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For me, EssayShark has been more than just a writing service — it’s been a reliable support system during stressful times. I like that the platform gives me full control over choosing my writer, and the process is always transparent. The work I’ve received is original, formatted correctly, and delivered ahead of schedule. The writers are professional and approachable, and the pay-after-approval system makes it safe and stress-free.

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The Truth Behind ‘Birds Aren’t Real' | My Life Online

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A short, important reflection on what ChatGPT cannot do.... from poet Phil Kaye

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A short, important reflection on what ChatGPT cannot do.... from poet Phil Kaye

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Rachel FeintzeigMs. Feintzeig is a writer based in Connecticut.

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Many successful people understand the power of a grudge — athletes, pop stars, your mother-in-law, our president.

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Here's analysis my students will readily read and seek to understand both content and craft. 

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Here's analysis my students will readily read and seek to understand both content and craft. 

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When Marvin Gaye sang the National Anthem at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game, he knew he was going to die soon. Rehearsals had been rocky. People feared that he wouldn't be on time to sing. He arrived late to the arena, disheveled and anxious. He wore a dark suit and oversized sunglasses to cover his bloodshot eyes. His voice trembled on the first line. By the time Marvin got to "...bombs bursting in air..." you could see his hands finally stop shaking. A rhythmic clap began to grow from the audience. By the last lines of the song, the entire crowd had joined in, clapping on beat with Marvin, breaking decorum to honor such brilliance. No one I know remembers who won the game.

If you are in Columbus, Ohio, on July 3rd of any year, you will likely drag yourself downtown with a blanket in the middle of the day, when the sun is still at its highest and most hungry. If you're lucky, you'll get a space at Huntington Park, where our beloved AAA baseball team, the Columbus Clippers, delivered back-to-back titles in 2010 and 2011. When night comes, you'll fall back into someone's arms, or be the arms that someone falls back into. And you'll roll your eyes when "Born in the U.S.A." plays while fireworks scream into the sky, tucking all its darkness into their pockets.

There are days when the places we're from turn into every other place in America. I still go to watch fireworks, or I still go to watch the brief burst of brightness glow on the faces of black children, some of them miles away from the forgotten corners of the city they've been pushed to. Some of them smiling and pointing upwards, still too young to know of America's hunt for their flesh. How it wears the blood of their ancestors on its teeth.

To be black and still alive in America is to know urgency. What Marvin Gaye knew, even as a man of God, was that Heaven might not be open for him, or for any of us.

There are times when I like to think that I see America the way that Marvin Gaye saw it in the spring of 1970-after he buried Tammi Terrell, and after his brother came back from a bloody war, when Marvin stared at all of our country's mess and told Smokey Robinson that he couldn't sleep because God was using him to write the album that would become What's Going On.

What I imagine to be most difficult is the exact moment when you realize that your wealth and success will still not save you: to be black and understand that you live in a country that values these things, but will still speak of how you earned your death if you leave too soon. Blackness and labor have been inextricable in America for hundreds of years, but still, being reminded of this hovering truth can destroy a man who does not think of what he does as labor, a man who perhaps thinks it's not "work" if I'm bringing people joy. I think of all these realities bearing down on Marvin Gaye, all at once in 1970, and how he could not, in good conscience, continue as the same artist.

What's Going On in its most literal and most difficult sense, is not so much an album as it is a small series of questions, almost rhetorical. What are we doing to each other, and what will the world look like if we don't change?

To be black and still alive in America is to know urgency. What Marvin Gaye knew, even as a man of God, was that Heaven might not be open for him, or for any of us. He knew then what so many of us know now: We have to dance, and fight, and make love, and fight, and live, and fight, all with the same ferocity. There are no half measures to be had. It is true, yes, that joy in a violent world can be rebellion. Sex can be rebellion. Turning off the news and watching two hours of a mindless action film can be rebellion. But without any actual hard rebellion, without reaching our hands into revolutionary action, all we've done is had a pretty fun day of joy, sex, and movies. There is no moment in America when I do not feel like I am fighting, when I don't feel like I'm pushing back against a machine that asks me to prove that I belong here. I know that urge to build a small heaven, or many small heavens. Ones that you cannot take with you, but ones that cannot be taken from you. A place where you still have a name. I believe, at one point, that Marvin Gaye looked at a country on fire, and wanted that place for us all.

We are perhaps at the crossroads that Marvin Gaye was at in 1970, still pushing our shoulder against one of the millions of doors America has built to keep us out. And we are all here, we unlikely patriots. All of us pushed to the margins, trying to fight for ourselves and one another, all at once.

I watch fireworks in July 2013. Two weeks later, George Zimmerman walks free, and Trayvon Martin is still dead.

Marvin Gaye sings, "If you wanna love, you got to save the babies," and a black mother pulls her son close.

I watch fireworks in July 2014. Later that month, the world turns to the Internet and sees Eric Garner choked to death by police officer Daniel Pantaleo.

Marvin Gaye sings "Trigger happy policing / Panic is spreading / God knows where we're heading," and thousands of people march from New York to Washington.

I will watch the fireworks in 2015 and black churches are burning in the south.

I will watch the fireworks in 2015 and no one marched for Renisha McBride.

I will watch the fireworks in 2015 and people I love can be legally married on Saturday, and then legally fired from their jobs on Monday.

Marvin Gaye sings "In the morning, I'll be all right, my friend," and a group of black children watch the sky light up, seeing darkness turned inside out for the first time.

For some of us, denying what this country is and what it is doing to our bodies is impossible. We are perhaps at the crossroads that Marvin Gaye was at in 1970, still pushing our shoulder against one of the millions of doors America has built to keep us out. And we are all here, we unlikely patriots. All of us pushed to the margins, trying to fight for ourselves and one another, all at once. Celebrating while still fighting perhaps represents the ethos of this country more than anything else. To bear witness to so much death that could easily be your own is to rush toward re-defining what it is to be a patriot in this country. It is even to rush towards re-defining "country" as a place where there both pride and safety are possible, at the same time, for all people.

And so a transgender woman steps onto the hallowed ground of the White House and fights to be heard in the name of undocumented transgender immigrants.

And so a woman scales a flag pole and tears down a symbol of oppression with her bare hands, taking time on the way down to deliver a word from the same God that whispered revolution in Marvin's ear.

And so a community buries more of its own, but does not forget to celebrate, and does not forget to sing.

These are the people who I will remember most when I look up to the sky this year, watch it explode in light, and hear the children laugh.

After finishing the national anthem, Marvin Gaye bowed lightly to thunderous applause before walking slowly from center court. Almost a year later, Marvin's fading body was resting in his brother Frankie's arms after he'd been shot by his father. Before dying, he told Frankie, "It's good. I ran my race. I've got nothing left to give." Frankie told police that he didn't get to his brother's side quicker because he thought the sound of the shots from his father's gun were fireworks.

Unlikely Patriots is our series of essays for July 4th that celebrates surprising, forgotten, and/or contrarian expressions of love for one's country. Lead photo: Marvin Gaye. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

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Marvin Gaye and the unlikely patriotism of resistance.

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Which of these personal essays do you recommend for teaching sensory language/details?

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Which of these personal essays do you recommend for teaching sensory language/details?

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100 Canadians Shaping the Country this year

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I was one of the first Syrian refugees to land in Canada in 2014. The settlement process was confusing, prolonged and alienating. How Canada finally became home.

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Opinion | ‘If You See a Fox and I’ve Died, It Will Be Me’

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My daughter told us to look out for her after she was gone, and sometimes we find her.

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Opinion | I Am Trying to See What My Beautiful Daughter Saw

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Life after loss is awful. I need to believe it’s also beautiful.

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A Sign, a Sunset and a Fall: Poems, Stories and Memoirs by Teens

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Some favorite student responses to three recent Picture Prompts.

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A long-from essay from The New Yorker I will be using this fall in my classroom. Gorgeous writing.

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A long-from essay from The New Yorker I will be using this fall in my classroom. Gorgeous writing.

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Writing Prompts About Food, Family and Culture

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Here are some questions to help students reflect on the food traditions and memories that are most meaningful to them.

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Before we start, I invite you to sign up for the Heinemann Newsletter. We send biweekly updates with articles from our blog and podcasts, featuring the latest thought leadership from our authors, and even samples from our latest titles.

Below is a transcript of this episode. Shamari Reid:
It's important to say, "We are humans." I think the book's title is just that declaration that we are humans.
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
We teach, and we love teaching, and then many of us feel called to do it. But we are humans, and that means a lot of beautiful things, but also a lot of complicated things. The book really is my exploration of all things beautiful and all things complex that comes with being a human, with teaching in the current times.
Edie:
Hi, this is Edie. Welcome back to the Heinemann Podcast. Our guest on the podcast today is author Shamari Reid. His forthcoming book, Humans Who Teach: A Guide for Centering Love, Justice and Liberation in Schools is a beautiful anecdotal exploration of self-compassion in a demanding profession. This conversation will give you insight into how those explorations became the foundation for a timely, compact book that guides you through the same work of examining self-care, boundaries, expansion and love.

Before we start, I invite you to sign up for the Heinemann newsletter. We send biweekly updates with articles from our blog and podcasts, featuring the latest thought leadership from our authors, and even samples from our latest titles. If you'd like to sign up, visit heinemann.com/newsletter. Now, my conversation with Shamari.

Thanks for being here. It's so nice to be here with you.
Shamari:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Edie:
Well, I was just thinking back to a conversation we had a little bit ago about your ... You've written your manuscript.
Shamari:
Right.
Edie:
It's out of your hands, it's onto the next phase of production.
Shamari:
Sure.
Edie:
Congratulations.
Shamari:
Thank you.
Edie:
And also, I know you've just reread it.
Shamari:
Yeah.
Edie:
I would just love to hear a little bit about that. This moment in time, rereading your manuscript, your writer's journey.
Shamari:
Sure. Sure. Yeah, the reread was a journey of all kinds of emotions and things that I didn't know I would feel.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I think partly because, when I was writing it, I was rereading it all the time. I'm someone, I'll write a paragraph, I might stand up, I'll walk around the house, I'll breath. And I'll go back and read the paragraph again. And then, the first thing that comes to me is the start of the new paragraph.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
So I reread, extend, reread, extend. I thought that I had reread the book and I knew it. Took some time from it, got the whole manuscript back and started rereading it. I thought it would just be a quick read.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
And then, I went on the journey of all kinds of emotions. I was like, "I'm going to rewrite that, I'm going to rewrite that. I'm going to rewrite the entire book." So I called my editor and I was like, "It's time to rewrite the entire book."
Edie:
Oh my gosh.
Shamari:
She said, "What? No, we're not doing that." So it's been one of those journeys for me. I'm very much of an iterative, I think, thinker. If I can go back to something just five minutes later, I have a whole new idea.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I'm always about extending, extending, extending. I think part of that was really me letting go. And getting comfortable with and okay with letting go.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
Knowing that I'll always have more I want to say.
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
I'll always have more I want to share. But right now, what I have said and what I have shared is enough.
Edie:
Yeah. The book, Humans Who Teach.
Shamari:
Yes.
Edie:
Let's talk a little bit about that term. I'd love to hear why you like the term Humans Who Teach.
Shamari:
Sure.
Edie:
Not just teachers, but humans who teach.
Shamari:
Sure. Humans Who Teach just makes sense to the way that I think, and the way that I feel, and the way that I move, and the way that I think about the work that we do. So for me, as a term, I'm realizing how different it is because folks have made me aware, "Hey, not everyone uses that term."
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
But for me, it has always just made sense. I said, many years ago, on a Heinemann podcast, I was talking with Kate and Maggie.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
On the Beyond the Letters.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I just was talking organically about some question and I said, "Well you know, it's human work that we do." It's work that happens in the hearts and minds of young people, that is informed by our own hearts and minds as people and as humans. So I think that's where I began to articulate the idea. However, I've always held close to that idea that we are humans before we are anything else.

I feel like, in this particular moment, a lot of my teacher friends are tired and exhausted, and are not feeling like they are allowed the space to be those things. They feel shame when they say, "Hey, I'm tired." Or, "I'm exhausted." Or, "Parent-teacher conferences were very long today." Not that they were bad, they were just long. But there isn't a lot of space, I feel, for teachers to be human. I think we're expected to be on all the time, and we're expected to be teachers all the time, and to give all the time. But I think the reality is we become empty.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
We become dehydrated. We need to be restored. So it's important to say, "We are humans." I think the book's title is just that declaration that we are humans.
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
We teach, and we love teaching, and then many of us feel called to do it. But we are humans and that means a lot of beautiful things, but also a lot of complicated things. The book really is my exploration of all things beautiful and all things complex that comes with being a human, who is teaching in the current times.
Edie:
Yeah. When you think that that shame, or feeling a little bit ashamed to say, "I'm tired, I'm exhausted," what is that rooted in? I know you speak to that in the book.
Shamari:
I do. It's a social lesson. But in the book, I talk about socialization. What I mean there is just all the things that we learn from birth until we're adults about our society. These are the messages that we receive from TV, from parents, from other teachers, other institutions. One of those messages is, that we received, is that teachers are just supposed to teach. We are just supposed to do and be everything for everyone, all the time, and especially for our students. In many ways, I think we are evaluated and/or our effectiveness maybe even measured based on how much we give to young people.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
Of course, we want to be effective. Who doesn't want to do their job well? Teachers want to do a great job. Because we've been taught to believe that doing a great job is going above-and-beyond all the time, that's what happens.

I think that's where the messages come from. It comes from other teachers. It comes in the form of encouragement and praise. It's not always negative. It's just, "Wow, I really admire how you stayed up late working on that. I really appreciate how you didn't take a lunch break today so that you could show up for someone else." That's also a way, I think, in which we encourage that kind of I would say overextension and the idea of having no real work-life-rest integration, work-life balance. That's what I would say it comes from. I think it's perpetuated and maintained when we continue to neglect the humanity of teachers, and talk about them as if they are just robots who can implement curricula, who can teach lessons plans on the drop of a dime.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
Even when we are in times of crises, like we are right now.
Edie:
Yes. Yeah. As we begin, by I think first acknowledging that humanity, seems like a vital first step.
Shamari:
Sure, sure.
Edie:
Then, beyond that, I think just as an extension as we grow, there's this self-care piece that comes in. I think, sometimes, that term can feel a little hollow right now. Or another thing to do.
Shamari:
That's right.
Edie:
Another thing for teachers to do.
Shamari:
That's right.
Edie:
What's your vision of self-care? Speak to that.
Shamari:
Sure. I'll tell the story of how I got there. I love stories.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
As anyone who knows, and when you read the book you'll see there are tons of stories all over the place. But there's a story around self-care for me. I love that you mention it being hollow, or being perceived as hollow. It was hollow for me, for a very long time. It was something that I thought only meant over indulgence and things that brought me joy or pleasure.

So when I used to say self-care, it would be like, "Okay, you had a long day, you taught, did a lot. You deserve self-care." What did that mean? I would go home, I would bake brownies, or I would bake chocolate ... I love to bake, by the way. I love food.
Edie:
Me too.
Shamari:
Which I say in the book.
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
"I love food."
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
I would bake, which was fine, and I would eat everything that was there.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
To the point where I got sick.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I told myself, "This is taking care of yourself though, because it brings you joy, and it brings you great feelings until it doesn't."
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
That's the over indulgence. It was my therapist, wow, four years ago, who was asking me about my self-care. I was so excited to say, "Cookies and brownies!" She was like, "Those are great, and I love that you love baking. But over indulgence is not caring for the self." I was like, "But it is. It makes me happy." She was like, "But is it making you well?"

We talked about self-care as being something that contributes to your wellness. The thing that I was doing, in my example, actually wasn't healthy and it wasn't leading to me being physically well, because I was making myself sick. I was just saying to myself that's what self-care was. That is how I learned about it. When I heard people talk about self-care, it was that over indulgence.

Now, what I understand, for me, and I say this across the book, self-care really is about caring for the self.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
I talk about that in three different ways. Caring for yourself physically, so your body. Nutrition, sleep, exercise, stretching, breathing, relaxation, massages. Things that your body actually needs to be well.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
Emotional self-care for me, which is a range of things you can do to make sure that you are well emotionally. It's beyond therapy.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
Yes, therapy is great but there are different kinds of therapy. Different forms of therapy, which are not always traditional. It's talking about what it means to take breathing breaks, which you're not only breathing, but you are processing your emotions. Taking time to check in with your body, to check in with yourself, and seeing where feelings are showing up is a kind of self-care.

Then, I talk about spiritual self-care, which is not connected at all to religion, but more to joy.
Edie:
To joy.
Shamari:
To joy. Joy as a thing that fuels us. The thing that, I think, is so integral to our humanity is joy and this connectedness. It's what makes us us.

That's how I've been reframing self-care, which means that it is ... Sometimes, it's work but it's more so how, it's all about how, we are taking care of ourselves. What are the things that we are doing, and checking in and saying, "Are these contributing to my wellness or not?" I'm not saying all things have to. I still love cookies. I still love brownies. I still bake.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
And at the same time, I'm always saying, "Am I being my healthiest self?"
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
Am I taking care of myself so that I can show up and love for myself and everyone else that I'm in relationships with, including young people who are my students?
Edie:
Yeah. I feel like some of that work, or the way I perceive it when I read your book, was the self-examination a little bit. Taking that step of self-examination.
Shamari:
That's right.
Edie:
To understand what care looks like.
Shamari:
That's right. And being honest.
Edie:
Yeah, exactly.
Shamari:
And being vulnerable.
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
And reflecting. For me, every time I revisit that checking in with self, I discover new things.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
I'm like, "Oh, here's another thing I need to be physically well, that I wasn't aware of a month ago."

But to the point you just made, it is about constantly checking in with yourself and seeing what do you need to be well?
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
And only you know that.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
People can encourage and offer examples. But it's really about when you are still, and you've checked in with yourself. And you've asked yourself in a space where you feel safe enough, vulnerable enough to be honest with yourself, "Here are the things that I actually need physically, the things I need emotionally and spiritually to be well." And to lead a life of peace, and love and joy because all humans really deserve that. Even those who teach, especially those who teach.
Edie:
Right. Yeah. I love how you framed that in the being able, with this, being able to show up with love. How have you seen that showing up with love in the classroom lead to liberation?
Shamari:
That's a great question. I love it. So much I could say.
Edie:
I know.
Shamari:
But what I will say is-
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
Here's what I will say.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
When I think about love and it's role in relationship deliberation, and how it has shown up in schools in ways that feel justice-oriented, ways that feel that they push us toward the world we all deserve, it comes back to relationships. With yourself and with young people. When love is present, I would like to believe and I've experienced, that it's from that place, that healthier place, that loving place, that we can actually have healthier relationships.

Meaning ... I talked about this a little bit today when I was talking with some other wonderful teachers in a session about the book, and this idea came up of when we get frustrated, when we get annoyed, when we become angry and that being the place from which we engage students. We end up saying and doing things that are not normal for us, but because in that moment-
Edie:
Gosh, it's-
Shamari:
We're just not well.
Edie:
No.
Shamari:
We're not okay.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
For me, love, of love of self and love of other people, means making sure that you are healthy enough and you are well enough, so that every relationship and every action flows from a healthy place and a loving place, and you can actually see people and see students in ways that are not blocked in or filtered by your frustration and by your anger, which are valid. I get it, I get tired, too.
Edie:
Yeah, right.
Shamari:
And frustrated, and annoyed. If I don't check in myself and don't take care of myself, I will begin to engage with young people from that place. And now, I'm bitter.
Edie:
Right.
Shamari:
And now, I'm jaded. Love keeps us grounded in that, keeps us hopeful, but also keeps us clear so that we can see and engage students from a place that makes sense to our hearts, and not a place of great frustration and great anger, which will happen if we don't take care of ourselves and we don't make sure we're well.
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
That's going to happen to any human.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
We become irritable, on the edge, et cetera. Which is nothing to be ashamed about, or feel bad about. It's an invitation, I think, to check in and say, "Okay, here's where I am. Something, I need something. What do I need to take care of myself to make sure that I'm not showing up in this way?"
Edie:
Yeah. You touched upon this a little bit in the beginning of the conversation, but how are teachers doing? How are teachers showing up?
Shamari:
Sure.
Edie:
What are you seeing?
Shamari:
Sure.
Edie:
Oh, yeah.
Shamari:
There's so much.
Edie:
I know.
Shamari:
You know what I think? There's a pattern, it's an unfortunate pattern. But a lot of the educators in my life who I know and who I have known for years, and I trust would be honest and vulnerable with me, have shared that they are tired. These are people who love the work.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
And feel called to the work. And want to do the work in ways that are loving, and that are effective, and contribute and move us closer to this world to be, but they're worn out and they're exhausted. That is what I'm hearing.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
In terms of what they need, I think it's space to figure out what they need. I think it is an invitation to say, "Let's pause for just a moment and ask yourselves what do you need?" To be well and to be rested.

But unfortunately, I don't know how often they get invited to check in with themselves. Often, they're invited to take on more work and to do more. They're being hurried and they're being rushed. "Do more faster. Move through that lesson plan faster. Get them ready for the test faster." But we are in a moment right now of various crises, and as humans we're effected. It's heavy. We carry it in the body and it can show up.

I think what they would need is space. It's space to reflect on what they need physically, emotionally and spiritually, as I said earlier. So that's what I'm hearing a lot of teachers in my life complain about, the lack of empathy they're getting from people outside the profession.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
People who don't understand what the work is that we do and who are saying, "Do more, do faster." That's so misguided and misinformed.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
We need the same breaks and the same moments of pause that everyone gets. Or, everyone else is encouraged to do. We should not feel bad or that we are neglecting our students because we need a moment to breathe.
Edie:
Yes. Yeah, you wish that for teachers don't you, in your book?
Shamari:
Yeah.
Edie:
Your book is such an invitation to engage in that.
Shamari:
Yeah, just to pause.
Edie:
Yeah, just to pause. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I love that. I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey in education.
Shamari:
Oh!
Edie:
Just a little bit.
Shamari:
Yeah, where do I start?
Edie:
Yeah. Start at the beginning.
Shamari:
I will. The beginning, I was not supposed to be a teacher. That was not the dream that people had for my life. Everyone wanted something else from me. I went with that. I was going to be a doctor. I was going to be this heart surgeon, because I always wanted to help people. I thought, I was told, that was the way to help. That was the way to spread kindness, and to spread love, and to care for folks is to work in medicine.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I got this great scholarship in this pre-med program. I was then supposed to go into med school and I hated it. It was awful. I loved the idea that I would be able to help people and impact people's lives, but the day-to-day-
Edie:
And that's a lot of schooling to hate.
Shamari:
It's just a lot. I was like, "Am I going to do this, really? Is this really going to be my story? I don't even like the sight of blood." In lab, we had to do anything with the dissections, I would run out. I failed my labs because I wouldn't go. Not because I couldn't. I was just like, "I don't want to touch any of that and there's blood involved."

I switched then to business, public relations. I was finding myself, trying to figure out how do I love on people in ways that make sense?
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I ended up in public relations. I remember being in class, and someone came, and was talking about some Disney World program. "Internship at Disney World, this number one PR place, public relations place. Come to Disney World and do an internship." I was like, "Sure. What do I have to lose?"
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
So I go to Disney World and I'm in class, learning about something about Disney, and Mickey Mouse comes in. Dressed up, being goofy, being silly. It was so much fun.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I got home and it was like, "But I had class today. Class was fun, and class was incredible. I feel really good. I want to be able to create that feeling for young people." I actually want young people to think about schools in that way. Where if it's Tuesday night and you have my class on Wednesday, you cannot sleep because you're so excited.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
Remember the old commercial when the kid was like, "I can't sleep because it's Disney World." I wanted that for schools.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
That pushed me.
Edie:
I love that.
Shamari:
I was like, "I want to be a teacher."
Edie:
Yeah, I love that.
Shamari:
I was like, "I'm not going to be a doctor, I am not going to be a PR professional." I could. "I'm not going to do advertising." I did that for a day. I did music too, and art. "I'm not going to do any of those things. I want to be a teacher." Because not only do I want to create these fun generative spaces, it's a space which I can do all those things. I can think about music, and art, and culture, and language. I can dance, and I can sing, and I can teach. I could do everything that I've ever wanted to do and I can love on young people.

Then, that moved me into education. Then the question was what are you going to teach? I had no idea.
Edie:
Oh my gosh. Did you grow up multilingual?
Shamari:
No.
Edie:
Okay.
Shamari:
Once I decided what I was going to teach, I then went and learned Spanish.
Edie:
Oh, you did? Okay. Yeah.
Shamari:
I was like, "Spanish." I then moved to South America.
Edie:
You did? Ah.
Shamari:
I lived in Argentina.
Edie:
Okay. I was wondering where that came in.
Shamari:
You're like, "Where did you get that?"
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
Yeah, I moved to South America, to Argentina, in a very small town. Not the capital, because I knew if I went there, I would speak English.

Edie:

Yeah, right.
Shamari:
So I went to a small town and I just immersed myself, and just tried learning Spanish just like that. It was really hard. I spent a lot of days frustrated because I couldn't communicate. It really, I think, also helped me become empathetic and to practice empathy, deep empathy, for people who end up in spaces where everything they know no longer serves them. They're being forced to be and show up in a way that doesn't make sense. That's how I learned it.

I lived in Argentina for a little while. Then, I lived in Uruguay, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Spain. That was my journey of trying to learn Spanish the best way I could.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
As many dialects as I could.
Edie:
Dialects, yeah. Yeah.
Shamari:
Sure. And it worked. But I became fluent and began using the language then, to think about how to address issues. The first thing I did was worked with folks around citizenship. I was like, "I want to use this language more than just in the classroom. I want to change the world again." Just came back to why I wanted to be a doctor. I do want to actually save lives in a way.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
I actually want the world to be better off.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
Yeah, that was the journey to and through education. Then, I became frustrated as a teacher because I kept being told I couldn't do this, and I couldn't do that. I had all these wonderful, innovative ideas. I was like, "But what if we did this and took a field trip here?" I would always here from administration, "No, that's not what the research says. No, that's not what the people who study this say. No, we don't have any theories about that."

Then, I remember asking the principle, "Well, who is doing the research? Who are these scholars and theories?" They're like, "Oh, academics." I was like, "I want to be one of those." People was like, "What is he talking about?"

Then, I left the classroom to go back to school, to get the credentials so that I could then write stuff. And say, "Here's a theory."
Edie:
Yes.
Shamari:
We can do the fun thing, we can talk about love. We can talk about emotion in a school space.
Edie:
Yeah.
Shamari:
And we should be talking about that, because it's a part of what it means to be humans, and everyone in the school is human. Kids, staff, faculty, et cetera. We are all human. We cannot leave our humanity outside these school walls.

Edie:

So great to share this space with you. Thank you, Shamari.

Shamari:

Thank you.

Edie:

Thanks for tuning in today. For a full transcript and to learn more, please visit blog.heinemann.com.

Shamari Reid (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at NYU. He has taught Spanish, English as a new language, and ELA at the elementary, secondary, and post secondary levels in Oklahoma, New York, Uruguay, and Spain. As a scholar-educator, Shamari's work centers love as a moral imperative in social justice education, and as a path toward culturally sustaining school communities.

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Simran Jeet Singh is executive director for the Aspen Institute's Religion and Society Program and author of "The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life." Singh shares his Brief But Spectacular take on how by focusing on the positive aspects of our multi-religious, racial and ethnic world, society can disrupt bias and build empathy.

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I used to be addicted to my anger.

In the right situation, I could become enraged at almost anything: our horrible cable company; the supermarket butcher when I unwrapped the pork chops and they stank of rotten meat slime; the post office worker across town who engages customers in long conversations and ignores the growing line of people slithering out the door; our insurance company for keeping me on hold for two hours to approve an MRI for which I contractually do not need approval; the rude front of house person who put me and my wife at a makeshift table by the bathroom door rather than have people older than twenty-five sitting in the empty dining room; the neanderthals teeing off behind us, who don't love it when one of us helpless ladies drives 250 yards to the green; my mother, for spending the grocery money we give her on thirty-one tubes of lipstick, despite the fact that she never goes out.

Hell hath no fury.

Years ago, in my heavy drinking, food-writer days - by heavy I mean a stiff pre-dinner cocktail (Manhattan, or Gibson) and a shared bottle of wine or two, which, for some, isn't heavy at all, but I've stopped comparing - our Saturday nights would start out blissfully. Standing in the kitchen, cooking. My wife, who excels at precision, would be in charge of chopping the perfect mirepoix. I'm good at the sear-braise-sauce-reduce stuff. Music would be on: Coleman Hawkins, or Billie Holiday, or Shawn Colvin. Everything would be lovely, until, at glass of wine number three, I'd slip down the proverbial slope. Susan says she could actually feel it happening; the winds would shift. The pitch of my voice would drop. We would be talking about the garden, or an impending vacation, or a hike that we wanted to do. Suddenly, I could feel my tumbleweed of rage rolling along, picking up frayed bits of history and anger and ancient resentment: Susan's ex-girlfriend from 1993, whom we'd supported for years early on in our relationship because she had not yet identified her as a grifter, despite all evidence to the contrary. Susan's inability to stand up for herself. Susan's potentially fatal allergy to the telephone. My having given up my apartment in Manhattan when maybe, just maybe, I shouldn't have.

Minutes later, we'd both be in tears. Susan would fly out the door and disappear into the night, without her cell phone. I would sit on the front steps and wait for her to return, which she would. I would apologize to her, and I would mean it.

It has not happened in a very long while; I have spent many hours trying to understand and unravel it, and am much more cognizant of what used to happen to me after the third glass of wine, when my dopamine fuse lit up like a Christmas tree. It frightened me, because I remembered the nights when my parents would be at each other - my father drinking his Dewars, and my mother, her Soave - and I'd watch as my mother's eyes changed mid-argument, and there was no pulling her back. Or when my father's uncontrollable furies resulted in his being incomprehensible and unstoppable, before being exhausted and spent. Or when a beloved cousin of mine screamed at the front desk clerk at our hotel in Paris, because our rooms weren't adjoining; she pounded on the desk, and her anger funneled up the center of the hotel's marble rotunda, and one by one, guests began peering out of their rooms and down into the belly of the space at this apoplectic person overcome with a rage so hot and pure that it was tactile and, in its form, perfect.

This is why is so addictive: it's why we can't look away. It is less the storyline than the pathological rage itself that locks Carmy in the walk-in freezer and pits him in a ferocious battle against Richie that gets to the place where one spits at the other in the throes of an indecipherable, dopamine-drenched verbal carpet bombing.

The thing that all of us - my parents, my cousin, me - experienced was our dopamine receptors lighting up like a pinball machine. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward, and while rage is hardly pleasurable, our brains not only don't know it; they don't care. They just want more. That feel-good rush is addictive, which is why it is almost impossible to stop, because humans are biologically hard-wired for it. Just ask any addict, be their drug of choice porn, or booze, or lying, or Facebook, or sugar, or shopping, or pills. It's rarely the act-of that does it; that's beside the point. It's the run-up, the plan, the sense of reward, the power on its way to fulfillment. This is why is so addictive: it's why we can't look away. It is less the storyline than the pathological rage that locks Carmy in the walk-in freezer and pits him in a ferocious battle against Richie that gets to the place where one spits at the other in the throes of an indecipherable, dopamine-drenched verbal carpet bombing.
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But what would happen if the biological power of addictive rage could be harnessed, captured, and used to divide, to incite violence and hatred, to reinforce disinformation (like, for example, racist tropes and conspiracy theories)? In the heat of rage's hot foreplay, it becomes impossible to put down one's sword, as the Buddhists say. It becomes impossible to care about reason or nuance or so-called civility because: foreplay is foreplay, and it is meant to accomplish exactly one thing. As any teenager who has made a mistake in the backseat of his parents' Hyundai will tell you, once on your way, it's very hard to stop.

But what would happen if the biological power of addictive rage could be harnessed, captured, and used to divide, to incite violence and hatred, to reinforce disinformation (like, for example, racist tropes and conspiracy theories)?

Much has been written about the addictive nature of anger and rage, and the neurobiological response to it; none of this is new information. And there are times when anger and rage are absolutely justified and necessary to achieve world-changing goals. When Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell A. Blair, Jr., and David Richmond sat down at a Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth's lunch counter in 1960, they were enraged; they had had more than enough. When patrons of the Stonewall Inn turned on a police raid, they had had enough. When thousands took to the streets to angrily protest the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, they were saying: we have had enough. Enough. Enough.

What makes these acts of rage so different from addictive rage is that they're fueled by grief, but also possibility and hope. This is the engine that powers them: the promise of change in the name of humanity and the lives of their children and their children's children and my children and your children, of evolution from dark to light, and death to life. Addictive rage in whatever form it comes and whatever it results in - indiscriminate bombing of innocents; the use of rape as a tool to terrorize; poisoning the planet; hate-filled calls for ethnic cleansing lightly cloaked as just cause; the perpetuation of myth and historical trope as a way to justify a particular stance for those too young to know or even care; fighting over the origin of a food rather than feeding it to each other - is not fueled by hope; it is fueled by an empty, uncontrolled fury that is sticky as a mouse trap, and pathologically compulsive. It has nowhere to go and nowhere to settle, like the silver flecks in a shaken snow globe. It is rage for the sake of rage; it is the dopamine hit of the addict who has just tasted their first vodka. Addiction is the disease of more, so one will never be enough, and if vodka isn't available, they will have to be fulfilled in another way. Because addictive rage, be it over the dining room table on a lovely Saturday night in New England, or on a geopolitical stage whose actors are willingly manipulated by social media, has no discernible goals; it has no end.

It will just keep running and running, and searching for more, always looking for the next hit.

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Canadian Short Stories - curated list, available online

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Canadian Short Stories - curated list, available online

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Kevin Hardcastle is an author from Ontario. His debut short story collection, Debris, won the Trillium Book Award in 2016 and his first novel, In the Cage, came out in 2017. He posted a roundup of short stories to read online on his personal website. This is an updated and adapted version of that original list. The 2022 CBC Short Story Prize is open, so get inspired by reading a great Canadian short story. You can also read a story by Hardcastle, Montana Border, that was published by The Walrus.
Why Kevin curated this list

"The past few months have been filled with uncertainty and unforeseen challenges for almost everybody, including those who write, publish and sell literature across the country. Books that were to launch this spring and summer have had to be released into the world without in-person readings and tour appearances. Festivals have had their authors and panellists recreate the experience online, as best they can, and as long as they have enough Internet to make it happen. Publishing houses are trying to find ways to draw attention to new books and voices and some authors have been left to do what they can to promote their work, while at the mercy of an industry scrambling to adapt.

"Nonetheless, people are sharing their own work and the work of writers that they admire. Those who love books have been doing what they can to keep people connected. The Writers' Trust has run online panels and created a fund for writers in need. The FOLD broadcast their festival online and continue on with their webinar series, giving crucial voices a platform. Renowned writers like David Robertson, Heather O'Neill, Vivek Shraya and Waubgeshig Rice have been reading prose and poetry or talking to their readers live on social media. Independent booksellers are delivering books or leaving them curbside so that we can stay home and get lost in those stories for a time.

The writing community I found, and some of the best new writing I read in past years, came as a result of writing, reading, and sharing short fiction. - Kevin Hardcastle

"But literature might still be hard to come by for readers who are unable to afford new books or who are in rural areas without access to booksellers, reliable Internet and, of course, their public libraries.

"Luckily, there is a treasure trove of short fiction that has been published in journals over the years, and much of it actually published or archived online. The writing community I found, and some of the best new writing I read in past years, came as a result of writing, reading, and sharing short fiction. So I thought that curating a list of short stories by Canadian, Indigenous and Métis authors would be a fine way to read some literature and to lend support. Many of those on the list have books out recently, or right now, and perhaps this is a way to lead readers further to those.

"Here are some stories by writers you may or may not know, along with stories that have been discovered through the CBC Short Story Prize."

Samuel Archibald is a Montreal-based short story writer. His debut collection of short stories entitled which is also the name of Archibald's hometown in Quebec - was nominated for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a finalist in Combat des Livres 2013, defended by Bernard Landry. The book was translated from French to English by Donald Winkler.

Three Tshakapesh Dreams was published by The Walrus.

André Babyn is a writer and editor from Toronto. His short stories have ben published in Maisonneuve, the Fanzine, Hobart and Grain. His novel Evie of the Deepthorn was published in spring 2020.

Imperfect Homes was published by Hobart Pulp.

War of Attrition was published by Joyland.

Sharon Bala was born in Dubai and currently lives in St. John's. Butter Tea at Starbucks won the Writers' Trust / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize in 2017.Her debut novel, The Boat People, was defended by Mozhdah Jamalzadahon Canada Reads 2018.

Butter Tea at Starbucks was published by The New Quarterly.

Kris Bertin is a writer from Halifax. He won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for his debut short story collection Bad Things Happen. He is also the author of the short story collection Use Your Imagination! and the graphic novel The Case of The Missing Men, which was illustrated by Alexander Forbes.

was published by The Walrus.

Shashi Bhat is a writer, the editor of Event Magazine and a creative writing instructor at Douglas College in B.C. She won the 2018 Journey Prize for the story Mute. She is the author of the novel The Family Took Shape. She is working on a novel called The Most Precious Substance on Earth and a book of short stories.

The Most Precious Substance on Earth was published by The New Quarterly.

Becky Blake is a writer and teacher from Toronto. She won the 2013 CBC Short Story Prize and the 2017 CBC Nonfiction Prize. She is also the author of the YA novel Proof I Was Here.

Kerry Clare is a writer in Toronto. She blogs at Pickle Me This and is the editor of the website 49th Shelf. Mitzi Bytes is her debut novel. Her second novel, Wait for a Star to Fall, will be published in fall 2020.

Happy Trails was published by The New Quarterly.

Megan Gail Coles is a playwright from St. John's. She is the author of short story collection Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome and the novel Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club. Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club will be defended on Canada Reads 2020 by YouTuber Alayna Fender.

Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club was published by Joyland.

Paige Cooper is an author and short story writer from Montreal. Her work has appeared in The Journey Prize Stories and Best Canadian Stories anthologies. Her first published book, the short story collection was on the longlist for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.

was published by Gulf Coast.

Trevor Corkum is a writer and teacher who lives in Toronto and Prince Edward Island. He has been nominated for the Journey Prize, a National Magazine Award, a Western Magazine Award, the CBC Short Story Prize and the CBC Nonfiction Prize. He was on the 2019 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Saving Face. His debut novel, The Electric Boy, is forthcoming.

was published by Joyland.

Nancy Jo Cullen is a fiction writer and poet living in Toronto. She is the author of the novel The Western Alienation Merit Badge, the short story collection Canary and three poetry collections: Science Fiction Saint, untitled child and Pearl.

Hashtag Maggie Vandermeer was published by This Magazine.

Brenda Damen is a writer from Calgary. Her short story won the 2020 CBC Short Story Prize. It was the first writing competition Damen ever entered and is her first published work.

Craig Davidson is a writer originally from St. Catharines, Ont. He has published several works of fiction, including Cataract City, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2013, Rust and Bone, which was made into an Oscar-nominated feature film of the same name, The Fighter and The Saturday Night Ghost Club. He is also the author of the memoir Precious Cargo, which was defended by Greg Johnson on Canada Reads 2018. He also writes horror novels under the name Nick Cutter.

was published by The Walrus.

Cherie Dimaline is a Métis author and editor currently living in Vancouver. Her books include , The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy, Empire of Wild and The Marrow Thieves. The Marrow Thieves won the Governor General's Literary Award for Young people's literature - text and the Kirkus Prize for young readers' literature. It is currently being adapted for television. The Marrow Thieves was defended by Jully Black on Canada Reads 2018.

Tamas Dobozy is a writer and professor at Wilfrid Laurier University. His short story collection won the Rogers' Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. The collection was also a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.

was published by The New Quarterly.

Erin Frances Fisher is a writer and musician based in Victoria. She published her debut short story collection, That Tiny Life, in 2018 and was a finalist for the Ethel Wilson fiction Prize and Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Her work has been published in publications like Granta, Little Fiction, The Malahat Review and PRISM international.

The Goddess Lisa was published by Little Fiction.

Andrew Forbes's first short story collection What You Need was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and Trillium Book Award. His stories have been published widely, appearing in publications like The Feathertale Review, Little Fiction, PRISM International, New Quarterly and Maisonneuve Magazine. He is based in Peterborough, Ont.

What You Need was published by Little Fiction.

Kathy Friedman's work has been published in many literary magazines, including The New Quarterly, PRISM International, Geist and Room. She was a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Friedman teaches creative writing at the University of Guelph.

was published by The New Quarterly.

Bill Gaston is a novelist, playwright and short story writer. He won the CBC Short Story Prize in 1998 and his previous two short story collections - Gargoyles and Juliet Was a Surprise - were finalists for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. His other books include A Mariner's Guide to Self Sabotage, Just Let Me Look at You and The Good Body.

was published by The New Quarterly.

Seyward's debut collection of stories is Even That Wildest Hope, published in 2019. Her stories have been nominated for the McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, a National Magazine Award and the CBC Short Story Prize longlist. She lives in Winnipeg.

What Bothers a Woman of the World was published by Cosmonauts Avenue.

Jane Eaton Hamilton is an award-winning writer whose work spans fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Their books include love will burst into a thousand shapes, Hunger and July Nights. They have twice won the CBC Short Story Prize and their work has been included in the Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Stories.

Khalida Venus Hassan is a short story writer and literary assistant based in Toronto. In 2018, she was a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She is working on her first collection of short stories.

was published by The Puritan.

Alix Hawley is a writer from B.C. She won the 2017 CBC Short Story Prize for her story She was also the winner of the 2015 Amazon.ca First Novel Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for her debut novel, All True Not a Lie in It, a book that fictionalized the life of Pennsylvania Quaker Daniel Boone. Her 2018 novel My Name is a Knife continues the story of Daniel Boone.

Andrew Hood has published two short story collections, The Cloaca and Pardon Our Monsters, the latter of which won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award in 2007. His work has appeared in publications like Maisonneuve, PRISM International and The New Quarterly. Hood lives in Guelph, Ont.

Don't Come In Here was published by The Coast.

David Huebert won the CBC Short Story Prize in 2016 and went on to publish a full collection of short fiction, titled Peninsula Sinking. The book won the Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award and was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize and Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Huebert is from Halifax.

Amy Jones debut novel, We're All in this Together, was a national bestseller and finalist for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Her most recent book is the novel Every Little Piece of Me. She currently lives in Toronto.

The Very First Girl in the World to Win the Dakar was published by The Puritan.

Daniel Sarah Karasik has published drama, poetry and fiction. Their books include Faithful and Other Stories, Hungry and Little Death. They live in Toronto. They won the 2012 CBC Short Story Prize.

Mine won the 2012 CBC Short Story Prize.

Cody Klippenstein is an award-winning short story writer. Her work has won the Zoetrope: All-Story short fiction contest and The Fiddlehead Short Fiction contest. She splits her time between Canada and the U.S.

Thrown Overboard, Manacled in a Box was published by Joyland.

Michael LaPointe is a writer and critic based in Toronto. His work has been published in The Atlantic, The New Yorker and the New York Times. He is also a columnist for The Paris Review. His debut novel, The Creep, will be published in 2021.

was published by Hazlitt.

Amanda Leduc is the author of The Miracles of Ordinary Men and Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space. She lives in Hamilton, Ont.

River House was published by The New Quarterly.

Canisia Lubrin is a poet and author based in Whitby, Ont. She has published two collections, her debut Voodoo Hypothesis, which received multiple award nominations, and her latest, The Dzygraphxst, published in March 2020.

The Origin of the Lullaby was published by Joyland.

Born in Inverness, Cape Breton and raised in Windsor, Ont., Alexander MacLeod is a short story writer and academic. His debut short story collection Light Lifting was shortlisted for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Commonwealth Prize. It won the Atlantic Book Award.

was published by Granta.

Pasha Malla was born in St. John's, grew up in London, Ont. and now lives in Toronto. Malla's debut short story collection, The Withdrawal Method, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and his first novel, People Park, was a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.

One Hundred Knives in the Air was published by The Walrus.

J.R. McConvey is a writer and documentary producer from Toronto. His work has appeared in publications like The Malahat Review, Joyland and others. His debut short story collection was Different Beasts, publihsed in September 2019.

Neutral Buoyancy was published by Joyland.

Sophie McCreesh is a fiction writer based in Toronto. Her work has been appeared in Peach Mag, Bad Dog Review, Hobart Pulp and other publications.

Hard to Know was published by Hobart Pulp.

Sarah Meehan Sirk is a radio producer and writer. Her first book was the short story collection, The Dead Husband Project. She lives in Toronto.

was published by Joyland.

Michael Melgaard is a short story writer from Toronto. He published his first collection of short fiction, Pallbearing, in 2020. His work has appeared in Joyland, Bad Nudes, The Puritan and other publications.

was published by Joyland.

John Metcalf is the author of over a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction. His books include Standing Stones: Selected Stories, Adult Entertainment and Kicking Against the Pricks. Now a fiction editor at Biblioasis, Metcalf lives in Ottawa.

Lives of the Poets was published by The New Quarterly.

Leah Mol has an MFA in creative writing from UBC. She works as a proofreader, writer and piano teacher. She currently lives in Toronto.

Lipstick Day won the 2019 CBC Short Story Prize.

Pamela Mordecai is a poet and fiction writer who lives in Kitchener, Ont. Her books include the poetry collection Journey Poem, short story collection Pink Icing and novel which was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in 2015.

was published by The New Quarterly.

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Here are 70 Canadian short stories available free online | CBC Books

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Kevin Hardcastle is an author from Ontario. His debut short story collection, Debris , won the Trillium Book Award in 2016 and his first novel, In the Cage , came out in 2017. He posted a roundup of short stories to read online on his personal website.

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Opinion | Empty Classrooms, Abandoned Kids: Inside America’s Great Teacher Resignation (Published 2022)

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It’s never been harder to oversee America’s classrooms, and it’s driving educators out en masse.

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For nearly 23 years from 1985 until 2007, Rick Reilly's writing graced the pages of Sports Illustrated, anchored by the back-page column "Life of Reilly" that largely defined his career at the magazine. In seven of the 10 years he wrote the column he was named National Sportswriter of the Year. In honor of Reilly's return to the pages of SI since his last column on Dec. 3, 2007, here is a collection of 10 of the most memorable articles from his SI career.

Reilly shares his adventure on a F-14D Tomcat fighter jet.

The tale of high school referee Kenny Wilcoxen.

The story of the 1923 bout between Bill Brennan and a dying Billy Miske, who hoped to stay on his feet long enough to bring home a $2,400 purse.

Inside the dark world of hazing and harassment of and by athletes at The Citadel, a military college in South Carolina.

Nick Faldo won a third green jacket but only after Greg Norman suffered the worst collapse in major tournament history.

The greatest sports dynasty of the '90s may (or may not) be about to hang it up, but behind the scenes the Chicago Bulls' season has certainly felt like a farewell tour.

Reilly asks his Sports Illustrated readers to send $10 each to hang malaria nets over kids in Africa.

After winning the 1991 British Open, Ian Baker-Finch lost his game and, in a desperate effort to find it, nearly lost his mind.

Reilly writes about the football team at the California School for the Deaf at Riverside.

The story of Korinne Shroyer, who's tragic suicide gave life to others in need.
To read more of Rick Reilly's articles, click here.

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Rick Reilly's 10 most memorable SI articles

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A collection of the 10 most memorable articles from Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly.

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https://www.southernliving.com/culture/celebrities/rick-bragg/rick-bragg-tomato-sandwich

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Rick Bragg Sets The Record Straight On What Makes The Best Tomato Sandwich

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Some people just don’t know what’s good.

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Today's blog post is in the form of a graphic essay. What the heck is that?

Not to brag, but my third grader could tell you. He recently stayed in from recess (his choice!) to work on his personal graphic narrative. In this case, graphic doesn't mean gruesome or explicit. (Although I'm certain there was farting in my son's story.) Graphic means pictures are involved. For Kam, this meant telling a story as a comic. It's a real thing. I'm telling it true!

The great University of Wisconsin Madison defines it like this.

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Switch It Up: A Graphic Essay - WordNerdopolis

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Today's blog post is in the form of a graphic essay. What the heck is that? Not to brag, but my third grader could tell you. He recently stayed in from recess (his choice!) to work on his personal graphic narrative . In this case, graphic doesn't mean gruesome or explicit.

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one line from Vonnegut leads to a powerful essay

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one line from Vonnegut leads to a powerful essay

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One of the most haunting lines of American literature is from Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse Five.
"Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time."
Billy Pilgrim, traumatized by his time in WWII as a young GI, finds himself traveling through the timeline of his life in a nonlinear fashion. Sometimes he is middle aged optometrist, sometimes he is a teen-aged soldier, sometimes he lives in a glass zoo with a porn star on an alien planet. Sometimes it is the moment of his death, but none of these things happen in order. They are smooshed together and present themselves as an amalgamation of bits and pieces and chunks, like a meatloaf that hasn't been thoroughly mixed before baking.

My mother, my vibrant, witty, and commanding mother, has dementia.
Iris Jennings has come unstuck in time.
She has been ill for some time. When she could no longer live in her own home, my husband, sons, and I cared for her at our house for several years. Every night she joined us for supper, and often hilarity ensued. My adolescent sons would talk of supporting and hobbits, my mother would recite lines of poetry, or complain about the president, and my husband and I would just try to feed everyone and get the kitchen cleaned up.

But, sometimes she would eat with her hands, chew with her mouth open, or discuss things at dinner that were not appropriate and made us all uncomfortable. (She knew way too much about the president's sex life as was reported in CNN, for example, and she could be graphic in her details.)

And, sometimes her body would fail her, and there were unspeakable messes for me to clean, or she would fall getting up from the table and it would take two of us to get her back on her feet. Sometimes she was confused about what she should do after dinner. ("Go back to her room and watch tv, like she did every night," was the answer we always gave.) After dinner, one son would clear the table with my husband, and one was dispatched to see that she and her walker got back to her room.

And, she smoked.

She started smoking when she was 16 years old... when students and teachers would gather by the furnace room in schools to puff away in happy delirium. It was ok. The advertisements said so. Doctors recommended Camels because they were less irritating and aided in digestion.

And by the 1970s, cigarettes helped you keep your weight down! Virginia Slims sponsored women's tennis. Anyone looking for women's empowerment knew that "You've come a long way, Baby!"

And indeed, Iris had come a long way. She started out as a depression era baby in a shotgun house (with no actual roads connecting to it) in one of the poorest areas of Appalachia, and she managed to become a tenured Assistant Professor of English at a land-grant R1 University. She was even the first woman in the state of West Virginia to serve on a jury.

When she taught in college, she and her friends would have a cigarette in the work room between classes. The work room was always stocked with ashtrays, and she and her other professor buddies would leave beautiful lipstick prints on the end of each butt. There were even large ashtray urns in the hallways so that students could smoke between classes. Some professors even smoked while they taught.

So, when she moved into my house, she had a hard time understanding our objections to her habit.

Even though we all had asthma.

And, even though none of us smoked.

And, even though I had chronic breathing problems as a child that necessitated midnight drives to the ER and shots of penicillin for pneumonia, she continued to do so. (Must have been the coal smoke/the weather/ the croup tent in the hospital/my poor constitution, etc. that caused those lung problems.)

We fixed up her room so that there were seals around the door to keep the smoke in.

And we used exhaust fans.

And we bought a large air purifier.

But we could still smell it.
Iris Jennings has come unstuck in time.
She still thought it was ok to smoke. Sometimes she would drop a (lit!) match on the floor and would yell for us to come and retrieve it. One time she calmly opened the door and said to my son "I have caught myself on fire," and everyone went running. I found Iris in the living room calmly waiting, while my husband and children turned the motorized lift chair over and tried to find a lit cigarette. It took an hour before she was allowed to return to her chair. She never really understood what the fuss was about.

She had, after all, come unstuck in time.

Some days I would take in her lunch, and she would thank me and ask me what I had done at work that day. Other days, she would ask me what I had learned in school that day. Some days she would worry that no one had fed her father (he died when I was three years old). Other days she would tell me that she was going to drive home tomorrow. (At the time, she could barely walk.) She often asked about her older sister, and wondered if she had checked in on their father. (That may have been a possibility as her sister had been dead for several years, too.)

Sometimes, she would give my husband a couple of dollars and tell him to walk across the street and buy her a couple of hot dogs at the little hot dog joint. (He would have been happy to do so, except we live in the woods, and there is no "hot dog joint" for several miles.)
Listen: Iris Jennings has come unstuck in time.
There is no doubt about it. My mother could dazzle a room full of students with her discussions of American literature, or the best uses of a comma back in the day.

A friend's mother once told me that she had her for English in the 1960s, and that Professor Jennings matter-of-factly my pointed out Walt Whitman's bisexuality, even though most students weren't quite sure what the word "bisexual" meant and had to look it up.

She was an authority on Early American Literature, and Henry James, and Mary Chestnut, and Edgar Allan Poe and the Transcendentalists.

She read like a fiend. She usually had between 3-5 books going at once.

One was always something academic and difficult, and she would force herself through a chapter or two every night. (Think history books about WWI, or books about Faulkner's Civil War.)

One was always something comfortable that she had read before and loved. (Think Patrick Dennis, Evelyn Waugh, and Kurt Vonnegut.)

One was always something fluffy and fun (mysteries, thrillers, even the well-written romance.)

If school was in session and she was teaching American Lit, she could be found plowing through something by Twain, Melville, or Emerson. Or wandering around the house quoting Emily Dickinson.

After the dementia set in, she would be found wandering around quoting some line from a book or a poem and demand that we figure out who said, "A rag, a bone, a Hank of hair," or " Good fences make good neighbors," or " Summer Afternoon: to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English Language."

Thank God for the internet.
I am telling you:
Iris Jennings has come unstuck in time.

She continued to live in the little shotgun house in the woods where she was born, until she had to come to my house for good.

For 80 years she slept in the room in which she was quite literally born and in which her mother died. She painted her house schoolhouse red, and when the family barn was near collapse, she gathered the wormy chestnut barn wood and created rustic garage with red doors. She settled down on her 11.5 acres in her little red house surrounded by catalpa (cigar) trees, giant hydrangea bushes, and blackberry vines, and settled down for the long haul. She moved my father in, bore me, and proclaimed her life to be a tribute to Henry David Thoreau. She even modeled her little haven after Walden Pond. (Except she had a little swimming pool from Montgomery Wards instead of a pond.)

She and my father gave big parties, with fires, and weenie roasts, and once a suckling pig over a spit. (We only did that once because the little kids, myself included, were horrified by the little pig with the apple in its mouth.)

My parents were a little too old to be hippies, but their friends ranged from university intellectuals to the blue-collar coal miners and farmers with whom they had been raised. These eclectic groups would sit and stare at the fire and talk about books and politics, and the ways of the world. If my Republican relatives were coming, Iris would stock up on Billy Beer just to torment them.

As a family we raised a couple of pigs, a neurotic goat, dozens of barn cats, a few half-feral dogs, and a passel of guinea fowl that took over the rustic garage to roost in the rafters and poop on the cars. My parents never could get a garden to grow, due to the rabbits, groundhogs, deer, and occasional bear or fox that wandered through our yard.

She was the unofficial town historian, and would write histories of Preston County, the railroad, and how our little coal-mining town had been settled. She taught high school before she became a professor, which meant that she had practically everyone of a certain generation in school. (Including my own father, I might add!) If someone in our community needed help in an English class, or to write a letter or report, they ended up at our dining room table working through it with her.

Now my mother is missing teeth and hasn't put a bra on in years. She has disheveled grey hair, wears nothing but t-shirts and sweatpants, and is confined to a bed in a nursing home.

She does, however, correct the grammar of the people who work with her there, whether they like it or not. If they tell her to lay down, she barks, "Lie, not lay!" And God Forbid they ask her where something is "at." (Between the A and T on preposition street, looking for an object!)

Sometimes when I visit her, I read James Thurber short stories to her...the same ones she read to me when I was sick as a child. We laugh together. We watch old movies together that she loved, like "The African Queen" and "Pretty Women." Sometimes she likes to watch the movie "Gettysburg."

Sometimes she thinks I am her sister. She tells me that she is glad we grew up together. And sometimes she thinks her roommate is a small child named Susie who plows around the room and is helpful. But usually she knows me when I come to visit. Usually she asks about my wedding ring, and who I married, and if he is nice to me. (Even though she lived in the same house with my husband for five years, and often referred to him as " the brains of the outfit. " Thanks, mom.)

She asks me what I plan to do with my life. I point out that I am 54 and have already done a good bit. She smiles. She isn't sure where we are in the temporal universe, but she is happy to see me, nonetheless.

Iris Jennings has come unstuck in time.

She used to be a bombshell. A friend once told me that his father and his friends were fascinated by the way that her bright red lipstick was always flawless. She was busty but had a good figure. (Thanks to the Virginia Slims, I guess.) One of those former students once told me that when she was in her early 20s and teaching High School, they were all secretly in love with her. (Remember, that is where she first met my dad. )

She wore beautiful Pendleton suits to work with heels and hose. She got her hair "done" once a week in a beauty parlor. Every summer before school started, she would take me to her sister's house near Allentown, PA, where they had huge shopping malls (this was the 1980s), and we would have a blast shopping and eating in lunch in interesting restaurants. That's where she introduced me to foods we didn't have much of in West Virginia, like baklava, gourmet coffee, French onion soup and Godiva chocolate. And, we always both came home with lovely clothes from Bamberger's Department Store, the Liz Claiborne Store, and The Limited. We had so much fun!

One of the main themes of Slaughterhouse Five is the trauma of war. Unlike Billy Pilgrim, Iris wasn't drafted and didn't watch the firebombing of Dresden. But, she did watch her 40-something mother die at home of breast cancer when she was only 12. And then a few decades later she was forced to nurse her 40-something husband through an excruciating and painful cancer. She knew something of trauma.

Another major theme of the novel is that death does not discriminate. Based on what I have seen in the nursing home, Vonnegut sure got that right.

My friends tell me that this is the long goodbye. And, it is. As much fun as we have with our movies, I sit and I watch her slip away a little more each visit. Do we have weeks? Months? Years? Who knows?

Is this essay the basis for the eulogy I will one day write?

Probably.

Each day is a little death. And not the literary type. (She would have thought that last sentence was hilarious, by the way. Look it up.)

My mother loved to travel. She, my Aunt Margaret Frances, and her nephew Pat took the train to see the World's Fair in New York City in 1964 and to Chicago and Kansas City in 1965. In 1967 she traveled to Europe on a 27-countries-in-26-days type tour. In the 1970s, she was the only person any of us knew who had taken such a grand European tour (who wasn't either very wealthy, or in the military.) She and my father would set out on vacation every year to tour historical battlefields or the tour the homes of famous literary greats. When I was 16 we borrowed my grandfather's Lincoln Continental, and drove across the country visiting relatives in Kansas City, Des Moines, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and the Grand Canyon. She and I spent two weeks in Italy one year, in Ireland another year, and she even went on a solo cruise to Greece. After my father died, she took bus trips to California, Nashville, Las Vegas, and New Orleans.

But eventually, her world was her house. And then, our spare bedroom. And now, one curtained off side of a room in a nursing home in Fairmont, WV.

Sometimes, when I come to visit, we go into the nursing home's garden. That is a big day for her.

As we age, our worlds get smaller and smaller. And, we become, like my beautiful, witty, intelligent, well-read and well-traveled mother, unstuck in time.

So it goes.

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One of the most haunting lines of American literature is from Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse Five. Billy Pilgrim, traumatized by his time in WWII as a young GI, finds himself traveling through...

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Taylor Swift fans...you'll find this fascinating.

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Taylor Swift fans...you'll find this fascinating.

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Taylor Swift Has Rocked My Psychiatric Practice

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Opinion | Amanda Gorman: In Memory of Those Still in the Water

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By writing an elegy through the words of history, I hope to unearth, or unwater, the dead from beneath a mass of waves.

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My brother died five years ago. Engraved in my mind is the moment I, the unlucky bearer of a mother’s worst nightmare, came to tell my Mum…

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The dilemma After Covid lockdowns, our primary He was slowly improving until February this year when his favourite teacher retired. He could trust her and she could control the class. After she left, he could not cope. Hysteria followed, real emotional grief. This led to emotionally based school avoidance occurring again. Home schooling is not an option. We feel so isolated with this. school-age son decided retirement is what he needs, not being at school. Initially, he returned to school happy and excited. The school ramped up the learning, saying the children were behind, and he struggled with that. There was disruption in class, which he wasn't used to, and he lost his joy of school. He refused to go in. We had three months of cajoling him to go, persuading, begging. We tried the tough approach: "Drag him in!" That backfired. We tried the parental support approach, either his dad or I sitting in the school library. That worked, but we also have jobs to go to. Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services haven't helped us much and we got a letter from the county council threatening a fine and legal action.
Philippa's answer This is not going to be a quick fix and you are not alone. Not Fine in School is a support group for families with children who find it hard or impossible to attend school. It launched in 2018 with 100 members. Post lockdown, they now have more than 30,000.

Persistent absenteeism is up 117% since the lockdowns, equating to 22.3% of all pupils in primary, secondary and special state schools. That's 1,615,772 pupils. And what seems to be happening in the UK educational system is that the individual pupil is seen as the whole problem rather than acknowledging that the school environment and unhelpful government policies around targets are a part of this, too. Parents are also blamed. And, in our educational system, there is too much of an attitude that draconian, punishing measures, such as fines for parents, are the way to go. This isn't the only way to go. One size does not fit all. Many of our schools are not fit environments for our children - they are too noisy, scary and overwhelming, while resources are too stretched to do much about it.

It sounds as if your son has had too much pressure put on him to "catch up", plus he doesn't feel safe in school. Maybe this happens when he sees a teacher lose control of the classroom. He has been put back into this situation without a gentle re-entry, without being given the time to adjust and find out how he can belong and feel secure in this situation. The children are further stressed by being told they are behind and must put in extra effort to catch up.

Professor Lucy Easthope, an expert disaster responder, told me: "My heart breaks at how wrong we may be getting this. After disasters around the world, many communities take time for children to heal. They suspend the curriculum and spend some weeks outside. The UK has taken a different approach after the pandemic and hammered catch-up and a pretence that nothing has happened. The wisest, most empathic children are simply not buying that."

Many who previously had not suffered from shyness are finding being among people again is draining

Many who previously had not suffered unduly from shyness are finding that being among people again after isolation is draining. It is as though being sociable is like a muscle that needs regular exercise. Our social muscles atrophied during the lockdowns, plus we were made to feel that we could either kill or be killed if we got too close to other people. Such a message may get deeply absorbed by children.

They needed time to rebuild their social muscle by re-establishing friendship groups and getting to know teachers again. Your son made progress when there was a teacher who made him feel safe, but that safety net went before his confidence had fully returned. And, as you have found out, no one can be scolded into being less sensitive or more confident.
If you have a question, send an email to askphilippa@observer.co.uk
Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions
Join with other parents to campaign for more flexibility in schools, more pastoral help, and a move away from the one-size-fits-all approach. And for your son, think in terms of very small steps and expect to accommodate some backwards steps at times, too.

You need to put some pressure on the school for them to recognise his need for an adult there who can relate to him well. Without a trusted safe relationship in school your son will find it difficult to reintegrate. You could also try some short one-on-one play dates to build up his tolerance of being around others.

Take your son's emotions seriously so he feels listened to and understood, but also show him you are not overwhelmed by his feelings by keeping calm. This will gradually teach him that he can, in time, contain them, too.

Recommended reading: The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why Sensitive People Struggle and How All Can Survive by W Thomas Boyce, and Square Pegs, Inclusivity, Compassion and Fitting In, edited by Ian Gilbert. There are many helpful case studies in the book, and it points out, "The trouble with square pegs is that by forcing them to fit the system's round holes, you end up damaging the peg, not the hole."

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Our son is refusing to go to school - and we feel so isolated

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The effect of Covid on our children has been huge. Your son needs to feel safe and be given time to catch up

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ne February night in a London hospital, my perception of time shrunk to the span of a moment. Around 24 hours after my wife went into labour, we were rushed into emergency surgery. Our baby had acquired an infection. As I held my wife's hand in the sterile silence of the operating theatre, it felt like nothing else in the world existed. Our recent past of slow, stable expectation faded away and the future became impossible to see with any fidelity - all that was left was now.

We were lucky; the threat receded, and after five nights of recovery and antibiotics, we stepped out of the timeless maternity ward and back into the world, carrying our daughter, Grace. Gradually, our future as a new family settled into view.

I am fortunate to have encountered such emergencies only rarely in my life - encounters with shock, fear or sudden loss - but for each, I can recall how time fell out of joint. Crisis tends to trap you in the present.

Over the past few years, I've been researching and writing a book called The Long View, about why our sense of time is malleable - how it can be foreshortened without us realising and how to lengthen our perspectives. Unlike the vast majority of other animals, we have a remarkable ability to manipulate time in our minds. Scientists call it "mental time travel": as you read these words, you can transport your perspective into the past and stitch together those memories into a tapestry of possible futures.

However, that does not mean our timeviews cannot be coloured, swayed or even diminished. Every day, we are exposed to a barrage of temporal stresses: shortsighted targets, salient distractions and near-term temptations. When these combine with the psychological habits we inherited from our ancestors, a longer perspective can recede from view.

Every day, we are exposed to a barrage of temporal stresses

One temporal stress that we now face daily is the sense that we live in a period of concatenating crises: financial crisis, pandemic crisis, climate crisis, Ukraine crisis, cost-of-living crisis - each one blending into another. People talk of a polycrisis, a cluster of related global risks and their effects, and of a permacrisis, the Collins Dictionary's 2022 word of the year, defined as "an extended period of instability and insecurity".

Is it true? Certainly it is for people personally affected by conflict, poverty or loss. But for those who live in relative comfort - myself included - it's less clear. I know that, for my part, the media I consume influences how I feel about myself and the world, whereas when my great-grandparents faced upheaval, they did not have to live in a 21st-century news environment with 24-hour feeds and daily doomscrolling.

Doomscrolling is not good for mental wellbeing and health. In one study, people asked to watch negative news bulletins were more likely to feel anxious and sad afterwards, and to catastrophise a personal worry that had nothing to do with the content. But more subtly, a daily diet of bad news could be influencing our timeviews. Immersing oneself in negative news risks the onset of doomism, a form of apathy where the future stops being plural - shrinking to a singular path or even seeming to end altogether - without us realising. A diet of continual outrage and shock can create skewed mental models of the past, present and future. People's judgments become based on what's most readily available and prominent in memory - a psychological effect called the "availability heuristic". The mind tends to paint possible futures using experiences that are most accessible.

We're also affected by whatever the loudest, most urgent distractions of the moment are, distractions in the present that come to dominate decisions. When people look ahead, the quieter information - slower changes that don't get picked up by the news - tend to be ignored. It's like what happens when you see a car crash, as the influential psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman once put it. "It is a common experience that the subjective probability of traffic accidents rises temporarily when one sees a car overturned by the side of the road." The irony is that people tend to underestimate their risk of a vehicle crash, and overestimate their risk of, say, terrorism, when it appears on the news. After 9/11, many people shunned flying to travel by car instead, which researchers estimate caused 1,200 additional deaths in the US.

A daily diet of bad news will influence our sense of time

As we navigate the time-shortening pressures of the modern world, it's worth noting that our minds did not evolve to take a long view. Our mental time machine we inherited from our ancestors changed the course of human evolution, but it came with flaws. One example is the way the mind tends to equate time with space. This is reflected in culture. Consider the pairing in the opening line of Star Wars: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

This tendency to entwine physical dimensions with temporal distance - called construal level theory - means that, in practice, people tend to place greater emotional weight on events that are visible, clearly in view, while feeling relatively indifferent to events "far" from now. The upshot is that events presented within the daily or hourly cadence of news gain disproportionate attention. Take the climate. Because many of its impacts won't be seen for years and decades, it's hard for some to register that the world is heating up until something serious happens, like weird weather, a flood or wildfire.

So, how might we cultivate a healthier timeview? We can't step out of the present altogether as doing so runs the risk of becoming detached from the injustices and suffering of today. However, it is possible to seek out the long news - of the decade or century, not just yesterday, today and tomorrow. Personally, I have tried to increase the time I spend reading books or longer-form journalism, for example, and cutting back on Twitter (I fail often, but at least I'm failing consciously).

There's also a growing body of psychological research showing techniques for achieving a longer view. One of the most promising is perspective-taking, where people are asked to step into the shoes of past or future generations to imagine their point of view. Researchers have found this is more effective than showing people data or abstract information, encouraging cross-generational empathy that can reduce psychological distance on issues such as future climate change.

For me, this begins with my daughter, Grace, imagining her path to the next century. She will be 86 years old in 2100. I find it remarkable to consider that there are tens of millions of citizens of the next century already living among us - and when I do so, my sense of time and possibility opens up a little more.

There are tens of millions of citizens of the next century already living among us

Discovering a longer view is not easy. When I look back at my own attempts over the past decade, I can see just how much my time perspective has fluctuated - and evolved. Indeed, halfway through drafting this article, I lost my sense of time entirely. In April, I was hospitalised in a mountain bike crash that left me with temporary amnesia, and no firm footing on my path from yesterday to tomorrow. My wife tells me I'd "wake up" every so often, shocked to learn about the accident, before responding with the same four words: "So, fill me in..." I was trapped in a loop, stuck in my own personal "now".

Looking back today, with my mental time machine restored, I am reminded how lucky I am to experience time in the way I do. The ability to project my mind across the long-term past and future certainly has its downsides - it allows me to worry, to fear what's to come, and even to contemplate my own mortality - but it is also a gift. It allows me to see how far our imperfect species has come, and the clarity to see the possible paths ahead - a plural future, rather than a singular one.

What I have learned is that the long view is about much more than escaping the traps of the present. Sometimes, it is a perspective that allows one to transcend the stresses of the moment. Other times, it offers guidance in periods of uncertainty. Often, it provides principles for understanding the world. But most of all, it is a way of seeing what matters most within the here and now. The long view, I believe, can make the present more meaningful. So, while it may well be true that we live in a period of crises, if we are to navigate our way through 2023 and beyond, it begins by changing the way we see time.

The Long View: Why We Need To Transform How the World Sees Time by Richard Fisher is published by Wildfire at £16.99. To buy it for £14.95, go to guardianbookshop.com

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Time-warped: how modern life shortens our perspectives

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Many of us feel the anxiety of living in a time of 'polycrisis', but taking a long view will help you cope

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Read this with "My Child is In an Impossible Place..." to see the hope of science in the fight against cancer.

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Read this with "My Child is In an Impossible Place..." to see the hope of science in the fight against cancer.

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It was a dream job: teaching ninth and twelfth graders English Literature at the first racially inclusive school in the nation's capital. I was told that 70 percent of my curriculum was predetermined by the department, but that I'd have control over 30 percent of the curriculum. I was excited to choose my texts, and to make really brave choices. Surely the school knew who they were hiring: an Asian female who went to an all-women's college, who wrote her Masters thesis in poetry as a study of Asian-American and immigrant identities. I imagined I was hired because I was bringing my unique self to the English department, a self that was in stark contrast to the almost all-white faculty.

Before I could be my brave self, I had to settle in. The first year teaching at any school is challenging. You are trying to master the curriculum, and also understand the students and faculty. You are trying to understand where you fit into all of it. I was already nervous about the fact that I was not only the only Asian person in my department but also the youngest person. Too many parents tried to slyly slip questions about my college and graduate work into conversations. I felt like I needed to prove myself, so I tried to lay low. I accepted the 70 percent of the curriculum I was given, and even let others dictate the 30 percent that was supposed to be my choice.

In English 12, which was a coveted class that typically only senior members of the department got to teach, I accepted teaching texts such as Beloved, Paradise Lost, The Sound and The Fury, and The Things They Carried. I have loved William Faulkner since reading him in high school, and I learned to love teaching Milton because I like rising to the challenge of teaching difficult texts. But then there was Tim O'Brien's novel about the Vietnam War. I tried to tell myself that The Things They Carried was hard too, and that therefore I should also love it - all of my colleagues who taught it chose it because of the figurative language, the book's Bible references. The book allowed them to impress students with words like "chiasmus." With so many reasons that the book should be taught, whenever I fumbled at teaching The Things They Carried, I thought it was my fault.

My sense of not being good enough to teach that text propelled me to learn more. I spent most of that first year diligently auditing my department head's classes even with a full schedule of my own, hoping that her love of the novel was going to magically infect me. I took copious notes, and then I tried to teach my classes exactly as she had taught hers. My students were generous and thoughtful, and I honestly don't think that they heard the false notes that I was increasingly attune to in my teaching. No matter how hard I worked, how many notes I took, and how well I mimicked my colleagues, I never learned to love that book.

I never loved it because I never was able to be myself while teaching it. How could I teach The Things They Carried, which is about what white men carried, and also be a Vietnamese immigrant, the daughter of a man who fought alongside Americans in the Vietnam War, and then was imprisoned for it? How could I teach Tim O'Brien's version of the Vietnam War that actually has no Vietnamese people in it? When I've said this to people in the past, they were always shocked: How can a book about the Vietnam War have no Vietnamese people in it? The main scene that describes Vietnamese people has them symbolized as water buffalo (my white colleagues had a whole lesson built around this water buffalo metaphor as if it was the most exciting thing in the world to discover that the animal represented my people).

Like the water buffalo, Vietnamese people are shot and killed. They have no personalities. No families. They are just the backdrop for American bravery and grief.

One of the main metaphors in The Things They Carried is that American soldiers were not just carrying backpacks full of rations, ammunition, photos from home, and other items necessary to make it through the war, but they were carrying the toll that the Vietnam War took on them. Teaching that text for a year took a huge toll on me. I have never before or since then taught with so little of my heart.

I could not face another year of teaching something that was so against what I knew to be true, so I needed to come up with the solution. That was when I decided to wield the 30 percent teacher's choice in the curriculum that I was promised. I chose to teach The Gangster We Are All Looking For by Le Thi Diem Thuy. It is a novel written by a Vietnamese refugee about the harrowing journey and resettlement of six Vietnamese refugees in late 1970s' San Diego. This wasn't just about using a Vietnamese perspective though. Gangster is beautifully written. In many ways, its broken narrative is a much more realistic reflection of post-traumatic stress disorder than O'Brien's perfectly crafted allegories. It has a compelling female protagonist who clearly had thematic ties to other characters we read that year, such as Caddy from The Sound and the Fury and Sethe from Morrison's Beloved. If I sound like I am trying to defend my choice, it's because I felt like I had to defend my choice. The other three teachers of English 12 that year were all veteran teachers, one was my department chair, and they all had chosen the 70 percent of the curriculum that I had inherited. They had been nicknamed the Holy Trinity, and to me they felt untouchable. Of course, students revered them. They had been at the school for decades, had made the English department what it was. It's only with many more years of teaching under my belt now that I realize how unhealthy that situation was. Schools need to be wary of setting up new teachers - especially new teachers of color - in impossible situations in which they are alone in a group of long-standing white faculty. I was never going to feel powerful in that situation.

So at first, I wasn't brave enough to completely jettison O'Brien; I taught some chapters of The Things They Carried alongside Gangster. As I was finally able to teach about the Vietnam War through a Vietnamese family's eyes, I found my true voice again. And once I found my voice, my students found me. I still have my student evaluations of me from that year, the ones that said that Gangster was their favorite book we read because it wasn't like anything they had read before, and it felt real. It felt real because it was real - because it i s real to tell the story of the Vietnam War through a Vietnamese perspective. Why hadn't anyone else before me thought of that? Why would they have?

I honestly believe that no one else had questioned teaching The Things They Carried because no one else was a faculty member who was actually a Vietnamese immigrant. No one else reacted as viscerally as I did to that text. There are so many clear and good arguments for diversifying the faculty of our schools, as there are measurable benefits to having faculty of color. I also think that schools need faculty of color because that is the only way they are going to find out what they are missing. Hiring faculty of color means that a schools doesn't just gain new perspectives, but they will have to re-examine long-held ones. Hiring me meant that after my first year teaching The Gangster We Are All Looking For, given the enthusiastic response from students, I was asked to share my lesson plans with my other colleagues so that they too could teach it alongside The Things They Carried. No matter where I teach, hiring me means that an Asian, female, immigrant experience will allow me to look at the curriculum through those lenses.

When asked about how The Gangster We Are All Looking For reflects the experience of VietnameseAmericans, Le Thi Diem Thuy said:

I will allow that every element in this book came from a personal passion, to wrest Vietnam the place (homeland) back from Vietnam the war, and to show Vietnamese people who carry entire worlds - of grief, of longing, of love - within them, and have something to say about those worlds. Who they are, what they have to say, and how they say it, is not incidental to the story, it is the story.

We need to make sure that when we tell our students stories, they have the whole story. Every person in the story has to have a voice. I am honored that my calling is teaching, and that I am able to give voice to people that were previously unheard. Recently, I met with parents of an Asian student who wanted to hear about my current school's curriculum. Their specific question was, "How are we represented in the curriculum?" They wanted to know when their child could see himself in something we studied. I felt proud that I was able to answer that I taught Inside Out & Back Again, a novel in verse about a Vietnamese immigrant's experience. Through that book, I am able to teach about immigration of many other cultures as well. The parents were satisfied, but they also expressed surprise. "How long has this been in the curriculum?" they wondered. "We had no idea." It wasn't until I answered them I realized it myself: "We have been teaching it for three years." Since I started teaching at this school.

Like the backpacks worn by the soldiers in The Things They Carried, teachers are weighed down with the baggage of a pre-existing curriculum, a curriculum that has sometimes existed for so long, no one even knows why it still exists. Maybe the faculty has not changed composition for years, and they cannot see why the curriculum should change. Diverse faculty provide new lenses. Faculty of color in mostly white independent schools offer fresh perspectives. When I was able to finally envision a curriculum that felt true to my experience, I felt a huge weight lifted off of me. We as teachers should not let our students carry the burden of curriculum that does not reflect who they are; we should lighten their loads. We should all feel the weightlessness that comes with being our true selves.
Thu Anh Nguyen is Equity, Justice, and Community Coordinator for the Middle School at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. She teaches sixth grade, and also writes and performs poetry.
Work Cited:
Books Q&A with Deborah Kalb

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The Things They Made Me Carry: Inheriting a White Curriculum - Teaching While White

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It was a dream job: teaching ninth and twelfth graders English Literature at the first racially inclusive school in the nation's capital. I was told that 70 percent of my curriculum was predetermined by the department, but that I'd have control over 30 percent of the curriculum.

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Op-Ed Contributor

Credit... Linda Huang

There appears to be a common sentiment in America that things have become too politically correct, that people have grown far too sensitive. I hear this complaint most often in conjunction with the proliferation of language - new pronouns, new labels - surrounding gender. What those who complain about an epidemic of political correctness don't understand is that for some of us, that language can be a lifeline.

Before I gained enough language, I believed that I was transgender. I'd never felt like a boy. I had friends who had begun transitioning and this was the language that they used, and so I followed. From the ages of 15 to 21 I dressed with a femme presentation. I wore wigs, a weave and makeup, and believed that after high school I would begin officially transitioning. I didn't feel at home in my body or this language - but it was all I had.

I attended high school in West Baltimore, in an incredibly depleted and violent neighborhood, in a criminally underfunded school. I was ostracized constantly, but I managed to build a small group of friends who served as a wall around me. This wall made me feel beautiful, it made me feel loved - but it couldn't teach me the words I needed to properly identify myself. The world I grew up in gave me no examples of fluctuation or variation.

My brief experience thinking of myself as transgender was jarring and confusing. I'd flinch if a girl referred to me as she or her; women often weaponized these pronouns against me when they viewed me as a threat or wanted to make fun of me. But I'd also cringe when boys referred to me as he or him, because those words felt too sharp, as if they were being used to remind me of my place; and when they came from boys I desired, I felt completely undesirable. I didn't assert my truth in language, because I didn't know how.

The older that I got, the less I felt represented in the transgender narrative. It simply did not fit. Some days I felt comfortable being a gay boy. Some days I felt at home as a beautiful girl. There were also times where I felt like neither, or both. When I got to college I started to experiment with androgyny. I cropped my long, bouncy, black weave into a blond and crimson Mohawk. I started to wear my clothes a bit looser so that people couldn't identify my gender.

If I'd had access to the right language, it's possible that I might have felt empowered by this change. Instead, people on campus began referring to me as "it" or "he-she." Eventually I folded into myself. I cut my hair off, wore drastically less makeup and took to wearing all black clothing, because I was constantly mourning the identities I might have had, that the world had slowly killed. I became increasingly depressed and even attempted to end my life.

In the years since, inclusion in language has blossomed. Now we not only have glorious and complex examples of what it means to be transgender, we also have words for people like me who simply don't feel at home as male or female, or being referred to as he or she. Now we have words like gender neutral, gender deviant, gender nonconforming and non-binary making and taking up space. Now we have pronouns like "they/them" and "zi/zer," among many others.

Sadly, it feels as though I missed the bus. I am completely at home now with my male identification. I don't know whether this was a natural progression or if I was beaten into submission by the world. However I got here, I feel comfortable with my "he" and "him," but I know that I lost a lot in my retreat. At times I still fear that I'm not being my most authentic self.

Language is meant to be inclusive, but most important, it is meant to expand, to be updated and challenged by the times. However, language can also repress: It's not a coincidence that the people who are most often allowed to deem the world too sensitive and politically correct are the ones who wield power and privilege over others. For black people, this means white people; for gay people, this means straight people; and for trans and gender-nonconforming persons, this means the world.

As a society, it seems sometimes that we have no desire to grow. Any hint at change is met with aggression. I wish so desperately that I could have had these words as a child, that I could have claimed my own gender neutrality, my own gender deviance. I wish that language was more accessible to people who need it most. People of color, people living in poverty in places like West Baltimore, people who are being suffocated by an inability to claim who they are.

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Opinion | P.C. Language Saved My Life (Published 2018)

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Op-Ed Contributor There appears to be a common sentiment in America that things have become too politically correct, that people have grown far too sensitive. I hear this complaint most often in conjunction with the proliferation of language - new pronouns, new labels - surrounding gender.

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Opinion | A New Mother, an Old Mother, a Love Story

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We travel with our ghosts. Who better to lead us to what comes next?

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Some thoughts from a recent craft seminar with award-winning writer Alexander Chee.

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Taryn Delanie Smith, posing as Denise, heaven's receptionist, the personality she created for a TikTok series, in New York City on Friday. (Jelani Rice for The Washington Post)

Do you ever wonder what heaven is like?

Well, I know, because I have seen it in a joyful, witty TikTok series featuring Denise, heaven's receptionist.

Denise is a gum-chewing, keyboard-clacking office worker - in heaven - who answers the phone, greets new arrivals and gives out the WiFi password. She asks the dead what they want their ghost outfits to be and checks them back in from visits "downstairs."

"Denise" was created by Taryn Delanie Smith, the current Miss New York and media personality and a former receptionist herself. In a white bathrobe standing in for celestial robes, using a pink plastic razor as a headset, she nails the details of office life: the strained politeness on the phone with a difficult client, the sotto voce comments to colleagues, the group coffee order, the faulty printer. Between calls, Denise gossips about Jackie O. bumping into Marilyn Monroe or complains that Paul Revere writes every email in all caps.

Playful as it is, Smith's vision of heaven conveys serious ethical content, as all visions of heaven do - and have done, from Jesus' rating a rich man's likelihood of entering the Kingdom of God as, essentially, "fat chance" ( Mark 10:25), to debates over the possibility of moral progress in NBC's " The Good Place."

Do good deeds get you in? Do you have to believe certain things? Can you still go if you've done something wrong? What even is wrong?

In one of my favorite Denise videos, a woman calls to make sure that her granddaughter won't be getting into heaven. Denise checks the file: "She's a mother, she's done a lot of good deeds. Things are looking good for her." When the caller explains that her granddaughter has had a child out of wedlock, Denise says, "So ... I hope you're sitting down. Well, we don't care."

@taryntino21 Ignore the makeup on my collar i know i need to get my heavenly robes cleaned. #denise #heaven #receptionist ♬ Bossa nova that looks good in a cafe(976272) - MiYAMO

According to Smith's ethical worldview, extramarital procreation is not immoral, but unkindness is. Denise denies an Angel Premium Plus upgrade for a woman who rejected her gay son.

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"Right, so do you remember, when you said all those things to your son Ricky when he came out to you? Yeah, right. So, we didn't like that. Yeah. Yeah. You didn't earn any points up here."

@taryntino21 Replying to @iiamdeej #receptionist ♬ Jazz masterpiece "As time goes by" covered by a Jazz violinist by profession(962408) - ricca

Also immoral: clerical greed. "So it says here you had a private jet," Denise says, checking the file of a megachurch preacher who calls to request an upgrade. "That's fun. Super fun. How'd you pay for the jet? Uh-huh. Okay. Okay. So I feel like ... you know what I'm about to say."

Using the concept of eternal judgment to criticize the clergy is a time-honored strategy. In "The Divine Comedy," Dante Alighieri consigns to his fictional hell popes who got rich selling church favors and jobs. "Your avarice afflicts the world," Dante's pilgrim says, "trampling down the good and raising up the wicked."

Denise doesn't make pronouncements like that. She just explains the rules: "We appreciate the fact that you went every Sunday for 20 years. ... But you also made ... 48 Starbucks baristas cry and that does ding your credit up here."

Smith's moral code is refreshingly positive, ecumenical and uncomplicated. When I spoke to her recently, she told me that every religion she studied as a student at St. John's University is "kind of saying something very similar, which is treat people well in your life. Do as much as you can, do as much good as you can with whatever you have."

But I don't think this is the reason Smith's videos get millions of views. Heaven may be a way to express morality, but even more than that, it's a way to comfort people in the face of death. As brief and funny as they are, Smith's videos do that, too.

At some point, TikTok commenters started asking Denise to greet their deceased loved ones. So she sometimes looks up from her monitor, pulls down her headset and turns her brilliant smile on a new guest, offering to show them the salad bar or sending angels to accompany a child to the heavenly meadow where family awaits.

"Could u do one welcoming my baby Olivia?" @ashleynoelle29 asked. "I lost her two years ago but I know she's with my dad and grandpa but I miss her so much." So Denise pauses her office chitchat to welcome Olivia - speaking gently, saying "she's beautiful," "so small," "so sweet" - and it's pitch perfect.

@taryntino21 Replying to @ashleynoelle29 #greenscreen ♬ Somewhere Over The Rainbow_What A Wonderful World - Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

Smith now reads thousands of requests a day and says she is sometimes overwhelmed by the feeling that she's sharing in her followers' grief. She wishes she could make videos for everyone.

In a way, though, she does. She has created such a vivid character that I don't need her to make me a custom video; I can simply imagine how Denise would have greeted my beloved English teacher when she died last month and what heavenly perks might delight Mrs. Stewart. I smile to think of it, even as my eyes well up. And even though I don't believe in heaven.

After all, most people who do believe in heaven - and that includes nearly 75 percent of American adults - still know that any "heaven" they envision now is made up. They won't find out what it's really like until, well, later. But made-up things can comfort us, too. And making up things together (Smith called the videos a collaboration with her viewers) is a certain path to human connection and, therefore, to consolation. Even in the face of death.

I don't believe in an afterlife, but I believe in the power of art and the collective imagination. I believe in the power of strangers to console one another.

I believe in Denise.
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Opinion | Why Denise, Heaven's Receptionist, is the best thing on TikTok

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Do you ever wonder what heaven is like? Well, I know, because I have seen it in a joyful, witty TikTok series featuring Denise, heaven's receptionist. Denise is a gum-chewing, keyboard-clacking office worker - in heaven - who answers the phone, greets new arrivals and gives out the WiFi password.

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(Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post)

Tom Bissell is an author and screenwriter. His books include "Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter" and "Creative Types: And Other Stories."
The Challenger space shuttle disaster and "The Legend of Zelda" are endlessly entangled in my mind. I'd always remembered - and began writing this essay believing - that, on Jan. 28, 1986, I was home sick from school and playing Zelda at the moment the shuttle exploded. The dates, alas, don't line up: The gamewasn't released to the North American market until 1987. Still, I think I know why my memory insists on this odd pairing. For people born in the early-to-mid-1970s, the Challenger disaster was our first collective glimpse of national decline - a dismal augury of the generational voyage to come. But Zelda was all brightness and ascendancy, suggesting that video games weren't the brain-rotting toys of our parents' worst assumptions but rather something new on this earth.

Before Zelda, kids like me played video games because we were bored to death in our small towns and suburban enclaves, craving the dopamine pellets games reliably dispensed. AfterZelda, kids like me played video games because they were engines of powerful surrogate experiences.

What we didn't know was that Zelda would be growing up right alongside us. The franchise's most recent iteration, "Tears of the Kingdom," was released last Friday. It's a game that my daughter, for one, "waited two whole years for!" In fairness to her, two years constitutes roughly one-fourth of her earthly existence, which is a long time to wait. And so we started playing it the moment she got home from school.

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The original "Legend of Zelda" - a game rampant with secrets, hidden passages and lost treasure - felt like a heightened version of childhood, akin to when I crashed around in the woods behind my grade school in the dim hope of finding something unusual. In real life, I rarely found anything, but in Zelda I always found something. A Zelda game is a curiosity-rewarding machine, wherein every weapon or item you find is a potential key, and you can't walk by a rock or a bush without being nagged by the feeling that it's hiding something special.

Despite that, over the years, I've missed more Zelda titles than I've played. But being able to walk away from Zelda and painlessly return to her later is a big part of the franchise's appeal, at least to me. The Zelda games aren't overstuffed with inane, distracting lore. They boast a few marquee characters - Princess Zelda, the intrepid player character Link, the big-bad Ganon - but the rest of it, from their graphical stylings to how they actually play, shifts and slides from Zelda to Zelda, sometimes with tectonic severity.

" The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild," released in 2017, embraced this path of divergence. It's often considered the greatest video game ever made. Needless to say, it's highly atypical when a series of any kind steps up to the plate for its 19th main installment and blasts the ball clear into the parking lot. I say that having barely played "Breath of the Wild." Instead, I watched my daughter play it, day after day, for weeks, during the opening innings of the pandemic. This was a Zelda game all right - mysterious and endlessly traversable - but it resembled the original Zelda the way a stromatolite resembles a sperm whale.

I've worked on and off in video game development for more than a decade, which is to say I don't think video games are bad for kids. On the contrary, I think the best games are plainly good for kids. Immoderate video game playing, like immoderate anything, should obviously be discouraged, but we never had that problem with our daughter. She'd always liked video games, but they rarely occupied her mind for long. "Breath of the Wild" changed that. Although the story it tells is roughly analogous to that of a Saturday morning cartoon, its gameplay and superb "puzzle shrines" - basically, escape rooms that must be solved via Link's time- and space-bending powers - often made "Breath of the Wild" feel like the unholy spawn of M.C. Escher and B.F. Skinner.

As my daughter experimented with Link's abilities to stop time for an object, to manipulate metallic objects with magnetism and to alter objects' midflight trajectories, I could almost sense the new neural pathways burning their way along her eager little brain. When I look back on developmental milestones, my daughter's first word, first step, first joke and first day of school are up there with her turning to me, grinning, after having finally figured out how to bypass the fiendish Hila Rao shrine in "Breath of the Wild." This should explain her anticipation for "Tears of the Kingdom," a direct sequel to "Breath of the Wild" - only the second direct sequel in the 37-year history of the franchise.

I played Zelda as an impish detective, investigating the humblest corners of the game world, bombing every rock and burning down every bush in the hopes of finding a secret door. What my daughter most loved about "Breath of the Wild," conversely,was futzing around with its elaborate systems. The cooking system, say, which allowed her to mix and match more than 100 ingredients, which sometimes resulted in a health-restoring omelet and other times in a pile of purple mush the game decorously referred to as "dubious food." She also enjoyed stacking the effects of Link's magical abilities - time-stopping a falling crate, say, then whacking it with her sword to redirect its trajectory, climbing atop and enjoying the ride once the time-stoppage effect wore off.

Link has a whole new array of thaumaturgical abilities in "Tears of the Kingdom," including one that, almost immediately, I sensed was going to be a problem. This ability, called Ultrahand (which sounds like a 1970s prog-rock arena band), allows Link to glue together wood, rock, wheels, tires, planks, engines and other stray items you find around the world. In practice, this allows the player to construct crude Lincoln Log-style boats, motorcycles, wagons, structures or, really, anything you can imagine.

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Once the Ultrahand ability was unveiled, I watched my daughter spend an hour constructing a series of log rafts that were far too large and elaborate to float. Whenever I nudged her toward some enticing cave entrance or, you know, finding the lost Princess Zelda, she shushed me. Finally, she got one of her oversize log rafts to rest easy upon the water, shortly after which she figured out how to imbue it with mechanical rather than wind power. She spent the next couple hours elaborating upon this new development, which mostly involved her launching one unmanned raft after another across a lake.

When we found the abandoned mine carts, the question for my daughter became how many she could glue together and still get them moving along the rusted tracks. Between all the Ultrahand R&D, my daughter was also chopping down trees and fusing together the resultant logs to make lean-to structures, just in case she came back to an area later and it was raining and she wanted to "cook something." (God help us all, you can cook in "Tears of the Kingdom," too.) At one point, sensing my impatience, my daughter invoked the Wright brothers as her mathematical proof for the necessity of experimentation. What about all the monsters, I asked, the beasts and creatures she was duty-bound as Link to strike down with sword and bow?"Meh," she said, shrugging. "Pass."

"Pass?" I wanted to say to her. " Pass? " Fighting monsters is the whole point of the game! Which isn't even true, strictly speaking. "Tears of the Kingdom," like every Zelda game before it, is about wandering, thinking, tinkering. I adored the original "Legend of Zelda" because it made the rural Midwestern world I grew up in feel enigmatic, even mildly dangerous. My daughter is growing up in Los Angeles, in the Hollywood Hills, otherwise known as the Land Without Yards and Sidewalks. She can't walk outside our front door to play without putting herself immediately in the path of some Porsche Cayenne doing 40 in a 15. Games such as "Breath of the Wild" and "Tears of the Kingdom" might be the closest approximation she has for the sort of unstructured play I took for granted as a kid. I'm not here to lionize the era I grew up in, much less the region, but there's something to be said for an impossibly elaborate sandbox world that's filled with peril and secrets but also doubles as a place for a kid like my daughter to be a goal-less weirdo and goof.

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You lose that ability as an adult. Even when we're in situations overtly shaped by play, we see them merely as opportunities to exploit, expand and conquer. But the purest forms of play are not supposed to incline us to exploit. They're supposed to incline us to poke and prod and explore.

I know my daughter will eventually get to the epic adventure part of "Tears of the Kingdom," and I know that, one day, she'll even rescue Zelda, but not until she has made the game world her own and pushed its systems to their limit. Until then, I'll happily watch her Ultrahand the most cockamamie wagon imaginable for her horse to drag up a mountainside. I'll watch her fill her inventory with mushroom skewers and dubious food. I'll watch her sneak up on wild horses, in the interest of breaking and taming them, even though her stable is already at capacity. I'll watch her dye her clothing orange, and then red, and then blue, and then orange again. Her life, I fear, as it plunges deeper into the 21st century, will be filled with far more Challenger disasters than Zelda releases. And so I'll tell her to remember this - the feeling of a world that feels lifted, not collapsed; conquerable, not corrupted; joyful, not terrifying. Remember this. And remember us, too, together. Playing.
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Opinion | What watching my daughter play 'The Legend of Zelda' taught me

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Tom Bissell is an author and screenwriter. His books include "Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter" and "Creative Types: And Other Stories." The Challenger space shuttle disaster and " The Legend of Zelda " are endlessly entangled in my mind. I'd always remembered - and began writing this essay believing - that, on Jan.

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Bruce Springsteen fans (Kelly!) will appreciate this.

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Bruce Springsteen fans (Kelly!) will appreciate this.

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When music gets cleaned up too much, listeners lose opportunities to connect their imperfections with those in the music.

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Incredible essay I've used in workshops about "the drone view" of structure in essays

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Incredible essay I've used in workshops about "the drone view" of structure in essays

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Three years into my daughter’s cancer treatments, my family has leaned into talking about hard things.

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Here's the answer to the question asked in "My Child is in an Impossible Place, and I am There with Her"

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Here's the answer to the question asked in "My Child is in an Impossible Place, and I am There with Her"

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On the particular grief of losing an adolescent child.

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Opinion | My Book Is Horrifying. My Book Is a Lifeline. My Book Is Banned.

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The organized movement to ban books in schools is betraying the young people it claims to protect.

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I am trying to survive this season of fear as I did another one, the summer of 1951, when I contracted polio. But how long can you live on the knife edge of unknowing?

Credit... Lucy Jones

One afternoon in early February, a gazillion memories ago, I put a few things on the curb the day before trash pickup, in accord with my neighborhood's ongoing swap meet. By the next morning the mail carrier had carted off the fireplace irons; someone else took the French coffee press. But my old kitchen wall clock went unclaimed. I propped it against a tree, a forlorn Dali melting into the rough winter earth. Its hands had been stuck at 7:00 for years.

A day later I saw the clock placed high in the branches of the tree, like the Cheshire cat; its hands were reset to 8:20. I took the bait and changed the time again, to 12:00, and so it began: A game of time tag, whimsical and anonymous, that went on for weeks. It was our little version of "Kilroy was Here," a wave of urban camaraderie during a New England winter.

Nobody touches the clock now. People are trying not to touch anything, especially one another, unless it's an emergency, an act of mercy. Time feels broken but so does space, every day a fluid lapse where nothing, or everything, happens. Numbers have become the telltale dispatches from the front: over 1.5 million cases, more than 90,000 dead, too few ventilators and too many hungry people, a million exhausted medical workers.

"I don't have the virus," Gary Shteyngart wrote in The New Yorker last month, about his middle-of-the-night sweats. "I have the fear." I do too. I follow mine like a bell-shaped curve through the day, trying to stay a mindful six feet away from my panic. Breathe, take your temperature, turn off the news, go for a walk, hug the dog. Count the things around you that you love; now, count the things you don't. The day's moods are volatile and unforgiving: Despair, denial, anger, anxiety, heartbreak. We're deluged with tips on how to survive, provided you're blessed and healthy and following the protocols. Turmeric in the tea, online yoga or bridge, Zoom graduations and AA meetings.

The tangible things I miss the most are nearby but might as well be on the moon: the swimming pool, my boat upon the river. The intangible - well, sorrow and emotional chaos can cross any border, no passport needed. I miss, most of all, the absence of fear. And touching people, a spontaneous hand on a cheek or shoulder. I miss good old neurosis, I told a friend, back when most of my problems were of my own doing.

Even on the bad days I know I'm one of the fortunate, protected by the time and space of economics: I have money for groceries and a safe house; I don't have to get on public transportation; I'm over 60 but healthy. I also realize that for vast numbers on this tattered planet, Covid-19 is merely another brick on the load of suffering they face every day.

"The world was already an awful place for billions of people," I blurt out to a friend one night, and his Zoom-blurry nod looks weary, like I've just awakened from a child's dream. Even my sadness feels inadequate, or slightly obscene, an Hermès scarf held up against a tsunami of grief.

I was lucky, too, during another season of fear, the summer of 1951 when I was 6 months old and contracted polio. It was one of the last, worst years of the epidemics that swept through the 20th century, just before the Salk vaccine came into use in 1955. The virus was claiming more victims with each seasonal phase and was still badly misunderstood; it often struck in summer and seemed to target the young, so parents kept their children inside during the vacation months. Movie theaters and water fountains were shut down; nobody went to the beaches. As with Covid-19, the rate of death or permanent affliction was difficult to pinpoint because of subclinical cases; many people caught polio and never knew they had it. A fraction died or suffered permanent paralysis.

Probably because I was so young, I had a relatively mild case: no dreaded iron lung, no utterly maimed childhood or cut-short life. What I had was a weak leg that never worked as well as the other, a limp that slowed me down but didn't fell me. Polio was a shadow in my life, not a divining rod.

I was too small to remember the fear my parents must have known. But I remember the mythic dimensions of what were called "the polio years," when the swimming pools were chained shut and the March of Dimes poster child was everywhere you looked. Most people recovered. The ones who didn't became polio's legacy and reminder, and their numbers gave rise to the field of modern physical therapy as we know it.

Polio changed the world, and so did its cure. When Edward R. Murrow interviewed Jonas Salk, just as the vaccine's success was announced, he asked him, "Who owns the patent to this vaccine?" Salk's answer became a part of history. "Well, the people, I would say," he told Murrow. "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"

We don't know yet what the scourge of Covid-19 will mean. Not just who and how many will die but also what it will do to those who live. It's a new model nobody can trace or predict: the way courage and loss and failure and endurance can interweave into social mores. Will we go to basketball games again, sing in a choir, let our kids try out for wrestling? What happens to all that precious, infernal time as we wait for a vaccine? How long can you live on the knife edge of unknowing?

When the quarantine began I reread Katherine Anne Porter's wrenching story about the 1918 flu pandemic, "Pale Horse, Pale Rider." Even better and fiercer than I remembered, its hallucinatory description of Miranda Gay's illness plays out against a backdrop of ambulance wails and jingoist patriots. What Porter so agonizingly captures is the koan that death takes the sunlight even as it leaves the living. Recovered and grieving her dead lover, Miranda has one of the saddest final lines in American letters: "Now there would be time for everything."

My neighbors and I have driveway parties where we line uplawn chairs for the four of us, 10 feet apart, and laugh about nothing. One night I take over a pot of chicken soup; two days later, a friend of a friend brings me a roaster she found at the store. We start to call it the chicken cycle of life.

I'd been making a maypole, adorned with ribbons, from old bamboo stakes for the front yard, but today it seems like a dumb idea; today, bleakness has beat out perseverance.

Then my adored 10-year-old friend comes crashing down the driveway, stopping the bike halfway to me. I gasp in happiness. "I miss you so much," I cry, and Tyler cries back, "I miss you too!" Together we put our arms up and out, heart surfing, bending toward each other like reeds. We have learned, lickety-split, how to love one another from afar.
Gail Caldwell's fourth memoir, "Bright Precious Thing," will be published in July.

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I am trying to survive this season of fear as I did another one, the summer of 1951, when I contracted polio. But how long can you live on the knife edge of unknowing? One afternoon in early February, a gazillion memories ago, I put a few things on the curb the day before trash pickup, in accord with my neighborhood's ongoing swap meet.

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This Valentine's Day, thanks to the advent of removable tattoo ink, couples can inscribe each other's names into their skin without that nagging fear of "forever." It's practical but unromantic, the fringe culture equivalent of a prenup.

If only I'd put off my quarter-life crisis until this year, maybe I wouldn't be living with my own flawed tattoo: blurry, bumpy with scar tissue, haloed with a permanent blue bruise. I've spent the past few years learning to love it -- not an easy task for someone who color-codes her e-mail, alphabetizes her bookshelves and tweezes compulsively. But as I read about removable tattoo ink recently, flipping through Time's "Best Inventions of 2007," I realized I'm not sorry my ink is permanent. I may have a messed-up tattoo, but I have no regrets.

It was a cold April afternoon when I walked into a random Lower East Side tattoo shop and rolled up my sleeve. I showed the artist where I'd inscribed, in felt tip pen on the inside of my left wrist, the phrase "break to keep fixing" -- a lyric by the seminal '90s punk band Jawbreaker. The artist swabbed the marker from my skin and had me rewrite the phrase with an aqua Sharpie. By then I'd written it dozens of times, trying to get it just right. This time, the one that mattered, I scrawled it nervously and told him I was ready. He sat me in a dingy basement, pulled out tools I could only hope had been properly sterilized and popped in a metal CD at full volume. It was over before the first song was.

Back in my Brooklyn kitchen I removed the bandage and rinsed my wrist with antibacterial soap. I realized then that my words, true to my handwriting, began in neatly printed letters and morphed by the end into script. Spooked that I hadn't noticed this until it was too late, I read that four-word phrase for a solid hour, waiting for a spelling error to materialize. None did, and I bravely reassured myself that this quirk just made it more "me." But the permanence of the act I'd committed was sinking in: This time, it couldn't simply be wiped away and written again.

Of course, fear of regret was the reason I'd waited until I was 25 to get my first tattoo. Fear of regret is, in fact, arguably the biggest modern risk of the popular practice, and a technology that erases it from the equation is likely to be a profitable one. Named with marketing in mind, Freedom-2 ink, which hit the market in several cities in late 2007, is made from biodegradable dye encapsulated in tiny plastic pellets. A tattoo done with it is just like an ordinary tattoo except that it comes with an emergency exit -- just break glass in case of change of heart. After a single laser treatment, the plastic dissolves, the ink is absorbed into the body and the design vanishes.

In contrast to the painful, costly and variously effective multiple laser treatments required to remove traditional ink, it sounds like a miracle -- and perhaps a frustration for the 17 percent of already tattooed Americans who say they'd undo theirs if they could. Angelina Jolie may have the means to continually rework her body art, but most of us don't. We'll be living out our years with the histories of our youthful indiscretions and failed romances written on our skin.

My own indiscretion wasn't impulsive. I'd stewed over the idea for years. I'm a textbook Virgo -- overanalytical to the point of being indecisive, and indecisive to the point of becoming impatient. I'd shaved my head with just a month to go before my high school valedictory speech in my tiny New England town because it was on my list of things to do as a teenager. So, too, with my first real office job and the sense that I was being absorbed into the anonymous Manhattan professional class, I felt like my dissipating youth would be wasted if I never got around to getting a tattoo. Or maybe I thought that a little act of adolescent rebellion would buy me a few more years before I had to really grow up.

Either way, I awoke that spring morning with an emotional itch so strong, I got out of work, looked up the address of the tattoo shop online and hopped on the train to the city. I'd been in New York for half a year and I felt like I was hatching, crawling from the crumbles of one life toward a new one. As they had in disparate times of heartbreak, depression and angst, the lyrics spoke to me: "This is the cure/ same as the symptom/ simple and pure/ break to keep fixing." I looked to them, now quite literally, to guide my course of action. They explained me to myself. They even explain, on some level, what happened next.

I picked the scab.

It was a nasty one. My friendly anonymous artist apparently dug a little too deep with the needle. Crusted over, the ink began to bleed, and the letters blurred. At some point I accidentally banged my wrist against the kitchen counter, loosening the scab prematurely. "Don't touch it!" everyone said, but I couldn't help myself. I ran my fingers over it compulsively as it peeled and flaked. I knew better, of course. But, like many things I encountered, I just couldn't leave it alone. An ink-stained piece of skin bearing the letter "T" came off completely. I blew it off my fingertip as if it were an eyelash.

The way I felt about it changed from moment to moment, long after it was finally healed. Sometimes it looked puffy and frayed, and my stomach would sink. I'd have this on me for the rest of my life. At my wedding. In my coffin. I'd forever be explaining it: What it meant, why it looked the way it looked. I'd be enduring the scoffs of my younger, heavily tattooed brother and the unconvincing reassurances of my best friends. I sometimes found myself eyeing the laser removal ads on the subway, considering the damage I could do to my credit.

At other times it looked almost perfect. In the shower, against my translucent skin and veins warmed by the water, it was solid and clean. I liked the jagged arc it formed from a distance, the way you had to be up close to read it, as if it were a private note to self. It's more appropriately symbolic than any other tattoo could be for me; it's something I created that has taken on a life outside my control. What it symbolizes is important enough to me that I was willing to risk wearing it forever. If it wasn't permanent, what would it be? Just painful jewelry. A commodity.

It's still a commodity of a sort, of course. I paid for it -- $60, including tip. But it's more than jewelry. I got butterflies in my stomach the time a boy ran his fingers over it and told me he liked it because it felt like Braille. It's me: flesh and ink. And like my astigmatism, cellulite and other scars, there's nothing much to do besides live with it. It may seem like forever, but tattoos, even the soon to be old-fashioned permanent ones, only last as long as we do. They're an extension of the body, that notoriously imperfect but incredibly functional machine. Mine is a body that steeps in indecision and then acts rashly, doesn't know how to feel comfortable feeling comfortable and can't resist picking a scab. But at least I can live with the scars.

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This Valentine's Day, thanks to the advent of removable tattoo ink, couples can inscribe each other's names into their skin without that nagging fear of "forever." It's practical but unromantic, the fringe culture equivalent of a prenup.

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It's some visual. The literal erasure of the word "racism" and by extension the lived experience of more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry and their descendants. Among them: Maggie Tokuda-Hall, author of Love in the Library -who received those amendments to her picture book by a Scholastic editor-and myself.

The author's note from Love in the Library with edits by Scholastic.
Image courtesy of Maggie Tokuda-Hall

It's some visual. The literal erasure of the word "racism" and by extension the lived experience of more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry and their descendants. Among them: Maggie Tokuda-Hall, author of Love in the Library-who received those amendments to her picture book by a Scholastic editor -and myself.

To omit aspects of history, "at a certain point, becomes not truthful," says Lynn Yamasaki, director of education at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), and a fellow descendant of the World War II incarceration of our parents and grandparents without due process. "If we take out the racism part of it, or if we take out the part where we link it to present-day events, then it's really the most important part that we are removing."

JANM condemned Scholastic's effort to excise racism from Tokuda-Hall's author's note. "Censorship of American history has no place in literature. It smothers freedom of expression, erodes democracy, and contributes to historical revisionism," stated Ann Burroughs, JANM president and CEO.

This time it was Scholastic. Yet fear-based, poor decision-making has occurred and is likely happening now across publishing. Even this case may not have seen the light of day if not for the editor, who spoke the quiet part out loud and in red ink, backed by an editorial letter expressing the same and, of course, Tokuda-Hall, who laid bare her pain, at some risk, to document her experience.

Read:SLJ's starred review of Love in the Library by Maggie Tokuda-Hall (text) & illus. by Yas Imamura

"They wanted to take this book and repackage it so that it was just a simple love story. Not anything that might offend book banners in this 'politically sensitive' moment," she wrote in a blog post. "The irony of curating a [Scholastic] collection titled Rising Voices: Amplifying AANHPI Narratives with one hand while demanding that I strangle my own voice with the other was the perfect encapsulation of what publishing, our dubious white ally, does so often to marginalized creators. Always, our voices are the first sacrifice at the altar of marketability."

It's a lesson in self-censorship. You don't have to be a bald-faced bigot to do damage. It's the well-intentioned capitulators that will do us in.

Where do we go from here? I turned to diversity, equity, and inclusion expert Lily Zheng. "When companies don't take a stance on issues-meaning systemic racism, injustice, inequity, sexism, transphobia, all of these-that means that their ability to take action on these issues is only as good or as bad as their worst informed decision maker," they say.

The failure is not with this one person, Zheng maintains, but the lack of a system or process to operationalize an organization's values. Talk to middle managers to learn what's happening on the ground. Listen without judgment to illuminate what's not working, then get granular on a dos and don'ts list. "We want our books to tackle tough topics of racism, sexism, transphobia. We want our editors to be able to recognize books that tackle this kind of content and approach it intentionally, critically, and helpfully," posits Zheng. "If inclusion is a value, how do you act when you see exclusive behavior, inside the organization or outside of it?"

It's rare that there's a concerted effort at the top to be racist. But the end result is the same if Scholastic or any company doesn't take a strong internal stand. While they may fear controversy or offending certain customers, there's no playing both sides. "You can't take no position and reap the benefit of it," says Zheng. "You do need to take sides, especially in a climate that is seeking to ban books and teach 'alternate' histories. Any publisher is in this position of needing to defend, I'll just say it-the truth."

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Kathy Ishizuka

Kathy Ishizuka is editor in chief of School Library Journal.

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Got Values? Then Live Them. It's time for publishers to operationalize their ideals

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It's some visual. The literal erasure of the word "racism" and by extension the lived experience of more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry and their descendants. Among them: Maggie Tokuda-Hall, author of Love in the Library-who received those amendments to her picture book by a Scholastic editor-and myself.

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There are the things I always keep on my person: My phone, because duh.

A tote bag, because it's easy to wash when I spill my chai all over it.

My various cards (the important ones, like my credit card, driver's license, school ID, and my frozen yogurt rewards punch card).

And a compact, individual-sized container of Old Bay seasoning.

You might be asking. "Emma, why Old Bay seasoning? Also, your skin is positively glowing today! What's your secret?"

Oh wow, thank you so much! There's no secret - it's just good genes and Shiseido free samples my grandmother sends me.

But in regards to the Old Bay, my reasoning mostly hinges on functionality. I eat nearly every meal in a college dining hall whose food can be best described as "demoralizing." A sprinkle of Old Bay can elevate anything from a dry chicken breast to a nondescript "featured fish" to even (if the pickings are especially bad) a hard-boiled egg.

And of course, the transformative power of Old Bay isn't limited to just the confines of college cuisine. Bland food runs wild like a plague amongst this earth! Carrying a shaker of Old Bay, I am Achilles armed with his mighty shield, running into an epic battle against unseasoned food. And even beyond its culinary uses, a container of Old Bay is a conversation piece! "Oh hey, what's that in your bag?" "Oh, just a shaker of Old Bay seasoning." "Wow, that's so cool! Will you be my friend? Also here's all the money in my wallet."

Old Bay transforms a tasteless foodstuff into a mediocre meal. You could say that it's my "spoonful of sugar." But instead of that magical syrup Julie Andrews doles out in Mary Poppins, it's orange, grainy and really high in sodium.

But aside from the functionality, I guess I keep Old Bay with me because it reminds me of home.

I remember eating a bucket of fries smothered in Old Bay while digging a giant hole into the middle of Bethany Beach, not far from where the spice blend was created. I remember the scent of seafood when my family hosted blue crab boils - the searing pain when the Old Bay coating the shells got into the cuts of my skin.

It's nice to have a bit of our pantry at the bottom of my bag. It's nice to carry something with me that reminds me of what I've left behind.

At 22, my childhood feels both like something still close enough to touch, and something that's sailed impossibly far away. When I think of home, I think of hardwood floors, the sound of boiling jjigae, of sunlight falling through a picture window. I think of our pantry stacked high with snacks, packets of dried seaweed, and its tall rack of spices. It's nice to have a bit of our pantry at the bottom of my bag. It's nice to carry something with me that reminds me of what I've left behind.

Emma Eun-joo Choi is the host of NPR's Everyone & Their Mom, a new show from Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!

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Old Bay in my bag: How I make anything taste like home

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There are the things I always keep on my person: My phone, because duh. A tote bag, because it's easy to wash when I spill my chai all over it. My various cards (the important ones, like my credit card, driver's license, school ID, and my frozen yogurt rewards punch card).

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Othered. It's the experience that happens when a new Egyptian immigrant to the U.S. explains to me that molokhiya is an Egyptian delicacy, unaware that it's one of my favorite Egyptian dishes ranking after koshary and macarona bil béchamel.

Othered. It's the automatic feeling that churns in my stomach when someone asks me how old I was when I came to America, forgetting that I was born here.

Neglected. Having my childhood abuse ignored by my teachers because they attributed it to my parents' foreign culture and religion.

Suspected. Being randomly searched at the airport when traveling anywhere domestically or internationally with my ex-husband who was born in Saudi Arabia to Egyptian parents.

Suspected. After leading a training on " Overcoming Islamophobia in America," and reading these words on an exit slip: "What is their agenda? Not meant to be hateful. I am suspicious. They have totally invaded Minneapolis and taken over the Senate and ABC. In America. Live as Americans. I am suspicious."

Excluded. I put my headphones in and began listening to choral music in preparation for rehearsal later that night. It occurred to me that I've sung choral pieces in English, Latin, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Swahili, and Hebrew. Never Arabic. I've been a choral musician for over 30 years, and have never sung a song in Arabic. Why might the music of my heritage be excluded from the Western canon?

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I'd been coming to the cancer treatment center for over a year, and only had three more infusions to go. Having already placed my belongings next to my chair in front of the large window wall, I had a few more creature comforts to finalize before settling in for the morning.

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It's the silent killer of finances. And society rewards us for it.

The house was still and dark, the kids were asleep, and save for my husband's occasional snore, it was so quiet that I could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen from our bedroom. I should have been knocked out, too.

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It's the silent killer of finances. And society rewards us for it. The house was still and dark, the kids were asleep, and save for my husband's occasional snore, it was so quiet that I could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen from our bedroom.

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How Childhood Trauma Leads to Addiction - Gabor Maté

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Opinion | What Would Happen if Women Athletes Got the Mythology Treatment They Deserve?

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Time, instead of adding to the luster of women’s sports as it does men’s, erodes it.

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This is heavy, but I found his book (and this essay) incredibly true and yet also funny at times. A great writer.

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This is heavy, but I found his book (and this essay) incredibly true and yet also funny at times. A great writer.

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'The heaviest pain in the world' - Rob Delaney on his son's death

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The first year of my son Henry's life was a tornado. His brothers, Eugene and Oscar, were four and two, so we had three boys under five. I say "we", but it was

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A short, important reflection on what ChatGPT cannot do.... from poet Phil Kaye

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A short, important reflection on what ChatGPT cannot do.... from poet Phil Kaye

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My Two-House, Duffel-Bag Life (Published 2021)

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When my parents divorced, I lost the link that held our family together. And then I found it.

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Opinion | How Can We Be a Country That Does This to Our Children?

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We should judge a nation by a simple metric: the number of weeping parents it allows, the small caskets it tolerates.

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My Two-House, Duffel-Bag Life (Published 2021)

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When my parents divorced, I lost the link that held our family together. And then I found it.

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Such a great essay to use with juniors and seniors...

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Such a great essay to use with juniors and seniors...

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We’re Missing a Key Driver of Teen Anxiety

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A culture of obsessive student achievement and long schoolwork hours can make kids depressed.

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he thing that separates human beings from other animals is our extraordinary capacity for complex, abstract thought. This is what has given rise to our diverse cultures, our scientific achievements, our ability to envisage the future and, hopefully, make it better than what has gone before. But our imperfect minds have also generated terrible mistakes and dangerous ideologies. If we don't know how to distinguish bad thinking from good, we can end up believing what we shouldn't, and behaving in ways that are harmful to ourselves, to others, and to the planet.

Philosophers are, of course, the archetypal expert thinkers. Their discipline is often portrayed as a kind of formal method that lists fallacies to be avoided and distinguishes between deductive and inductive reasoning, invalid and sound arguments. These things have their place. But philosophy cannot be reduced to mere technique. Thinking well also requires adopting the right attitudes and being prepared to nurture effective habits. Without these "intellectual virtues" even the cleverest end up merely playing theoretical games.

Throughout history wise men and women have applied themselves to these problems in the service of their own development and that of humankind. Rather than start from scratch, why not draw on thousands of years of experience, and millions of hours of reflection and practice? Here is what some of the greatest philosophers in history can tell us about how to think - and live - well.

1. Be sincere

"A wrangler is one who aims only at victory, being indifferent whether the arguments which he employs support his own contention or that of his opponent."
Akapāda Gautama
Written some time between the sixth and second centuries BCE, supposedly by Akapāda Gautama, the Indian classic the Nyāya Sūtras is the first great treatise on the principles of reasoning. Gautama distinguishes between three kinds of debate. In jalpa (wrangling) the aim is victory, while vitanda (cavilling) is concerned wholly with criticising the other side. But in good or honest discussion, vada, the aim is truth.

Sometimes philosophy descends into adversarial combat. But the best thinkers avoid wrangling or cavilling. One such philosopher, Bernard Williams, identified sincerity as one of the two primary "virtues of truth", alongside accuracy.

The most dangerous enemy of sincerity is not deliberate deception but the desire to be right overpowering the desire to get to the truth. Sincerity in thought therefore requires overcoming an ego that hates admitting being wrong.

2. Be charitable

It's easier to dismiss people we disagree with if we attribute to them obviously foolish or stupid beliefs. But just as we are not as smart as we like to think we are, other people are not usually as stupid as we take them to be.

The best way to understand any position is to ask what assumptions would make it rational

To avoid what David Hume called the "vulgar error" of "putting nothing but nonsense into the Mouth of the Adversary" we should employ the principle of charity. This requires us to consider the best, strongest version of an opponent's argument, not only the worst. This may be a better case than they themselves can muster. If you were a remainer during the EU referendum campaign, for example, it would have been all too easy to brush aside some of the crass claims made by the official leave side. But there were more serious, less easily dismissed arguments, and those were the ones that most demanded a response.

Applying the principle of charity can expose flaws as well as strengths. Janet Radcliffe Richards believes the best way to understand any position is to ask what assumptions would make it rational. Why would a family think a drunk relative was a suitable babysitter, but only until they discovered she was an atheist? Their conclusion is rational if you think that the risk of being led into hell is worse than the risk of being harmed through negligence. The family's reasoning was flawless: it was their premises that were wrong.

3. Be humble

Philippa Foot was one of the best British philosophers of the 20th century. Yet she told me, "I couldn't give a five-minute lecture on dozens of philosophers. I couldn't tell you about Spinoza. I'm very uneducated really."

Mary Warnock was another philosopher with a keen sense of humility, saying: "I haven't done very much work and I haven't done it very well."

Both women's remarks sound ludicrously self-deprecating to anyone who knows their work. In fact, they reveal a self-awareness and honesty that helped them to excel. Foot was probably right to say that she wasn't as good a scholar as many of her peers and wasn't especially clever in the sense of having an ability to process complex logical calculations quickly. Rather than trying to compete with those who were, she played to her strengths: great insight, a penetrating mind, and a good nose for what's right.

Similarly, Warnock's excellence was not as an original thinker. She was a great explainer of others' ideas and, most importantly, a brilliant chair of ethics commissions which helped bring experts together to make public policy. She left a greater legacy than much work by "better" philosophers.

There are times when confidence and conviction are needed. But when we're trying to think as clearly as possible, their absence is a virtue, not a vice. We should all become self-aware about where our intellectual strengths and weaknesses lie. Social media shows how the temptation to opine over and above our competence is strong, and must be resisted through intellectual humility.

4. Keep it simple, but not simplistic
"It is futile to do with more things
that which can be done with fewer."
William of Ockham
The principle of Occam's razor - one should not multiply entities beyond necessity - was sadly never expressed so clearly by the 14th-century Franciscan friar to whom it is attributed. Sometimes called the parsimony principle, it has come to refer to the idea that all other things being equal, a simpler explanation is preferable to a more complicated one.

Applying the principle, however, is no simple matter. The key proviso is "all other things being equal". All-too-human cock-ups are more common than complicated conspiracies, but some things really are conspiracies. Bombs and bullets are usually fired by adversaries, but there are also false-flag operations.

Illustration: Till Lauer/The Guardian

So Occam's razor really needs the addendum "only expect as much simplicity in an explanation as the thing being explained allows". The preference for simplicity is a virtue so long as it is accompanied by a refusal to deny real-world complexities. We should look for explanations that are neither more convoluted nor more simplistic than is necessary.

5. Watch your language

In the Analects, Kongzi (also known as Confucius) says that the first thing he would do if he were to administer the government would be to "rectify names". He explains: "If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success."

Philosophers have always been keen to define their terms and use language accurately. In the 20th century, this perhaps went too far, with some philosophers thinking that all they could do was "conceptual analysis" - or figuring out what, precisely, a term might refer to. But even that is a vital task.

Think of how common it is for the misuse of language to assist the misuse of political power: Putin's "special military operation", or the labelling of plans to fund care of the elderly as a "dementia tax".

Getting words right sometimes requires changing them. "Gay marriage" used to be an oxymoron but most have come to agree that it is right that the meaning of "marriage" has evolved. Right now, there is a heated debate about what "woman" and "man" mean in relation to trans people. There is no way of resolving this unless both sides acknowledge that they are engaged in advocacy for their preferred usages, not simply trying to show that one set of meanings is objectively correct.

6. Be eclectic

Onora O'Neill's self-suspicion captures the value and peril of casting a wide intellectual net. As a leading bioethicist, O'Neill has had to learn from medics, biologists, public health professionals, scientific researchers, civil servants and more. None of these experts is competent to resolve thorny issues like those of gene editing or embryo research alone.

Breadth of thought always requires the sacrifice of some depth - be prepared to move out of your intellectual comfort zones

Many - maybe most - important issues cannot be resolved with just one kind of expertise. To think about how to feed a nation you need to call on the knowledge of dieticians, ethicists, farmers, ecologists, cooks and economists. Climate science isn't enough to generate a policy response to global warming, you also need to know about technology, geopolitics, economics and agriculture.

Breadth used to be a typical characteristic of philosophers. Aristotle studied nature in a lagoon on the island of Lesbos, Descartes dissected animals as well as concepts, Hume was better known in his day as a historian than as a philosopher. Narrow specialisation is a recent development.

Breadth of thought, however, always requires the sacrifice of some depth. That's why you need O'Neill's acute sense of being a trespasser. We have to be prepared to move out of our intellectual comfort zones, but we also have to be careful, in unfamiliar spaces, to retain a sense of humility.

7. Think for yourself, not by yourself

In his essay What Is Enlightenment Kant defined immaturity as "the inability to make use of one's own understanding without direction from another", adding that: "'Have courage to make use of your own understanding' is thus the motto of enlightenment."

Has the pendulum swung too far towards striking out on your own, though? As the philosopher Alvin Goldman says: "You can get more knowledge by using social sources, that is by drawing on the experiences of others and what they have to contribute. They have maybe better ideas, maybe better education than you do on certain subjects, or they have just read more about it than you have."

As Bhikhu Parekh argues, our willingness to draw on outside knowledge should extend to thinkers beyond our own cultures. Just as it is arrogant to think that we as individuals have nothing to learn from our peers, to assume any one tradition has a monopoly on making sense of the world is pure chauvinism. Our minds work best when in dialogue with others.

8. Seek clarity not certainty

Philosophers - and I suspect all of us - tend towards one of two different objectives: clarity and certainty. I think that after more than two millennia of seeing which approach is more fruitful, it is clear, if not certain, that the clarifiers have won. One of the few certainties we have is that certainty of any interesting kind is rarely possible. If you seek greater clarity, on the other hand, new vistas open up.

Another reason to be suspicious of certainty is that it is seductive. For example, psychologists such as Elizabeth Loftus tell us that in court cases witnesses who express certainty about what they have seen tend to be believed more, but confidence is an unreliable indicator of accuracy. Certainty is also the friend of dogmatism, arrogance and fundamentalism. Those who seek it should be careful what they wish for.

9. Pay attention

Iris Murdoch was a philosopher and a novelist. These two vocations were intimately linked. As her colleague Mary Midgley put it: "On Murdoch's view of ethics, we learn what is the right thing to do by attending to what is the case and increasing our understanding of reality." For example, empathy teaches us more about what is needed to treat a person well than moral theory.

Paying close attention, rather than constructing arguments, lies at the heart of the best philosophising

Paying close attention, rather than constructing arguments, lies at the heart of the best philosophising. Descartes is famous for his line "I think, therefore I am" but this is an argument in appearance only. It is a truth arrived at by observation: when you try to doubt that you are thinking, your doubting shows that you must be existing.

It was also by paying close attention that Hume saw how Descartes was wrong to conclude that this thinker whose existence was certain was an indivisible, mental substance. Hume, like the Buddha, invited us to attend more carefully and observe that we are only ever aware of particular thoughts, feelings and sensations, not an "I" that stands behind them.

Arguments do matter, but assessing the validity of our reasoning requires paying close attention to its progression more than it does knowledge of formal logic. Good thinking is just thinking with full attention.

10. Follow the mean

One principle that can be applied almost universally is Aristotle's incredibly useful doctrine of the mean, a version of which is also taught by Kongzi. This says that for practically every virtue, there is not an opposite vice but an excess and a deficiency. Generosity is the mean between profligacy and tightfistedness, understanding between lack of sympathy and indulgence, pride between self-hatred and arrogance.

The same applies to the virtues of thinking. Aristotle said: "It is the mark of the trained mind never to expect more precision in the treatment of any subject than the nature of that subject permits." You can be too precise as well as too vague, you can be too understanding of a view you disagree with as well as too dismissive, you can think too much for yourself or too little.

That is why every intellectual virtue needs to come with a warning not to slavishly apply it: follow the argument wherever it leads but don't follow it to absurdity; question everything but not all the time; define your terms as clearly as you can but don't think all terms can be defined with scientific precision. Even virtuous habits of thought can become vices if they are misapplied. The virtues of thinking require balance and judgment - and, thankfully, these are skills any one of us can learn.

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Think yourself better: 10 rules of philosophy to live by

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From Aristotle to Iris Murdoch: what the greatest minds of the past 2,500 years have to tell us about the good life

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Opinion | A Smarter Way to Reduce Gun Deaths

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To break the paralysis, focus less on guns and more on those firing them.

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Tom Brady of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers leaves the field after his team lost to the Dallas Cowboys in the NFC Wild Card playoff game on Monday. (Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)

Dear Tom Brady,

Guess you heard it's Everybody Pile on Tom Brady Week.

Figures. When you're a staggeringly handsome quarterbacking demigod who's been operating at wildly unimaginable heights for 23 years, they're bound to jump on with both feet when they finally get their chance.

You have one lousy game and suddenly it's "too old, "washed up," "selfish mercenary," "should've quit three years ago."

But I just want to say one thing - and I think I speak for millions of us who aren't staggeringly handsome quarterbacking demigods: Don't quit.

Look, Tom, I'm out here. Real Life is nothing like NFL Superstar Life. Feeling the thrill of victory with 46 of your best friends while 75,000 people forget to breathe? Once you quit, you won't find anything like that out here. The other day I got the best parking place at Whole Foods and I fist-pumped. Actually fist-pumped. How sad is that?

You don't realize how good you have it. Out here, when somebody on a plane elbows me in the kidney to shoehorn ahead of me so he can get to his seat one second faster, I don't have five linemen the size of Sub-Zero freezers who will fling him to the ground and step on his larynx.

Besides, you're still Tom Terrific! You'll be 46 next season, but you look 36. You were third in NFL passing yards this season, behind the Chiefs' Patrick Mahomes and the Chargers' Justin Herbert. You have toothbrushes older than those guys.

After your Tampa Bay Bucs lost to the Dallas Cowboys on Monday night, ESPN's Marcus Spears had the gall to say, "I don't think Tom Brady will win you games anymore."Apparently, Spears's WiFi was out on New Year's Day, when you dropped two 50-yard-plus dimes for touchdowns, coming from behind to beat Carolina. You know who can't win you games anymore? Marcus Spears. Because he retired. At 31.

Besides, all these people hollering for you to quit ... Why? Because you're 45? Because you've broken about every age record for non-kickers in NFL history?

Why would you quit something that nobody in history has done better? You are the GOAT. And after you quit, what will you go off and do? Play golf? Meh. You're going to be decent as a Fox broadcaster, sure, but you're no Charles Barkley.

Out here, in Real Life, there's not going to be a room full of reporters wanting to hear about your every move.
Q: Tom, I noticed you decided to go with the Horsey Sauce rather than the Spicy Buffalo. Was that a decision you made earlier in the day or more spur of the moment?
You knew what a dumb idea it was to briefly retire last year. It's still a dumb idea. It's not just me hoping you keep playing. About a dozen teams out there probably don't want you to quit either - because they could use a living legend. Not every day a guy with seven Super Bowl rings walks through the door.

I mean, dude, look at your choices ... San Francisco, where you'd be about 26 minutes from where you grew up ... Denver, where maybe you could rent Russell Wilson's house, which has 12 bathrooms, one for every game the Broncos lost this season ... the New York Jets, who haven't had a big-time quarterback since Joe Namath was wearing a white fur coat in '71. And that's not counting Carolina, Cleveland, Houston, Indy, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Tampa and Tennessee. Telling you, most of these teams would rename the airport for you.

Look, TB12, you've sacrificed your whole life for this moment. While your friends were having the lobster tacos, you were having a protein shake with an electrolyte-infused-water chaser. While all your old teammates headed for the chocolate fountain bar, you went back to the gym for two more hours of bow-and-arrow pulls. While your family Netflixed, you cozied up to scintillating film of the Cleveland Browns' nickel package. You get to do whatever the heck you want as long as you want.

Besides, some fires you can't put out. I've seen you on the bench, screaming at your o-line when you're behind. What are you going do with all that competitive juice? Scream at the Grease Monkey lube guy? "You gonna take that from a U-joint?!"

Remember what you said after you beat the Los Angeles Rams this year in OT with yet another clock-ticking miracle? "That was awesome. That was f---ing awesome." Trust me, very few things out here are that kind of awesome.

Although watching you play football comes close.
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Dear Tom Brady, Guess you heard it's Everybody Pile on Tom Brady Week. Figures. When you're a staggeringly handsome quarterbacking demigod who's been operating at wildly unimaginable heights for 23 years, they're bound to jump on with both feet when they finally get their chance.

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The summer box office is known for action-packed hits, beloved remakes and long-awaited sequels. This year is no exception with Spider-Man: Far from Home, the Lion King and Toy Story 4 hitting the big screen. Of course summer movies have high entertainment value, but some can also offer valuable opportunities for out-of-school learning.

Students benefit from experiences that expand their knowledge, not just from math or science but also from the world around them. We all have a framework of attitudes and beliefs that define our worldview. Sometimes to see life for what it truly is, we need to break away from these notions. Movies can remind kids that we all have different perspectives, that human rights matter, that cultures can share many fundamental values, and that kindness and compassion are key qualities in a just, civil and inclusive society.

We've put together several movie recommendations to get kids thinking and reflecting this summer. The selections here can help students see the world from new perspectives, giving them an introduction to people, cultures, events and beliefs that may be new to them. And though movies aren't always 100% historically or scientifically accurate, they can still be a great starting point for rich conversations.

With references to the 1950s, there's a lot to unpack about technology vs. nature in The Iron Giant. But what kids (and even adults) will really learn from this tale of robot/kid friendship is acceptance, the consequences of being too quick to judge and the many forms of heroism.

Discussion questions: What do you know about the Cold War of the 1950s? How might the characters have acted differently if the story had been set in another time period (like post-9/11)? Where do you see statements about technology v. nature? How does paranoia drive the plot of the film?

This Disney flick about human excess and environmental decay manages to be relatable to kids. An adorable robot and his quest to connect with another are the backdrop for a reflection on the impact of our collective actions.

Discussion questions: What does Wall-E learn from the movie Hello, Dolly? How is satire used in the movie to drive home the messages about the environment and big business? What similarities do you see in the movie and in our consumption of media today? Do you think this is our future?

Coco explores the Day of the Dead and a kid's desire to become a musician despite his family's wishes. A moving tribute to Mexican traditions and customs, this movie will get kids contemplating the ways we remember and honor our departed family members.

Discussion questions: What about learning the traditions of the Day of the Dead surprised you? How does your family pay tribute to relatives and loved ones after they've passed away? How do you think the practice of honoring the dead might factor into how tight-knit Mexican families make important decisions?

Based on the real-life 1940s All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, this classic film will get kids thinking about the value of female athletes throughout history. Students will also see how both individual strength and teamwork play a factor in success.

Discussion questions: What is women's role in most professional sports ― and their role in the film? Have all those changes been good? To keep the game popular with fans, the players flaunted their femininity. Do you think this was all in good fun, a sign of the times, or somewhat demeaning?

Remember the Titans tells the inspirational true story about the struggles and victories of a newly integrated high school football team in 1971. Themes of segregation and prejudice will help students think critically about race relations.

Discussion questions: How did playing football help the students better understand the prejudice of the time? Do you see segregation or racism today in schools or neighborhoods? How might you apply the lessons from the movie (change is inevitable, teamwork and attitude are important) to the issues of today?

The main character in this satirical movie is an insurance salesman who discovers that everyone around him is part of an elaborate "show" and that every aspect of his life has been orchestrated. Kids will inevitably begin to question the consequences of our media-driven world.

Discussion questions: How does this movie address the reality of those who spend hour after hour of their free time watching TV or movies? Does the proliferation of social media make the story outdated today? What lessons can we still learn about how we consume ― and are influenced by ― media?

With a strong female lead, this sci-fi alien tale leaves out the action scenes in favor of a reflective look at how we communicate as a species. It's great for class discussions, and students will end up having lots to say about the political and personal choices we make.

Discussion questions: How might you have started to communicate with the aliens? What are the benefits of communicating through symbols rather than words? How does this movie compare with other movies or stories about aliens?

Despite some controversy surrounding a central white character in a civil rights-era film, this movie adaptation still demonstrates how oppressed people have a story that needs to be told. It will get kids thinking about segregation and class differences in our society, and what it takes to break the legacy of racism.

Discussion questions: Why do you think people might be critical that the story is anchored in the coming-of-age tale of a white girl? Do you think the characters are realistic representations of the time, or are they stereotypes? How do we know?

A girl living in England struggles to pursue her soccer dreams while also respecting her parent's traditional Indian values. This feel-good story grounds the popular "follow your heart" theme in relevant discussions about second-generation immigrant families and cultural identity.

Discussion questions: How much should you preserve the traditions of a culture when you're no longer living (or never lived) in that place? What are some strategies for helping to build up your own sense of self-worth and for coping with pressures from family members or society?

While this lighthearted tale isn't based on a historical event and doesn't delve into deep intellectual themes, it does give insight into the emotional turmoil of a young man trying to come out. It's a rare slice of cinema that gives kids a chance to relate to and empathize with the struggles of a gay man and the gay community.

Discussion questions: How does the film compare to the novel it's based on ( Simon v. the Homo Sapiens Agenda)? How do you think these childhood experiences might later affect someone as an adult? What other type of secrets do you think students may be struggling with in high school? How might it affect their relationships with their classmates?

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Here Are 10 Movies That Will Teach Kids Empathy, Inclusion And Other Good Lessons This Summer

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The summer box office is known for action-packed hits, beloved remakes and long-awaited sequels. This year is no exception with Spider-Man: Far from Home, the Lion King and Toy Story 4 hitting the big screen. Of course summer movies have high entertainment value, but some can also offer valuable opportunities for out-of-school learning.

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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/26/opinion/we-want-your-visual-op-eds.html

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Opinion | We Want Your Visual Opinion Pieces (Published 2018)

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We are now accepting visual op-eds for publication in The New York Times Opinion section.

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https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/how-to-hate-a-jew-like-a-jew

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The rampant antisemitism in the news these days has taken a toll on the psyches of Jewish people like me around the country. But on top of that, the high-profile conspiracy-mongering and acts of violence against Jews have made it incredibly tricky to hate any Jew at all, which simply isn't fair to people who are skeeved out by Woody Allen or who were swindled out of their life savings by Bernie Madoff. It's totally reasonable to have a Jewish nemesis or adversary-I personally have several-but it's important to carry your grudge in a thoughtful, culturally sensitive way. With that in mind, here are some tips on how to hate a Jew like a Jew.

1. Choose your Jew. It's critical to start with a personal connection. Which Jew do you hate, and why? Was your high school bully Jewish, and have they continued to dunk your head in a toilet regularly as an adult? Did a person who once celebrated a bar mitzvah engage in sexual intercourse with your spouse, setting off acrimonious divorce proceedings? Did Steven Spielberg accidentally or intentionally run over your beloved dog? These are all legitimate reasons for hating someone Jewish, but not every Jewish person.

If you absolutely must resent George Soros, please make sure you have an exceptionally specific reason. Unless he committed an offense as personal as stealing your family's prize-winning cheesecake recipe and passing it off as his own, consider giving him a pass. He's been through enough.

2. Be specific. Similar to #1, this is huge. You'll want to steer clear of any sweeping generalizations about Jewish people as a whole. Definitely avoid dipping into talk about "cabals," "protocols," or "the banks." Don't happen to "notice" when a few people have names that end in -berg or -stein. No need to "just ask questions" about Jews overall unless those questions are "When is Hanukkah this year?" (Answer: Sometime in December, but I haven't looked it up yet.) or "Is it weird if I wear a yarmulke at your wedding?" (Answer: Nope!)

Also... there's no such thing as "the Jews." A global conspiracy of all Jewish people would be impossible to cultivate and keep up. Canonically, no gathering of more than one Jewish person in history has been able to reach a consensus on where to get the best bagels in town or what shoes Grandpa should be buried in. Dominating international financial markets is, to be frank, above our organizational capacity.

3. Follow the Gibson Guideline (a.k.a. the Kanye Korollary). If what you're saying sounds like a voicemail Mel Gibson might leave while drunk, your vendetta has gone off the rails. (Remember Mel Gibson? From Lethal Weapon and also from continuing to direct and star in movies despite his numerous loathsome tirades against Jews and African Americans? No, I don't have any follow-up to that recollection. Just taking a walk down memory lane!)

4. Leave Israel out of it. Unless, of course, you're criticizing the Israeli government on its own merits. And in that case, leave the rest of us out of it. As an American Jew, my most deeply held problematic allegiance is to the seasons of Seinfeld after Larry David left.

5. In fact, maybe don't bring up Judaism at all. Honestly, the only time it really makes sense to hate someone because of their Judaism is when you are both rabbis, and you're arguing over how to define "sunset" or whether vegan bacon is kosher in the spirit of Biblical law. Instead of mentioning the religion of a person you hate, focus again on the cause of your animus. Rather than calling someone a "sneaky Jew," perhaps refer to them as "the bastard who crushed Muffin with his goddamn Lexus SUV and who also produced the beloved but overrated film The Goonies." It lets whoever you're talking to know what you're actually mad about.

6. It helps if you yourself are Jewish. I'm not saying this qualification is mandatory, but it's definitely a point in your favor. As a Jewish person, you're likely to find yourself in close contact with other Jews and have more opportunities to get sick of and annoyed at them. Friends. Family members. Colleagues. These are the kinds of people it's common to come into conflict with. Familiarity breeds kvetch, as no one says, but they should. And if you don't know what kvetch means, that is basically antisemitism on its own. I'm not saying to convert to Judaism for the purpose of maintaining Jewish enemies, but it is worth considering.

With these guidelines, you should be equipped to hate a Jew the Jewish way, for petty personal reasons, rather than right-wing conspiracy talking point reasons. There's no need to play into broad antisemitic tropes or post links to bizarre antisemitic "documentary" films (I'm looking at you here, Kyrie Irving). Hate any Jew you want on the merits of their own behavior. We, the Jews, will thank you for it. Well, most of us will, at least. Consensus remains impossible for us.

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The rampant antisemitism in the news these days has taken a toll on the psyches of Jewish people like me around the country. But on top of that, the high-profile conspiracy-mongering and acts of violence against Jews have made it incredibly tricky to hate any Jew at all, which simply isn't fair to people who are skeeved out by Woody Allen or who were swindled out of their life savings by Bernie Madoff.

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Opinion | Once You See the Truth About Cars, You Can’t Unsee It

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Opinion | Once You See the Truth About Cars, You Can’t Unsee It

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Cars promised liberation. They delivered something very different.

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Reading trauma-reading as a potential source of pain, insecurity, humiliation, or stress-disproportionately affects marginalized communities. But educators can interrupt traumatic reading practices in schools and make their spaces healing and inclusive instead.

In "Healing Reading Trauma: Rebuilding a Love of Reading through Libraries for Liberation," a June 24 on-demand program of ALA Virtual, two school librarians offered best practices for building foundations and collections that undo harm.

"We wanted to make sure our libraries are spaces where students not only feel that they are welcome to join in the process of developing a love for reading at any stage, but also that our libraries are practices of liberation," said Julia Torres, teacher-librarian at Denver Public Schools. "We are about student empowerment."

Torres and Julie Stivers, teacher-librarian at Mount Vernon Middle School in Raleigh, North Carolina, began their session by reviewing factors that contribute to reading trauma: high-stakes testing, a fixation on what education systems consider to be classics, toxic or lack of meaningful representation, trauma-centered narratives, and shaming students for reading choices.

"If we're measuring literacy growth only through test scores, we're failing them," said Stivers. She added: "We know how problematic some of the 'classics' are."

To illustrate this point, Torres shared a chart of the New York State Education Department's top 20 book titles read in its public schools (such as The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), of which a majority were written by white men and take place in historical time periods.

"A lot of these students don't read these books because they don't feel they relate to the lives that they're living," said Torres, who noted that the top books among her students this year were Long Way Down, The Hate U Give, and The Poet X, as well as poetry, manga, and graphic novels.

To interrupt traumatic practices, Torres and Stivers had several suggestions-the first of which includes realigning the role of the school librarian.

"Students are more important than books. We're not gatekeepers of books, that's not our role," said Stivers. "I would much rather lose a book than a reader."

Other interruption strategies included redefining what "counts" as reading and deploying inclusive programs and policies that emphasize diverse, reflective collections. At Stivers's library, for example, she and her students created a set of guidelines for professional and collection development called the #LibFive, which includes tenets such as "Graphic novels and manga are not extra" and "Show the joy in our stories."

Her library also holds a True Book Fair, in which students are invited to select new books intentionally curated to their interests without any associated cost (as opposed to a traditional book fair, where titles must be purchased).

Citing the ways in which Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about Indigenous people and Harper Lee wrote about Black people, Torres stressed that decolonization is essential to the process. "Decolonizing your mind is something we always have to do and support our students in doing," she said. "Our conversations shouldn't be debating the humanity of characters."

To that end, Stivers cautioned that white librarians should not be acting as "saviors" for their students, but as partners. "I'm not saving my kids because I'm pointing them in the direction of Jason Reynolds and Angie Thomas. I'm not doing things for them; I'm doing things with them." She stressed that librarians should be prepared to read the books themselves and do the antiracist work surrounding the literature.

Overwhelmingly, these strategies have holistic benefits. "When we interrupt traumatic reading practices, it will show up in our circulation data and also in other data throughout the school," said Stivers.

So will other, less tangible benefits: "We honor each other by showing each other we recognize the ways in which our lived experiences may be different," said Torres. "[Students] see the library as a place that's more than transactional."

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Ridding Schools of Reading Trauma | American Libraries Magazine

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Reading trauma-reading as a potential source of pain, insecurity, humiliation, or stress-disproportionately affects marginalized communities. But educators can interrupt traumatic reading practices in schools and make their spaces healing and inclusive instead. In "Healing Reading Trauma: Rebuilding a Love of Reading through Libraries for Liberation," a June 24 on-demand program of ALA Virtual, two school librarians offered best practices for building foundations and collections that undo harm.

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OPINION: Why the narrative that critical race theory ‘makes white kids feel guilty’ is a lie

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The wave of state legislation and school board policies restricting what educators can and can't teach shows no signs of slowing. These efforts rely on a narrative that learning about the history of racism and white supremacy harms students - particularly white students, leaving them feeling guilty and ashamed. We emphatically reject this narrative; it in no way matches our combined 30-plus years of experience as public school teachers.

It is not teaching about racism that endangers our students, but the curricular gag-rules that seek to perpetuate their miseducation.

Our use of the term "miseducation" comes from the 1933 Carter G. Woodson text, "The Mis-education of the Negro." Woodson argued that the struggle for education was not just about access, but also curricula. How could formal education be liberatory for a child if "the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies?" Woodson was also clear that racist curricula affect Black and white children. To those who claimed children were too young to confront the history of racism in the classroom, Woodson replied:

These misguided teachers ignore the fact that the race question is being brought before Black and white children daily in their homes, in the streets, through the press and on the rostrum. How, then, can the school ignore the duty of teaching the truth while these other agencies are playing up falsehood?

It is not teaching about racism that endangers our students, but the curricular gag-rules that seek to perpetuate their miseducation.

We are white women, who teach mostly white kids, in two of the whitest states - Oregon and Vermont - in the country. Woodson's argument - that all children deserve a curriculum that challenges the lie of white supremacy - has deeply shaped how we view our role as educators. Our identities and educational genealogies have made us particularly alert to the way white children have become props in the recent onslaught of miseducation policies.

Woodson asserted that the prevailing narratives in too many U.S. schools harmed Black and white children, albeit differently. Both groups were inculcated with scripts of Black racial inferiority and white racial superiority. Two sides of the same old and ugly lie.

To avoid confronting this lie, the narrative of history lessons making white kids feel guilty has taken hold. Many of the recent "anti-CRT" bills ban any curricula that could lead an individual to "feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual's race or sex." A Heritage Foundation commentary endorsing the laws asked, "How would you feel if your child came home from school and said her teacher had told her that everything that happens in the world is 'racist' and that she's part of the problem because of the color of her skin?" The universal language here only thinly veils the assumed white subject for whom this concern is whipped up.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was more explicit in an appearance last fall on ABC's "The View":

One of the worries that I have about the way that we're talking about race is that it . . . seems so big that somehow white people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past. . . . What we don't do is make seven- and 10-year-olds feel that they are somehow bad people because of the color of their skin.

We have been among those amplifying the now-common retort: "If kids of color are old enough to experience racism, white kids are old enough to learn about it." But this formulation has limitations.

Related: OPINION: Why Florida's ban on textbooks is just another scare tactic

Early in their encounters with the history of systemic oppression, white students sometimes express denial, disbelief, anger and yes, guilt. But the right would have you believe that those feelings are the end of the story rather than its beginning. We are lucky to work with students over the course of a school year or longer. Our lessons are not one-offs. There is space and time for students' initial reactions to be named, understood and analyzed - and often transformed. In our experience, for many white students, learning about systemic racism is in fact not harmful, but generative.

When students express denial or disbelief, we assist them in finding the resources they need to verify facts. We might ask, "I wonder why some of us struggled to believe this was true? Any ideas?" Through discussion, it is possible for students to understand that what they have been taught - and not taught - shapes their feelings about what they are learning now. We can also introduce a key idea for all critical consumers of information: Knowledge is contested. There are dominant narratives and counternarratives, state-sanctioned history (i.e., textbooks) and marginalized histories.

When students understand that there is a struggle to define the past, they are less likely to deny history and more likely to investigate with curiosity why they know what they know and how they came to know it. When students respond with anger - "How could this have happened?" "Why did I never know about this before now?" - we again lean on questions. We might ask, "How would the world be different if more children were learning this history earlier and more fully?" and "So now that you know this history, what do you want to do with it?"

When young white people display signs of guilt or shame - we have had students say things like "white people suck" or "I am embarrassed to be white" - our job is to help them process those feelings and foster a healthier sense of self and identity.

In a recent podcast, the writer Clint Smith suggested that it is possible to reckon with the truth without allowing it to define your present beliefs. "You are not defined by the decisions that your great-great-grandfather made," he said. "What would it look like to say, 'My great-great-grandfather fought in this [Civil] War for a cause that runs counter to everything that I believe in today. And my family is not defined by that'?"

Not only can this create a healthy separation between the actions of our ancestors and ourselves, but it also invites us to look for models of white people throughout history who acted for justice. These examples help students imagine and build an identity untethered from the perpetuation of racism.

Related: OPINION: Schools must do a better job teaching anti-racism

If one were to believe Fox News, a curriculum like ours - one that regularly and explicitly examines white supremacy's manifestations, past and present - is a recipe for demoralized children who hate themselves and their country. But our classrooms are not sites of doom and gloom. Students are hungry for explanations - real explanations - for the world they have inherited, and in our experience, they often feel relieved to gain insight into why things are the way they are. Moreover, our curriculum emphasizes the varied, powerful and creative ways that people have resisted oppression and built justice. We are careful to offer students models of action, examples of people just like them who have tried to change the world and sometimes succeeded. No, our classrooms are not incubators of cynicism. They are brimming with curiosity, conversation and, yes, joy.

To defeat the efforts to miseducate our children, we will all need to do our part: teachers, school administrators, school boards, labor unions, professional and community organizations, elected officials, parents, caregivers and students. We need to testify at school board meetings and state department of education hearings, write letters to the editor and op-eds and advocate to unseat the elected officials who are the architects of these attacks. And for those of us who are white, we need to know that when we emphatically reject the narrative of the guilty white child by telling our stories, the right's lie will be obvious: Their concern is not that children will feel bad when learning about the fight for racial justice, but that children will feel good. Young white people with the capacity to act in solidarity with movements for justice are dangerous to white supremacy and its guardians. Those are the real stakes - not white children feeling guilty, but white children armed with truth, history and a righteous desire to work with others to change the world.
Christie Nold (she/her) has been teaching in Vermont public schools for eight years. Prior to her experience in public education she worked at Shelburne Farms, an organization dedicated to education for sustainability, and taught in a village school in Nedryhailiv, Ukraine. Ursula Wolfe-Rocca (she/her) taught high school in a suburb of Portland, Oregon for 20 years. She is an organizer and writer with the Zinn Education Project and on the editorial board of "Rethinking Schools" magazine. This story about critical race theory was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger's newsletter.

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OPINION: Why the narrative that critical race theory 'makes white kids feel guilty' is a lie

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The wave of state legislation and school board policies restricting what educators can and can't teach shows no signs of slowing. These efforts rely on a narrative that learning about the history of racism and white supremacy harms white students, leaving them feeling guilty and ashamed. That narrative is a lie.

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An Address to My Fellow Faculty Who Have Asked Me to Speak About My Work

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An Address to My Fellow Faculty Who Have Asked Me to Speak About My Work

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My work is to pay attention when my mother says, "I cried all of my tears that first year I lived in Turkey." To pay attention when my mother says of her freshman roommate, "It was like Tigger rooming with Owl."

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Opinion | If It Was Good Enough for Socrates, It’s Good Enough for Sophomores

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I chose this text because it weaves together four informative pieces brilliantly.

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Over the last year, we have seen high-profile suicides that have gripped our attention-from Kate Spade to Anthony Bourdain to, most recently, the tragic death of Parkland shooting survivor Sydney Aiello. It is often recognized, correctly, that suicide is highly linked to mental illness, particularly depression. That, in and of itself, is ample reason for us to think carefully about mental illness and its consequences, but before I tackle the issue of suicide, I want to comment, more foundationally, on why mental health should matter and be more central to our attention in health.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." Yet when we think of health, we tend to prioritize physical well-being at the expense mental health. Instead, we should tackle mental health the same way we tackle physical health-with an eye towards preventing disease by addressing the foundational forces that cause us to be sick or well. We must do so for three key reasons-there are others, of course, but here I focus on three in the interest of making a succinct, and hopefully persuasive, case.
Mental disorders account for a significant portion of the global disease burden.
About 15 percent of the world's diseases are mental illnesses. The challenge of mental disorders is especially acute in the U.S., where an estimated one in five adults-about 44 million people-experience mental illness each year. Depression is one of the most common mental illnesses, affecting an estimated 300 million people around the world. Depression is so widespread that the WHO has projected that, by 2030, it will be the leading cause of the global disease burden.

Mental illness may be even more common than we think. Many mental health challenges are likely underreported. There are a number of reasons for this. They include differences of opinion within the mental health field about the characteristics of these disorders, as well as changes to how we study them across populations and cultures. We also have a long way to go before we create a culture where stigma no longer prevents people with mental illness from getting assistance. Thirty-eight percent of Americans have said they are "definitely or probably" unwilling to have a person with mental illness move next door to them; 58 percent said this about having someone who is mentally ill work closely with them; and 68 percent said it about having someone who is mentally ill marry into their family. These attitudes make it likelier that many people with mental illness will remain under the radar, making it hard to accurately assess their true numbers.
Mental disorders are shaped by contemporary social conditions.
Health-both physical and mental-is a product of the social, economic, and environmental conditions in which we live. Our minds, just like our bodies, are shaped by a complex array of factors, including where we live, our genetics, our childhood experiences, and our access to material resources. Income, for example, is one of the most significant influences on health and is linked to a number of common mood- anxiety disorders. From 2009 to 2013, 8.7 percent of people with annual incomes below the federal poverty line reported experiencing "serious psychological distress," compared with the lower levels of psychological distress reported by individuals with higher annual incomes.

Mental illness has also been linked to social conditions like discrimination, which can undermine the health of often-targeted groups, like immigrants, racial minorities, and the LGBT population. For example, state laws allowing businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples have been linked with a 46-percent increase in mental distress among this group. And, when mental illness does strike, racial and ethnic disparities in care access can prevent members of marginalized communities from receiving treatment. These realities suggest the importance of addressing mental health not just at the level of treatment, but by engaging with the broader socioeconomic forces that do so much to shape our lives.
Early childhood is a critical time for preventing mental illness.
Mental illness tends to have an earlier onset than other chronic conditions, and the burden of mental illness falls heavily on the young. As of 2011, up to 50 percent of children and adolescents living in the U.S. met diagnostic criteria for at least one mental health disorder before reaching age 18.

It is important to note that if mental illness is not treated early, it can increase the risk of other disorders throughout life. People with mental illnesses tend to have higher mortality rates than people without them, which can be linked to co-occurring physical challenges, like heart disease, diabetes, and HIV. Mental disorders also drive mortality risk through their link to suicide, which claims over 800,000 lives around the world each year. The lifelong threat of mental illnesses points to the importance of addressing these diseases early, while the brain is still developing and interventions stand a better chance of taking hold. This means creating the conditions for health before a child even leaves the womb. Prenatal substance use can lead to low, and very-low, birth weight or premature birth, potentially harming mental health. Very-low birth weight (less than three pounds.) has been linked with an up to 4.5 times higher risk of psychiatric problems, and low birth weight (less than five pounds.) has been linked with a 2.5 times greater risk of adult psychiatric problems. Exposure to toxic substances in early life, such as lead, can also threaten mental health-higher blood lead levels have been associated with a higher risk of major depressive disorder and panic disorder in young adults. By preventing these hazardous childhood exposures, we could do much to improve mental health.

If we break an arm or develop an infectious disease, it will be difficult for anyone to mistake our condition for good health. If, however, we struggle with mental illness-such as depression, anxiety, or post- traumatic stress disorder ( PTSD)-it is possible that our disease will present few outward symptoms. At the same time, the stigma that is still too-often attached to mental illness can make those who develop a disorder less likely to seek the help they need. Given these challenges, and the reasons I have listed, it is critical that we address mental health with as much energy and insight as we apply to physical concerns. Our health deserves nothing less.
LinkedIn Image Credit: wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock Facebook Image Credit: Sam Wordley/Shutterstock

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Mental Health Should Matter as Much as Physical Health

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The health of the mind is just as important as the health of the body.

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Google Arts & Culture features content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online.

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Celebrating what brings us joy, and the uniqueness of communities.

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Taylor Swift lyrics as central to a college course on reading and writing... 

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Taylor Swift lyrics as central to a college course on reading and writing... 

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Watch CTV News Northern Ontario | Local News Video | Top Headlines

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News video from Northern Ontario and around the world. Live breaking news, national news, sports, business, entertainment, health, politics. Daily top stories and updated news headlines.

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Opinion | The Joys of Swimming While Fat

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An illustrator finds freedom in the water.

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David M. Chamberlain has been teaching history for twenty years, first at Kennett High School in northern New Hampshire and for the last decade at Burke Mountain Academy in Vermont. He recently accepted a position teaching U.S. history at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. He is a James Madison Fellow and his work on environmental history has been published in AppalachiaThe History Teacher, and Environmental Practice.
The nation's first Lyceum was founded in Millbury in central Massachusetts in 1826
Each day seems to bring dire assessments of the poisonous state of America's political culture and urgent warnings that our fraternal animosities and passions may soon erupt into widespread violence. Prominent American historians have taken to the pages of major newspapers to express concerns that our political divides are beginning to resemble those that rent the union in the 1850s. In her new book How Civil Wars Start, UC San Diego political scientist Barbara Walter concludes that the United States is an anocracy, a country that occupies a perilous position between autocracy and democracy and which is ripe for internal conflict. Anxieties are growing too among foreign observers of American politics. Recently, Tom Homer-Dixon, a respected Canadian intellectual, urged his nation to begin contingency planning for a crackup of the American polity. Ordinary American citizens are apparently seeing through the same dark prism as experts. A recent CBS poll finds that 62% of Americans believe that in the aftermath of a future presidential election, the losing side will resort to violence.

What is scarce in our public discourse, however, are practical proposals to dampen intense political partisanship and provide our nation with a path away from what far too many of us have already concluded is an irrepressible conflict. It is incumbent on all concerned citizens, regardless of political orientation, to support efforts to promote mutual understanding and take the first halting steps toward reconciliation. I have no illusions that such a path will be quick, easy, or without controversy. What I envision is a concerted, bipartisan, 50 state, multi-year approach that draws its inspiration from the lyceum movement of the 19th century and is modeled on the summer seminars that thousands of American teachers, myself included, attend annually.

The lyceum movement arose in the United States in the 1820s and was predicated on the assumption that ongoing education was critical for the civic health and prosperity of the community. In towns across a still largely agrarian nation, adults were provided with opportunities for self-improvement through hearing lectures and debates by scholars and attending classes on a variety of topics. The often parochial world of small town life in the 19th century was enlarged through the creation and maintenance of lyceums across America.

How much less parochial and isolated are we than our forebears? How much are we in need of enlargement ourselves? It has become a tragic truth of our times that conservatives and liberals have become sorted geographically, with the former inhabiting mostly rural areas and the latter clustered in cities. To make matters worse, experts warn that we are increasingly living in narrow informational silos, our views circumscribed by the network we watch or the algorithm that steers our social media accounts. We should take a cue from the lyceum movement and get serious about designing institutions to counter the pernicious provincialism of our own times.

We already possess a contemporary template for how this new lyceum movement could be built. Every summer organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History bring together cohorts of teachers to study different topics at sites across the nation. Over the years, I have been fortunate to attend seminars on John Steinbeck, the history of the transcontinental railroad, and the Pacific Theater during World War II. In a typical summer, there are scores of such seminars conducted, which allows thousands of teachers to come together to learn from renowned scholars, to share ideas with each other, and to renew ourselves by temporarily throwing off the constraining routines of our own lives.

I propose that we replicate this model but instead of bringing teachers to sites across the country, we bring everyday adult citizens. Citizens would be selected through a formal application process and travel costs, meals, and accommodations would be paid by philanthropic organizations and perhaps pledge drives conducted on our ubiquitous cable news shows. Each state could host one of these citizen seminars, inviting 50 people, more or less evenly split between Republicans, Democrats, and independents, to a weeklong event. Participants would live, eat, recreate, and study together in a communal setting such as a college dormitory or convention center.

Ideally, states would select a venue within their borders that would appeal to our collective identity as Americans to remind attendees of the bonds that still unite us. National Parks and sites of historical significance would make ideal places to learn together and soften obdurate hearts. During the week, attendees would discuss assigned readings about history, civics, and contentious contemporary debates. There is no dearth of pressing topics to consider. One day could be devoted to the problem of race in American history, another to the second amendment and gun policy, a third to our basic constitutional architecture. Imagine the conversations that could ensue, the mutual respect and trust that could be fostered, if citizens simply had a structured forum to share their views with civility.

The overriding goal of the week though, would be teaching participants about the central role that norms play in a democratic republic. Sadly, many citizens have derived from their studies of the American system of government that the U.S. Constitution alone is sufficient to safeguard our democracy and ensure our cherished rights. To borrow from the 19th century poet James Russell Lowell's words on the centennial of the ratification of the Constitution, there is a deeply entrenched faith that the document's mechanistic checks and balances render it a "machine that would go of itself."

However, in their book How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt underscore the importance of norms, which they define as unwritten "shared codes of conduct" that are akin to calling your own fouls in pickup basketball or respecting the do-over if there is a close call in a neighborhood wiffle ball game. Establishing the norms that participants agree on are essential to our politics and then agreeing to practice them throughout the week could have a transformative effect on the nation as participants fanned back out to their homes and shared their experiences at their supper tables, their places of worship, their workplaces, and on the internet.

Well respected university professors would deliver lectures each day to contextualize the readings and answer questions. Local schoolteachers could then help facilitate discussions and activities to encourage participants to learn from each other and to share how they arrived at their own political sensibilities. Teachers also have hard won experience mediating disputes, calling people back to their better selves and maintaining order. Our republic is indeed fractious but I am certain that teachers could ensure a weeklong truce between the Don't Tread on Me Crowd and their woke adversaries.

Samara Klar, at the University of Arizona, has conducted research which validates the merits of the plan sketched above. Her research has found that participants of bipartisan discussion groups were more likely to modify their views and find areas of common ground than homogeneous partisan groups. What's more, they report enjoying their experience and the desire for similar interactions.

Good citizenship is a learned behavior that requires practice. A 50 state 50 student program would send 2,500 citizens back into their communities annually with a better understanding of public policy and political ideology, but more importantly imbued with a new spirit of civic virtue. Teachers know that very few students leave a classroom unchanged for the better. Let's send the adults back to school.

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For America, Let's Send the Adults Back to School

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David M. Chamberlain has been teaching history for twenty years, first at Kennett High School in northern New Hampshire and for the last decade at Burke Mountain Academy in Vermont. He recently accepted a position teaching U.S. history at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey.

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If you have ever attended any session where I have presented and the topic of diversity has come up, you know I am quick to tell attendees that I do not give out diverse book lists. Here is my reason why: there are no diverse texts. It is in the transaction (Rosenblatt, 1986) between the reader an

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By Kurt Ostrow Illustrator: Kendrick Daye Lil Nas X's single, " Montero (Call Me by Your Name)," flaunts his queerness. In one scene of the music video, he twerks on a muscle-daddy devil in nothing but Nikes and a pair of briefs, his red braids bouncing.

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Opinion | After Two Decades in Solitary, This Is His First Day Out

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After nearly 33 years in prison — and over two decades in solitary confinement — Jack Powers embarks on the first day of his new life.

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Every January, my social media feeds fill with ads, free trials, and coupons from the diet and wellness industry, promising to help me with my (presumed) resolutions to be better, faster, leaner, and healthier. Every diet program claims some type of relationship to science.

The same is true with reading instruction. Most programs or approaches claim to be based on "science." But consider the many possible meanings of this claim. Some approaches to reading instruction are developed as part of rigorous, peer-reviewed research and are continuously evaluated and refined. Others are designed by practitioners who draw on experience, and whose insights are validated by inquiry after development. Many are based on well-known principles from research or assumptions about learning in general, but haven't themselves been tested. Some "research-based" instructional tools and practices have been shared, explained, interpreted, misinterpreted, and re-shared so many times that they bear little resemblance to the research on which they were based (Gabriel, 2020). Others rack up positive evidence no matter how many times they're studied. Then there are practices that have no evidence behind them but are thought to be scientific-because they've always been assumed to be true.

"Polarizing Pitches"

When it comes to diet and wellness, advertisers work to make complicated choices about food and exercise appear simple and easy. And once phrases like "clinically proven" began to appear on almost every dieting option out there, many products-to stand out-changed their messaging to the now-familiar polarizing pitch, which typically involves one or more of these claims:

This type of promotion is challenging because approaches that seem to conflict with each other both make claims about their own effectiveness and the ineffectiveness of others.

Similar polarizing pitches can now be seen in approaches to early reading instruction. Multiple approaches-often different and even resistant to each other-claim to be scientific and "evidence-based." But too few programs have been examined with gold-standard studies to make comparisons meaningful. And every new evidence-rating system has slightly different recommendations (Gabriel, 2020). The "evidence-based" label seems to have lost its distinctive meaning. Rather than solely asking whether an approach is "evidence-based," most educators now want to know what the individual components of high-quality instruction truly are.

What We Do and Don't Agree On

The challenge, really, is to discern which reading-instruction approach is right for your school community, in what ways, at which times. Understanding what your school or classroom needs for current students is made more difficult by the lack of shared language for common concepts in the field, and the "all-or-nothing" mentality that suggests you must go all one way or another. Moreover, instructional decisions in this area matter tremendously. Just like unbalanced nutrition, the wrong program or combination of approaches can do more than waste time; it can discourage, limit, and minimize students' opportunities to learn. Perhaps this is why discussions about various programs evoke passionate responses from different factions in the "reading wars."

Within every approach to literacy instruction lies a unique logic or way of making sense of the central challenge of literacy development and of the best strategies for dealing with that challenge. Still, there's little disagreement on the non-negotiables of effective reading instruction, even if polarized perspectives use different terminology to describe them. I state these non-negotiables as: Students need developmentally appropriate, precise (explicit) instruction about every strand of literacy (letter patterns, vocabulary, usage, comprehension), instruction that includes clear modeling, plenty of practice, and specific feedback on that practice. There's also little disagreement on these general principles for effective reading instruction:

Reading and writing more is better than reading and writing less.

Clearer specific teaching and feedback is better than vague teaching and feedback.

Code-focused instruction (in which students learn about letter sounds, patterns and word structures) is important, and meaning-focused instruction (where students learn about vocabulary, text structure, discourse, genre and communication patterns) is important. But their successful integration is most important.

This last point is the crux of media representations of the "reading wars" and the conversations and, in some cases, legislation, that has followed. Code-focused instruction, or phonics instruction, has been presented as largely absent in reading instruction, and its absence is viewed as wholly responsible for persistently low achievement in reading (MacPhee, Handsfield, & Paugh 2021).

But the tension between code- and meaning-focused reading instruction has led to pendulum swings toward trends in curriculum and instruction that favor one and then the other for nearly a century. This in itself is problematic, leading to narrow conceptions of what students need.

The principles behind code-focused and meaning-focused reading instruction have been anchored in different fields of study and are best understood by researchers or practitioners in those different fields, so varied terms, philosophies, and approaches will always be at play. For this reason, the term "science of reading" really ought to be plural. Understanding reading development among diverse students requires an understanding of multiple fields of science (bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing), not just one. A myopic focus on just one field leads to deficiencies in one area or another-for teachers and students. And there's mounting agreement that to interrupt the status quo of unequal reading achievement in the United States, research in the science of reading needs to use more diverse tools and perspectives (Milner, 2020).

Soil Scientists and Botanists

In my graduate classes, I refer to people who are heavily invested in code-focused instruction as "soil scientists" because they focus on the foundation in which literacy (considered here as a tree) grows. They're often interested in the granular details of early literacy skills, like phonological and phonemic awareness, that are hidden below the surface for a competent reader. Evidence for instruction here is often drawn from linguistics, speech-language pathology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Foundational skills provide readers with access to written words by "cracking the (alphabetic) code" and allowing students to look at letters and link those letters with sounds that combine into words. Using my tree metaphor, building basic skills is like focusing on the right nutrients and balance within the soil to support the proliferation of skills (roots) that can fuel initial growth-and are vital for the life of the tree. A strong foundation of skill mastery can be the first step to healthy growth in literacy.

I think of educators more heavily invested in meaning- and comprehension-focused instruction as botanists. They are interested in nurturing the tree as it grows: ensuring it has sunlight (language exposure) and water (compelling reasons for reading and exposure to a wide range of text types). Evidence for instruction in this area often drawn from sociology, sociolinguistics, semiotics, rhetoric, and communications.

As a tree grows, it sprouts branches that reach out toward its best sources of nutrients. Similarly, students with an interest in and knowledge about a certain topic or genre will extend (read) in that area and grow a stronger, leafier "branch" in that subject. With trees, as more leaves emerge, they provide increased surface area for capturing nutrients from the environment, until the leaves become the main source of nutrients for the tree and its roots. If each leaf represents a student's experience with a text, this metaphor illustrates how reading more can reinforce the brain's understandings of letter- and text-patterns (the roots). Reading more helps a student build content knowledge, linguistic knowledge, and textual knowledge through increased exposure to language and ideas.

What Does This Mean for Teaching Reading?

No tree is the same. Some are well-matched to their current soil environment; others are not, and require more attention to thrive. Similarly, no two students are the same. So, in teaching reading, depending on the needs of the student, there's a time for a focus on the "soil" and a time to focus on nutrients in the environment (texts, talk, and teaching that's explicitly about meaning-making).

A scientific approach to teaching reading would acknowledge that, like a sapling, every student has within them the natural ability to develop literacy. It would acknowledge that each unique student will require different kinds and degrees of support for component skills and the many processes of literacy.

A scientific approach would also acknowledge that any teacher will bring expertise to some, but not all, of the many strands of literacies and pedagogies for teaching those strands. No good botanist can work without knowing something about soil science; no soil scientist succeeds without knowing the parts of trees. But people usually specialize based on their interest and experiences. So, a school leader has to gauge how well a particular teacher's strengths and focus areas align with the school's literacy curriculum and goals-and how much additional training she may need to adapt to her students' needs.

Many argue that basic skills have been neglected and need a renewed focus. However, historically, it's not the presence, absence, or balance of phonics vs. comprehension instruction that always leads to poor outcomes (Bond & Dykstra, 1967); it's the lack of responsive integration of phonics and other instruction (Connor & Morrison, 2016).

It's worth adding that there is an implicit history of inequality behind the reading wars that's rarely discussed in conversations focused on reading science. Historically, code-focused, direct instruction was part of a no-frills, no-nonsense version of literacy teaching (Eppley & Dudley-Marling, 2018; Haberman, 1991). Such instruction was seen to require little teacher expertise to deliver because it's largely scripted or routinized (though delivering it well actually requires significant skill). Under-resourced schools have long seen a revolving door of inexperienced teachers and persistently low test scores which make this approach seem all the more logical.

On the other hand, child-centered, unscripted approaches that depend on teachers' use of data and in-the-moment analysis of student needs have often been the domain of better-resourced schools with experienced teachers who were trusted to make their own instructional decisions. (For information on balancing literacy instruction, see sidebar "How to Know If You're Providing Enough Phonics Instruction.")

Today, some teachers have the tools, training, and ongoing support to provide systematic code-focused instruction (phonics) in a way that is engaging, cohesive, and differentiated. But many do not. This is clear from surveys and interviews with teachers, who say they lacked preparation for the complexity of teaching reading, especially phonics, to diverse learners, despite passing scores on the tests of reading knowledge required for initial certification in many U.S. states (NCTQ, 2020).

Likewise, some teachers have the tools, training, and ongoing support to provide explicit comprehension instruction in a way that's purposeful and integrated with all aspects of written language, from phonics to spelling to grammar. Many do not. This is clear from looking at the questions on standardized tests that students most struggle with and the underlying mental processes, as reflected by recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP, 2019) findings. According to the 2019 NAEP, 66 percent of 4th graders tested could do the tasks required to score as "basic," which require little more than accurate word recognition and literal comprehension. However, scoring "proficient" requires inference, judgement, and the ability to construct an argument about ideas drawn from a text. Only 35 percent of U.S. 4th graders scored proficient or advanced.

This pattern suggests that meaning-focused comprehension instruction is neither absent nor adequate. So I would argue that one more pendulum swing towards phonics (to be followed in 15 years by a swing away) would do little to equip educators with the ongoing support they need for cohesive, integrated instruction. Explicit comprehension instruction must engage all levels of language, using culturally sustaining texts, in the context of purposeful activities if students are to develop higher levels of comprehension.

A lack of adequate phonics instruction is surely a social justice issue. A national debt is owed to students whose school experiences haven't included full access to rigorous skill development for reading and writing. Yet teaching students to recognize words without also teaching them to integrate, interpret, apply, judge, critique, and construct arguments about or with them is an example of systematic oppression. If literacy is to liberate, its components must fully integrate.

Needed: An Integrated Approach

Let's return to our comparison of reading programs and diet programs. We seem to have an understanding as a culture that there are multiple evidence-based ways to go about getting in shape, even if some basic principles apply to all of us. We don't seem to have this sort of flexibility about approaches when it comes to beginning reading instruction. But we desperately need it. Significant evidence has accumulated about the different profiles of learners, the varying reasons for students' difficulties with reading, and the need for different forms of instruction to ensure equitable opportunities to develop literacy. Some students need teachers who can build up their foundation for literacy with explicit, teacher-directed instruction. Others need an opportunity for increased independence as their literacies self-extend through engagement with texts they can and want to read.

If science is both a body of knowledge generated through systematic inquiry and a process for generating such knowledge, then embracing the sciences of reading should include embracing the process of inquiry as we implement various reading instruction approaches, as well as embracing research findings to help choose an effective program. Testing out a certain approach and finding it sound doesn't mean a wholesale rejection of all others. Science is tentative, not tyrannical.

Leaders and policymakers should remember that the individual differences that make each of us unique matter for reading instruction. Reading and writing require the orchestration of multiple complex cognitive, social, affective, and linguistic tasks. How well a student performs these tasks is influenced by many factors, only one of which is the type of instruction her teacher uses. Students' individual language histories, cultural knowledge, interests, skills, health, text exposures, and reasons for reading affect their responses to instruction and intervention.

Treating evidence-based programs or approaches as solutions to be applied rather than possibilities to be tried out is problematic. Figuring out who needs what means asking the right questions about our students, instructional routines, and contexts, and having the wisdom, flexibility, and resources to adjust. It means positioning each teacher as the principal investigator of their classroom, someone who consistently inquires about the optimal balance of instructional practices for their current students-and positioning leaders to investigate how teachers are implementing reading instruction.

If anything, science shows us that the diversity of students' responses to instruction-even the same instruction-requires instructors to be flexible in their selection of content and pedagogy to provide equal opportunities for each learner's development.

How to Know If You're Providing Enough Phonics Instruction

So how can school leaders know if they're providing the right balance between a basic-skills-centered and a meaning-centered approach? As described by the IRIS Center at the Peabody College of Education (2021), you'll know whether your approach is delivering sufficient phonics if 80 percent of all students, including those in special education, can read simple texts independently at the end of 1st grade and more complex texts with understanding by the end of 3rd, and if those who require additional support show progress as a result of a short-term (about 3-4 months) intervention.

On the other hand, you'll know your current emphasis (or lack thereof) on phonics has missed the mark if interventions for most students take longer than a few months, and/or if more than 20 percent of students seem to need them. These percentages are based on federal guidelines for RTI models.

Critical Questions on Literacy Instruction

Science is about asking good questions and using those questions to find evidence or explanations that help improve an endeavor. Unfortunately, as H. Richard Milner notes, most research highlighted in current discussions of the science of reading has been conducted on white, monolingual students and may have limited implications for the education of diverse learners, whose pathways to literacy may vary (Milner, 2020). Ethical action in determining effective literacy instruction in the current climate means asking the right questions and responding quickly to the answers. Three questions are a solid start:

Is there a pattern based on language, culture, or skill level of students who are well-served by your current curricular approach? How would a rebalancing or reintegration of instruction help you better serve students not in this group?

Are all students engaged in meaningful practice in reading? If so, are there ways you might make such practice even more engaging, meaningful, and inclusive? If, on the other hand, students are practicing isolated skills without opportunities for integration, or reading without building skills for more complex engagement, what missing instruction or opportunities for integration could you provide?

Is this approach bearing fruit? This is the key question when weighing whether the literacy instruction approach you consider scientific-and have been trying out-is right for your students and teachers. Even if individual measures or skills show growth, ask whether all students are increasingly independent, engaged, and flexible as readers and writers-and if not, why not.

Reflect & Discuss

➛ What are your greatest concerns about current trends and programs in early-reading instruction? Why?

➛ Consider examples of effective reading instruction you've observed or participated in. What are the key components or characteristics of such instruction?

➛ Do you agree with Gabriel that schools need "flexibility" in their approaches to reading instruction? What does flexibility mean to you in this context?

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When it comes to reading instruction, an "all or nothing" approach is actually unscientific.

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The Standards & Testing Agency, rightly, wants schools to develop independent writers (STA 2018a, 2018b). However, it's clear that many writing pedagogies aren't fit for this purpose. They aren't orientated towards teaching children to be motivated and independent writers (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022). In these pedagogies, children have become dependent on their teachers - what Donald Graves called being on 'writers' welfare'.
Please sir, can I have another writing prompt?
Graves warned us that this would happen over forty years ago (Graves 1976, 1983). He told us that children will be content to sit patiently and wait until they are told what they must write. Children will learn that to write is to write for an audience of one - their teacher. They will be dependent and controlled within an inch of their writing lives. They won't be required to make any kind of writerly decisions. It will all be planned and done on their behalf. They will also learn that to write well is to write about the things your teacher likes (Young et al. 2022). We now have a generation of children who have received a writing apprenticeship which has left them listless and indifferent. They are consumers rather than producers, reciters not writers, responders not composers (Young & Ferguson 2020). They believe writing is an artificial act which they are disconnected from.

I often visualise a child sitting outside their primary school on the last day of Year Six. They have in their hand a suitcase labelled 'writing and being a writer'. The suitcase should be full of everything they will need to go on and write successfully and happily (Young & Ferguson 2022). At the moment, I wonder what it is we put in their suitcase that is helpful to them. I wonder whether children will be able to write well when there is no teacher to do it for them.

A question worth asking is this: what would happen if you gave the children in your class a series of open-ended writing sessions every day across a few weeks? What do you predict your class would do? A school which teaches their children how to be independent writers would be pretty confident (Young & Ferguson 2021b). Others, I suspect, would be terrified. Their students would be like fish out of water. They've never been asked to write anything independently. They've not been taught the metacognitive or self-regulation strategies they would need to be successful and productive (Young et al. 2021).

'We need to break the teaching cycle that places young people on writer's welfare. Children won't learn if we think for them... We want independent learners and thinkers. We want independent writers.' - Donald Graves

Graves' messages have often been misunderstood - that somehow he was telling us that teachers shouldn't teach. Yet he called for:

Explicit instruction to be coupled with self-regulation.

Children to have a daily, sustained and meaningful opportunity to practise writing.

Children to receive verbal feedback and additional individualised instruction while they are writing.

These all remain bedrocks of what we know about world-class writing teaching today (Graves 1983, 1994; Wyse 2019; Young & Ferguson 2022b).

'Children want to write. They want to write the first day they attend school... The child's marks say, "I am". "No you aren't," say most school approaches to the teaching of writing... We take the control away from children and place unnecessary road blocks in the way... Then we say, "They don't want to write. How can we motivate them?"' - Donald Graves

It's important to point out that Graves predicted that teachers too would lose their sense of ownership and professionalism in the writing classroom. They too will be put on 'writers' welfare'. He talks of how there will be an increasing mistrust of accountability measures and that these measures will spread paranoia and suspicion around the profession. This has certainly come to pass. As we have said, the Standards & Testing Agency wants schools to develop independent writers. However, because of the high-stakes nature of the DfE's use of schools' results, some feel that they must put their children on writers' welfare to get the results they need. However, this 'writers' welfare' pedagogy has not led to a rise in standards.

In 2021, around one in three children left primary school without meeting the basic 'met' standard for writing.

In 2020, children's writing enjoyment was at its lowest since records began.

In 2019, a quarter of children failed to achieve the early learning goal for writing at the end of the early years foundation stage (EYFS).

In 2019, around 30% of children failed to achieve the 'met' standard at KS1. Only 16% of children at KS1 were able to demonstrate that they could write above the basic 'met' standard.

In 2019, prior to the pandemic, only one in five KS2 children in England were able to write above the 'met' standard. Approximately, one in four children left primary school without meeting the standard for writing.

This was predicted by academic George Hillocks when he concluded that a 'writers' welfare' model for teaching writing is the least effective of all the orientations a school could adopt (Hillocks 1986; Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022). But it doesn't have to be this way. There are schools who are doing fantastic work and teaching their children how to live the writer's life ( LINK).

I'll finish with Graves and his gentle reminder to us all: the only way we can get children off writers' welfare is to put writing back where it belongs - in the hands of the child.
References

Graves, D. (1976) Let's Get Rid of the Welfare Mess in the Teaching of Writing, Language Arts, 53(6) pp.645-651

Graves, D. (1983) Break the welfare cycle: let writers choose their topics, The English Composition Board, 3(2) pp.75-78

Graves, D. (1983) Writing: Teachers & Children At Work Portsmouth: Heinemann

Graves, D. (1994) A Fresh Look At Writing Portsmouth: Heinemann

Hillocks, G. (1986) Research on Written Composition: New Directions for Teaching, Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English

Wyse, D., (2019) Choice, Voice and Process - Teaching Writing in the 21st Century: Revisiting the Influence of Donald Graves and the Process Approach to Writing, English in Australia, 53 (3) pp.82-91

Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2020) Real-World Writers: A Handbook For Teaching Writing With 7-11 Year Olds London: Routledge

Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2021a) Writing For Pleasure: Theory, Research & Practice London: Routledge

Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2021b) Guide To Personal Writing Projects & Writing CLubs For 3-11 Year Olds Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre

Young, R., Ferguson, F. Hayden, T., Vasques, M. (2021) The Writing For Pleasure Centre's Big Book Of Mini-Lessons: Lessons That Teach Powerful Craft Knowledge For 3-11 Year Olds Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre

Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022) The Science Of Teaching Primary Writing Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre

Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2022b) Handbook Of Research On Teaching Young Writers Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre

Young, R., Ferguson, F., Kaufman, D., Govender, N. (2022) Writing Realities Brighton: The Writing For Pleasure Centre

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A whole generation of children have been put on 'writers' welfare'

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download article The Standards & Testing Agency, rightly, wants schools to develop independent writers (STA 2018a, 2018b). However, it's clear that many writing pedagogies aren't fit for this purpose. They aren't orientated towards teaching children to be motivated and independent writers (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022).

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Opinion | Dementia Is a Place Where My Mother Lives. It Is Not Who She Is.

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Thinking of it this way creates a boundary between me and the treacherous drop of despair.

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When you lose a sibling, it feels like there will never again be a person who knows or understands you to the depths he or she did. There is an indescribable void, a chasm so deep and unrelenting it seems to swallow you.

At least that's been my experience.

This month marks the eighth anniversary of my sister's death. Sonya, my only sibling, was four years my senior and enjoyed playing the role of big sis and second mom. Over the years, I've become painfully aware of the unofficial holidays, National Sisters' Day and National Friendship Day - both observed on the first Sunday in August. These celebrations go hand in hand for me; Sonya was my sister and my best friend.

Though she's not physically here, Sonya still carries and keeps me as I try to navigate this life and world without her. I always feel confident that she's looking out for me, watching my back. I have wanted to find a way to express that sentiment for some time now.

If you know me on any level you know I have three obsessions: my nephews (my sister's children), journalism and Dave Matthews Band.

Every summer, I use vacation time to follow the Midwest swing of my favorite musicians' tour. What began as one or two shows annually with my sister has grown to eight to 10 some years. Beyond the Midwest, I've also seen them in Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington state.

This band - Dave Matthews, Stefan Lessard, Carter Beauford, Tim Reynolds, Rashawn Ross, Jeff Coffin and Arthur "Buddy" Strong - means everything to me. I've been lucky enough to meet them all. They are as kind as they are talented.

I love so much of DMB's music, but in recent years there's been one song that has quieted my tears enough so I could sleep at night, or helped rouse me from bed in the morning so I could make it to work. It's simply called "Sister." There is a line throughout: "Sister, you keep me."

Over the years, David - that's what I like to call him - has watched me sob from the rail when he performs that song. He has looked at me with sympathetic eyes and even offered comforting words. He could never know that it was my sister who agreed to go with me to his concerts in the early years, when no one else would. He could never know that a month before she died in 2011, Sonya encouraged me from her hospital bed to attend the Dave Matthews Band Caravan in Chicago, a DMB-sponsored three-day music festival, because she knew I was already grieving and needed to feed my soul.

I have wanted a tattoo with some of the "Sister" lyrics for a few years now, but I wanted Matthews to write them on me. That magical moment happened last month, just hours after attending my 100th Dave Matthews Band show at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in Wisconsin. Some would say the stars aligned. But I know that Sonya put Matthews in my path that day - because she keeps me.

The encounter between us was intimate; no one else was around. My dear friend Liesl and I spotted Matthews and his trainer as they were about to go for a run through town. He smiled when I called out "David" and said: "Well, hello there." We hugged. I introduced myself and reminded him we had previously met. He said: "I know," and something else so sweet, so endearing, but something I want to keep between us.

I told him about Sonya, how important "Sister" has been to me and that it would mean everything if he would write some of the lyrics on me. He humbly agreed, and repeatedly said how kind it was of me to ask and how honored he was to do it. He was amazingly attentive, asking me which specific lyrics, where on my body I wanted them and if I wanted to be able to read them.

"Yes," I said. "This is for me, to help get me through."

We talked about how he's watched me cry at shows during "Sister" - "I have," he said - and I was able to thank him for his presence in my life through his healing music. And just as when I first met him in 2015, he thanked me for being a fan. "I've seen you a thousand times," he said, gratitude in his voice.

Many fans think Matthews wrote "Sister" for his oldest sister, Anne, who in 1994 was killed by her husband in a murder-suicide domestic violence incident in South Africa. But in a recent interview, Matthews said the song was about his baby sister, Jane. In the same interview, Matthews said "Sister" is one of the best songs he's ever written.

"It's about my love of my little sister; a genuine thank-you to the universe for making someone who knows me so well," Matthews told Vulture.

I understand that feeling. I crave that connection. People often thought Sonya and I were twins and expressed shock when they learned we were born four years apart. We were inseparable. And not a day passes that I don't ache to hear her voice and her laugh, and to be smothered by her hugs.

Grief is a fickle character. Some days I think I've gotten it beat. I've made such progress - I can get through a day, a week, even a month without crying at my desk; I can look in the mirror and smile instead of sob when I see her staring back; and I have even reclaimed my health.

That I now have a tattoo to remember her by, designed by the only person who could get it just right, means so much.

David John Matthews may never understand how his handiwork and his overwhelming kindness touched my soul. But I think he might. He shows empathy and compassion in many ways, including in how he treats his fans.

And in a moment of levity, after Matthews wrote the lyrics on me, he said, "I'll do my best here," and began signing his name. The thing is, I did not ask him to sign his name.

It's been a long-running joke among my friends and I that after 25-plus years of being a fan, I've never asked Matthews for an autograph. But when one of my favorite musicians in my favorite band decides to brand me for life, who am I to argue?

Thank you, David.
Email IndyStar columnist Suzette Hackney at suzette.hackney@indystar.com. Friend her on Facebook at Suzette Hackney and follow her on Twitter: @suzyscribe.

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I asked Dave Matthews to write lyrics from his song 'Sister' on my arm. Here's what he did.

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When you lose a sibling, it feels like there will never again be a person who knows or understands you to the depths he or she did. There is an indescribable void, a chasm so deep and unrelenting it seems to swallow you. At least that's been my experience.

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By The Way

Meet the people you're stuck with before your flight

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The Runner
Maybe their connecting flight arrived behind schedule, or maybe they're one of those deranged people who shows up late for the thrills. You don't know their backstory, but you do know they're running through the terminal with no regard for anyone in their path.

The Nightmare
Anyone using their electronics without headphones. FaceTime, YouTube, a phone call to their grandma, Instagram Reels, Bruce Springsteen - whatever it is they're blasting, we don't want to hear it.

The Mob
Boarding isn't starting for another 15 minutes, but that won't stop this herd from crowding the gate like it's the front door of a Best Buy on Black Friday in 2014. Some are determined to get overhead space. Others saw the pack and didn't want to get left behind. All of them are going to end up sitting on the plane for another 30 minutes until takeoff.

The Infrequent Flier
Actually, it is their first rodeo. You can spot them by the panic-stricken look in their eyes approaching their turn at security. Their ID and boarding pass are nowhere to be found. They wore flip-flops, so now they're barefoot in the body scanner. Their overflowing carry-on bag just got flagged for six counts of oversize liquids. Holding up the line at TSA is their M.O.

The Dad
He's standing guard at the gate, hands on his hips while surveying the scene. Technically, he's on vacation, but he is decidedly not relaxed. Who can blame him? He just spent the last hours wrangling his family to finish packing and get in the car, heaving their luggage onto a cart five bags high, and successfully rolling it through the terminal.

The Influencer
These travelers agree with Shakespeare: All the world's a stage, including the airport, so they might as well make TikToks. Content isn't going to create itself.

The Zombie
Their body is at the airport, but their attention is not. Headphones in and eyes glued to their phone, these travelers are under the impression that they don't need to look where they're walking, despite the minefield of obstacles in their path.

The Sleeping Beauty
The good news: This person has the ability to sleep anywhere. The bad news: They're sleeping so soundly they'll almost certainly miss their flight.

The Minimalist
No one knows how, but this person has managed to travel with a single backpack. Not a stuffed-to-the-brim, 55-liter behemoth for campers. Just ... a backpack. The less stuff on them, the more questions we have. The only traveler scarier is the person with no luggage at all.

The Pre-Gamers
Societal norms mean nothing for travelers knocking back drinks at all hours of the day. You'll find the anxious flier who needs a drink for their nerves, or the couple happy with a beer before takeoff. Then there's the group doing shots to get a jump-start on their bachelor party/high school reunion/music festival shenanigans. One in 10 will miss their flight.

The Campers
Picnic or plane to catch? As far as we can tell, these people aren't going anywhere anytime soon. They're sprawled out whether takeoff is in 2 hours or 20 minutes. Bags: everywhere. Electronics: charging. Spatial awareness: none.

The Lovebirds
The airport couples come in many configurations: sitting silently together, zoned out on their phones, cuddling, fighting. Traveling together may be second nature for them, or a new phenomenon that will test their bond.

The Tantrum
They've never heard the phrase "don't shoot the messenger." You'll spot them yelling (fruitlessly) at anyone with a name tag, whether it's the gate agent who can't get them on a full flight or the barista at the understaffed Dunkin'.

The Bond, James Bond
While the rest of us look like we rolled out of bed, this traveler stepped right out of GQ. They're an increasingly rare sight - impeccably dressed and neatly poised at the gate as if they're at a fancy bar. Seeing this person makes you question why you couldn't be bothered to even brush your hair.

The Pilot
It shouldn't be surprising to see a pilot at the airport. And yet, it's always weird. What are they doing out here rolling their suitcase through the terminal with the rest of us?

The 24 people in line at Starbucks
That's not stopping anyone from joining the queue for that caffeine fix.

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An illustrated encyclopedia of people at the airport

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By The Way Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Story continues below advertisement Advertisement The Runner Maybe their connecting flight arrived behind schedule, or maybe they're one of those deranged people who shows up late for the thrills.

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A South Dakota school district planned to destroy Dave Eggers's novel. He went to investigate.

In early May I discovered that my book " The Circle" had been pulled from high school reading lists in Rapid City, S.D. It was one of five books - four novels and a memoir - that were deemed inappropriate for high school seniors. Copies of these books had been bought in the spring of 2021, meant to be read by seniors in the fall of 2021. But upon discovering brief sexual passages in each book, school officials pulled the titles from classrooms and even the schools' libraries. Officials eventually decided that these books, most of which had never been unpacked from their boxes and were in mint condition, should be destroyed.

This was my first time having a book I'd written banned, but two of the books, Stephen Chbosky's " The Perks of Being a Wallflower" and Alison Bechdel's " Fun Home," are routinely assigned to high school students in the United States and are routinely challenged. "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," a coming-of-age novel that has sold millions of copies, features a few scenes of awkward teenage sexual exploration. "Fun Home," an illustrated memoir about Bechdel's complicated childhood and her coming out as gay, includes a few cartoon panels of two young women engaged in sex. Both books had been offered to Rapid City high school students in English classes for many years before 2021, without controversy.

But the coronavirus pandemic and an influx of new school board members have drastically changed the atmosphere for teachers in the district. I visited Rapid City in May and spoke to 25 teachers spread across the district's three high schools. Uniformly, they said that their work had become far more difficult in the last two years, and that the book ban was yet one more sign that their jobs were becoming untenable. At the school board meeting I attended, on May 17, multiple speakers lamented the "mass exodus" of teachers. There are currently 157 vacant positions in a district that employs 1,680. Eighty-eight of the open positions are for classroom teachers. Parents and students say the district is "disintegrating" and "imploding." Jill Haugo, a nine-year teacher at Central High School, said she has never seen anything like this. "Teachers are breaking their contracts in the middle of the year and just leaving."

How all this happened is instructive. In fact, it might be a blueprint for how any school district can be overtaken by the narrow interests of people and groups without a direct stake in the schools. One such person is the president of the Rapid City school board, Kate Thomas.

Thomas is a longtime resident of Rapid City, married with seven children, many of them grown. She was first elected to the school board in 2015. At that time, her children were home-schooled. One of them, a teenager, occasionally attended programs at Central High School. Thomas herself had attended a Rapid City public elementary school, but she enrolled in Catholic school for middle and high school. Her biography on the Rapid City school district website lists her as "a parishioner of Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help." She currently has no children who attend any schools in the district.

Shortly after Thomas was first elected to the school board, Kathryn Kettering, an English teacher at Central High School, received an email from Thomas. "She told me that she'd received a complaint from a parent who said I was teaching a pornographic book," Kettering said. The book in question was John Green's " Looking for Alaska," which includes a brief scene describing characters' fumbling attempts at oral sex.

"In all my years teaching," Kettering said, "I've never had an objection to any material I've assigned. In fact, parents often told me in conferences how much 'Looking for Alaska' meant to their kids." Thomas did not name the parent who had complained, and Kettering never heard directly from any parent about the book. Principal Mike Talley told Kettering that he would deal with the email from Thomas, and Kettering never heard anything else about the issue.

When the coronavirus hit, the mask debate engulfed Rapid City as it had every other region in the country. But in Rapid City, it dovetailed with a June 2021 election, in which four school board seats were to be filled. Residents were accustomed to genial and uneventful school board races, where little money was spent, awareness was modest, and voter turnout was low. But this election was very different in tenor and scale.

To no small extent, that difference came from two chief influences, the Family Heritage Alliance and the Free Republic Political Action Committee. The Family Heritage Alliance is a South Dakota-based nonprofit whose website explains its mission this way: "It is our wish that our culture and our government bring glory to Christ." The group has sponsored events throughout South Dakota that the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as anti-Islam, and it has promoted articles, videos and speakers that criticize homosexuality. ("We fight for families and we don't apologize for it," Norman Woods, executive director of the Family Heritage Alliance, told The Washington Post in response to a request for comment.)

The Family Heritage Alliance is also active in training, supporting and recruiting candidates for a variety of public offices. One of themwas Deb Baker, who had previously been the FHA's treasurer and a board member. Just before the election, she was removed from the group's corporate filings. Though her children and some of her grandchildren attended Rapid City schools, Baker currently has no children in any local schools. Her official bio says, "She believes all children deserve the same great education and life preparation that her children and she received from this district."

Baker's opponent in the election was Natalie Slack, owner of a small marketing firm. When Slack ran, her kids were 13, 15 and 17, and all attended Rapid City public schools. She is a registered Democrat but had voted for Republicans many times, and never thought of Rapid City as a place split down hard partisan lines. She said the pandemic and the debate over masks and vaccines changed that, as did Donald Trump's visit to nearby Mount Rushmore in 2020. "His visit polarized and radicalized people here" and stoked fears of teachers pushing a "woke" agenda, she said. A pro-Baker campaign mailer sent around Rapid City by the conservative Shining Light PAC urged voters: "Protect our students! Educate them, not indoctrinate them! "

The other major influence in the school board election was the Free Republic Political Action Committee, headed by Rapid City resident Kevin Maher. Maher is the president of the Rapid City Catholic School System, which oversees the three local Catholic schools. Though he has no children in the Rapid City public school system, his PAC poured $16,950 into the school board election, spreading its donations among four candidates: Baker, Thomas, Gabe Doney and Breanna Funke. Though $16,950 does not seem like a great sum, it dwarfed other donations in the races. (Maher did not respond to a request for comment sent to his PAC's email address.)

In the end, voter turnout was low - less than 13 percent of the electorate cast ballots - and all four candidates supported by the Family Heritage Alliance and the Free Republic PAC won school board seats. Shortly thereafter, Thomas was named president of the board. After she took office in August 2021, the board instituted a policy whereby each of its meetings would begin with a Christian prayer led by a local minister.

"Kate Thomas was terse with members of the public in meetings," said Timmi Bubac, an English teacher at Stevens High School. "The board members elected were known to not be supportive of teachers, both from actions and comments made in the past."

Standing between the board and the teachers were the principals of the three local high schools and the district superintendent. Most of the teachers I spoke to said the superintendent, Lori Simon, and the principals had been generally supportive of teachers in the past. But after the new board was installed, the superintendent and principals pursued a course of preemptive censorship.

"There seemed to be more fear driving decision-making on the part of the administration," said Bubac. "We, as teachers, began to be asked to choose materials that weren't controversial. In a meeting with administration, my colleague and I were told that we shouldn't teach a certain book because it contained abortion themes. It was clear that this request was due to the environment of scrutiny that both the board and some members of the community were creating."

The stage was set for the banning of books.

In the spring of 2021, English teachers at Rapid City's three public high schools had been asked to put together a reading list for their senior English students. The teachers chose 43 contemporary books, each fitting one of four themes - ethics in society; identity: race, gender and class; humans and the environment; and contemporary poetry - that seniors would concentrate on. For each theme, the students could choose one of six books. The teachers felt this gave students options, affording them control over their reading.

After the English teachers submitted their list, a separate committee reviewed and approved the curriculum of which the books would be a part. The books arrived in Rapid City in May 2021, at a cost of just under $70,000. They included 180 copies of " How Beautiful We Were," a novel by Imbolo Mbue; 30 copies of " Girl, Woman, Other," a novel by Bernardine Evaristo; 35 copies of " Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" by Alison Bechdel; 75 copies of " The Perks of Being a Wallflower," a novel by Stephen Chbosky; and 30 copies of my novel, " The Circle."

But on Aug. 2, 2021, the high school principals and other officials from the district began to question the use of these books. Valerie Seales, the district's director of teaching, learning and innovation, sent an email to Simon with a photo of a passage from "How Beautiful We Were," indicating that she had gotten a complaint from a teacher about it. The passage describes a character encountering her parents engaged in sexual activity in the kitchen, a scene similar to the one that was seemingly objectionable in my own novel.

"I ordered that these books be returned to the warehouse," wrote Seales, who declined to comment on specific details in this story. "The reason I am bringing this to your attention is I think some English teachers are going to want to fight this fight to keep the books. I am taking the stance that they are inappropriate and we will not use them for assigned or voluntary reading list[s]. Let me know if you disagree."

In an email to the principals the same day, Simon wrote: "Now more than ever, what curriculum and resources/books we use will be subject to public scrutiny. Let's avoid issues proactively."

The district then ordered a second review of all the books on the reading list. For the next six weeks, as new passages deemed inappropriate were identified, new instructions were sent by the three high school principals - Jocelyn Hafner of Stevens High School, Jennifer Roberts at Rapid City High and Mike Talley at Central High. An email from Talley on Aug. 19, 2021, read:

"We have been asked to remove this book ['Girl, Woman, Other'] from [our] list of Literature options due to the explicit subject matter in the book. An excerpt is provided below. This book, along with the previously discussed book 'How Beautiful We Were ' need to be boxed up and transferred to the Warehouse. Please box these books up, write the total number of books in each box on the outside of the box, and have them brought to the office. 'Mandy' will complete the transfer paperwork for the Warehouse.

"You can get boxes from the custodians. Thank you."

In an unusual move, custodial staff was tasked with removing the books from classrooms - sometimes in the middle of class. But there were still copies of these books in most of the high school libraries. At one point, upon learning that "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" had not been removed from the Central High library, Talley appeared there - "mad as hell," in the words of one employee - and pulled the copies from the shelves himself.

All along, teachers tried to make adjustments without much direction from district leaders. "I asked for a meeting with administration about these decisions," said Timmi Bubac. "I was trying to understand the point of view from which they were making decisions. I scheduled a meeting with Valerie Seales, but she didn't show up." She emailed Thomas, the school board president, and got no reply.

"It just demonstrated a complete lack of respect for what we do and all the work that was done to choose relevant literature for these older students," Jill Haugo of Central High School said. "On top of everything else for the year, it just felt like the last straw."

The principals and school board did not back down. In fact, at a May 3, 2022, school board meeting, plans were presented to destroy the 350 copies of the five books in question.

Every school district discusses and lists property that is no longer useful. Surplus items may include broken gym equipment, outdated projectors or damaged file cabinets. At the May 3 board meeting, the district's list of surplus property was published. Notable was that most of the equipment was designated "to be recycled." Desktop covid dividers were "to be recycled." A refrigerator was "to be recycled." But the five books deemed inappropriate were "to be destroyed."

When the local press, in particular the Rapid City Journal, reported on this language, and when the news became national, the school board doubled down. In an email to the press signed by the entire board, the books in question were declared "pornographic." It read, in part:

"According to district policy, if a student had the explicit pictures from one of the books on their computers it would be considered pornography and they would be subject to disciplinary action. It is concerning that staff would recommend this material for a reading class. One or more of these books likely violated Codified Law 22-24-27 and would be deemed 'Harmful to Minors.' "

South Dakota's Codified Law 22-24-27 prevents the distribution to minors of sexually explicit material that is "without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Given that all five books are literary works that have only a few pages (or just a few paragraphs) of sexual content, the law does not apply in this case. Court rulings, including Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982), have further found that books cannot be removed from school libraries simply because certain individuals think they're offensive.

Unspoken in much of the debate is that the vast majority of books assigned to high-schoolers also contain material that would probably be deemed objectionable under the same standards. The students of Rapid City are still allowed to read " Oedipus Rex," in which the protagonist kills his father and then sleeps with his mother. They are still allowed to read " The Great Gatsby," which contains alcoholism, adultery and murder. " Romeo and Juliet," which remains on reading lists and on the shelves of all three Rapid City public high school libraries, centers on a torrid love affair between teenagers, both of whom kill themselves.

Speaking of underage sex: There is an interesting wrinkle to the banning of sexually explicit books in South Dakota, given that the age of consent in that state is 16. In South Dakota, a 16- or 17-year-old can also be married, if they have signed permission from one parent. That means that in Rapid City, young people aged 16, 17 and 18 can legally have sex, and can legally be married (an arrangement that often includes sex), but they're not supposed to read about sex in books.

When the book ban made national news, I talked with Amanda Uhle, my colleague at the publishing company McSweeney's, about making the banned books available to Rapid City high school seniors.We called Mitzi's Books, an independent bookseller in Rapid City, and we made an arrangement whereby we would buy books for any seniors who had been deprived access to them. So far more than 400 copies of the five banned books have been provided free to these students.

With the help of Mitzi's, on May 16, Uhle and I had a public event in support of the banned books and the teachers' right to teach them. Almost 200 people attended. A number of students and parents and teachers spoke from the podium, but just as notable were those who didn't. The day of the event, three teachers and librarians who had told Uhle and me that they would speak removed themselves from the roster. They were apologetic and embarrassed, but said they could not risk public exposure.

About two dozen high school students attended the event, and they were angry. "It's just simply disrespectful," said Colton Porter, a senior. "I voted three weeks ago, and they're telling us what we can read?"

"Art in general is supposed to make you feel something," said Kiran Kelly, another senior. "You're supposed to question morals and views and other people's points of views. And if you're banning books, then you're basically saying you don't support listening to other people. You don't support seeing other people's points of view. And I think that's stupid."

Every student I met in Rapid City had a smartphone, a device known to be used to access the internet. In the age of ubiquitous online pornography, book bans are antiquated and odd, in that the instigators of such bans purport to shield young people from inappropriate material, while doing nothing to restrict students' access to the web. But it's unlikely that the Rapid City school board is genuinely trying to restrict what high school students see. More important is the symbolism. More important is bullying the district's teachers away from assigning challenging books.

"I actually apologized to my students at the end of this school year, admitting to them that I didn't think they got the best of me," said Bubac. "I was teaching scared. I only selected safe books this year. I did as I was told by leadership. I feel sad that I did this, but until this year, I hadn't any complaints about any books that I taught."

When I met Jen Mueller, who teaches AP English, she was in her last few days at Central High School. She had spent 22 years at Central, but she had just accepted a job in Hill City, 25 miles away. "My new principal trusts his teachers as professionals," she said, "and I have been overwhelmed by the welcome and support that I received at all levels of administration, including the superintendent and school board. They appear to work together and like each other - something that hasn't been true in Rapid City for several years."

There was little noticeable public support in Rapid City for the bans. At the May 17 school board meeting, 19 residents spoke during the public comment period. Fourteen of them - students, parents and teachers - were against the book ban. Three people, only one of them with children in the district, spoke in favor. Of the 25 teachers in the district I talked with, none had had more than one or two instances of parents objecting to texts they have taught.

I reached out to all three high school principals, none of whom answered my emails, though Talley later responded to an email from The Post and declined to address specific details. Kate Thomas provided a statement similar to the one issued by the board in May. "No book has been banned by the Rapid City Area School District," she wrote. "Once the books were placed on the surplus list and the Board was provided a copy of the books, the Board had concerns about selling/giving the books away if the books might be considered harmful to minors, given the sexually explicit nature found in at least one of the books (pictures depicting adults engaging in sexual activity)."

Where do things go from here? It depends. The school board recently indicated that it will seek a way to discard the books without destroying them. Fine, but will the teachers of Rapid City risk another battle with their principals and school board? They might assign challenging books again, or they might, understandably, save their energy for other issues - like keeping their students and themselves safe from mass shootings.

So far there are some troubling indicators that the new school board's posture will have long-term effects. At Central High School, there have been efforts to fill the position vacated by Mueller. In May, a candidate known by members of the English department was interviewed for the opening, and there was much excitement about hiring her. But after a group interview with teachers and Talley, in which she "knocked it out of the park," according to one faculty member, Talley requested a second, private interview. "This was unusual," said the candidate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for this article, told me. She said that the principal pressed her on her views about the book controversy and that his questions left her offended and unsettled. In the end she withdrew her candidacy and took a job two and a half hours away. (Talley declined to answer a question about the interview.)

The school board, though, continues to push ahead. Before its June 6 meeting, it circulated a new document called the "Parents/Guardians/Students Rights in Education Policy." The document asserted that "Parents are the primary caretakers of their child's education" and listed six rights of parents. Most of these rights had been in school materials for years, but now there was a new one, "Right #6." It read: "Parental/guardian knowledge and consent is for ALL LGBTQ/gender identity related discussions, handouts, videos, or online/printed materials except in mandatory reporting situations."

The board chose not to vote on the document at that meeting, but it did invite a local pastor to speak. According to two of those who attended, he talked about returning the Bible to the classroom and condemned kids who identify as trans. One of the attendees was Emily Vigil, a local fifth-grade teacher whose daughter, a high school student, identifies as trans. "It was the most bizarre spectacle I've ever witnessed," Vigil said. "I was shaking, crying and looking around in complete confusion. How was this appropriate for a school board meeting?"

I asked her if she'd considered leaving teaching. "I absolutely love my school, students and families," she said, "but I've thought multiple times of leaving teaching this year. The bottom line is we need the health insurance."

Meanwhile, teachers who can leave are leaving.

On June 16, Bubac tendered her resignation. "My name and even my entire course content is being made public, which is fine," she said, "but I know the public scrutiny will continue. I'm tired of the fear-based decision-making." She accepted a position at Western Dakota Technical College. "I've heard multiple teachers on my floor and in other departments express their desire to leave their positions if they could find an alternative," she said.

Bubac's teaching position, along with 87 others in the Rapid City school district, remains vacant.

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A South Dakota school district planned to destroy Dave Eggers's novel. He went to investigate. In early May I discovered that my book " The Circle" had been pulled from high school reading lists in Rapid City, S.D. It was one of five books - four novels and a memoir - that were deemed inappropriate for high school seniors.

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Four forces are propelling the rising rates of depression among young people.

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Four forces are propelling the rising rates of depression among young people.

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The United States is experiencing an extreme teenage mental-health crisis. From 2009 to 2021, the share of American high-school students who say they feel "persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness" rose from 26 percent to 44 percent, according to a new CDC study. This is the highest level of teenage sadness ever recorded.

The government survey of almost 8,000 high-school students, which was conducted in the first six months of 2021, found a great deal of variation in mental health among different groups. More than one in four girls reported that they had seriously contemplated attempting suicide during the pandemic, which was twice the rate of boys. Nearly half of LGBTQ teens said they had contemplated suicide during the pandemic, compared with 14 percent of their heterosexual peers. Sadness among white teens seems to be rising faster than among other groups.

But the big picture is the same across all categories: Almost every measure of mental health is getting worse, for every teenage demographic, and it's happening all across the country. Since 2009, sadness and hopelessness have increased for every race; for straight teens and gay teens; for teens who say they've never had sex and for those who say they've had sex with males and/or females; for students in each year of high school; and for teens in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

So why is this happening?

I want to propose several answers to that question, along with one meta-explanation that ties them together. But before I start with that, I want to squash a few tempting fallacies.

The first fallacy is that we can chalk this all up to teens behaving badly. In fact, lots of self-reported teen behaviors are moving in a positive direction. Since the 1990s, drinking-and-driving is down almost 50 percent. School fights are down 50 percent. Sex before 13 is down more than 70 percent. School bullying is down. And LGBTQ acceptance is up.

The second fallacy is that teens have always been moody, and sadness looks like it is rising only because people are more willing to talk about it. Objective measures of anxiety and depression- such as eating disorders, self-harming behavior, and teen suicides-are sharply up over the past decade. "Across the country we have witnessed dramatic increases in Emergency Department visits for all mental health emergencies including suspected suicide attempts," the American Academy of Pediatrics said in October. Today's teenagers are more comfortable talking about mental health, but rising youth sadness is no illusion.

The third fallacy is that today's mental-health crisis was principally caused by the pandemic and an overreaction to COVID. "Rising teenage sadness isn't a new trend, but rather the acceleration and broadening of a trend that clearly started before the pandemic," Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, told me. But he added: "We shouldn't ignore the pandemic, either. The fact that COVID seems to have made teen mental health worse offers clues about what's really driving the rise in sadness."

Here are four forces propelling that increase.
1. Social-media use
Five years ago, the psychologist Jean Twenge wrote an influential and controversial feature in The Atlantic titled "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" based on her book iGen. Around 2012, Twenge wrote, she had noticed that teen sadness and anxiety began to steadily rise in the U.S. and other rich developed countries. She looked for explanations and realized that 2012 was precisely when the share of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent and mobile social-media use spiked.

In the past few years, scientists have disputed the idea that social-media use itself makes teenagers miserable. "There's been absolutely hundreds of [social-media and mental-health] studies, almost all showing pretty small effects," Jeff Hancock, a behavioral psychologist at Stanford University who has conducted a meta-analysis of 226 such studies, told The New York Times recently.

But I think Twenge's strongest point is misunderstood. Social media isn't like rat poison, which is toxic to almost everyone. It's more like alcohol: a mildly addictive substance that can enhance social situations but can also lead to dependency and depression among a minority of users.

This is very close to the conclusion reached by none other than Instagram. The company's internal research from 2020 found that, while most users had a positive relationship with the app, one-third of teen girls said "Instagram made them feel worse," even though these girls "feel unable to stop themselves" from logging on. And if you don't believe a company owned by Facebook, believe a big new study from Cambridge University, in which researchers looked at 84,000 people of all ages and found that social media was strongly associated with worse mental health during certain sensitive life periods, including for girls ages 11 to 13.

Why would social media affect teenage mental health in this way? One explanation is that teenagers (and teenage girls in particular) are uniquely sensitive to the judgment of friends, teachers, and the digital crowd. As I've written, social media seems to hijack this keen peer sensitivity and drive obsessive thinking about body image and popularity. The problem isn't just that social media fuels anxiety but also that-as we'll see-it makes it harder for today's young people to cope with the pressures of growing up.
2. Sociality is down
Both Steinberg and Twenge stress that the biggest problem with social media might be not social media itself, but rather the activities that it replaces.

"I tell parents all the time that if Instagram is merely displacing TV, I'm not concerned about it," Steinberg told me. But today's teens spend more than five hours daily on social media, and that habit seems to be displacing quite a lot of beneficial activity. The share of high-school students who got eight or more hours of sleep declined 30 percent from 2007 to 2019. Compared with their counterparts in the 2000s, today's teens are less likely to go out with their friends, get their driver's license, or play youth sports.

The pandemic and the closure of schools likely exacerbated teen loneliness and sadness. A 2020 survey from Harvard's Graduate School of Education found that loneliness spiked in the first year of the pandemic for everyone, but it rose most significantly for young people. "It's well established that what protects teens from stress is close social relationships," Steinberg said. "When kids can't go to school to see their friends and peers and mentors, that social isolation could lead to sadness and depression, particularly for those predisposed to feeling sad or depressed."

This is important to say clearly: Aloneness isn't the same as loneliness, and loneliness isn't the same as depression. But more aloneness (including from heavy smartphone use) and more loneliness (including from school closures) might have combined to push up sadness among teenagers who need sociality to protect them from the pressures of a stressful world.
3. The world is stressful-and there is more news about the world's stressors
Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist and author, told me that no single factor can account for the rise of teenage sadness. But she believes a part of the answer is that the world has become more stressful. Or, at least, teenagers' perception of the world seems to be causing them more stress.

"In the last decade teenagers have become increasingly stressed by concerns about gun violence, climate change, and the political environment," she wrote in an email. "Increased stress among young people is linked to increasing levels of sadness. Girls, more than boys, are socialized to internalize distress, meaning that they tend to collapse in on themselves by becoming depressed or anxious."

Fears about finances, climate change, and viral pandemics are smashing into local concerns about social approval and setting oneself up for success. "I think of it as a pile-on effect," Steinberg said. "We're coming out of the pandemic, and then suddenly Russia goes to war. Every day, it feels like there's something else. It creates a very gloomy narrative about the world."

This sense of doom doesn't just come from teenagers. It comes from us, the news media, and from the social-media channels through which our work is distributed. News sources have never been more abundant, or more accessible. But journalism also has a famous bad-news bias, which flows from an unfortunate but accurate understanding that negativity generally gets more attention. When we plug our brain into a news feed, we are usually choosing to deluge ourselves with negative representations of reality. A well-known 2019 experiment randomly forced people to stop using Facebook for four weeks before a midterm election. The study found that those who logged off spent more time hanging out with family and friends, consistent with the idea that social-media use displaces pro-social behaviors. It also found that deactivating Facebook "reduced factual news knowledge" while "increasing subjective well-being." We cannot rule out the possibility that teens are sad about the world, not only because the world contains sadness, but also because young people have 24/7 access to sites that are constantly telling them they should be depressed about it.
4. Modern parenting strategies
In the past 40 years, American parents-especially those with a college degree- have nearly doubled the amount of time they spend coaching, chauffeuring, tutoring, and otherwise helping their teenage children. The economist Valerie Ramey has labeled this the " rug rat race." High-income parents in particular are spending much more time preparing their kids for a competitive college admissions process. When I interviewed Ramey about her work in 2019, she told me that she "couldn't believe the amount of pressure our friends were putting on their kids to get ready for college."

The "rug rat race" is an upper-class phenomenon that can't explain a generalized increase in teenage sadness. But it could well explain part of what's going on. And in the 2020 Atlantic feature "What Happened to American Childhood?," Kate Julian described a related phenomenon that affects families a bit more broadly: Anxious parents, in seeking to insulate their children from risk and danger, are unintentionally transferring their anxiety to their kids.

I want to pull out two points from Julian's complex essay. First, children are growing up slower than they used to. Today's children are less likely to drive, get a summer job, or be asked to do chores. The problem isn't that kids are lazy (homework time has risen), or that scrubbing dishes magically dispels anxiety disorders. Rather, Julian wrote, these activities "provide children with two very important things": tolerating discomfort and having a sense of personal competence.

Second, researchers have noted a broad increase in an "accommodative" parenting style. If a girl is afraid of dogs, an "accommodation" would be keeping her away from every friend's house with a dog, or if a boy won't eat vegetables, feeding him nothing but turkey loaf for four years ( an actual story from the article). These behaviors come from love. But part of growing up is learning how to release negative emotions in the face of inevitable stress. If kids never figure out how to do that, they're more likely to experience severe anxiety as teenagers.

Julian highlighted a new treatment out of Yale University's Child Study Center called SPACE, or Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions. Put simply, SPACE forces parents to be less accommodating. If the girl is afraid of dogs, encourage her to play with young puppies. If the boy hates vegetables, caramelize the hell out of some broccoli. This sort of advice is infinitely easier to type than to put into practice. But folding a bit of exposure therapy into modern parenting and childhood might help teenagers grapple with a complex and stressful world.

Other explanations don't fit neatly into the above categories. Maybe drugs are a big factor: One study found that a sixth of the increase in teen suicides was associated with parental opioid addiction. Maybe the authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt are right that college campuses and internet culture have come to celebrate fragility. Maybe political polarization is fueling anxiety, not only by creating mutual hatred but also by encouraging people to reject opposing views, which over time reduces their capacity to handle cognitive dissonance in a confusing world.

The truth is I'm not satisfied by any of the above explanations, on their own. But I see no reason to keep them alone. They interact, amplify, and compound. And together they paint a powerful picture.

The world is overwhelming, and an inescapably negative news cycle creates an atmosphere of existential gloom, not just for teens but also for their moms and dads. The more overwhelming the world feels to parents, the more they may try to bubble-wrap their kids with accommodations. Over time, this protective parenting style deprives children of the emotional resilience they need to handle the world's stresses. Childhood becomes more insular: Time spent with friends, driving, dating, and working summer jobs all decline. College pressures skyrocket. Outwardly, teens are growing up slower; but online, they're growing up faster. The internet exposes teenagers not only to supportive friendships but also to bullying, threats, despairing conversations about mental health, and a slurry of unsolvable global problems-a carnival of negativity. Social media places in every teen's pocket a quantified battle royal for scarce popularity that can displace hours of sleep and makes many teens, especially girls, feel worse about their body and life. Amplify these existing trends with a global pandemic and an unprecedented period of social isolation, and suddenly, the remarkable rise of teenage sadness doesn't feel all that mysterious, does it?

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Four forces are propelling the rising rates of depression among young people.

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The Supreme Court decision on abortion rights will have many strong arguments... certainly this one is.

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The Supreme Court decision on abortion rights will have many strong arguments... certainly this one is.

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I'm livid.

I haven't been this angry-or disappointed in America-since watching the George Floyd video. I experienced the same white-hot outrage at watching in helpless disbelief as a government institution designed to protect us openly and smugly flaunts injustice.

Sadly, there are even more similarities between the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and the George Floyd murder: it is the willful subjugation, humiliation, marginalization, and enslavement of a group based only on their physical attributes. The Republicans don't want to confiscate guns, just ovaries. The United States now allows abortion laws that are more restrictive than when the country was founded. The colonies in 1776 were more amenable to abortion than Oklahoma and Texas in 2022.

The abortion issue is also similar to the George Floyd protests in that the will of the majority of Americans is being thwarted by a minority of conservatives less interested in conscience than in grooming pliable voters. According to Gallup, 85% of Americans think abortion should be available in some or all circumstances, while 35% believe it should be available in all circumstances. Only 13% say it should be illegal in all circumstances. And yet illegal in all circumstances is the law being enacted by eight states, with five more allowing exceptions only for rape and incest. And more states are lining up to hop aboard the FU America train as it time-travels back to the Middle Ages. No witches allowed.

How is it possible that such restrictive laws can be passed when only 13% of the people support them? It is a slow-motion overthrow of democracy through GOP gerrymandering, voter restrictions targeting minorities and the poor, stoking racial fears, and the ignorance and complacency of voters too busy preparing for Fourth of July barbecues to do their actual patriotic duty of preserving democracy.

I've written many articles logically addressing the anti-abortion arguments. It's useless to do so again-or perhaps it always was-because logic is not what compels them. It is the conviction that their personal belief system is morally superior and therefore should be imposed on everyone else. This is the basic premise of all horror and action movies. The killer in horror is a mindless entity-such as the characters Mike Meyers, Jason, Jaws, etc.-that cannot be reasoned with. Nothing can be said to dissuade them from carnage. In thrillers-Bond films, Kingsmen, Mission: Impossible, etc.-the arrogant villain is convinced their righteous vision outweighs everyone else's, justifying their mass destruction. They cannot be reasoned with.

How can you reason with Rep. Mary E. Miller (R-Ill) who said to the crowd at a Trump rally on Sunday: "President Trump, on behalf of all the MAGA patriots in America, I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday." The crowd enthusiastically cheered. Miller's spokesperson said she just mixed up her words, meaning to say "the right to life." Even if that were true, the bigger point is: when she said "victory for white life" THE CROWD ENTHUSIASTICALLY CHEERED! People now feel empowered to openly express misogyny and racism. If only they were able to express shame.

That is what we now face: those who will ignore reason, decency, and the Constitution to replace democracy with plutocracy (rule by the wealthy) and theocracy (rule by those claiming to represent God). And we're letting them-like a family intently watching TV while burglars openly rob their home of valuables.

What especially disturbs me is that many of the anti-abortionists take this stance, not because they have examined all the arguments and facts, but because it is an accepted form of virtue signaling. Their opposition to abortion is just another way of wearing a t-shirt proclaiming, "I'm a moral person. I love babies."

If they truly believed that a fetus is an actual human being with rights equal to a born woman, then to them abortion would be murder. If they were sitting in a room and saw an angry man enter a schoolyard with an ax and heard the screams of children, they would probably do something to stop the murder. But what have most done to stop abortion, other than talk. Have they got arrested blocking the abortion clinic? After all, that's the least they can do to prevent murder. The answer is the majority have done nothing because they don't really believe it's murder. It's about how they want to look to others and to feel moral to themselves. It's like shopping therapy, except it's "cause therapy."

According to one study, "Legal induced abortion is markedly safer than childbirth. The risk of death associated with childbirth is approximately 14 times higher than that with abortion. Similarly, the overall morbidity associated with childbirth exceeds that with abortion." Which means the government can now force a woman to endure a life-threatening procedure against her will. Hey, Oklahomans, suppose a married woman with two children deliberately gets pregnant but her husband is killed in an accident. She decides she'd rather not risk the danger of giving birth and leaving her two children orphans. Should the government have the right to tell her she, as a conscientious parent, can't make that decision? Now the government can make parental choices as well.

In 1991, Susan Faludi wrote the brilliant Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women in which she identified how historically whenever women made substantial gains regarding equal rights, there was a cultural backlash attempting to subvert them. That is exactly what's happening today. It's no wonder that two of the Supreme Court Justices leading the backlash-Thomas and Kavanaugh-have been accused of inappropriate sexual misconduct in the past. Or that Justice Thomas's wife, Ginni, a staunch Trump supporter, colluded to overthrow the lawful election.

How is it that we can so blatantly disrespect women, to insult them to their faces and think we can get away with it? Has our culture perpetuated the myth to men and women that submissiveness is to be rewarded, like an abusive boyfriend bringing flowers after hitting her? As philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote in "[I]n exchange for her liberty she has received the false treasures of her 'femininity'. Balzac illustrates this manoeuvre very well in counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen."

The undeniable result of this Court decision is that women are officially reduced to second-class citizens. All pretense that they are equal in the eyes of the law has been dropped. They will be first judged by their body, not their intellect. The subconscious message that will influence culture is: if the government finds women incapable of making their own decisions-like children-how can we take them seriously.

The glass ceiling just got lower and thicker. And covered with razor wire.

The police murder of George Floyd triggered the largest protest movement in the history of the U.S., with up to 26 million people taking to the streets. The video of his death touched Americans deep in their souls. There are some injustices that cannot be tolerated. I hope we can find this Court decision as deeply troubling and intolerable without videos of women dying in childbirth or from self-induced abortions.

Peaceful demonstrations in the streets are fine because they articulate our frustrations and make the will of the people known. But the real test of everyone's commitment to equal rights for all will be this November in the elections. Conservatives are counting on moderates and liberals staying home while their followers pick our lawmakers. Do not let this happen. Every candidate who supports anti-abortion legislation-regardless of party or gender-must not be voted into office. None.

That is the only way to take back the country from the entitled 13%.

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Roe v. Wade: Women Have Just Been Declared Second-Class Citizens (Remember to Smile, Ladies)

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I'm livid. I haven't been this angry-or disappointed in America-since watching the George Floyd video. I experienced the same white-hot outrage at watching in helpless disbelief as a government institution designed to protect us openly and smugly flaunts injustice. Sadly, there are even more similarities between the U.S.

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My Mother's Fried Chicken Was a Link to My Past--and My Daughter's Future | Kwame Alexander

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My Mother's Fried Chicken Was a Link to My Past--and My Daughter's Future | Kwame Alexander

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I chose this text because my students will write about food, Kwame Alexander is one of our favorite authors, and reflection is a comfortable place for many writers to begin.

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Frying chicken right is like riding a bike backward. Or writing a sonnet. It's hard, sometimes elusive-but in the face of loss, it can also be life-giving.

This is All on the Table, a column featuring writers we love sharing stories of food, conflict, and community.

The last meal I shared with my mother was in a capacious hospital room in Chesapeake, Virginia. It was breakfast time and the sun was a carefree soul galloping through the window like a wild horse. Having not eaten much in the 48 hours since she'd been admitted with complications of sarcoidosis, she was quite hungry. So I fed her. Spooned the applesauce. Placed in her mouth a few ice chips from the water glass she couldn't finish (crunching ice always gratified her). That was 2017. The year my heart broke into a million jagged puzzle pieces.

None of us is ever prepared for death. When a great tree falls, the birds, with no branch to perch on, scatter. Looking for a new home. In the four years since my graceful mother has passed, I've been searching. Thumbing through old scrapbooks, sprinkling her ashes in places we lived and traveled- Brooklyn and St. Croix and Fayetteville, North Carolina-all in an effort to find some solace. To find a new home.

In 2018, when the American School in London invited me to become its inaugural Innovator-in-Residence, I welcomed the opportunity for that solace, along with a professional reboot. I'd gotten into a writing rhythm that, while successful, felt almost too comfortable. The process of coming up with a beginning, middle, and end was akin to riding a bike for me, and I could cruise through a story, arms akimbo, head to the wind. I needed to challenge my storytelling normal, become inspired in new and exciting ways, learn to pop a wheelie.

Part of moving yourself forward in a life-giving way is to take the things from the past that have helped shape and mold you and use them as anchors to the future. My own vision of what lay ahead came during two farewell dinners hosted by friends in the summer of 2019. First, award-winning children's book illustrator Melissa Sweet crafted homemade lobster rolls the size of my arms in her palsy-walsy Maine home. Then I drove south to dine alfresco-grilled snapper, cheddar biscuits, Summer in a Bottle rosé-in celebration of Jacqueline Woodson's latest novel at her family's country estate. These two women not only burned in the kitchen, but laughed and told stories and answered phone calls and helped with homework and listened. At the same time. With the cool and calm of a river flowing in a forest. Just like my mother used to do. Determined to do the same, the new Kwame would find his way home not only by moving to London but by cooking.

In my first few weeks there, I figured out how to catch a bus to Maida Vale, write at an outdoor café while sipping English breakfast tea, and take refuge at the bottom of the London Library when it rained. I also learned to make some pretty tasty pasta-fettuccine Alfredo, spinach lasagna-that my finicky 11-year-old daughter, Samayah, actually enjoyed.

As the weeks turned to months, I discovered the best walking route to Samayah's new school. I learned how to listen and acknowledge her cries for independence and smile when she grabbed my hand and held it, our fingers braided like the cornrows her mother designed. I learned how to answer her not-so-random questions about why can't we get a car or do you have to walk me the whole way or can we have a break from pasta... and make Granny's fried chicken for dinner?

"If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you," wrote Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones. Thus, I imagined, if you read good cookbooks, good food would come out of your kitchen. So I immersed myself in a plethora of cooking primers, instructional videos, and blogs. I cooked daily while listening to music, helping Samayah with homework, and just being in the moment. My recipe file fattened. Some meals turned out delicious the first time: Fish chowder. Ghanaian red red. Lobster mac and cheese (which almost didn't happen 'cause lobster meat in London is more expensive than beluga caviar). Others required experimentation: Tuscan bread salad. Blueberry scones. Beer-battered fish. Unfortunately, my buttermilk pancakes looked, and tasted, more like crepes. Fortunately, my daughter loves crepes. But she also loves chicken, and she kept asking me to make it.

During my adolescent summers, my mother often took us to Virginia Beach where we'd spend the day building sandcastles, swimming too far out, and screaming bloody murder when we got bit by a jellyfish. Two things loom large in those memories. One was this: As hungry as we were from playing in the water, we hated getting out of it for lunch because of my mother's belief that one must wait 30 minutes to swim after eating (or face severe cramps due to lack of blood flow to the stomach and thus drown). The other: Once you bit into one of my mother's crispy, juicy fried chicken drumsticks, the complaining stopped. She charmed us.

Until she was five, Samayah was a vegetarian-until we sent her to my mother's for her own summer weekend. As the story goes, Granny packed the three visiting grandchildren into her burgundy Hyundai one Saturday morning and carted them off to Virginia Beach for a day of swimming and sandcastles. Around midday she summoned each of them from the water and handed out brown paper bags full of chicken. When Samayah came home I understood the resoluteness in her smile. "Daddy, I'm not a vegetarian anymore."

Fried chicken was one of my mother's signature dishes, as it was my grandmother's, and her grandmother's before that. Now that I wanted to continue the tradition for my daughter in my modest London kitchen, I needed the recipe. So I called around to my sisters, my aunts, even my father (who only ever lovingly made two dishes, mustard mac and cheese and tad-too-bland baked chicken). But I got the same answer from each of them: There is no recipe. They simply used a little bit of this and a little bit of that and cooked it until it was done. These reveals were often followed by joyous remembrances of picnics and Sunday dinners and family reunions, and every now and then I'd get a clue: Barbara had that cast-iron skillet. Your grandmother used Crisco. The paper bag? They say it's to better coat the chicken, but we only used it 'cause Momma used it. Garlic powder. Paprika. And don't forget the oil has gotta be hot!

This is how I began putting the pieces of my puzzle back together again. I'd go to the butcher down the block and buy six wings and two breasts one day, four thighs and five legs another. Try to remember my mother in the kitchen-her fingers covered in flour, her jubilant singing filling the room, her seasoned spirit. Imagine and reimagine the ingredients in her brown paper bag. See her placing the chicken in her pan, allowing each piece room to breathe. And every time I cooked, I felt a little bit closer to her, perched on a branch of her life.

Frying chicken right can feel like riding a bike backward. Or writing a sonnet. It's hard, sometimes elusive. But there is a form to guide you, and with practice you can find the flow. For me it took a dozen tries, and yet the ecstatic look on my kid's face when she bit into that twelfth and final chicken wing was worth the wait. She got what she'd asked for. So did I. Through cooking I'd reunited with my mother, forged a powerful kinship. It was life-giving.

This one beautiful life is a series of puzzles. If you're fortunate you get someone to show you how they fit together. If you're really lucky, when they're gone, you learn how to let their memory guide you, hug you, gather you. So that when you get sad and unsure-because this new puzzle seems undoable-at least you have the precious memories to feed you while you put the pieces back together and find your way home.

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Kwame Alexander is the poet-in-residence at NPR's 'Morning Edition' and cocreator of a Disney+ series based on his Newbery Medal-winning novel, 'The Crossover.'

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My Mother's Fried Chicken Was a Link to My Past-and My Daughter's Future

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Frying chicken right is like riding a bike backward. Or writing a sonnet. It's hard, sometimes elusive-but in the face of loss, it can also be life-giving. This is All on the Table , a column featuring writers we love sharing stories of food, conflict, and community.

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