And the second? The second is Ryan Seacrest.

Seacrest appears in Clark’s obits like the Boswell to Clark’s Samuel Johnson, quoted instead of family members as the apparent authority on Clark’s life and legacy. His tribute to Clark on “Idol” the night after his death became a news story in and of itself. For years, Seacrest had been slowly positioning himself as the new Dick Clark, taking over as the host of the New Year’s broadcast when Clark was ill, and modeling his career after Clark’s by taking ownership stakes in radio shows and TV ventures. Seacrest has become so entwined with Clark’s story that when news of the death broke, it was hard not to picture Seacrest kneeling in some dark rite, screaming to the heavens as Clark’s power possessed him, “Highlander”-style.

The problem with this image is that it’s far too interesting to have anything to do with Ryan Seacrest, a man who has made a career out of being professionally boring. If we’re going with a sci-fi reference, it’s easier to think of him like the bureaucrats in “Brazil,” toiling away in some back office, looking up briefly as an intern arrives to tell him the news, nodding curtly, shedding a single tear, and immediately returning to work. (During his tribute on “Idol,” he said that Clark was “in a better place saying, ‘Hey, let’s get on with the show, OK?’”) Seacrest is not someone who does dramatic things in fields. He is a person who stands in places of no place and intones blank words like a priest performing some long-deprecated rite. And he’s been very, very successful at it.

Seacrest’s extraordinary rise, so counter to the prevailing trends of the time, points to a current of artistic and social conservatism in the mass audience that persists despite the relentlessly progressive story we like to tell ourselves about the march of culture.

Like Clark, Seacrest got his start in radio. Clark’s early jobs were in an industry where local was king, getting spots at small-bore stations in upstate New York and only going national when “Bandstand” was picked up for TV distribution. Seacrest, however, came to radio just as it was being deregulated and local stations were being eliminated in favor of national conglomerates like ClearChannel. As such, he was able to move to Los Angeles and, at the age of 20, take over a morning radio show that became nationally syndicated. He followed that up with his own form of conglomeration, taking over the weekly “American Top 40″ from Casey Kasem in 2004, and launching his own new programming ventures, like “On Air With Ryan Seacrest,” a four-hour block he records daily and which is distributed to more than 150 stations nationwide.

But his big break was “Idol.” Premiering in 2002, it at first seemed an unlikely phenomenon. Why would anyone want to watch a “Star Search” where the contestants didn’t change? The country did not lack for pop stars, after all: Between “Total Request Live” and Radio Disney we were experiencing something of a bumper crop in those years. The success of “Idol” speaks to both the unalloyed effectiveness of its format and something deep in the national mood at that moment. Bathed in post-millennial anxiety, and eager as always to avoid discussing the possible causes of and responses to a national tragedy, “Idol” seemed to reflect our best selves. It was meritocratic (the best will win, regardless of their social position), individualistic (only single singers, no messy bands), populist (the people vote), and aggressively cheerful.

Key to that success was Seacrest. The judges represented the business aspect of the transaction, the reward at the end. The voters were America, of course. But Ryan was the Idol. For struggling amateurs, he was the end product they were training for, smooth, professional and unchallenged, a perfect pop product encased in a suit. While the contestants’ images varied, Seacrest’s presence on stage was a constant reminder of what the producers had in mind when they talked about a pop star.

There have long been rumors that Seacrest is gay. It’s hard to know what to do with these, exactly, but there is something undeniably unsettling about his sexuality. The image he projects is that of a non-threatening teenage boy, a pre-pubescent heartthrob like Ricky Nelson, David Cassidy or Justin Bieber. But Seacrest, who has dated Teri Hatcher and Sheryl Crow, is decidedly post-pubescent. He is, as they say, a grown man. Merv Griffin, who hired him to host a children’s computer-themed quiz show called “Click!” in the mid-’90s, said that “he had this spiky haircut, and we knew all the little girls in the audience would love him, and they did.” And they do. And he doesn’t care. Which is, maybe, a big point in his favor.

But it’s a point against the audience. All teen idols grow up, and as moral panicky as the process can be (“I’m Not a Girl,” etc.), we’ve seen it happen enough times now to know that part of the pleasure of a non-threatening teenager is knowing the threat they will inevitably become; Justin Bieber is fascinating because we want to see how it all spirals down. For Seacrest to stay in that neuter state reflects a childish, eyes-closed denial of reality among those audience members who still like it. The last decade has seen a remarkable opening of public discourse about all kinds of sex; currently the news media is tirelessly (and tiresomely) covering a story that basically amounts to “Hey, some people like bondage!” Adult sexuality is at least an option for our public conversations now, and lots of openly gay celebrities have remained idols in their own way, able to publicly pursue relationships without having to maintain the facade of blank sexlessness. But if Seacrest, the Delphonic seer of conventional wisdom, is in fact gay (or sexual at all) and truly thinks breaking face would kill his career, then maybe he’s right. For all the recent gains we’ve made, there’s a sizable portion of our fellow citizens who would much rather have Ricky Schroder stay a boy. Whether you want to have Seacrest or be him, he is selling the troubling fantasy that desire doesn’t have to be dirty.

Throughout a decade in which celebrity scandals were everywhere, Seacrest himself remained steadfastly above the fray. The scandal boom was great for entertainment news, but unstable workers are bad for the entertainment business. Scandal-plagued actors may get more publicity, but they make it a lot harder for a production to get insured, and the harder it is for the talent to hit their marks, the longer it takes to make the product. You never had to worry about that with Seacrest. A tireless worker and consummate professional, a morality clause would just be superfluous for any contract you might want to strike with him. In a decade of turmoil, Seacrest was the rock, the thing you could always depend on.

But since when has good TV been about dependability? The fun of watching “Idol” is its anarchy, whether it’s Paula’s looseness and Simon’s free-form contempt, an unknown amateur maturing into a star or flaming out under pressure, or the direction of each season, which producers, for all their tinkering, ultimately leave in the hands of the audience. “Idol,” at its best, is a show that can genuinely surprise everyone. In the midst of that glorious chaos, Seacrest stands apart, a stable center. His ability to parlay that personality into lucrative positions on other shows indicates that stability is what a certain portion of the audience wants. And that’s worrisome.

During an authoritarian period in American politics, culture was the lone bright spot. It seemed to be rapidly democratizing: corporate conglomerates were failing, user-generated content was everywhere, and even highly controlled mediums like TV were expanding their offerings to become far more adventurous. But no shift brings everyone along with it, and as easy as it now is to find people who like “Mad Men,” cultural progressives are haunted by fears about what everyone else is watching. Maybe, like Glenn Beck said, we really are surrounded; certainly a lot of people seemed to watch “Two and a Half Men.” Seacrest is like your square brother who went into banking: His success makes you wonder if the cultural power you feel when you’re with your people is really all that strong. Despite the fact that Ryan Seacrest has never done anything even slightly objectionable, people hate Ryan Seacrest. And that’s why.

“Idol” has, inevitably, begun to wane in influence and audience. As the paying audience for pop music massively declined during the ’00s, “Idol” had been able to stay ahead of the curve by making it about competition and narrative rather than music. But that audience had broken down too, splintered into niches by the expanding array of entertainment options. This should have spelled doom for Seacrest, eternally a mass-market guy. But he saw it coming, saw that the family-friendly audience he served would soon just become one market among many, and formed Ryan Seacrest Productions in 2006. His major hits so far have all involved the Kardashians, but he just signed a big new deal with Comcast, and more could be on the way.

If Dick Clark is an eternal teenager trapped in a ‘50s image of adolescence, Seacrest is a teenager from 2002 who’s persisted across time, simultaneously trying to please parents and safely experience more sensual pleasures from the standpoint of a moment when America had a serious interest in being pure and virginal. He’s achieved this by splitting his personality across business ventures, appearing as a squeaky-clean host on TV and radio while using his production company to push delightfully trashy reality fare like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” When we look at Ryan Seacrest, we see innocence; when we look at Ryan Seacrest’s productions, we see naughtiness framed as a secondhand experience. A man so averse to scandal that he takes pains to present himself as asexual, Seacrest is one of the few remaining examples of television’s “Least Objectionable Programming” doctrine, a remnant of the era of mass audiences. His particular evil genius has been to recognize that you can do just this but for every audience. Give the family hour what it wants, give the late-night gossipers what they want, and keep it all firmly separate with plausible deniability.

Trailers have become a culture and an art form all to themselves. Being a true movie obsessive now means not only being up on films as soon as they come out, but trailers, too, and this practice has been greatly facilitated by the Internet. A certain kind of person will remember downloading the original “Phantom Menace” trailer in 1998 and then buying tickets for “Meet Joe Black” just to see it on the big screen. (Some of these people also may have worn matching T-shirts to this event and then left immediately after the 130-second clip was over.) The online release of a much-anticipated movie’s trailer has now become a major media event, as the viral frenzy last week over the trailer for Ridley Scott’s “Aliens” prequel “Prometheus” shows.

New trailers are dissected second-by-second for clues about the movie on online message boards and in fan communities across the Web. The “Titanic” rerelease — and the marketing around it — offers a rare opportunity to see directly how the trailer has evolved in the last decade and a half, along with the art of making big-budget movies.

Look at the two “Titanic” trailers — the original and the new one. The 1997 spot takes the audience in a straight and narrow line through the plot of the movie. In two-and-a-half minutes, we get about 75 percent of the film: the scientific expedition, the arrival on the ship, the conflict, the romance. You have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen. The new trailer is a different story. If you haven’t seen the movie before, you would be hard-pressed to say what it was about, aside from a shipwreck and a love story. In the case of “Titanic,” the most universally known film in existence, that’s perfectly fine. But the trailer’s style is far from unusual, even for new movies. Trailers in the ’80s and ’90s gave you didactic plot overviews with heavy-handed narration; trailers today offer impressionistic glimpses and visceral thrills.

For another example, look at the theatrical trailer for “Jurassic Park,” from a little less than two decades ago. It gives you a step-by-step overview of the movie’s plot along with another feature of older trailers: the omniscient narrator. “Since the beginning of time …” he intones as the trailer begins, and we’re told what to expect. People will come to a park, dinosaurs will be brought back to life, they will get loose, and the people will have to survive.

Compare that to the trailer for “Prometheus.” It is amazing. It makes you incredibly excited to see the movie. And you have almost no idea what it’s about. (Something about Charlize Theron racing to turn off a really annoying smoke alarm?) There is literally more plot information in the YouTube description of the trailer than in the trailer itself. There’s no narration, just portentously intoned lines about kings and beginnings, few shots last for more than a second, and it builds from a quiet beginning to ear-shredding shrieks accompanying micro-second glimpses of huge effects shots.

“Trailers are a lot more visceral than they used to be,” said Jeff Smith of Open Road Entertainment, a veteran maker of movie trailers. “There’s less information given to you. You feel it more than you understand it.”

In conversations with trailer editors, they said that the form has changed in three main ways over the last decade and a half. The first is the move from narration to title cards. By the end of the ’90s, the use of omniscient voice-over narration, which had been a feature of trailers since they began, came to seem as dated as Hypercolor shirts or wallet chains. The trailer for Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedian” did a great job parodying the clichés that had built up over time, though they didn’t use the style’s originator in the spot. (That was Don LaFontaine, who later did it anyway in a Geico spot; Don is the first hit when you Google “‘in a world’ guy.”)

But there were technical reasons, too. “It’s easier for us to cut with graphics because we don’t have to rely on a narrator,” said trailer editor Jim Hale of Fishbowl Films. “And sometimes a narrator doesn’t work for a piece. We’ve done a lot of horror movies and sometimes it’s hard to get a narrator to read with the intensity you need. The words you use on a horror trailer like ‘terrifying’ and ‘shocking’ can sound a little cheesy when read.”

Voice-over actors (who are still used for some trailers, and are almost always used for TV spots, where the audience can’t be expected to pay as much attention) have been replaced by two different devices. One is title cards: simple, straightforward slides giving you information. The other technique is to use clips from the movie to tell the story. In some cases this can be straightforward, but it can also be more abstract, as with “Prometheus.” And it’s been remarkably consistent across genres: compare the trailer for “Mrs. Doubtfire” to something like “Bridesmaids.” It’s the same basic idea, but without the narration. What you realize, watching these two, is how little the narration was really needed. Remove it from the “Doubtfire” trailer and you get the point just as well.

Another big change involves the way trailers sound. While the music used tends to be the focus, those noises you hear at the end of the “Prometheus” trailer simply didn’t exist 20 years ago. “That’s a way more subtle effect that I don’t know if the general audience realizes, but people in the industry sure do,” said Smith. “There’s a greater emphasis on sound design than ever before, and a lot of these big trailers do spectacular things with it.” (If you want to know what “sound design” is, check out this video about “Transformers.”)

Again, technical reasons have driven this change. The installation of Dolby digital sound in most theaters has opened up a whole new set of possibilities. For one, sounds can be deeper and louder than was previously possible; for another, sounds can move around the theater, not just to the left or right, but backward and forward. All this heightens that “visceral” experience. If you want a trailer to convey dread, use an ominous bass sound; if you want it to show panic, a rapid high-pitched screeching can be used. The giant objects so common to blockbuster movies now can have their bulk properly sounded out.

The biggest change, however, is the pace of editing. Going back to “Titanic,” both trailers share a sequence where we see Rose looking upward, cars being loaded onto the ship, and Jack running through the crowd. In the 1997 trailer, it lasts for seven seconds. In the new trailer, it lasts for four. It’s the same content, the same information. It’s just quicker. “Every decade the cuts get faster and faster and faster,” said Brian McCaughey, the creative director of Doubleplusgood Entertainment. “And the information goes by at a much faster rate. That’s something that George Lucas was very big on as far back as the early 1980s: Let’s see how fast we can get things going before they become incomprehensible.”

The switch to digital again has had a huge effect on this acceleration. “When you’re editing on a computer, it’s easier to move sections of a trailer around,” said Hale. “You can rearrange things quickly, moving one second of the story around to see if things work. Back when they were editing trailers on film, it was a lot tougher to take a chunk out of the middle of the trailer because you had to go get a new shot duplicated. Now you can just drop things in. You’ve got instant access.” It’s also allowed editors to make much smaller, faster cuts, bringing images down from a movement to, sometime, a blink.

Oddly enough, the rerelease of “Titanic” also shows how this trend may be starting to turn back. “When you’re cutting a 3-D trailer your speed goes down massively,” said McCaughey. “You can’t do the fast Michael Bay, Tony Scott cuts. If you cut it that way in 3-D, the eyes don’t have a chance to adjust to the images in 3-D. They’re going by too fast and it just doesn’t work.”

It may be too much to hope that we really see a slowdown in cutting. (That it is premised on the survival of 3-D seems an awful sort of Sophie’s choice.) What’s clear, though, is that trailers have come into their own. Those who make them have to stay out of the spotlight, not wanting their work to overshadow the movie itself. But a careful eye will reveal some true treasures from the past decade and a half, from “Gone in 60 Seconds” (“a real game-changer,” said Smith) to “Where the Wild Things Are.” And trailers have spawned their own communities, like the forums at Movie-List.

“There are a lot of great trailers out there,” said Hale. “In this business, the competition used to be not as heavy as today. Everyone’s stepped up their game. Trailers have become a real art form in and of themselves.”

That may end up being the case years down the line. But judging from the available evidence, it’s not going to happen any time soon. Bigelow’s movie was released in 2009, but in 2011, only 5 percent of the top-grossing movies were directed by women. And, astoundingly, the Oscars are even worse. None — zero — of the films in the best picture, best director, best adapted or original screenplay, best lead or supporting actor, and best supporting actress categories were directed by women. In the major categories, 98 percent of nominations went to movies directed by men, 84 percent went to movies written by men, and 70 percent went to movies starring men. The only female-centered movies that appear outside the best actress categories are “The Help” and “Bridesmaids.” In the best picture category, there are as many movies about women as there are movies about horses.

Getting beyond basic cast-and-crew details, Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist pop culture media critic and the editor of Feminist Frequency, has produced a video putting the 2012 best picture nominees to the so-called Bechdel test. This looks at whether a film has, at any point, female characters having an interaction with each other that’s not about a male character. Only two of the 10 pass. While it’s possible for male directors and writers to produce representative depictions of women (as Manohla Dargis said in a 2009 interview, “Flaubert wrote ‘Madame Bovary.’ That’s all we need to say about that”), they mostly don’t. Female characters aren’t given anything to do besides pine about their (heterosexual) romantic interests.

Besides Bigelow, only three other women have been nominated for the best director Oscar: Sofia Coppola for “Lost in Translation” in 2003, Jane Campion for “The Piano” in 1993, and Lina Wertmüller for “Seven Beauties” in 1976. In the years since Bigelow’s win, no women have been nominated. “Women in Hollywood are still largely excluded from prominent decision making and production roles,” Sarkeesian wrote in an email. “Bigelow’s win is definitely something to celebrate, but I don’t think it reflects on any substantial shift within the film industry as a whole.”

“Hollywood is very big on symbolism and mistaking symbolic breakthroughs for actual breakthroughs,” Richard Rushfield, a veteran entertainment journalist who blogs at rushfieldbabylon.com, wrote me. “And then once they’ve had the symbolic breakthroughs and pat themselves on the back for a job well done, they forget to do the job.”

Nor were the 2010 Oscars an unalloyed triumph for feminism. As Rebecca Clark Mane, a feminist cultural critic from the University of Washington, pointed out, the dual wins for Sandra Bullock in “The Blind Side” and Mo’Nique in “Precious” sent a troubling message. “They managed to both celebrate regressive gender politics which locate women’s primary role as mothers while at the same time setting the ‘bad’ black mother against the ‘good’ white mother,” she wrote.

“Bridesmaids” has already had a positive effect on the fortunes of some women in the industry; “Who Invited Her?,” a comedy by Sascha Rothschild about a woman invited along on a bachelor party weekend, was quickly picked up after “Bridesmaids’” big numbers came out. But it’s troubling that the job prospects of an entire gender seem dependent on what’s likely to be a comedy fad, and it’s telling that every action movie of note released since “The Hurt Locker” has been directed by a man.

The source of women’s underrepresentation at the Oscars is not exactly a mystery. A recent study by the L.A. Times confirmed what we all pretty much suspected: The Academy is overwhelmingly white and male. Seventy-seven percent of Oscar voters are male, a population that is very much at odds with America but fairly representative of the people who make the decisions in Hollywood.

Hollywood’s sexism is so obvious that it’s become almost hard to get worked up about. But these numbers should be incredibly troubling. Few industries that aren’t explicitly men-only, like professional sports, are allowed to display such drastic gender bias. Hollywood movies are funded by men, made by men — and, usually, made for men, especially young men.

Awareness of that audience makes the Academy’s embrace of even the two female-centric movies problematic. While the commercial success of “Bridesmaids” is heartening, its Oscar nominations came only in the writing and supporting actress categories, not the prestige picture/director awards. And it’s notable that only a female comedy that was repeatedly, and pointedly, presented as a male “raunch comedy” with female leads could receive recognition. It’s like the supposedly anachronistic plot of another nominee, “Albert Nobbs“: Women can only succeed by acting like men. It’s not that “Bridesmaids” isn’t a great film that deserves a billion awards. It’s just that, standing up there by itself, you start to get suspicious why that film was singled out. It’s like Carrie suddenly getting picked as homecoming queen. Reasonable observers begin to suspect there’s an ulterior motive at work.

There’s a similar problem with “The Help” being the only female-centric best picture nominee. Its problems with race have been widely discussed (and, indeed, Sarkeesian does in her video). But its representation of women in general is problematic, too. In the best picture category, male leads get to be actors, landowners, adventurers, inventors, writers, executives, soldiers and architects. Female leads get to be … housewives or domestic servants. (Even the supporting female characters are largely wives and mothers.) It’s not that this doesn’t represent an aspect of women’s experiences. It’s just that it doesn’t represent anything close to the entirety of women’s experiences, and the recognition of a film that emphasizes gender stereotypes and not a movie that gives another kind of portrait (like “Young Adult,” say) is telling.

How to fix this? The industry isn’t going to deal with the problem by itself, or it would’ve done so already. It’s even in its self-interest to cater to female audiences (movies like “Twilight” show how much potential is there), but Hollywood still can’t manage to get its act together. Nor is the nature of the entertainment business holding movie executives back from employing more women. Television, while far from parity, at least offers better opportunities for female creators, from Tina Fey’s “30 Rock” and Jenji Kohan’s “Weeds” to all the female showrunners now working and the older actresses that have found a home on the small screen when the movies turned their back.

Maybe we need some affirmative action for Hollywood. If the government thinks it’s important to set standards for equality in workplace hiring, sports and college admissions, it might be time to recognize the importance of movies’ cultural and economic power. Hollywood is, after all, a multibillion-dollar industry, and one of America’s biggest exports. For women to have so few opportunities in the upper ranks of such an important industry is absurd, and exactly the kind of thing the government would want to get involved in — theoretically, anyway. In reality, of course, Hollywood has ingratiated itself so thoroughly with elected officials that it’s highly unlikely any such action will get taken soon.

Writing about these sorts of issues can sometimes be hard, especially when it comes to private organizations like movie studios. Unlike the government, Paramount Pictures never agreed to fairly represent their audience, and have the right to pursue profit however they please, even if it would be more profitable not to ignore half of your potential audience. And if Terrence Malick wants to make a movie so man-focused that it could fairly be retitled “Father Issues Across the Ages,” he should go right ahead, especially if it’s going to turn out as wonderfully as “Tree of Life” did. But award shows are dedicated to recognizing a large number of quality films regardless of commercial interest, and are decided by a small, defined elite. Though they are also, of course, four-hour smugfests of meaningless, self-congratulatory drivel, they offer an opportunity for a cultural industry to show what it values. And if the Oscars are anything to judge by, then Hollywood doesn’t value women very highly at all.

Then she tried another little touch. She reached over and affectionately tugged on my ear.

“I love you,” I blurted out.

Well, that sure was a deal breaker, wasn’t it?

A shocked silence ensued. I didn’t know what to do. So I dealt with my panic the way I always did: with talking.

“Hold on,” I said. “That was a tic.”

She knew what I meant. After our first date had gone well, I took the plunge and showed her my various medication bottles. “This one’s for my allergies,” I said. “This one’s for my stomach. And this one … ” I hesitated, rattling the small pills around the plastic tube like a tiny maraca of anxiety. “For my Tourette’s. I have Tourette’s syndrome.”

“I know!” she said. “They told me. I love it!”

As it turned out, our mutual friend had let her know, and in another sign of our compatibility, she was charmed. But this still left us, early in our relationship, with a problem. How to handle my embarrassing, untimely tics? There’s no way to really suppress them. Tics are like sneezes: If they want to come out, they will. And the “I love you” was pretty ingrained at that point. A former girlfriend would signal that she wanted me to tell her I loved her by tugging on my ear, and so that physical trigger was strongly linked to the unfortunate blurt. I couldn’t just stop doing it. Instead, my new ear-tugger suggested we modify the tic, so that instead of saying “I love you” I would say, “I love you Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

Sometimes the best way to handle a ridiculous situation is to get a little ridiculous, too.

——

I was diagnosed with Tourette’s after my junior year in college, an unusually late time for the disorder to be identified. It’s such an amorphous bundle of symptoms that it’s hard to pinpoint an exact date when it started, and it’s always tempting to peer into the past and guess at behaviors that might have been early signs. When I slammed my head into my wooden desk in frustration during an argument at age 12 — was that a tic? How about when I would clear the back of my throat over and over, annoying everyone? When you’ve always been a weird kid, it’s hard to tell which parts of your personality are merely dispositional and which fall under the umbrella of a medical condition.

The first behavior I can say for sure was a sign of Tourette’s was a simple head jerk. I’d be sitting there, minding my own business, when my head would suddenly swing to the right or the left. It hurt, just as it would if someone had grabbed my head and forcibly jerked it to the side, and as a repeated behavior, it made my neck sore. I didn’t do anything about it right away, though. I figured it was just a shiver.

That summer, I was tutoring elementary school kids and reading Jonathan Lethem’s “Motherless Brooklyn.” The novel is about Lionel Essrog, a guy with Tourette’s syndrome who tries to solve a murder. The book presents an accurate and sympathetic portrait of the disease. It’s so accurate, in fact, that it allowed me to self-diagnose. The sudden jerking of my limbs? Check. The repetition of what others said, especially if it rhymed? That, too. The nonsensical swears delivered in a voice not quite my own, the obsessive counting, the ability of music to quiet my tics — I saw all that in Lionel, and I saw it in myself, too. It would take a visit to the doctor to make the diagnosis official, but I think the first time I thought of my disease as “Tourette’s,” the first time I gave it a name, was while reading Lethem’s book.

Over the next year, I made my way through a medical system that felt awfully confusing at the time but which I now recognize as familiar to anyone with an unusual diagnosis. I was shuttled from neurologist to neurologist and medication to medication. Eventually, I lost any faith in my doctors’ ability to actually understand my disease and found myself hoping only for a treatment that would make it better. I was frowned at sternly amid dark intimations that there was nothing really wrong with me, and in the sterile quiet of the examining room, my tics would often fail to come out and play.

So here’s the question: Did reading “Motherless Brooklyn” finally allow me to identify my illness? Or did reading a work of fiction influence me to frame my behaviors in a misleading way, tilting the doctors toward a diagnosis they would not otherwise have reached? How could I even know?

After going on a medication that didn’t work, I was switched to another, but had to fully come off the first drug before I could start the next. And that’s when the Tourette’s really came out, full and raging. That fall, I walked through the campus at night screaming and hitting trees, entertaining vivid thoughts of hurling a garbage can through the auditorium’s glass doors. At one point, I tried to climb the sheer concrete wall of our library, which was not just disturbing but kinda stupid.

I self-medicated, of course, since there was no other option. Any Tourette’s meds are just tranquilizers of one form or another, so I soaked up all the legal downers I could get my hands on as a way of calming the fury. And it helped, mostly, or at least made me less aware of my craziness. But where did this come from? I’d gone from a head twitch to full-blown Tourette’s in six months. Had the meds created it? Had I created it? Did I somehow unleash my Tourette’s by naming it? Did I conjure that bundle of symptoms out of my body like Bloody Mary? And if so, did that make it more or less real?

——

After college, I moved to New York, and the Tourette’s got worse. One night, I went to a production of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf,” Ntozake Shange’s wonderful play the lives of seven black women. It was going fine until a climactic scene when the characters talk about awful things that happened to them, switching between characters and building to a crescendo in which they all yell in unison. In the silence that followed, my Tourette’s decided to interject something. And that something was me yelling, “I’m sorry!”

Apparently my inner Tourette’s has white liberal guilt.

That’s how Tourette’s works. It’s not delusional. You’re not yelling obscenities at some imagined demon. It’s just that your neurons are misfiring and forcing air out through your mouth in a particular tone that’s sometimes a word. In fact, you can have a conversation with your tics, which was the best way I found to defuse public alarm about them. On the subway, I would start swearing (a giant “do not touch” sign in New York), but would then say, “OK, calm down,” like I was talking to an unruly child. People around me would laugh, and while I don’t know what they thought I was doing, exactly, it sure worked better than when I was able to clear a good five-foot radius around me on a packed-full train by swearing violently without any clear cause.

So where do those words come from? While only a small percentage of Tourettics (less than 15 percent) display coprolalia, or obscene tics, it’s certainly one of the weirder medical symptoms you’re likely to come across. That urge to loudly use taboo words is not a strictly verbal phenomenon, either, as there are reports of deaf Tourettics signing swear words involuntarily. And it can be quieted by strange things, like music, where the regular rhythms seem to keep the unpredictable, herky-jerky pace of tics in line. My Tourette’s seemed to like the sound of uninterrupted guitar feedback, like that squealing wash smoothed over the blips in my brainwaves and interrupted the urge to tic.

The answer to where all this comes from, or why certain things help, is ultimately “who knows?” In a historical context, this is an improvement on the old answer — demonic possession — but it’s hardly ideal. Tourette’s, which can be found in 200,000 Americans, is still rare enough and confusing enough that there’s not much research into how it works. I can offer metaphorical explanations, but I don’t know if they’re right, or if they apply to anyone but myself.

Eventually, I found a new doctor who put me on a new medication, one that worked much better and with far fewer side effects. Unfortunately, a full month’s supply of the drug would cost over a thousand dollars out-of-pocket, which made my insurance plan reluctant to cover it. I had to spend a lot of time fighting with them, and getting my pharmacy to stock this still-rare medicine on a regular basis, and so forth. I ended up not taking my meds on the weekend to conserve them for workdays in case something went wrong when it came time to renew, as it always seemed to, and so the character of “Mike on the weekends” became much more sweary and unpredictable — but even I had to admit, weirdly entertaining. I was known to unload a series of f-bombs on people wearing shorts (why shorts?) and the behavior was weird enough that I never got beat up.

Things got better, as they tend to do with the disease; Tourette’s wanes over time, and my expensive medication eventually went generic and I could take it every day, which I did assiduously for about seven years straight. “Mike on the weekends” disappeared. Then, earlier this summer, a clerical error resulted in me having to spend three days drug-free. I wouldn’t say it was perfect: The tension would build up, and most evenings I would take a dose of another tranquilizer I’d been prescribed as a booster. But I didn’t tic much. The Tourette’s has faded.

When I was first diagnosed, it was so much a part of my identity that friends felt like it was a good thing to mention to possible dates. Now, people I meet mostly don’t even realize I have it. Ultimately, I’ve let go of the questions — where did it come from? Could I have stopped it myself if I’d tried hard enough? — in exchange for getting on with my life. There’s a temptation for your mental illness to become synonymous with your personality. After all, it’s the easiest explanation for the way you act. And as confusing and irritating as that can be, that’s also a comfort, in a way, because it’s a kind of armor against the judgment of the outside world. But when that illness-as-metaphor disappears, you are left alone with the hard work of forging an identity on your own.

And now, at the age of 31, is a good time for that. The girl I mentioned at the beginning — the girl I involuntarily said “I love you” to – is now the person I say “I love you” to voluntarily all the time. We’ve been dating for nine years and are engaged to be married, and she still loves my tics as much as she loves me. (I worry that she may love them more sometimes, but never mind.) Tics are ultimately triggered by pressure and stress, and the best way of avoiding them is to be relaxed. That’s a problem for Tourettics, since ticcing in public or the possibility of ticcing in public can easily make you nervous. But with my fiancée, I am always at ease, always relaxed. So maybe that’s what’s made the Tourette’s wane. Maybe having her around lets the Tourette’s settle enough to give the rest of my personality a shot at seeing the light of day.

The nice thing, though, is that it ultimately doesn’t matter so much. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve let go of my self-indulgent interest in my own drama and become far more interested in the task of actually accomplishing something. Besides, when you really get to know other people — your friends, your family, your partner — you realize we’re all pretty weird. It’s just that Tourette’s makes you unable to contain those urges: the chaotic confusion, the love of language, the urge to lash out at the world even if you’re only beating at the air with your fists. It starts at the center of your body and radiates out until it reaches public view, announcing to the world what you’d hoped to keep hidden. And if there’s anything I’ve learned from having Tourette’s, it’s that other people mostly don’t care about your secrets. They probably feel the exact same way.

Mike Barthel is a Seattle-based grad student. He also writes about pop culture for the Awl and the Portland Mercury.

The ADL’s mission has always been to aggressively promote tolerance. They’ve relentlessly called attention to white power groups, from the KKK to the neo-Nazis to the militia movement, and sponsored diversity-oriented educational programs. They’ve also been somewhat supportive of interfaith relations, denouncing an anti-Mormon film in the early 1980s.  They can be an attack dog, the public face of the Jewish nonprofit sector, willing to make a public stink about anti-Semitic comments even when others are hesitant.

Running parallel to this history of laudable public service, however, is a darker story centering largely on Foxman. The ADL’s private domestic spying operation had been going on since its inception, but after Foxman took over it engaged in operations like spying on anti-apartheid activists and other non-extremist groups. Foxman and the ADL became worried as much about direct domestic persecution of Jews as they were about opposition to Israel, and began to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Certainly, anti-Zionism can bleed into anti-Semitism, but Foxman has taken this to a cartoonish degree, demanding apologies from Americans for expressing views on Palestine that would be well within the mainstream in the context of Israeli domestic politics.

Why is Foxman such a caricature? The best explanation may be generational. Like other Jewish men his age, Foxman grew up in a far less tolerant world, and his paranoid policing of public discourse springs from that different formative experience. But today, in a country that’s more pro-Jewish than almost any other in the world, his antics seem out of place, particularly to younger Jews. But a broader point might simply be that he is a classic neoconservative, while the vast majority of American Jews are liberal, and this disconnect has made him less and less able to convincingly play the role of representative of the Jewish people.

Foxman’s conservatism is clear in his selective outrage. He refused to condemn anti-Semitic statements by Sun Myung Moon’s Bush administration-allied Unification church, declined to protest Fox News’ frequent use of Nazi imagery for the purposes of political vilification — and, of course, in contrast to his opposition to an anti-Mormon film, he’s happily gotten on board with the anti-Islamic sentiment that even he acknowledges is key to opponents of the Park51 project near ground zero.

To those who’ve been watching closely, Foxman’s mosque posture could be seen coming. After 9/11 resulted in a surge of anti-Muslim sentiment in America, it became impossible for him to both fulfill the ADL’s historical mission of promoting religious tolerance and advance neoconservative goals, which were often explicitly anti-Muslim.

The ADL’s work is extremely important. To have someone opposed to its fundamental mission at its head greatly diminishes its capacity to accomplish its goals. Foxman owes it to the organization to which he’s dedicated his life to step down and join something that aligns more closely with his present interests, like, say, the Heritage Foundation.

The broad visibility of his hypocrisy — and even bigotry — on this issue has fundamentally changed the way many Americans view Foxman and the ADL. For a long time, he’s managed to mix his political ideology with a religious identity, giving his views a kind of untouchable glow. But no longer. Do American Jews really want Abe Foxman to be their spokesman?