# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Slow Reveal Graph is an instructional routine that promotes sensemaking about data. This highly engaging routine uses scaffolded visuals and discourse to help students (in K-12 and beyond) make sense of data. As more and more of the graph is revealed, students refine their interpretation and construct meaning, often in surprising ways.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Vax Rates, ESAs, and Cell Phone Bans: 12 Charts That Defined Education in 2025

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
These research findings captured the K–12 world at the start of President Trump’s second term.

# data[].attributes.headline
Ways to think about graphics... so many moving (& fascinating) examples.

# data[].attributes.subject
Ways to think about graphics... so many moving (& fascinating) examples.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Information Graphics Reveal Your Brain’s Blind Spots

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Illustrations by Mona ChalabiApril 7, 2022

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
9 Ways to Imagine Jeff Bezos’ Wealth (Published 2022)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A fortune of $172 billion is almost impossible to fathom. For the magazine’s Money Issue, the artist Mona Chalabi came up with some extremely original comparisons.

# data[].attributes.headline
Tending the Deadliest Garden from National Geographic (available to read with an email address)

# data[].attributes.subject
Tending the Deadliest Garden from National Geographic (available to read with an email address)

# data[].attributes.body
The information will delight and surprise readers, but as usual, the craft is also worth a close look.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What it takes to tend poisonous plants in the world’s deadliest garden

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A toxic tour of the high-security facility with more than a hundred plants that could kill you.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
DataIsBeautiful is for visualizations that effectively convey information. Aesthetics are an important part of information visualization, but…

# data[].attributes.headline
from the Georgetown Exoneration Project: mini-docs to convince a judge to release a prisoner

# data[].attributes.subject
from the Georgetown Exoneration Project: mini-docs to convince a judge to release a prisoner

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Georgetown Prisons and Justice Initiative

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Wrong Hair, Wrong Size, Wrong Man: Framing Gary Benloss

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A big climate problem we can actually solve

# data[].attributes.headline
Pair this with Ocean Vuong poem "Aubade with Burning City"

# data[].attributes.subject
Pair this with Ocean Vuong poem "Aubade with Burning City"

# data[].attributes.body
Imagine a multi-genre approach to studying war: timeline to anchor this period, art that reflects the time then and after, georgraphy study of the environmental impacts of war, poetry to center civilians & the power of human creation, and music... it will go far beyond knowledge alone to the emotions that make facts and figures more permanent in our minds.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By April 1975-after almost twenty years fighting in Vietnam-the United States began its pull-out. That winter the North Vietnamese pushed the South Vietnamese back forcefully and definitively.

The Americans knew that it was over. They needed to pull out about 1000 Americans-many of them civilians-and 6000 at-risk Vietnamese, who would suffer if they were left behind.

Evacuation Plan Set

In preparation for the expected evacuation, the American Embassy distributed a 15-page booklet called SAFE (Standard Instruction and Advice to Civilians in an Emergency). A map within the booklet indicated the assembly areas were helicopters would be able to land to pick people up. An insert page read:
Note evacuational signal. Do not disclose to other personnel. When the evacuation is ordered, the code will be read on Armed Forces Radio. The code is: "The temperature in Saigon is 105 degrees and rising." This will be followed by the playing of "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas."
Those who were not U.S. citizens but expected to participate in the evacuation, contacted Americans they knew and asked them to sing the tune. They feared they might not recognize it.

Operation Frequent Wind

Throughout April, the United States reduced the number of people and the equipment in Vietnam. Then on April 28, 1975, the order from President Gerald Ford arrived, launching Operation Frequent Wind, the term used for the final evacuation. The coded message went out: The temperature in Saigon is 105 degrees and rising." Then the wistful strains of White Christmas played on the radio.

In nineteen hours, 81 helicopters carried approximately 7,000 people to aircraft carriers offshore.

As more people than expected arrived to clamber onto the helicopters, people left their belongings behind. Men and women opened their suitcases to locate passports. For some climbing on to the Sikorsky H-34s, there was no room to sit. They stood anxiously, desperate to get out.

Final Evacuation of Vietnam

During the final hours of Operation Frequent Wind, two military personnel were killed. Shrapnel from a North Vietnamese rocket struck them as they guarded the airbase to let others evacuate.

At 7:53 a.m. on April 30, the last helicopter lifted off the roof of the embassy and headed out to sea.

Later that morning, North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace.

To read about the story of White Christmas click here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Evacuation of Vietnam Signaled by Playing of White Christmas

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By April 1975-after almost twenty years fighting in Vietnam-the United States began its pull-out. That winter the North Vietnamese pushed the South Vietnamese back forcefully and definitively. The Americans knew that it was over. They needed to pull out about 1000 Americans-many of them civilians-and 6000 at-risk Vietnamese, who would suffer if they were left behind.

# data[].attributes.headline
Book Love Foundation top picks for Book Clubs study at 20% off...

# data[].attributes.subject
Book Love Foundation top picks for Book Clubs study at 20% off...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Book Love Book Club Recommendations
Please enjoy a special teacher discount of 20% off the titles of your choice using the code BOOKLOVEBOOKCLUB.
And below, we collected the favorite books of the Book Love Book Club.

2024-2025 Book Club Titles

The Book Love Foundation is dedicated to teachers who inspire a love of reading. We provide classroom libraries comprised of hundreds of books carefully chosen by the teachers to meet students where they are and lead them to the deep rewards of reading. We put those books into the hands of teachers who demonstrate a commitment to rich reading lives of all students.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Book Love Book Club Recommendations - Bookelicious

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Please enjoy a special teacher discount of 20% off the titles of your choice using the code BOOKLOVEBOOKCLUB. And below, we collected the favorite books of the Book Love Book Club. 2024-2025 Book Club Titles Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj The Collectors by M T Anderson The Door of No Return [...]

# data[].attributes.headline
Passage study: style, sentence structure, and footnotes to add information

# data[].attributes.subject
Passage study: style, sentence structure, and footnotes to add information

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
died six years ago, he's come back in ways that are mysterious and magical and hard to explain. It started the day of his funeral, when the doves that were released over his coffin refused to fly home, perching instead in the oak tree just above his grave as if witnessing a visitation. Then there was that drive to El Paso, Texas, when - not once but twice - the windshield wipers started swiping just as the satellite radio cut out midsong, switching to the tune Myers' sister Natasha had been listening to at the exact moment when her mom called with the news that her brother was gone. There was the way Myers' nephew - the one who was just a baby when Myers died - would sometimes point into an empty corner of a room and say "uncle." There were the Pokémon cards that Myers had loved as a child but hadn't played with in years turning up one by one in unexpected and impossible places, like the middle of a clean kitchen floor. There were the nights when Myers' mother, Letitia Wilbourn, would feel him, actually feel him, resting his head upon her shoulder, even though no one was there. But, of course, that's not right. There was someone there. He was there. She knew it. Such is the logic of grief.

Tragedy rips the grieving out of the storyline of their own life, denies them any sense of what the past meant or the future will hold. Wilbourn remembers few details from her son's funeral, but she does remember the doves. "That lady said, 'These birds have never done this. Never,'" she tells me, sitting on a small sofa in the darkened living room of her modest house in the suburbs of Fort Worth, surrounded by pictures and mementos from her son's short life: an infant footprint from the hospital where he was born, a class project he wrote about wanting to own a whale, a photo of him posing in his Little League uniform with a shy smile. "The lady was like, 'Was he a very gentle spirit?'"

DuQuan Myers was a gentle spirit. His family called him the "animal whisperer," the kid who loved to roam the farmland that still abutted their Echo Heights neighborhood and who would bring home all kinds of creatures he'd "rescued" - dogs, cats, turtles, frogs, lizards, toads, even once a snake that Wilbourn found, to her horror, in a candy jar. When his three older sisters squabbled, Myers was the one who always could diffuse the situation, the baby brother whose humor and charisma and cheerfulness were impossible to resist. It fit no known narrative that Myers would hurt any living thing, himself included. And yet on the evening of Feb. 17, 2017, Wilbourn had been driving home from her job as a cop for the Tarrant County Sheriff's Office when she received a phone call. On the other end, she could hear the keening sobs of the young woman Myers had dated off and on for years. "She said, 'Quan's dead,'" Wilbourn explains. "I was like, 'What?' She said, 'DuQuan's dead.'" Home alone in his apartment near Texas State, 26 years old and only months away from getting a degree in criminal justice, Myers had shot himself in the head.

Without thinking, wild with grief, Wilbourn turned her car toward San Marcos and drove 77 miles in 30 blind minutes before a friend called and persuaded her to pull over and turn around. Myers was gone. There was nothing to be done that night, which Wilbourn spent at home, alone, her phone switched off so nothing could puncture the cocoon of mourning and confusion. She'd spoken to Myers earlier that day, just before he'd begun his shift at FedEx. He'd seemed fine, his normal self. But had she missed something? She knew he had a gun, but he lived in Texas; everyone has one. She'd only discussed suicide with him once before, back when Chris Benoit, a wrestler Myers admired, hanged himself. Myers had said, "Oh, I'd never commit suicide. I love me way too much for that." Then he'd grinned at her with that way he had. "Look at how pretty I am." Now, her beautiful boy was gone.

In the car the next day, on the way to San Marcos to begin the procedural processes of death - closing up Myers' apartment, identifying his body, speaking to investigators who had no doubt that the gunshot wound was self-inflicted - Wilbourn was on a call with the medical examiner when, out of nowhere, she heard herself asking if they could save Myers' brain, if they could have it studied. "I just knew that the suicide didn't make sense, because he wasn't suicidal," she says, her voice measured, her Texas accent melodic. "I was just praying for answers, and when the phone rang, that's what came out. I wasn't thinking that anything was wrong with his brain or anything like that, I just knew something wasn't right. It's just the mother's instinct."

There was also, perhaps, a subconscious concern. Myers had played football for seven years, from sixth grade through his senior year of high school. In the time since he'd stopped playing, Wilbourn had learned about chronic traumatic encephalopathy - the degenerative brain disease that had plagued NFL greats like Mike Webster, Andre Waters, and Dave Duerson (who shot himself in the heart specifically so that his brain would be intact when studied). Like many people, she'd been alarmed by the reports of these famously tough athletes whose very toughness had been their undoing. Then again, she didn't actually think Myers fit the CTE profile: He had not played football past high school; he'd never had a concussion that she knew of; he was nothing like Aaron Hernandez or Junior Seau, men who'd grown angry and addled and violent before dying angry and addled and violent deaths. So it was a surprise, she says, when "the first thing out of my mouth was 'Can we donate his brain to Boston University?'" She looks down at the photos surrounding her. "I think that was just a God thing."

IT HAS BEEN ALMOST two decades since Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Famer Mike Webster become the first NFL player to be diagnosed with CTE, after a heart attack at age 50 put an end to misery so intense that Webster - by then sleeping in his car because he couldn't remember where he lived - would shoot himself with a taser gun until he mercifully blacked out. Even then, CTE wasn't exactly a new discovery: A medical report from 1928 described boxers with "punch-drunk syndrome," later classified as dementia pugilistica. The first known use of the term "chronic traumatic encephalopathy" occurred in a neurology paper written in 1949. But Webster's 2005 diagnosis was a watershed moment, implicating the most popular sport in America, one grafted into the guts and glory of the American psyche - and one that millions of American kids were suiting up to play every season. So documentaries were made. Brain banks were established. Funding flowed. And as more and more brains of dead athletes were submitted for study, it became clear that, while CTE was a progressive disease, it was not the sole province of aging NFL players. It could show up in the brains of people in their teens and twenties, people who'd never played past the age of 18.

Even in CTE's earliest stages - and for reasons scientists are still exploring - its effects could be grave. "We're north of 1,300 brains, and while the overwhelming majority are from people who are older, we certainly have hundreds of brains of people in that younger age group," says Dr. Robert Cantu, co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, chair of neurosurgery at Emerson Hospital, and the nation's leading authority on concussions. "CTE hasn't directly killed anybody in their teens, twenties, thirties, forties, but we have a lot of people with CTE that have died at those ages. Almost all of them have died by suicide."

It is well-established that suffering even just one concussion is a risk factor for developing mental-health issues. The year after Myers' death, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study that found that a person's risk of dying by suicide doubled after being diagnosed with a concussion. A 2021 study in the Journal of Neurotrauma followed patients for 180 days and found "significantly increased rates of depression, anxiety, or suicidal ideation following concussion" in those under 26 years of age. Another study, from 2022 and published in American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, found that 48 percent of all concussion patients were later diagnosed with depression, anxiety, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia in the three years that they were tracked, and that "all of the mental illnesses this study chose to evaluate were present in a higher proportion of patients after a concussion than the general population."

But CTE isn't just about diagnosed concussions, most of which go on to heal with no obvious, lasting effects. It's about repeated, seemingly benign assaults to brain tissue, little "dings" that could occur dozens of times in a single game and that a player may not even clock but that nonetheless cause damage at the cellular level - microscopically torn blood vessels, disconnected neurons, jumbled tau proteins (the building blocks of the fibers that carry nutrients and messages from cell to cell). Given time, the brain can usually repair this damage - except when players don't even know there's been damage, and so don't grant themselves time to recover. In that case, injuries can compound until the brain is overwhelmed, until - unable to reconfigure themselves - the tau proteins essentially rot, creating toxic lesions that spread deeper into the brain and even sometimes into the brain stem. This past June, the largest CTE study to date confirmed that the best predictor of future brain disease was not the number of diagnosed concussions a player had sustained but rather the cumulative force of all hits to the head throughout their career. In other words, a lot of little impacts could be as damaging as a smattering of major ones.

This means that when kids across America suit up this fall to square off on the gridiron, every hit will matter, every "ding" and every bell rung will count toward an unspecified number past which the brain might be permanently impaired. It means that no amount of concussion protocols can definitively stave off disaster, that some level of danger is lurking in every play. It means that America's greatest game is hurting our children in insidious and incalculable ways, and that addressing the issue might mean fundamentally changing the way we teach a game that has become fundamental to America's sense of self.

"It's a really profound problem to confront, especially for a sport that's been at the center of so much of our community and cultural life, as youth football is and has been," says Kathleen Bachynski, a professor of public health at Muhlenberg College and author of No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis. Bachynski's research details a long history of medical objections that have done little to intercept the sport's cultural dominance. In the 1890s, The Chicago Tribune announced that football would "physically ruin thousands of young men." In the early 1900s, the brutality of Ivy League games led them to be described as "boy-killing, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport" (even Teddy Roosevelt intervened, leading to the limitation of certain plays). And throughout the 20th century, doctors continued to sound the alarm in publications like the Journal of the American Medical Association ("Football is no game for boys to play"), the Journal of School Health ("More concussions occur in football than is generally realized"), and the American Journal of Public Health ("[Children are] encouraged to addle their own brains with repeated concussions in such sports as football and boxing"). Meanwhile, as boxing declined in popularity, football's reach only grew. Youth leagues began mushrooming in the Sixties. Kids as young as five suited up. "It's really hard for us, societally, to confront something that we thought was great might not have been so great," says Bachynski of this cultural expansion. "But there are some health risks that we have decided even a fully-informed parent can't allow their kid to [take]. If you understand all the risks and harms of cigarettes, you cannot let your 12-year-old smoke a cigarette - that's not something you can choose as a parent. And we have to decide: 'Do repeated head impacts fall in that category?'"

For football's defenders, the answer is no. "I love this sport. I think it's America's greatest sport," says Dr. Julian Bailes, a former team physician for the Pittsburgh Steelers, a neurological consultant to the NFL Players Association, and the head of the medical advisory committee for Pop Warner, the country's largest youth-football league. Bailes knew Mike Webster personally and, having helped identify the clinical evidence of Webster's CTE (he's played by Alec Baldwin in the movie Concussion), is considered to be a pioneer in the field. He certainly acknowledges the cumulative nature of the risk when it comes to head impacts and CTE, but argues that the threshold for developing the disease would be unlikely to be met just by playing a few years of youth football. "I'm not pro-head injury or pro-concussion, but there's no conclusive evidence that if you play youth football it's going to lead to long-term brain damage," he tells me. "The risk occurs as [players] get into high school and college, and they are big and strong and fast and have 600 to a thousand hits a season. So in my opinion, it's a misdirected argument. There's probably 100 kids who get killed on bicycles every year. There's no kids dying playing Pop Warner football."

But science continues to raise red flags about the sport. A 2016 study published in Radiology found that playing just one season of youth football caused measurable changes in the white matter of children's brains as well as diminished brain function, even in players who had not displayed signs of having a concussion. Another, from 2018, showed that both years of football play and the age at which an athlete started affected the volume of the thalamus, the egg-shaped structure in the center of the brain that relays information from the body and has been associated with cognition and mood. "Tau is the sexy thing to talk about, so that's what people talk about," says Cantu of the changes to the brain that can occur from repetitive brain injury. "They think, 'You got CTE. That's bad.' Well, you can be very bad off without CTE, just from all those hits."

According to Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist and director of the CTE Center at Boston University - where she heads up the largest brain bank in the country - patients diagnosed with CTE almost always show other signs of brain damage, but those same injuries can still be present without the pathology of a progressive disease. "There are a lot of other changes that can cause very disabling symptoms, and they don't have to rise to the level of CTE," she says. "We're seeing changes in brain architecture, shrinkage of the brain, damage to brain structures, inflammation, evidence of vascular disease - meaning the tiny blood vessels of the brain are probably injured and leaky."

All of these changes have the potential to affect cognition and mental health. And even if the effect is difficult to quantify, with more than 2 million kids playing tackle football every year, certain researchers question whether it has led to an epidemic of children whose potential is diminished, whose cognition might have been a little higher, whose chances of developing depression or dying by suicide might have been a little lower if they had never played a sport in which they had repeatedly sustained injury to their brains. "The novel mental-health-disorder research is actually becoming quite strong," says Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard football player and professional wrestler who went on to co-found the Concussion Legacy Foundation and get a Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience after a concussion he suffered in the ring in 2003 kicked off a sleep disorder, a behavior disorder, and a throbbing headache that didn't let up for years. Now considered the public face of CTE awareness - he's the guy Newsweek called after Hernandez died by suicide in prison, and the person families typically contact if they want to donate the brain of a loved one suspected of having CTE - Nowinski not only believes that the connection between repetitive, low-level head impacts and mental illness is strong enough that developing a mood disorder could prove to be a risk factor for developing CTE, but he also believes that the connection is strong enough to be worrisome in its own right.

A study published in the Journal of Neurotrauma the month before DuQuan Myers' death found that cumulative head impacts, with or without diagnosed concussions, increased the risk of depression, apathy, and behavioral dysregulation. A study published just a few months after his death found that participants with CTE showed accumulations of tau lesions specifically "in brain regions that have been associated with ... impulsivity, depressive symptoms, anxiety, and explosivity." Other studies have found football players to have higher rates of depression than the population at large. "Essentially," says Nowinski, "we're taking kids who have never had an anxiety or depression or self-harm issue, and they're getting it because of damage to their brain."

A MATTER OF HOURS after a bullet entered DuQuan Myers' brain, the local medical examiner in Lockhart, Texas, carefully, gingerly, removed it and submerged it in a formaldehyde solution. She then placed the container into a styrofoam box bound for Boston. Once the brain arrived at McKee's lab at the Boston University CTE Center, it was photographed and dissected. Half was snap-frozen and stored in perpetuity in a negative-80-degree freezer. The other half, the half that would be used to make the diagnosis, was put back in formaldehyde. Then the waiting game began.

Inside the skull of a living human, the brain is almost the consistency of jello, a miraculous mush of electrical charges. It took months for the formaldehyde to seep all the way in, hardening Myers' brain to a consistency that would allow it to be cut into eighth-of-an-inch slivers. Those slivers were then further dissected into hundreds of 10-micron slices, almost impossibly thin ribbons of neural matter that were stained and put into slides for McKee or one of her team to analyze under a microscope. Meanwhile, clinicians were rounding up medical records to determine Myers' medical past, his history of head impacts, and what symptoms he may have had. Both teams worked blindly: Neither would communicate about Myers' case until the clinicians had finished their research and the pathologists had made their determination.

In the spring of 2018, Letitia Wilbourn received a notification that McKee and her colleagues had come to a conclusion in her son's case. Not knowing what she expected or even what she wanted to hear, she arranged to take the call by herself, over her lunch break. "I didn't want to be home alone," she says. "I was carrying so much guilt with his suicide, thinking, 'Did I miss something? Did I do something? What caused it?' I had so much guilt."

On the call, McKee gently shared the diagnosis: Myers had had stage 1 CTE, characterized by one to three microscopic lesions. At this level, the lesions would have affected such a small percentage of Myers' brain that they may not have accounted for any changes in mood or behavior. But they would certainly have been proof of brain trauma that had been unable to fully heal. In fact, his brain also showed arteriolosclerosis (the thickening of small blood vessels), neuroinflammation, and loss of fibers in the white matter, Wilbourn was told. "Then they explained that there was nothing that I could have done to prevent what happened," she says. "They told me that there was no way for me to have known. It was an instant release. I actually had the best day I'd had since he'd died. And then came the guilt of having put him in football to begin with."

As gentle as he'd been off the field, Myers had been formidable on it, starting as both an offensive and defensive lineman despite his small size - only five feet five and 140 pounds by the end of high school. "He loved to tackle people, that's for sure," Wilbourn tells me. She thought of all those times when he had taken a brutal hit and she'd caught her breath, wondering if she should go down to the field and check on him but stopping herself with the reminder that parents weren't supposed to do that. She thought of that time he'd broken his leg during practice and been rushed to the hospital, how she'd thought that fractured fibula and tibia were the worst injuries of his life. She thought of the terrible headaches he'd have after practices, how she'd chalked them up to allergies. She remembered how in high school he'd complained about his vision and suddenly needed glasses when no one else in the family ever had. Now, on the phone with McKee, these things took on new meaning, the past reorganizing itself in her mind.

She'd been clear with the clinicians at Boston University: Myers' life was not without sadness. He and his girlfriend had recently broken up, though that wasn't unusual: They'd broken up and gotten back together more times than Wilbourn could count. His cousin had just passed away, shot by an ex in an act of passion. Like the rest of the extended family, Myers had been shocked and devastated, but seemingly not any more than anyone else. On the call with Boston University, these events were referred to as "triggers," not relevant to the official diagnosis, but certainly not irrelevant to what transpired.

"Often there's a very impulsive component to these suicides," McKee tells me when discussing Myers' case this past spring. "People with an injured brain have a lower ability to control their impulses. They can be fine one minute and then all of a sudden just pull the trigger or whatever they decide to do. Their judgment is off. There's a situation where something doesn't go well or they become depressed, and they don't have the checks and balances that a person who didn't have an injured brain [would have]. We all get depressed at some point, we all feel lousy, but the injured brain just can't stop it. They can't pull themselves back."

For McKee's team, Wilbourn's grief has become a familiar refrain. "That's really common, in my experience, to have just a random, totally impulsive act that just blindsides the family," McKee says. "That's not uncommon with these suicides."

Then again, she also has encountered plenty of cases in which the suicide is not unexpected. It's the end that some families have been expecting, warding off, fighting back for a long, long time.

AROUND THE TIME of his freshman year of college, Michael Bartlett - the person he was, the person he'd always been - started to disappear. It happened gradually, so slowly that at first it didn't seem like much of anything at all, maybe just a bumpy transition into adulthood. Still, his parents, Larry and Susan, grew concerned: Michael had always been friendly and easygoing, with a smile so big it seemed to hijack his entire, handsome face. On the football field, he'd been the sort of solid kid others looked up to. Now, he seemed to frustrate more easily; now, he seemed a little aloof. A year or so into these changes, Larry and Susan took him for academic testing, hoping to figure out why their smart, quizzical son - the one who'd read philosophy as a child - was struggling so much with college. The results surprised them: They were told that Michael had a very high IQ but very low cognitive function. "She said it was like having a 400 horsepower engine in a car with no wheels," Susan says of the report. "And we're like, 'What does that mean?'"

What it ultimately meant was a decade of misery for her family, a decade of Michael's brain seeming to turn on him. He tried cognitive therapy. He tried antidepressants. He tried taking medication for ADD. When none of that helped, he self-medicated with alcohol. He dropped out of college, moving home to his parents' house in La Mesa, California, isolating himself in his room, fully aware that not just his future but something even more intangible was slipping away. "He knew there was something wrong with his brain," says Susan. "He kept saying, 'There's something wrong. This is my best tool. I cannot lose my brain. I can't.' He tried to figure out what was wrong: 'Maybe I have this, maybe I have that. I don't know what's wrong.'" She doesn't remember him ever mentioning CTE, though the thought may have occurred to him. He'd started playing football when he was nine, coming home so beat up that Susan remembers thinking, "'You're not going back to that.' That's the stupidest thing I ever saw." But he did go back. By his early twenties, "he started to shut down a lot. I knew we were in terrible trouble, because he would say things like, 'If I can't get my brain right, I can't live.'"

Eventually, it became clear that he didn't intend to. He got a DUI. He tried to hang himself with a belt in his closet. When Michael was arrested for lunging at the gun of one of the cops who'd responded to a suicide call, Larry couldn't help but realize that, mixed in with the hurt and sadness, he also felt a sense of reprieve. "The thing is, he wasn't gonna die in jail, wasn't gonna commit suicide if he stayed there," he says, his voice breaking. Michael never had a girlfriend. He never had a job. Larry and Susan had no idea what to do. There was no family history of mental illness, no indications of past trauma; there was only the constant vigil their life became, trying to keep their son alive. "We had problems leaving the house at all," says Susan. "Because we were always afraid [of what we'd find] when we came home."

When it comes to mental illness, causation is difficult, if not impossible, to prove. Many mental illnesses present in young adulthood - and their causes are certainly multifactorial. But for a number of the scientists who study CTE and brain injury, the multifactorial nature of mental illness - the nature versus nurture of it - is exactly the point. No one can predict their genetic chance of developing a mental illness; no one can predict how those odds might change after hundreds or thousands of blows to the head. "In the concussion clinic that I run, all of our clinicians doing intake evaluations ask, 'Have you ever been diagnosed or worked up for ADD, ADHD, any learning disability, any mood disorder, anxiety, depression, panic attack?'" Cantu says. "The reason that we do this is that whenever you have an underlying challenge to start with, brain injury will only aggravate it."

This is especially true while the brain is still developing. Though Michael Bartlett never played football past high school, he started at an age when the head is still relatively big compared with the body, and when the muscles of the neck have not been built up, meaning that even minor impacts can snap the head about. At nine, the brain is also less myelinated than it one day will be. "Myelin is the coating of nerve fibers," Cantu explains. "It's like the coating of a telephone wire. It not only improves transmission, but it also makes it a little harder to break, so the same degree of acceleration forces on youngsters' brains can do more damage to the axons than they would do to an adult."

Most importantly, according to Cantu, Bartlett began playing just before a crucial stage of brain development that, he says, occurs between the ages of 10 and 12. In these years, the circuitry is being honed - some connections between nerve cells drop out, and others are enhanced - creating the smoother neural pathways that not only allow for more efficient information processing but also dictate adult personality and intellect. "If you injure the brain during that period of time, you're essentially causing your genetic endowment not to occur, but some aberration of it," says Cantu. "And the aberration is not better."

Nor is it reversible. A 2017 study on 214 former football players found that those who had started tackle football before the age of 12 were twice as likely to have "problems with behavioral regulation, apathy, and executive function" and three times more likely to have "clinically elevated depression scores," even if they never played past high school. Another study from the following year found that participants with CTE who'd started playing tackle football before 12 developed behavioral and mood symptoms 13 years earlier than those who started at 12 or later, a pattern that was also observed in participants without CTE. (Bailes points out, however, that there are some studies that do not replicate these findings.) Younger age of first exposure to a collision sport - one in which contact doesn't just randomly happen but is part of every play in the game - has been associated with structural alterations in the thalamus (even when adjusting for years of play) and in the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves that connects the brain's two hemispheres. And while damage may not become apparent until early adulthood, when cognitive demands could outpace the brain's diminished capabilities, or may even fly under the radar - how can one measure potential that's lost? - the bottom line, Cantu argues, is that "those who start young will have greater later-life chances to wind up with cognitive, behavioral, and mood issues - and if they get CTE, it'll be worse."

All of which could contribute to an explanation of what happened on July 11, 2019. Just after his 29th birthday, Michael Bartlett drove to an overpass, pulled his car over, climbed up on the concrete wall, and jumped 85 feet to the pavement below. Larry and Susan had been driving around La Mesa, frantically looking for him, when they saw the flashing red lights. "The police wouldn't even let me see him," Larry says. "All they would let me do is hug the body bag. I don't even remember the next two days. It was just like we were in a different world. And it's been that way ever since."

These days, when Susan feels like she's spiraling, she pulls out the report from Boston University, the one that diagnosed Michael with stage 1 CTE. "You know, when you're in a bad place, it's kind of helpful to see the medical answer," she explains. It doesn't change what happened, of course, but it achieves something: It solves the mystery Michael had been so desperate to solve when he was alive. For that, the Bartletts are grateful. "That's where our son exists today, in Boston," says Larry. "That's his contribution to this horrible disease. He contributed his brain."

THE CHICAGO SPRING RECEPTION hosted by the Concussion Legacy Foundation is a cascade of grief amid canapes. One evening this past spring, in a lovely room of the University Club with sweeping views of downtown, family members of the deceased or desperate stand up one by one to share their plight. There is the young son who speaks of his father's decline, the dad who wants to honor his child's memory, the teammate who wonders if his friend's struggles await him also. Toward the end of the impromptu speeches, Jan Callaghan falteringly makes her way to the center of the room. Her son Barrett's legacy story is on the CLF's website, alongside a photo of the football helmet he'd worn in middle school, the one scarred with deep gashes and gouges.

She'd pointed them out the day before, standing over the helmet as it rested on the dining-room table of her house in the Orland Park neighborhood of Chicago. There was a time when those gouges were a source of pride. Now, Jan shudders at the thought.

For years, hers had been a football family, their lives arranged around the endless drills and practices, their weekends spent driving to and from games, their laundry hamper full of grass-stained uniforms. When he was seven, Barrett saw his brother Richie play and begged his parents to find a team for him. Jan remembers getting a call from her husband during one of Barrett's first games: "He said, 'You've got to get up here. You're not going to believe this.'" As she approached the field, she searched out Barrett's little red uniform with the number 3. "And my jaw dropped as I watched him go from one end of the field to the other with the football, never stopping. As a young boy, he was a force. When that football hit his hands, there was no stopping him."

As Barrett got older, it became clear that he'd never play professionally, but it was also clear that football would organize the rhythms of his life. One of his sisters was a cheerleader. His dad, Rich, volunteered as a coach. "The slogan we had was 'Don't drop your bonnet,'" he says the day we meet, sitting at the kitchen table, his voice thick with sorrow. "'Tackle the right way, into the chest with your face guard up. Don't have your head down.'" Richie had heeded this warning. But Barrett was a different sort of player than his brother, one who made up for his small size with his tenacity. "He was a really tough player," Jan says. "He did play with his head."

There were a lot of tough players on the South Side of Chicago, where the kids attended Catholic school and where football came second to God, if only just. "They call it the black-and-blue South Side Catholic," says Rich. "Because the kids are black and blue." So it was hard to explain to football friends what was happening to Barrett in the final years of his life. People thought he was lazy when he dropped out of college and moved back home, unfocused when he couldn't hold down a job, losing the thread when he'd lash out aggressively for almost no reason. People distanced themselves. Jan would have to remind them, "This is Barrett we're talking about. You've known him forever. Do you think it was normal that he couldn't finish school?" She saw how he couldn't sleep, how embarrassed he was when he couldn't take in simple information or remember simple tasks, how he saw his brother and sisters building lives and careers and families and felt desperately left behind. When he came down to the kitchen one summer afternoon and told Jan he thought he had CTE, she had already come to the same conclusion. She assumed she'd go the rest of her life not knowing for sure. But when state troopers knocked on her door at 4 a.m. the morning of Sept. 26, 2021, and told her that Barrett had died in an accident, a head-on collision with a car going the wrong way on the highway, she had barely been able to even take in the news before she started making plans to have his brain donated.

As with smoking and lung cancer, there's no known threshold for developing CTE and no way to know an individual player's risk factors for being affected by it or other structural changes to the brain - no way to yet explain why some players are ravaged while others seemingly escape harm. On average, those who play a collision sport for less than five years have a very small chance of getting diagnosed with the disease, but the risk goes up after that; at 15 years of play, the risk has been estimated to be 10 times higher. The location of the damage probably matters, too; some parts of the brain are "silent" and harm to them could pass unnoticed, while others are crucial to cognition and regulation of mood. And some people may just take longer to heal, making them more susceptible to outrunning their cognitive reserve. "Probably in some cases, the brain's regulatory systems are not very good - they are more fragile - so the brain cannot bring itself back to normality," says Dr. Lea Grinberg, a neuropathologist who studies the early stages of neurodegenerative disease and whose 2018 study on Alzheimer's found it to also be preceded by mood dysregulation.

Despite these unknowns, the diagnosis of stage 1 CTE has been enlightening, but further isolating for Barrett's family. "This woman whose husband took his life brought up this great point," Jan tells me. "She said, 'Everybody went on and on when he passed about what a hard, tough player he was and a great teammate. And then when I told everybody that he had CTE? Crickets. Nobody wants to talk about it.'" She looks down at her hands spread over the table. "It's like you're on an island," she continues. "I don't know if they just don't believe it, or they don't want their precious little football tarnished." Or maybe, she considers, they just don't want to have to face the possibility that the same fate could await their kid, which is a reservation she understands.

Even Rich had trouble accepting Barrett's diagnosis at first, though time and research have helped him come around. "There's clearly more than a smoking gun here," he says. "The gun's been fired." Jan nods in agreement: "You pay attention, or you don't."

IN RECENT YEARS, plenty of people have paid attention. According to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, participation in tackle football for kids ages six to 12 has declined almost 29 percent since 2016, the year the NFL first publicly (and belatedly) confirmed a link between football and CTE - which has now also been found in the brains of hockey, soccer, and rugby players, as well as wrestlers, mixed-martial artists, and the first woman, Australian rules footballer Heather Anderson, who died last year at the age of 28 by an apparent suicide. Meanwhile, every state in the nation has passed laws aimed at protecting children who get concussions playing sports, and helmets have undergone overhauls in pursuit of the perfect padding. U.S.A. Football, which governs the amateur arm of the sport, has promoted "heads up" tackling and concussion training. Pop Warner introduced concussion guidelines in 2010 (including the mandate that anyone suspected of having a concussion must be cleared by a medical professional), banned full-speed head-on blocking and tackling drills in 2012, limited full-contact practices to 25 percent of the time and banned kickoffs (the game's most dangerous play) for athletes under the age of 11 in 2016, and got rid of the three-point stance (which lowers a player's head) in its younger divisions in 2019. (Changes have also been made to youth hockey and soccer.)

Yet many brain scientists and public-health officials question whether some of these changes are having a demonstrable effect, or even an effect at all, when it comes to the most insidious forms of brain injury. Many states' laws tend to deal with managing concussions after they happen, not preventing them. When it comes to helmets, improvements better protect the skull, but they do not stop the brain from ricocheting inside of it, slamming against bone, torquing the brain stem; in fact, the more padding a helmet has - and thus the heavier it is - the more of a weapon it ostensibly becomes. A British Journal of Sports Medicine study from 2017 found that new protective equipment had no measurable effect on concussion prevention, much less on the prevention of non- or subconcussive blows. Leagues that use heads-up techniques have actually recorded slightly more concussions (though the increase was statistically insignificant).

According to Cantu and Nowinski, the only changes that demonstrably help are those that reduce contact overall, like the ones Pop Warner has implemented in the face of declining participation. Yet such changes are only as good as their enforcement, and while volunteer coaches may mean well - and may no longer subscribe to the myth that their job is to turn grade-schoolers into gladiators - they may also take false comfort in pronouncements that attempt to undermine the connection between CTE and collision sports and that are sometimes made by organizations with a financial stake in keeping that connection blurry. The International Consensus Conference on Concussion in Sport, an entity responsible for issuing the guidance that informs sports protocols across the globe - and one led by a number of scientists with ties to sports organizations - has consistently published statements that treat the science as unsettled, providing legal cover to conference sponsors like FIFA and World Rugby should they be accused of covering up known risks. In 2016, Pop Warner settled a case brought by the mother of a former player who died by suicide at age 25 and was later found to have CTE, opening the door to other potential lawsuits. ("At Pop Warner, there is nothing more important than the safety of our players, and since 2010, we have led the way in making the game of youth football a safer and better experience than ever before," the organization stated in response to the settlement.)

For whatever reason, there are certainly scientists who tend to focus not on what's known - that exposure to collision sports is the one constant in nearly all documented cases of CTE and that CTE is not the only negative neural outcome - but instead on what's unknown. "Nobody's looking at chess players to see if they die by CTE," says Dr. Michael Lewis, who specializes in preventive medicine and serves on the Pop Warner Youth Football Medical Advisory Board. While Lewis supports the changes Pop Warner has made, he also argues that they are solutions to a problem that may be overstated - or oversimplified by pointing a finger at collision sports. "I mean, I kind of look at it as the climate-change thing. Is the science settled on climate change? I don't think so. But what's the downside of cutting back on carbons? [When it comes to] getting your head hit or whatever, there's no downside to decreasing the exposures. We kind of look at it as, 'OK, the science is anywhere but settled, but let's be conservative and let's limit the amount of contact in practice.' Let me just say, it's not straightforward. It's the brain. It's complicated."

Such a stance puts one of the doctors advising the nation's largest youth-football organization behind not just the NIH but even the NFL in acknowledging the connection between football and CTE. But one need look no further than the American Academy of Pediatrics to see the sway football has had over science. In 1957, the academy advised against collision sports for children ages 12 and younger, concluding that "body-contact sports, particularly tackle football and boxing, are considered to have no place in programs for children [of this age]." Since that time, and even as an abundance of evidence of brain trauma has come to light, the academy's stance has softened. In 2015, the AAP - the same group that recommends against body-checking in hockey in players under the age of 15 due to concussion risk - released a policy statement that essentially sidestepped the issue when it comes to America's most popular game. It conceded that eliminating youth tackle football would "likely lead to a decrease in the incidence of overall injuries, severe injuries, catastrophic injuries, and concussions," but also argued that it would "lead to a fundamental change in the way the game is played."

In light of this trade-off, the AAP, the agency tasked with advising parents and pediatricians about reasonable risk, essentially passed the responsibility for that determination on to them: "Participants in football must decide whether the potential health risks of sustaining these injuries are outweighed by the recreational benefits associated with proper tackling." (When approached about this policy, a representative from the AAP informed Rolling Stone that it was "currently undergoing an update.")

Thus far, CTE can only be diagnosed postmortem, though this month, Bailes' research team will begin stage three of an FDA trial to diagnose the disease in living people using PET scans and MRIs. This would be a significant breakthrough, not just enabling those with the disease to get early intervention but also allowing for the possibility of treatment. "There's plenty of potential treatments," says McKee. "But it's hard to assess their efficacy without having a biomarker to follow to see if it's getting better. That's part of the problem right now: We can't diagnose it during life, so we can't follow a treatment to see if it's actually beneficial. But I think we're going to get there."

Until then - and in light of not just CTE but other potential cognitive and mental-health outcomes - many doctors and scientists argue that the best approach from a public-health perspective is to outlaw the collision part of collision sports, at least until children's brains have passed the period of rapid development in their tween years. The Concussion Legacy Foundation's "Stop Hitting Kids in the Head" campaign has encouraged parents to hold off on enrolling their kids in tackle football until they are 14. Cantu has called on the surgeon general to ban tackle football for children under that age, pointing out that all of the health and social benefits of a team sport can be retained in less-violent versions of these games (in fact, the Manning brothers famously didn't start playing tackle football until middle school). McKee goes even further, arguing that no one should play a collision sport until they reach the age of consent, until they are emotionally mature enough to weigh the risks themselves and physically mature enough to better withstand them. That may sound extreme to football diehards, but not to McKee, who spends her days looking at damaged brains and speaking to the devastated families who donate them. "Part of the reason I can't let this go is I know what it's doing to people," she tells me. "And I also know it's preventable."

A TEXAS THUNDERSTORM is brewing, the air growing hot and thick with the smell of the coming rain, on the recent Saturday morning when Letitia Wilbourn visits her son's grave. Under the shade of the oak tree where the doves once perched, she rearranges the plastic flowers and carefully sweeps dust off the gravestone with a little brush she keeps in the car for that purpose. Her daughter Natasha stands there and cries. Wilbourn tries to keep herself busy. "I promised Quan I wouldn't break," she says, walking back to her car. "I told him I will always try to smile when I'm discussing him."

Back home, Wilbourn sits on the floor of her living room, in view of Myers' football trophies, surrounded by his photos, down the hall from the room where his clothes still hang in the closet. The extended family has gathered today, assorted cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandchildren passing through the room and in and out of the house, a tight-knit, boisterous group of which Wilbourn seems to be the calm and stoic center. Life goes on, certainly, even if, in some ways, it now revolves around the memory of death. "If Quan was still here right now, then he probably would be dealing with something mentally in his head," Natasha offers haltingly. "Like, how would he be today? Would he be outside walking around with his shirt off? No shoes? Where would he be?"

Wilbourn's oldest child, Monique, nods. They all know the CTE narrative, the tragic way it unfolds. "What would have been the progression? Would we have to have been looking for him out in the streets?"

"I don't know if I would be happy seeing him here right now with dementia versus what happened," Natasha says, beginning to cry again. Wilbourn reaches for her daughter's hand. Still, she doesn't break.

There are times when she does. Sometimes, she'll be driving and pass a field with peewee players huddled together, their little helmets and bodies clashing under the Texas sun, and she won't be able to look away. "I pull over and pray for every kid out there," she tells me. "I pray, and I cry." When people ask about her son, she tells them about CTE. She implores parents to consider other sports. She wants her son's death - her own suffering - to have some purpose, some meaning. But, she tells me, "this is Texas, and football is God to some people."

As we're talking, a 12-year-old boy walks into the room and sits silently on the sofa. He's Wilbourn's nephew's child. He started playing tackle football this past year, despite his family's experience with CTE, despite Wilbourn's admonishments, despite the fact that his father sits nervously on the sideline of each game, watching his son's head and the movements of his body, looking for signs of disaster. This very afternoon, the boy is a witness to his family's grief, yet it won't stop him from playing this game of neural Russian roulette. What can Wilbourn do? He isn't her child. All she can do is pray that maybe, just maybe, this is a game he'll win.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
They Played Football as Children. Now Their Families Mourn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
These football players gave it up after high school but the damage was seemingly done. Now, their families look for answers about chronic traumatic encephalopathy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Because I’m Latino, I can’t have money?" Kids on Race

# data[].attributes.headline
How daily writing transformed sixth graders

# data[].attributes.subject
How daily writing transformed sixth graders

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
info passage quotations Discipline is not obedience

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Planning Writing Practice- one skill at a time

# data[].attributes.body
This mini-documentary makes bold claims: "baseball is like life, like 'doing time'...you have to have patience." The viewer has to make the comparisons. Check it out. Subtle and smart.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
San Quentin's Giants | Op-Docs | The New York Times

# data[].attributes.headline
from a gr. 7-8 Literary NF book clubs unit

# data[].attributes.subject
from a gr. 7-8 Literary NF book clubs unit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Text Structure compare Lincoln's grave robbers

# data[].attributes.headline
excerpts from the graphic memoir, They Called Us Enemy

# data[].attributes.subject
excerpts from the graphic memoir, They Called Us Enemy

# data[].attributes.headline
An extended passage from a gr. 7-8 Literary NF book club. We studied several passages from this during the unit.

# data[].attributes.subject
An extended passage from a gr. 7-8 Literary NF book club. We studied several passages from this during the unit.

# data[].attributes.headline
Students briefly reflect on growth every time they turn in their notebooks.

# data[].attributes.subject
Students briefly reflect on growth every time they turn in their notebooks.

# data[].attributes.headline
Book Clubs help students study informational writing more deeply

# data[].attributes.subject
Book Clubs help students study informational writing more deeply

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Shoe Dog by Phil Knight - In this instant and tenacious New York Times bestseller, Nike founder and board chairman Phil Knight "offers a rare and revealing l...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Striker and the Clock by Georgia Cloepfil: 9780593714881 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An illuminating perspective on the life of an athlete and the pursuit of excellence outside the spotlight. Georgia Cloepfil played professional soccer for six years, on six teams, in six countries. In…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERIn his first and only official autobiography, music icon Elton John reveals the truth about his extraordinary life, from…

# data[].attributes.headline
So many amazing books for high school here.

# data[].attributes.subject
So many amazing books for high school here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Best Books of the Century: Introducing the List | Kirkus Reviews

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Revisiting the best books of the past 25 years was a joyful nostalgia trip for the editors of ‘Kirkus Reviews.’

# data[].attributes.headline
Another student's reflections on notebook writing

# data[].attributes.subject
Another student's reflections on notebook writing

# data[].attributes.headline
What happened here? Tell the story in the voice of a reporter.

# data[].attributes.subject
What happened here? Tell the story in the voice of a reporter.

# data[].attributes.headline
What does this say? What does it NOT say?

# data[].attributes.subject
What does this say? What does it NOT say?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Left vs. Right (US) — Information is Beautiful

# data[].attributes.headline
Harper's Index...just the facts, but students can pick one or two and explain what the facts say...

# data[].attributes.subject
Harper's Index...just the facts, but students can pick one or two and explain what the facts say...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
PEN America sought to further understand the impacts of this censorship – the identities and genres being erased from public schools.

# data[].attributes.headline
What can you take to actually improve sports performance according to science?

# data[].attributes.subject
What can you take to actually improve sports performance according to science?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Snake Oil Sports Supplements - Information is Beautiful

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ukraine-Russian War Infographics & Data Visuals - Information is Beautiful

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Most helpful & contextualising graphics & visualisations from around the web.

# data[].attributes.headline
gr. 9 teaching: writing next to an infographic to practice skills

# data[].attributes.subject
gr. 9 teaching: writing next to an infographic to practice skills

# data[].attributes.headline
grade 9: planning a writing project around a big idea

# data[].attributes.subject
grade 9: planning a writing project around a big idea

# data[].attributes.headline
How a storyboard helped a student plan an essay

# data[].attributes.subject
How a storyboard helped a student plan an essay

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Using a storyboard to consider structure for an essay

# data[].attributes.headline
College admissions essay after school workshop

# data[].attributes.subject
College admissions essay after school workshop

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
College Admissions Essay: What is this really about?

# data[].attributes.headline
Two conferences (one writer) after school work time

# data[].attributes.subject
Two conferences (one writer) after school work time

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
College Admissions Essay: Why a 5P Essay?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
180 Days project Sully writing conference

# data[].attributes.headline
3 Boys Talk about reading in High School

# data[].attributes.subject
3 Boys Talk about reading in High School

# data[].attributes.headline
confer during reading time to see what you learn about a reader

# data[].attributes.subject
confer during reading time to see what you learn about a reader

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
First reading conference with an uninterested reader

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
First reading conference with non-reader

# data[].attributes.headline
Nudge a reader to commit to reading at home...

# data[].attributes.subject
Nudge a reader to commit to reading at home...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What if I haven't read the book? Reading Conference

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
CONFERRING Three students, twelve minutes

# data[].attributes.headline
"The Giving Tree" at Fifty: Sadder Than I Remembered | Ruth Margalit

# data[].attributes.subject
"The Giving Tree" at Fifty: Sadder Than I Remembered | Ruth Margalit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A few weeks ago, rummaging around the Strand, I came across a fiftieth-anniversary edition of Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree." It had the fern-green cover familiar from childhood, the same oversized dimensions, the same appealing sketch on its front-a squiggly drawing of a tall tree, its top spilling off the page, and a little boy, looking up at it. But instead of experiencing a pleasant rush of nostalgia, I was dismayed. A strange thing happens when we encounter a book we used to love and suddenly find it charmless; the feeling is one of puzzled dissociation. Was it really me who once cherished this book?

The beginning of the story is innocuous enough: a boy climbs a tree, swings from her branches, and devours her apples (I'd never noticed that the tree was a "she"). "And the tree was happy," goes the refrain. But then time passes, and the boy forgets about her. One day, the boy, now a young man, returns, asking for money. Not having any to offer him, the tree is "happy" to give him her apples to sell. She is likewise "happy" to give him her branches, and later her trunk, until there is nothing left of her but an old stump, which the old man, or boy, proceeds to sit on.

A little Googling corroborated my own distaste. "The Giving Tree" ranks high on both "favorite" and "least favorite" lists of children's books, and is the subject of many online invectives. One blog post, " Why I Hate The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein," argues that the book encourages selfishness, narcissism, and codependency. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, environmental activists rue the boy's pillaging of the tree and, by extension, the environment. William Cole, who turned down the manuscript when he was an editor at Simon & Schuster (Silverstein took it to Harper & Row), was troubled by its portrayal of parenthood: "My interpretation is that that was one dum-dum of a tree, giving everything and expecting nothing in return." More recently, the children's-book author Laurel Snyder said, "When you give a new mother ten copies of 'The Giving Tree,' it does send a message to the mother that we are supposed to be this person."

Still, it's difficult to know whether Silverstein, who died of a heart attack in 1999, after keeping out of the public eye for more than two decades, meant for us to read the book so conclusively. His biography and body of work suggest a subtler, and, in the end, perhaps an even more troubling, way of looking at it.

***

Silverstein detested stories with happy endings. As he once put it, "The child asks, 'Why don't I have this happiness thing you're telling me about?'" His own up-by-the-bootstraps childhood was marked by insecurity and self-doubt. Born in 1930 on the northwest side of Chicago, Sheldon Allan Silverstein grew up in a second-story apartment crammed with relatives. His parents, an immigrant father from Eastern Europe and a Chicago-born mother, opened an unsuccessful bakery on the heels of the Great Depression. Though Silverstein's mother encouraged his early knack for drawing, his father made it clear that he was expected to join the flailing family business. But Silverstein couldn't sit still. He was a distracted student, who may have also suffered from dyslexia (at fifteen, he misspelled his middle name on his Social Security application). As Lisa Rogak writes in "A Boy Named Shel," an engaging 2011 biography of the man, "His attention span ran from nil to nonexistent."

Silverstein discovered his passion for drawing early, and it became his refuge from his increasingly wrathful father. After a few unsuccessful attempts at college-he never graduated, explaining, "I didn't get laid much and I didn't learn much. Those are the two worst things that can happen to a guy"-Silverstein's listlessness and love of cartoons found an unexpected outlet in the military, which he joined in 1953, serving on the newspaper of a troopship in Japan. His break came three years later when, discharged and unemployed, he visited the offices of a fledgling magazine for men and met its editor, himself an avid cartoonist: Hugh Hefner.

So began Silverstein's long association with Playboy, where he published not only cartoons and illustrations but also ongoing travelogues from such places as Tokyo, Paris, and Moscow, and became a regular fixture at the seedily infamous Playboy Mansion. By Rogak's count, he bedded hundreds, if not thousands, of women. He was raggedly attractive (though not particularly handsome): his beard full, his brows furrowed, his half smile gap-toothed, his hair long (later he was completely bald). He liked to wear pirate shirts and a pair of shiny corduroys that, according to a female friend, "made him look like a filing cabinet." During those Playboy years, Silverstein shuttled back and forth between Chicago and downtown New York; he frequented folk clubs and began making his own music-scribbling away songs on the back of cocktail napkins and tablecloths, performing folk and jazz numbers in a low, gravelly voice.

He was wildly prolific and prolifically wild. On a visit to Denmark, Silverstein signed on as the vocalist of a group called Papa Bue's Bearded Viking New Orleans Danish Jazz Band. He was the mastermind behind Johnny Cash's Grammy-winning song "A Boy Named Sue." He palled around with Norman Mailer and Dustin Hoffman, and reportedly advised a young Bob Dylan on lyrics for what turned out to be "Blood on the Tracks." "He was our own personal beatnik," his friend, the actress Lois Nettleton, tells Rogak. Silverstein himself once remarked of his itinerant lifestyle, "Comfortable shoes and the freedom to leave are the two most important things in life."

As becomes clear from reading Rogak's biography, Silverstein never intended to write or draw for children. He was often impatient around kids and, Rogak claims, "made no secret of the contempt he felt" for most children's books. "Hell, a kid's already scared of being small and insignificant," he once said. "So what does E. B. White give them? A mouse who's afraid of being flushed down the toilet or rolled up in a window shade and a spider who's getting ready to die." But writing kids' books was the complete opposite of the work he was doing for Playboy and, maybe for that reason, and with the prodding of a savvy editor, he decided to try his hand at it.

The result was a classic Silversteinian burst of productivity: in 1964 alone, he published three children's books and one book for adults. Among them was "The Giving Tree," whose breakaway success caught by surprise not only his publishers, who had printed a modest run of seven thousand copies, but also Silverstein himself, who claimed it had no message. Sales of "The Giving Tree" doubled every year in the decade following its publication; they have since topped five million copies worldwide. But Silverstein was continually asked to defend the book, and this seems to have sapped his energy. "It's just a relationship between two people; one gives and the other takes," he would often repeat. It would take him another decade to complete his next children's book, the fiercely imagined poetry collection "Where the Sidewalk Ends," and, by 1975, he had almost entirely stopped talking to the press. (Silverstein never married and never wanted to have kids. But circumstances changed the year he turned forty, when one of his former Mansion "playmates" gave birth to a daughter; in 1982, the girl, Shoshanna, died of a brain aneurysm at age eleven, a tragedy from which Silverstein is said to have never recovered. Two years later, a son, Matthew, was born.)

"Where the Sidewalk Ends" was banned from many libraries across the country for years after its publication: it was said to promote such diverse ills as drug use, suicide, death, the occult, violence, disrespect for authority, disrespect for truth, and rebellion against parents. It also happened to be a book that perfectly encapsulated the idiosyncratic concerns of childhood. One poem, called "Eighteen Flavors," is about a person who "labels all the flavors on their ice cream cone before accidentally dropping them all." Another is about an acrobat hanging from a trapeze who asks for "just one thing, please / As we float through the breeze - Don't sneeze." The book easily and sensitively inhabited a child's perspective.

A moralistic reading of "The Giving Tree" is challenged again and again by Silverstein's other writing for children, as he consistently ended his books on a note of ambiguity. Consider "The Missing Piece," another Silverstein classic. Published in 1976, "The Missing Piece" tells the story of a circle that's missing a wedge. The circle goes in search of this lost piece and, after some tribulations, finds it. The story could have easily ended there-the circle made whole!-but it doesn't. Instead, the newly spiffy circle begins to roll too fast, and its view of the world becomes blurred. "That's the madness of the book," Silverstein said, "the disturbing part of it."

If madness is what he was after, then the "The Giving Tree" might be read as another expression of it, perhaps a cousin to a song Silverstein wrote, called " Fuck 'Em," in which he cheerfully exclaims, "Hey, a woman come around and handed me a line / About a lot of little orphan kids sufferin' and dyin' / Shit, I give her a quarter, cause one of 'em might be mine." Rogak, his biographer, has her own explanation for "The Giving Tree" 's portrayal of self-abnegation-one that echoes his beatnik years: "Given his disgust with the me-first attitude among the folksingers and other artists in the Village who were creating art as a form of self-analysis, it almost sounds like he wrote it as an experiment, a reaction to their own mushiness."

The dismay I felt on rereading the book soon gave way to something else. Finding that a childhood favorite wasn't at all what I remembered carried with it a peculiar thrill, a kind of scientific proof that I'd grown up and changed. And, if I've changed, perhaps "The Giving Tree" has, too. What, for example, does Silverstein mean with his injection of the flat, repetitive "happy"? He wasn't one for happiness. In fact, the book's illustrations seem to undermine this very conceit. "And the tree was happy," we are told, but all we see is a sorry stump and a hunched old man staring forlornly into the distance. Is she happy? We have to ask. Is he? Or maybe the book isn't about love or happiness at all, but a lament about the passing of time, an unsentimental view of physical decay, a withering away. Maybe it's enough to take Silverstein's own reading of it. "It's about a boy and a tree," he once said. "It has a pretty sad ending."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"The Giving Tree" at Fifty: Sadder Than I Remembered

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A few weeks ago, rummaging around the Strand, I came across a fiftieth-anniversary edition of Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree." It had the fern-green cover familiar from childhood, the same oversized dimensions, the same appealing sketch on its front-a squiggly drawing of a tall tree, its top spilling off the page, and a little boy, looking up at it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Research and data to make progress against the world's largest problems

# data[].attributes.body
The ultimate data dog...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Best in Show - What's the Best Dog Breed, According to Data? - Information is Beautiful

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What are the best dog breeds according to data on dog intelligence, longevity & health? How does that tally with public popularity of various dog breeds?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
I Recommend Eating Chips (Published 2021)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When our horizons are narrow, junk food — shelf-stable, reliably flavored and yet endlessly unique — offers us a taste of infinity.

# data[].attributes.body
A wild and hilarious obituary

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Renay Mandel Corren

El Paso, TX-A plus-sized Jewish lady redneck died in El Paso on Saturday.

Of itself hardly news, or good news if you're the type that subscribes to the notion that anybody not named you dying in El Paso, Texas is good news. In which case have I got news for you: the bawdy, fertile, redheaded matriarch of a sprawling Jewish-Mexican-Redneck American family has kicked it. This was not good news to Renay Mandel Corren's many surviving children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, many of whom she even knew and, in her own way, loved. There will be much mourning in the many glamorous locales she went bankrupt in: McKeesport, PA, Renay's birthplace and where she first fell in love with ham, and atheism; Fayetteville and Kill Devil Hills, NC, where Renay's dreams, credit rating and marriage are all buried; and of course Miami, FL, where Renay's parents, uncles, aunts, and eternal hopes of all Miami Dolphins fans everywhere, are all buried pretty deep. Renay was preceded in death by Don Shula.

Because she was my mother, the death of zaftig good-time gal Renay Corren at the impossible old age of 84 is newsworthy to me, and I treat it with the same respect and reverence she had for, well, nothing. A more disrespectful, trash-reading, talking and watching woman in NC, FL or TX was not to be found. Hers was an itinerant, much-lived life, a Yankee Florida liberal Jewish Tough Gal who bowled 'em in Japan, rolled 'em in North Carolina and was a singularly unique parent. Often frustrated by the stifling, conservative culture of the South, Renay turned her voracious mind to the home front, becoming a model stay at home parent, a supermom, really, just the perfect PTA lady, volunteer, amateur baker and-AHHAHAA HA! HA! HA! Just kidding, y'all! Renay - Rosie to her friends, and this was a broad who never met a stranger - worked double shifts with Doreen, ate a ton of carbs with Bernie, and could occasionally be stirred to stew some stuffed cabbage for the kids. She played cards like a shark, bowled and played cribbage like a pro, and laughed with the boys until the wee hours, long after the last pin dropped. At one point in the 1980's, Renay was the 11th or 12th-ranked woman in cribbage in America, and while that could be a lie, it sounds great in print. She also told us she came up with the name for Sunoco, and I choose to believe this, too. Yes, Renay lied a lot. But on the plus side, Renay didn't cook, she didn't clean, and she was lousy with money, too. Here's what Renay was great at: dyeing her red roots, weekly manicures, dirty jokes, pier fishing, rolling joints and buying dirty magazines. She said she read them for the articles, but filthy free speech was really Renay's thing. Hers was a bawdy, rowdy life lived large, broke and loud. We thought Renay could not be killed. God knows, people tried. A lot. Renay has been toying with death for a decades, but always beating it and running off in her silver Chevy Nova. Covid couldn't kill Renay. Neither could pneumonia twice, infections, blood clots, bad feet, breast cancer twice, two mastectomies, two recessions, multiple bankruptcies, marriage to a philandering Sergeant Major, divorce in the 70's, six kids, one cesarean, a few abortions from the Quietly Famous Abortionist of Spring Lake, NC or an affair with Larry King in the 60's. Renay was preceded in death by her ex-boyfriend, Larry King. Renay was also sadly preceded in death by her beloved daughter, Cathy Sue Corren Lester Trammel Webster, of Kill Devil Hills, NC, who herself was preceded in death by two marriages, a fudge shop and one eyeball lost in a near-fatal Pepsi bottle incident that will absolutely be explored in future obituaries. Losing her 1-eyed badass b**** of a daughter in 2007 devastated Renay, but it also made her quite homeless, since Cathy pretty much picked up the tab. A talented and gregarious grifter, Renay M. Corren eked out her final years of luxury (she literally retired at 62) under the care, compassion, checking accounts and, evidently, unlimited patience of her favorite son and daughter-in-law, Michael and Lourdes Corren, of world-famous cow sanctuary El Paso, TX. Renay is also survived by her son Jeffrey Corren and his endlessly tolerant wife Shirley, of Powell's Point, NC; Scott Corren, and what's left of his colon, of Hampton, VA; Marc and Laura Corren, the loveliest dirt farmers of Vernon, TX (seriously, where is that); and her favorite son, the gay one who writes catty obituaries in his spare time, Andy Corren, of - obviously - New York City. Plus two beloved granddogs, Mia and Hudson. Renay was particularly close to and grateful for the lavish attentions of her grandaughter Perla and her great-grandchildren Elijah and Leroy, as well as her constant cruise companions Sam Trammell of Greenville, NC, and Adam Corren of El Paso, TX. Renay took tremendous pride in making 1 gay son and 2 gay grandchildren, Sam Trammell and Adam Corren.

There will be a very disrespectful and totally non-denominational memorial on May 10, 2022, most likely at a bowling alley in Fayetteville, NC. The family requests absolutely zero privacy or propriety, none what so ever, and in fact encourages you to spend some government money today on a 1-armed bandit, at the blackjack table or on a cheap cruise to find our inheritance. She spent it all, folks. She left me nothing but these lousy memories. Which I, and my family of 5 brothers and my sister-in-laws, nephews, friends, nieces, neighbors, ex-boyfriends, Larry King's children, who I guess I might be one of, the total strangers who all, to a person, loved and will cherish her. Forever. Please think of the brightly-frocked, frivolous, funny and smart Jewish redhead who is about to grift you, tell you a filthy joke, and for Larry King's sake: LAUGH. Bye, Mommy. We loved you to bits.

RIP RENAY MANDEL CORREN 10 MAY 1937 - 11 DEC 2021

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Obituaries in Fayetteville, NC | Fayetteville Observer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Renay Mandel Corren El Paso, TX-A plus-sized Jewish lady redneck died in El Paso on Saturday. Of itself hardly news, or good news if you're the type that subscribes to the notion that anybody not named you dying in El Paso, Texas is good news.

# data[].attributes.body
I just used the first few pages of this article as an example of argument. The author does a great job of clearly laying out claim/evidence paragraphs. It was a great mentor text for their Writer's Notebooks. They went off on about their personal "Best Musician."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Few artists are as prolific. As widely imitated. As consistently excellent. Which is why it's finally time to declare what's been true for a while now...

Best Rapper Alive. It's a lofty goal. A phrase Jay-Z famously uttered in 2003 on "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" that declared Shawn Carter the new standard while still paying respect to the late greats Tupac "2Pac" Shakur and Christopher "The Notorious B.I.G." Wallace. A few years later, the other Mr. Carter, Lil Wayne, laid claim to the throne by outworking any and all competition with a canon of indisputable music.

But in 2022, who wears the crown (at least now that Jay has graduated to full-on GOAT)? Is it our perennial hitmaker Drake? The brilliant J. Cole? Or maybe it's the enigmatic Kendrick Lamar who would probably garner the most votes. But in hip-hop's always-on culture, can you really be the best rapper alive if you haven't given us an album in five years?

And doesn't the South got somethin' to say? Last year, when Spotify's RapCaviar asked Twitter which rappers would be on the Mount Rushmore of the 2010s, fans decreed it would be Drake, Cole, Kendrick...and who? LeBron James quickly led the charge for Future as the fourth, with James Caan (yes, that James Caan) among the chorus of supporters. (Eventually, the great Nicki Minaj received the RapCaviar nod.) Later in the year, in an interview with N.O.R.E. and DJ EFN on the Drink Champs podcast, Kanye West made what at the time sounded like a bold declaration: Future is the most influential artist of the past decade.

"I got here through music," Future tells me. "I didn't get here for having the best interviews. Other dudes in the world can have the best speech. They can do this in one take and it'd be perfect. I just found a way to make art with words. And through that, that's just how I live."

But was Kanye's declaration really so bold? Consider Future's style, which, while widely imitated, is today still singular. Not only does Future use his voice to contort words and syllables into shapes we've never encountered before-his own innovative take on the concept of "bars"-but his verses are uniquely versatile: He can traipse the full spectrum of human emotion, from lovingly tender to cruelly toxic to heart-wrenching to turned up to 11, all within the space of an eight count.

Artistically, his impact can't be denied. Especially not after eight solo albums, 19 solo mixtapes, one collaborative album, four collaborative mixtapes, two EPs, and one soundtrack (for 2018's Superfly). Worldwide, he's been streamed over 30 billion times and has, in the process, inspired an entire generation of rappers. Few artists are as prolific.

When you survey the hip-hop landscape, no other artist has been as consistently excellent, or as influential, for as long as he has. He invented his own sound, which has since become the dominant style in rap. He has delivered hit after hit after hit. And he's done it all on his own terms.

I'll say it again: Future is the best rapper alive.

​​In the beginning, few believed that he would be at the forefront of hip-hop music. In the aughts he was known as Meathead, the Dungeon Family outcast more committed to hustling than music, before he flooded the Atlanta underground with a series of undeniable mixtapes. (DJ Drama once told me that every club DJ had to have a 30-minute Future set to keep the party going.)

Today, Future is the King of Atlanta-and he earned it. Consider his contemporaries. It saddens me every time Jeezy stirs up comeback talk and then falls short. T.I. is more committed to becoming a comedian these days. Ludacris is a bona fide movie star. And the youth all still check for Future. He's the O.G. who's still considered a peer (and a rival) to the younger artists he collaborates with musically.

One of my favorite Future songs is 2019's "Krazy but True," a rare, clear declaration of his desire to be hip-hop's top dawg:
"I'm God to you n-ggas, I worked too hard just to spoil you n-ggas
You need to pay me my respect
Your socks, rings, and your lean
The way you drop your mixtapes, your ad-libs, and everything
Damn, that's crazy, but it's true....
I was the ghost behind the page
I freestyle every day
I never depend on none of these rappers, they bite me anyway
Damn, that's crazy, but it's true."

In casual conversation, Future is funny, often playful. But once the tape recorder light turns red for an interview, something in him changes and talking to him becomes a chess match. He's 38, yet still a bit of a smart-ass kid, shrewdly deflecting questions by asking me about myself, like my time working at The Source and XXL magazines. I'm used to it with Future, though. He's a cranky creative with a platinum touch. He's hard to pin down. But we have history.

When Future's smash hit "Racks" hit in 2011, I couldn't tell the difference between Future and the song's lead artist YC. At my hip-hop blog, Rap Radar, the slander aimed at Future was immediate. What is this mumble rap? We called Future "the Autotune crooner." We felt he was stepping in the lane of T-Pain.

"Tony Montana," Future's own first big single, did little to change my opinion. But it did feature Drake, whom I had already developed a close enough relationship with to hit up personally, BlackBerry to BlackBerry.

Why are you on this song? I remember messaging him. I don't get it.

You don't know what the fuck you're talking about, Drake replied. Future is dope.

Future's dizzying run of early hits was undeniable. "Same Damn Time" knocked so hard that Sean "Diddy" Combs felt compelled to hop on the remix and deliver his hardest verse in years. I became a believer.

Future's 2012 debut, Pluto, was promising, and I was all the way locked in for his second album, Honest. For my CRWN live-interview series in 2014, we rented out Atlanta's Plaza Theatre and I got to share the stage with him. "I laid the foundation for any artist to come behind me," Future said that night. And they did. Artists from that era, like Desiigner and Lil Durk. And artists still to come, like Lil Baby, Gunna, and Lil Uzi Vert. They all borrow inspiration from his style, and Future had thoughts for all of his disciples: "I wrote the dictionary for what you use, words for designing.... All their ad-libs, from the way you do your verses to your melodies, it comes from Future. It's hard to get away from it, because I did the blueprint."

Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn grew up in Kirkwood, an area of Atlanta roiled by the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. A lot of drugs and a lot of guns. Young Nayvadius was brought up by his mother, with help from aunts and uncles, but sometimes even a village isn't quite enough. He says he used to have junkies drive him to class. Most fondly, a "junkie named Fred," Future told me onstage in Los Angeles at another CRWN event, in 2019. "Shout-out, Fred, too! He used to take me to school." Nayvadius dropped out of Decatur's Columbia High School during his senior year.

At a family member's funeral around that time, Future ran into his cousin Rico Wade, whom he had always considered a kind of father figure. The funeral meeting led Nayvadius, with one foot still in the streets, to hang out in the studio with the legendary Dungeon Family. (One of Future's favorite moments in the studio was witnessing André 3000 freestyle his guest verse for Sleepy Brown's 2004 song "I Can't Wait.") He was there not just with Dungeon Family members like the Goodie Mob, Killer Mike, and Bubba Sparxxx but with outside artists like Trey Songz, Talib Kweli, and Daz Dillinger. Nayvadius began learning and making music. It was a different kind of education from school but a learning experience all the same. "I'm like, 'They're living like street dudes where I'm from, but living better. It's legit,'" he recalled back in 2019. "That's when I started thinking, I can take this serious."

In 2011, Epic Records' then chairman Antonio "L.A." Reid signed Future to his label. A move that felt preordained. Reid had worked with Rico Wade's production crew, Organized Noize, when Reid and Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds signed OutKast to their LaFace Records in the 1990s. "I think Future's consistency is a big part of his wave," says OutKast's Big Boi. "He always comes through with a clutch jam. Dungeon Family genetics."

Future had an incredible mixtape run in the underground Atlanta circuit with efforts like Dirty Sprite, and his debut studio album, Pluto, spawning several hits. By the time Honest was being teased, Future's projects were feverishly anticipated on a mainstream scale. (While Honest went gold, its reception from the blogs and hardcore rap fans was lukewarm, and it was the last Future solo album that didn't go to the top of the Billboard 200 chart. As Future told me in Los Angeles in 2019: " Honest, I wasn't quite honest.")

Faced with a potential slump, Future was also dealing with rumors of a split with his former fiancée, R&B star Ciara. This, after Future, Ciara, and Mike Will Made It, one of Future's most prolific producer-collaborators, created a massive hit in "Body Party" for her 2013 self-titled album. The song seemed to mark the beginning of a creative partnership, but it was not to be.

"Body Party" went double platinum and was Ciara's biggest sales success since 2004's "1, 2 Step." Their son, Future Zahir Wilburn, was born in 2014, but Future Sr. and Ciara broke off their engagement, and Ciara later started dating her now husband, Russell Wilson. Unfairly or not, the tabloids-and Twitter-had a field day.

Future, meanwhile, retreated from the public spotlight and went back to the Georgia underground. He put his head down and got to work, reemerging with a triumvirate of classic mixtapes: Monster, Beast Mode, and 56 Nights, that last one featuring "March Madness," which at the time was one of the biggest hits of his career. "Future dropped hit after hit for over 10 years without any major breaks between releases and evolving with each project while always remaining rooted in the streets," Epic Records chair and CEO Sylvia Rhone tells me. "He is so prolific and so dedicated to his craft that he lives in the studio. He's understated in many ways."

Future reclaimed his swagger and hasn't looked back.

In March, I met up with Future at Jungle City, the iconic recording studio on Manhattan's West Side. Clad in a navy-and-orange tracksuit, with his trademark dreads falling over his eyes, Future is stone-faced. He's ready to let the music do the talking.

Jungle City boasts wide, inspiring views of the Hudson. Everyone from Pusha T to Justin Bieber has recorded here. Elements of classic albums like Beyoncé's Lemonade, Rihanna's Anti, J. Cole's 2014 Forest Hills Drive, and Kendrick Lamar's DAMN., were all crafted in this facility. An appropriate spot then for Future to unveil the new music he's been working on for his next album during his longest sabbatical to date.

"​​That's because I'm happy," he says of the hiatus now. "I'm genuinely happy with life. And there was a time where I was only happy when I was on the stage, and in the studio. Like it was my escape."

At Jungle City he's surrounded by his core crew, including his photographer, Dwight "Shootrr" Elder, and his boisterous blood brother, Casino, who is the CEO of their record label, Freebandz. Weed smoke is thick, but there's no alcohol consumption. Instead, the studio console is overflowing with candy, snacks, and sodas. It's sweet tooth heaven. Future, with no preamble, presses "play."

Jungle City is, like, surround sound. In these situations I'm usually able to keep my cool. But the music Future's playing is making it hard for me to maintain my poker face. Truth be told, Future's last two albums, 2019's The Wizrd and 2020's High Off Life, weren't my favorites, despite going gold and platinum, respectively. I'd argue they fall prey to formula, filler, and moments of creative indecisiveness. Taken together, they suggested gravity might have finally come for Future's dominance, the kind of decline that often hits a rapper after a decade at the top. And it was noticeable that after his disappointing 2020 collaborative project with one of his disciples, Lil Uzi Vert-the album was called Pluto x Baby Pluto -2021 was the first year of his entire career that Future didn't release a full-length project of his own.

But Future was far from ready to be written off. Especially when you consider his more recent run of features. There's Rick Ross's "Warm Words in a Cold World," which plucked Future from his typical trap sonics and had him sounding geeked and confident (Emblematic lyric: "Let her ride foreign just so she won't be tacky"). Future shows up and shows out at the beginning and end of upstart Nardo Wick's "Me or Sum," rapping, "All bad bitch eat seafood." And on 42 Dugg's "Maybach," Future addresses one of his famous exes: "Tell Steve Harvey I don't want her." (Future dated Harvey's daughter, entrepreneur and model Lori Harvey, for two years, beginning in 2019.)

He's an absolutely relentless, spontaneous workhorse. And me, I'm a calculated, purpose-driven, militant individual. We can pretty much create anything.

Still, I'm hoping for a full studio album that reasserts his status. His approach may be unconventional, but at his core, Future is a spirited storyteller. For his next album to triumph, I just want that authenticity, that realness, that smidgen of exaggerated and ruthless masculinity (with a wink) mixed up with his signature vulnerability that pulls us in. The unique combination of elements that make Future who he is. "Putting this project together is just people understanding that I love hard," he admits. "Probably love the hardest. I wanted to showcase my skills as far as melodies and topics and being vulnerable."

The new music relies less on hooks and more on aggression. Future attacks the opening tracks with the type of lyrical ferocity he displayed on his signature classic, "March Madness." A full version of a viral snippet labeled "Hermès Astronaut" booms through the speakers. Future flows over tranquil wood flutes, and it sounds even better than the tease suggested. Another song includes the lyrics: "After I fuck you, let me cry on your shoulder." A little of his trademark toxicity with a memorable turn of phrase.

Future sounds reignited, unstoppable. "I'm putting myself out there," says Future. "Sharing my lifestyle with the world. Sharing my pain with the world. Sharing my ups, sharing my downs with the entire universe. I believe in the energy of the universe and manifestation. That's why I'm giving myself, because I'm willing to correct myself. I don't want to just...be wrong. I'm willing to give you all of me, so you can tell me how to build on me, and make me a better me."

After a barrage of solo bangers, Future shares the spotlight with other artists on songs featuring Kanye West, Drake, and Gunna (a fresh follow-up to their pulsating smash "Pushin P"). Future has always gotten by with a little help from his friends. Most notably Drake on 2015's What a Time to Be Alive, an impromptu collaborative mixtape, the result of a six-day studio cram session.

"He's an absolutely relentless, spontaneous workhorse," Drake tells me. "And me, I'm a calculated, purpose-driven, militant individual. You take his free-flowing genius and you mix it with my level of understanding and planning and-records, albums, singles-we can pretty much create anything together."

The Drake and Future partnership has been particularly fruitful. Creatively, Future says that the pair just really connect. "Anytime we work in the studio, the level, the energy-we're trying to perfect this shit but still stay raw, still stay gritty, and still be moving at the speed of the universe," says Future. "It's something that you have to work at, but it's something that you have to find too."

Future feels blessed that he met Drake so early on in his career: "We made the most out of it. You're in a place where your self-esteem and ego allow a person to be in your space. And not be afraid to be like: I want to align and build with this.... You're never weak when you understand another man's strengths. I'm never weak now. I know what I need to be unstoppable. I know what I need to feel like, Okay, I'm never lacking, or, I'm never down."

Their number one record is Drake's "Way 2 Sexy," with Young Thug. And, Drake adds, they have "no plans of stopping." Remarkably, it was Future's first number one single on the Billboard Hot 100. "To have a number one record after 10 years, I still had to prove myself," he says.

I ask why he thinks that is. Why he still has to show and prove himself.

"I don't even give a fuck," he responds.

He estimates that his ability to evolve is what has given him longevity. "I grew in the business and I made adjustments and I continued to build, continued to overcome any doubt," he says. "If there was doubt, there's no more doubt. I'm here to stay. I already proved that. Had a hundred hits in one year, they still like, 'Hey, what are you going to do next?' I had to prove it again that I can do it again. Came back and dropped one album [2017's Future] and dropped another album the following week [ Hndrxx]." He literally replaced himself at the top of the charts. He made history. "I proved that I can have two number one albums in two weeks. I had to prove so many times throughout my career that I was here to stay."

Future and Drake have both, in their own way, changed the course of rap history. But the person we see kicking it with Future at Balenciaga stores and in Miami Heat courtside seats right now is Kanye West. "Me and Kanye always had a relationship," Future reveals to me now. "But it's hard for people to understand, because I don't put everything on Instagram. Kanye flew me to Paris in 2011 or 2012 to work on music. [Discussing] his clothing line before it came, his shoe business before it came. People don't know I've been able to go to his house, and pull up right into the crib. We just never talked about it."

It seems like a random pairing until you recall Future's 2014 "I Won," a saccharine dedication to their paramours at the time, Ciara and Kim Kardashian. Years later, West isn't just openly sharing that he asked Future for help on new music, he fully enlisted Future as an executive producer of Donda 2, which tackles his divorce drama and the deterioration of his relationship with Kim. I ask him what his reaction was when he heard Kanye call him "the most influential artist of the past 10 years" on the Drink Champs podcast.

"When he said that, I understood why he called me to Paris, even though I didn't understand it at that time," says Future. "I understood why we had certain conversations. I understood him being a part of 'I Won.' Even him having me write on certain [Kanye] albums that people don't even understand I wrote on."

Future says working closely with Kanye is about the love of the game. "Sometimes not getting credit when you write with him because the love of the art is...I want it to be right. Top tier. Just being able to create and put those textures over different music, and being involved with something like that. And then later down the line in a priceless moment, him saying what he said on Drink Champs. The value of that statement. The value of the relationship as it continues to grow, the value of just treating people like they are priceless, instead of treating people like they got a dollar sign on them every time."

It's that mentality-treating people right, no matter if you're getting something in return-that separates Future from many of his industry peers. "When you don't think people are looking, they're looking," he says. "They're watching. When you don't think they are listening, they're listening. I could have broken a bridge that I want to cross again, a broken bridge that I might need to cross again, off an assumption. But I just knew, every time when I do anything, man, I was doing it out of the kindness of my heart. I don't want to have any expectations for someone else and they let me down."

Last December, Future brought West out during his headlining set at Rolling Loud in San Bernardino, California. "There's brotherly love for each other," he says. "You're going to pop out when it's time to pop out. And every time I ask you to do something, it's going to make sense. We made the biggest moment." West even impromptu freestyled over "Fuck Up Some Commas." Live in front of tens of thousands of fans, Ye went from full secular cussing to chanting "Jesus gang."

There may or may not be a couple of lady friends in an adjoining room at Future's Peninsula New York penthouse the night before his cover shoot. Adam Sandler's The Waterboy is on a big screen, but a tired Future is lying on the couch, oblivious. Before calling it a night, he wants someone to come in and braid his hair.

We start talking about his first release of 2022, "Worst Day." It's about the Valentine's Day blues of a man with too many women to please: "Feel like I'm God-level, so many chicks I adore / Avoidin' the hurt, ridin' in circles in a Aventador."

"I'm just like, shit, this is the perfect time to put it out," says Future. "Get past it. Talk about it. Don't have to talk about it no more"- it being his previous high-profile relationships and drama with his many babies' mothers. "It was like some shit the fans wanted to hear from me, but at the same time I was already really past it."

The music video for the song begins with an interview with controversial YouTube image consultant Kevin Samuels, who believes that women overestimate their beauty and success, and hence their value in the social marketplace as they get older. His inclusion was seemingly designed to provoke the Internet; The Source called the video a link-up of "toxic all-stars." Future, however, says he didn't know who Samuels was until the video dropped, and if he did he "probably wouldn't have picked him" to be a guest star. "If I knew who he was before the video, I would've felt like it was a typical move," says Future, who notes that the creative decision was made by the video's director. "People associate me with being toxic. I would've overthought it."

He says that these days, he's not too concerned with the toxic masculinity tag that seems to always follow him around. "People have their own definition of what toxic is," says Future. "[These women] all were toxic to me. They just don't want to admit it."
Future Answers Questions From His Celebrity Friends
"Can I do a song while we're doing this?"

It's rare to truly witness an artist at work. Especially one as successful as Future. And he puts an end to our time together in an unforgettable way by recording a song from scratch. I've been in the studio with a lot of artists, but this was a new experience. Sitting at a microphone stationed outside the vocal booth and beside the engineer-a technique he's continued to develop since his eight-times-platinum single "Mask Off" was created that way-Future is less than six feet to my left, verbally sketching out lyrics and melodies. He stutters through declarations like, "Trapping with a demon / We're like twin brothers" and "She walked in with a goofy, I got a chance to intercept it" and proceeds to build a verse brick by brick, laying his vocals down one line at a time. In 20 or so minutes, he has a pretty strong demo that's now booming out into the wee hours of Manhattan.

"I do art, man," says Future. "It doesn't lose value. It doesn't depreciate. My passion is always going to overcome anything. This project is about sometimes having an open heart, handling everybody with open arms, man. You are going to get the bad end of the situation. Sometimes people out there try to make you seem like the suspect. Really, you are the victim. But at the same time, I've always been put on a pedestal, that either I can't complain about certain shit, I can't speak on certain shit."

Future thinks he's finally achieved some measure of happiness by simply "living and growing." But the vulnerability that made him a star is still very much a part of his music. It always will be. "I always found a way to create around everything, man. I turn pain into diamonds."

Pain into diamonds.

"I do that," says Future, "with my eyes closed."

Elliott Wilson is a journalist and the chief content officer of Tidal.
Watch Now:
Behind The Scenes with Cover Star Future
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Gregory Harris
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Grooming by Kumi Craig using La Mer At The Wall Group
Manicure by Maki Sakamoto using Essie
Tailoring by Marius Ahiale for Lars Nord Studio
Set design by Nicholas Des Jardins
Production by That One Production

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Few artists are as prolific. As widely imitated. As consistently excellent. Which is why it's finally time to declare what's been true for a while now... Best Rapper Alive. It's a lofty goal.

# data[].attributes.body
Good model to show a writer "in conversation" with sources. Includes summary, analysis, and synthesis.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Four forces are propelling the rising rates of depression among young people.

Sign up for Derek's newsletter here.
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.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Four forces are propelling the rising rates of depression among young people.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why We Shouldn't Shield Children From Darkness by Matt de la Peña

# data[].attributes.subject
Why We Shouldn't Shield Children From Darkness by Matt de la Peña

# data[].attributes.body
https://time.com/5093669/why-we-shouldnt-shield-children-from-darkness/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Why We Shouldn't Shield Children From Darkness'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Maybe instead of anxiously trying to protect our children from every little hurt, our job is to simply support them through such experiences

# data[].attributes.headline
Why Can't a Smart Woman Love Fashion? by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

# data[].attributes.subject
Why Can't a Smart Woman Love Fashion? by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

# data[].attributes.headline
I wrote this while teaching argument this semester and have submitted it to our local paper. 

# data[].attributes.subject
I wrote this while teaching argument this semester and have submitted it to our local paper. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Video: Opinion | The No Good, Very Bad Truth About the Internet and Our Kids

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our kids are at the mercy of tech companies, with only an outdated law to protect them.

# data[].attributes.headline
In Uvalde, should Little League go on? This makes a case for it (+ a terrific title for the piece.)

# data[].attributes.subject
In Uvalde, should Little League go on? This makes a case for it (+ a terrific title for the piece.)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
In a Town Crippled by Grief, the Healing Power of a Perfect Pitch

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Uvalde, Texas, was set to cancel its Little League All-Star Championship after a school shooting left 21 people dead. Then, the decision was made: The games would go on.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.southernliving.com/culture/celebrities/rick-bragg/rick-bragg-tomato-sandwich

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rick Bragg Sets The Record Straight On What Makes The Best Tomato Sandwich

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Some people just don’t know what’s good.

# data[].attributes.headline
A short, important reflection on what ChatGPT cannot do.... from poet Phil Kaye

# data[].attributes.subject
A short, important reflection on what ChatGPT cannot do.... from poet Phil Kaye

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An NPR best book of the year * New York Times bestseller The Washington Post sportswriter and New York Times bestselling author of the “fascinating…

# data[].attributes.headline
Whole text of informational essay used in pre and post assessments

# data[].attributes.subject
Whole text of informational essay used in pre and post assessments

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Federal Funding Cuts Ripple Through Heart of Trump Country

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Unseen trends, uplifting stats, creative solutions — a new chart every day. From Information is Beautiful.

# data[].attributes.headline
What started as a book club for World Cultures in grade 9 became a core text due to student enthusiasm for this story

# data[].attributes.subject
What started as a book club for World Cultures in grade 9 became a core text due to student enthusiasm for this story

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park, Maryanne Vollers: 9780143109747 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
“I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea, and that I escaped from North Korea.” - Yeonmi Park “One of the most harrowing stories I have ever heard - and one of the…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This short, engaging column can teach you a few moves for incorporating information from sources into an essay.

Our new This entry aims to help support those participating in our For even more on how to help your students write interesting, clear and meaningful informational pieces, please see our related writing unit. STEM-writing contest, in which students are invited to choose an issue or question in science, technology, engineering, math or health that interests them, then write a 500-word explanation that will engage and enlighten readers. Mentor Text series spotlights writing from The Times that students can learn from and emulate.
All informational journalism quotes experts and stakeholders. That's the journalist's job - to gather information from a range of sources so that the resulting article is authoritative and balanced.

Page or click through The Times or any other news source and you'll see. You would of course expect front-page articles about serious issues to reference multiple perspectives the way this one on the coronavirus does, quoting patients, Chinese officials,public health experts and scientists who study virology.But if you check out pieces from sections like Style and Sports, you'll notice the same. Whether you're reading a piece on social-media influencers or skateboarding, you'll see that the writer has included a range of points of view.

If you're writing your own piece, perhaps for our contest, you might be wondering, how do you choose the right people to quote? How do you use the information they give you? Even if you're not conducting live interviews the way journalists do, any research-based writing task requires you to learn how to weave in the information you find in books or other sources. So when do you quote and when do you paraphrase? How do you do both of those things seamlessly?

For this edition of Mentor Texts, we've chosen to spotlight the short, engaging Tip column that appears weekly in the Magazine. Here's why it's so useful:

It is written to a practical and engaging formula, one you are welcome to follow if you are participating in our STEM-writing contest.

The column is usually no more than 400 words long. Since our contest gives you only 500 words to work with, Tip can show you how to impart a wealth of interesting information in just a few paragraphs.

Because it is so short, each edition is built around an interview with a single expert. Noting what expert the author, Malia Wollan, chooses and how she uses the resulting information can help you see when to quote and when to paraphrase, and teach you how to do both gracefully.

Here are some ways to do that.

Choose three articles from the Tip column, whichever you think will interest you most.

For instance, you might choose ...

After you've read three, answer these questions: What do you notice about the structure of a Tip column? That is, what predictable elements can readers expect to find in every edition?

If you went through the exercise above, you no doubt noticed this pattern:

The first line of all Tip articles is a quote from an expert. ( For example, "Hit the shark in the eyes and gills," says Sarah Waries, the chief executive of Shark Spotters, an organization in Cape Town that employs 30 specialists to scan the city's beaches with binoculars from the cliffs and sound the alarm when they see one in the water.")

That same expert gives background and advice throughout the piece. ( "It's critical to stop the bleeding," Waries says.)

The expert also usually gets the last word in the form of a final, fitting quote. ( "Sharks are everywhere," Waries says. "They're in all the oceans.")

Below are three STEM-focused articles from this column that we have chosen as mentors. We've excerpted the first paragraph of each, but please read them all in full.
"How to Enjoy Snowflakes"How to Hold a Venomous Snake "How to Fast":

Whom does the writer quote in each of these columns? Why do you think the author chose them? Do you think they were good sources of information?

Look closely at when the author chooses to quote the experts and when she paraphrases the information they gave her. What is the difference? Why do you think she chose to quote the lines she did? Give some examples from the pieces to explain your reasoning.

What do you notice about how she works in quotations? How does she introduce them so they make sense and add a little color? For instance, the second paragraph of "How to Hold a Venomous Snake" begins this way: "Unless you're a trained venom extractor, don't pick up a snake with your hands. Even zookeepers and herpetologists keep out of striking distance by scooping specimens up with a pole called a snake hook. 'Everybody thinks they know what they're doing because they saw it on YouTube,' Harrison says." How do the first two sentences give practical information that leads us into the YouTube quote? How does that quote add a bit of humor to the piece?

Finally, look closely at the quotes that begin and end each piece. How would you describe the differences? Would the quotes work if they were flipped? What about any quotes you find in the middle paragraphs of these pieces? What observations can you make in general about the structure of a Tip column and how quotations work to build that structure?

": ":

"It's easier to appreciate snowflakes when you don't have a shovel in your hand," says Kenneth G. Libbrecht, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., who studies snowflake morphology by growing ice crystals in his laboratory. Go out in the snow with dark clothing on and let a few flakes fall on your coat. Peer at them through a magnifying glass. Don't assume you'll see the archetypal, branching-star type called stellar dendrites, which require temperatures around minus 15 degrees Celsius. To see those in the wild, Libbrecht travels to a small town in northeastern Ontario. "The people there think I'm crazy," he says.

''The snake will defecate on you,'' says Jim Harrison, who extracts venom from approximately 1,000 snakes every week for use in drug research and development. Learn to ignore the stink. Collecting venom requires pinching a snake firmly behind its skull until it clamps its fangs over a sterile collection vial; snakes will squirt excreta in an effort to escape. ''When I'm done extracting the cobras, I'm covered in feces and my wife won't come close to me,'' Harrison says.

"Fasting is mental over physical, just like basketball and most other stuff in life," says Enes Kanter, the 6-foot-11 center for the Portland Trail Blazers. Raised in Turkey, Kanter, 27, is a Muslim who has fasted from sunrise to sunset during the month of Ramadan since he was 8. This season, Ramadan aligned with the N.B.A. playoffs, so Kanter fasted through seven playoff games. During the year he forgoes food and water a day or two a week. "Don't be scared to try it," he says.

Now, answer these questions:

Before you go, one last thing to notice. You may have been taught in school to cite your sources by using footnotes, or by putting them in parentheses after you've referenced the information. That's not how journalists do it, yet they still make their sources clear.

If the article is online-only, sources are sometimes linked. For pieces like Tip, which appear both online and in print, sources are referenced in the reporting. For example, direct quotes, like "It's critical to stop the bleeding," from the shark piece, above, will have a "[name of person] says" somewhere in the sentence ("Waries says"). Paraphrases often start with a lead-in like, "According to ..." or "Studies have found ..." The Tip column quotes only one expert each week, so there is no need to keep adding "According to," but, to continue our shark theme, notice the ways this paragraph from an Aug. 2019 article, " How Sharks Glow to Each Other Deep in the Ocean," acknowledges its source:

In a study published Thursday in iScience, researchers reveal the secret behind this magical transformation: Molecules inside their scales transform how shark skin interacts with light, bringing in blue photons, and sending out green. This improved understanding of these sharks' luminous illusions may lead to improvements in scientific imaging, as the study of biofluorescence in other marine life already has.

How does the first sentence make clear that the information comes from a particular study? How does the use of a colon help?

Video

Back

transcript

Massive Shark Spotted in Cape Cod

Great white sharks have become increasingly prevalent along the beaches in Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Last year was the state's first fatal shark attack since 1936.

"Whoa. No way. Oh my God." "Hold on, you guys. Hold on." "Holy [expletive]." "It just hit the boat." "Oh my God." "Oh my God." "Wow." "Left, left." "Dad, come look at it. Dad, come, come over here. Dad."

Great white sharks have become increasingly prevalent along the beaches in Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Last year was the state's first fatal shark attack since 1936. Credit Credit... Reuters

We started with sharks, and we're ending with sharks.

Let's pretend that you're a journalist, it's summer, and there have been a rash of shark attacks in the United States and around the world. Your editor gives you not just the 400 words Malia Wollan got to write about how to survive a shark attack, but, instead, 1,200, three times that number. She assigns you to investigate the question: Should swimmers worry about sharks?

How will you find out? Whom will you interview? What information will you be looking for? What individuals, institutions and organizations might be reliable experts or stakeholders on this question? How will you know they're reliable? What kinds of studies and statistics might you need, and how will you know those are reliable?

Make as long of a list as you can of all the people and places you might consult to get a full answer to that question, then share your list with others.

Then take a look at a 2015 Times piece in which the reporter Christine Hauser answers the very question we posed above: Should swimmers worry about sharks? What experts and organizations does she seem to have consulted? How many of them are similar to what you put on your list? Are there any she's missing that she might have included if she had another 1,000 words to work with? How did she work the information in, both via direct quotes and paraphrases?

Finally, now that you've gone through all the exercises in this lesson, your next assignment is, of course, to figure out who and what expert sources to consult to find a range of information about whatever you're writing about - then borrow some of the "writer's moves" above to weave that information into your essay as seamlessly as you can. Good luck!

Look through the piece. How many sources, whether they're people or institutions, are named? How many are quoted, and how many are cited as the source of paraphrased information? How are they cited? What do those sources add to the piece?

Why do you think the author chose these sources? How reliable do they seem? How do you know?

How is the information from experts woven into the piece? How are quotes introduced? How do paraphrases make the source of the information clear?

What points of view, if any, are missing? What experts or stakeholders could this person have interviewed to get those points of view? Why?

What else do you notice or admire about this piece? What lessons might it have for your writing?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Quoting and Paraphrasing Experts and Research: The Times Tip Column

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This short, engaging column can teach you a few moves for incorporating information from sources into an essay. Our new This entry aims to help support those participating in our For even more on how to help your students write interesting, clear and meaningful informational pieces, please see our related writing unit .

# data[].attributes.headline
MENTOR TEXT: An informational article annotated by the author to show his decision-making

# data[].attributes.subject
MENTOR TEXT: An informational article annotated by the author to show his decision-making

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nicholas St. Fleur INFORMATIONAL Mentor Text

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Hamilton – “Wrote My Way Out” (Nas, Dave East, Lin-Manuel Miranda & Aloe Blacc) [Official Video]

# data[].attributes.headline
11 Elements of Effective Adolescent Writing Instruction

# data[].attributes.subject
11 Elements of Effective Adolescent Writing Instruction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Eleven Elements of Effective Adolescent Writing Instruction