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Tara Westover's memoir "Educated," which describes growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and then going on to Harvard and Cambridge, is our May pick for the new PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, "Now Read This." Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up to our newsletter. Learn more about the book club here.
The memoir "Educated" begins with the image of author Tara Westover as a young girl, standing on a railway car beside a barn beside the mountain in rural Idaho where she grew up. It is an evocative picture that sets the scene for how different her childhood was to many others. This was in part due to the harsh landscape, but also to the fact that her family did not believe in formalized education or traditional medicine.

"Dad worries that the Government will force us to go" to school, she writes in the prologue. "But it can't, because it doesn't know about us."

Below, Westover annotates the first page of "Educated" to show readers how she chose her language and imagery, and explain the themes and ideas she wanted to set up from page one:
Prologue
I'm standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn. The wind soars, whipping my hair across my face and pushing a chill down the open neck of my shirt. The gales are strong this close to the mountain, as if the peak itself is exhaling. Down below, the valley is peaceful, undisturbed. Meanwhile our farm dances: the heavy conifer trees sway slowly, while the sagebrush and thistles quiver, bowing before every puff and pocket of air. Behind me a gentle hill slopes upward and stitches itself to the mountain base. If I look up, I can see the dark form of the Indian Princess.

The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sage- brush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. The shape of that dent lasts only a moment, and is as close as anyone gets to seeing wind.

Turning toward our house on the hillside, I see movements of a different kind, tall shadows stiffly pushing through the currents. My brothers are awake, testing the weather. I imagine my mother at the stove, hovering over bran pancakes. I picture my father hunched by the back door, lacing his steel-toed boots and threading his callused hands into welding gloves. On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping.

I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don't go to school.

Dad worries that the Government will force us to go but it can't, because it doesn't know about us. Four of my parents' seven children don't have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. We have no school records because we've never set foot in a classroom. When I am nine, I will be issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth, but at this moment, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I do not exist.

Of course I did exist. I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected.

I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cycle- the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons-circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain.

There's a story my father used to tell about the peak. She was a grand old thing, a cathedral of a mountain. The range had other mountains, taller, more imposing, but Buck's Peak was the most finely crafted. Its base spanned a mile, its dark form swelling out of the earth and rising into a flawless spire. From a distance, you could see the impression of a woman's body on the mountain face: her legs formed of huge ravines, her hair a spray of pines fanning over the northern ridge. Her stance was commanding, one leg thrust forward in a powerful movement, more stride than step.

My father called her the Indian Princess. She emerged each year when the snows began to melt, facing south, watching the buffalo return to the valley. Dad said the nomadic Indians had watched for her appearance as a sign of spring, a signal the mountain was thawing, winter was over, and it was time to come home.

All my father's stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho. He never told me what to do if I left the mountain, if I crossed oceans and continents and found myself in strange terrain, where I could no longer search the horizon for the Princess. He never told me how I'd know when it was time to come home.

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Tara Westover annotates the first page of her memoir, 'Educated'

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Tara Westover's memoir "Educated," which describes growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and then going on to Harvard and Cambridge, is our May pick for the new PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, "Now Read This." Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up to our newsletter.

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"An education is the remaking of a person. You can submit to that remaking passively, or you can take an active part," Tara Westover, the author of "Educated," tells us in this essay.

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Our July pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, "Now Read This" is Min Jin Lee's historical novel "Pachinko." Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up to our newsletter. Learn more about the book club here.
Min Jin's historical novel "Pachinko" opens with the startling line: "History has failed us, but no matter."

So begins a family saga of four generations of ethnic Koreans who migrate to Japan and to whom history is not always kind. And yet each generation perseveres, enduring the oppression of Japanese colonialism and finding their way the best they can.

Below, Lee annotates the first page of "Pachinko." In her annotations, she explains why she chose that as the book's opening line, how she finds her ideas, and what she was thinking as she wrote.
Yeongdo, Busan, Korea
History has failed us, but no matter.

At the turn of the century, an aging fisherman and his wife decided to take in lodgers for extra money. Both were born and raised in the fishing village of Yeongdo-a five-mile-wide islet beside the port city of Busan. In their long marriage, the wife gave birth to three sons, but only Hoonie, the eldest and the weakest one, survived. Hoonie was born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot; he was, however, endowed with hefty shoulders, a squat build, and a golden complexion. Even as a young man, he retained the mild, thoughtful temperament he'd had as a child. When Hoonie covered his misshapen mouth with his hands, something he did out of habit meeting strangers, he resembled his nice-looking father, both having the same large, smiling eyes. Inky eyebrows graced his broad forehead, perpetually tanned from outdoor work. Like his parents, Hoonie was not a nimble talker, and some made the mistake of thinking that because he could not speak quickly there was something wrong with his mind, but that was not true.

In 1910, when Hoonie was twenty-seven years old, Japan annexed Korea. The fisherman and his wife, thrifty and hardy peasants, refused to be distracted by the country's incompetent aristocrats and corrupt rulers, who had lost their nation to thieves. When the rent for their house was raised again, the couple moved out of their bedroom and slept in the anteroom near the kitchen to increase the number of lodgers.

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Min Jin Lee annotates the first page of her bestselling book 'Pachinko'

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Our July pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, "Now Read This" is Min Jin Lee's historical novel "Pachinko." Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up to our newsletter. Learn more about the book club here.

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Pirette McKamey, a veteran English teacher, spent 30 years investigating what helps young people to view themselves as writers.

Editor's Note: In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. In recent years, that number is closer to just three years leading a classroom. The "On Teaching" series focuses on the wisdom of veteran teachers.

"I want to say something important about writing," Pirette McKamey told 25 seniors in her English class at San Francisco's Mission High School one fall afternoon in 2012. It's incredibly hard, and always incomplete, she explained. "I've reread some of my essays 20 times and I still go, 'I can't believe I made this mistake or that mistake.'"

"I'm going to read a powerful essay as a model today," said McKamey, who frequently shares her students' work at the beginning of class as a way to showcase examples of effective and creative approaches to writing. She appreciated the student's paper for "the heft of its content," she told the class. "It also feels real. It was written with real engagement and honesty."

In his essay, one of McKamey's students wrote about his life ambitions, including his desire to become a musician. He compared his goals with those of two other individuals, chosen from the many real and fictional people the students had studied earlier that year in a five-week-long unit titled "Quests." The vision behind this unit was rooted in McKamey's observation that as teenagers approach adulthood, they want to examine how people from different eras and cultures have defined values such as success, goodness, and courage.

After McKamey finished reading the essay, students discussed what made it work-and which approaches they could employ in their own writing. As the discussion winded down, McKamey passed out a grammar worksheet.

Today, there is a growing consensus that students need strong writing skills to succeed in the workplace and to fully participate in society, but educators passionately disagree on the best ways to teach those skills. Some call for greater focus on the fundamentals of grammar: building vocabulary, identifying parts of speech, and mastering punctuation. Others believe that students need more opportunities to develop their writerly voice through creative expression and work that allows them to make connections between great literature and their personal lives.

Meanwhile, it appears that many of the methods seem to be falling short: Results from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress suggest that only one in four 12th- and eighth-graders is meeting grade-level expectations in writing. In both tested grades, Latino and African American students scored lower than their peers in other racial and ethnic subgroups.
[The best writing teachers are writers themselves]
McKamey spent 29 years teaching in majority black and Latino schools. Over the years, she observed that many of her students came into her classroom believing that they "don't like writing" or are "bad writers." Since McKamey first started teaching at San Francisco's Luther Burbank Middle School in 1989, she has been refining her own methods to help dispel these self-perceptions.

In McKamey's classes, this means that students must feel compelled to write every day. But rather than prioritizing the mechanics of sentence structure or writing rooted in personal experiences, McKamey's students work on a variety of exercises, including punctuation worksheets, argumentative and narrative essays, poetry, fiction, and long research papers. And while McKamey's methods have evolved significantly since she first started teaching, her goal has remained the same: help every student develop a portfolio of high-quality work, which will serve as irrefutable evidence that they are capable of writing.

McKamey's approach to writing instruction was shaped in part by her own experiences as a high-school student. One of just a handful of African American students at a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania, she noticed that most of her teachers would return papers with feedback that focused on what she did wrong. Whenever McKamey's teachers praised her in the classroom, their feedback usually centered on her personality-rather than her intellectual contributions. Fran Bradley, McKamey's high-school economics teacher, was an exception. When McKamey asked a question or made a comment, Bradley would engage in an enthusiastic discussion about McKamey's ideas. He often read passages from her work in front of the class.

Even though McKamey's parents always told her that she was intelligent and a good writer-despite her uneven grades-Bradley made an effort to cite evidence showing the benefits of McKamey's intellectual contributions in her writing. When McKamey felt valued for her intellect, she explained, she was more willing to engage with the classwork-and she produced some of her strongest academic writing.

McKamey's years as a teacher were deeply influenced by the research of the social psychologist Claude Steele. Best known for his studies on what researchers call the " stereotype threat," Steele uncovered a unique form of distress that suppresses academic achievement in certain situations-during tests for African American students or math classes for women, for example-when an individual has the potential to confirm a negative stereotype about his or her social group. Steele's research found that certain actions by teachers or mentors can dispel these crippling anxieties-they can signal in their feedback that they hold a student to high standards while also citing spots in the work where the student meets the challenge, for example.

Pablo Rodriguez-a former student of McKamey's, who moved to the United States from Guatemala in 2009-still remembers McKamey's feedback on his first essay in her class. He recalls the stars dotting the paper next to specific passages, and comments such as, "This is so interesting. I never thought of it this way," or "I'm so intrigued by the point you are making here. Could you tell me more what you mean by that?"

In the past, most of Rodriguez's writing earned D's and C's, and his papers would come back with a lot of grammar corrections, Rodriguez, who is now 23 and works as a youth counselor, told me. This made him feel hopeless about his ability to write. "Ms. McKamey taught me skills to deal with my weaknesses," Rodriguez explained. "But she saw my strengths and it made me feel motivated. I wanted to write essays that would make Ms. McKamey love it more than anything she's ever read, and I started spending hours at the library rewriting my papers."

McKamey argues that the most important skill for a teacher is his or her ability to build trust with a student, which develops when students can sense that the educator is willing to hear their ideas, thoughts, and musings despite their challenges with grammar, low grades, or test scores in previous classes. This doesn't mean that teachers need to cushion their feedback with fake praise, but it does mean, she thinks, that schools should help teachers develop skills to recognize what all students, including those who might be considered "low achieving," do in their classrooms-instead of focusing mostly on what they don't do or know.
[A educator witnessed school desegregation-and resegregation]
"Just because I struggle with some grammar rules doesn't mean I can't think deeply," says one of McKamey's former students, Ajanee Greene, who's now 23 and a student at Jackson State University. In 2012, McKamey says, Greene wrote one of the strongest research papers McKamey had read in her classes, even though she had received a D in English at another school. Her 12-page final paper explored how the long history of racial exclusion contributed to violence in black communities-and affected her own family in San Francisco.

"The newspapers talk about the violence, but they don't talk about a much bigger epidemic-the private pain of families who are left to live with the aftermath" of that violence, Greene, who became the first in her family to graduate from high school, wrote in 2012. "Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone can inflict. The violence stays with families and becomes a part of their lives. Nobody feels the same and family relationships get strained. This causes more pain, and the cycle intensifies ... The psychological damage destroys communities more than unemployment and poverty."

For her paper, Greene had read and analyzed 20 articles and studies, interviewed neighbors, and added her own point of view. Before McKamey's class, Greene had never written a research paper. "Ms. McKamey believed in me and then pushed me to work really, really hard," Greene explained. She ultimately got an A- in McKamey's class.

Drawing on the methods she uses in her English classes, McKamey has been coaching other teachers across all subjects for about a decade now. As part of this process, teachers meet in small groups where they review the work of middle-achieving students who have made a recent shift-went from chronic C's to an A- in a recent essay, or analyzed passages more deeply, or showed intellectual engagement instead of just trying to get a good grade. Teachers then share practices that contributed to the growth in that student's skills: verbal or written feedback, more explicit instruction in the components of academic writing, or reading student work in front of the class, among others.

Analyzing the work of middle-achieving students-rather than just failing or thriving ones-can significantly improve teachers' effectiveness with underachieving students, McKamey argues. When teachers focus on the work of the lowest-achieving students, McKamey has observed that such conversations often turn into a space to blame the students, their parents, or other teachers, or they veer off into emotionally invasive discussions of a student's private life. Focusing on middle-achieving students who showed recent improvement helps teachers dispel unrecognized stereotypes-and learn how to notice and build on their strengths. (One study found that white teachers graded black and Latino students more harshly for the same performance, accounting for as much as 22 percent of the achievement gap.)

"The task is to educate all students in front of me," McKamey reflected. "There are so many opportunities to miss certain students: not see them, not hear them, shut them down. Despite years and years of teaching, there are times when the student is communicating something to me and I can't hear their thinking at the moment, but I can't ruin it. I have to keep it alive."
This article is part of our project "On Teaching," which is supported by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Panta Rhea Foundation.

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recent national assessment of educational progress

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research of the social psychologist claude steele

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Pirette McKamey, a veteran English teacher, spent 30 years investigating what helps young people to view themselves as writers.

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Our August pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, "Now Read This," is Lesley Nneka Arimah's debut short story collection "What It Means When A Man Falls From the Sky." Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up to our newsletter. Learn more about the book club here and see all the previous book club selections here.
Strong women populate Lesley Nneka Arimah's short stories in her debut collection, "What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky."

Some defy their mothers. Others defy convention. Glory, the titular lead character of one story, is equally independent and complicated. She seems haunted by bad luck, but as the story progresses we wonder if perhaps it is luck of her own making. Is the story meant to be realism or magical realism? Is Glory cursed or bad at decision-making? Or do people simply view her all wrong? As with many of Nneka Arimah's stories, there is no easy answer.

Below, Nneka Arimah annotates a page of "Glory," explaining where she got the opening scene, how she sees Glory, and the challenge of writing unlikeable characters. (Click on the yellow text to see the annotations.)
Glory
When Glory's parents christened her Glorybetogod Ngozi Akunyili, they did not foresee Facebook's "real name" policy, nor the weeks she would spend populating forms and submitting copies of her bills and driver's license and the certificate that documented her birth on September 9, 1986, a rainy Tuesday, at 6:45 pm, after six hours of labor and six years of barrenness. Pinning on her every hope they had yet to realize, her parents imagined the type of life well-situated Igbos imagined for their children. She would be a smart girl with the best schooling. She would attend church regularly and never stray from the Word. (Amen!) She would learn to cook like her grandmother, her father added, to which her mother countered, why not like her mother, and Glorybetogod's father hemmed and hawed till his wife said maybe he should go and eat at his mother's house. But back to Glorybetogod, whom everyone called Glory except for her grandfather, who called her "that girl" the first time he saw her.

"That girl has something rotten in her, her chi is not well."

Husband pulled wife out of the room to prevent a brawl ("I don't care how old that drunk is, I will fix his mouth today") and begged his father to accept his firstborn grandchild. He didn't see, as the grandfather did, the caul of misfortune covering Glory's face that would affect every decision she made, causing her to err of the side of wrong, time and time again. When Glory was five she decided, after much consideration, to stick her finger into the maw of a sleeping dog. At seven, shortly after her family relocated to the U.S., Glory thought it a good idea to walk home when her mother was five minutes late picking her up from school, a choice that saw her lost and sobbing in a Piggly Wiggly parking lot before night fell. She did a lot of things out of spite, the source of which she couldn't identify-as if she'd been born resenting the world.

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An annotated page from 'What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky'

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Our August pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, "Now Read This," is Lesley Nneka Arimah's debut short story collection "What It Means When A Man Falls From the Sky." Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up to our newsletter.

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We asked members of the BuzzFeed Community to tell us about their favorite lines from literature. Here are some of their most beautiful replies.

2. "In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars."

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Suggested by Jasmin B., via Facebook
3. "She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together."

-J. D. Salinger, "A Girl I Knew"
Suggested by mollyp49cf70741
4. "I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart; I am, I am, I am."

-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Suggested by Brooke K., via Facebook
14. "As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts and the Two Thoughts he thought were these: a) Anything can happen to anyone. and b) It is best to be prepared."

-Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Suggested by Alyssa P., via Facebook
15. "If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me."

-W. H. Auden, "The More Loving One"
Suggested by Blake M., via Facebook
16. "And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."

-John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Suggested by Missy W., via Facebook
18. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

-William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Suggested by Emily F., via Facebook
19. "America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing."

-Allen Ginsburg, "America"
Suggested by Jimmy C., via Facebook
20. "It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories."

-W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
Suggested by fireworkshurricanes
22. "At the still point, there the dance is."

-T. S. Eliot, "Four Quartets"

23. "Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering."

-Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Suggested by Sam H., via Facebook
24. "In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart."

-Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank
Suggested by claires10
26. "The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order."

-Toni Morrison, Beloved
Suggested by lisah4b5176fb6
27. "How wild it was, to let it be."

-Cheryl Strayed, Wild
Suggested by Natalie P., via Facebook
28. "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?"

-T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Suggested by Kati A., via Facebook
30. "She was lost in her longing to understand."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Suggested by melibellel
31. "She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world."

-Kate Chopin, "The Awakening"
Suggested by Madeline M., via Facebook
32. "We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that once our eyes watered."

-Tom Stoppard, Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead

37. "Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet."

-L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Suggested by Stacy W., via Facebook
38. "I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark."

-Raymond Carver, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"
Suggested by Savey S., via Facebook
39. "I would always rather be happy than dignified."

-Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre
Suggested by Chelsea Z., via Facebook
41. "I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"

-W. B. Yeats, "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven"

42. "It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes."

-Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
Suggested by uncnicole
43. "For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly."

-Langston Hughes, The Big Sea
Suggested by TonyaPenn
45. "I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night."

-Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Suggested by Maria K., via Facebook
46. "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

47. "Journeys end in lovers meeting."

-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Did your favorite line from literature make the list? Tell us about it in the comments below! And if you'd like to be featured similar BuzzFeed posts, be sure to follow the BuzzFeed Community on Facebook and Twitter.

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51 Of The Most Beautiful Sentences In Literature

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2. "In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars." -Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Suggested by Jasmin B., via Facebook 3. "She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together."

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August, and I say this with no affection, you are a month of hot garbage.

There is no good in you, August. You serve no purpose.

You are the wrong temperature not only in one place but in every place.

To go outdoors in you, August, is to walk into a stranger's mouth. It is to sit in a vile cloud of heat and moisture that wicks away energy from every limb like a wizard's curse. To go outdoors in you, August, is to be wrapped in a thick hot sponge and beset by mosquitoes. It is to have your whole body lightly braised in a fine oil like a slightly rotisseried chicken, to wrap yourself in a piece of wet paper towel and climb into a microwave. It is to stand inside a fart.

But to go indoors in you, August, is to walk into a store's cold refrigerator of beer, or a florist's icy chamber of rare plants. To go indoors in you is to step into the freezing arctic and be blasted by a thousand icy winds, to witness penguins shivering in your office and huddled for warmth. Indoors is an icy cave where it is always winter and never Christmas and there is no Turkish delight and Santa is four months away. Did you bring ice cream with you from outdoors? Too bad; you do not want it now, and it is frozen to your hand with a layer of ice an inch thick, and you will need to chisel it off.

Indoors in August is the surface of a moon of Jupiter, but not one that supports life. Indoors you must step over several dead tauntauns and the flags of many failed polar expeditions and the stiff form of the little match girl to get into the elevator. But you are still damp with sweat, which now freezes to your body, like a cursed ice pop. To stay indoors in August is to need several sweaters at least, but you have just come from the warm cave of the tropics and there was no thought of sweaters then. August indoors should sell sweatshirts, like any place that is freezing cold that you do not realize will be freezing cold - San Francisco in summer, indoors literally anywhere in August.

Want to go back outdoors? Oh, but now it is raining. There are also mosquitoes.

August heard we liked summer, so it gave us extra summer, but it did not get useful feedback about what of summer was good. August demands that you go lurching out on the weekend convulsed with the regrets of July and June, trying to seek fun, but now it is unpleasant everywhere.

August is too wet in places and too dry in other places, and also there are primaries in it, which is confusing. The news is just as bad as ever, but sometimes the anchors are on vacation, and it does not seem to make a difference. The television does nothing but tell you to go back to school, and this is cruel to students who must go back to school and cruel to everyone else who must be reminded of the ineluctable march of time toward the grave and how much fashions have changed since their youth.

When a movie comes out in August, it is a movie about a large shark whose entire endeavor is to insult you for fun, or it is a Good Movie that you cannot gather a group to see on a Friday night because you will all have Thoughts about it afterward.

There is too much of you, August. We did not need 31 days of this, but you have 31 days anyway, to spite us. You smell funny. You are the second helping of summer we ordered because the first helping was so delicious but we did not realize we would be full by the time you arrived.

You contain no holidays, August. You confuse the holiday aisles of CVS, and they try to sell Halloween candy but furthermore back-to-school supplies but furthermore a small plastic shovel for making sand architectures at the beach. There are no fireworks in you. The sports are all over, or they are too far along.

You are too late in the year for us to make any changes and have them stick. Everything is too close to over for anything to be different, and the thing that comes after you is fall, where they shove pumpkin spice into us until we cry out to the gods for mercy, and the whole world is full of gourds.

Vile month, despicable month, everything about you is garbage, and I spite you.

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Opinion | August, you are a garbage month

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August, and I say this with no affection, you are a month of hot garbage. There is no good in you, August. You serve no purpose. You are the wrong temperature not only in one place but in every place. To go outdoors in you, August, is to walk into a stranger's mouth.

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The Sackler dynasty's ruthless marketing of painkillers has generated billions of dollars-and millions of addicts.

The north wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a vast, airy enclosure featuring a banked wall of glass and the Temple of Dendur, a sandstone monument that was constructed beside the Nile two millennia ago and transported to the Met, brick by brick, as a gift from the Egyptian government. The space, which opened in 1978 and is known as the Sackler Wing, is also itself a monument, to one of America's great philanthropic dynasties. The Brooklyn-born brothers Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler, all physicians, donated lavishly during their lifetimes to an astounding range of institutions, many of which today bear the family name: the Sackler Gallery, in Washington; the Sackler Museum, at Harvard; the Sackler Center for Arts Education, at the Guggenheim; the Sackler Wing at the Louvre; and Sackler institutes and facilities at Columbia, Oxford, and a dozen other universities. The Sacklers have endowed professorships and underwritten medical research. The art scholar Thomas Lawton once likened the eldest brother, Arthur, to "a modern Medici." Before Arthur's death, in 1987, he advised his children, "Leave the world a better place than when you entered it."

Mortimer died in 2010, and Raymond died earlier this year. The brothers bequeathed to their heirs a laudable tradition of benevolence, and an immense fortune with which to indulge it. Arthur's daughter Elizabeth is on the board of the Brooklyn Museum, where she endowed the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Raymond's sons, Richard and Jonathan, established a professorship at Yale Cancer Center. "My father raised Jon and me to believe that philanthropy is an important part of how we should fill our lives," Richard has said. Marissa Sackler, the thirty-six-year-old daughter of Mortimer and his third wife, Theresa Rowling, founded Beespace, a nonprofit "incubator" that supports organizations like the Malala Fund. Sackler recently told W that she finds the word "philanthropy" old-fashioned. She considers herself a "social entrepreneur."

When the Met was originally built, in 1880, one of its trustees, the lawyer Joseph Choate, gave a speech to Gilded Age industrialists who had gathered to celebrate its dedication, and, in a bid for their support, offered the sly observation that what philanthropy really buys is immortality: "Think of it, ye millionaires of many markets, what glory may yet be yours, if you only listen to our advice, to convert pork into porcelain, grain and produce into priceless pottery, the rude ores of commerce into sculptured marble." Through such transubstantiation, many fortunes have passed into enduring civic institutions. Over time, the origins of a clan's largesse are largely forgotten, and we recall only the philanthropic legacy, prompted by the name on the building. According to Forbes, the Sacklers are now one of America's richest families, with a collective net worth of thirteen billion dollars-more than the Rockefellers or the Mellons. The bulk of the Sacklers' fortune has been accumulated only in recent decades, yet the source of their wealth is to most people as obscure as that of the robber barons. While the Sacklers are interviewed regularly on the subject of their generosity, they almost never speak publicly about the family business, Purdue Pharma-a privately held company, based in Stamford, Connecticut, that developed the prescription painkiller OxyContin. Upon its release, in 1995, OxyContin was hailed as a medical breakthrough, a long-lasting narcotic that could help patients suffering from moderate to severe pain. The drug became a blockbuster, and has reportedly generated some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue for Purdue.

But OxyContin is a controversial drug. Its sole active ingredient is oxycodone, a chemical cousin of heroin which is up to twice as powerful as morphine. In the past, doctors had been reluctant to prescribe strong opioids-as synthetic drugs derived from opium are known-except for acute cancer pain and end-of-life palliative care, because of a long-standing, and well-founded, fear about the addictive properties of these drugs. "Few drugs are as dangerous as the opioids," David Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told me.

Purdue launched OxyContin with a marketing campaign that attempted to counter this attitude and change the prescribing habits of doctors. The company funded research and paid doctors to make the case that concerns about opioid addiction were overblown, and that OxyContin could safely treat an ever-wider range of maladies. Sales representatives marketed OxyContin as a product "to start with and to stay with." Millions of patients found the drug to be a vital salve for excruciating pain. But many others grew so hooked on it that, between doses, they experienced debilitating withdrawal.

Since 1999, two hundred thousand Americans have died from overdoses related to OxyContin and other prescription opioids. Many addicts, finding prescription painkillers too expensive or too difficult to obtain, have turned to heroin. According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, four out of five people who try heroin today started with prescription painkillers. The most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that a hundred and forty-five Americans now die every day from opioid overdoses.

Andrew Kolodny, the co-director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative, at Brandeis University, has worked with hundreds of patients addicted to opioids. He told me that, though many fatal overdoses have resulted from opioids other than OxyContin, the crisis was initially precipitated by a shift in the culture of prescribing-a shift carefully engineered by Purdue. "If you look at the prescribing trends for all the different opioids, it's in 1996 that prescribing really takes off," Kolodny said. "It's not a coincidence. That was the year Purdue launched a multifaceted campaign that misinformed the medical community about the risks." When I asked Kolodny how much of the blame Purdue bears for the current public-health crisis, he responded, "The lion's share."

Although the Sackler name can be found on dozens of buildings, Purdue's Web site scarcely mentions the family, and a list of the company's board of directors fails to include eight family members, from three generations, who serve in that capacity. "I don't know how many rooms in different parts of the world I've given talks in that were named after the Sacklers," Allen Frances, the former chair of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine, told me. "Their name has been pushed forward as the epitome of good works and of the fruits of the capitalist system. But, when it comes down to it, they've earned this fortune at the expense of millions of people who are addicted. It's shocking how they have gotten away with it."

"Dr. Sackler considered himself and was considered to be the patriarch of the Sackler family," a lawyer representing Arthur Sackler's children once observed. Arthur was a gap-toothed, commanding polymath who trained under the Dutch psychoanalyst Johan H. W. van Ophuijsen, whom Sackler proudly described as "Freud's favorite disciple." Arthur and his brothers, the children of Jewish immigrants from Galicia and Poland, grew up in Brooklyn during the Depression. All three attended medical school, and worked together at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, in Queens, collectively publishing some hundred and fifty scholarly papers. Arthur became fascinated, he later explained, by the ways that "nature and disease can reveal their secrets." The Sacklers were especially interested in the biological aspects of psychiatric disorders, and in pharmaceutical alternatives to mid-century methods such as electroshock therapy and psychoanalysis.

But the brothers made their fortunes in commerce, rather than from medical practice. They shared an entrepreneurial bent. As a teen-ager, Mortimer became the advertising manager of his high-school newspaper, and after persuading Chesterfield to place a cigarette ad he got a five-dollar commission-a lot of money at a time when, he later said, "even doctors were selling apples in the streets." In 1942, Arthur helped pay his medical-school tuition by taking a copywriting job at William Douglas McAdams, a small ad agency that specialized in the medical field. He proved so adept at this work that he eventually bought the agency-and revolutionized the industry. Until then, pharmaceutical companies had not availed themselves of Madison Avenue pizzazz and trickery. As both a doctor and an adman, Arthur displayed a Don Draper-style intuition for the alchemy of marketing. He recognized that selling new drugs requires a seduction of not just the patient but the doctor who writes the prescription.

Sackler saw doctors as unimpeachable stewards of public health. "I would rather place myself and my family at the judgment and mercy of a fellow-physician than that of the state," he liked to say. So in selling new drugs he devised campaigns that appealed directly to clinicians, placing splashy ads in medical journals and distributing literature to doctors' offices. Seeing that physicians were most heavily influenced by their own peers, he enlisted prominent ones to endorse his products, and cited scientific studies (which were often underwritten by the pharmaceutical companies themselves). John Kallir, who worked under Sackler for ten years at McAdams, recalled, "Sackler's ads had a very serious, clinical look-a physician talking to a physician. But it was advertising." In 1997, Arthur was posthumously inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame, and a citation praised his achievement in "bringing the full power of advertising and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing." Allen Frances put it differently: "Most of the questionable practices that propelled the pharmaceutical industry into the scourge it is today can be attributed to Arthur Sackler."

Advertising has always entailed some degree of persuasive license, and Arthur's techniques were sometimes blatantly deceptive. In the nineteen-fifties, he produced an ad for a new Pfizer antibiotic, Sigmamycin: an array of doctors' business cards, alongside the words "More and more physicians find Sigmamycin the antibiotic therapy of choice." It was the medical equivalent of putting Mickey Mantle on a box of Wheaties. In 1959, an investigative reporter for The Saturday Review tried to contact some of the doctors whose names were on the cards. They did not exist.

During the sixties, Arthur got rich marketing the tranquillizers Librium and Valium. One Librium ad depicted a young woman carrying an armload of books, and suggested that even the quotidian anxiety a college freshman feels upon leaving home might be best handled with tranquillizers. Such students "may be afflicted by a sense of lost identity," the copy read, adding that university life presented "a whole new world . . . of anxiety." The ad ran in a medical journal. Sackler promoted Valium for such a wide range of uses that, in 1965, a physician writing in the journal Psychosomatics asked, "When do we not use this drug?" One campaign encouraged doctors to prescribe Valium to people with no psychiatric symptoms whatsoever: "For this kind of patient-with no demonstrable pathology-consider the usefulness of Valium." Roche, the maker of Valium, had conducted no studies of its addictive potential. Win Gerson, who worked with Sackler at the agency, told the journalist Sam Quinones years later that the Valium campaign was a great success, in part because the drug was so effective. "It kind of made junkies of people, but that drug worked," Gerson said. By 1973, American doctors were writing more than a hundred million tranquillizer prescriptions a year, and countless patients became hooked. The Senate held hearings on what Edward Kennedy called "a nightmare of dependence and addiction."

While running his advertising company, Arthur Sackler became a publisher, starting a biweekly newspaper, the Medical Tribune, which eventually reached six hundred thousand physicians. He scoffed at suggestions that there was a conflict of interest between his roles as the head of a pharmaceutical-advertising company and the publisher of a periodical for doctors. But in 1959 it emerged that a company he owned, MD Publications, had paid the chief of the antibiotics division of the F.D.A., Henry Welch, nearly three hundred thousand dollars in exchange for Welch's help in promoting certain drugs. Sometimes, when Welch was giving a speech, he inserted a drug's advertising slogan into his remarks. (After the payments were discovered, he resigned.) When I asked John Kallir about the Welch scandal, he chuckled, and said, "He got co-opted by Artie."

In 1952, the Sackler brothers bought a small patent-medicine company, Purdue Frederick, which was based in Greenwich Village and made such unglamorous staples as laxatives and earwax remover. According to court documents, each brother would control a third of the company, but Arthur, who was occupied with his publishing and advertising ventures, would play a passive role. The journalist Barry Meier, in his 2003 book, " Pain Killer: A 'Wonder' Drug's Trail of Addiction and Death, " remarks that Arthur treated his brothers "not as siblings but more like his progeny and understudies." Now Raymond and Mortimer, who became joint C.E.O.s, had a company of their own.

In the early sixties, Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee senator, chaired a subcommittee that looked into the pharmaceutical industry, which was growing rapidly. Kefauver, who had previously investigated the Mafia, was especially intrigued by the Sackler brothers. A memo prepared by Kefauver's staff noted, "The Sackler empire is a completely integrated operation in that it can devise a new drug in its drug development enterprise, have the drug clinically tested and secure favorable reports on the drug from the various hospitals with which they have connections, conceive the advertising approach and prepare the actual advertising copy with which to promote the drug, have the clinical articles as well as advertising copy published in their own medical journals, [and] prepare and plant articles in newspapers and magazines." In January, 1962, Arthur travelled to Washington to testify before Kefauver's subcommittee. A panel of senators assailed him with pointed questions, but he was a formidable interlocutor-slippery, aloof, and impeccably prepared-and no senator landed a blow. At one point, Sackler caught Kefauver in an error and said, "If you personally had taken the training that a physician requires to get a degree, you would never have made that mistake." Quizzed about his promotion of a cholesterol drug that had many side effects, including hair loss, Sackler deadpanned, "I would prefer to have thin hair to thick coronaries."

As the Sacklers grew wealthy, they became patrons of the arts. In 1974, the brothers gave the Met three and a half million dollars, enabling the construction of the wing housing the Temple of Dendur. Mortimer used the space for a lavish birthday party. The cake was in the shape of the Great Sphinx, but its face had been replaced with Mortimer's.

In April, 1987, when Arthur Sackler was seventy-three, he demanded that his third wife, Gillian, account for all their household expenditures. He dictated a terse memo: "I am determined to take command of all situations for which I personally and my estate bear the ultimate obligation." A month later, he had a heart attack, and died. The family gathered for a fond memorial service at the Met, but Arthur's children fought bitterly with Gillian, and sparred with Mortimer and Raymond, over the estate. They accused Gillian of trying to steal their inheritance, and of being "inspired variously by greed, malice, or vindictiveness toward her stepchildren." According to the minutes of a family meeting, Arthur's daughter Elizabeth suggested that he had hidden the true worth of some family investments, "because he didn't want Morty and Ray to think they were more valuable." A family lawyer told the children, "There were no absolutely white lilies here on either side."

Arthur's descendants still owned a third of Purdue Frederick, and Mortimer and Raymond were interested in buying the stake. The company, which had moved to Connecticut and would eventually change its name to Purdue Pharma, had made a great deal of money under their stewardship. But such riches were about to seem paltry. By the time the brothers made their bid, Purdue was already developing a new drug: OxyContin.

Humans have cultivated the opium poppy for five thousand years. The father of medicine, Hippocrates, recognized the therapeutic properties of the plant. But even in the ancient world people understood that the benevolent powers of this narcotic were offset by the perils of addiction. In his 1996 book, " Opium: A History," Martin Booth notes that, for the Romans, the poppy was a symbol of both sleep and death. During the nineteen-eighties, Raymond and Mortimer Sackler had a great success at Purdue with an innovative painkiller called MS Contin, a morphine pill with a patented "controlled release" formula: the drug dissolved gradually into the bloodstream over several hours. ("Contin" was short for "continuous.") MS Contin became the biggest seller in Purdue's history. But, by the late eighties, its patent was about to expire, and Purdue executives started looking for a drug to replace it.

One executive who was centrally involved in this effort was Raymond's son Richard, an enigmatic, slightly awkward man who, in the family tradition, had trained as a doctor. Richard had joined Purdue in 1971 as an assistant to his father, and worked his way up. His name appears on numerous medical patents. In the summer of 1990, a Purdue scientist sent a memo to Richard and several other colleagues, pointing out that MS Contin could "face such serious generic competition that other controlled-release opioids must be considered." The memo described ongoing efforts to create a product containing oxycodone, an opioid that had been developed by German scientists in 1916.

Oxycodone, which was inexpensive to produce, was already used in other drugs, such as Percodan (in which it is blended with aspirin) and Percocet (in which it is blended with Tylenol). Purdue developed a pill of pure oxycodone, with a time-release formula similar to that of MS Contin. The company decided to produce doses as low as ten milligrams, but also jumbo pills-eighty milligrams and a hundred and sixty milligrams-whose potency far exceeded that of any prescription opioid on the market. As Barry Meier writes, in "Pain Killer," "In terms of narcotic firepower, OxyContin was a nuclear weapon."

Before releasing OxyContin, Purdue conducted focus groups with doctors and learned that the "biggest negative" that might prevent widespread use of the drug was ingrained concern regarding the "abuse potential" of opioids. But, fortuitously, while the company was developing OxyContin, some physicians began arguing that American medicine should reëxamine this bias. Highly regarded doctors, like Russell Portenoy, then a pain specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, spoke out about the problem of untreated chronic pain-and the wisdom of using opioids to treat it. "There is a growing literature showing that these drugs can be used for a long time, with few side effects," Portenoy told the Times, in 1993. Describing opioids as a "gift from nature," he said that they needed to be destigmatized. Portenoy, who received funding from Purdue, decried the reticence among clinicians to administer such narcotics for chronic pain, claiming that it was indicative of "opiophobia," and suggesting that concerns about addiction and abuse amounted to a "medical myth." In 1997, the American Academy of Pain Medicine and the American Pain Society published a statement regarding the use of opioids to treat chronic pain. The statement was written by a committee chaired by Dr. J. David Haddox, a paid speaker for Purdue.

Richard Sackler worked tirelessly to make OxyContin a blockbuster, telling colleagues how devoted he was to the drug's success. The F.D.A. approved OxyContin in 1995, for use in treating moderate to severe pain. Purdue had conducted no clinical studies on how addictive or prone to abuse the drug might be. But the F.D.A., in an unusual step, approved a package insert for OxyContin which announced that the drug was safer than rival painkillers, because the patented delayed-absorption mechanism "is believed to reduce the abuse liability." David Kessler, who ran the F.D.A. at the time, told me that he was "not involved in the approval." The F.D.A. examiner who oversaw the process, Dr. Curtis Wright, left the agency shortly afterward. Within two years, he had taken a job at Purdue.

Mortimer, Raymond, and Richard Sackler launched OxyContin with one of the biggest pharmaceutical marketing campaigns in history, deploying many persuasive techniques pioneered by Arthur. Steven May, who joined Purdue as an OxyContin sales representative in 1999, recalled, "At the time, we felt like we were doing a righteous thing." He used to tell himself, "There's millions of people in pain, and we have the solution." (May is no longer working for Purdue.) The company assembled a sales force of as many as a thousand representatives and armed them with charts showing OxyContin's benefits. May attended a three-week training session at Purdue's headquarters. At a celebratory dinner following the training, he was seated at a table with Richard Sackler. "I was blown away," he recalled. "My first impression of him was 'This is the dude that made it happen. He has a company that his family owns. I want to be him one day.' "

A major thrust of the sales campaign was that OxyContin should be prescribed not merely for the kind of severe short-term pain associated with surgery or cancer but also for less acute, longer-lasting pain: arthritis, back pain, sports injuries, fibromyalgia. The number of conditions that OxyContin could treat seemed almost unlimited. According to internal documents, Purdue officials discovered that many doctors wrongly assumed that oxycodone was less potent than morphine-a misconception that the company exploited.

A 1995 memo sent to the launch team emphasized that the company did "not want to niche" OxyContin just for cancer pain. A primary objective in Purdue's 2002 budget plan was to "broaden" the use of OxyContin for pain management. As May put it, "What Purdue did really well was target physicians, like general practitioners, who were not pain specialists." In its internal literature, Purdue similarly spoke of reaching patients who were "opioid naïve." Because OxyContin was so powerful and potentially addictive, David Kessler told me, from a public-health standpoint "the goal should have been to sell the least dose of the drug to the smallest number of patients." But this approach was at odds with the competitive imperatives of a pharmaceutical company, he continued. So Purdue set out to do exactly the opposite.

Sales reps, May told me, received training in "overcoming objections" from clinicians. If a doctor inquired about addiction, May had a talking point ready. " 'The delivery system is believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug,' " he recited to me, with a rueful laugh. "Those were the specific words. I can still remember, all these years later." He went on, "I found out pretty fast that it wasn't true." In 2002, a sales manager from the company, William Gergely, told a state investigator in Florida that Purdue executives "told us to say things like it is 'virtually' non-addicting."

May didn't ask doctors simply to take his word on OxyContin; he presented them with studies and literature provided by other physicians. Purdue had a speakers' bureau, and it paid several thousand clinicians to attend medical conferences and deliver presentations about the merits of the drug. Doctors were offered all-expenses-paid trips to pain-management seminars in places like Boca Raton. Such spending was worth the investment: internal Purdue records indicate that doctors who attended these seminars in 1996 wrote OxyContin prescriptions more than twice as often as those who didn't. The company advertised in medical journals, sponsored Web sites about chronic pain, and distributed a dizzying variety of OxyContin swag: fishing hats, plush toys, luggage tags. Purdue also produced promotional videos featuring satisfied patients-like a construction worker who talked about how OxyContin had eased his chronic back pain, allowing him to return to work. The videos, which also included testimonials from pain specialists, were sent to tens of thousands of doctors. The marketing of OxyContin relied on an empirical circularity: the company convinced doctors of the drug's safety with literature that had been produced by doctors who were paid, or funded, by the company.

David Juurlink, who runs the division of clinical pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Toronto, told me that OxyContin's success can be attributed partly to the fact that so many doctors wanted to believe in the therapeutic benefits of opioids. "The primary goal of medical practice is the relief of suffering, and one of the most common types that doctors see is pain," he said. "You've got a patient in pain, you've got a doctor who genuinely wants to help, and now suddenly you have an intervention that-we are told-is safe and effective."

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Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, who served as a drug-policy adviser to the Obama Administration, said, "That's the real Greek tragedy of this-that so many well-meaning doctors got co-opted. The level of influence is just mind-boggling. Purdue gave money to continuing medical education, to state medical boards, to faux grassroots organizations." According to training materials, Purdue instructed sales representatives to assure doctors-repeatedly and without evidence-that "fewer than one per cent" of patients who took OxyContin became addicted. (In 1999, a Purdue-funded study of patients who used OxyContin for headaches found that the addiction rate was thirteen per cent.)

Within five years of its introduction, OxyContin was generating a billion dollars a year. "There is no sign of it slowing down," Richard Sackler told a team of company representatives in 2000. The sales force was heavily incentivized to push the drug. In a memo, a sales manager in Tennessee wrote, "$$$$$$$$$$$$$ It's Bonus Time in the Neighborhood!" May, who was assigned to the Virginia area, was astonished to learn that especially skillful colleagues were earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions. One year, May's own sales were so brisk that Purdue rewarded him with a trip to Hawaii. As prescriptions multiplied, Purdue executives-and the Sackler family members on the company's board-appeared happy to fund such blandishments. Internal budget plans described the company's sales force as its "most valuable resource." In 2001, Purdue Pharma paid forty million dollars in bonuses.

One day, May drove with a colleague to Lewisburg, a small city in West Virginia. They were there to visit a doctor who had been one of May's top prescribers. When they arrived, the doctor was ashen. A relative had just died, she explained. The girl had overdosed on OxyContin.

Arthur and Mortimer Sackler each married three times, and Raymond married once. There are fifteen Sackler children in the second generation, most of whom have children of their own. The Sackler clan has pursued a variety of causes and interests. In 2011, Mortimer's widow, Theresa, who sits on the board of Purdue, was awarded the Prince of Wales Medal for Art Philanthropy. When the medal was conferred, Ian Dejardin, the Sackler Director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, remarked, "It's going to be difficult not to make her sound utterly saintly." Theresa's daughter, Sophie, is married to the English cricket player Jamie Dalrymple, and lives in a forty-million-dollar house in London. Raymond's thirty-seven-year-old grandson, David Sackler, runs a family investment fund, and is the only member of the third generation who sits on Purdue's board. The fact that Purdue is privately held is a major reason that the Sacklers' connection to OxyContin has remained obscure. A publicly traded company makes periodic disclosures to its shareholders. But Purdue, Barry Meier writes, "was the Sackler family's private domain."

On occasion, press accounts about OxyContin note that profits from the drug flow to the Sacklers, but these stories tend to depict the family as a monolith. As with any large clan, however, there are fissures of discord. In the eighties, Mortimer sued his ex-wife Gertraud, claiming that she had illegally taken possession of an apartment that he owned on Fifth Avenue and had loaned it out to a contingent of models and photographers. None of Arthur's descendants sit on the company's board. At a courthouse in Long Island, in files stemming from the family fight over Arthur's fortune, I came across a document indicating that, after a "protracted negotiation," Arthur's estate "sold its one third interest in Purdue" to Raymond and Mortimer.

"I have never owned any shares in Purdue," Michael Sackler-Berner, a Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter who is a grandson of Arthur Sackler, told me, in an e-mail. "None of the descendants of Arthur M. Sackler have ever had anything to do with, or benefited from, the sale of OxyContin." Sackler-Berner made no mention of Librium, Valium, or MS Contin, but he added, "Given the current controversy surrounding OxyContin, I appreciate your clarifying the matter."

Even though Mortimer Sackler had a large stake in the company, he was only an occasional presence at the Connecticut headquarters. He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1974, reportedly for tax reasons, and lived a flamboyant life in Europe, shuttling among residences in England, the Swiss Alps, and Cap d'Antibes. (In 1999, Queen Elizabeth conferred an honorary knighthood on him, in recognition of his philanthropy.) Raymond Sackler, who lived in Connecticut, had a more modest temperament and came to his office at Purdue-where he was respectfully known as Dr. Raymond-every day. John Kallir, Arthur's former advertising colleague, recalled, "Ray was quiet, reasonably honest, always married to the same woman. The least interesting of the three brothers."

Almost immediately after OxyContin's release, there were signs that people were abusing it in rural areas like Maine and Appalachia. If you ground the pills up and snorted them, or dissolved them in liquid and injected them, you could override the time-release mechanism and deliver a huge narcotic payload all at once. Perversely, users could learn about such methods by reading a warning label that came with each prescription, which said, "Taking broken, chewed or crushed OxyContin tablets could lead to the rapid release and absorption of a potentially toxic dose." As more and more doctors prescribed OxyContin for an ever-greater range of symptoms, some patients began selling their pills on the black market, where the street price was a dollar a milligram. Doctors who were easily manipulated by their patients-or corrupted by the money in play-set up so-called pill mills, pain clinics that thrived on a wholesale business of issuing OxyContin prescriptions.

The company did not pull the drug from shelves, however, or acknowledge that it was addictive. Instead, Purdue insisted that the only problem was that recreational drug users were not taking OxyContin as directed. "Their rap has always been that a bunch of junkies ruined their product," Keith Humphreys, the Stanford professor, said. In 2001, Michael Friedman, Purdue's executive vice-president, testified before a congressional hearing convened to look into the alarming increase in opioid abuse. The marketing of OxyContin had been "conservative by any standard," he maintained. "Virtually all of these reports involve people who are abusing the medication, not patients with legitimate medical needs."

In 2002, a twenty-nine-year-old woman from New Jersey, Jill Skolek, was prescribed OxyContin for a back injury. One night, after four months on the drug, she died in her sleep, from respiratory arrest, leaving behind a six-year-old son. Her mother, Marianne Skolek Perez, was a nurse. Distraught and bewildered, she became convinced that OxyContin was dangerous. Perez wrote to F.D.A. officials, urging them to append to OxyContin packaging a warning about the risk of addiction.

The following year, Perez attended a conference on addiction at Columbia University. A sandy-haired man named Robin Hogen, wearing a pin-striped suit and a bow tie, was there, too. He was a communications specialist for Purdue, and had launched a vigorous campaign to defend the drug, warning newspapers to be careful about their coverage. "We're going to be watching them," he had promised. He had also enlisted Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and his associate Bernard Kerik to preëmpt any government crackdown. "We have to be politically Machiavellian, often, to win the day," Hogen once said. At the Columbia event, he was asked about Perez's daughter. He cautioned that one should not read into the tragedy any liability on Purdue's part. The real problem, he said, was Jill Skolek: "We think she abused drugs." (Hogen subsequently apologized for his remark. He no longer works for Purdue.)

Another speaker at the event was Purdue's senior medical adviser, J. David Haddox, who insisted that OxyContin was not addictive. He once likened the drug to a vegetable, saying, "If I gave you a stalk of celery and you ate that, it would be healthy. But if you put it in a blender and tried to shoot it into your veins, it would not be good." When Haddox was walking out of the event, Perez, who is petite and rail thin, deliberately bumped into him. Caught off guard, Haddox staggered backward and fell, with a clatter, into a row of folding chairs. "It was one of those Kodak moments," Perez recalled. "It was probably the wrong thing to do. But I loved it."

Arthur Sackler once wrote that "all health problems devolve upon the individual," and it was Purdue's position that OxyContin overdoses were a matter of individual responsibility, rather than the drug's addictive properties. In addition to people like Hogen and Haddox, the company put forward several top executives to mount a defense, including Howard Udell, Purdue's general counsel, who had been a longtime legal adviser to the Sacklers. Udell "was like Tom Hagen in 'The Godfather,' " an attorney who dealt with him told me. " Very loyal to the family." Udell was clearly aware, however, of the abuse potential of OxyContin. According to court documents, his own secretary became addicted to the drug, and was subsequently fired by Purdue.

By 2003, the Drug Enforcement Administration had found that Purdue's "aggressive methods" had "very much exacerbated OxyContin's widespread abuse." Rogelio Guevara, a senior official at the D.E.A., concluded that Purdue had "deliberately minimized" the risks associated with the drug. But the company continued shifting the blame to drug abusers, creating a public-service announcement that showed a teen-ager raiding his parents' medicine cabinet.

In a phone interview, Hogen told me that, for Purdue and the Sacklers, "there was a sense almost of betrayal-how could people put the availability of that product in jeopardy by abusing it for pleasure?" Hogen said that the company received many letters from grateful pain patients, thanking Purdue for "giving them their lives back." Asked about his reticence to acknowledge that OxyContin might be addictive, Hogen said, "Today, addiction is broadly seen as a disease. Then, it was not. I think our understanding of addiction has grown enormously in the last fifteen years."

People have known for thousands of years that opium derivatives are addictive, I said.

"You really need to talk to a clinician," Hogen replied. "I'm not a doctor."

J. David Haddox is a doctor. In 2001, he told an Associated Press reporter, "A lot of these people say, 'Well, I was taking the medicine like my doctor told me to,' and then they start taking more and more and more." He added, "I don't see where that's my problem." (Haddox, who still works for Purdue, declined to comment.)

The truth was that the dangers of OxyContin were intrinsic to the drug-and Purdue knew it. The time-release formula meant that, in principle, patients could safely ingest one giant dose every twelve hours. They could sleep through the night-a crucial improvement over conventional painkillers, such as morphine, which require more frequent dosing. One of Purdue's initial advertising campaigns featured a photograph of two little dosage cups, one marked "8 A. M." and the other "8 P. M.," and the words "Remember, Effective Relief Just Takes Two." But internal Purdue documents, which have emerged through litigation, show that even before the company received F.D.A. approval it was aware that not all patients who took OxyContin were achieving twelve-hour relief. A recent exposé by the Los Angeles Times revealed that the first patients to use OxyContin, in a study conducted by Purdue, were ninety women recovering from surgery in Puerto Rico. Roughly half the women required more medication before the twelve-hour mark. The study was never published. For Purdue, the business reason for obscuring such results was clear: the claim of twelve-hour relief was an invaluable marketing tool. But prescribing a pill on a twelve-hour schedule when, for many patients, it works for only eight is a recipe for withdrawal, addiction, and abuse. Notwithstanding Purdue's claims, many people who were not drug abusers-and who took OxyContin exactly as their doctors instructed-began experiencing withdrawal symptoms between doses. In March, 2001, a Purdue employee e-mailed a supervisor, describing some internal data on withdrawal and wondering whether or not to write up the results, even though doing so would only "add to the current negative press." The supervisor responded, "I would not write it up at this point."

Doctors who prescribed OxyContin were beginning to report that patients were coming to them with symptoms of withdrawal (itching, nausea, the shakes) and asking for more medication. Haddox had an answer. In a 1989 paper, he had coined the term "pseudo-addiction." As a pain-management pamphlet distributed by Purdue explained, pseudo-addiction "seems similar to addiction, but is due to unrelieved pain." The pamphlet continued, "Misunderstanding of this phenomenon may lead the clinician to inappropriately stigmatize the patient with the label 'addict.' " Pseudo-addiction generally stopped once the pain was relieved-"often through an increase in opioid dose."

"When you promote these very massive doses of opioids, the more of it that is out there the more abuse there will be," David Kessler said. "It's almost linear." U.S. sales of OxyContin soon exceeded those of Viagra. Everywhere the drug spread, addiction followed. To Steven May, the sales representative in Virginia, it seemed as if the problems associated with OxyContin were metastasizing, "like a cancer."

According to Robin Hogen, the members of the Sackler family "were unified in their shock that this was happening to a product they were very proud of." The Sacklers did not have an arm's-length relationship with Purdue, Hogen said: "This was an active family and an active board." In 1999, Richard Sackler became Purdue's president. As the head of a privately held company, however, he felt no pressure to be the public face of the business, and he never appeared at forums where people like Haddox defended Purdue. Indeed, though Sackler presided over the tremendously successful launch of OxyContin, he has never given an on-the-record interview about the drug. "I've had a lot of experience with Purdue over the years, in different settings, but I've never even seen Richard Sackler," the addiction specialist Andrew Kolodny, who is a frequent Purdue critic, told me. "I don't think I'd know him if he was standing in front of me."

Even after it became clear that OxyContin was being widely abused, Purdue refused to concede that it posed risks. Company leaders worried mainly that attempts to stem overdoses might deprive pain patients of access to the drug. "They said, 'We need to make sure that these products are available for patients,' " Hogen said. "That was their sole focus." According to Steven May, the sales force was instructed to ride out the controversy, ignore abuse reports, and "sell through it." As late as 2003, the F.D.A. sent Purdue a warning letter about ads that "grossly overstate the safety profile of OxyContin by not referring in the body of the advertisements to serious, potentially fatal risks."

In his congressional testimony, Michael Friedman, Richard Sackler's deputy, said that Purdue first became aware of problems with OxyContin only in April, 2000, after a series of press reports about people abusing it recreationally in Maine. But Purdue didn't need the media's help to know that something was seriously off with the distribution of OxyContin. For years, it had maintained a contract with I.M.S., a little-known company, co-founded by Arthur Sackler, that furnished its clients with fine-grained information about the prescribing habits of individual doctors. Purdue's sales representatives used the data to figure out which doctors to target.

Such data could also be used to track patterns of abuse. "They know exactly what people are prescribing," Kolodny said. "They know when a doctor is running a pill mill." At the 2001 hearing, James Greenwood, a Pennsylvania congressman, asked Friedman whether Purdue would take any action if, say, I.M.S. data revealed that a rural osteopath was writing thousands of prescriptions.

Friedman replied that it was not up to Purdue to assess "how well a physician practices medicine."

"Why do you want that information, then?" Greenwood pressed, before answering his own question: "To see how successful your marketing techniques are."

Greenwood then observed that, in a recent case involving a Pennsylvania doctor, Richard Paolino, who was wantonly overprescribing OxyContin, a local pharmacist had alerted the authorities. "He looked at this data and he said, 'Holy God, there is some guy in Bensalem called Paolino, and he's writing prescriptions out the wazoo,' " Greenwood said. "Now, he had that data and he blew the whistle. And you had that data. What did you do?"

Purdue had not alerted the authorities. Clinicians like Paolino were breaking the law-he was sentenced to a minimum of thirty years in prison. But overprescribing generated tremendous revenue for the company. According to four people I spoke with, at Purdue such prescribers were given a name that Las Vegas casinos reserve for their most prized gamblers: whales.

In July, 2001, Richard Blumenthal, who was then the attorney general of Connecticut, wrote to Richard Sackler. "I have been increasingly dismayed and alarmed about the problems and escalating abuse of OxyContin," he began, citing overdose deaths, addiction, pharmacy robberies, and "the astonishing growth in state funding" that was being used to pay for OxyContin prescriptions through Medicaid and Medicare. Blumenthal acknowledged that other prescription drugs were also abused. "But OxyContin is different," he wrote. "It is more powerful, more addictive, more widely sold, more illicitly available, and more publicized." He urged Purdue to "overhaul and reform" its marketing of OxyContin.

The Sacklers disregarded his recommendation, and so in 2004 Blumenthal filed a complaint against Purdue, on behalf of the State of Connecticut. It cited data indicating that a fifth of OxyContin prescriptions were now for dosing intervals shorter than twelve hours. In fact, Blumenthal obtained Purdue records indicating that company officials knew by 1998 that prescriptions for eight-hour intervals were becoming more and more frequent. In one document, a Purdue employee called the numbers "very scary."

Such alarm over off-label dosing may have been prompted less by concern about public health than by considerations of profit. If OxyContin was being widely prescribed at intervals of fewer than twelve hours, the company might lose its "two pills a day" marketplace advantage against cheaper alternatives, like generic morphine, and insurers could start refusing to cover the costs. As early as 1997, some benefit plans had begun citing abuse of OxyContin as an excuse not to pay. In a 1997 e-mail, Richard Sackler urged colleagues to counter this resistance, warning that, for insurance companies, " 'addiction' may be a convenient way to just say 'NO.' "

Purdue has been sued thousands of times over OxyContin since its release. (Steven May, the sales rep, initiated a whistle-blower suit years after leaving the company; it was dismissed, on procedural grounds.) In 2002, Howard Udell said that the firm would defend itself "to the hilt." The next year, a New York trial lawyer named Paul Hanly assembled a lawsuit, signing up five thousand patients who said that they'd become addicted to OxyContin after receiving a doctor's prescription. In discovery, Hanly obtained thousands of documents. "They demonstrated that this company had set out to perpetrate a fraud on the entire medical community," he told me. "These pronouncements about how safe the drug was emanated from the marketing department, not the scientific department. It was pretty shocking. They just made this stuff up."

In 2006, Purdue settled with Hanly's clients, for seventy-five million dollars. Shortly afterward, the company pleaded guilty, in a case brought by federal prosecutors in Virginia, to criminal charges of misbranding, and acknowledged that Purdue had marketed OxyContin "with the intent to defraud or mislead." (Rudolph Giuliani had tried, on Purdue's behalf, to get the lead prosecutor to scuttle the case.) Michael Friedman, the executive vice-president, pleaded guilty to a criminal misdemeanor, as did Howard Udell and the company's chief medical officer, Paul Goldenheim.

Marianne Perez attended the sentencing, in Virginia. "I was on cloud nine," she recalled. She had been working with the prosecution, and doing everything she could to inform the public about the dangers of OxyContin. Before the sentence was handed down, Perez delivered a victim-impact statement. "I want to know why the Sackler brothers have not been held accountable," she said. (Richard Sackler, despite his leadership role at Purdue, had not been charged.)

During a break in the proceedings, Perez looked over at Friedman, Goldenheim, and Udell, and told herself, "I could reach over, at ninety-eight pounds, and smack one of them." This time, she restrained herself. Instead, she told them, "You are sheer evil. You are bastards." The executives reddened, but said nothing. They all received probation, and were ordered, collectively, to pay nearly thirty-five million dollars in fines. Purdue agreed to pay an additional six hundred million. Given the billions of dollars that the Sacklers and Purdue had reaped from OxyContin, some observers felt that the company had got off easy. Arlen Specter, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania, remarked that such fines amounted to "expensive licenses for criminal misconduct."

Arthur Sackler wrote a regular column for the Medical Tribune, and one of his fixations was the unethical behavior of tobacco companies. In 1979, he critiqued the "weasel-worded warning" on cigarette packages as insufficient, arguing that the "hazard to health should be more specific." He also condemned newspapers and magazines for accepting "misleading" advertising about cigarettes, and contended that the publishers must "square with their own consciences their contribution to our national mortality."

In 1998, the tobacco industry, which had been sued by dozens of states, entered into the largest civil-litigation settlement in history, agreeing to pay two hundred and forty-six billion dollars. Tobacco and opioids are different in significant ways. The F.D.A. approved OxyContin as a medicine, and, whereas tobacco can kill you even when used as directed, Purdue would argue that this isn't the case with OxyContin. Mike Moore, who, as Mississippi's attorney general, played a key role in the tobacco litigation, noted another difference: the tobacco companies had more money to spare than Purdue does. "To resolve the opioid problem, you're going to need billions," he said. "Treatment alone could be fifty billion dollars or more. And you need prevention and education programs on top of that."

Moore is now working with Paul Hanly and other attorneys to bring a fresh wave of lawsuits against Purdue and other pharmaceutical companies. Ten states have filed suits, and private attorneys are working in partnership with dozens of cities and counties to bring others. Many public officials are furious at the makers of powerful painkillers. Prescriptions are expensive, and taxpayers often foot the bill, through programs like Medicaid. Then, as the ruinous consequences of opioid addiction take hold, the public must pay again-this time for emergency services, addiction treatment, and the like. Moore feels that the Sackler family, as the initial author and a prime beneficiary of the epidemic, should be publicly shamed. "I don't call it Purdue. I call it the Sackler Company," he said. "They are the main culprit. They duped the F.D.A., saying it lasted twelve hours. They lied about the addictive properties. And they did all this to grow the opioid market, to make it O.K. to jump in the water. Then some of these other companies, they saw that the water was warm, and they said, 'O.K., we can jump in, too.' " There may be significant legal distinctions between a tobacco company and an opioid producer, but to Moore the ethical parallel is unmistakable: "They're both profiting by killing people."

One day in August, 2015, a plane landed in Louisville, Kentucky, and Richard Sackler stepped out, surrounded by attorneys. Eight years earlier, the State of Kentucky had sued Purdue, charging the company with deceptive marketing. Greg Stumbo, the state attorney general at the time, initiated the suit; the son of a cousin of his had fatally overdosed on OxyContin. Purdue fought the suit with its customary rigor, pushing to move the proceedings elsewhere, on the ground that the company could not get a fair trial in Pike County, Kentucky-the rural stretch of coal country where the state intended to try the case. In support of this motion, the company commissioned a demographic study of Pike County and submitted it to the court, as an illustration of potential bias in the jury pool. The report was revealing in ways that Purdue may not have intended: according to the filing, twenty-nine per cent of the county's residents said that they or their family members knew someone who had died from using OxyContin. Seven out of ten respondents described OxyContin's effect on their community as "devastating."

A judge ruled that Purdue could not shift the venue for the trial, and so Richard Sackler flew to Louisville. He gave a deposition at a law firm. Four lawyers questioned him about his role in the development and the marketing of OxyContin. Tyler Thompson, the lead attorney, told me that Sackler's demeanor during the session reminded him of Jeremy Irons's portrayal of Claus von Bülow, the aristocrat accused of murdering his wife, in the 1990 bio-pic " Reversal of Fortune. " "A smirk and a so-what attitude-an absolute lack of remorse," Thompson said. "It reminded me of these mining companies that come in here and do mountaintop removal, and leave a mess and just move on: 'It's not my back yard, so I don't care.' " Mitchel Denham, a former litigator in the Kentucky attorney general's office, also attended the deposition. "It was surreal," he recalled. "We were face to face with the guy whose company had helped to create the opioid epidemic." Denham told me that, in preparing for trial, he discovered a photograph of the 1997 Pikeville High School football team. "Nearly half the players had died of overdoses, or were addicted," he said. "It was going to be a pretty good visual."

But Denham never presented the photograph to a jury, because before the case could go to trial Purdue settled, for twenty-four million dollars. This was a coup for the Sacklers. The settlement was more than Purdue's original offer-half a million dollars-but still totally incommensurate with Pike County's needs; Purdue admitted no liability; and, in settling, the company sealed from public view both Richard Sackler's deposition and internal documents obtained through discovery. Purdue has sometimes claimed to have never "lost a case" related to OxyContin, but it's more accurate to say that the company has never allowed a case to go to trial, often settling rather than litigating the culpability of the company-and the Sacklers-in open court. "That's the main reason these folks don't go to trial," Denham said. "Because all these documents could end up in the public record." The Kentucky prosecutors were required to destroy millions of documents, or return them to Purdue. The medical-news Web site STAT subsequently sued to unseal Richard Sackler's deposition. A state judge ruled in its favor, but Purdue appealed. I spent several months trying to obtain a copy of the deposition, but, because it remains under a protective order while Purdue appeals the matter, no lawyer would share it with me. Mike Moore said, "The idea that they're fighting so hard to keep this deposition hidden should tell you something."

Richard Sackler stepped down as Purdue's president in 2003, but stayed on as co-chairman of the company's board. After spending several years as an adjunct professor of genetics at Rockefeller University, he moved to Austin, Texas, in 2013. He lives in a modern hilltop mansion on the outskirts of the city, in an area favored by tech entrepreneurs. According to tax disclosures from his personal foundation, he has continued giving money to Yale, but his largest donation in 2015 was a hundred-thousand-dollar gift to a neoconservative think tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Through a representative, Sackler declined to speak with me. I contacted a dozen other members of the Sackler family, but none of them would answer questions about OxyContin. Jo Sheldon, a London-based media adviser, called me, and said that she works with some of the Sacklers. (She would not identify which ones.) When I told her that I had questions for the Sacklers, she said that my inquiries would be better directed to Purdue. She said of the Sacklers, "Some of them are still quite involved in Purdue, but some have absolutely nothing to do with it," apart from depositing checks.

Given the sometimes fractious nature of the Sackler family, it was striking that they were united in their silence on the subject of OxyContin. These were urbane, expensively educated, presumably well-informed people. Could they conceivably be unaware of the accumulated evidence about the tainted origins of their fortune? Did they simply put it out of mind? "Greed can get people to rationalize pretty bad behavior," Andrew Kolodny had told me. Someone who knows Mortimer, Jr., socially told me, "I think for him, most of the time, he's just saying, 'Wow, we're really rich. It's fucking cool. I don't really want to think that much about the other side of things.' "

Paul Hanly, the lawyer, said that the Sacklers' steadfast refusal to address the legacy of OxyContin may just be a legal tactic-and a shrewd one. "The more interviews you give, the more targets you create for lawyers like me, and for government investigators," he said. I wondered whether philanthropy might represent, for at least some of the Sacklers, a form of atonement. But, when you consider the breadth of the family's donations, one field is conspicuously lacking: addiction treatment, or any other measures that might serve to counter the opioid epidemic.

In August, 2010, Purdue quietly replaced OxyContin with a drug that was subtly different. The company had been granted patents for a reformulated version of OxyContin. If you crushed these new pills, they became not a fine, dissolvable powder but an unwieldy gummy substance. Purdue had received F.D.A. approval for the reformulation, in part, by touting the ostensible safety of the new product. The F.D.A. had approved a label, the first of its kind, that included a claim about the drug's "abuse deterrent" properties.

In an interview, Craig Landau, Purdue's C.E.O., told me, "A very large proportion of Purdue's R. & D. efforts post-2001 was dedicated toward addressing the specific vulnerability of the original OxyContin product." To a casual observer, it might have seemed that the makers of OxyContin, after years of obstructing efforts to curb the disastrous impacts of their painkiller, had finally seen the error of their ways. But Purdue was almost certainly motivated by another consideration: it needed to block competition from generic drugs. Arthur Sackler had often used the pages of the Medical Tribune to criticize generics. In 1985, the paper had published a story, "Schizophrenics 'Wild' on Weak Generic," describing how "all hell broke loose" at a veterans' hospital after the psychiatric unit switched from a brand-name antipsychotic to a generic. ( According to the Times, the F.D.A. investigated and found that the story was bogus, because "the generic had been introduced six months before the purported problems began.") I spoke with a leading patent lawyer who frequently represents manufacturers of generic drugs, and she said that companies often make a minor tweak to a branded product shortly before the patent expires, in order to obtain a new patent and reset the clock on their exclusive right to produce the drug. The patent for the original OxyContin was set to expire in 2013.

Purdue had long denied that the original OxyContin was especially prone to abuse. But, upon receiving its patents for the reformulated drug, the company filed papers with the F.D.A., asking the agency to refuse to accept generic versions of the original formulation-because they were unsafe. The F.D.A., ever obliging, agreed, blocking any low-cost generic competition for Purdue. For more than a year, Purdue continued to sell the original formulation of OxyContin in Canada. According to a recent study, OxyContin sales in Windsor, Ontario-just across the border from Detroit-suddenly quadrupled, a clear indication that the pills were being purchased for the U.S. black market. Through I.M.S. tracking data, Purdue would have been able to monitor the Canadian surge, and to deduce the reason for it. (The company acknowledges that it was aware of the spike in sales, and maintains that it alerted authorities, but will not say when it did so.)

By the time Purdue reformulated OxyContin, the country was in the middle of a full-blown epidemic. Andrew Kolodny, the addiction specialist, told me that many older people remain addicted to the reformulated OxyContin, and continue to obtain the drug through prescriptions. These people purchase the drug legally, and swallow the pills whole, as instructed. "That's Purdue's market now," Kolodny said. Younger people, who can less readily secure prescriptions for pain-and for whom OxyContin may be too expensive-have increasingly turned to black-market substitutes, including heroin. As Sam Quinones details in his 2015 book, " Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic," heroin dealers from Mexico fanned out across the U.S. to supply a burgeoning market of people who had been primed by pill addiction. This is one dreadful paradox of the history of OxyContin: the original formulation created a generation addicted to pills; the reformulation, by forcing younger users off the drug, helped create a generation addicted to heroin. A recent paper by a team of economists, citing a dramatic uptick in heroin overdoses since 2010, is titled " How the Reformulation of OxyContin Ignited the Heroin Epidemic." A survey of two hundred and forty-four people who entered treatment for OxyContin abuse after the reformulation found that a third had switched to other drugs. Seventy per cent of that group had turned to heroin.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Quinones's investigation is the similarities he finds between the tactics of the unassuming, business-minded Mexican heroin peddlers, the so-called Xalisco boys, and the slick corporate sales force of Purdue. When the Xalisco boys arrived in a new town, they identified their market by seeking out the local methadone clinic. Purdue, using I.M.S. data, similarly targeted populations that were susceptible to its product. Mitchel Denham, the Kentucky lawyer, told me that Purdue pinpointed "communities where there is a lot of poverty and a lack of education and opportunity," adding, "They were looking at numbers that showed these people have work-related injuries, they go to the doctor more often, they get treatment for pain." The Xalisco boys offered potential customers free samples of their product. So did Purdue. When it first introduced OxyContin, the company created a program that encouraged doctors to issue coupons for a free initial prescription. By the time Purdue discontinued the program, four years later, thirty-four thousand coupons had been redeemed.

Purdue Pharma now acknowledges that there is an opioid crisis, but maintains that it has taken every available step to address it, from sponsoring "prescription monitoring" programs in some states to underwriting drug-abuse education. Craig Landau, the C.E.O., told me, "If the Holy Grail is a pain medicine that is safe and effective for patients with severe pain but carries no abuse risk, we haven't found it yet." He added that the company has been trying to develop "non-opioid pain products." Purdue likes to emphasize that there are many other powerful painkillers, and that OxyContin never had more than two per cent of the market for opioids. This is true in terms of the number of prescriptions. But most painkillers are prescribed for very short periods-following surgery, for instance-and in relatively small doses, whereas OxyContin's sales have been driven by long-term, high-dose prescriptions. If one measured market share by the actual volume of narcotics administered, OxyContin's would be considerably higher. Some doctors I spoke with estimated that it could be as high as thirty per cent.

The United States accounts for roughly a third of the global market for opioid painkillers. But, as politicians and journalists have raised alarms over the addiction crisis, many American doctors have grown leery, again, of prescribing these drugs. In a statement, Purdue acknowledged that even patients "who take OxyContin in accordance with its F.D.A.-approved labeling instructions will likely develop physical dependence." The company maintains that physical dependence is different from addiction, but Jane Ballantyne, the president of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, said that, for patients, this can be a meaningless distinction: if they find themselves unable to stop taking a drug, for fear of crippling withdrawal, "at a certain point that might as well be addiction." The drugstore chain CVS, which has been accused of profiteering from opioids, recently announced that it plans to limit prescriptions for powerful doses to one week's worth, a change that could have a major impact on the abuse of these drugs. It may also be that OxyContin has achieved market saturation. In recent years, American clinicians have issued about a quarter of a billion opioid prescriptions annually. Last year, in Ohio, a state particularly hard hit by the epidemic, 2.3 million residents-roughly one in five people in the state-received a prescription for opioids. In 2012, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a story about pain patients who had offered testimonials about the wonders of OxyContin in Purdue promotional videos. Johnny Sullivan, the construction worker who had talked about OxyContin easing his back pain, became addicted to the drug. In 2008, while driving home from a hunting trip, he apparently blacked out; he flipped his truck, and died instantly. In a Purdue brochure, Sullivan is quoted as saying that OxyContin pills "don't put me in a stupor or make me groggy."

David Juurlink, the Toronto doctor, told me that opioids are problematic even for users who don't succumb to addiction. "Opioids really do afford pain relief-initially," he said. "But that relief tends to diminish over time. That's, in part, why people increase the dose. They are chasing pain relief from a drug that has failed. I see all these people who are convinced they are one of the 'legitimate' pain patients. They're on a massive dose of opioids, and they're telling me they need this medication, which is clearly doing them harm. For many of them, the primary benefit of therapy, at this point, is not going into withdrawal."

Even Russell Portenoy, the Purdue-funded doctor who advocated for wider long-term use of opioids, has reassessed his views. "Did I teach about pain management, specifically about opioid therapy, in a way that reflects misinformation?" he said to the Wall Street Journal in 2012. "I guess I did." (In a statement, Portenoy told me that he has "refocussed" his approach to pain management, adding, "No funder has had any undue influence over my thinking.")

In his defense, Portenoy has pointed out that, two decades ago, doctors did not know what they know now about opioids and addiction. The Sackler family and Purdue Pharma could have taken responsibility in a similar spirit: apologizing for their role in unleashing a national catastrophe while noting that, during the nineties, they had relied on a series of mistaken assumptions about the safety of OxyContin. But Purdue has continued to fight aggressively against any measures that might limit the distribution of OxyContin, in a way that calls to mind the gun lobby's resistance to firearm regulations. Confronted with the prospect of modest, commonsense measures that might in any way impinge on the prescribing of painkillers, Purdue and its various allies have responded with alarm, suggesting that such steps will deny law-abiding pain patients access to medicine they desperately need. Mark Sullivan, a psychiatrist at the University of Washington, distilled the argument of Purdue: "Our product isn't dangerous-it's people who are dangerous."

Last year, the C.D.C., which formally declared an opioid epidemic in 2011, introduced the first set of guidelines to help reduce the prescribing of strong painkillers like OxyContin. "Opioids should not be considered first-line or routine therapy for chronic pain," the guidelines said, recommending that doctors first consider "non-pharmacologic" approaches, such as physical therapy, and "non-opioid pharmacologic" treatments.

Purdue and other pharmaceutical companies have long funded ostensibly neutral nonprofit groups that advocate for pain patients. The C.D.C. guidelines were nonbinding, yet many of these organizations fought to prevent the agency from releasing them. This kind of obstruction is typical at both the state and the federal level. A recent series by the Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity revealed that, after Purdue made its guilty plea, in 2007, it assembled an army of lobbyists to fight any legislative actions that might encroach on its business. Between 2006 and 2015, Purdue and other painkiller producers, along with their associated nonprofits, spent nearly nine hundred million dollars on lobbying and political contributions-eight times what the gun lobby spent during that period.

Since Purdue made it more difficult to grind OxyContin pills, prescriptions have reportedly plummeted by forty per cent. This suggests that nearly half of the original drug's consumers may have been crushing it to get high. As David Juurlink pointed out to me, it is a misnomer to call the reformulation an "abuse deterrent." It can still be abused-and is, widely, by people who become addicted by swallowing the pills, just as the bottle instructs. But Purdue, facing a shrinking market and rising opprobrium, has not given up the search for new users. In August, 2015, over objections from critics, the company received F.D.A. approval to market OxyContin to children as young as eleven.

Forbes estimates that the Sacklers continue to receive some seven hundred million dollars a year from the family companies, and, as the Sacklers are surely aware, the real future of OxyContin may be global. Many big companies, once their sales plateau in America, look abroad. After introducing OxyContin in the U.S., Purdue moved into Canada and England. At the University of Toronto, the company sponsored a class on pain management for medical and dental students. The instructor was a member of Purdue's speakers' bureau. Students received a complimentary textbook, produced by Purdue, that described oxycodone as a "moderate" opioid. The course was discontinued after students and doctors criticized it; one of the critics was Rick Glazier, a physician at the university, whose son, Daniel, had fatally overdosed on OxyContin in 2009.

As OxyContin spread outside the U.S., the pattern of dysfunction repeated itself: to map the geographic distribution of the drug was also to map a rash of addiction, abuse, and death. But the Sackler family has only increased its efforts abroad, and is now pushing the drug, through a Purdue-related company called Mundipharma, into Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Part of Purdue's strategy from the beginning has been to create a market for OxyContin-to instill a perceived need by making bold claims about the existence of large numbers of people suffering from untreated chronic pain. As Purdue moves into countries like China and Brazil, where opioids may still retain the kind of stigma that the company so assiduously broke down in the United States, its marketing approach has not changed. According to a Los Angeles Times report from 2016-well after the Sacklers' playbook for OxyContin had been repudiated by the medical establishment as possibly the main driver of the opioid epidemic-Mundipharma commissioned studies showing that millions of people in these countries suffered from chronic pain. The company has organized junkets, and paid doctors to give presentations extolling OxyContin's virtues. In fact, certain doctors who are currently flogging OxyContin abroad-"pain ambassadors," they are called-used to be on Purdue's payroll as advocates for the drug in the U.S.

The Times report described Joseph Pergolizzi, Jr.-a Florida doctor who runs a pain-management clinic and hawks a pain-relieving cream of his own invention on cable TV-giving paid talks in places like Brazil about the merits of OxyContin. In Mexico, Mundipharma has asserted that twenty-eight million people-a quarter of the population-suffer from chronic pain. In China, the company has distributed cartoon videos about using opioids for pain relief; other promotional literature cites the erroneous claim that rates of addiction are negligible. In a 2014 interview, Raman Singh, a Mundipharma executive, said, "Every single patient that is in emerging markets should have access to our medicines." The term "opiophobia" has largely fallen into disuse in America, for obvious reasons. Mundipharma executives still use it abroad.

"It's a parallel to what the tobacco industry did," Mike Moore told me. "They got caught in America, they saw their market share decline, so they export it to places with even fewer regulations than we have." He added, "You know what's going to happen. You're going to see lots and lots of death." In May, several members of Congress wrote to the World Health Organization, urging it to help stop the spread of OxyContin, and mentioning the Sackler family by name. "The international health community has a rare opportunity to see the future," they wrote. "Do not allow Purdue to walk away from the tragedy they have inflicted on countless American families simply to find new markets and new victims elsewhere." David Kessler, the former F.D.A. commissioner, believes that the destigmatization of opioids in the U.S. represents one of the "great mistakes" of modern medicine. When I asked for his thoughts on Mundipharma's efforts to market OxyContin abroad, he said, "It gives me a sick feeling. It makes me ill."

Earlier this year, Peter Salovey, the president of Yale, announced that the university will rename a residential college that was named for John C. Calhoun, because Calhoun's "legacy as a white supremacist and a national leader who passionately promoted slavery as a 'positive good' fundamentally conflicts with Yale's mission and values." This move, which was not without its critics, was emblematic of a broader trend to look back skeptically at individuals who were venerated in earlier epochs, and ask how they should be judged by the moral standards of today. At Oxford, a Rhodes Scholar from South Africa recently led a campaign to take down a statue of Cecil Rhodes.

One great fortune-and reputation-that has evaded such scrutiny is that of the Sacklers, a family whose dubious business practices are not an artifact of previous centuries but an ongoing reality. If present statistics are any indication, in the time it likely took you to read this article six Americans have fatally overdosed on opioids. Yet Yale appears to be in no hurry to rename its Raymond and Beverly Sackler Institute for Biological, Physical and Engineering Sciences, or its Richard Sackler and Jonathan Sackler Professorship of Internal Medicine. Perhaps it's because the Sacklers, unlike the Calhoun family, still have a fortune to give away.

"It's amazing how they are left out of the debate about causation, but also about solutions," Allen Frances, the Duke psychiatrist, said of the Sacklers. "A truly philanthropic family, looking at the last twenty years, would say, 'You know, there's several million Americans who are addicted, directly or indirectly, because of us.' Real philanthropy would be to contribute money to taking care of them. At this point, adding their name to a building-it rings hollow. It's not philanthropy. It's just a glorification of the Sackler family." According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, more than two and a half million Americans have an opioid-use disorder. Frances continued, "If the Sacklers wanted to clear their name, they could take a very substantial fraction of that fortune and create a mechanism for providing free treatment for everyone who's become addicted." Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, created the Nobel Peace Prize. In recent years, several philanthropic organizations run by the descendants of John D. Rockefeller have devoted resources to addressing climate change and critiquing the environmental record of the oil company he founded, now called ExxonMobil. Last year, Valerie Rockefeller Wayne told CBS, "Because the source of the family wealth is fossil fuels, we feel an enormous moral responsibility."

Mike Moore, the former Mississippi attorney general, believes that the Sacklers will feel no pressure to emulate this gesture until more of the public becomes aware that their fortune is derived from the opioid crisis. Moore recalled his initial settlement conference with tobacco-company C.E.O.s: "We asked them, 'What do you want?' And they said, 'We want to be able to go to cocktail parties and not have people come up and ask us why we're killing people.' That's an exact quote." Moore is puzzled that museums and universities are able to continue accepting money from the Sacklers without questions or controversy. He wondered, "What would happen if some of these foundations, medical schools, and hospitals started to say, 'How many babies have become addicted to opioids?' " A baby with a physical dependency on opioids is now born every half hour. In places like Huntington, West Virginia, ten per cent of newborns are dependent on opioids. A district attorney in eastern Tennessee recently filed a lawsuit against Purdue, and other companies, on behalf of "Baby Doe"-an infant addict.

Purdue executives won't be able to settle every case against them, Moore believes. "There's going to be a jury somewhere, someplace, that's going to hit them with the largest judgment in the nation's history," he said. Paul Hanly noted that, in the face of a crippling judgment, Purdue may have to declare bankruptcy. "But I'm certainly not going to walk away if they do," he said. "At that point, I would start looking closely at individual liability on the part of the Sacklers."

Robin Hogen, the former Purdue communications executive, said, "I don't want to be portrayed as an apologist for what is clearly a public-health crisis. But I wanted to make sure you spoke to someone who had very high regard for the Sackler family. The Sacklers were first class in everything they did." I asked him what he would say to the doctors and the public-health officials who believe that the heirs of Raymond and Mortimer Sackler bear some moral responsibility for the epidemic. "I'm not a doctor," Hogen demurred. "I really can't comment."

The Sacklers have always excelled at the confidence game of marketing, and it struck me that the greatest trick they ever pulled was to write the family out of the history of the family business. I was reminded of Arthur Sackler's admonition that you should endeavor to leave the world a better place than it was when you came into it, and I wondered about the moral arithmetic of the Sacklers' deeds. But the family, through a Purdue representative, declined to comment.

I recently went to Amagansett, on Long Island, to meet a man I'll call Jeff. At a restaurant, he told me about his struggles with addiction. A decade ago, when he was a teen-ager, he started abusing opioids. They were "everywhere," he recalled. He particularly liked OxyContin, for the "clean high" it provided. After sucking the pill's red coating off, he crushed the rest with the edge of a cigarette lighter, then snorted it. He didn't inject it. "When I was growing up, I always told myself, 'I'll never stick a needle in my arm,' " he said.

In a soft, unflinching tone, Jeff recounted the next decade of his life: he kept abusing painkillers, met a woman, fell in love, and introduced her to opioids. One day, his dealer was out of pills and said, "I'll sell you a bag of heroin for twenty bucks." Jeff was reluctant, but when withdrawal set in he acquiesced. At first, he and his girlfriend snorted heroin. "But you build up a tolerance, just like with the pills," he said, and eventually they started injecting it. They were high when they got married. Jeff's wife gave birth to a boy, who had an opioid dependency. "The doctors weaned him off with droplets of morphine," he said.

After a long stretch in rehab, Jeff has been sober for more than a year. His baby is healthy, and his wife is clean, too. Looking back, he said, he feels that an impulsive youthful decision to snort pills set him on a path from which he could not deviate. "It was all about the drug," he said. "I just created a hurricane of destruction."

We left the restaurant and strolled along a leafy side street flanked by grand houses. During the worst years of his addiction, Jeff worked as a tradesman in the area. I had asked him to show me a property that he had serviced, and we stopped outside a sprawling estate that was mostly hidden behind dense shrubbery. It was the home of Mortimer Sackler, Jr. Jeff, who knew about the family, appreciated the irony. "I couldn't tell you how many times I was on that property, sitting in a work truck, snorting a pill," he said.

We reached an ornamental wooden gate, beyond which was a yard dominated by a stately weeping willow. As I was admiring the tree, Jeff said that, for the people who maintained the grounds, it was "a pain in the ass." Whenever the wind picks up, he explained, branches break and scatter all over the lawn. "But the place has to be flawless," he said. "There can't be a leaf on the ground." So a crew comes by regularly, to clear away the mess. ♦

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized opioid dependency among infants.

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Patrick Radden Keefe on how the Sackler family and its firm, Purdue Pharma, ruthlessly marketed painkillers to generate billions of dollars-and millions of opioid addicts.

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Using Virtual Reality to Motivate Writers

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Literacy Daily-the blog of the International Literacy Association (ILA)-features education stories, teaching tips, book reviews, and more.

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When I first started teaching reading and writing workshop, the hardest part was that I couldn't picture the classroom, the work. I couldn't see it. This was some of my internal dialogue. I was pretty skeptical. It was only by seeing people like Kathleen Tolan, Carl Andersen, and Mary Ehrenworth do the work of workshop in front of me that I began to become a believer.

As my editorial team and I worked on A Novel Approach, we realized that a set of videos might help. All of these videos-and many more-are available within the book. You will find them called out in special sidebars.
via GIPHY
I want to share a few of them here for anyone to see and use and discuss. They are not perfect - scratch that, I am not perfect. If I could, I would change a bunch so that I look like a perfect teacher, I am full of critique. In making these videos we wanted to capture some specific ideas in workshop teaching and in the book but we also wanted them to feel as authentic as possible with a boom mike and a film crew. So we tried not to cut too much, not to redo, we tried to keep things as real as possible. You will see imperfection. You will see me stumble. You will see some lessons land and some that only begin a journey. But I think there are moments that capture something kind of nice. Like this conference, with Charlotte.

In this conference, Charlotte and I work together to help her take the next step in her interpretation work and while we struggle at first, there is just a lovely moment when Charlotte turns a corner and knocks it out of the park. I think there are moves I make here to help her that you could do too:

This conference is similar - Jalissa and I have a good conversation, and we are able to find some work around language specificity that led her to some interesting places.

Or this mini-lesson in Peg Bruno's 6th grade classroom. It builds off of the work done before, pushing kids to use what they already know and go a bit further. It's pretty short, and pretty clear. I think if you are looking for a mini-lesson that does the parts of a lesson well, and that delivers a strategy clearly and succinctly, this is a good one to use. I also love that we see a boy totally unengaged in the lesson and in the "active engagement." This is what that part of the lesson is for - to look for kids who need some guidance.

Or this Read Aloud in Caine Schekner's classroom. I love here that while the kids don't seem super into the read aloud as like a whole class, when they talk to each other they are thoughtful, engaged, and pretty brilliant. I like that I work here to listen, take what they are doing well, and offer strategies to clarify, complicate, or multiply their thinking.

Each of these videos shows a way of teaching that can help kids access and practice the skills and strategies of a unit of study. I hope that they also show how these methods of teaching, this pedagogy, can help offer opportunities to connect to our students, and allow our goofy, scattered, quiet, or determined personality to come through our teaching. I became passionate about teaching workshop because I saw kids grow and move closer to their dreams, and because the ways I taught when I taught workshop helped me to see my students and truly listen to what they were telling me. I give myself a B/B+ in these videos for those relationship-building goals. But the point, to me, is that these methods of teaching help me to talk less, listen more, and teach rather than tell.

I hope they help you do the same.

♦ ♦ ♦

Thank you to Heinemann's Sherry Day, Michael Grover, Tobey Antao, and Dennis Doyle for the two-day photo shoot, and to Peg Bruno and Caine Schekner for the time with their kids.

KATE ROBERTS is a national literacy consultant, top-selling author, and popular keynote speaker. She taught reading and writing in Brooklyn, NY and worked as a literacy coach before joining the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project in 2005, where she worked as a Lead Staff Developer for 11 years. Kate's latest book, A Novel Approach, asks how we can teach whole class novels while still holding onto student centered practices like readers workshop. She is also the co-author of Falling in Love with Close Reading (with Christopher Lehman), DIY Literacy (with Maggie Beattie Roberts), and she co-wrote two Units of Study books on Literary Essay. Her work with students across the country has led to her belief that all kids can be insightful, academic thinkers when the work is demystified, broken down and made engaging. To this end, Kate has worked nationally and internationally to help teachers, schools, and districts develop and implement strong teaching practices and curriculum.

Follow Kate online.
Twitter:
@TeachKate Pinterest: /
Blog: IndentBlog KateAndMaggie.com

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A Peek at A Novel Approach Videos: Mini Lesson, Conferring, and Read Aloud with Kate Roberts

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Here, Kate Roberts shares just a few extended classroom clips from her book, A Novel Approach. In this blog, you'll get a chance to watch Kate confer with two different students, and see how Kate structures a mini-less and read aloud.

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Short story vending machine dispenses tales-to-go

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Reading for pleasure is at an all-time low in the U.S. A recent government report revealed Americans read for fun about 17 minutes each day. "CBS This Morning: Saturday" co-host Dana Jacobson reports on a unique program that brings reading to unexpected places.

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Credit... Henning Wagenbreth

The newest students are transforming the way schools serve and educate them, including sending presidents and deans to Instagram and Twitter.

Credit... Henning Wagenbreth

They are, of course, super connected. But on their terms. Which is why college-bound iGens (Gen Zers, if you prefer) present a challenge to the grown-ups on campus eager to reach and teach them.

Consider orientation season. Katie Sermersheim, dean of students at Purdue University, has a mother lode of information and resources to share (including wellness initiatives and a new mindfulness room). But getting iGen's attention?

"It can be frustrating slash extra challenging to figure out how to get the word out, whatever that word is," Ms. Sermersheim said. "I do get discouraged."

A generation that rarely reads books or emails, breathes through social media, feels isolated and stressed but is crazy driven and wants to solve the world's problems (not just volunteer) is now on campus. Born from 1995 to 2012, its members are the most ethnically diverse generation in history, said Jean M. Twenge, psychology professor at San Diego State University.

They began arriving at colleges a few years ago, and now they are exerting their presence. They are driving shifts, subtle and not, in how colleges serve, guide and educate them, sending presidents and deans to Instagram and Twitter.

They are forcing course makeovers, spurring increased investments in mental health - from more counselors and wellness messages to campaigns drawing students to nature (hug a tree, take a break to look at insects) - and pushing academics to be more hands-on and job-relevant.

They are a frugal but ambitious lot, less excited by climbing walls and en suite kitchens than by career development.

Most critically, they expect to be treated as individuals. Students raised amid the tailored analytics of online retailers or college recruiters presume that anything put in front of them is customized for them, said Thomas C. Golden of Capture Higher Ed, a Lexington, Ky., data firm. He sees group designations evolving into "segments of one."

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Ingrid Koester, 19, center, and other Princeton University students shooting a video, based on the Taylor Swift song "22," that welcomes the class of 2022. Orientation leaders and staff members from the office of the dean of undergraduate students were extras in the video. Credit... Mark Makela for The New York Times

Students want to navigate campus life, getting food or help, when it is convenient for them. And, yes, on their mobile devices or phones. "It's not really technology to them," said Cory Tressler, associate director of learning programs at Ohio State University, noting that the iPhone came out when most were in grade school.

It is why Ohio State this year, rather than battle device use, issued iPads to 11,000 incoming students. The school designated 42 fall courses "iPad required" (21 more will be added in the spring) and is building an app that in addition to maps and bus routes has a course planner, grades, schedules and a Get Involved feature displaying student organizations.

In the works is more customization, so when students open the app it knows which campus they are enrolled at, their major and which student groups they belong to.

Speaking to students on their terms just makes sense, said Nicole Kraft, a journalism professor at Ohio State who takes attendance via Twitter (she has separate hashtags for each of her three courses). She posts assignments on Slack, an app used in many workplaces. And she holds office hours at 10 p.m. via the video conference site Zoom, "because that is when they have questions."

Dr. Kraft does not use email for class, except to teach students how to write a "proper" one. "That is a skill they need to have," she said.

While these students are called "digital natives," they still must be taught how to use devices and apps for academic purposes, Dr. Kraft said. She's had students not know that they could use Microsoft Word on an iPad. "We make a lot of assumptions about what they know how to do."

Campuses also have been slow to recognize that this age group is not millennials, version 2.0.

"IGen has a different flavor," said Dr. Twenge of San Diego State University and author of "iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy - and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood - and What That Means for the Rest of Us."

It is tricky to define a large part of the population. But Dr. Twenge said big data sets revealed broad psychological patterns shared by those coming of age amid defining social, cultural and economic events.

The difference between growing up in the prosperous 1990s versus seeing family members lose jobs and homes during the 2008 recession alters one's perspective, she said. It is why iGens are so focused on debt and insist that they get skills and experiences that will lead to a career.

The prevalence of school shootings and domestic terrorism has also shaped them.

"This generation defies the stereotypes of young adults," in terms of risk-taking, Dr. Twenge said. They are "more receptive to messages around safety" and less eager to get driver's licenses, and they come to college "with much less experience with sex and alcohol."

They are also more cautious when it comes to academics, fear failure and have learning preferences distinct from millennials, said Corey Seemiller, professor at Wright State University and co-author of "Generation Z Goes to College," who queried 1,200 students on 50 campuses.

"They do not like to learn in groups," favor videos over static content and like to think about information, then be walked through it to be certain they have it right.

"They want a model" and then to practice, said Dr. Seemiller, who posts samples when assigning a paper. "I'll say, 'Let's look through them and see what works.'" Having grown up with public successes and failures online, she said, students are hungry to have a big impact, yet "worry they will not live up to that expectation."

And despite their digital obsession, Dr. Seemiller's research shows this generation favors visual, face-to-face communication over texting. They are not always good at live social interaction, but they crave it. "They want authenticity and transparency," she said. "They like the idea of human beings being behind things."

As a generation that "has been sold a lot of stuff," said Dr. Seemiller, iGens are shrewd consumers of the tone and quality of communication. That's pushing colleges to focus not only on what they say, but also how they say it.

Which is what orientation leaders and staffers in Princeton's office of the dean of undergraduate students - known on social media as ODUS - have tried to master in the way they welcome the class of 2022.

Mayra Mateo of Columbus, Ohio, an incoming freshman at Ohio State University, working on the iPad given to her by the university, which issued the devices to 11,000 incoming students. The college designated many fall courses "iPad required." Credit... Jessica Phelps for The New York Times

A brainstorming session in March generated what became a Princetified cover of Taylor Swift's"22," a video with orientation leaders and ODUS staff members as extras, a cappella groups singing the score and Nicolas Chae, a sophomore, directing.

Cody Babineaux, an incoming freshman from Lafayette, La., whose video of his acceptance to Princeton has 4.6 million Twitter views, appreciated it, especially the Harvard shirt sniffed and tossed out in the first 20 seconds. "It was hilarious," he said. "It didn't try too hard."

Getting student attention and keeping it matters to administrators trying to build excitement for campus events, but also in prodding students about housing contracts and honor codes. "We are an office that enforces university standards. We can't be firing off," said Thomas Dunne, deputy dean of undergraduate students. "But you have to be animated and human-sounding. Our voice is very personal."

ODUS has become an active presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter with a vibe that winks, pokes, weaves in memes and slang terms like BAE (before anyone else) and on fleek (flawlessly styled), and applies hashtags with wit (a free ice cream for dropping by the ODUS office with dance moves worthy of Dean Dunne? #GetServed, #GameOfCones).

Mr. Dunne, whose Facebook page began as a student prank without his knowledge more than a decade ago, leans on staff members who include 20-somethings. One, Ian Deas, who favors Snapchat, identifies student "influencers," following them on Facebook and Instagram.

In posts, he looks for "those trendy phrases that help us stay in the conversation." When ODUS staff members respond to student posts, it amplifies their reach. "When we are being interactive, our stuff pops up in other people's feeds" and drives curiosity about "who is behind the voice."

Being social on social media attracts students who might tune out official communication. Mr. Babineaux said he and his friends noted when college posts sounded "goofy" or "like your grandfather trying to say swag."

He also notices that his generation is criticized "because we are always on our phones," which gets interpreted as being disconnected. In fact, he said, "we just have more connection with everyone all the time."

It is also how students like Mr. Babineaux learn and get information.

"Social media has helped me get a lot more prepared for Princeton," he said, adding that he has scrolled through old posts of campus ("I have never seen snow") and watched videos, including of graduation. "I thought, 'That will be on my Instagram page in four years.'"

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The iGen Shift: Colleges Are Changing to Reach the Next Generation (Published 2018)

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The newest students are transforming the way schools serve and educate them, including sending presidents and deans to Instagram and Twitter. Credit... Henning Wagenbreth They are, of course, super connected. But on their terms. Which is why college-bound iGens (Gen Zers, if you prefer) present a challenge to the grown-ups on campus eager to reach and teach them.

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Nicole A. Cooke, a Library Journal Mover & Shaker, believes that the current flood of fake news and dubious information represents a golden opportunity for libraries. Her new ALA Editions Special Report Fake News and Alternative Facts: Information Literacy in a Post-Truth Era shows how librarians can make a difference. In this interview she talks about why information literacy is a key skill for all news consumers.
Information literacy seems to be one of those perpetually timeless topics, and there are dozens of books about it out there already. What motivated you to write this book, and how did you take a fresh approach to the topic?
I was an academic instruction librarian before becoming faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, so I have worked with information literacy strategies for a long time, and I have read many of the books! I am also an information behavior scholar (I.e., how people seek, avoid, and use information). Information literacy is absolutely a form of information seeking and use which has a particular emphasis on pedagogy, in that we are trying to instruct people how to be better and more efficient information evaluators and consumers. Specifically, I have been long been interested in affective information behavior (how emotions impact people's information behaviors and patterns).

As fake news reached its fever pitch I saw really intelligent people sharing fake news on social media, not because their intelligence failed them in any way, but because they were personally invested in the message and/or the person/source of the information. Another thing that I noticed is that people shared information without reading the content, which is a result of trusting a source, but is also indicative of information overload, or being inundated with information and not always knowing how to deal with it our parse it out in such a way that automatically weeds out the bad stuff. The plethora of information also makes it easy to dismiss or avoid information that makes them angry, fearful, frustrated, uncomfortable in any way.

I wrote this book because I wanted to explore the emotional/affective investment people have in the information they consume and share, and see if that exploration can impact how information professionals teach and learn about fake news.

When it comes to strong research and evaluation skills, are there generational differences between kids and their parents?

I think so, but I think kids and their parents have more in common than not, particularly when it comes to the emotional investments in messages or groups, and their capacities to be better and savvier consumers of information. I think the main differences manifest in the mode of delivery and consumption of information - meaning kids likely spend more time online and have many more online sources and apps to consult. Their parents may still be reading newspapers and watching television news and may have a better sense of source credibility. Of course, there are exceptions to all these rules!

The ease with which many of us are hoodwinked by phony information seems directly tied to the sheer glut of information that bombards us all day long. What advice can you offer to help people be more discerning about what information they consume?

Be skeptical and don't take everything you see at face value. A lot of us are very entranced in filter bubbles and echo chambers (i.e., we so carefully curate our information and social media feeds, we miss a lot of information, including conflicting information). It's easy to fall into a lull that convinces us that we're receiving quality information all the time. We need to read more broadly.

Take the time to examine the information before absorbing it; question it. Manually inspect the information, as opposed to relying on browser plug-ins and other tools designed to automatically detect fake news.

Also, question your reaction to the information. Are you dismissing it because it's not factual or comes from an unfamiliar source, or because it makes you uncomfortable?

What are a few telltale signs that a "news" story you're reading online may not be news at all?

Extravagant headlines - headlines that use flowery, inflammatory, and/or absolutist words.

Ask yourself: have I seen the story anywhere else? Triangulation (finding the story in at least 3 places) can help us determine whether a story is fake.

Trust your gut. Does something seem off or unbelievable about the story? Check the date on the story. Ask yourself: do I recognize the website? Is the site overrun with ads?

Click the link! Take the time to read the story before sharing it and see what it's all about. Clickbait headlines usually don't match the content.

If you're still not sure, check the hoax busting and fact checking sites.

People don't necessary appreciate being told that the article they just read was actually made up. How can library staff share methods to help library users think critically about information without offending or irritating them?

I think being proactive is something that will work in our favor here. If we can share informal strategies and techniques for information evaluation (such as displaying the posters and infographics in the back of the report) we can work towards keeping ideas in the forefront of people's minds. So, the next time they see something questionable, they might remember that dramatic and/or absolutist headlines are fishy, and that might lead them to check the date of the article or look to see if it appears someplace else. Just as we do passive programming, dealing with fake news lends itself to passive education; and we can of course continue to conduct instruction sessions and workshops.

Another way to address this is not to approach susceptibility to fake news as a deficit (e.g., you fell for the hoax because you didn't know any better); rather, we might approach it from the angle that fake news, misinformation, and disinformation are increasingly sophisticated and are so pervasive, it's hard to negotiate everything we come across. We've all been victims of fake news at one time or another. It's another area that requires our vigilance and attention.
Learn more in the new ALA Editions Special Report.

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Fighting fake news: a frank conversation with Nicole A. Cooke

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Nicole A. Cooke, a Library Journal Mover & Shaker, believes that the current flood of fake news and dubious information represents a golden opportunity for libraries. Her new ALA Editions Special Report Fake News and Alternative Facts: Information Literacy in a Post-Truth Era shows how librarians can make a difference.