationship. - This question revealed underlying societal views and personal feelings about masculinity and identity. #### 💬 Quote > Oh, which one of you is handy? And I was just like, why does she want to know that like why does she care > — Tobin Low Tobin Low on a loaded family question #### 📚 Transcript The **Ira Glass:** question started right after Tobin and his husband moved to the Bay Area and got a house together. Tobin's family was pretty excited about this. They all lived within an hour. And they brought meals over for weeks. His mom bought them shades. But this question popped up. And the first time I noticed it happening, it was **Tobin Low:** with my aunt. Kind of out of nowhere, she was like, oh, which one of you is handy? Is one of you handy? And I was just like, why does she want to know that like why does she care yeah **Tobin Low:** and i had i had like feelings about it and i couldn't tell why um and then it just kind of kept happening with other family members like they would be talking about like oh you guys moved in together into this house. Which one of you is handy? And on its face, it was kind of like, oh, we know when you're in a house, there's a lot of things to fix and a lot of things to do. But it felt like there was something else happening there, and it kind of bothered me. **Ira Glass:** Something else there? Like, there was a question underneath the question that they were trying to get the answer to. Yeah, **Tobin Low:** like, there was something else trying to be figured out and i don't know like the more i thought about it and why i was having feelings about it it was kind of like this weird aha moment of like oh i think you're asking who the man is in my relationship Right. You're both men. Yes. **Ira Glass:** But one of you is really the man. Yes. **Tobin Low:** Yeah. **Ira Glass:** Then, when Tobin would tell them that it was his husband who was the handy one, he felt like he was just giving the man ammunition to put a picture of their relationship that just bugged him. Like they were being sized up into **Tobin Low:** familiar categories. Which of you is the husband? Which of you is the wife? Like, it was weird because whenever they would ask it, I could feel myself getting defensive. I didn't want to give them that picture. And I think part of my defensiveness came from, I think, well, oh man, not to take us in a whole other direction, but if you spend any amount of time in the closet. In the closet. For Tobin, that means middle school and high school. I think you're afraid of being found out at all as being effeminate in any way. Like I know for me, I was very conscious of if anyone could detect quote unquote, you know, feminine traits about me and then figure out if I was gay or not. And so I do think that like myself and a lot of gay men, like carry that around for like kind of the rest of your life. And so I think that comes up in having to answer a question like this also. **Ira Glass:** Yeah. Yeah, it's funny because it's, like, this innocent question and then really, like, it, it's like there's a bomb waiting to go off, actually. Like, there's so many feelings. Yeah, **Tobin Low:** it feels like it hits on a thing, at least for me, that I spent a lot of time as a kid running from or spent a lot of time trying to not have to answer. Yeah. Like, how masculine am I? And is somebody else more masculine than I am? Yeah. And like, I do want to make room for the idea that they could have meant none of this. Like, absolutely none of this. Did you address it directly with any of them? No, because that would be bonkers. To say, oh, you asked me who's handy. --- ### [Beyoncé Question as Litmus Test](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8769a989-ce5a-453e-818e-74f80587f717) 🎧 06:42 - 10:01 (03:18) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/7cbf774c-18cc-4e7f-84bf-e1c0dbe41c29" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Emmanuel asks dates "What do you think about Beyoncé?" as a litmus test to reveal their attitudes toward powerful Black women. - Negative or dismissive answers signal red flags about their views on Black women and compatibility. #### 💬 Quote > The Beyoncé question... can really tell you if you should be crazy in love or putting everything he owns in a box to the left. > — Emmanuel Berry Emmanuel Berry on using Beyoncé question on dates #### 📚 Transcript **Ira Glass:** So Tobin, who you just heard, is one of the editors here at our show. And really the idea for today's program came out of a conversation that happened at a staff meeting. And what happened was we all got talking about these kind of question traps, where it seems like somebody is asking about one thing, but the question is a proxy for trying to figure out something else. **Tobin Low:** Tobin will explain more. The conversation was about the questions people ask on first dates, the kind that force who someone really is out into the open, maybe even without them realizing. One such question I didn't even know was a thing, but a few of my co-workers said that for Black women of a certain age, it's having a kind of renaissance. Emmanuel, our executive editor, asks it this way. What do you think of Beyonce? It was a question that I found myself trying to ask basically a lot on first dates because it told me a lot about them. It a question that tells you, one, in some ways, how they feel about a powerful Black woman. It's a question that tells you how they think about Black women in general, kind of a little bit to me. And that, like, if you feel the need to, like, put her down or, like, say something negative about her, it's like a real turnoff. It's like a red flag, basically. They describe her singing style as kind of, like, catawalling or, like, oh, she's just screeching. **Tobin Low:** Bim, another producer, has also asked this question on Many a Date. All these words that sort of, like, have double meanings if you're a woman and also if you're a Black woman, I'm just like, all right, so you don't like loud people. Okay, okay. That means you don't like me. **Tobin Low:** Could you tell me about some like specific times that you've asked the Beyonce question and what the guy's response was and what it told you? First date, bar date, pretty standard. Beyonce actually came on in the bar in the background. It was oh, what do you think about Beyonce? And he was like, I don't, I don't understand what the big deal is about her. Like you, like women act like they're in a cult or something. And it's like, they seem like crazy. I was like, oh, well, I really like her. And like, I don't really think I'm in a cult. Emmanuel **Tobin Low:** walked the guy through all the reasons Beyoncé is, in fact, pretty great. But the guy didn't budge. No, he did not, uh, didn't care to. And maybe didn't care to hear me talk in general is what it seemed like, so. They **Tobin Low:** did not go out again because, well, you could say he was unapologetic when he fucked up the night. That's a play on a Beyonce lyric, by the way. Sorry, couldn't help myself. Anyway, B.A. Parker, who's also been on the show, she said for her, it doesn't even have to be Beyonce. Any well-known Black woman does the trick. If you say Serena Williams and they say, oh, I think she's overrated. Or if you say Jada Pinkett, it's like, well, she's too masculine or she's ruining Will Smith's life. She's controlling him. Or how do feel about Lizzo? Like, oh, she's a cover ass. I bring up like a black female celebrity to get their opinion on them. And it usually becomes like a litmus test for how they would treat me as a partner, how they would view me as a person. But **Tobin Low:** the Beyonce question, she agrees, is the most potent. --- ### [Recognition Beyond Cognition](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c19a1916-7c0d-4a9d-8219-e1c597f2c40e) 🎧 34:53 - 46:24 (11:30) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/77af27e7-b667-482c-bd8e-1e67db67ab35" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - The question "Does your mother recognize you?" misframes dementia as only cognitive recognition. - Recognition is deeper: emotional presence and caring persist even without name recall, altering how we relate to loved ones with dementia. #### 💬 Quote > Does she recognize you? I'm not so convinced that the inability to remember names necessarily means that a person with dementia can't recognize or care about other people. > — Janelle Taylor Janelle Taylor on dementia and recognition #### 📚 Transcript **Ira Glass:** We've arrived at question three of our program. Question three, how's your mom? So we spotted this next thing we want to play you in an academic journal. It was originally a paper in Medical Anthropology Quarterly written by an anthropologist named Janelle Taylor, who adapted it to read here on the radio. This one question that Janelle Taylor is writing about, it kept showing up all the time in her personal life. And she says as an anthropologist, she knows when lots of people are asking the same question over and over, it means something. And she wrote this essay to think through what is underneath that question. **Janelle Taylor:** My mother is living with progressive dementia. Because I'm reading these words on the radio, I can't hear your response. But I'm listening for the question that, as I've learned, always comes. Everyone, almost without exception, responds with some version of the same question. Does she recognize you? There are variants, of course. Does she still know who you are? But does she still know your name? However it may be phrased, the question is always whether my mother recognizes me, meaning can she recite the facts of who I am, what my name is, and how I'm related to her. When everyone keeps asking me, does she recognize you? I find myself thinking, that is the wrong question. I believe the question really is, or should be, do you, do we, recognize her as a person who's still here? Does she recognize you? The weirdness of the question becomes more obvious if you think about what would be required to answer it. Let's say I ask my mother, what's my name? Who am I? How old am I? How do we know each other? Testing her that way, what does it prove? What does it actually accomplish? I read a book by a journalist named Lauren Kessler. She wrote about how she would correct her own mother when her mother called her by the wrong name. Every time she would visit her mother, she'd take framed photos from the dresser and point to them and quiz her mother. You know who this is, don't you, Mom? Of course she didn't. Kessler writes, so I told her again and again, each visit, who was who, and then quizzed again. Thinking back on this now, I am appalled at my insensitivity. What did I think I was doing? I managed to accomplish only two things. I made myself miserable, and I made my mother irritable. I don't need my mother to tell me my name, or how I'm related to her. I already know these things, and I know that she has dementia. So why then would I make a point of asking her these questions that I know she can't possibly answer? It seems rude, or just mean. I can't bring myself to do it. I guess you could say that my mother raised me better than that. Does she recognize you? I'm not so convinced that the inability to remember names necessarily means that a person with dementia can't recognize or care about other people. But very often, it does mean that other people stop recognizing and caring about them. My mother was close to lots of people, but only one friend remains present in her life. Every month or two, Eli Davis drives an hour and a half from her home to Seattle to visit Mom, bringing treats and hugs and her always cheerful self. I love her dearly for it. And I wonder, where are the others? Where are the couples with whom my parents socialized? The women with whom Mom spent hours and hours on the phone all through my childhood? This shouldn't surprise me as much as it has. Maybe it's not fair to expect friends to step up, even close family drop off. Friendships in America are not usually expected to survive dementia. Friendships are often more like pleasure crafts than life rafts, not built to brave the really rough waters. Does she recognize you? When people ask me whether my mother still recognizes me, they're often expressing concern for me, asking me how I'm bearing up under the burden of suffering that her dementia must place on me. And they're quite ready to hear about my burdens and my suffering. What they find harder to hear, I think, is that being around my mother is not a nightmare or a horror. It's not like any of that. Here's what it is. In a cafe, as we share a scone, mom and I make what passes for conversation. I've learned to ask only the sort of question that doesn't require any specific information to answer. So, things going okay with you these days? How's my favorite mom doing? You doing all right? I tell her funny little stories about my kids. Sometimes we leaf through a magazine, looking at the pictures and commenting on them. Sometimes we look out the window and I make general observations that require no specific response. Looks like spring is coming. Look at those leaves coming out on the trees. That guy's hair is really curly. With each exchange, Mom smiles at me, beaming affectionately in that familiar, slightly conspiratorial way, as if we're both in on the same joke. So, our conversations go nowhere. But it doesn't matter what we say, really, or whether we said it before, or whether it's accurate or interesting or even comprehensible. The exchange is the point. Mom and I are playing catch with touches, smiles, and gestures, as well as words, lobbing them back forth to each other in slow, easy, underhand arcs. The fact that she drops the ball more and more often doesn't stop the game from being enjoyable. It's a way of being together. Does she recognize you? She may not recognize me in a narrowly cognitive sense. But my mom does recognize me as someone who's there with her, someone familiar perhaps. And she doesn't need to have all the details sorted out in order to care for me. The impulse to care, the habit of caring, these are things that run deep in my mother, someone who for most of her life was very engaged in caring for other people, her children, her husband, her grandchildren, her friends. Even some of the behavioral quirks that my mom has developed make sense to me in those terms as expressions of care. Here's an example. People with dementia often engage in repetitive behaviors, and mom is no exception. When I take her out to a cafe, I usually get a cup of black coffee for myself and order a cup of hot chocolate for her. Not too hot, and don't forget the whipped cream on top. As we drink them, she checks constantly to see whether my cup and hers are even, whether the liquids have been drunk down to the same level. And if not, she'll hurry up and drink more to catch up, or else stop and wait for me. Or if we share a cookie, she's concerned to make sure that the halves be the same size and that we eat them at the same rate. I think keeping track of whether our drinks and cookies are even comes naturally to my mother, a woman who has always had to carefully divide quite limited resources, first with her own brothers and later among her four children. She's cared about such details all her life, and caring about them was also a way in which she cared for other people. Mom also does still take care of me in some small but important ways. One time, a little more than a year ago, I stopped by the assisted living facility where she was living at the end of a very busy day and an especially hectic week. I had stayed up very late the night before, trying to finish grading student papers, then spent the whole day teaching and in meetings. I went with her up to her room, I turned on the TV, and we sat down together on the couch. I was exhausted. I leaned back and yawned. Mom patted my hand and said to me, You're tired. Just go ahead and sleep. You can just lay down right here. And so I sat there next to my mom, holding her hand, feeling her warmth against me all along one side of my body. And I leaned my head on her shoulder and slept. Music Does she recognize you? For a while, after we first moved my mother into an assisted living facility, she often said that she wanted to go home. I understood this to mean that she wanted to move back to the house where she had lived for 40 years until my father's death, the house in which I grew up. Usually, I responded with my own mild version of reality orientation, explaining as gently as possible that that house was all empty and cold now, and nobody was there to keep her company or help her do stuff, so it was probably better to stay here. One time, though, I asked her a question instead. You mean home to the house up in Edmonds? No, on the farm, she answered. You go down. With her raised arm, she traced out the curve of a long-ago road. For the first few years of her life, my mother had lived on a small farm in southern Idaho before her father moved the family to Seattle during World War II to seek work on the docks. They're inside there, she added. Who? I asked. My mom and my dad. My mother's in her 70s. Her parents are not waiting for her inside an Idaho farmhouse. You could use that evidence to draw a clear line between us. Me, here, on the side of reality, competence, personhood, recognition. Her over there, on the side of delusion, incapacity, not quite fully human. But what she was longing for was her childhood home. She missed her mom and dad. She was trying, in her own way, to hold on to them. Just as I was trying, against the odds, to hold on to her. --- ### [Musical on Tutoring and Anxiety](https://share.snipd.com/snip/44042bbd-5d77-4e24-bf64-6e121fbcfe88) 🎧 48:03 - 57:03 (09:00) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/199d6e35-710e-4535-8133-c9ce4bd00bf0" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Milo Kramer tutored kids for New York's elite public schools and created a musical show to share their raw struggles. - One poignant song explores a student's anxiety about answering if Shakespeare's Othello is racist under pressure to conform. #### 💬 Quote > Divya looks at the assignment rubric... I say, remember, grades don't matter, Divya. > — Milo Kramer Milo Kramer performing from his tutoring show about student stress #### 📚 Transcript **Ira Glass:** five years, Milo Kramer tutored kids who wanted to leap over that chasm and into those eight elite high schools. At first, it Milo feel good. Because **Milo Kramer:** I thought I was helping children. And I only gradually came to understand that I was really just a fucked up cog in a larger fucked up system. This **Ira Glass:** recording is from a one-person show that Milo did this fall about the kids they tutored. I worry a little that **Milo Kramer:** it's going to be hard to get across over the radio **Ira Glass:** what's so special about this show. Most of it is songs, songs about the kids that Milo tutored, these very funny and heartbreaking portraits of these middle school and high school kids, and Milo's relationship to them. Like, for example, the boy who takes a lot of pleasure denouncing God and the Democrats. Jason's **Milo Kramer:** 16, and he proudly identifies as libertarian. He's a 16-year libertarian. I'm kind of afraid of him. **Ira Glass:** Milo is not a great singer. They would tell you that themselves. Or a skilled musician. But they've written songs in secret since they were the age that these kids are, that they're writing about. And there's just something in the intentional roughness and sincerity of what they're doing. It kind of matches the rawness of these kids and their feelings. of Milo's reactions to them. When a girl from Queens named Dana, who's better at math than Milo and probably should be a scientist or engineer someday, tells Milo that if she does end up in college, she wants to study theater. Milo, who's broke and struggling and wanting to do theater, sings, **Milo Kramer:** I want to tell her not to. I want to tell her not to. You cannot study theater. You have to study math. You're good at math. You're failing math. You want to study theater? Theater doesn't matter. There's a pandemic. **Ira Glass:** Lots of the songs in the show are about the kids' anxieties, about school and this test and all the pressure they feel from their parents. And they're about Milo trying to figure out not just how to teach them, but what they possibly could say to comfort them. Faith, for example, is a terrible reader. Faith **Milo Kramer:** says I think I'm stupid. I can't read. I guess I'm stupid. I get B's. I must be stupid. I say I don't think you're stupid Faith repeats, I'm sure I'm stupid. If you think I'm smart, please prove it. I tell her intelligence is unmeasurable and different in every individual. Faith just looks at me and says no. I say yes. She says no, she says no, no, no, no. I say, hey, when I was your age, my mom hid all my report cards from me. When I asked her what my grades were. She always told me. You're right where you should be. You're right where you should be. Our **Ira Glass:** radio show today is about questions. And to close out the show, I'm just going to play you one more thing. This is one full song from Milo's show about a question that a student faced. It's an essay question. **Milo Kramer:** Divya has to respond to the question. Is Shakespeare's Othello racist in a five-paragraph essay for her white teacher by Monday? And she says, just tell me the answer, please. I have so much homework this week. I need to get this done as fast as possible. Is Othello racist? Yes or no? I'm like, have you read the play? She's like, yes, and I watched the Laurence Fishburne movie. I'm like, great, so what do you think? She's like, I don't know. I'm 15. I'm afraid to say the wrong thing. I'm like, same. This stuff is hard to talk about, but you've got to trust yourself, even though you've also got to constantly question and interrogate yourself. Either way, you've got to try. You've got to try. You've got to try, try, try, try, try. I'm desperate to do a good job. Divya's Indian American mom can hear us in the next room. I do not know what to do. Divya looks at the assignment rubric to see how she'll be graded. She needs a clear defensible thesis, followed by three unique body paragraphs. I can tell she's overwhelmed. I say, remember, grades don't matter, Divya. Learning can't be measured. Just trust how you feel you did. She says maybe grades don't matter if you're rich, but in my family, grades are so important. I think I thought at first that Divya didn't have the words to talk about the play in any nuanced way, but now I start to think that her understanding is deeper than my own. And she might never talk to me about Othello honestly and shouldn't have to. Finally, I decide she just wants me to provide her with some easy answer to satisfy her teacher and get her through the semester unscathed. So I'm like, okay. Your teacher is either looking for an essay that's like, yes, Othello is very racist. The story of the play is there's this super professionally and romantically successful black man all of these white guys are jealous of and cannot handle. That tension is resolved when the white guys tricked Othello into murdering his wife, thereby turning him into the brutish stereotype they wanted him to be all along. That the title role was performed in blackface for centuries underscores this. Moreover, that's a good, that's kind of a transition word, Divya. Moreover, i.e. my next body paragraph will be about, moreover, Desdemona's whiteness, in contrast, is repeatedly presented as innately good, innocent, and desirable. The other essay you could write that would also get an A goes, no, Othello is not super racist. Othello is a flawed attempt at anti-racism. In that, it's Shakespeare's only play to center a dynamic black protagonist. The play was banned in apartheid South Africa for depicting an interracial relationship. Moreover, the play's most prejudiced characters are always presented as either stupid Rodrigo or evil Iago. It would be a mistake to conflate the perspectives of these characters with the meanings of the work as a whole. Either of those essays would get A's, divya, but what your teacher's reductive yes or no prompt does not allow for is an essay that's like what I think I think, which is something like, Othello is a product and reflection of another culture, Elizabethan England, 400 years old, written at a time when race was just being invented as a system of power. The play later became a cultural export of the British Empire, which colonized black and brown people around the world. The play remains a bestseller of the Shakespeare industrial complex. In other words, Divya, Othello and racism are so indelibly linked that the question, is Othello racist, seems to confuse both what racism is and what artworks are. In my opinion, what's really racist, Divya, is that we are required to read Othello for the billionth time that it's on the curriculum at your Brooklyn public high school, though the play is boring. When we could be reading any number of contemporary black playwrights. **Michael:** Divya **Milo Kramer:** responds, don't hate me, but I kinda liked reading Othello. The story is really crazy and the language is really pretty. **Ira Glass:** Milo Kramer and the one-person show School Pictures, recorded at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. School Pictures is running at Theater Latte Da in Minneapolis from February 5th to March 2nd. It's going to come back to New York in the fall. If you want to hear more songs from the show or book the show for your town, go to milocramer.com. --- Created with [Snipd](https://www.snipd.com) | Highlight & Take Notes from Podcasts