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On New Year's Eve, back in 2012, Savannah Eason retreated into her bedroom and picked up a pair of scissors.

"I was holding them up to my palm as if to cut myself," she says. "Clearly what was happening was I needed someone to do something."

Her dad managed to wrestle the scissors from her hands, but that night it had become clear she needed help.

"It was really scary," she recalls. "I was sobbing the whole time."

Savannah was in high school at the time. She says the pressure she felt to succeed - to aim high - had left her anxious and depressed.

"The thoughts that would go through my head were 'this would be so much easier if I wasn't alive, and I just didn't have to do anything anymore.' "

Looking back Savannah, now 23, says the pressure started early.

She told us her story as we sat at the kitchen table of her childhood home in Wilton, Conn., a wealthy community near New York. Her dad commutes to the city where he works in finance.

From the outside, Savannah's life may have appeared picture-perfect: two well-educated, loving parents; a beautiful home; siblings and lots of friends.

From an early age, Savannah says, she was considered one of the smart kids, and when she arrived at Wilton High School, she was surrounded by many other high achievers. Lots of kids take a heavy load of Advanced Placement and honors courses. They play varsity or club sports and are involved in lots of extracurricular activities.

But by sophomore year, the high expectations began to feel like a trap. Like many kids at her school - and at elite high schools across the country - she felt compelled to push herself to get good grades and get into a top college.

"Even though I was getting A's and B's, mostly A's, in all my classes - all my honors classes - I still felt it wasn't good enough," Savannah says.

No matter how well she did, someone else was doing better. "The pressure I put on myself was out of control," she says. She says she felt the pressure all around her - from peers, teachers and her parents.

Newfound awareness of these kinds of struggles, has started a conversation - and new initiatives - in her community. A group of parents is trying to shift the culture to balance the focus on achievement with an emphasis on well-being. Part of the equation is freeing up kids to find their own motivation and life path. There is a growing body of evidence pointing to elevated risks of anxiety, depression, and drug and alcohol use among kids raised in privileged communities.
A wake-up call
Savannah's mother, Genevieve Eason, feels she was partly to blame for the pressure Savannah felt.

"I know I was talking to her by eighth grade," Genevieve recalls, "about how she needed to find out what her passions were, so she could get involved in the right activities ... so that would look good on her college applications."

But after Savannah's problems began, Genevieve says, she backed off. She helped Savannah drop some of her tougher courses. And the family started to focus on well-being.

"Up to that point, I totally bought into the idea we're supposed to push our kids to achieve. When they encounter obstacles, we push [them] to overcome those," Genevieve says. But pushing too hard can backfire.

Given the pressure-cooker environment in her community, Genevieve wondered how many other teens may also be struggling.

In order to find out, she got together with some other parents and counselors - and worked with Wilton High School to do something very unusual. They hired a psychologist to come in and assess the student body.

On the day we visited, the seniors were preparing for graduation. In the main hallway, there was a bulletin board on which students have each pinned the logo of the college they plan to attend. We saw Dartmouth, Yale, Vanderbilt, Harvard - and many other highly selective universities.

Clearly, many kids here excel. But the results of the mental health assessment showed that a lot of kids struggle, too.

"The survey results definitely suggested that Wilton High School's rates of anxiety and depression with students was higher than national averages - significantly higher," says school principal Robert O'Donnell. He says he was surprised and concerned.

About 1,200 students - almost the entire student body - took the survey, known as the Youth Self-Report. The survey found that compared with a national norm of 7 percent, about 30 percent of Wilton High School students had above average levels of internalizing symptoms. These include feelings of sadness, anxiety and depression. It also includes physical problems that can be linked to emotional distress such as headaches or stomachaches. Often, kids may hide these feelings.

The survey also found that rates of alcohol and drug use among Wilton students were higher than average, too. We asked the psychologist who did the assessment whether she was surprised by what she found.

"This is by no means unique to Wilton. It's a common phenomenon across high-achieving schools," says Suniya Luthar, professor emerita at Columbia University's Teachers College and founder of Authentic Connections, a nonprofit that aims to build resilience in communities and schools.

Luthar has been studying adolescents for more than 20 years. She has published several studies that document the elevated rates of drug and alcohol use by kids who grow up in privileged communities - where incomes and expectations are high. Surprisingly, she says, the rates rival what she has documented in low-income, urban schools.

"What we've found is that kids in high-achieving, relatively affluent communities are reporting higher levels of substance use than inner-city kids and levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms are also commensurate - if not greater," Luthar says.

Her most recent study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, found that rates of substance abuse remain high among upper-middle-class kids, as they enter early adulthood. The alcohol or drugs are a form of self-medication.

Savannah's mother, Genevieve Eason, says she is not surprised by Luthar's findings.

"People choose communities like this to give their children opportunities, but it comes at a cost," Eason says.

The survey findings have been a wake-up call for the community of Wilton. "A lot of people were in denial," says Vanessa Elias. The mother of three children is the president of the Wilton Youth Council, which aims to promote the emotional well-being of the community.

"People don't talk about these things," Elias says. Families often struggle silently, not realizing that their friends' or neighbors' kids are experiencing the same struggles. "So having an opportunity to create a conversation about this was really important," she says.
Dialing back the pressure
The community has lots of ideas about how to tackle these issues.

The high school is focused on continuing to train counselors, and student-directed initiatives are aimed at raising awareness about anxiety and depression.

Wilton is also offering a resilience training program - GoZen! - to elementary school students. It's a research-based program that teaches coping and happiness skills. There's a body of evidence to show that resilience training can help reduce symptoms of depressive or negative thinking among children.

At home, Elias says, she has tried to create a low-stress environment for her children. For instance, she limits the number of after-school activities her kids participate in so they don't spend every afternoon being driven around, overscheduled. She also limits homework time in the evening for her youngest daughter - a third-grader. As a result, "there's a lot less friction in the household," she says.

And when she realized that the focus on standardized testing was making one of her daughters anxious in first grade - and giving her stomachaches - she opted her two youngest children out of standardized testing.

Elias says she has been influenced by the book How To Raise An Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims, which aims to help parents break free of what the author dubs the "over-parenting trap."

But to really change things - to dial back the focus on academic achievement at all costs - will require a culture shift, says Eason.

"We have to broaden our definitions of success and celebrate more kinds of success," she says.

For Eason's daughter, Savannah, this means forging a new path.

"I don't want to work on Wall Street; that sounds miserable to me," Savannah says.

She enrolled in culinary school, and she is training to be a pastry chef.

"I'm never going to live the same lifestyle I did growing up," Savannah says, "I'm not going to make that much money, but that's OK."

She has her own set of priorities. "It's not about how big your house is and what kind of car you drive. It's about happiness and peace."

This is a different kind of success, one that her parents are now celebrating with her.

"I spend hours making a cake, and my favorite part is when you cut it up and people eat it," Savannah says. "That's the part when you bring joy to people, and that's what's important to me now."

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The Perils Of Pushing Kids Too Hard, And How Parents Can Learn To Back Off

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On New Year's Eve, back in 2012, Savannah Eason retreated into her bedroom and picked up a pair of scissors. "I was holding them up to my palm as if to cut myself," she says. "Clearly what was happening was I needed someone to do something."

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The doctrine of original sin has often been held to be intolerably dark, a counsel of despair. It says we are by nature morally flawed, that we are born in error and live in it irremediably, that each of us deserves punishment and will receive it, unless redeemed by God's arbitrary grace. It insists that we cannot cure ourselves by our own efforts, and it has led some people to make extraordinarily disturbing claims, such as that children who die in infancy could burn in eternal hellfire.

It's hard to argue with the fact that inherent depravity is a profoundly pessimistic idea, and one with potentially bad effects. A rejection of the idea of original sin might argue that if we believe we can be good and do good by our own efforts, we are likelier to strive to do so. If we believe we are intrinsically evil, it follows, we will cease trying to make ourselves or the world better. Why not, then, think more positively about ourselves and believe in the possibility of human goodness and our potential for improvement right here in this world?

It would take a book or a shelf of them to examine original sin as a theological doctrine, going back to Augustine's interpretation of Adam and Eve. Even so, it is not clear that the preachers of original sin have managed to explain why a benevolent God would create such profoundly flawed creatures as they believe us to be. And if you don't believe in God at all, or not in that sort of God, the whole line of argument is moot.

Despite all of that, I would like to entertain the notion that a secularized conception of original sin is plausible, and that believing it might have good effects. In short, perhaps it's time for a new Puritanism, though with fewer witch trials this time around.

When I look within, I see certain extreme failings. I have not been able to get rid of most of them, and I have accumulated others as I've gone along. Perhaps you've done better, but most of us certainly come up short of our own ideals, ones I hope most people, religious or not, generally share - to be generous, peaceful, energetic in helping others and hesitant to help ourselves at their expense; to take care of the world we inhabit; to not only not kill one another (or even think about it), but to love one another. Even by our own mortal standards, we are profoundly flawed.

To complicate matters further, action undertaken for apparently good motives can often yield unintended harmful consequences, outweighing any possible good effects. We can intend, at best, only a tiny proportion of the effects of any of our actions. In trying to make the world an excellent place for human beings to live by developing and applying ingenious technologies, for example, we may wind up rendering it uninhabitable. Or in trying to keep ourselves safe and secure by stockpiling defensive weaponry, we may annihilate life on earth. There's really no need for God's punishment when you're making your own hellfire. As Paul told the Romans (according to David Bentley Hart's excellent recent translation of the New Testament), "I do not know what it is that I accomplish" and "what I wish, this I do not do; instead, what I hate, this I do."

Even the sheer fact that we are finite in our knowledge and in our power leads us to make terrible moral mistakes. But many of us commit those sort of transgressions knowingly, because we have malicious or violent impulses and motivations. We may even justify or defend them.

There is some level of self-scrutiny too merciless for most of us, some inner corridor too dark. We are mystified, or purport to be, by mass shooters, for example. What could possibly motivate a person to want to kill - everyone? What could turn them so against their own species? I suggest that to answer a question like that we must look within ourselves - at our own violent fantasies, the ways we hate or negate the world, our moments of imagined annihilation of people we fancy to be our enemies, our feeling at times that we are being arbitrarily persecuted or misunderstood. Perhaps, if we were witheringly honest, we might see a school shooter within us, or a bully or abuser of the sort that helped create people like that.

This insight is not the exclusive province of Christian theology. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "I have within me the capacity for every crime." Not long after, the American feminist Voltairine de Cleyre amplified this sentiment. Few readers of Emerson, she wrote, believed that he truly meant those words, but rather they took it as an attempt by Emerson to "say something large and leveling." She went on:

But I think he meant exactly what he said. I think with all his purity Emerson had within him the turbid stream of passion and desire; for all his hard-cut granite features he knew the instincts of the weakling and the slave; and for all his sweetness, he had the tiger and the jackal in his soul. I think that within every bit of human flesh and spirit that has ever crossed the enigma bridge of life, from the prehistoric racial morning until now, all crime and all virtue were germinal.

We may regard a shooter - or a racist, a sexual predator, an addict or someone who commits suicide (as de Cleyre herself tried to do at least once) - as alien. This reinforces, to ourselves and others, our sense of our own sanity and goodness; it is a way to keep us safe not only from those who would commit such crimes, but from the parts of ourselves who are like them, or who could have gone down that road.

But what if we put aside such defenses? What if, by connecting with the criminal, with the deranged or patently evil - and I believe this is what Emerson was striving to do - we gain some deeper understanding?

The doctrine of original sin - in religious or secular versions - is an expression of humility, an expression of a resolution to face our own imperfections. In undertaking any such act there is risk. To allow the self-scrutiny required in this act to turn to self-loathing would be debilitating. But a secularized doctrine of original sin, a chastened self-regard, doesn't entail consigning ourselves to the flames. There is much to affirm in our damaged selves and in our damaged lives, even a sort of dignity and beauty we share in our imperfect awareness of our own imperfection, and our halting attempts to face it, and ourselves.

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Opinion | What's So Good About Original Sin?

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The doctrine of original sin has often been held to be intolerably dark, a counsel of despair. It says we are by nature morally flawed, that we are born in error and live in it irremediably, that each of us deserves punishment and will receive it, unless redeemed by God's arbitrary grace.

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By Mimi Swartz

Ms. Swartz is an executive editor at Texas Monthly and a contributing opinion writer.

SANTA FE, Tex. - The makeshift memorials were growing larger by the hour outside Santa Fe High School on Saturday, the balloons holding up valiantly while the floral bouquets were already beginning to wilt in the early summer heat. In the aftermath of the murder of eight students and two adults at the school by Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, the familiar yellow caution tape had been wrapped around the school's perimeter. On a weekend night, there were still some cars in the school parking lot, eerily unaccounted for. There were the usual blood drives and fund-raisers for funeral expenses, and it seemed as if every church and bank sign in town, from those made with old fashioned magnetic letters to retina-searing LEDs, was offering a single message: Pray for Santa Fe.

You could almost conjure the whole scene in your mind without visiting the place, the aftermaths of school shootings having become so familiar. The only thing that made Santa Fe different was the hypocrisy of major Texas politicians - the ones who have never wavered in their push for more guns on college campuses, showy open-carry laws and laws that have made it easier for the mentally ill to buy guns.

By now you have heard of our Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's dubious suggestion that schools should reduce the number of entrances and exits to prevent more shootings - and that divorce, abortion and video games are to blame. Then there was Gov. Greg Abbott's promise to "do more than just pray for the victims and their families," by holding round-table discussions to stop the violence. He promised to speed up background checks and keep guns away from those who pose "immediate danger." But if history is any indication, both men will be more obsessed with keeping transgender kids from using the bathroom of their choice than keeping all kids safe in their schools.

The most effective breach in the bloviation came from the Houston police chief, Art Acevedo, who wrote a Facebook post that went viral, taking on "the elected officials that ran to the cameras today, acted in a solemn manner, called for prayers, and will once again do absolutely nothing." Let's hope he has grander ambitions.

Still, it's no wonder that most Americans cite the lack of change since the murder of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 as evidence that we are locked in a toxic stasis, thanks mostly to our politicians' love affair with the National Rifle Association.

And yet change has come, albeit slowly. And it has come not from the top, but from grass-roots campaigns often driven by women - the infuriated-mom equivalent of #MeToo that has joined with older organizations like The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and Michael Bloomberg's Mayors Against Guns. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America was started by Shannon Watts in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, and now as a part of Everytown for Gun Safety has over four million members. Then there are smaller groups like Survivors Empowered, started by Sandy and Lonnie Phillips after their daughter was killed in the mass shooting in 2012 in Aurora, Colo.

These people have no fear of the N.R.A. - despite its steady targeting of people, especially women, who speak out against them. These are the volunteers who have gone door to door with petitions and who speak before state legislatures. And it works: They have brought significant change to eight states, forcing stronger background checks, limiting gun access to perpetrators of domestic violence, and creating "red flag" laws to allow the local police and families to take guns away from relatives who are at risk to themselves or others - laws that might have prevented at least some of the mass shootings in the last decades.

These are the people who forced change in Vermont, persuading Gov. Phil Scott to require a criminal background check for every gun sale in the state, and who, in Florida, successfully pushed for a red flag law and raised the minimum age to buy a gun to 21. In the same state they managed to close the so-called Charleston loophole, which allowed gun sales after three business days, even if a background check was not completed. (Dylann Roof, who murdered nine African-Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, got his weapon this way.)

Thanks to pressure from these groups, Maryland, Vermont and Oregon have passed laws meant to take guns away from domestic abusers, with Kansas and Pennsylvania set to do the same. Ditto the five states that now have laws prohibiting bump stocks, the attachments that allow semiautomatic weapons to work like machine guns, like the one used by Stephen Paddock to kill 58 people and wound hundreds more in Las Vegas.

Then there is Survivors Empowered, which not only has a rapid response team to help victims and survivors of mass shootings - they showed up in Santa Fe, too - but also started a campaign of buying billboard ads to shame politicians the group feels are beholden to the gun lobby. In Alabama, it ran a billboard ad, in bold black type on a blood-red background, that announced: "Congresswoman Martha Roby has received over $14K from the N.R.A. Enough is enough."

So it's not that nothing has been done since Sandy Hook. It's that nothing has been done by the likes of the governor of Texas, or the president of the United States - who can't seem to move beyond round tables and tweets to actually make the country safer. Yes, our gun laws vary from state to state - some places are far safer than others. And yes, so much more needs to be done.

"I'll get downtime after we've voted all of these N.R.A. shills out of office," a Moms Demand Action member told me last weekend. Spoken like someone with the will to keep kids from getting shot in art class.

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Opinion | Things Have Changed Since Sandy Hook

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By Mimi Swartz Ms. Swartz is an executive editor at Texas Monthly and a contributing opinion writer. SANTA FE, Tex. - The makeshift memorials were growing larger by the hour outside Santa Fe High School on Saturday, the balloons holding up valiantly while the floral bouquets were already beginning to wilt in the early summer heat.

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The school shooting has become an American motif, a previously unthinkable option for the odd, the alienated and the spurned, a way to find voice through violence.

We had yet another one last week in Santa Fe, Texas, where a student killed 10 people and injured 13 others. After the shooting, Paige Curry, a student at the school, offered a chilling assessment of our current predication.

A television news reporter asked: "Was there a part of you that was like, 'This isn't real, this would not happen at my school?' "

Paige responded, shaking her head, an uncomfortable, reflexive smile on her face that mocked the naïveté of the question: "No, there wasn't."

The reporter pressed: "Why so?"

Paige continued: "It's been happening everywhere. I've always kind of felt like eventually it was going to happen here, too."

Schools across the country are preparing for this morbid eventuality. According to a 2015-16 Crime and Safety Survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, 92 percent of public schools have a written plan describing procedures to be performed in the event of an active shooter.

According to Vox:

"Since Columbine, 32 states have passed laws requiring schools to conduct lockdown drills or some form of emergency drill to keep students safe from intruders. Some states went even further after 20 children died in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. Now, six states require specific 'active shooter' drills each year."

These preparations - sheltering in place, ducking for cover, running for your life - have become a routine part of our children's educational experience. This is not normal and must never be accepted as such. Neither are these shootings normal. This is all insanity.

We have too many guns in this country, including too many based on combat weapons, and as a result we have too many shootings and deaths.

Many of us know this. We also know that legislators in Washington, as well as Donald Trump himself, are so beholden to the National Rifle Association that little to nothing will be done to stem the real problem: guns and their availability.

Instead, politicians talk about tangential issues like the mentally ill, the "hardening" of soft targets like schools, and putting even more guns in people's hands, like the lunacy of arming teachers.

A main facet of Trump's campaign was the condemnation of violence in Chicago and what that said about the culture there.

As The Washington Post pointed out, Trump promised in his inauguration speech to end this "American carnage," but "gun deaths are up over 12 percent year-over-year. Firearm injuries are up nearly 8 percent. The number of children under the age of 12 shot by a gun has increased by 16 percent, while instances of defensive gun use are up nearly 30 percent."

Yes, gun violence is actually on the rise.

As Time magazine pointed out in November, "Firearm-related deaths rose for the second-straight year in 2016." The magazine continued:

"In 2016, there were more than 38,000 gun-related deaths in the U.S. - 4,000 more than 2015, the new C.D.C. report on preliminary mortality data shows. Most gun-related deaths - about two-thirds - in America are suicides, but an Associated Press analysis of F.B.I. data shows there were about 11,000 gun-related homicides in 2016, up from 9,600 in 2015. The increase in gun-related deaths follows a nearly 15-year period of relative stasis."

Furthermore, according to an April F.B.I. report: "The F.B.I. has designated 50 shootings in 2016 and 2017 as active shooter incidents. Twenty incidents occurred in 2016, while 30 incidents occurred in 2017." The state with the largest number of those active shooters - six - was, you guessed it, Texas.

But as politicians in Washington have made clear that they have no desire to address this issue, no desire to stand up to the N.R.A., no desire to stop treating these deaths as collateral damage, those seeking change must change tactics.

People seeking common sense gun control must become single-issue voters on gun control. Support for more restrictions may not be the only reason to vote for a candidate, but it must be sufficient to vote against one.

We have to stop waiting for politicians to display courage and instead start to instill fear in them.

As an individual voter, you don't need to have a slate of reforms in mind, you only have to vote consistently for candidates who are committed to reviewing the issue and advancing smart, effective policy.

This is now about the long game. The N.R.A. didn't amass its clout overnight, and the building of a contingent of politicians committed to gun control also won't come overnight. But it can, and indeed must, be done.

Students like Paige shouldn't simply assume that one day a fellow student will show up with a gun and an appetite for death, and that there is nothing Washington is willing to do to prevent it.

Enough is enough!

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The school shooting has become an American motif, a previously unthinkable option for the odd, the alienated and the spurned, a way to find voice through violence. We had yet another one last week in Santa Fe, Texas, where a student killed 10 people and injured 13 others.

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Recently, I've been lucky enough to be around a lot of people who I would regard as moral heroes. They spend their lives fighting poverty, caring for the young or the sick, or single-mindedly dedicated to some cause. I've been wondering what traits such people tend to have in common.

The first is that they didn't overthink their decision before choosing to live this way. They didn't weigh the costs and benefits or wage any internal battle with themselves. As Anne Colby and William Damon write in "Some Do Care," a book that has organized my thinking on this subject: "We saw an unhesitating will to act, a disavowal of fear and doubt, and a simplicity of moral response. Risks were ignored and consequences went unweighed."

At some point in their lives, somebody planted an ideal. Somebody set a high example of what a good life looks like, and the person who went on to become a moral hero just assumed that, of course, that's what one should do.

They tend to have a "This is what I do" mentality. They don't have a lofty sense of themselves. They don't have a sense that they are doing anything extraordinary. "What I do is as simple and common as the laughter of a child," Mother Teresa once said.

They have a weird obliviousness to inferior pleasures. They are not tempted by worldly success because they are not interested in worldly success. They don't talk much about personal happiness, because they're not particularly interested in themselves, period.

That's because, as Colby and Damon argue, their self-identity is fused with a moral ideal. Their identity is not based on being a lawyer or a pianist. Their identity is defined by a certain moral action. They feel at home in the world when they are performing that moral action and feel out of sorts when they are not.

We see them tirelessly serving the poor or risking their lives for democracy and think they are performing great acts of self-sacrifice, but it doesn't feel that way to them. It feels like the activation of their own nature. Doing that work seems to them as ordinary as doing the dishes. Something needed to be done, so they did it.

Another quality you see is constant goal expansion. Some believe that a person's character is set in childhood - that after age 18, people don't change all that much. That's not how it is with these people. They are to moral life what lifelong learners are to intellectual life.

Some series of problems get presented to them - say, in the form of a parentless child landing on their doorstep or a new social wrong in their community. They see needs and respond with an instinctive and sometimes reckless series of "yeses" - and later on figure out how they're going to address them. "Never look down to test the ground before taking the next step," Dag Hammarskjold once advised. "Only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road."

You often see such people expanding their ambitions in the face of hardship. Andrei Sakharov was a Soviet scientist who became so concerned with the radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests that in 1961 he wrote to Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev dismissed him, portending decades of government intimidation and eventually internal exile. But every time the Soviets punished him, he expanded his activism and widened his critique.

Often, they have another strong back. There's usually a team of peers around them sharing core tasks and carrying them when they can't carry themselves. Great moral leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King may get the bulk of attention, but they usually emerge from trusted small groups.

People who lead these lives tend to possess an insane level of optimism, a certainty that history does change for the better and that achieving justice is only a matter of time. They remain undaunted even in the face of severe hardship and assume that every wrong is temporary.

Finally, the direction of their lives moves almost invariably from fragmentation to integration. The fragments of their character have become integrated around one single-minded moral cause. They tend to be hedgehogs, not foxes. Their efforts are generally built around healing some rupture in society, reconciling differences, bringing the unlike together, a move from fragmentation to wholeness. However contentious the world may look, they have a mind-set that at our deepest level we are all connected in a single fabric.

Some of these moral heroes even seem to sense that no matter how diverse their fields of work are, they're all somehow part of the same big struggle.

As one antipoverty activist put it to Colby and Damon: "I also know that I am part of a struggle. I am not the struggle. I am not leading any struggle. I am there. And I have been there for a long time, and I'm going to be there for the rest of my life. So I have no unrealistic expectations. Therefore, I am not going to get fatigued."

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Recently, I've been lucky enough to be around a lot of people who I would regard as moral heroes. They spend their lives fighting poverty, caring for the young or the sick, or single-mindedly dedicated to some cause. I've been wondering what traits such people tend to have in common.

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By Rob Henderson

Mr. Henderson served in the Air Force before going to Yale, where he majored in psychology. He graduated on Monday.

NEW HAVEN - There aren't many conservative students at Yale: fewer than 12 percent, according to a survey by our student newspaper. There are fewer former foster children. I am one of the rare students on campus who can claim both identities.

My unusual upbringing has shaped my conservatism. My birth mother was addicted to drugs. As a young child, I spent five years in foster care. At age 7, I was adopted, but for a long time after that I was raised in broken homes.

Foster care, broken homes and military service have fashioned my judgments. My experiences drive me to reflect on what environments are best for children. Certainly not the ones I came from.

Where I came from can be understood through my name: Robert Kim Henderson. All three names were taken from different adults.

Robert comes from my supposed biological father. The only information I have about him is his name from a document provided by a social worker responsible for my case when I was a foster child.

My middle name, Kim, comes from my biological mother. It was her family name. She succumbed to drug addiction, rendering her unable to care for me.

And my last name: Henderson. It comes from my former adoptive father. After my adoptive mother left him, he severed ties with me in order to hurt her. He figured that my emotional pain from his desertion would be transmitted to my adoptive mother. He was right. The three people who gave me their names have something in common: All abandoned me. None took responsibility.

Last year, a fellow student told me I was a victim. Yale is the only place where someone has said this to me. I responded that if someone had told me I was a victim when I was a kid, I would never have made it to the Air Force, where I served for eight years, or to Yale. I would have given up. When I was 10, a teacher told me that if I applied myself, I could alter my future. This advice changed my life. From my response, my fellow student inferred that I was not as progressive as him. As our conversation unfolded, he asked, "What does it actually mean to be a conservative?"

For me, the answer is that people who came before us weren't stupid. They were stunted in many ways. But not in every way. Older people have insights worthy of our attention.

One piece of inherited wisdom is the value of the two-parent family. It's not fashionable to talk about this. How people raise their children is a matter of preference. But it is not really up for debate that the two-parent home is, on average, better for children.

First, two parents can provide their children more resources, including emotional support, encouragement and help with homework. One conscientious parent, no matter how heroic, cannot do the work of two. Second, single-parent households have a lower standard of living, which is associated with lower school grades and test scores.

Here is an example of the success of intact families from one of my psychology classes. The professor asked students to anonymously respond to a question about parental background. Out of 25 students, only one student besides me did not grow up in a traditional two-parent family. It's no accident that most of my peers at Yale came from intact families.

Outcomes are worse for foster children. Ten percent of them enroll in college, and 3 percent graduate. To my knowledge, among more than 5,000 undergraduates at Yale my senior year, the number of former foster children was under 10.

Along with taking accumulated wisdom seriously, I understand conservative philosophy to mean that the role of the individual in making decisions and undertaking obligations is paramount. Individuals have rights. But they also have responsibilities.

For instance, when I say parents should prioritize their children over their careers, there is a sense of unease among my peers. They think I want to blame individuals rather than a nebulous foe like poverty. They are mostly right. Many people who come from privilege do not like placing blame on ordinary people. They prefer to blame ideologies, institutions, abstractions.

A cynical interpretation of this attitude is that some students want to keep the competition down. Fewer children raised in good families means less competition for those at the top.

My skin crawls when people use me as an example of a person who can shoulder the burdens of a nontraditional upbringing and succeed. They use my success as an argument for lax attitudes about parenting. But I am one of the lucky ones.

Many people have asked me how I turned out to be relatively successful, given my turbulent childhood. My answer is simple: During adolescence, I had the benefit of two parents, my adoptive mother and her partner, and I believed I had control of my future.

My adoptive mother and her partner raised me from middle school through high school in the early to mid-2000s in a rural California town called Red Bluff. They made a stable home for me. We had dinner together every weeknight. We talked about minutiae. They would ask me, "How was school today?" And I would respond with the usual "It was fine." They gave me unsolicited advice. I was sarcastic in response. And we loved one another.

I experienced a stable family, if only for a few years. Though they experienced homophobia and struggled financially, they never let it get in the way of doing the right thing for their son.

Ordinary adults taking responsibility made all the difference for me. I maintain that the agency of individuals will lead to fewer impoverished childhoods.

If today that makes me a conservative, great. I take responsibility for that.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Life as a Foster Child Made Me a Conservative. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Opinion | Why Being a Foster Child Made Me a Conservative

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By Rob Henderson Mr. Henderson served in the Air Force before going to Yale, where he majored in psychology. He graduated on Monday. NEW HAVEN - There aren't many conservative students at Yale: fewer than 12 percent, according to a survey by our student newspaper. There are fewer former foster children.

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WASHINGTON - The hallmark of President Trump's Twitter feed is that it sounds like him - grammatical miscues and all.

But it's not always Trump tapping out a Tweet, even when it sounds like his voice. West Wing employees who draft proposed tweets intentionally employ suspect grammar and staccato syntax in order to mimic the president's style, according to two people familiar with the process.

They overuse the exclamation point! They Capitalize random words for emphasis. Fragments. Loosely connected ideas. All part of a process that is not as spontaneous as Trump's Twitter feed often appears.

Presidential speechwriters have always sought to channel their bosses' style and cadence, but Trump's team is blazing new ground with its approach to his favorite means of instant communication. Some staff members even relish the scoldings Trump gets from elites shocked by the Trumpian language they strive to imitate, believing that debates over presidential typos fortify the belief within his base that he has the common touch.

His staff has become so adept at replicating Trump's tone that people who follow his feed closely say it is getting harder to discern which tweets were actually crafted by Trump sitting in his bathrobe and watching "Fox & Friends" and which were concocted by his communications team.

Those familiar with the process wouldn't fess up to which tweets were staff-written. But an algorithm crafted by a writer at The Atlantic to determine real versus staff-written tweets suggested several were not written by the president, despite the unusual use of the language.

"Looking forward to greeting the Hostages (no longer) at 2:00 A.M." someone tweeted from Trump's account at 6:41 p.m. May 9. The Atlantic's analysis pegged it 17 percent likely written by Trump, based on a complex comparison with past Trump tweets.

Staff-written tweets do go through a West Wing process of sorts. When a White House employee wants the president to tweet about a topic, the official writes a memo to the president that includes three or four sample tweets, according to those familiar with the process.

Trump then picks the one he likes best, according to the two people, neither of whom wanted to be named because they're not authorized to talk about the operations. Sometimes Trump will edit the wording and sometimes he'll just pick his favorite for blasting out to his 52 million Twitter followers.

While staff members do consciously use poor grammar, they do not intentionally misspell words or names, one person familiar with the process explained.

"Tweets that are proposed are in his voice," said one of the people. "You want to do it in a way that fits his style."

Dan Scavino, who is the White House director of social media and keeper of Trump's twitter account, didn't respond to a request for comment. A White House spokesman declined to comment.

The process is quite different from how other leaders have operated.

Mitt Romney's failed 2012 campaign famously required 22 different people to sign off on a Tweet, a laborious process that robbed any sense of spontaneity or authenticity from the messages. But they were grammatically sound.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama also had controls in place intended to be sure their messages were largely spotless.

It's been long understood that some of Trump's tweets are composed by his staff. During the campaign, Trump used an Android phone to tweet while most of his staff used iPhones. This provided a reasonable guide to determine whether or not a tweet came directly from him.

But now Trump has an iPhone, making it more difficult to determine the true author. To help with this there's also a Twitter account called @TrumpOrNotBot that rates the authenticity of Tweets sent via Trump's personal account.

"When the Twitter account is so central to his identity, it was interesting to know if a message is from his voice or is staff-written," said Andrew McGill, a senior product manager and writer at The Atlantic, who created the bot. He launched the project in March 2017.

McGill's program analyzed hundreds of tweets written by Trump before he was president and detected patterns in his use of language.

Each tweet sent from the president's current account is compared with the older ones, and the bot assigns a percentage chance that Trump was the real author of each message.

On Sunday, for example, the president issued a tweet focused on the private server Hillary Clinton used when she was secretary of state. "What ever happened to the Server, at the center of so much Corruption, that the Democratic National Committee REFUSED to hand over to the hard charging (except in the case of Democrats) FBI?" McGill's bot found there was a 96 percent chance the message was written by Trump.

The bot found there was only a 36 percent chance that a message sent Thursday was drafted by the president: "Tomorrow, the House will vote on a strong Farm Bill, which includes work requirements. We must support our Nation's great farmers!"

But McGill suspects his bot has gotten less accurate over time. "They've gotten increasingly sophisticated about mimicking him online,'' he said.

Some clues are still seen as reliable. Tweets that include photographs or videos are likely composed by staff. And ones that have hashtags are also likely staff-written, McGill said.

Martha Brockenbrough, founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, said that the president's disregard for standard English plays into the public persona he has created for himself that he's a man of the people, despite his billions.

"Grammatical conventions tend to be elitist and always have been," said Brockenbrough. "The lack of regard for it, and the fact that he's now having American tax dollars fund people to ape his style, is meant to poke people like you and me in the eye - people for whom language matters."

Trump's grammatical gaffes often spark rounds of online mocking - debates that Trump doesn't mind having.

"If the political conversation is about Donald Trump's typos, that plays into the narrative that the coastal elites don't understand ordinary Americans who make typos," said Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. Farnsworth recently wrote a book on how presidents connect to supporters.

But the country's most sophisticated guardians of language say there's a more insidious motive for Trump's disregard for the rules of English.

"The president's use of language, like his White House, is chaotic. But that is not necessarily a problem in itself," said Langdon Hammer, chairman of Yale University's English Department. "It's what he uses language for - the strategic interests served by his sloppiness."

Hammer said that Trump's particular style allows him "to speak vaguely, equivocate, insinuate, inflame, and intimidate."

The consequence, according to Hammer: "He doesn't treat speech as something to stand by and take responsibility for. Sad!"

Annie Linskey can be reached at annie.linskey@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @annielinskey.

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Does Donald Trump write his own tweets? Sometimes - The Boston Globe

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WASHINGTON - The hallmark of President Trump's Twitter feed is that it sounds like him - grammatical miscues and all. But it's not always Trump tapping out a Tweet, even when it sounds like his voice.

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On Feb. 18, 2016, I woke up in my crew quarters on the International Space Station for the 328th day of a yearlong mission, the longest ever flown by a NASA astronaut. After breakfast and a conference call with the ground, I got into my work for the day: conducting a physics experiment, taking a sample of my own blood for a NASA study, performing routine maintenance on life support equipment, and answering questions for an elementary school in Arizona via live video uplink.

When I finally had a few free moments to myself, I opened up a laptop and typed out an email. I spent longer writing that email, and proofread it more carefully, than anything I had written in a long time.

I had decided to reach out to the author of a book that had meant a lot to me, something I had never done before. I was writing to Tom Wolfe, and I wanted to tell him that the reason I was spending a year in space, the reason I had flown three earlier missions to space and had flown high-performance aircraft in the Navy before that, was all because I had come across "The Right Stuff" as an 18-year-old college freshman.

In 1982, I was on my way to flunking out of school, with no particular ambition but to party with my friends. I was in line at the campus store one day when a book cover caught my eye - I picked up the book while I waited in line, and by the time I reached the cash register I was so engrossed I bought the book and took it back to my dorm. By the next day, I had finished it and had found my life's ambition: I was going to fly military jets off an aircraft carrier, become a test pilot, and maybe even become an astronaut.

I had known these pursuits existed before, of course, but Tom Wolfe's prose brought them to life in a way that spoke to me as nothing else had before. As a terrible student with severe attention problems, I was a poor candidate to achieve any of these goals. But I had achieved them, and I wanted to thank Tom Wolfe, who died on Monday at the age of 88, for the part he had played in my life by sending him a photograph of myself holding the book in the space station.

Later the same day, I received an email in reply.
Dear Commander Kelly,
::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Santa Barranza! I can't believe it! "The Right Stuff" itself has made it into space! And now have I photographic evidence to prove it!
Most exciting of all is your account of the part it played in your rise to where you are today ... which is to say, on top of the world. I choose to believe all of it. At last I can point with extravagant pride at what I have done for the U.S.A. Mainly, I must thank you for going to the trouble - considering all you have on your hands - of writing this earthling way down below. Sometime when you've returned, I would love to talk to you about your adventures.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Meantime, keep 'em orbiting!

I was excited to have received a response, but more than that I was excited that it was written in classic Tom Wolfe style. There could be no mistaking who had written this lavishly punctuated letter.

He and I arranged to talk on the phone a few days later. (The crew of the space station can call people on Earth using voice-over-internet software, but they can't call us back.) Once I got through to him and explained the strange voice lag that makes it sound as though an awkward pause follows each line, we talked for over an hour as the space station completed two-thirds of an orbit around the Earth. I told him about my journey to the space station on a Russian Soyuz rocket, a collaboration that would have been unthinkable during the time of the events in "The Right Stuff." He asked what I had been doing that day, what kinds of foods I could eat, and how often I got to talk to my family.

When it was my turn to ask questions, I asked Tom how he writes his books. He started to explain that he gives himself a quota of words per hour he tries to meet on a writing day, and that he uses an outline to give him a sense of structure and direction.

When it was my turn to speak again, I said, "I actually meant - how do you write? Like, physically. Do you use a laptop?"

"Oh," he said. "I use a pencil."

"A pencil," I repeated. I couldn't imagine writing an entire book by hand.

When I turned the subject to "The Right Stuff," I asked him about the title. It's hard to think of another book title that has become so widely used - not only when we talk about astronauts but when we talk about almost anything. Everyone knows what it means, even if they've never read the book or seen the film, and as an astronaut for the last 20 years I have been subjected to countless questions, jokes and jibes about whether I've got it.

"The title didn't come until well into the writing process," Tom told me. He had been working on the book for years and had started to fear it would never be done. One day when he was talking with a friend who worked in law enforcement, he mentioned that he'd always had a great deal of respect for police officers, those who knowingly risk their lives to help others.

"You know what?'" the friend said. "It takes guts to be a police officer, but you know who's really got to have courage? Test pilots. Those guys have really got the right stuff."

Tom said that knew the moment he heard that phrase that he had found the title for his book. Not long after, his wife suggested that - though his original plan had been to write about Mercury, Gemini and Apollo - he had done enough by telling the story of Mercury. He had documented America's first steps off our planet in a unique way. And he'd found his title. He submitted the manuscript to his publisher not long after, and the book was published in 1979. It's never been out of print since.

"Whenever I tell people how inspired I was by 'The Right Stuff,'" I said, "they always assume that I was inspired by the idea of space travel. But the truth is, I was captivated by your descriptions of the test pilots, before any of them were chosen as astronauts. The idea that their job was to get into an experimental airplane and struggle to stay alive just by their wits - I wanted to do that."

"Even with the way the book starts?" Tom asked.

The book begins with a test pilot getting smashed to bits when his airplane malfunctions; a few pages later, another dies when a catapult on an aircraft carrier fails, and "his ship just dribbled off the end of the deck, with its engine roaring vainly, and fell 60 feet into the ocean and sank like a brick." A pilot "rolls in like corkscrew from 800 feet up and crashes"; another passes out when his oxygen system fails; another let his airspeed fall too low before extending his flaps and loses control of the airplane.

Tom was right to sound incredulous: This part of the book was not exactly an advertisement for flight test. A career Navy pilot faced a 23 percent likelihood of dying from an accident - and this statistic did not include deaths in combat, since those could not be classified as "accidental."

All this was meant to create a sense of the kind of courage these men had to possess in order to simply do their jobs every day. Before Tom's readers could understand the concept of "the right stuff," they had to understand the risks those pilots faced (and still face). But, I tried to explain to Tom, as a college freshman I saw something in those opening pages that spoke to me. I told him that seeing the risk of death brought to life on the page affected me the way nothing else had before. If I could risk my life in the same way, relying on my wits to bring me back down onto the runway in one piece, that would be something. Risking my life would give me life a meaning it hadn't seemed to have before.

I followed the paths of the characters in the book as closely as I could - joined the Navy, became a naval aviator, qualified to fly jets off an aircraft carrier, was accepted into the Navy test pilot school at the Patuxent River air station, where "The Right Stuff" begins. I flew experimental aircraft and tested their flying abilities. Unlike many of the characters in the first pages of the book, I'd come back alive every time. Only after having survived all that did I apply to NASA as an astronaut; then I flew another experimental craft, the space shuttle.

I didn't entirely understand, when I was a kid reading "The Right Stuff" for the first time, that in a sense Tom had invented the idea of the astronaut by writing about the Mercury 7. He taught us how to read their identical crew cuts and enormous wristwatches, their rakish smiles and indomitable swagger, their "Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving," their endless pool parties at Cape Canaveral, racing their Corvettes along the highway testing their luck and believing themselves (incorrectly) to be "equally gifted in the control of all forms of locomotion." By the time I became an astronaut myself, the culture had changed - the astronaut corps was more diverse and less debauched, but some of the swagger remained.

As we wrapped up our conversation, Tom suggested that I should think about writing a book about my experiences. I didn't tell him I wasn't sure whether I would be able to write a book - despite all I had done earlier in my life to overcome my attention problems, I still had trouble concentrating on reading and writing for long periods of time. Despite the extraordinary nature of the mission I was on, writing a book still seemed like an unattainable journey.

Still, with his encouragement, I wrote that book. I called it "Endurance," and it was published last October. A few months later, I received an email from a woman whose grandson was in jail. She wanted me to know that her grandson had read and enjoyed both "The Right Stuff" and my book.

"Time weighs heavily in a jail," she wrote. She told me her grandson could relate to my descriptions of living without fresh air, freedom or the touch of family, since as an inmate he is living under the same conditions. "We are hopeful this experience will be a turnaround for him," she wrote. "I think your writing will be influential in his life, much as Tom Wolfe inspired you."

Now that I had struggled to wrestle my own sentences to the ground, trying to find the right word to convey an accurate meaning as well as a feeling, a tone and a rhythm that needs to flow into the next sentence, and the next - now I was starting to understand the complexity of what Tom had achieved in his book. And I now understand just a bit what it felt like to Tom to get that first email I sent him from the space station.

When I received his response, that email with all the colons and exclamation points, I assumed it was partly out of politeness that he was showing such enthusiasm for having heard from me. But receiving this woman's email about her grandson has meant the world to me - it's made every late night and early morning I spent working on my book worthwhile.

Now I am a retired astronaut myself, just as the Mercury astronauts were when I met them in the 1990s. I spend my time traveling and telling people about my time in space. I want young people to be inspired to do their best and push beyond what they believe to be their limitations - I want the things I've learned to help someone else. I'm grateful that I came along at the right time to get to fly the missions I did. I'm grateful that I had a great work of literature to show me the way.

Scott Kelly, a retired NASA astronaut, wrote this essay with Margaret Lazarus Dean, a professor of English at the University of Tennessee. They are also co-authors of Mr. Kelly's memoir, "Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery." This essay was adapted from their foreword to a forthcoming reissue of "The Right Stuff" in Britain.
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Opinion | Scott Kelly: How Tom Wolfe Changed My Life

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On Feb. 18, 2016, I woke up in my crew quarters on the International Space Station for the 328th day of a yearlong mission, the longest ever flown by a NASA astronaut.

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Scott Kelly: How Tom Wolfe Changed My Life  

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Re " His College Saw Despair. His Parents Didn't, Until It Was Too Late " (front page, May 11):

Graham Burton was my daughter's classmate at Hamilton. His parents' open letter to the Hamilton College community reports that faculty and administrators exchanged emails about Graham's "complete crash and burn" shortly before his suicide.

I understand Hamilton's obligations regarding student privacy. Maybe that's why Graham's parents weren't alerted. But neither was the Hamilton Students of Concern team. Did any of the Hamilton adults ask Graham face to face if he was thinking of hurting himself, if he needed help?

Tone-deaf Hamilton administrators speak of helicopter parents as being part of the problem, reminding me of the class of 2019's orientation, when an administrator described us as "lawn mower parents," clearing obstacles for our kids. And about our kids' well-being, he said, "We've got this."

Here's what triggers communication to Hamilton parents: accumulating disciplinary points for policy infractions. Hamilton parents are notified if their child streaks, or makes excessive noise too often.

How about a student permissions policy allowing for notice to parents if and when mental health concerns arise? Some Hamilton students are suggesting this.

Maybe some parents are the problem, but statements of college administrators following Graham's and other students' deaths hardly assure that they've got this.

MEG MORAN, PORTSMOUTH, N.H.
To the Editor:
I grieve deeply for Gina Burton, and I appreciate how betrayed she must feel by her son's college, which had both legal and moral responsibilities to act, if not "in loco parentis," then at least in the interests of her son's physical safety and well-being.

A college's obligations of care couldn't be more clear, but, with the few exceptions noted in your article, they are owed to one recipient only: the student, not the parent. There are many excellent and obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being that the student, if at least 18, is a legal adult.

A college has no right to assume anything about a student's relationship or history with her parents. There may be no relationship, or it may be one of abuse and control. The intervention of a toxic parent can have brutal, even fatal, consequences. It may vastly prolong illness.

If the college had respected its obligations to Graham Burton, an adult man, and acted more aggressively to get him appropriate care, he might still be alive.

ANDREA BENZACAR, NEW YORK
To the Editor:
Thank you so much for this article. My thoughts go out to the family.

When my daughter was a college freshman, she called me, in the dead of winter, from the dugout on the baseball field. She was severely despondent and alone. She felt hopeless. After I got off the phone with her, I called the college and tried to get someone to go to her, to offer support and counsel. The person I spoke to refused, stating that my daughter was over 18 and had to ask for the help herself. As anyone who has suffered from severe depression knows, it is often impossible to make that leap alone.

After contacting several college personnel in various departments, including the health center, I finally gave up and drove the 350 miles to her. Thank goodness all ended well. But I shudder to think what might have been.

K.R., NEW YORK
The writer's full name is being withheld to protect her daughter's privacy. To the Editor:
The nightmarish stories of college students who commit suicide elicit basic questions about what steps colleges can take to avert such terrible outcomes. Federal laws like the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act need revision to make it easier for college advisers and faculty to contact families when students are failing and/or showing signs of distress.

Faculty, staff and students need to be educated about diseases like depression, bipolar disorder and substance use disorder, which are causally related to outcomes like death from suicide.

While schools cannot become mental health facilities, they need to have sufficient resources to intervene directly in crises like the ones depicted all too frequently in the media.

The good news is that for every story that ends in tragedy, there are thousands of others that result in recovery, thanks to the tireless work of engaged college personnel, peer support groups, mental health clinicians and families coming together on behalf of those stricken with mental health challenges.

ANTHONY ROSTAIN
PHILADELPHIA
The writer, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, is co-author of the forthcoming book "The Stressed Years of Their Lives: Helping Your Kid Survive and Thrive During Their College Years." To the Editor:
This article made me reflect on my own college days five decades ago. No one I knew committed suicide, although there were days when we were very discouraged. When did suicide become "the second-leading cause of death, after accidents, for college-age adults in the United States"? What happened in our society to create such despair?

MARSHALL CARTER-TRIPP
EL PASO
To the Editor:
As a father and an educator, I grieve for Graham Burton. I also sympathize deeply with his parents, who believe that the college should have contacted them about his difficulties. But what about his friends? The college was bound by privacy rules and restrictions; his friends weren't.

Shouldn't we encourage our students to notify loved ones when they think a peer is in crisis? I'm not saying Graham Burton's friends were responsible for his tragic death, any more than his college was. But at moments like this one, we seem to put all of the onus on institutions and none of it on the students.

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN
PHILADELPHIA
The writer is a professor of education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. To the Editor:
Should colleges alert parents to mental health concerns? Some tragedies might be averted when caring parents are able to intervene, but college students are adults and have privacy rights. Moreover, some parents are abusive and will only increase the student's risk of distress.

There is a solution in plain sight: Every term colleges should ask students to indicate who (if anyone) they want contacted in case of emergency. The questions should be precise about the type of emergency and the nature of the information provided. Consent should be requested on a regular basis. Colleges want students to learn about consent; the least they can do is model the behavior.

JENNIFER J. FREYD, EUGENE, ORE.
The writer is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon.

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Opinion | How to Reduce Suicides in College

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Re " His College Saw Despair. His Parents Didn't, Until It Was Too Late " (front page, May 11): Graham Burton was my daughter's classmate at Hamilton. His parents' open letter to the Hamilton College community reports that faculty and administrators exchanged emails about Graham's "complete crash and burn" shortly before his suicide.

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In Robert Frost's famous poem "Mending Wall," the narrator describes an encounter with his neighbor at the stone wall that divides their land. They are there to repair the damage inflicted by winter. Reflecting on nature's apparent dislike of all artificial barriers, the narrator questions the benefits of the task, and gets this answer: "Good fences make good neighbors."

Do they?

It is clear that Frost's narrator views this bit of folk wisdom with skepticism, but by refraining from providing a firm answer to our question, the poem manages to increase our curiosity: Besides the most obvious, delineating private property, what do "fences" truly represent?

If one looks at history, the answer seems obvious: What fences have very often indicated is not simply what is mine and what is yours, but, more subtly, who I am versus who you are. This tendency is based on the human inclination to define one's identity in contrast to someone cast as a different, an untrustworthy Other best kept at a distance.

The danger that such a separation between the self and the other can cause is evident throughout history. In Ancient Greece, where a profound appreciation of human reason produced a brilliant civilization, pernicious biases were also established. Women were assumed to be guided by passions rather than rationality, and so they were considered inferior to men and excluded from the cultural and political life of the city-state. As the word "virtue" - from the Latin "vir," meaning "man" - so clearly expresses, the ethos that Greek as well as Roman culture fostered derived from a military and patriarchal mentality. The "fence" of bigotry and prejudice that prevent the flourishing in public life of half the population certainly hobbled the development of Greek and Roman society.

The Greeks held similarly disparaging views toward foreigners, called "barbarians" because they seemed to say "bar-bar-bar" when they spoke. The Greek word "logos," which simultaneously indicated "language" and "rationality," gave further validation to that premise: Those who did not share the Greek idiom were viewed as inferior Others who lacked the intellectual talents that had made possible the free and self-ruled society that the Greek polis represented. (This was in fact a unique achievement; in all other civilizations at that time absolute monarchs reigned uncontested over legions of subjects.)

The sharp division between Greek and non-Greek was vividly represented in the sculptures that were placed on the Parthenon in Athens to celebrate the victory that, against all odds, the small Greek city-states had obtained against the immense Persian Empire. To suggest that the Eastern enemy possessed none of the extraordinary qualities belonging to the Greeks, the Athenian artists used mythological comparisons that described the Persians as monstrous creatures - giants, centaurs and Amazons, female warriors that the Greeks evoked to ridicule the weak and decadent femininity of all Eastern peoples.

This was also expressed in pottery, especially, by the colorful and whimsical attire the Persians donned for war, which was contrasted with the noble nudity of the brave citizen-soldiers who fought in defense of the Greek polis.

When the Macedonian king Alexander the Great absorbed the Balkan Peninsula as the start of an empire that soon stretched as far as India, the experiment of the polis came to an end. Despite the fear of their eastern neighbors that the early Greeks had so diligently cultivated, the rapprochement between East and West that the unity of empire made possible proved enormously fruitful for both sides: While the rich culture of Greece reached further into Asia, the heritage of the East, which, besides art and science also included religions such as Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, replenished with all sorts of new perspectives the cultural reservoir of the West.

A new chapter began when Rome established itself as the leader of yet another enormous empire. A major gain for the Romans was the encounter with the Hellenistic heritage that the poet Horace described with these famous words: "When Greece was taken she enslaved her rough conquerors." Despite the enormous cultural debt they owed to the Greeks, the Romans, driven by feelings of envy and competition, promoted a mythical narrative that, echoing old prejudices, portrayed the Greeks as a decadent and effeminate people while the Romans were models of masculine virtue and uprightness.

Thanks to such greatness, the myth suggested, the gods had elected the Romans (rather than the Greeks) to spread civilization over the entire world. Those who failed to swear allegiance to Rome's sacred mission were labeled dangerous Others deserving annihilation.

When the barbarians, emboldened by the many problems that in time began to corrode the Empire, finally crossed the borders with which Rome for so long had kept at bay all foreigners, the Eternal City collapsed both in myth and in reality. During the following turbulent centuries different peoples clashed but also mixed and merged, while Christianity became the leading religion of the West. With the rise of Islam, the Other came to be represented by the Muslims, whose rapid territorial expansion (which included cities that had been important centers of Greek and Latin culture) struck fear in the very heart of Europe.

To foster the righteous spirit of the Crusaders, Christian art depicted Muslims with monstrous traits suggesting they were closer to animals than human beings. But the humiliating defeat that the "infidels" dealt to the Crusaders turned out to be an unexpected gift: the Christian world, having come into contact with the Muslim intelligentsia, rediscovered its own cultural roots - the classical heritage that eventually led to the blooming of the Renaissance.

What that seems to prove is that, just as Frost's narrator suggests when he recalls how the winter sabotages walls, the regeneration that culture always needs can occur only when the fences of prejudice are breached to allow encounters between different people, traditions and ideas.

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Opinion | The Ancient Myth of 'Good Fences'

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In Robert Frost's famous poem "Mending Wall," the narrator describes an encounter with his neighbor at the stone wall that divides their land. They are there to repair the damage inflicted by winter. Reflecting on nature's apparent dislike of all artificial barriers, the narrator questions the benefits of the task, and gets this answer: "Good fences make good neighbors."

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A reader writes that the photographs are a reminder of what we have lost.

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How College Students Can Learn to Write Well  

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"Thank you, come again" - those four words, spoken in an exaggerated Indian accent, have followed immigrants and Americans of South Asian descent like a bad penny since "The Simpsons" premiered in 1989. They helped make Apu, the show's tightfisted convenience store owner, a household name. And they are often repeated to us, with a sly grin or a guffaw, by the same people who are surprised that we speak English in grammatically sound sentences.

Last week brought Indian-Americans of my generation some relief: Hank Azaria, the white actor who has voiced Apu for 29 seasons, told Stephen Colbert that he is willing to stop playing the character because he now understands why Apu is troubling to the community that he is supposed to represent. "My eyes have been opened," Mr. Azaria said. "And I think the most important thing is that we have to listen to South Asian people, Indian people in this country when they talk about what they feel and how they think about this character."

Two cheers for Mr. Azaria. Credit for his newfound enlightenment on this issue belongs to Hari Kondabolu, the comedian, whose 2017 documentary "The Problem With Apu" is a funny and informative explication of how the character perpetuated ugly stereotypes about South Asians that harm people to this day. Though "The Simpsons" has on occasion portrayed Apu and his family with nuance and pathos, the character also encourages the infantilizing of Indian immigrants as simple-minded people who talk in a singsong voice. Even Apu's last name - Nahasapeemapetilon - is presented in a way that invites mockery.

Of course, Mr. Azaria doesn't control Apu's fate on the show. That responsibility falls to the writers of "The Simpsons" and the corporate bosses at Fox, the network that airs the show. Going by what the show's creator, Matt Groening, said dismissively about the criticism of Apu - "I think it's a time in our culture where people love to pretend they're offended," he told USA Today - and the show's churlish reaction to Mr. Kondabolu's documentary on an episode earlier this month, Apu will probably remain ensconced in the Kwik-E-Mart.

No doubt such an outcome would please the many fans of Apu, some Indian-Americans among them, and those who love to rail against "political correctness" - Apu is just a funny fictional character, and critics are being overly sensitive, these people often argue.

But for many of us, it is not so easy to dismiss Apu and his accent as a mere joke. It is too often clear that the joke is on us - and even more so on our older relatives. Apu was the only major South Asian character on prime-time TV for many years, helping to define how millions of Americans think Indians, Pakistanis and other people from the subcontinent talk and live.

As with all caricatures, there is some truth to Apu. Many South Asian immigrants, especially those who came in earlier decades, do work behind the counters of 7-Elevens and other such stores, often because it is the only work they can get. Many of them are parsimonious because they are sending money home or saving up to send their kids to college. They don't always understand American slang and norms, and so can come across as bumbling. They cling to customs and religions that they brought with them from the old country because those are their connection to home.

But many aspects of the character reveal Apu to be the brown equivalent of blackface minstrel performances. He comes across as a caricature designed to mock a minority for the entertainment of the majority. "Often, racism is dismissed under the guise of humor," says Shilpa Davé, a professor at the University of Virginia and author of "Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film." "There is always an undercurrent of truth to it and there is also an undercurrent of censure and satire."

Brownface - or brown-voice, in the case of Mr. Azaria and Apu - does not have as long a history as blackface, but there are plenty of examples of it. Mr. Azaria has said he was inspired by a performance Peter Sellers gave in a 1968 comedic movie, "The Party." His face darkened with makeup, Mr. Sellers plays an Indian actor who is invited to a Hollywood bash, which he proceeds to wreck. Earlier, Mr. Sellers had a cameo as a clueless Indian doctor in the 1962 movie "The Road to Hong Kong." In the 1988 movie "Short Circuit 2," Fisher Stevens, who is white, plays an Indian scientist with brown makeup and a fake accent. More recently, in 2012, Ashton Kutcher put on brownface for an ad for PopChips. Even blackface has not disappeared - it crops up especially around Halloween.

Clearly, a lot has changed since Apu entered American living rooms. Mindy Kaling, Hasan Minhaj, Aziz Ansari and Kumail Nanjiani, to name a few rising actors, are regular fixtures on screens big and small. Priyanka Chopra, a Bollywood star, plays the leading character in the ABC drama "Quantico." South Asians, of course, still face obstacles - there are not a lot of them in positions of power behind the camera, Ms. Davé says - but they are in a much better position to offer viewers a necessary corrective to the cramped representation put forward by the creators of Apu.

But keeping Apu on "The Simpsons" in his current form would be a huge missed opportunity for the show, which on the whole has been one of the most thoughtful voices in American popular culture by addressing issues like immigration, discrimination and the power of big corporations that most network TV shows have studiously avoided. Mr. Groening has said he named Apu after Satyajit Ray's humanist masterpiece, "The Apu Trilogy," suggesting that he of all people ought to understand why many people find this character so troubling.

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Opinion | A Reckoning for Apu, 'The Simpsons' and Brownface

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"Thank you, come again" - those four words, spoken in an exaggerated Indian accent, have followed immigrants and Americans of South Asian descent like a bad penny since "The Simpsons" premiered in 1989. They helped make Apu, the show's tightfisted convenience store owner, a household name.

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A Reckoning for Apu, ‘The Simpsons’ and Brownface  

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College Admissions: Let’s Cut the Stress!  

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Last night I collapsed in a heap on my daughter's bed and screamed, "I hate this whole college process!" My daughter, a high school senior, looked at me and said, "But Mom, this is not your college process." Oh, but it is my college process.

Although colleges pretend they are dealing with a 17-year-old who is capable of making this decision on his or her own, that is simply not the case. My meltdown was preceded by my trying to print out our financial aid awards, which are sent only to the student.

The meltdown hit when I realized that one of the schools only admitted her for the spring semester (January), and for the fall semester she is admitted to its travel program, which costs $34,799! For one semester.

So what could make the process easier? How about mailing financial aid offers to the parents, who after all are the ones who will be paying for the school? Let us see them first so we can decide what the choices really are.

RACHEL DAYANIM
BROOKLINE, MASS.
To the Editor:
The college admissions process was an emotional roller coaster. Going through the process of compiling my accomplishments opened up insecurities. My peers and I have deemed sites like College Confidential extremely toxic. Seeing that people with higher qualifications did not get into certain schools stirred up doubts such as, "What chance do I have, if they couldn't even get in?"

I'm surrounded by people who are top tier in academics, outstanding volunteers, skilled musicians and athletes, and leaders in extracurriculars at a highly competitive school. But many of us didn't get into the schools we dreamed of. While growing up, there was an emphasis on being well-rounded individuals, but it seems colleges are becoming more selective in recruiting people with strengths in a certain area.

Then there's the discussion of race. I'm an Asian-American, and we've become a huge overachieving force in education, yet many of us aren't able to get into schools we would otherwise qualify for based on merit.

ZOE IMANSJAH, ARCADIA, CALIF.
To the Editor:
As a parent who is one year out from my son's college admissions process, I offer these insights. First, do not encourage the concept of a "first choice" school. My son applied to six schools, any of which he would have been happy to attend. When he got into three of the six, there was no angst about not getting into a "first choice," just an evaluation of what would be the best fit for his goals.

Second, ditch the obsession with name-brand East Coast schools. I'm an Ivy grad living on the West Coast with a high-level academic position. I work with successful people who have attended an incredible gamut of universities. They are where they are because of passion and persistence, not where they went to school.

Finally, even if your kid is going to her or his dream school, there will be bumps. High school to college is a huge transition. Getting into the best or right school does not change the reality of finding yourself living with a group of strangers with less structure than ever before in your life.

APRIL STEMPIEN-OTERO
SEATTLE
To the Editor:
Of all the stressful aspects of the college application process, the one causing the most anxiety for me as a parent was exposure to college consultants. I participated in free introductory seminars that left me with a niggling fear that I would be doing my son a disservice if I didn't hire an expert to review his essay, devise a strategy and manage all aspects of his application.

Luckily, my son had the good sense not to succumb to the hype. He was determined to do it himself, with support from Khan Academy test prep, his school counselor, and friends and family who expressed faith in his ability. Now that he has been accepted to all of his top-choice schools, he can enjoy a sense of accomplishment and attend his dream school, an accomplishment that is all his own.

BETH BRODSKY, BRONX
To the Editor:
Alas, I am unable to say what works and what does not in the college admissions process because my fate is to wait. I applied to one school early decision (Stanford). I got deferred, so I had to wait for the final (negative) decision. Additionally, I was wait-listed from my next top three schools (U.C. Berkeley, Dartmouth, Cornell). The wait list (or a deferment) is rather like purgatory. You're qualified enough to not be rejected, but not good enough to be accepted. So you wait, even though you've already been waiting for three-plus months.

And while you do so, you wonder what you could have done better to be admitted. Would higher grades or scores have helped? Should I have pushed my athletics and extracurriculars more? Was my essay too flat? I will never know. Nor can we do anything now, except send our spring grades and write an update letter to the admissions committee. So we wait.

CONNIE BERDAN
GLASTONBURY, CONN.
To the Editor:
It is ugly out there. Despite our best efforts to start the message of "where you go is not who you'll be" very early (ninth grade), a motivated, high-achieving student will body-block you if you suggest restraint.

My daughter heard about a Postal Service subscription that allows you to view a photo online of each piece of mail that is going to be delivered to your house on that day. I am not making this up. She knew exactly how much the piece of mail from her top-choice school would weigh if a rejection and how much if an acceptance (thanks, College Confidential).

The morning she saw that she was going to receive a letter with the lower postage (not an acceptance) was miserable. She had already been accepted (by email thankyouverymuch) to three schools she is delighted about, but this was her dream school. So she arrives home to go to the mailbox and view the actual piece of mail only to find she was wait-listed! So now we wait some more.

KIM KUNASEK
PARADISE VALLEY, ARIZ.
To the Editor:
As a parent of four college graduates, and as a high school educator for over three decades (17 years as head of school), I have a simple suggestion: Get rid of "early decision" and use only "early action." The former requires a student to commit to attend in advance of admittance; the latter does not. For a senior in the fall, such a forced commitment is like a proposal of marriage; yet six months later, the senior might have fallen in love with another school. The only benefit from early decision over early action redounds to the college or university, looking to boost its "yield" (percentage of "admits" who attend). There is no benefit to the student, who deserves more freedom of choice in this major decision.

JAMES S. BERKMAN, BOSTON
To the Editor:
While I have read countless New York Times articles on the college admissions process, they did not prepare me for the results: five wait lists and 14 rejections, in addition to acceptance at my safety school.

With college admissions being a world of expensive consultants, prep courses for SATs and competition with students attending private schools, as a low-income student in an Alabama public high school, in many ways I didn't have a shot at all. The Common Application itself was a foreign land to me and my classmates, although my 98th percentile test scores allowed me a place in the top handful of my class.

While I will be attending the University of Alabama in the fall, it still pains me to think of the life-changing possibilities had I been admitted to Northwestern or Georgetown.

I do not know how the admissions process could be remedied, but with legacy admissions and athletic preferences, this will only become an increasingly divisive issue.

ANNA SNYDER
MERIDIANVILLE, ALA.
To the Editor:
I wish I had realized sooner that where you go to college is not nearly as important as what you do when you get there. I think a lot of us seniors worried that we'd end up at a safety school without considering the benefits. If I could get a do-over, I would have looked at more schools where I could have been a big fish in a small pond and taken more leadership opportunities, instead of only focusing on a school's pedigree.

AMELIA REUBEN, WASHINGTON
The writer will be in the class of 2022 at American University. To the Editor:
America's college admissions process parallels one of the great problems of the country - too much unreliable information. Colleges, faced with low-value standardized tests, many more applicants than openings, and inflated grades, make up arbitrary criteria for discriminating among students. There simply is not enough data in a standard application - and the time allotted to reviewing it by an admissions officer - to make an honest, meritocratic decision.

Students, faced with a seemingly arbitrary admissions process whose criteria vary from year to year, attempt to do it all. Instead of excelling in one or two extracurriculars, or demonstrating significant competence in one field of knowledge, today's students attempt to cover all bases. The result is an often soulless pursuit of trophies and, ultimately, a declining value in being randomly admitted to highly selective schools.

Perhaps that is, ultimately, the best preparation for life.

ARI TRACHTENBERG
NEWTON CENTRE, MASS.
To the Editor:
As a sophomore at Columbia, I vividly remember the existential dread of college admissions. A formidable proportion of my classmates are legacy students and/or from families in the top 1 percent. As a first-generation student, I am constantly amazed by the opportunities here, and I wish admissions committees would end legacy and financial preferences to allow more working-class families like mine to experience a life-changing education.

For our society to progress, we need to democratize education, not further incentivize pay-to-play agendas.

SEAN KELSO, NEW YORK
To the Editor:
Having navigated this process as a parent and a professional application coach, I want to stress how critical it is to start early. Whether begun with excitement or dread, applying to college inevitably spins into overwhelming as deadlines near. After much touring and testing, September arrives and students find they've barely familiarized themselves with the ins and outs of the actual application.

I recommend using the summer to make friends with the Common Application, and to start drafting the personal essay and assembling the extracurricular information requested. By the time September arrives, families will feel a better sense of control because they've left nothing to the last minute.

So, for all those embarking on this journey, get a head start. It will mean a stronger application, anchored in a well-considered essay. It will also go a long way to preserving family harmony.

LIZ GESSNER, BROOKLYN

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Opinion | College Admissions: Let's Cut the Stress!

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Last night I collapsed in a heap on my daughter's bed and screamed, "I hate this whole college process!" My daughter, a high school senior, looked at me and said, "But Mom, this is not your college process." Oh, but it is my college process.

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Recent and archived work by Carl Richards for The New York Times

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Listen to this short podcast from Behavior Gap Radio, and then think about what being a creative person means to you. Do you see yourself as a creative type? Why or why not?

In " Want to Be Creative on Purpose? Schedule It," Carl Richards writes:

What if you don't have to be "creative" to create?

We all know the archetype of the creatives, right? Eccentric, weird, scattered, messy. The creatives are plagued perpetually by writer's block (or sculptor's block or painter's block or whatever block). They spend most of their time lazing about gloomily, smoking cigarettes and cursing this cruel world. But then, every once in a while, the creatives are so touched by the muse that they are forced to immediately drop everything, go into a trance and become a funnel for the beauty of the world.

Personally, I think that's a bit too precious. This notion to wait around in the rain until you get struck by lightning to make art (or anything) doesn't mesh with my experience at all. What comes much closer is the famous Chuck Close quotation: "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work."

The major implication of Mr. Close's quotation is that you don't have to be creative to create. So here's a secret ninja trick that will help: Don't wait around for creativity to strike. Strike creativity! Invent an obligation for yourself so you have to be creative on purpose.

I once heard a story about a guy who wanted to write a book. But he was too overwhelmed by the enormity of the process, so for a decade, he didn't do it. One day, he decided to create a 5,000-word monthly magazine and offer a two-year subscription to everyone he knew. A bunch of people signed up, and all of a sudden, he had to do it. At the end of two years, he had 120,000 words to work with to create this book.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us:

- Instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, have you ever simply sat down and begun working, even if you didn't think the work was as creative as it should be? If so, when, and how did it work out? What tips did you use to sustain yourself while working? And if not, why not?

- Do you think creativity can be scheduled? Would it work for you to set aside a certain amount of time devoted to creative output daily, or weekly, in order to produce enough to reach your aim, or goal? Would that discipline break through any procrastination or blocked creativity that you need to complete your project? Why or why not?

- Can creativity work be manufactured with dedication and persistence? Or, can creativity be scheduled? Why or why not, and how?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

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Listen to this short podcast from Behavior Gap Radio, and then think about what being a creative person means to you. Do you see yourself as a creative type? Why or why not? In " Want to Be Creative on Purpose? Schedule It," Carl Richards writes: What if you don't have to be "creative" to create?

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As predicted, when the subjects were in the tidy room they chose the health boost more often - almost twice as often - when it had the "classic" label: that is, when it was associated with convention. Also as predicted, when the subjects were in the messy room, they chose the health boost more often - more than twice as often - when it was said to be "new": that is, when it was associated with novelty. Thus, people greatly preferred convention in the tidy room and novelty in the messy room.

Given that divergence from the status quo is the essence of ingenuity, we conducted a second experiment to test whether messiness fostered creativity.

Forty-eight research subjects came individually to our laboratory, again assigned to messy or tidy rooms. This time, we told subjects to imagine that a Ping-Pong ball factory needed to think of new uses for Ping-Pong balls, and to write down as many ideas as they could. We had independent judges rate the subjects' answers for degree of creativity, which can be done reliably. Answers rated low in creativity included using Ping-Pong balls for beer pong (a party game that in fact uses Ping-Pong balls, hence the low rating on innovation). Answers rated high in creativity included using Ping-Pong balls as ice cube trays, and attaching them to chair legs to protect floors.

When we analyzed the responses, we found that the subjects in both types of rooms came up with about the same number of ideas, which meant they put about the same effort into the task. Nonetheless, the messy room subjects were more creative, as we expected. Not only were their ideas 28 percent more creative on average, but when we analyzed the ideas that judges scored as "highly creative," we found a remarkable boost from being in the messy room - these subjects came up with almost five times the number of highly creative responses as did their tidy-room counterparts.

(These results have been confirmed by independent researchers at Northwestern University, who found that subjects in a messy room drew more creative pictures and were quicker to solve a challenging brainteaser puzzle than subjects in a tidy room.)

Our findings have practical implications. There is, for instance, a minimalist design trend taking hold in contemporary office spaces: out of favor are private walled-in offices - and even private cubicles. Today's office environments often involve desk sharing and have minimal "footprints" (smaller office space per worker), which means less room to make a mess.

At the same time, the working world is abuzz about cultivating innovation and creativity, endeavors that our findings suggest might be hampered by the minimalist movement. While cleaning up certainly has its benefits, clean spaces might be too conventional to let inspiration flow.

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Opinion | It's Not 'Mess.' It's Creativity.

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As predicted, when the subjects were in the tidy room they chose the health boost more often - almost twice as often - when it had the "classic" label: that is, when it was associated with convention.

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Still, I rose at 5:54 Monday morning in my cousin's apartment in the South End to the sound of birds chirping. My hopes rose, too.

Then I walked to Boston Common to take the bus to the start in Hopkinton in slanted rain. My shoes were soaked and my toes nearly numb as I took a seat on the bus. I was bundled up like a third grader ready for a walk to school. In Minnesota. In January. In the next seat was a woman from Utah wearing a racing singlet and running sleeves she planned to discard. It rained here three years ago, she reminded me.

I knew that. I ran that year, too, but the rain didn't start in 2015 until much of the field, including me, was nearly half-done. And it felt about 15 degrees warmer than the 37 degrees it was as we journeyed to Hopkinton. Yet there was little question this steely woman from the West was way less terrified of the next few hours than I was.

Any hopes of pre-race comfort in the tents behind the school disappeared when we arrived at the start village behind Hopkinton High School, which had turned into a mud bowl. Smart runners brought a second pair of shoes to change into on the start line. I brought extra socks, but putting a dry sock into a mud-soaked sneaker doesn't work so well.

For the first five miles my feet felt as if they were in ski boots. I couldn't feel my toes as the rain shifted between steady downpour and Noah's Ark-style soaking. I desperately wanted to finish, but I didn't want to lose extremities in the process. I started jogging my memory to recall the hospitals along the route. There are several, thankfully.

And then, after about an hour, it all became sort of normal for a bit. You settle into a rhythm. Splish, splosh. Splish, splosh. There were moments when the rain slowed, though it never stopped, and the wind quieted, and you thought, O.K., no big deal. Then, just as quickly, Mother Nature unleashed a storm cell after storm cell for a few minutes just to keep us on our toes. Our wet, miserable toes.

So why not quit? Because long-distance runners live for the story. We love you thinking we are just crazy enough to run 26.2 miles in driving rain and freezing temperatures. It's rebellious, almost countercultural, or at least it was in the pre-running boom days, and that spirit still lies at the center of what is now a truly mainstream endeavor.

Also, while plenty of Bostonians were smart enough to stay inside - this is supposedly the area with the largest concentration of graduate degrees, after all - tens of thousands of others came out to cheer us on, and did they ever bring it.

Bruce Springsteen's "No Surrender" was blasting on the speakers as I passed through Natick. You could hear the Wellesley women screaming in Mile 13 a good quarter-mile before we got to them. An old college friend appeared to cheer me on Heartbreak Hill. Hadn't seen her in 25 years. Thank you!

And then, eventually, the six most beautiful words in distance running happened. "Right on Hereford, left on Boylston." That's your last half-mile in this magical race, and I was streaking toward the finish line in Copley Square, airplaning my arms and weaving across the road in delirium. Sure, there was some hypothermia, after it was done. Another deluge, more gusty winds. Bring it on.

Best. Boston. Ever. At least in the telling.

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What It Was Like to Run the Boston Marathon in a Freezing Deluge

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Still, I rose at 5:54 Monday morning in my cousin's apartment in the South End to the sound of birds chirping. My hopes rose, too. Then I walked to Boston Common to take the bus to the start in Hopkinton in slanted rain.

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What It Was Like to Run the Boston Marathon in a Freezing Deluge  

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Last August, as college started up again, I hadn't quite finished my beach read, William Finnegan's "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life," so I brought it to my freshman writing class. I tried reading a few passages aloud to break the ice. I thought my students might relate to one in which the writer first wonders about turning his surfing experiences into something worth reading:

"Our queer devotions, frustrations, little triumphs, and large peculiarities, plus a few waterfront characters, plus photos, could probably keep a blog burbling along."

"What do you make of that?" I asked. "Large peculiarities - what do you suppose he means?"

Crickets.

Sand I'd smuggled back from California slid from between the pages to my desk.

Maybe they were wondering what a blog was.

We expect college freshmen to feel at least as comfortable with self-expression as the burbling bloggers and writers of yesteryear. Something beyond stylized selfies must populate their social media streams, after all.

But every year I find that getting them to admit to feeling devoted or frustrated, to being peculiar in any way (much less in a large way), verges on impossible. And as someone who has read thousands of student essays over the past 10 years, few things are more dispiriting - and as the pages mount, soul-crushing - than those written by 18-year-olds who can't see themselves as peculiar.

But why can't they?

One reason reveals itself when someone finally asks the clarifying question: "Do you mean we can write with the word 'I'?"

The class looks up in wonder. This happens every semester.

Somewhere along the way, these young people were told by teachers that who they are in their writing ought to be divorced from who they are on their phones, or as the writer Grace Paley may have said, with their families and on their streets. They know a private "I" who experiences devotion and frustration. I see them text in class and talk and laugh and sometimes cry in the halls. They wear band T-shirts, often from my era, so I assume they have taste. I watch them read.

But no matter who they are in private, when I first encounter their writing, they use only the public passive voice: The text was read. The test was taken.

It's never: I read the text. I took the test. And it is never ever: I loved the text with queer devotion!

It's true that a student's writing style isn't everything and that much of what we call good writing cannot be taught. (Bad writing apparently has been.) One can be devoted to something - a band from the '90s, surfing, YHWH- without being able to put that devotion into words.

But my experience with students has me worried that years of "texts being read" and "tests being taken" have created the sense in them that whatever they're devoted to doesn't matter much to the rest of us - so long as they know the answers to our questions, so long as they pass the test. Writing so passively and with what they've been taught is appropriate and "objective" distance from topics they often seem disinterested in, these young people signal to me that they're still waiting for something important or real to happen to them.

Perhaps they feel that only someone who has lived through something momentous - like the teenagers who survived the Parkland, Fla., shooting - has earned the right to be heard. It's hard to imagine any of those young activists writing, "The rally was held because Congress was lobbied and guns were purchased."

But what about those queer devotions and frustrations, experiences and ideas that have stirred an individual heart into peculiarity?

A decade teaching young writers has taught me a great deal. First, we need to value more the complete and complex lives of young people: where they come from, how they express themselves. They have already lived lives worthy of our attention and appreciation.

Second, we need to encourage young people to take seriously those lives they've lived, even as they come to understand - often through schooling and just as often not - that there's a whole lot more we'll expect of them. Through this, we can help them learn to expect more of themselves, too.

Some lines from the great writer John McPhee have helped me consolidate these lessons over the years. Reflecting in The New Yorker in 2011, he wrote: "I once made a list of all the pieces I had written in maybe 20 or 30 years, and then put a check mark beside each one whose subject related to things I had been interested in before I went to college. I checked off more than 90 percent."

I always tell my students that I find these lines heartening. As a writer, I've spent more than 20 years reckoning with the joys and tragedies, the shame and grief, commitments to sports and study, of my own pre-college years. A good deal of my writing continues to take me to northern Florida where, when I was young, my father was killed by a drunken driver; the stories I continue to uncover there - about justice and race and addiction - begin with me at 5 and continue through my adolescence into this adult life.

Mr. McPhee, and Mr. Finnegan, too - who at 13, he writes, found in the obliterative sea that "the frontiers of the thinkable were quietly, fitfully edging back" - tell me that there's no good reason for me ever to stop going to Florida and attending to what happened there.

At the start of this semester, I read some passages from Barry Lopez's wintry classic "Arctic Dreams." The descriptions are incomparable, even as the setting itself remains ineffable: "The physical landscape is baffling in its ability to transcend whatever we would make of it. It is as subtle in its expression as turns of the mind, and larger than our grasp; and yet it is still knowable."

This has been the lesson for my students this term. Look around at what baffles you; look in at your peculiar self and how your own frontiers continue to edge back. Don't worry, you'll never fully grasp how the world transcends you and your ability to describe it. I surely don't, and I'm 41! But don't forget: You've been trying to understand and triumph in the world for as long as you can remember, even as a kid. Now go and write.

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Opinion | The Soul-Crushing Student Essay

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Last August, as college started up again, I hadn't quite finished my beach read, William Finnegan's "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life," so I brought it to my freshman writing class. I tried reading a few passages aloud to break the ice.

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You deserve to be punished with several fists to your face! You're nothing but a troublemaker! I've had enough of your Racist talk! You'd better watch what you say and to whom you say it! You may just end up in the hospital with several injuries or maybe on a cold slab in the local morgue! You've got a big mouth that needs to be slammed shut permanently!
Local morgue? Slammed shut permanently? These threatening words are taken from a letter sent to me by an anonymous white person. It was handwritten in black ink, covering both sides of a yellow sheet of paper torn from a legal pad. It is one of hundreds of letters, emails, postcards and voice messages I received - to say nothing of menacing discussions of me on white supremacist websites - after I wrote and published the essay " Dear White America " in December 2015 here at The Stone. What I had offered as a letter of love had unleashed the very opposite - a wave of white hatred and dehumanization.

Some white respondents wrote about desires of kicking me and leaving me "half dead" or "knocking my head off my shoulders." Others made an assessment of my academic bona fides: "This coon is a philosopher in the same way Martin King was a PhD and the same way that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are 'Reverends': Just another new way to pimp."

After receiving the letter that spoke of a cold slab and shutting my mouth permanently, I decided to share it with my students in my graduate philosophy seminar. I needed a witness - perhaps I needed my students to help carry some of what I was feeling. So, I read it aloud.

I had not anticipated my emotional response. As I read the letter, I began to feel a different kind of threat. The kind of threat that has implications for those whom I love. You see, a threat to my life will inevitably impact the lives of my loved ones. And that is a threat that impacts me, my body, my spirit, with a different kind of existential and emotional gravitas.

When I finished reading the letter, I looked at my students as I thought about the reverberations of such a threat. My eyes watered, my body became stilted, I felt a rush of unspeakable anger run through my blood. I said to my students: "This involves my loved ones. I can't take this hatred anymore! I need a few minutes outside of class." The room fell silent.

Looking back, I wish that I had said: "To hell with it all! It is not worth it. Too many white people will never value my humanity. So many whites in America will never be honest about their hatred of black people. So, let's close this class session on that. Let's just say, 'To hell with it all!'"

Well, that didn't happen. I came back into the room, where everyone was still silent. My students' faces, for the most part, were turned down. I know what they had felt, black students, students of color and white alike. They bore witness to my vulnerability, my suffering, the sting of unmitigated hatred. And they saw the impact in an otherwise safe academic space.

A few moments passed. I apologized to them and resumed teaching. But the space between us in the classroom was not the same; we had witnessed something together. That space will never be the same.

I wanted to model for my students what it is like to be a contemporary philosopher who remains steadfast in the face of hatred. I wanted them to internalize something of what it means to practice philosophy, to love wisdom, in the face of danger, threats of violence and intolerance. Yet, there was a part of me that failed that day.

My composure had collapsed. I seemed to have lost my bearing, my confidence was shaken. I was pushed to rethink what I assumed was a mission of love, the kind of love that refuses to hide and requires profound forms of vulnerability. I had wanted to help heal our broken world, to exalt love in an otherwise ethically catastrophic America. Now I could hear the voices of some of my students of color, "Dr. Yancy, why do you continue to write about whiteness and to address white people?" There is affection and alarm in that question, concern for my safety. And it is a reasonable question.

Given such nasty, unconscionable, violent and perhaps liable discourse, why do I continue to speak to white America about its racism? After all, I am not a masochist, nor do I want to be a martyr.

It is true that being on the receiving end of such hate caused me to grow weary, fatigued and profoundly pained. Mixed with all of that was the outrage I felt when "white innocence" was uncovered as white privilege and white complicity with systems of white racism. I had become, as the civil rights heroine Fannie Lou Hamer once said, "sick and tired of being sick and tired." And in so many ways, and for good reason, I still am.

So, here I am facing a dilemma. Do I give up on white people, on white America, or do I continue to fight for a better white America, despite the fact that my efforts continue to lead to forms of unspeakable white racist backlash?

I am convinced that America suffers from a pervasively malignant and malicious systemic illness - white racism. There is also an appalling lack of courage, weakness of will, spinelessness and indifference in our country that helps to sustain it. That indifference is itself a cruel reality, a reality that often makes me want to scream at the top of my lungs until I fall flat on my face from exhaustion. That indifference makes me sick to my stomach.

When it comes to white racist hatred, America never seems to have short supply. Perhaps you believe that I exaggerate. But I know better. You see, many whites in America have no need of me. They refuse what James Baldwin called a disagreeable mirror, one that shows them what they would rather not see.

White people have told me where to go: "Yancy, flights leave for Africa every day. We can all admit bringing you to this country was a mistake, so let us get rid of you and correct the mistake. You are not happy, we are not happy with your behavior, so do it." Or "There are two ways you can return to Africa: On a passenger ship, or in a coffin freighter. Choose quickly." Notice the urgency of that warning, the implied threat to my life.

You see, for many white Americans, I am disposable. For others, I'm more beast than human. "This ignorant monkey has no audience but other ignorant monkeys." Or, "This monkey isn't talking to me." Or, "As I see it, the only people whose racism is a problem is colored monkeys. They don't want to live without White people. They CAN'T live without White people."

For other whites, I am both subhuman and vermin. The words don't lie: "Dear Black America, let go of your black victimhood and bring yourself to the point of admission that you hoodrats and pavement apes are the ones destroying black lives and communities. And in closing, don't blame Whitey!"

And then there are those unspeakable white projections. "In a sane world, this ugly Nigger would be just beheaded ISIS style. Make America WHITE Again." Or "This Nigger needs to have a meat hook lovingly, well, you know, time to use your own imagination!" Others are quick to recommend that I act in my own "best interest": "Kill Yourself. Do it Immediately."

Beheaded ISIS style? A meat hook? Kill myself? Reader, the sickness of these threats should trouble your very soul.

James Baldwin writes, "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." White America has long lost its innocence. Given its horrendous treatment of the indigenous peoples of this land, there was never any innocence. There were monsters, though. Land takers. Brutal dispossession. And then body snatchers and the selling and buying of black flesh. To be haunted while asleep has its advantages, because one will awake. But to be haunted while awake by a teratology of whiteness is far more frightening.

Yet just when I began to unmoor, a braver white America began to speak, to risk, to love. Perhaps for the first time, these white readers took off their masks, even if only for a moment, to hear me. Then again, perhaps they had already known about the difficulties involved in removing their masks, knowing how hard it is to avoid falling back on "white innocence." They entered that space of risk and honesty where they dared to tell the truth about their whiteness. "Thanks Professor Yancy for your thoughts," one woman wrote. "The system is racist. As a white woman, I am responsible to dismantle that system as well as the attitudes in me that growing up in the system created. I am responsible for speaking out when I hear racist comments."

And the disagreeable mirror produced painful disclosures. "Beautiful words, thoughtful words, and words that needed to be said. Thank you for holding up a mirror to my inner hate." A shared understanding of the complexity of white racism was staring back at me. "Thank you. I am a white liberal/ardent backer of civil rights, but as you say, also a racist. Godspeed, and thank you for helping to keep me honest." Or "I have been living this past year with the growing understanding that my white privilege is toxic." Or "I would like to offer you a gift in return: A commitment to fully accept the racism (and sexism) that is embedded in me, acknowledge the privilege that comes with having been born a white American, try my best to be educated about the suffering my racism and privilege causes others."

In response to these positive responses, however, some will still insist, "Their white history speaks louder than their words." But history, I say, is not fixed. And as human beings we are protean.

Unlike Odysseus, who tied himself to the mast of a ship so that he could not fully respond to the songs of the sirens, I ask that if you are prepared to be wounded, to be haunted by the joy of love, compassion and vulnerability, untie your ropes, leave the contrived masts of your own undoing, step out into the water - join me there. It might feel like Sisyphus rolling that enormous boulder up the hill again, but let my history embolden you. As James Baldwin said, Black history "testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible."

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Opinion | Should I Give Up on White People?

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You deserve to be punished with several fists to your face! You're nothing but a troublemaker! I've had enough of your Racist talk! You'd better watch what you say and to whom you say it! You may just end up in the hospital with several injuries or maybe on a cold slab in the local morgue!

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In 2015, I conducted a series of 19 interviews with philosophers and public intellectuals on the issue of race. My aim was to engage, in this very public space, with the often unnamed elephant in the room. These discussions helped me, and I hope many of our readers, to better understand how race continues to function in painful ways within our country. That was one part of a gift that I wanted to give to readers of The Stone, the larger philosophical community, and the world. The interviewees themselves - bell hooks, Cornel West, Judith Butler, Peter Singer, David H. Kim, Molefi Kete Asante among them - came from a variety of racial backgrounds, and their concerns and positions were even more diverse. But on the whole I came to see these interviews as linked by a common thread: They were messages to white America - because they often directly expressed the experience of those who live and have lived as people of color in a white-run world, and that is something no white person could ever truly know firsthand. That is how I want to deliver my own message now.
*

Dear White America,

I have a weighty request. As you read this letter, I want you to listen with love, a sort of love that demands that you look at parts of yourself that might cause pain and terror, as James Baldwin would say. Did you hear that? You may have missed it. I repeat: I want you to listen with love. Well, at least try.

We don't talk much about the urgency of love these days, especially within the public sphere. Much of our discourse these days is about revenge, name calling, hate, and divisiveness. I have yet to hear it from our presidential hopefuls, or our political pundits. I don't mean the Hollywood type of love, but the scary kind, the kind that risks not being reciprocated, the kind that refuses to flee in the face of danger. To make it a bit easier for you, I've decided to model, as best as I can, what I'm asking of you. Let me demonstrate the vulnerability that I wish you to show. As a child of Socrates, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, let me speak the truth, refuse to err on the side of caution.

This letter is a gift for you. Bear in mind, though, that some gifts can be heavy to bear. You don't have to accept it; there is no obligation. I give it freely, believing that many of you will throw the gift back in my face, saying that I wrongly accuse you, that I am too sensitive, that I'm a race hustler, and that I blame white people (you) for everything.

I have read many of your comments. I have even received some hate mail. In this letter, I ask you to look deep, to look into your souls with silence, to quiet that voice that will speak to you of your white "innocence." So, as you read this letter, take a deep breath. Make a space for my voice in the deepest part of your psyche. Try to listen, to practice being silent. There are times when you must quiet your own voice to hear from or about those who suffer in ways that you do not.

What if I told you that I'm sexist? Well, I am. Yes. I said it and I mean just that. I have watched my male students squirm in their seats when I've asked them to identify and talk about their sexism. There are few men, I suspect, who would say that they are sexists, and even fewer would admit that their sexism actually oppresses women. Certainly not publicly, as I've just done. No taking it back now.

To make things worse, I'm an academic, a philosopher. I'm supposed to be one of the "enlightened" ones. Surely, we are beyond being sexists. Some, who may genuinely care about my career, will say that I'm being too risky, that I am jeopardizing my academic livelihood. Some might even say that as a black male, who has already been stereotyped as a "crotch-grabbing, sexual fiend," that I'm at risk of reinforcing that stereotype. (Let's be real, that racist stereotype has been around for centuries; it is already part of white America's imaginary landscape.)

Yet, I refuse to remain a prisoner of the lies that we men like to tell ourselves - that we are beyond the messiness of sexism and male patriarchy, that we don't oppress women. Let me clarify. This doesn't mean that I intentionally hate women or that I desire to oppress them. It means that despite my best intentions, I perpetuate sexism every day of my life. Please don't take this as a confession for which I'm seeking forgiveness. Confessions can be easy, especially when we know that forgiveness is immediately forthcoming.

Being a 'good' white person or a liberal white person won't get you off the hook.

As a sexist, I have failed women. I have failed to speak out when I should have. I have failed to engage critically and extensively their pain and suffering in my writing. I have failed to transcend the rigidity of gender roles in my own life. I have failed to challenge those poisonous assumptions that women are "inferior" to men or to speak out loudly in the company of male philosophers who believe that feminist philosophy is just a nonphilosophical fad. I have been complicit with, and have allowed myself to be seduced by, a country that makes billions of dollars from sexually objectifying women, from pornography, commercials, video games, to Hollywood movies. I am not innocent.

I have been fed a poisonous diet of images that fragment women into mere body parts. I have also been complicit with a dominant male narrative that says that women enjoy being treated like sexual toys. In our collective male imagination, women are "things" to be used for our visual and physical titillation. And even as I know how poisonous and false these sexist assumptions are, I am often ambushed by my own hidden sexism. I continue to see women through the male gaze that belies my best intentions not to sexually objectify them. Our collective male erotic feelings and fantasies are complicit in the degradation of women. And we must be mindful that not all women endure sexual degradation in the same way.

Don't tell me that you voted for Obama. Don't tell me that you don't see color. Don't tell me that I'm blaming whites for everything. To do so is to hide yet again.

I recognize how my being a sexist has a differential impact on black women and women of color who are not only victims of racism, but also sexism, my sexism. For example, black women and women of color not only suffer from sexual objectification, but the ways in which they are objectified is linked to how they are racially depicted, some as "exotic" and others as "hyper-sexual." You see, the complicity, the responsibility, the pain that I cause runs deep. And, get this. I refuse to seek shelter; I refuse to live a lie. So, every day of my life I fight against the dominant male narrative, choosing to see women as subjects, not objects. But even as I fight, there are moments of failure. Just because I fight against sexism does not give me clean hands, as it were, at the end of the day; I continue to falter, and I continue to oppress. And even though the ways in which I oppress women is unintentional, this does not free me of being responsible.

If you are white, and you are reading this letter, I ask that you don't run to seek shelter from your own racism. Don't hide from your responsibility. Rather, begin, right now, to practice being vulnerable. Being neither a "good" white person nor a liberal white person will get you off the proverbial hook. I consider myself to be a decent human being. Yet, I'm sexist. Take another deep breath. I ask that you try to be "un-sutured." If that term brings to mind a state of pain, open flesh, it is meant to do so. After all, it is painful to let go of your "white innocence," to use this letter as a mirror, one that refuses to show you what you want to see, one that demands that you look at the lies that you tell yourself so that you don't feel the weight of responsibility for those who live under the yoke of whiteness, your whiteness.

I can see your anger. I can see that this letter is being misunderstood. This letter is not asking you to feel bad about yourself, to wallow in guilt. That is too easy. I'm asking for you to tarry, to linger, with the ways in which you perpetuate a racist society, the ways in which you are racist. I'm now daring you to face a racist history which, paraphrasing Baldwin, has placed you where you are and that has formed your own racism. Again, in the spirit of Baldwin, I am asking you to enter into battle with your white self. I'm asking that you open yourself up; to speak to, to admit to, the racist poison that is inside of you.

Again, take a deep breath. Don't tell me about how many black friends you have. Don't tell me that you are married to someone of color. Don't tell me that you voted for Obama. Don't tell me that I'm the racist. Don't tell me that you don't see color. Don't tell me that I'm blaming whites for everything. To do so is to hide yet again. You may have never used the N-word in your life, you may hate the K.K.K., but that does not mean that you don't harbor racism and benefit from racism. After all, you are part of a system that allows you to walk into stores where you are not followed, where you get to go for a bank loan and your skin does not count against you, where you don't need to engage in "the talk" that black people and people of color must tell their children when they are confronted by white police officers.

As you reap comfort from being white, we suffer for being black and people of color. But your comfort is linked to our pain and suffering. Just as my comfort in being male is linked to the suffering of women, which makes me sexist, so, too, you are racist. That is the gift that I want you to accept, to embrace. It is a form of knowledge that is taboo. Imagine the impact that the acceptance of this gift might have on you and the world.

Take another deep breath. I know that there are those who will write to me in the comment section with boiling anger, sarcasm, disbelief, denial. There are those who will say, "Yancy is just an angry black man." There are others who will say, "Why isn't Yancy telling black people to be honest about the violence in their own black neighborhoods?" Or, "How can Yancy say that all white people are racists?" If you are saying these things, then you've already failed to listen. I come with a gift. You're already rejecting the gift that I have to offer. This letter is about you. Don't change the conversation. I assure you that so many black people suffering from poverty and joblessness, which is linked to high levels of crime, are painfully aware of the existential toll that they have had to face because they are black and, as Baldwin adds, " for no other reason."

Some of your white brothers and sisters have made this leap. The legal scholar Stephanie M. Wildman, has written, "I simply believe that no matter how hard I work at not being racist, I still am. Because part of racism is systemic, I benefit from the privilege that I am struggling to see." And the journalism professor Robert Jensen: "I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the institutional racism around me. Every time I walk into a store at the same time as a black man and the security guard follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am benefiting from white privilege."

What I'm asking is that you first accept the racism within yourself, accept all of the truth about what it means for you to be white in a society that was created for you. I'm asking for you to trace the binds that tie you to forms of domination that you would rather not see. When you walk into the world, you can walk with assurance; you have already signed a contract, so to speak, that guarantees you a certain form of social safety.

Baldwin argues for a form of love that is "a state of being, or state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth." Most of my days, I'm engaged in a personal and societal battle against sexism. So many times, I fail. And so many times, I'm complicit. But I refuse to hide behind that mirror that lies to me about my "non-sexist nobility." Baldwin says, "Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within." In my heart, I'm done with the mask of sexism, though I'm tempted every day to wear it. And, there are times when it still gets the better of me.

White America, are you prepared to be at war with yourself, your white identity, your white power, your white privilege? Are you prepared to show me a white self that love has unmasked? I'm asking for love in return for a gift; in fact, I'm hoping that this gift might help you to see yourself in ways that you have not seen before. Of course, the history of white supremacy in America belies this gesture of black gift-giving, this gesture of non-sentimental love. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered even as he loved.

Perhaps the language of this letter will encourage a split - not a split between black and white, but a fissure in your understanding, a space for loving a Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Jones, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald and others. I'm suggesting a form of love that enables you to see the role that you play (even despite your anti-racist actions) in a system that continues to value black lives on the cheap.

Take one more deep breath. I have another gift.

If you have young children, before you fall off to sleep tonight, I want you to hold your child. Touch your child's face. Smell your child's hair. Count the fingers on your child's hand. See the miracle that is your child. And then, with as much vision as you can muster, I want you to imagine that your child is black.

In peace,

George Yancy
George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University. He has written, edited and co-edited numerous books, including "Black Bodies, White Gazes," "Look, a White!" and "Pursuing Trayvon Martin," co-edited with Janine Jones.

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In 2015, I conducted a series of 19 interviews with philosophers and public intellectuals on the issue of race. My aim was to engage, in this very public space, with the often unnamed elephant in the room. These discussions helped me, and I hope many of our readers, to better understand how race continues to function in painful ways within our country.

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You deserve to be punished with several fists to your face! You're nothing but a troublemaker! I've had enough of your Racist talk! You'd better watch what you say and to whom you say it! You may just end up in the hospital with several injuries or maybe on a cold slab in the local morgue! You've got a big mouth that needs to be slammed shut permanently!
Local morgue? Slammed shut permanently? These threatening words are taken from a letter sent to me by an anonymous white person. It was handwritten in black ink, covering both sides of a yellow sheet of paper torn from a legal pad. It is one of hundreds of letters, emails, postcards and voice messages I received - to say nothing of menacing discussions of me on white supremacist websites - after I wrote and published the essay " Dear White America " in December 2015 here at The Stone. What I had offered as a letter of love had unleashed the very opposite - a wave of white hatred and dehumanization.

Some white respondents wrote about desires of kicking me and leaving me "half dead" or "knocking my head off my shoulders." Others made an assessment of my academic bona fides: "This coon is a philosopher in the same way Martin King was a PhD and the same way that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are 'Reverends': Just another new way to pimp."

After receiving the letter that spoke of a cold slab and shutting my mouth permanently, I decided to share it with my students in my graduate philosophy seminar. I needed a witness - perhaps I needed my students to help carry some of what I was feeling. So, I read it aloud.

I had not anticipated my emotional response. As I read the letter, I began to feel a different kind of threat. The kind of threat that has implications for those whom I love. You see, a threat to my life will inevitably impact the lives of my loved ones. And that is a threat that impacts me, my body, my spirit, with a different kind of existential and emotional gravitas.

When I finished reading the letter, I looked at my students as I thought about the reverberations of such a threat. My eyes watered, my body became stilted, I felt a rush of unspeakable anger run through my blood. I said to my students: "This involves my loved ones. I can't take this hatred anymore! I need a few minutes outside of class." The room fell silent.

Looking back, I wish that I had said: "To hell with it all! It is not worth it. Too many white people will never value my humanity. So many whites in America will never be honest about their hatred of black people. So, let's close this class session on that. Let's just say, 'To hell with it all!'"

Well, that didn't happen. I came back into the room, where everyone was still silent. My students' faces, for the most part, were turned down. I know what they had felt, black students, students of color and white alike. They bore witness to my vulnerability, my suffering, the sting of unmitigated hatred. And they saw the impact in an otherwise safe academic space.

A few moments passed. I apologized to them and resumed teaching. But the space between us in the classroom was not the same; we had witnessed something together. That space will never be the same.

I wanted to model for my students what it is like to be a contemporary philosopher who remains steadfast in the face of hatred. I wanted them to internalize something of what it means to practice philosophy, to love wisdom, in the face of danger, threats of violence and intolerance. Yet, there was a part of me that failed that day.

My composure had collapsed. I seemed to have lost my bearing, my confidence was shaken. I was pushed to rethink what I assumed was a mission of love, the kind of love that refuses to hide and requires profound forms of vulnerability. I had wanted to help heal our broken world, to exalt love in an otherwise ethically catastrophic America. Now I could hear the voices of some of my students of color, "Dr. Yancy, why do you continue to write about whiteness and to address white people?" There is affection and alarm in that question, concern for my safety. And it is a reasonable question.

Given such nasty, unconscionable, violent and perhaps liable discourse, why do I continue to speak to white America about its racism? After all, I am not a masochist, nor do I want to be a martyr.

It is true that being on the receiving end of such hate caused me to grow weary, fatigued and profoundly pained. Mixed with all of that was the outrage I felt when "white innocence" was uncovered as white privilege and white complicity with systems of white racism. I had become, as the civil rights heroine Fannie Lou Hamer once said, "sick and tired of being sick and tired." And in so many ways, and for good reason, I still am.

So, here I am facing a dilemma. Do I give up on white people, on white America, or do I continue to fight for a better white America, despite the fact that my efforts continue to lead to forms of unspeakable white racist backlash?

I am convinced that America suffers from a pervasively malignant and malicious systemic illness - white racism. There is also an appalling lack of courage, weakness of will, spinelessness and indifference in our country that helps to sustain it. That indifference is itself a cruel reality, a reality that often makes me want to scream at the top of my lungs until I fall flat on my face from exhaustion. That indifference makes me sick to my stomach.

When it comes to white racist hatred, America never seems to have short supply. Perhaps you believe that I exaggerate. But I know better. You see, many whites in America have no need of me. They refuse what James Baldwin called a disagreeable mirror, one that shows them what they would rather not see.

White people have told me where to go: "Yancy, flights leave for Africa every day. We can all admit bringing you to this country was a mistake, so let us get rid of you and correct the mistake. You are not happy, we are not happy with your behavior, so do it." Or "There are two ways you can return to Africa: On a passenger ship, or in a coffin freighter. Choose quickly." Notice the urgency of that warning, the implied threat to my life.

You see, for many white Americans, I am disposable. For others, I'm more beast than human. "This ignorant monkey has no audience but other ignorant monkeys." Or, "This monkey isn't talking to me." Or, "As I see it, the only people whose racism is a problem is colored monkeys. They don't want to live without White people. They CAN'T live without White people."

For other whites, I am both subhuman and vermin. The words don't lie: "Dear Black America, let go of your black victimhood and bring yourself to the point of admission that you hoodrats and pavement apes are the ones destroying black lives and communities. And in closing, don't blame Whitey!"

And then there are those unspeakable white projections. "In a sane world, this ugly Nigger would be just beheaded ISIS style. Make America WHITE Again." Or "This Nigger needs to have a meat hook lovingly, well, you know, time to use your own imagination!" Others are quick to recommend that I act in my own "best interest": "Kill Yourself. Do it Immediately."

Beheaded ISIS style? A meat hook? Kill myself? Reader, the sickness of these threats should trouble your very soul.

James Baldwin writes, "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." White America has long lost its innocence. Given its horrendous treatment of the indigenous peoples of this land, there was never any innocence. There were monsters, though. Land takers. Brutal dispossession. And then body snatchers and the selling and buying of black flesh. To be haunted while asleep has its advantages, because one will awake. But to be haunted while awake by a teratology of whiteness is far more frightening.

Yet just when I began to unmoor, a braver white America began to speak, to risk, to love. Perhaps for the first time, these white readers took off their masks, even if only for a moment, to hear me. Then again, perhaps they had already known about the difficulties involved in removing their masks, knowing how hard it is to avoid falling back on "white innocence." They entered that space of risk and honesty where they dared to tell the truth about their whiteness. "Thanks Professor Yancy for your thoughts," one woman wrote. "The system is racist. As a white woman, I am responsible to dismantle that system as well as the attitudes in me that growing up in the system created. I am responsible for speaking out when I hear racist comments."

And the disagreeable mirror produced painful disclosures. "Beautiful words, thoughtful words, and words that needed to be said. Thank you for holding up a mirror to my inner hate." A shared understanding of the complexity of white racism was staring back at me. "Thank you. I am a white liberal/ardent backer of civil rights, but as you say, also a racist. Godspeed, and thank you for helping to keep me honest." Or "I have been living this past year with the growing understanding that my white privilege is toxic." Or "I would like to offer you a gift in return: A commitment to fully accept the racism (and sexism) that is embedded in me, acknowledge the privilege that comes with having been born a white American, try my best to be educated about the suffering my racism and privilege causes others."

In response to these positive responses, however, some will still insist, "Their white history speaks louder than their words." But history, I say, is not fixed. And as human beings we are protean.

Unlike Odysseus, who tied himself to the mast of a ship so that he could not fully respond to the songs of the sirens, I ask that if you are prepared to be wounded, to be haunted by the joy of love, compassion and vulnerability, untie your ropes, leave the contrived masts of your own undoing, step out into the water - join me there. It might feel like Sisyphus rolling that enormous boulder up the hill again, but let my history embolden you. As James Baldwin said, Black history "testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible."

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Opinion | Should I Give Up on White People?

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You deserve to be punished with several fists to your face! You're nothing but a troublemaker! I've had enough of your Racist talk! You'd better watch what you say and to whom you say it! You may just end up in the hospital with several injuries or maybe on a cold slab in the local morgue!

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Holocaust Is Fading From Memory, Survey Finds  

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The survey, conducted by Schoen Consulting from Feb. 23-27, involved 1,350 American adults interviewed by phone or online, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. Millennials were 31 percent of the sample, and the results for that group have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.

The questions were developed by a committee that included officials from the Claims Conference, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, as well as a Holocaust survivor and a polling expert from George Washington University. (In a strange footnote, the head of Schoen Consulting, Doug Schoen, is in the news this week for arranging for President Trump to give a speech during a 2015 event in Ukraine.)

Worldwide, the estimated number of living Holocaust survivors has fallen to 400,000, according to the Claims Conference, many of them in their 80s and 90s. And Holocaust remembrance advocates and educators, who agree that no book, film or traditional exhibition can compare to the voice of a survivor, dread the day when none are left to tell their stories.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington collects comment cards from many visitors before they leave, and they underscore that "no educational experience that anyone has coming through here has as much of an impact as hearing from a survivor directly," said Kristine Donly, interim director of the Levine Institute for Holocaust Education at the museum, who sat on the board that developed the survey.

And so, across the country and around the world, museums and memorials are looking for ways to tell the witnesses' stories once the witnesses are gone.

At the site of the Monument to Six Million Jewish Martyrs, the Philadelphia Holocaust Remembrance Foundation has been developing an interactive memorial plaza, scheduled to open in October. Visitors will use a new app that will, among other things, feature survivors' recorded testimonies.

In one part of the plaza, train tracks that carried prisoners to the Treblinka death camp will be embedded in the pavement. When visitors step onto the tracks, the app, using geocaching technology, will pull up videos of Philadelphia residents "who were on those very trains that led to Treblinka," said Eszter Kutas, the remembrance foundation's acting director.

And at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, near Chicago, visitors can speak with one of seven holograms of survivors - a project also tested at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Drawing on recorded testimony, the holograms can answer questions in real time.

Visitors to the Illinois museum's Take a Stand Center first watch a five-minute film in which a survivor introduces him- or herself. In one, Fritzie Fritzshall describes being taken to a ghetto at gunpoint during Passover, and from there to Auschwitz.

"I have so much more to tell you," she says. "So please ask me questions."

Then the hologram appears, "so real that our audience typically gasps when they see it," said Susan L. Abrams, the museum's chief executive.

"It really was as effective as hearing from a live survivor, and that surprised us," Ms. Abrams said. "When you sit in this theater and the lights dim, everything else melts away. Our visitors truly believe that they are having this conversation with a survivor. I don't think even we realized just how powerful it would be."

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conference on jewish material claims against germany

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Holocaust Is Fading From Memory, Survey Finds

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The survey, conducted by Schoen Consulting from Feb. 23-27, involved 1,350 American adults interviewed by phone or online, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. Millennials were 31 percent of the sample, and the results for that group have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.

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Last week, thousands of teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky walked out of their classrooms. West Virginia teachers did the same thing in February, and Arizona may be next. They are protesting state governments that are failing to pay teachers a decent wage, replace outdated textbooks, ensure manageable class sizes and fix school buildings in need of repair.

But our schools have even bigger problems.

Every weekday during the academic year, more than 50 million children across the United States enter public school buildings. Many of these buildings are so dilapidated and poorly designed that children's health and safety are at risk.

Some are in floodplains or lack heat or air conditioning. Others lie near fault lines and haven't been built to withstand earthquakes.

Young Americans are coming of age in a world that is drier and hotter than ever before. Wildfires, severe storms, floods and other environmental extremes will become more frequent and intense. Natural hazards, when combined with crumbling infrastructure, can lead to disaster.

Consider tornadoes. About 1,200 occur annually in the United States. Oklahoma also happens to be one of the most tornado-prone states in the nation. In May 2013, 56 schools there were damaged or destroyed by tornadoes, including Plaza Towers Elementary School, where seven children were killed. That school did not have a tornado shelter or safe room. State Representative Rebecca Hamilton said that every child who died there "was our responsibility." She added: "A tornado didn't kill them. We did."

Fewer than half of public schools in Oklahoma have a tornado shelter, and in 2017 the Oklahoma Uniform Building Code Commission quietly removed the requirement that new schools have them.

Oklahoma teachers are lobbying lawmakers for $200 million in increased school funding over the next three years. But it would cost more than $1 billion just to protect the state's schoolchildren from tornadoes.

Flooding is the most common and costly natural hazard in the United States. According to a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts, 6,444 schools - which serve nearly four million students - are in places highly vulnerable to flooding. Before West Virginia teachers walked out of their classrooms to demand higher pay, many were flooded out following historic rainfall in June 2016. At least 35 schools sustained minor to severe damage.

Heat waves claim more lives than any other natural hazard, and in 11 of the country's largest school districts, in addition to countless smaller ones, many schools do not have air-conditioning.

In the Santa Maria-Bonita School District in California, teachers report that classroom temperatures sometimes reach 90 degrees. Thirty percent of the classrooms in the district lack air-conditioning, primarily because they are in old buildings that do not have the electrical capacity to support portable units. It would cost upward of $45 million to install central air in all classrooms. In 2015 the teachers' union asked the school board for that funding, but the request was denied. Some teachers have resorted to offering sweaty and distracted students small cooling towels purchased with donated funds.

At the other end of the temperature spectrum, cold snaps have left children shivering in schools with malfunctioning boilers and drafty windows that do little to protect them when temperatures dip below zero. Low-income and black and Hispanic students are more likely to attend such poorly maintained schools.

This winter, Marietta English, president of the Baltimore Teachers Union, wrote in a letter to the school system's chief executive, Sonja Santelises, that "trying to provide a stable learning environment in these extreme conditions is unfair and inhumane." Dr. Santelises acknowledged that "too many of our buildings have outdated heating systems, poor insulation and aging pipes as a result of years of inadequate funding for maintenance and facilities improvements."

When it comes to earthquakes, we have seen some progress in terms of seismic upgrades for schools in states such as California and Oregon. But many other places lag woefully behind.

In Utah, hundreds of old school buildings with unreinforced masonry lie along or near the Wasatch Fault and could suffer serious damage, including complete collapse, in an earthquake. And in Washington, one in three children attend schools built before seismic construction standards were adopted statewide. The most unsafe schools are largely in poorer districts.

This is another reminder that these issues are not just environmental. They are social justice issues, too.

If we legally require children to attend school, then we should be held accountable for keeping them safe there. We need to see a real investment in our nation's school infrastructure and emergency planning efforts.

The American Society of Civil Engineers, which assigned our deteriorating school facilities a D+, estimates that just maintaining and operating them will cost $58 billion annually, while upgrading them would cost $77 billion annually.

We also need to spend more on predisaster mitigation efforts like reinforcing old schools and building storm shelters. The National Institute of Building Sciences recently reported that the nation could save $6 for every $1 it invests in mitigation by limiting the damage when disasters occur. And last year the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued guidelines, which I helped develop, on school building safety and emergency preparedness that all school systems should follow.

Students recently walked out of school to draw attention to gun violence. Should they do the same to protest all the other ways their safety is being put at risk? What would happen if children walked out of schools that are in floodplains or near fault lines? Should those without access to storm shelters in Tornado Alley refuse to show up until lawmakers do something? Should students who are too hot or too cold to learn just put down their pencils?

Of course, this is not really an option. Children's educations are too important to interrupt, and many students who attend shoddy schools may never experience a catastrophe. But we need to spend whatever time and money it takes to ensure those buildings are safe. Well-meaning parents shouldn't have to hope, as they send their kids off to school, that their loved ones will graduate before the next big disaster strikes.

Lori Peek is the director of the Natural Hazards Center and a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a co-author of "Children of Katrina" and helped write "Safer, Stronger, Smarter: A Guide to Improving School Natural Hazard Safety."
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Last week, thousands of teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky walked out of their classrooms. West Virginia teachers did the same thing in February, and Arizona may be next. They are protesting state governments that are failing to pay teachers a decent wage, replace outdated textbooks, ensure manageable class sizes and fix school buildings in need of repair.

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By the time Giancarlo Cruz Michael Stanton was in junior high school, he had grown weary of classmates mocking him for his given name and of teachers and coaches mangling the pronunciation of it. His friend Enrique didn't care for his own name, either.

Together they made a pact. They would go by Mike and Ricky.

"He came in one day," said Stanton's mother, Jacinta Garay, "and said: 'Mom, I hate my name. Why did you name me that?' And on and on."

What Stanton didn't know was that it could have been worse. His mother was going to name him Fidel.

"No, you're not," she recalled her husband telling her at the time. "No, you're not. No, you're not. No, you're not."

Mike Stanton, now her ex-husband, stood his ground.

"That," he recalled in March, sitting with Garay in the living room of her home in the Los Angeles area, "was something worth fighting for."

A week later, outside the Yankees' spring training clubhouse in Tampa, Fla., Giancarlo Stanton said he had no idea about any of this.

"Nuh-uh," he said, laughing, but also realizing the name Fidel wouldn't have gone over well with the Cuban exile community in South Florida. The Marlins drafted him in 2007 as a 17-year-old, eventually awarded him a $325 million contract and watched him develop into a National Leaguemost valuable player before trading him to the Yankees in December.

"Thank you for not naming me that, especially being drafted by Miami," said Stanton, who will make his home debut for the Yankees on Monday afternoon. "That would have been not so good."

We are all born into names, and, like circumstance, some are more fortunate than others, particularly for athletes. Amid the dysfunction of the Knicks, Carmelo Anthony's countenance remained Melo. Why wouldn't Noah Syndergaard, towering with flowing blond hair, embrace his distant heritage and answer to the name fans gave him, Thor? And there would not be an admonition for all to rise for Aaron Judge if his adoptive parents had been named Jones.

While some athletes are destined to embody their names, Stanton's name - polyglot, lyrical and lengthy - may reveal something about him, too.

If he had stayed with Mike - the name he used publicly through high school and during his first two seasons with the Marlins - he would not even be the first Mike Stanton to play for the Yankees. But there has never been another Giancarlo to play in the major leagues.

"You've got something unique, you don't run from it, you embrace it," said Stanton, whose bats and gloves have always been stamped with "Giancarlo." "I've met some cool fans that come up and say, 'Hey, we've got the same name.' But, personally, there's no one in my phone that I say, 'Oh, what up, Giancarlo?' I like the uniqueness of it."

That is not to say he minds what people call him. His mother calls him Cruz, his father calls him Mike, relatives call him Mikey and his new teammates mostly call him G. His parents gave him so many names, they said, in part so he could choose the one he liked.

Meet the Family

When Giancarlo was learning how to write, he made a drawing for his father. He spelled out his first name, all in lowercase, with brightly colored markers. His father took it to work at the post office and hung it in his locker.

If it was hard then to see his son growing up to be one of baseball's best players, it was easier in that drawing to see an expression of what he might become - his attention to detail, his zest for rich experiences and an embrace of his name.

In that way, along with his uncommon size, 6 feet 6 inches and 245 pounds, Stanton seems to be neatly tailored for New York and all that it has to offer. Until now, his exposure to the city's culture, clubs and cuisine has come in small bites: a night out here, a weekend there. Home runs, like the two he hit on opening day on Thursday in Toronto, will make it easier for the fans to embrace him. But they will also make it harder for him to blend into the background.

Stanton was raised in the melting pot Tujunga area of Los Angeles by a mother and father who were poles apart. His parents were married for 10 years - splitting up when he was 8 - and seem to have but one thing in common: They both worked for the Postal Service.

Mike has the wit and fashion sense of a suburban dad - khaki shorts with the shirt tucked in, white socks, a sweatband on his wrist - and is as deeply abiding as one. He was there for his son growing up - throwing him batting practice after school before putting in a night shift - and in his moment of peril, accompanying him to a hospital when he was horrifically hit in the face by a pitch in 2014.

Jacinta Garay, whose parents were African-American and Puerto Rican, has piercings on each cheek and musical tastes ranging from Afro-Latin jazz to Lynyrd Skynyrd. She recently got her first cellphone so Giancarlo no longer had to leave a message on the house phone to reach her. But she still rates as a cool enough mom that Stanton invited her to his birthday party at a Hollywood club so she could meet Snoop Dogg.

Of her son's predilection for haute couture (and flashy sneakers, including a pair of gold metallic high tops), his mother said: "He's really into coordination and how things look and how to match the colors. The bling tennis shoes - he gets that from me. And he teases me about the furry boots?"

Said his father, with resignation: "He didn't learn how to dress from me."

When it came to naming her children, Garay's eclectic tastes mostly reigned. Her older son, Egidio Carlos Moacir Garay, has a first name she found poetic with the Portuguese soft "g" (pronounced e-JID-e-o) - but off-putting with a hard Spanish "g." Moacir is a nod to the Brazilian jazz composer Moacir Santos.

Her daughter, who is two years older than Giancarlo (pronounced zhon-CAR-lo), was supposed to be a boy, so Kyricio became Kyrice (pronounced KIE-reece); her middle name is Valivia, the name of Garay's grandmother.

When her plan to name her younger son Fidel was quashed, she pondered an alternative. An aficionado of foreign and independent films, Garay revered the actors Giancarlo Giannini and Giancarlo Esposito, and she liked the way the name sounded. "I talked to my cousin and she was, 'Yeah, let's do it,' because we just loved the way that Giancarlo flows," Garay said, pronouncing it with a flourish.

(Stanton's second name came because his mother's favorite singer was Celia Cruz and because an actor who lived in the neighborhood - A Martinez - played a character named Cruz on the late-1980s soap opera "Santa Barbara.")

If their names caused occasional angst, the children did not stew over it. Egidio went by E. G., Kyrice went by Ky and Giancarlo became Mike.

"We just chalked it up to, my mom went to too many Parliament concerts in the '70s," said Egidio, 38, who teaches political science at Glendale Community College in California. "It just kind of was. It wasn't something we spent a lot of time deconstructing."

In retrospect, though, their names may have subtly spurred his worldview.

"Growing up in more suburban areas where you have that name that stands out, it's already pointing you out as being a little different," Egidio said. "Being a little kid in first grade being picked on for your ethnicity and identity, it compels you to make those broader connections to cultures and have a wider horizon about the world."

For Giancarlo, there were other nudges to do that. His father had traveled to China, India and Africa. His uncle Miguele would bring him gifts and regale him with tales about his frequent visits to Colombia, and take him to local Latin festivals. Giancarlo's eyes were opened further when he took a trip with high school classmates to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, at the tip of Baja California Sur. He went fishing, rode all-terrain vehicles on the beach, ate Mexican food and listened to mariachi.

"It was fascinating to me," said Stanton, who in recent off-seasons began to explore Europe, and then places further afield, cities like Istanbul, Bucharest, Jerusalem and Dubai. Asia and South America are being considered as the next possible destinations. "You don't understand until you grow up a little bit how cool places are."

The more recent trips have been with two housemates - the former Marlins pitchers A. J. Ramos and Ricky Nolasco - and another friend, the Marlins clubhouse attendant Jeremy Ruder.

Getting Away

Stanton's Instagram feed - a montage of photos from shirtless workouts, vacation spots, celebrity hobnobbing and other areas of the baseball life - are often accompanied by pithy captions that show an often self-deprecating wit.

"On the field it's hard to joke around - I'm game time," Stanton said. "But off, when I'm not working, I'm a jokester. I don't want to spend all my energy being mad and focused."

While Stanton's Yankees teammates have been struck by how fastidiously he adheres to his hitting and workout routines, he is adamant about leaving his work at the office. He has told his father, at times, that he does not want to talk about baseball with him. And Ramos, who has lived with him since 2011, said that in the time they have known each other, they have not had more than 10 conversations about baseball away from the ballpark.

The travels over the winter also provide a necessary break from baseball.

"We play seven months, counting spring training, and you're so regimented that if you don't get away it makes you crazy," said Ramos, the Mets reliever who will share an apartment with Stanton in New York this season. "We actually set a plan for what we want to do, and 100 percent of that time we don't even stick to that plan. There's no one holding us to it but us. That's the balance."

While Ramos has relished experiences like riding to a pyramid in Egypt on camelback - "It looks fake, like it's in a movie," he said - their group also returned home with conversations that challenged the way they think. "You go there and you see what's true and not true," he said.

For Stanton, his first trip to Europe was a transformational one. Though it was regimented - he did baseball clinics in the Netherlands, Czech Republic and Italy after the 2011 season - the architecture, the food and the culture were unlike anything he had seen growing up in Los Angeles, bouncing through minor league towns or living in Miami.

He also noticed how it sounded to hear names like Gianpiero, Gianpaolo, Gianluigi and even Giancarlo.

When he returned to Los Angeles, he matter-of-factly mentioned to his parents that the next season he was no longer going to go by Mike.

"I was shocked," his mother said. "I had my mouth open for a week. He's going to go by Giancarlo now? Are you serious?"

"Yeah," his father said. "I didn't see it coming."

Stanton said it was simply a matter of growing up, of coming to a fuller appreciation of what was important to him. And part of that was making sure that people knew him not only by the home runs he hit, but also by his name.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: How a Star Lost a Name And Found Himself. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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How Giancarlo Stanton Let Go of 'Mike' and Embraced Who He Is

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By the time Giancarlo Cruz Michael Stanton was in junior high school, he had grown weary of classmates mocking him for his given name and of teachers and coaches mangling the pronunciation of it. His friend Enrique didn't care for his own name, either. Together they made a pact.

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How Giancarlo Stanton Let Go of ‘Mike’ and Embraced Who He Is  

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Science communication is the art of making science accessible, and thanks to the internet, science is more accessible than ever. More research and original data is being posted publicly online, and a new generation of science ambassadors - in the tradition of Mythbusters or Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan - has found a large audience on social media. But they face a conundrum: the platforms that help get their message out sometimes favor a style that inflames as much as it informs.

Science enthusiasts have built enormous audiences online not only because they appeal to human curiosity, but also because they have a flair for entertainment.

Michael Stevens, whose YouTube channel Vsauce often explores psychology, has described how he packages his videos to reach the biggest audience and has bragged that he could even make paint drying interesting. Derek Muller is known for using man-on-the-street interviews on his popular YouTube channel Veritasium to expose misconceptions about science. And Elise Andrew, who commands an audience of 25 million through her Facebook page, " IFLScience," often shares science-themed memes.

A lot of the science stuff that goes viral ends up being "information-light and punchline-heavy," said Yvette d'Entremont, who runs SciBabe, a popular Facebook page.

Ms. d'Entremont specializes in debunking myths around homeopathy, pet wellness, G.M.O.s and other trends. Her arguments are dense with citations, but she also dispenses a fair amount of snark, as in an essay for The Outline titled " The Unbearable Wrongness of Gwyneth Paltrow " about the Goop wellness guru.

"There are a lot of really wonderful science communicators on YouTube that find a way to break down science concepts; they do these long form videos," she said. But she says the videos that really go viral are, "short punchy ones that seem to be taking a swing at things that we hate, or that we're trying to combat in sci-comm or in the skeptic universe."

Some of this trend may result from algorithms that promote certain types of content over others, often to maximize the time users spend on a site.

"The algorithm is trying to make people react, trying to make people engage," said Guillaume Chaslot, a former YouTube engineer who now advocates for greater accountability for tech platforms. "When you have these very combative videos, it's very efficient at getting people to watch."

His site, AlgoTransparency, shows how videos asserting that the Earth is flat and that vaccines are harmful were among those most recommended by YouTube's algorithm in February. Another was "Bill Nye Destroys Noah's Ark," in which the famed scientist dismantles arguments from creationist Ken Ham.

Facebook has said it will make changes to its algorithms to favor "time well spent" over just time spent. (The company declined to comment.) A statement from YouTube pointed to its announced changes intended to combat misinformation.

After Mr. Zozaya posted his video, anti-vaccination activists left hateful comments, accused him of being a shill for the pharmaceutical industry and even posted personal information about his family. At first, he gleefully debated them, cheered on by 65,000 new Facebook fans.

It wasn't just for the views, although he admits that aspect was gratifying. As a devotee of empiricism, Mr. Zozaya felt compelled to push back against the discredited autism-vaccines link. He also empathized with the autism community.

"Think about it from their perspective," he said. "There's people who are like, 'I would rather have my child die of X deadly disease and be contagious and put everyone else in danger than have my child get this condition that you were born with.'"

As it happens, he later found out he is on the autism spectrum himself.

Mr. Zozaya realized he wasn't convincing anyone by picking fights, nor was he doing much to further human understanding. But when he shifted toward more informational videos - like an analysis of the role snakes play in the environment - his viewership plummeted.

"I was really disappointed," he said. "I thought I had a following mostly made up of people who loved science, because that is what I originally wanted to build on. I wish honestly that people were as much into science as they are into shutting people down."

There is a real concern in the science communication community about how best to handle the tide of pseudoscience.

Emily Gorcenski is a data scientist and activist who has studied how fake science spreads on the internet. In her view, snark or cheeky videos are not the problem: If people are really committed to a piece of pseudoscience, a video from someone like Mr. Zozaya will not convince them otherwise, no matter how respectful. Rather, she's more concerned with how much science is locked up behind university doors or in paid journals.

"We live in a time of deep polarization on many fronts," she said. "We're partly in this position that we're in because scientific communication, scientific writing, is deeply inaccessible. If there is something that makes it more accessible for people, then I'm all for it."

Mr. Zozaya believes he can build the kind of audience he wants: People who love science. It might just take a little longer.

In January, he posted a video tracing the origin of the mythical "el chupacabras," a monster said to suck the blood out of livestock, back to the evolutionary advantage of fear. It has about 6,400 views - not viral, but not bad either. He is working on a video about the placebo effect.

"I will definitely keep making videos," he said.

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video recordings  downloads and streaming

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At 12, He Had a Viral Science Video. At 14, He Fears He Was Too Rude.

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Science communication is the art of making science accessible, and thanks to the internet, science is more accessible than ever. More research and original data is being posted publicly online, and a new generation of science ambassadors - in the tradition of Mythbusters or Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan - has found a large audience on social media.

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At 12, He Had a Viral Science Video. At 14, He Fears He Was Too Rude.  

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When I was 5, the night before we left Yugoslavia and a few years before that country embarked on the Balkan wars and eventually dissolved, my mother put me to bed. Before starting on the hour of lullabies I demanded, out of nowhere she said, "The smells of your childhood will always stay with you and will make you remember home."

"But what if you were born in a garbage bin?" I said.

"Then the smell of garbage will always remind you of home," she said, and her eyes filled with tears, making me (incorrectly) assume that she'd been born in a garbage bin herself and was getting emotional about it.

Though I didn't think much of it at the time, my mother was right about the smells. It is well documented that our senses can cause an involuntary flooding of memory. Some call it the "Proust phenomenon," after the scene in "In Search of Lost Time" when a character's childhood comes back to him simply from tasting a madeleine biscuit soaked in tea.

To me, the Belgrade of my childhood smelled like the Marlboro cigarettes my mother smoked - even while I was in utero (it was the '80s) - and the perfume my aunt wore and chestnuts roasting in the winter, which sellers scooped into a paper cone and we ate on our way to my grandma's place.

But I didn't think about those smells as being special, because I had never not smelled them. We hadn't yet moved to Australia, with its clean air, eucalyptus trees and suburban lawns, where the Southern Cross constellation hung above us, far from our family and the small gray sky of my hometown. I didn't know that I would miss the smells, or rather, that I wouldn't realize I missed the smells, and their associated memories, until I experienced them again.

It's only now, as an adult living in New York, that I have my own Proustian moments. On a cold day smelling of snow, I sometimes get a whiff of urine in a doorway, and that olfactory cocktail reminds me of our building on the Boulevard of Revolution, with its green door, where my family lived when I was small. Men used to relieve themselves in the doorways there, just as they do here.

Behind the green door was an old foyer, and if you were walking down the stairs, you had to push a button each time you arrived on a new floor because the light was on a timer that went out. Out the back of that building I played with other kids. Stray kittens would appear near the caretaker's toolshed and we'd argue over them, tugging them out of one another's grasps, except when it was snowing and the kittens huddled under the shed and we'd make snowmen instead.

All those memories from a stinky doorway.

For me, the Belgrade of today is not home. We left there a long time ago, and I rarely visit. When I do, I often get lost, and the slang of young people is unfamiliar. It is not the home I remember when my senses are triggered (like when I try the Israeli peanut snack Bamba, which is uncannily similar to the Yugo Smoki I grew up on). The more time I spend with my memories, the more I augment them, my fantasy Belgrade becoming more beautiful than it ever was.

The United States is a nation of immigrants (still), and New York City is brimming with them. People who have been parted from the smells and tastes of their homes, who I assume are, like me, jolted back when a long-forgotten piece of music blares from a passing car, or a childhood spice enters their nostrils on a windy street in Queens. Do their memories make them feel nostalgia, or love, or are they ambivalent, terrified, heartbroken?

My son was born in New York City a few months ago. Based on the sensations of our block, he may well feel at home smelling a garbage bin. He might also remember the smell of the cinema near our apartment: popcorn and synthetic butter. The sound of his mother humming a Yugo-rock tune. Will these sensations, of the only home he has known, ever stand out to him as something to be missed?

If we go back to Australia (I'm not sure what the final straw will be - health care, education, immigration policy, gun laws), my son will be left with memories waiting to be sparked like a match. And then, the sound of a siren might take him back to our East Village block, where I pushed him in a stroller, picking up dog poop and balancing a coffee that I spilled on myself, and then cursed over and over. Maybe the smell of a dog's breath will remind him of the couch he had to share with poodles while his parents shouted at the news, or the dog run with its squirrels and cobbles.

As stimuli fly at my baby - I watch him turn his head when he hears someone shouting, at the smell of laundry coming from a grating - I wonder what version of home he's creating for himself. Which memories will my son carry of the city where he lived when he was born? And will he be like me, and many others who have moved, carrying certain baggage wherever he goes?

I remember my mother's comment about how the smells of my childhood would remind me of home, and home, I now know, is a place that exists not on a map but in my mind, ready to appear in its full, smelly glory at any moment.

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When I was 5, the night before we left Yugoslavia and a few years before that country embarked on the Balkan wars and eventually dissolved, my mother put me to bed. Before starting on the hour of lullabies I demanded, out of nowhere she said, "The smells of your childhood will always stay with you and will make you remember home."

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"This is about social norms," said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia. "More middle-class parents are saying, I'm not succumbing to the idea that the only acceptable education is an expensive one."

Free Initiatives

In recent years, Pasadena City College has had a 320 percent increase in students whose parents make more than $100,000 a year, to 828 students last year from 197 in 2007. And it's not alone.

A 2017 study that looked at tax records and college attendance data found that hundreds of two-year colleges are now magnets for well-off students, with many - like Williston State College in North Dakota, and Colorado Northwestern Community College in Rangely - having clocked notable increases. More recently, colleges like Northern Virginia Community College have reported their own increases. The number of first-time students there whose family income is $60,000 or above rose 69 percent, to 6,104 this past year from 3,610 in 2010.

[ READ MORE: With Changing Students and Times, Colleges Are Going Back to School]

Academics who study college pricing say they think the phenomenon is likely to take off further as more cities, states and institutions start free programs like the one Gov. Jerry Brown of California signed into law in October. Already, some free community college initiatives have become magnets for middle-class students. Oregon is making changes to its program, Oregon Promise. But last school year, the majority of the $11.8 million in aid went to upper-income families.

Ms. Shahverdian is taking advantage of a free-college program Pasadena began, as it waits for the state to fund Mr. Brown's plan.

And this fall, Princeton will join a growing group of selective colleges that are focusing more on transfer students. The initiative is directed at attracting more low-income students, but middle-class ones are also likely to see benefits.

To lure students, some two-year colleges are starting to look a lot like their four-year peers, offering study abroad programs, modern dorms and renovated cafeterias.

"We don't have lazy rivers and climbing walls," said Scott Ralls, the president of Northern Virginia Community College, which consists of six campuses outside of Washington that have become magnets for the area's middle-class students. But the college does have an honors program, a hockey team and a new 80,000-square-foot fine arts center, with a campus bookstore, a fitness center and a multipurpose gym.

As for Pasadena, the outdoor Olympic-size swimming pool is hard to miss, along with sign-up sheets for tennis and fencing, and coding clubs. Nearby, students can grab coffee at the campus espresso bar.

"We want to serve everyone in this community," said the school's superintendent-president, Rajen Vurdien. That includes a club that supports students who have recently been released from prison, a club to aid recently arrived immigrants and a tutoring collective. There are signs for the campus food pantry and pamphlets for the free dental clinic.

Melting Pots

Ariana Woodworth, a first-year student who graduated last year from South Pasadena High School and wants to transfer to the Parsons School of Design in Manhattan when she finishes at Pasadena City College, says being thrown into the melting pot that is community college has been an important plus. Her high school was mostly middle class and wealthy.

Still, going 15 minutes from home for college, while many of her classmates were heading across the country, "took a toll."

"It was rough," she said.

And not everyone thought it was a great idea. Ms. Shahverdian said one classmate at La Cañada told her: "Oh, that's good for you. But I would never be able to do that."

Welcome to the new Learning section - a deep dive into the joys, excitement, challenges and opportunities in the world of education and learning. This is the first of four refreshed and redesigned sections we will publish this year.

Drawing on the commitment to the subject and the expertise across The New York Times, we want Learning to be a place where educators, students and parents can join a vigorous conversation around the best ways to educate people, whether children or adults. (You can reach us at learningsection@nytimes.com with comments and ideas.) - Jane Bornemeier, Editor

Nshan Boiadjian, 20, is expected to graduate in May from Valencia College in Orlando, Fla., with his associate degree in general studies. "A lot of people think if you don't go to a big, hot-shot university, your education is garbage," he said. "It's not."

A self-proclaimed "talker," Mr. Boiadjian said he benefited from the small class sizes common at Valencia and the engaged teachers whose focus was their work in the classroom, not their research. Few community college professors do outside research.

He recalls spending hours after one mythology class debating the origins of Buddhism with a professor and several other energized students. "We went on and on."

Valencia has recently become one of a growing number of community colleges to administer a bachelor's degree, and Mr. Boiadjian has decided to stay on.

Community colleges face significant graduation challenges, though. Nationally, just 6 percent of community college students get a bachelor's degree within five years, according to data from 2004 through 2008 from the National Center for Education S tatistics. For students whose parents have degrees, the outcomes are slightly better, but not by much.

Mia Fleming, an international business major at Pepperdine University, thinks she knows why. During her two years at Merced College, a 15,000-student commuter college north of Fresno, she saw how a lean roster of guidance counselors made it challenging to stay focused and motivated. She said she needed to "really seek out" good teachers.

Nicole Figueroa is in her third year at Pasadena as a communication studies major, and she hopes to become the first person in her family to get a four-year degree. She has no issues with attending a community college that serves middle-class students, as long as administrators do not lose sight of their work with low-income ones. The school offers an abundance of key services, she said, but needs to get better at "putting them out there."

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Middle-class parents who send their children to community colleges say it can send a powerful message to them about personal finance.

John Riordan is a management consultant from a Washington suburb, with Northern Virginia Community College down the road from his house. One of his sons is there now and has his sights on a degree from the University of Virginia. Mr. Riordan's daughter will begin community college in the fall. He says it is valid to debate the merits of the University of Virginia for two or four years and suspects that four may be better.

"But do a cost-benefit analysis. Is it 20 times better?" he said.

Lynn O'Shaughnessy, the author of "The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price," cautions that saving money can come with some unknown costs.

While many community colleges have clearly marked pathways to graduation and transfer agreements with highly prestigious four-year schools, not all do. And some students discover that the two years of classes they took "saving money" need to be retaken when they transfer to a four-year school.

Byria Hamblin, a graduate of Lone Star College, near Houston, did not let that happen during her two years there, and she is a now a political science major at Tulane University in New Orleans. Ms. Hamblin, an award-winning debater in high school, said she had always thought she would go straight to a four-year school. But the prices blew her away.

While at Lone Star, she was agitated by Instagram photos of her high school classmates. One friend went to Columbia University and spent a lot of time "living an urban lifestyle," and another went to George Washington University in Washington, where he explored the capital. When classmates were home for breaks, they were not always kind about her choice.

But once Ms. Hamblin got to Tulane, which costs more than $50,000 a year, the tables turned. When she tells her new friends there where she spent her first two years, she often hears, "I really should have done that."

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Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges

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"This is about social norms," said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia. "More middle-class parents are saying, I'm not succumbing to the idea that the only acceptable education is an expensive one."

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The Draw of Community Colleges for Middle-Class Families  

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Thank you very kindly, my friends. As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about. It's always good to have your closest friend and associate to say something good about you. And Ralph Abernathy is the best friend that I have in the world. I'm delighted to see each of you here tonight in spite of a storm warning. You reveal that you are determined to go on anyhow.

Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God's children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there.

On Feb. 1, 1968, two black sanitation workers were crushed by garbage compactors, prompting hundreds of their fellow workers to take action. For several years, the workers had considered banding together and striking, but had been unsuccessful in organizing. The tragic deaths spurred them into protesting low wages, discrimination within the sanitation department and the life-threatening working conditions. Dr. King's focus had shifted to economic disparities. Through the Poor People's Campaign, waged by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr. King outlined demands for more affordable housing, jobs and other anti-poverty measures.

I would move on by Greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon. And I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and aesthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even go by the way that the man for whom I am named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg. But I wouldn't stop there. I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating President by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there.

Dr. King was referring to his namesake Martin Luther, a medieval German monk whose theses condemned the Roman Catholic Church's practice of offering forgiveness of sins for donations. Dr. King and his father were previously named Michael King, but his father, also a minister, adopted the name Martin Luther King after he learned about the monk during a visit to Germany when Dr. King was a small child.

I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but "fear itself." But I wouldn't stop there. Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy."

Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding. Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee-the cry is always the same: "We want to be free."

And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.

And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and done in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I'm just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period to see what is unfolding. And I'm happy that He's allowed me to be in Memphis.

I can remember-I can remember when Negroes were just going around as Ralph has said, so often, scratching where they didn't itch, and laughing when they were not tickled. But that day is all over. We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God's world.

And that's all this whole thing is about. We aren't engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying-We are saying that we are God's children. And that we are God's children, we don't have to live like we are forced to live.

Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we've got to stay together. We've got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.

Dr. King was first and foremost a preacher, and ministers who led the civil rights movement felt it their duty to connect the Bible to modern-day discrimination. Andrew Young, who would go on to serve in Congress, as a United States ambassador to the United Nations and as mayor of Atlanta, once told The New York Times: "I mean, in the Old Testament, God is a God of action, leading people out of slavery, and we identified with that: 'Go down, Moses; tell old Pharaoh to let my people go.' Martin almost never closed a speech without quoting either Jeremiah or Isaiah or Amos."

Secondly, let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now, we've got to keep attention on that. That's always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window-breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers are on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn't get around to that.

Now we're going to march again, and we've got to march again, in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be-and force everybody to see that there are thirteen hundred of God's children here suffering, sometimes going hungry, going through dark and dreary nights wondering how this thing is going to come out. That's the issue. And we've got to say to the nation: We know how it's coming out. For when people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory. We aren't going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don't know what to do. I've seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there, we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth, and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around."

In 1963 in Birmingham, organizers enlisted children to protest segregation. Bull Connor, the public safety commissioner, directed police officers to use dogs and firehoses on the young demonstrators. The sight of children being battered with thunderous water and attacked by dogs turned public opinion in favor of black demonstrators. In September, 1963, four girls - Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carol Robertson and Carol Denise McNair - would die in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.

Bull Connor next would say, "Turn the fire hoses on." And as I said to you the other night, Bull Connor didn't know history. He knew a kind of physics that somehow didn't relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. And we went before the fire hoses; we had known water. If we were Baptist or some other denominations, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist, and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water. That couldn't stop us.

And we just went on before the dogs and we would look at them; and we'd go on before the water hoses and we would look at it, and we'd just go on singing "Over my head I see freedom in the air." And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, "Take 'em off," and they did; and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, "We Shall Overcome."

And every now and then we'd get in jail, and we'd see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn't adjust to; and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham. Now we've got to go on in Memphis just like that. I call upon you to be with us when we go out Monday.

Now about injunctions: We have an injunction and we're going into court tomorrow morning to fight this illegal, unconstitutional injunction. All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper." If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there.

But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.

Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren't going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.

We need all of you. And you know what's beautiful to me is to see all of these ministers of the Gospel. It's a marvelous picture. Who is it that is supposed to articulate the longings and aspirations of the people more than the preacher? Somehow the preacher must have a kind of fire shut up in his bones. And whenever injustice is around he tell it. Somehow the preacher must be an Amos, and saith, "When God speaks who can but prophesy?" Again with Amos, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Somehow the preacher must say with Jesus, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me, and he's anointed me to deal with the problems of the poor."

And I want to commend the preachers, under the leadership of these noble men: James Lawson, one who has been in this struggle for many years; he's been to jail for struggling; he's been kicked out of Vanderbilt University for this struggle, but he's still going on, fighting for the rights of his people. Reverend Ralph Jackson, Billy Kiles; I could just go right on down the list, but time will not permit.

The Rev. James Lawson, the Rev. H. Ralph Jackson and the Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles were among the leading ministers who were organizing the strike and fighting on other fronts against discrimination in employment and education. Mr. Lawson was a longtime friend of Dr. King. He had served as a missionary in India, deepening his belief in Ghandian nonviolence. He had been expelled from Vanderbilt University for his participation in lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville. The Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles was one of the last people to speak to Dr. King, talking to him inside his hotel room at the Lorraine Hotel and then walking out with him onto a balcony where he was shot.

But I want to thank all of them. And I want you to thank them, because so often, preachers aren't concerned about anything but themselves. And I'm always happy to see a relevant ministry.

It's all right to talk about "long white robes over yonder," in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here! It's all right to talk about "streets flowing with milk and honey," but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God's preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.

Now the other thing we'll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people. Individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively-that means all of us together-collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that?

After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the American Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it.

We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles. We don't need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God's children are concerned."

"Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."

And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy-what is the other bread?-Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain.

Jesse Jackson, who would later capture the nation's attention with strong runs for the presidency, worked intimately in Operation Breadbasket, an arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference focused on creating jobs and economic opportunities for black people.

We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on town-downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.

But not only that, we've got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank. We want a "bank-in" movement in Memphis. Go by the savings and loan association. I'm not asking you something that we don't do ourselves at SCLC. Judge Hooks and others will tell you that we have an account here in the savings and loan association from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Judge Hooks was Benjamin Lawson Hooks, who later led the N.A.A.C.P. He was appointed Tennessee's first black criminal court judge in 1965.

We are telling you to follow what we are doing. Put your money there. You have six or seven black insurance companies here in the city of Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an "insurance-in."

Now these are some practical things that we can do. We begin the process of building a greater economic base. And at the same time, we are putting pressure where it really hurts. I ask you to follow through here.

Now, let me say as I move to my conclusion that we've got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end.

Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We've got to see it through. And when we have our march, you need to be there. If it means leaving work, if it means leaving school-be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.

Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. One day a man came to Jesus, and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters of life. At points he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew and throw him off base.... Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side.

They didn't stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the "I" into the "thou," and to be concerned about his brother.

Now you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn't stop. At times we say they were busy going to a church meeting, an ecclesiastical gathering, and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn't be late for their meeting. At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that "One who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony." And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jerusalem-or down to Jericho, rather to organize a "Jericho Road Improvement Association."

Again, Dr. King tied the civil rights movement to the Bible. The Montgomery Improvement Association was the organization created to manage the successful bus boycott after Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat on a city bus, sparking the movement in 1955.

That's a possibility. Maybe they felt that it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effect.

But I'm going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It's possible that those men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles-or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about 2200 feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass."

And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked-the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"

That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" The question is, "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.

Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you. You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up.

The only question I heard from her was, "Are you Martin Luther King?" And I was looking down writing, and I said, "Yes." And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that's punctured, your drowned in your own blood-that's the end of you.

On September 20, 1958, Mr. King was promoting "Stride Toward Freedom," his book about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in a crowded Harlem department store when Izola Ware Curry, a woman who had delusions and paranoia, stabbed him. Her steel letter opener, seven inches long with an ivory handle, just missed Dr. King's heart, and doctors told him if had sneezed, he could have died. Ms. Curry also had hidden a pistol in her purse. She died in 2015.

It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had merely sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital.

An article about the stabbing from United Press International quoted Dr. Emil A. Naclerio who said: "Had Dr. King sneezed or coughed, the weapon would have penetrated the aorta. He was just a sneeze away from death."

They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I've forgotten what those telegrams said. I'd received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I've forgotten what that letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I'll never forget it. It said simply,

"Dear Dr. King, I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School."

And she said,

"While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I'm a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."

The Wall Street Journal recently discovered what is believed to be that letter in archives of King's correspondence at Morehouse College, his alma mater. The letter was not quite as Mr. King remembered a decade after he had first read it. The author of a handwritten letter that ended with "I am so glad you didn't sneeze" was Jean Kepler, a 37-year-old housewife who lived in Pleasantville, a town near White Plains. The Journal shared the document with several historians who believe the correspondence to be the letter that had vexed people for 50 years. Ms. Kepler, who was active in civil rights, committed suicide in 1971 after enduring amputations due to complications with diabetes.

And I want to say tonight-I want to say tonight that I too am happy that I didn't sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1961, when we decided to take a ride for freedom and ended segregation in inter-state travel.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent.

The Albany movement, which followed several years after the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, was a campaign for civil rights that was considered a failure. Despite hundreds of arrests of black protesters and the subsequent publicity, the local campaign did not end in immediate changes. But historians and participants say it laid a foundation for Mr. King and organizers to better strategize in Birmingham.

If I had sneezed-If I had sneezed I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill.

The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination based race, religion, sex or national origin and banned segregation in public places.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama, to see the great Movement there.

If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been in Memphis to see a community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering.

I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze.

And they were telling me-. Now, it doesn't matter, now. It really doesn't matter what happens now. I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane, there were six of us.

The pilot said over the public address system, "We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked, and to be sure that nothing would be wrong with on the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we've had the plane protected and guarded all night."

And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I'm happy, tonight.

I'm not worried about anything.

I'm not fearing any man.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

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"I've Been to the Mountaintop," Dr. King's Last Sermon Annotated

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Part rousing sermon/part somber premonition, "I've Been to the Mountaintop" proved prophetic as Dr. King reflected on a near-death experience from a decade earlier and how he knew there were threats against his life in Memphis. He expressed his joy of having lived to see major changes in racial discrimination.

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He was battling racism in the North then, not just in the South. He was pushing the government to address poverty, income inequality, structural racism and segregation in cities like Boston and Chicago. He was also calling for an end to a war that was draining the national treasury of funds needed to finance a progressive domestic agenda.

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Op-Ed Contributor

Gratitude may be the mother of all the other virtues, as Cicero said, and it may be among the healthiest. But it's also an elusive one in a society that is always striving for more and in a world "more full of weeping than you can understand," as Yeats wrote.

Our tendency is to reach past what we have attained, to have expectations that lie just beyond our grasp and to ascribe our success to ourselves rather than others. It is also easy to confuse gratitude with self-satisfaction.

We all feel, from time to time, that things are never as good as they ought to be or as we want them to be. When one goal is attained, isn't there always another one that needs to be seized? And isn't dissatisfaction with the way things are the impetus to make things better?

Often it is. Yet life without the leavening effects of gratitude has a hardening effect. Ingratitude leaves us in a state of perpetual discontent, short-tempered, rarely at peace, rarely at rest. Stripped of gratitude, we find ourselves frustrated and fearful, impatient and on edge. Ingratitude also blinds us to the good in our midst - beauty, the wonders of nature, the gift of friendship, the blessings of family.

Ignatius of Loyola, the 16th-century Spanish theologian and founder of the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits, wrote that "ingratitude is one of the things most worthy of detestation before our Creator and Lord." It is, he said, "a failure to recognize the good things, the graces and the gifts received."

Building on this point, Tim Keller, the founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City and one of America's leading theologians, told me that ingratitude is a fundamental rather than a superficial sin. It is part and parcel of pride and self-centeredness, a deep denial of how dependent we are on God and one another. If we aren't thankful, it's because we don't think we owe anyone anything.

My guess is that if you think about people you know whose lives are characterized by gratitude, you'll find them to be outward- rather than inward-looking, quick to be kind. They approach the world with delight, a certain enchantment and a light touch. They are not blind or indifferent to the hardships and pain surrounding them, but they are still able to find joy in the journey. "The world is hot and cruel,/We are weary of heart and hand," G. K. Chesterton wrote in a poem responding directly to Yeats. "But the world is more full of glory,/Than you can understand."

Feeling that they are the object of affection and love, people who are grateful are more able to dispense grace to others. Gratitude finds ways to express itself; the result is a more humane, tender and merciful society.

But gratitude in its most remarkable manifestation is separate from circumstances. Those who show gratitude in the midst of hardship, as their world shatters around them, have the most to teach the rest of us.

I've written before about my friend Steve Hayner, who was president of Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga., and a huge influence on my life. He was told he had terminal cancer on Easter weekend four years ago. (He died early in 2015.) Shortly after he learned the news, he said: "There are never any guarantees in this life, and this is a chance to take Jesus' words to heart: 'And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your life span?' (Matthew 6:27). We'll choose the way of trust and joy instead." And so he did.

Months later, in reflecting on how things had changed for him, knowing that death soon awaited, Steve wrote: "Life is just plain different now. I like parts of my previous life better. But the choices have changed. Every day has always been an opportunity for attentiveness, gratitude and living into God's call." Now he had much less of a desire to "seize the day," he said, than "to welcome it - with all its twists and turns, surprises and disappointments, moments of delight and discoveries of yet other areas to which I must pray my goodbyes and let the grieving roll." And so he did.

None of us is exempt from periods of pain, doubt and discouragement. Even the Apostle Paul confessed in his second letter to the Corinthians that there were times when he felt the pressures of life pushed him beyond the ability to endure, "so that we despaired of life itself."

Gratitude is hardly restricted to people of faith, just as people of faith are not exempt from ingratitude. This is another way that people don't fit into tidy boxes. Temperament, disposition and life circumstances all play a factor in determining how we face the world.

But for many of us of the Christian faith, there are certain events that are sources of continuing thankfulness. Good Friday and Easter Sunday are pre-eminent among them. They reassure us that while suffering is unavoidable, death is not final and hope is eternal, that there are things that lie beyond the joy and anguish of this life. There is gratitude in the conviction that the story doesn't end and that there are endless new chapters to be written, and that ultimately there is reconciliation and redemption to be found for my broken life and our broken world.

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Op-Ed Contributor Gratitude may be the mother of all the other virtues, as Cicero said, and it may be among the healthiest. But it's also an elusive one in a society that is always striving for more and in a world "more full of weeping than you can understand," as Yeats wrote.

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"They are so direct in their messaging. They are so clear. They seem unflappable."

Dr. Damour, who has spent her career talking and listening to teenagers, said she believes the Parkland teens are showing the world the potential of their peer group. "Those of us who live with teenagers and are around them can see something that is different about this generation," she said.

There is still much to learn about the postmillennial cohort - social scientists haven't even agreed on when this generation begins, although there seems to be a consensus forming that the year 2000, give or take a few years, is a good place to start. But data collected from various health surveys already show that today's teens are different from previous generations in many ways.

Many risky behaviors have dropped sharply among today's teens. Cigarette smoking among teens is at a historic low since peaking in the mid 1990s. Alcohol use has also declined significantly - the number of teens who have used alcohol in the past 30 days is down by half since the 1990s. Teen pregnancy rates have hit historic lows, and teens over all are waiting longer to have sex than their parent's generation. Teen driving fatalities are down about 64 percent since 1975. Some of that is attributed to safer cars, but teen crashes have declined between 10 and 30 percent in states with tiered licensing systems, and teen drunken driving has dropped while teen seatbelt use has increased.

While most health researchers celebrate these changes in teen health, some scientists think the trends suggest a lower level of maturity among today's teens. Perhaps teens are safer simply because their reliance on social media and smartphone use means they are getting out less. In September, the journal Child Development published a study by Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, noting that there is a decline in a number of "adult" activities among today's teens. In seven large, nationally representative surveys of eight million American adolescents from 1976 to 2016, fewer adolescents in recent years are having sex, dating, drinking alcohol, driving, working for pay and going out without their parents.

"The big picture is that they are taking longer to grow up," said Dr. Twenge, whose latest book is "iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy - and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood."

In an article in The Atlantic last fall titled "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?," Dr. Twenge argued that teens are more comfortable in their bedrooms or on smartphones or social media than at a party. While they are physically safer than past generations as a result, rates of teen depression and suicide are on the rise. "It's not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades," she wrote. "Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones."

But a number of social scientists and adolescent health researchers disagree with that conclusion. While teen depression and suicide rates are worrisome, there is no causal link to show those trends are the result of smartphones and social media. In fact, a literature review by Unicef researchers in December found that moderate use of digital technology tends to be beneficial for children's mental well-being, while no use or too much use is associated with a "small negative impact." The larger issues that affect a child's well-being are family functioning, social dynamics at school and socio-economic conditions, the report concluded.

Don Tapscott, author of "Grown Up Digital," said he believes today's teenagers are better communicators than any previous generation. "They didn't grow up being the passive recipients of somebody else's broadcast," he said. "They grew up being interactors and communicators. In the 1960s we had a generation gap. What we have today is a generation lap - they are lapping their parents on the digital track."

The clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel interviewed groups of middle school and high school students around the country in 2015 and 2016 for her new book, "Voice Lessons for Parents: What to Say, How to Say It and When to Listen." Dr. Mogel spoke with diverse kids from various regions and walks of life, but found herself consistently impressed by their thoughtfulness, how much they liked their parents, and how much they cared about the world around them.

"The press and general public like to see them as spoiled and not having to work hard for anything except grades and being very entitled," Dr. Mogel said. "But they're courageous, energetic, optimistic and really smart."

Neil Howe, a historian whose books include "Millennials Rising," said that unlike earlier generations, today's teens have accepted the structures of society and have learned to work within those boundaries. "They're very good at using rules to make their point, and they're absolutely excellent at negotiating with their parents, and negotiating in a reasonable way about how to bend these rules in a way that will make them more effective and give them more space," he said. "This is not a 'throw the brick through the window and burn stuff down' group of kids at all. They're working very constructively, arm-in-arm with older people they trust, to make big institutions work better and make them stronger and more effective."

Ms. Lythcott-Haims notes that the current crop of teenagers is the first generation to grow up with active shooter drills since kindergarten. "I think what we might have here is a generation that really defines itself by the markers of their childhoods," she said. "In addition to being marked by these gun violence tragedies, they came to consciousness with a black man in the White House and smartphones in their hands."

What does all this mean for the future of today's teens? All of the researchers agreed there is still much more to learn about this cohort, but what we know so far is promising.

"We are in the process of distilling the data and discerning who they are, but I am excited," said Ms. Lythcott-Haims. "We don't know who they will be in their 20s, but already they have agency, the sense of your own existence, your own right to make decisions and your own responsibility for outcomes and consequences. That's what we need to have to be mentally well. I think these folks could turn out not to be just leaders, but to be a generation that we look back on and end up calling one of the greatest."

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Are Today's Teenagers Smarter and Better Than We Think?

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"They are so direct in their messaging. They are so clear. They seem unflappable." Dr. Damour, who has spent her career talking and listening to teenagers, said she believes the Parkland teens are showing the world the potential of their peer group.

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Are Today’s Teenagers Smarter and Better Than We Think?  

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But parents who are unable or unwilling to confront that messiness may view their child's outbursts as a problem that urgently needs to be solved.

When that happens, Laura Markham, a clinical psychologist and editor of the site AhaParenting.com, said: "We ridicule kids, we blame them, we tell them it's their own fault; we isolate them by sending them to their rooms."

The nature of the parent's response may vary, Dr. Markham said, but the message is the same - that anger, sadness or frustration are unacceptable.

This, Dr. Markham noted, is the opposite of resilience; instead, it's a fragile rigidity that leaves both parent and child fearful that outsized emotions could shatter them.

In contrast to this fragility, parents who don't flinch from the power of emotions like anger have a greater capacity to absorb challenging interactions with their children, said Dr. Siegel, who is executive director of the Mindsight Institute. And don't worry if this kind of resilience doesn't come naturally, he said - with practice, it gets easier.

Here are some tips for making those difficult interactions easier to absorb:
Take a Breath
To respond thoughtfully to our child's outbursts, we have to first silence the alarm bells going off inside our head. Dr. Markham coaches parents to "hit the pause button" before taking any action, even in the face of a screaming child. In her research, Ms. Lewis learned that parents and children often synchronize their heart rates, breathing and other physiological functions, so calming ourselves down can have a measurable, physical effect on our child - not to mention on our own ability to face a situation calmly.
Let Emotions Happen
Resilience depends on an understanding that emotions - even those considered "negative," like sadness, grief or anger - aren't a problem to be fixed, but a natural consequence of being human. "The thing about emotions is that they don't last forever; there's a beginning, middle and end to all of them," said Carla Naumburg, a clinical social worker and author of "Ready, Set, Breathe: Practicing Mindfulness With Your Children for Fewer Meltdowns and a More Peaceful Family." More than that, allowing ourselves - and our children - to experience and express a full range of emotions is vital to our well-being. Dr. Markham noted that it is actually when we don't express our emotions that we lose control of them - not the other way around.
Get Curious
So often as parents, we ask "why" questions about unwanted behavior ("Why can't he remember to put his socks in the hamper?"). But Dr. Naumburg said that asking ourselves "Why am I responding this way?" may be a more useful question, especially when our buttons are getting pushed. "Notice what's happening with you, and start to take responsibility for it," Dr. Markham suggested.
Set Boundaries With Compassion
Establishing and holding the line on boundaries can lead to some of the most unpleasant moments in the parent-child relationship - but approaching those moments with compassion and kindness goes a long way toward keeping your blood pressure down. Dr. Markham and Dr. Naumburg suggested verbally acknowledging your child's feelings and comforting him or her doesn't have to mean giving in to their demands. "There are times when I will sit with my daughter in my lap, as she's crying, and snuggle her as I'm saying 'no' to her," Dr. Naumburg said. "She's still crying, but we're still connected."
Examine Your Yeses and Nos
Susan Newman, a social psychologist and author of "The Book of No: 365 Ways To Say It and Mean It," said parents should be especially mindful of the times you're most likely to give in to your child's outburst. "If you can recognize what triggers you to an automatic 'yes,' it's time to step back and say, 'Hold it a minute, why am I doing this?'" Dr. Newman suggested. "We're living in this culture of 'yes' parenting," Dr. Newman said, "and it's easier to say yes than to deal with a child's meltdown." But parents can consider, "How will a 'no' help?" as a way to explore the reason for a particular boundary so that you and your child can better understand it.
Get Some Distance
When we identify closely with our children, or rely on them as a barometer of our own self-worth, we set ourselves up for disappointment (or worse) when things don't go exactly as we planned. "Our egos are very tied up in our parenting," said Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of "How to Raise an Adult." Dr. Naumburg noted that this is partially informed by a cultural narrative that suggests that "If the kids are not O.K., then it's because we parents have done something wrong." As Ms. Lythcott-Haims put it, "If we can get a life, maybe our kids can have one too."

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To Raise Resilient Kids, Be a Resilient Parent

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But parents who are unable or unwilling to confront that messiness may view their child's outbursts as a problem that urgently needs to be solved.

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To Raise Resilient Kids, Be a Resilient Parent  

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The actions of the so-called Greensboro Four led directly to the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which the civil rights organizer Ella Baker urged students to form in April 1960 to coordinate the continuing sit-ins. Later, SNCC would play a major role in the Freedom Rides and in voter registration efforts across the South. And the momentum that began at the Woolworth's lunch counter would eventually contribute to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in public spaces.

Perhaps more than anything, the results of the Greensboro sit-ins showed the power of a small group of students prepared to stand alone if necessary.

"Inevitably, people ask me, 'What can I do?'" Mr. McCain said in an interview in 2005. "What kind of question is that? Look around you. Once you identify what you want to do, don't ask for the masses to help you, because they won't come."

University uprisings, 1968

In the spring of 1968, student protests exploded on multiple continents. Some accomplished their stated goals and others did not, but even the latter contributed to a climate in which change seemed possible and more people were inspired to act.

In March, more than 1,000 students at the historically black Howard University took over the administrative building, and many more barricaded themselves in their dormitories. They demanded that the university president resign; that the curriculum emphasize African-American history and culture; that a judiciary system involving students be created; and that disciplinary proceedings against students involved in an earlier protest be dropped. The university agreed to the third and fourth demands.

Students at Columbia University used similar tactics a month later, occupying several buildings for a week before 1,000 police officers stormed the campus to evict them. Strikes continued for the rest of the semester, essentially paralyzing the university even after the occupiers were cleared out. The students were protesting two things - the construction of a university gym in Morningside Park in Harlem that would provide only limited access to Harlem residents, and Columbia's Vietnam-era contract with a weapons research think tank - and Columbia canceled both.

On the other side of the Atlantic, students revolted in France and Poland. In Warsaw, protests against government censorship built from 300 students in January to 20,000 in March, but were ultimately suppressed. And in Paris, some 20,000 swarmed the Sorbonne in May, turning cars into barricades and clashing with riot police. French labor unions and teachers joined a 24-hour general strike in support of the students, bringing the nation to a grinding halt but failing to topple President Charles de Gaulle.

Apartheid divestment, 1970s-80s

As with the Greensboro sit-ins 16 years earlier, the uprising started by public school students in Soweto, South Africa, would expand far beyond them.

On June 16, 1976, several thousand students near Johannesburg began a peaceful march that turned deadly when the police attacked with guns and tear gas. The protesters were objecting to a law that mandated Afrikaans-language education, but they set in motion a global movement against apartheid. Images of police brutality - particularly a photograph of a high school student carrying the body of Hector Pieterson (12 or 13 years old; accounts differ) - drew international attention to the broader cruelty of South Africa's government.

From the actions of the students of Soweto grew a vast campaign led by college students in the United States, who built shantytowns on campus quads, blockaded buildings and disrupted speeches by South African politicians. From Columbia University to the University of California, protests compelled administrators to withdraw billions of dollars in investments from companies tied to South Africa. Over time, the resulting economic stress contributed, along with other factors, to the dismantling of apartheid.

Tiananmen Square, 1989

On June 4, 1989, several weeks of student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing ended in slaughter when thousands of Chinese troops began firing on crowds of protesters in Tiananmen Square. Hundreds of people, possibly thousands, were killed; a death toll was never released.

Nearly 30 years later, China is still not a democracy. Its trend, on display in 1989, of allowing economic but not political liberalization continues. And in some ways, the protests had the opposite of their intended effect: The crackdown provided a visceral demonstration of how far the government would go to suppress dissent, which discourages some would-be activists to this day. But an iconic image from June 5, of a lone, still unidentified man standing in front of a column of tanks, endures as an emblem of defiance in the face of overwhelming odds.

Velvet Revolution, 1989

Eight days after the Berlin Wall fell, signaling the beginning of the end of East Germany's Communist government, the students of neighboring Czechoslovakia stepped in to topple their own.

The uprising began with thousands and grew until Prague was flooded with 500,000 protesters, who stayed stubbornly peaceful even as riot officers attacked, giving the revolution its name. Just 11 days after the protests began, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia relinquished power, paving the way for the playwright Vaclav Havel to become president in December.

It was an extraordinary revolution - "swift, entirely nonviolent, joyful and funny," said the author Timothy Garten Ash - and one of the most rapid and complete successes for a student-led movement in modern history.

Iran, 1999

After a series of scuffles between college students and the police in July 1999, officers raided a dormitory at the University of Tehran, wounding at least 20 people and jailing 125. If their goal was to stop the unrest, the police could not have gone more astray: In response, more than 10,000 Iranian students took to the streets.

In the short term, the protests forced officials, including President Mohammad Khatami and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to condemn the police raid. The ayatollah urged restraint even if students "set my picture on fire or tear it," a remarkable directive from a government not normally tolerant of political dissent.

But perhaps more important were the long-term consequences. Since Iran's 1979 revolution, student activists had generally been tied to political parties. After the 1999 protests, that ceased to be the case. And while Iran's society and politics remain tightly regulated, the tradition of student activism has continued there, more so than in many countries with similar political systems.

Black Lives Matter, 2013-present

The Black Lives Matter movement began with three women in their late 20s and early 30s: Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. But when it exploded into national view in 2014 after the police killing of Michael Brown, 18, many of the protesters who filled the streets of Ferguson, Mo., were students.

Like the students of Parkland, they were protesting gun violence - but by the police, often involving unarmed black suspects, in shootings captured on video. Unlike the students of Parkland, they were not lauded in the prevailing public narrative, a discrepancy that some Black Lives Matter activists have noted in recent weeks. Instead, they were frequently labeled troublemakers and thugs.

But even as questionable police shootings happen, convictions of officers remain rare, and protests on the streets continue, Black Lives Matter has had a fundamental impact on the national conversation about racial bias and the use of excessive force by the police.

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7 Times in History When Students Turned to Activism

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The actions of the so-called Greensboro Four led directly to the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which the civil rights organizer Ella Baker urged students to form in April 1960 to coordinate the continuing sit-ins. Later, SNCC would play a major role in the Freedom Rides and in voter registration efforts across the South.

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With their consistent tweeting of stories, memes, jokes and video clips, the students have managed to keep the tragedy that their school experienced - and their plan to stop such shootings from happening elsewhere - in the news for weeks, long after past mass shootings have faded from the headlines.

Many observers have simply assumed that, like fish in water, the students are skilled simply because they have been using the platforms for most of their lives. That is not entirely true.

Ms. González became one of the most well-known of the shooting survivors after giving a passionate speech about gun control the Saturday after the attack. But when her name began to trend on Twitter, she did not know how to use it.

"You know that meme where it's a picture of a grandma in front of a computer?" she said in a recent interview. "That was me. In the early days, someone DM'd me and I was like, 'O.K., so how do I respond? Where does the keyboard go?''' (A DM is a private message.)

Ms. González, 18, had been more of a Tumblr fan. She was also a fan of Instagram, but, before the shooting, had begun to use the platform less frequently after realizing she was wasting her time on it.

And Facebook?

"Facebook is not really used by the people in my community."

Ms. González was surrounded by classmates who were familiar with Twitter's ever-evolving dialect of memes, wisecracks and news stories. Within a week, she said, they had taught her the basics. How to make a thread. How to follow a thread. And, perhaps most importantly, the difference between a retweet, which reposts someone else's tweet, and a quote tweet, which allows a user to retweet with a comment above the original.

The Parkland students' use of quote tweets is one of their most effective tools. Ms. Chadwick, in particular, has used the technique, as well as other memes to mock the students' ideological opponents.

In one memorable exchange, Ms. Chadwick was scrolling through her Twitter feed last month when she saw someone remark that politicians were "easy to buy." She and her classmates had spent the last week educating themselves on how easy the AR-15 was to purchase. She made the obvious connection, and tweeted:

We should change the names of AR-15s to "Marco Rubio" because they are so easy to buy.
- Sarah Chadwick// #NEVERAGAIN (@sarahchad_) Feb. 23, 2018

The Fox News host Laura Ingraham chided Ms. Chadwick, 16, for her tone, and attributed the quote to "Stoneman Douglas sophomore Sarah Chadwick."

Ms. Chadwick's response?

I'm a junior. https://t.co/P9clE1ks5N
- Sarah Chadwick// #NEVERAGAIN (@sarahchad_) Feb. 23, 2018

Given their single-minded focus on preventing school shootings, the more prominent Parkland students most often find themselves tangling with conservative politicians and commentators who support broad gun ownership rights, including Senator Marco Rubio, Ms. Ingraham, the N.R.A. spokeswoman Dana Loesch and the Fox News contributor Tomi Lahren.

The Florida senator, who has vast experience being mocked on Twitter by his political opponents, declined to comment directly on Ms. Chadwick's tweet. A spokeswoman for Mr. Rubio pointed toward his recent tweets about political discourse, and how the two sides need to learn to talk each other again.

In response to a call and texts, Ms. Loesch, who is usually not shy about responding online or elsewhere to critics, directed an interview request to an N.R.A. official, who declined to comment.

And as for Ms. DeVos? Students said that she spoke to few of them on her visit Wednesday, and left in a hurry.

I thought she would at least give us her "thoughts and prayers," but she refused to even meet/speak with students. I don't understand the point of her being here
- carly (@car_nove) March 7, 2018

In an interview on Tuesday, Ms. Lahren applauded the students' use of social media to fight for their views. She said she was not bothered by quote tweets, which she saw as simply "a way to continue a conversation," a tool that she said that she also used frequently.

But when it was pointed out that one of Ms. Chadwick's meme tweets instructed her to "stop talking," she added: "I hope these kids understand that free speech isn't just saying what you want to say, it's hearing what you don't want to hear. It's great to be vocal about your stance but simply telling someone to stop talking doesn't seem very constructive."

Quote tweeting may allow Twitter users some small window into the other sides of a debate. Delaney Tarr, who had about 500 followers before the shooting and now has close to 97,000, said she believed the tool breaks through the filter bubbles that keep ideological opponents from hearing each other.

"Even if people maybe side with the other people a little bit more, they understand both sides," she said, of the benefits of quote tweeting. "We want people to be educated."

The social media activism has come with a cost for the high schoolers, who before the shooting just used these platforms to keep up with friends, make jokes and pass the time. Ms. Tarr was one of several students interviewed who said that she no longer felt comfortable using her Twitter account to express her opinions on pop culture, or the other lighter subjects she used to tweet about.

"The fact is that I have to represent our movement," she said. "It's not just me tweeting whatever I want to tweet about. It has to be drawn back to who I am to the media, to who I am to the country."

It is another way in which the students at Parkland have lost the normalcy of their teenage years. Ryan Deitsch said that he did not feel comfortable even tweeting his opinion of "Black Panther" (he thought it was great and that comparisons to "Thor: Ragnarok" were beside the point). Many other parts of his life have been put on hold. He has yet to respond to the colleges that have accepted him.

All of the students scoffed at the idea that they were coordinating their tweets. But they did say that as they are all following one another on the various platforms, they frequently alight on the same subject or tweet. (When reached for interviews, several of them were in the same room.) On Tuesday, a handful of them worked together to make a video parody of Ms. Loesch's own video using an hourglass to tell celebrities and other N.R.A. critics "your time is running out."

But while Ms. González and Ms. Chadwick said they usually composed their tweets on the fly, Ms. Tarr said she often took more time, mindful of her new audience and of the gravity of what she says online now.

"I'll start typing a tweet, then I'll delete it," she said. "I'll think 'what else can I say' then type and delete again. I do miss having that teenage Twitter account. But we don't get that regular teenage life anymore. It just doesn't exist."

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marjory stoneman douglas high school (parkland  fla)

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How the Parkland Students Got So Good at Social Media

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With their consistent tweeting of stories, memes, jokes and video clips, the students have managed to keep the tragedy that their school experienced - and their plan to stop such shootings from happening elsewhere - in the news for weeks, long after past mass shootings have faded from the headlines.

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Emma González spoke for just under two minutes on Saturday before tens of thousands of demonstrators at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, describing the effects of gun violence in emotional detail and reciting the names of classmates who had been killed.

Then she said nothing for four minutes and 26 seconds.

Ms. González, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., has emerged as one of the most prominent faces among the student activists who have mobilized against gun violence after a shooting at their school last month that left 17 dead.

Their facility with social media has added urgency to demands for more gun control. Ms. González, who has more than 1.3 million followers on Twitter, has spent much of the last month urging her audience to turn out for Saturday's marches.

She stared straight ahead during her period of silence onstage, her sometimes watery eyes fixed in the distance. Then a timer went off.

"Since the time that I came out here, it has been six minutes and 20 seconds," she said. "The shooter has ceased shooting, and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape, and walk free for an hour before arrest.

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What Emma González Said Without Words at the March for Our Lives Rally

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Emma González spoke for just under two minutes on Saturday before tens of thousands of demonstrators at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, describing the effects of gun violence in emotional detail and reciting the names of classmates who had been killed. Then she said nothing for four minutes and 26 seconds.

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Much of their leadership and community work, driven by the loss of classmates and friends, might not have been considered in the college admission process. Now, some of the most vocal Parkland seniors - whether accepted or denied to their top college choices - are rethinking their college plans, hoping in one way or another to capitalize on the momentum.

Samantha Fuentes, who was wounded by a bullet and shrapnel in the Parkland attack, is contemplating sitting out the first semester or even the full year to continue the campaign to promote more rigorous gun safety laws.

"If the movement is solidifying even more and hitting the nation from all directions and they need soldiers, I will put college off," said Ms. Fuentes, 18, who is staying close to home with tentative plans to attend Broward Community College, then Florida Atlantic University.

As a shooting victim and survivor, she is willing to speak at universities or to politicians about gun legislation.

"The truth is, us kids, we just want to be the voice for the people we lost, or for people who don't think they have a voice," said Ms. Fuentes, who would like to eventually become an elementary schoolteacher. "I am prioritizing this over college right now, I am prioritizing people's lives over my education."

University admissions offices declined to discuss individual applications, but many noted that civic engagement is a plus in considering whether to admit an applicant. In fact, some colleges publicly assured high school applicants in advance of last weekend's March for Our Lives rallies that their participation in peaceful protests would not harm admission chances.

Harvard, for example, issued a statement: "The mission of Harvard College is to provide a deeply transformative liberal arts and sciences education that will prepare our students for a life of citizenship and leadership. Fundamental to our mission is our belief that students have the right to protest peacefully about issues of concern to them. Students who are disciplined for engaging responsibly in exercising their rights and freedoms would not have their chances of admission compromised or their admissions revoked."

While on spring break this week, Mr. Hogg said he was leaning toward taking a gap year to focus on the midterm elections, hoping to rally young voters and target politicians supported by the National Rifle Association.

"We are trying to get these laws changed to drive down the number of people who die by gun violence," he said. "I can figure out everything else later."

Mr. Hogg said he does not believe his outspokenness had anything to do with the college denials, but admits it has been frustrating. In a late-night, March 16 message on Twitter - liked by at least 64,000 and retweeted nearly 6,600 times - Mr. Hogg told his followers, "Just got rejected from another college but that's ok we're already changing the world. Goodnight everyone."

He added that he was comforting himself by eating chocolate muffins. The response was mixed, with some mocking his rejection, some encouraging him to take a gap year and others touting him as precisely the type of student colleges should recruit.

After a Twitter follower suggested he apply to a California university, Mr. Hogg confirmed that one of the schools that denied his application was University of California, San Diego. The University of California, Los Angeles, also turned him down, he said later.

On Wednesday morning, Laura Ingraham, the conservative radio host, taunted Mr. Hogg by linking to a story on Twitter about his college application denials. "David Hogg Rejected by Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it," she said. Mr. Hogg pushed back, calling for sponsors to boycott Ms. Ingraham's show. He later posted a list of advertisers to his nearly 600,000 followers, and Ms. Ingraham on Thursday apologized on Twitter.

"Any student should be proud of a 4.2 GPA," including Mr. Hogg, she wrote. "On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland."

Ryan Deitsch, a Parkland classmate who wants to follow his father and grandfather into filmmaking and photography, said his applications were rejected from several schools, including U.C.L.A. and Northwestern University. He was admitted to Florida State University, Savannah College of Art and Design and Columbia College Chicago.

"I don't know what the next couple of months will look like. Right now, we are ramped up and the world is watching so now is the time for us to act," Mr. Deitsch, 18, said just hours after a phone interview with Columbia College Hollywood, which is not affiliated with the Chicago school. "To do that, some of us might have to change our original plans. Right now, I am thinking of taking at least a semester off to devote to the movement."

Though the shooting and organized response thrust Parkland students into the spotlight, Mr. Deitsch, a student journalist who filmed students in the aftermath of the shooting, does not believe it entitles him to special college privileges.

"It's disappointing to not get into certain schools, but I try to keep things in perspective," he said. "I am not angry. If I didn't qualify then I shouldn't just be admitted because I spoke the loudest. There is much more important work for us to do."

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marjory stoneman douglas high school (parkland  fla)

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Parkland Activist Rejected by Colleges. But It's O.K.: 'We're Already Changing the World'

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Much of their leadership and community work, driven by the loss of classmates and friends, might not have been considered in the college admission process. Now, some of the most vocal Parkland seniors - whether accepted or denied to their top college choices - are rethinking their college plans, hoping in one way or another to capitalize on the momentum.

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There was no Saigon government in large parts of the country, and it wasn't the fault of people who lived there that South Vietnamese generals had never been able to govern. Elections were sometimes held, but they were rigged public relations efforts for the benefit of Washington. The rural population in the South was like a second country, and those people mostly supported Ho Chi Minh. They had since after World War II, but especially since Ho beat the French Army in 1954. That was their war of independence, but Washington misunderstood the consequences of Ho's victory and decided to reverse it.

Serious journalists today carry with them an awareness of this history - not necessarily the specifics, but the way the media's perception of the war matured - when they start work. They've read David Halberstam's book "The Best and the Brightest," describing the shallow, arrogant views of government officials who didn't think they needed to know that much about Vietnam, and who were too busy to see the country except as a chunk of geography on the map they wanted to control. Reporters today also know how presidents and their advisers, wary about the next election at home, were afraid of losing some piece of the world to "the Communists" and how paranoia served to perpetuate the fighting when the war had already been lost.

They've absorbed the message of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, revealed through the courageous reporting of Neil Sheehan of The New York Times. They've read the classic books by the historian Bernard Fall on the French and American wars in Indochina. They start off determined to bring insights from the recent past to their reporting about international situations and understand that American elected officials are generally ignorant about other countries.

The Vietnam War has ended up putting an unusual burden on young reporters, their newspapers and TV outlets. Too much stress is placed on reporting the latest incremental turn in a story, especially regarding America's current and brewing conflicts abroad. The news media's business model depends on it. But to serve the public well, the industry needs the time and space to permit reporters to include a larger context in their reporting from abroad. Otherwise, news becomes "Here they come, there they go" linear reporting about military action that doesn't have the meaning it needs to permit Americans to understand where these new conflicts are taking us.

For me, in my old age, the war comes back, out of order, my subconscious offering up memories without my asking. Here's one: that time climbing through a hillside bamboo thicket during a military operation when the heat felt so intense it got inside me, and yet I couldn't seem to drink enough water and was vomiting. I thought I was going to die. Here's another: The troop-carrying choppers settle onto the rice paddy, mud a foot deep, the men move out, tense because this is a Vietcong area, and they burn the village down, even though the enemy isn't shooting at them, ignoring the screaming women and children who are trying to keep the fire from taking everything as they run to haul water from their wells in buckets, throwing it up on their burning thatch.

In 1995, 20 years after the end of the war, I was asked to do an anniversary report. I chose to go to Beallsville, Ohio, a small town that had too many casualties. One of the veterans I went to see, a Marine, came to the door but didn't invite me in or shake my hand. I explained what I was doing, a film for PBS about his experience and the town's loss. He listened, but his expression was hostile. I said I had been in Vietnam myself as a TV reporter for five years over a decade. I tried to think how I could get beyond this awkward moment because sometimes by sharing experience, you can help people realize that you're with them, not against them. But I couldn't overcome his hostility so many years after the war was supposed to be over. I thanked him and left.

I was probably a reminder of all the bad news that had come out of Vietnam, especially on TV. The news was always too brief and too blunt - the ambush, the mine, the wounded, the medevac helicopter trying to come in to get the men out. Then cut to a commercial. His family might have written to him about what they were seeing and asked, is it like that? It was clear that he resented me, maybe hated what he thought was journalistic misrepresentation of the war as he knew it. Or maybe he knew the bad news was correct but didn't want to deal with that either.

There was often resentment among ground troops about "hit and run" reporting - getting news and pictures of the latest firefight by riding helicopters in and out of the battlefield the same day. That style of reporting was a response to pressure from editors back home to get the story out as quickly as possible, to beat the competition, the other wire services, the other networks. Better reporters stuck around for a while, spent the night, shared the combat food rations, the heat and rain, made friends before leaving. So the grunts felt you weren't just using them, like a stage set to entertain the viewers back home with a little bang-bang, as we used to call it.

When the Vietnam War was over, the Pentagon decided that there had been too much negative reporting from the war zone and that it would limit journalists' access to battlefields. Handouts about what had happened would be prepared by public affairs staff, and officers, called "minders," would go along with correspondents to supervise their movements and the information they got. A colleague told me that in Iraq, he wasn't permitted to speak with local people. It's still possible to find out what's actually going on under these restrictive conditions, but it's harder and takes more time. It's also a lot more dangerous now, because wars have become more violent.

Good journalism is always hard to do, but there's a new generation of reporters who take nothing for granted because of what they know about Vietnam. Their work is everywhere in the best daily newspapers, on cable news and in online newsletters, blogs and websites. Of course journalism is populated by an assortment of people. There's no entrance exam, so a lot of reporting is done by people who are ignorant and inexperienced about the subjects they pretend to know. Journalism is no better or worse than any other American institution. But the best young reporters have learned from the Vietnam War to question authority and find out for themselves what's really going on. And that's how it's supposed to work in a democracy.

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Opinion | How Vietnam Changed Journalism

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There was no Saigon government in large parts of the country, and it wasn't the fault of people who lived there that South Vietnamese generals had never been able to govern. Elections were sometimes held, but they were rigged public relations efforts for the benefit of Washington.

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Adhiambo Mitchell lost both his legs in a car accident on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn almost 10 years ago. Nolan Ryan Trowe was partly paralyzed while cliff diving in Northern California in 2016. When they met last year, they bonded over a shared attitude toward their disabilities.

"It's very affirming to be around someone as positive as Adhiambo," Mr. Trowe said. "I have never heard him complain about anything."

"Nolan is adventurous," Mr. Mitchell said. "You can put him in any predicament and he'll know how to maneuver. There is no cowardice in him. And he is a really good rapper."

Mr. Mitchell, 42, works as a taxi dispatcher, is a student at DeVry University and uses prosthetics or a wheelchair to get around. He is also a single father of three boys and lives in an East Harlem housing project. Mr. Trowe, 24, grew up mostly in Southern California and is a graduate student in sociology at New York University, where he is also taking a photography class. He walks with two canes.

Mr. Trowe started documenting his friend's busy life, which includes weekends as Mr. Mitchell cares for his younger sons: Torrian, 8 and Ali, 10.

Mr. Mitchell recently started a podcast, "The Juggernaut Show," about living with disabilities. Because prosthetic legs can be painful to wear, and quite expensive, he is studying biomechanical engineering so he can invent comfortable, low-cost and easy-to-maintain prosthetic legs.Losing his own legs, he said, has motivated him to try to help others with disabilities.

"After a while it was like my disability became a gift," he said, "and I became more aware. You can make a difference by helping other people."

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'It Was Like My Disability Became a Gift'

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Adhiambo Mitchell lost both his legs in a car accident on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn almost 10 years ago. Nolan Ryan Trowe was partly paralyzed while cliff diving in Northern California in 2016. When they met last year, they bonded over a shared attitude toward their disabilities.

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In the aftermath, H&M chose a lawyer and company insider, Annie Wu, to lead a new four-person team at its Stockholm headquarters focused on global diversity and inclusiveness.

"We want to be held accountable," she said this week in her first interview since taking the job.

"We didn't recognize that in this now new age of transparency," she added, "what the brand stands for is super important to people."

Lost in Translation

Fast fashion companies, which specialize in low-priced, quickly produced clothing and have grown faster than the apparel industry as a whole for years, are under pressure to be more prolific and provocative as they sell across more borders.

H&M, which added 479 stores last year, now has more than 4,000 stores in dozens of countries. Inditex, the enormous parent company behind Zara, has more than 7,500 stores in 94 countries.

Zara said it produces 20,000 designs each year, 98 percent of them created in-house, all sent through multiple reviews before being offered for sale. But some of the outsourced designs have proved problematic.

When fashion is contracted out, "there's a lot less control, a lot less oversight and involvement from the company along every step of the process," said Felipe Caro, a business professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has spent years studying Zara.

Last year, critics complained that images of frogs on a Zara skirt resembled a cartoon character called Pepe, which was designated a hate symbol of the alt-right by the Anti-Defamation League.

The skirt was designed by an independent Spanish artist based in London. In a statement at the time, he said that the frogs had "no connection at all with anything related to hate, violence or discrimination."

Ricardo Cavolo, another artist who designed for the same collection, said in an email that the design process "was pretty fast." He spent two days at Zara's headquarters in Spain, creating paintings on denim that the company then reproduced without making any suggestions or changes, he said.

Supply chain experts urge more careful, decentralized vetting procedures that send designs through a central checkpoint at headquarters and also past gatekeepers in the country of sale.

Soon after shifting into her new role at H&M, Ms. Wu said, she visited South Africa, where the importance of soliciting local input quickly became clear.

"I thought I was very culturally aware," said Ms. Wu, who was born in Taiwan, grew up in New York and speaks Mandarin. "I learned so much more just by being in that office."

A Homogeneous Work Force

A few months ago, during a long day spent styling and photographing products for H&M's website, no one on the Stockholm set appeared to raise concerns about one more item to process, the hoodie with the offensive message, according to a person familiar with the shoot.

Critics said the garment might have been flagged if H&M's team was more diverse.

"It's so easy to avoid this kind of controversy," said Angel Sinclair, the founder of the advocacy group Models of Diversity. "If you care about being culturally sensitive, just be more culturally inclusive of talent and managers in the business."

H&M has more than 100,000 workers worldwide. But the fashion giant's board is entirely white. And retail experts said that much of the creative process takes place in and around its European home office, handled by young employees who are often oblivious to societal sensitivities in markets oceans away.

Ms. Wu, who reports directly to H&M's chief executive, Karl-Johan Persson, said she did not know the ethnic or racial backgrounds of the employees and contractors involved with the monkey hoodie. But an internal investigation of the incident - which she declined to discuss in detail - showed "how important awareness-raising is generally," she said.

"There are hundreds of steps of getting a product to market - it's never one point in time where we can say, 'It's your fault,' because there are teams at work on things, there are approval processes throughout," she said. "It's really hard to pinpoint when."

A Need for Speed

H&M and Zara used to stun the industry with their ability to move garments from design to store floor within weeks, when other retailers required more than half a year. But some brands can now perform the same feat much faster, while others, like Amazon and Adidas, are experimenting with on-demand manufacturing.

ASOS, an online fashion retailer, adds 4,500 new products to its website each week, according to a recent report from the Fung Global Retail & Technology research firm.

H&M, which has suffered a string of gloomy earnings reports and said this week that it is sitting on $4.3 billion in unsold goods, plans to invest in its supply chain to make it "faster, more flexible and more responsive."

"This is a low-tech, low-profit, low-growth industry that is being turned upside down," said John S. Thorbeck, an expert on retail supply chains. "Each of these companies would rather get something as rapidly to market as possible and retract a mistake."

Prioritizing speed means fewer checks and balances, said Adheer Bahulkar, a retail expert at the consulting firm A. T. Kearney.

"When you have two hours to approve a line versus two months, things go unnoticed," he said.

Bulwarks Against Bad Taste

Fast fashion has produced tone-deaf products for more than a decade, passing them off as a rounding error given the enormous volume of items the companies generate each year.

But more shoppers have begun calling on retailers to take a stand on social and political issues, such as sexism and gun control.

"These incidents are happening in a climate where marginalized communities are feeling more targeted, more under attack, so they're more in tune with these issues," said Melissa Garlick, a lawyer with the Anti-Defamation League. "Fashion companies have a responsibility to the public and to consumers to ensure that they're being sensitive in designing and marketing products - they have to be aware of what lines not to cross."

Several companies have pledged to diversify hiring, retool corporate guidelines and initiate other measures to prevent mistakes from going out the door.

Zara now uses an algorithm created to scan designs for insensitive or offensive features. In 2016, it hired a committee of diversity officers. Diversity and inclusion training has become mandatory for all new employees.

At H&M, Ms. Wu said she was organizing workshops to help employees recognize unconscious bias and was also reaching out to anti-racism groups and other organizations. In North America, H&M is planning to hire a New York-based diversity manager.

Ms. Wu's first two months on the job have yielded commitment from executives but, so far, few specific measures. She acknowledged that raising awareness is not "the Band-Aid" that can fix all of H&M's problems.

"We are a very large corporation, and mistakes do happen," she said. "It starts with us scrutinizing all of these different processes."

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To Avoid More Racist Hoodies, Retailers Seek Diversity

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In the aftermath, H&M chose a lawyer and company insider, Annie Wu, to lead a new four-person team at its Stockholm headquarters focused on global diversity and inclusiveness. "We want to be held accountable," she said this week in her first interview since taking the job.

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BODA, Central African Republic - Tyler Pager is the winner of Nicholas Kristof's 2018 "Win-A-Trip" contest to take a university student on a reporting trip. Mr. Pager, 22, graduated from Northwestern University and is now studying at Oxford University. He and Mr. Kristof recently traveled to the Central African Republic, a small, land-locked country in the middle of the continent, and this is the first of Mr. Pager's dispatches.

As rebel forces burned his house to the ground, Teddy Sanguibe narrowly escaped death by jumping through a window. Although he has burn scars around his upper leg from the day he fled his home, he managed to survive the conflict that broke out here in 2012 relatively unscathed compared to many of his family and friends.

His grandfather, aunt and two brothers were killed by the Seleka, a predominantly Muslim militia that led violent campaigns throughout the country. Seleka forces also captured Mr. Sanguibe's father, who worked as a guard at a local gas station, and tried to recruit him. He refused, so the militia tortured him. Mr. Sanguibe watched helplessly as soldiers whipped and stabbed his father with bayonets. The Seleka forces eventually freed him after the family paid a ransom of roughly $500, a large sum for a family making just a few dollars a day.

I met Mr. Sanguibe, now 19, at the one-story school he attends. He and most of his peers cannot afford textbooks, and the school has only two functioning classrooms, with walls blanketed by graffiti, to serve its nearly 800 students. In the third classroom, broken desks and litter lie strewn across the cement floor, rendering the room unusable. Only two of the 14 teachers receive a salary, and the remaining 12 are volunteers, parents with no formal training.

My visit to Mr. Sanguibe's school could easily have left me feeling discouraged about the lack of resources and opportunity for kids like him. The lottery of birth allowed me to go to good schools and then on to college, where I've had access to hundreds of books and professors in every discipline.

But instead, Mr. Sanguibe's resilience left me inspired. Even with all the obstacles he has faced and the violence he has witnessed, he spoke enthusiastically about returning to school after the fighting dissipated. His favorite subjects are French and math, and he wants to learn English one day. Right now, his school doesn't have anyone to teach it. He hopes to become a teacher.

Mr. Sanguibe's thirst for knowledge underscores the fact that access to education should be a right, not a privilege. Instead of hiding in his home from armed forces trying to kill him, Mr. Sanguibe spends his days in the classroom, and because of it, he has renewed hope for his future.

His story also serves to remind us that we can - and should - help those around the world who struggle to obtain an education. It's easy to fixate on the problems in our backyard or the latest political scandal in Washington, but we can't ignore Mr. Sanguibe and his fellow students. This is especially true because there are low-cost ways to invest in education around the world.

On average, education costs $1.25 a day per child in developing countries, according to the Global Partnership for Education. The Global Peace Index estimated that the economic cost of violence across the world in 2016 was $14.3 trillion, and research shows education promotes social cohesion and peace.

So, for less than a cup of coffee, we can support organizations that work to help students like Mr. Sanguibe get school books and help schools like his hire more trained teachers. Extra funds may even allow Mr. Sanguibe to learn English or enable his school to repair its broken classroom.

The sad reality is that Mr. Sanguibe and his classmates are among the lucky ones. Most children don't attend school here, Boniface Katta, Boda's mayor, told us. Boda has only six schools to serve its population of just over 20,000 people, so in some cases, a teacher will have 250 to 300 students in a classroom. Most teachers are volunteers - the central government pays only six teachers' salaries in Boda. Mr. Katta explained that even during his childhood under the dictatorship of Jean-Bédel Bokassa, many more students learned to read and write than are learning now.

While securing peace remains his top priority, Mr. Katta warned about the pitfalls of neglecting education. He fears that if the country's children don't go to school, places like Bangui, the country's capital, and Boda could relapse into violence again when those children grow up uneducated and face few job prospects.

Resolving the continuing political conflicts in the Central African Republic may be far-off, but it's clear that education is a worthwhile investment, right now, to promote lasting peace.

"I believe in education," Mr. Sanguibe told me. "Education can improve my situation."

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Opinion | After a Narrow Escape From Death, School Beckons

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BODA, Central African Republic - Tyler Pager is the winner of Nicholas Kristof's 2018 "Win-A-Trip" contest to take a university student on a reporting trip. Mr. Pager, 22, graduated from Northwestern University and is now studying at Oxford University.

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Duke's Coach K: "You're not going to believe how lucky you are" - CBS News

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Mike Krzyzewski, who's led Duke basketball since 1980, shares his historic path to becoming the most winning coach in Division I college basketball

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Canada, for instance, is predictably cluttered with hockey players, but significant concentrations also pop up in Sweden, Russia and the Czech Republic. The United States accounts for many of the top players in women's golf, but South Korea has just as many. Baseball stars are generously sprinkled across the southern United States but the postage-stamp-size Dominican Republic isn't far behind. In women's tennis, we see a dispersal around Europe and the United States, then a dazzling, concentrated burst in Moscow.

The pattern keeps repeating: general scatterings accompanied by a number of dense, unexpected crowdings. The pattern is obviously not random, nor can it be fully explained by gene pools or climate or geopolitics or Nike's global marketing budget. Rather, the pattern looks like algae starting to grow on an aquarium wall, telltale clumps that show something is quietly alive, communicating, blooming. It's as though microscopic spores have floated around the atmosphere in the jet stream and taken root in a handful of fertile places.

A quick analysis of this talent map reveals some splashy numbers: for instance, the average woman in South Korea is more than six times as likely to be a professional golfer as an American woman. But the interesting question is, what underlying dynamic makes these people so spectacularly unaverage in the first place? What force is causing those from certain far-off places to become, competitively speaking, superior?

In early December, I traveled to the heart of one of those breeding grounds, the Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow. Russia is the birthplace of a group of athletes who have affected the World Tennis Association rankings in the same way that zebra mussels have affected the Great Lakes - which is to say, pretty much clogged them. The invasion happened swiftly: at the end of 2001, Russia had one woman (Elena Dementieva) in the W.T.A. Tour's top 30. By the start of 2007, Russian women accounted for fully half of the top 10 (Dementieva, Maria Sharapova, Svetlana Kuznetzova, Nadia Petrova and Dinara Safina) and 12 of the top 50. Not to mention 15-year-old Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, who was the International Tennis Federation's No. 1-ranked junior and who was joined in the top 500 by five countrywomen also named Anastasia.

Spartak, usually preceded in the tennis press by the word "famous" or "legendary," had produced three of the top six Russians (Dementieva, Safina and Anastasia Myskina), along with Anna Kournikova, now retired. Tournament pairings regularly became all-Spartak affairs, most memorably the 2004 French Open final, Myskina over Dementieva, the continuation of a rivalry the two began at age 7. To put Spartak's success in talent-map terms: this club, which has one indoor court, has achieved eight year-end top-20 women's rankings over the last three years. During that same period, the entire United States has achieved seven.

"They're like the Russian Army," says Nick Bollettieri, the founder of the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Fla., and the former coach to Sharapova, Andre Agassi and other top-ranked players. "They just keep on coming."

Getting to Spartak, however, takes more than a talent map; it's not located on any real maps. Fortunately, help arrived in the form of Elena Rybina, a chain- smoking, speed-talking translator who worked part-time for the Russian Tennis Federation and who possessed a fast-alternating combination of film noir toughness and childlike giddiness that I took as the quintessence of modern Russia.

"I learned my English listening to music, like Elton John," she said. " 'Crocodile Rocks'! I love it!"

We rode the subway half an hour northeast to Sokolniki Park and started walking. And walking. Sokolniki is almost twice the size of Central Park, considerably less central and only vaguely parklike. It's basically a huge forest of birch and elm trees filled with a disconcertingly energetic population of stray dogs. We walked past an abandoned chess club, an abandoned amusement park, an abandoned factory and the smashed onion dome of what appeared to be an abandoned church.

"It is very beautiful in summer," Rybina assured me as we passed a pond frosted with green scum. "But Spartak, I must warn you, is not so nice."

"What do you mean?"

Rybina lighted a Davidoff cigarette and raised her eyebrow into a Gothic arch. "Spartak is not exactly like a palace."

We turned a corner, followed a road for a few hundred yards and saw a loose assortment of peaked buildings and shotgun shacks that resembled a dilapidated ski village. Windows were dim cataracts of warped plastic, paint was scabbed and peeling and the buildings were frescoed in a rich coat of grime. A glaze of ice coated the club's 15 outdoor clay courts, as it did for six months of the year. A beat-up 18-wheeler lent the scene a postnuclear, "Mad Max" vibe. The only bright color came from the rainbow sheen of diesel fuel in the puddles.

Rybina shrugged indifferently and lighted another Davidoff. We walked past the inexplicably manned guard post, past an A-frame that appeared to be a storehouse for scrap metal and toward a larger structure that resembled a greenhouse. We ducked through a low door and onto the court. The surface was worn down in frequently trodden spots, like cathedral steps. Two wooden sticks nudged the sagging net futilely toward regulation height. The fluorescent lights buzzed. "We are lucky," Rybina whispered. "The heat is working." When it doesn't, the kids play in their coats.

The class, called the Little Group, had already arrived. They wore heavy coats and toted their tennis rackets in backpacks, sports duffels and plastic grocery bags. At first glance, they looked like a standard-issue assortment of 5- to 7-year-olds: there was Denis, the handsome blond in the blue turtleneck; Alexandra, the lanky towhead in the green T-shirt; Gunda, the smiley ponytailed girl in the silver shoes; and Vova, the revved-up boy with the Asiatic eyes who was the class's only 4-year-old. There were 12 students in all. They had been coming to Spartak three times a week since September; by now they'd been on the court perhaps 40 times. As the lesson began, a few of them made their final preparations, reaching into their bags for what appeared to be their good luck charms: a tidy gallery of stuffed dinosaurs, bunnies and pandas formed on the wall behind the base line.

The coach, 77-year-old Larisa Preobrazhenskaya (pronounced pray-oh-brah-ZHEN-skya), stood at the sideline, watching. She wore a red-and-white tracksuit and a knowing, amused expression. Preobrazhenskaya was Spartak's most renowned youth coach, but she wore her authority lightly, radiating a grandmotherly twinkle behind hooded eyes. She'd been quite a player in her day, the 1955 Soviet singles champion. She still looked athletic, sauntering around the court with a John Wayne limp caused by a sore hip. The parents huddled by the door, watchful and silent.

The students formed a circle on one side of the net and started to stretch. I watched, scoping for telltale signs of überkinder superiority, but saw nothing of the sort. The Little Group proceeded to hustle energetically through a 15-minute set of calisthenics worthy of Jack LaLanne: jumping jacks, hops, crab walking, bear walking, skipping, sidestepping, zigzagging through a line of orange cones. I was half expecting them to pull out medicine balls, when they actually did pull out medicine balls, passing them back and forth earnestly like so many extras in a Rocky movie.

"All the motions," Preobrazhenskaya would tell me. "It is important to do everything, every practice."

The Little Group paired off with rackets and began imitatsiya - rallying with an imaginary ball. They bounced lightly from foot to foot, they turned, they swung, the invisible balls flew. Preobrazhenskaya roamed the court like a garage mechanic tuning an oversize engine: realigning a piston here, tightening a flywheel there. Several times, she grasped their small arms and piloted their bodies through the stroke. Thus the lesson began, and with it the unspoken implication: the great, rusty Spartak machine was coming to life, carrying its cargo of mini-geniuses another step closer toward inevitable glory.

As I pictured the scale of the David and Goliath phenomenon this unlikely scene embodied, the question arose: how does Spartak do it?

Explanations were not in short supply. I'd heard plenty from American tennis coaches, a nicely bulleted list that included a Slavic gene pool that produces a seemingly inexhaustible supply of tall, fast, strong kids; the economic and cultural gateway that opened with the 1991 collapse of the Communist government; the former Russian president Boris Yeltsin's enthusiastic (if at times klutzy) love for the sport; and the potent catnip effect of Kournikova, the former top 10 player who, though she never won a singles tournament, provided an escape-hungry generation of girls (and, more important, their parents) with vivid proof that tennis success equaled glamour, fortune, fame.

The Russians, when I asked them, chimed in with explanations of their own, including the lifelong commitment of coaches like Preobrazhenskaya; the superior biomechanical techniques taught at the Moscow Institute of Physical Culture, where many of Russia's top coaches train; and (in a nostalgic burst of cold war trash talking) the intrinsic softness of the West.

Watching the Little Group play, I, too, felt a strong urge to bellow my share of theories: it must be the medicine balls! The discipline! The lack of Game Boys! I was particularly struck by the kids' obvious enjoyment of the lesson. One of the mothers told Preobrazhenskaya that her daughter, Gunda, had awakened early that day, unable to sleep. "Today is my day with Larisa Dmitrievna!" Gunda had said. "It is today!"

In sum, there are a lot of explanations, some better than others. For instance, is the Russian gene pool really that innately superior to that of Ukraine or Slovenia or Southern California? If Kournikova inspired so many Russians, then where were the German stars inspired by Steffi Graf? But ultimately the theories fall short because they don't explain the principles underpinning Spartak's success. Indeed, seeing the place up close made me wonder if there were any principles. Spartak radiates the glow of happenstance, the diamond in the trash heap. (This impression is apparently shared by the Russian Tennis Federation, which has been content to allow Spartak to remain with its single indoor court.)

So even here, at the core of one of the globe's brightest talent blooms, the question of that talent's source remains enigmatically tangled, perhaps as much of a mystery to those who nurture these athletes as it is to the rest of us. It's enough to make you wish for a set of X-ray glasses that could reveal how these invisible forces of culture, history, genes, practice, coaching and belief work together to form that elemental material we call talent - to wish that science could come up with a way to see talent as a substance as tangible as muscle and bone, and whose inner workings we could someday attempt to understand.

As it turns out, that's exactly what's happening.

I was peering inside an incubator at the Laboratory of Developmental Neurobiology at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. The incubator, about the size of a small refrigerator, held shiny wire racks on which sat several rows of petri dishes containing clear pink liquid. Inside the liquid were threadlike clumps of mouse neurons, which were wired to platinum electrodes and covered with a white, pearlescent substance called myelin. Within that myelin, according to new research, lies the seed of talent.

"In neurology, myelin is being seen as an epiphany," Douglas Fields, the lab's director, had told me earlier. "This is a new dimension that may help us understand a great deal about how the brain works, especially about how we gain skills."

The myelin in question didn't look particularly epiphanic, which is understandable since it would normally be employed by mice for sniffing out food or navigating a maze. Neurologists theorize, however, that this humble-looking material is the common link between the Spartak kids, the Dominican baseball players and all the other blooms on the talent map - a link all the more interesting for the fact that few outside this branch of neurology currently know much about myelin. In fact, as Fields pointed out, if indirectly, the talent map wasn't technically the most accurate name for my hypothetical landscape. It should be called the myelin map.

"I would predict that South Korean women golfers have more myelin, on average, than players from other countries," Fields said. "They've got more in the right parts of the brain and for the right muscle groups, and that's what allows them to optimize their circuitry. The same would be true for any group like that."

"Tiger Woods?" I asked.

"Definitely Tiger Woods," he said. "That guy's got a lot of myelin."

Fields, 53, is a sinewy man with a broad smile and a jaunty gait. A former biological oceanographer who studied shark nervous systems, he now runs a six-person, seven-room lab outfitted with hissing canisters, buzzing electrical boxes and tight bundles of wires and hoses. The place has the feel of a tidy, efficient ship. In addition, Fields has the sea captain's habit of making dramatic moments sound matter-of-fact. The more exciting something is, the more mundane he makes it sound. As he was telling me about the six-day climb of Yosemite's 3,000-foot El Capitan he made two summers back, I asked what it felt like to sleep while hanging from a rope thousands of feet above the ground. "It's actually not that different," he said, his expression so unchanging that he might have been discussing a trip to the grocery store. "You adapt."

Fields reached into the incubator, extracted one of the pink petri dishes and slid it beneath a microscope. "Have a peek," he said quietly.

I leaned in and saw a tangled bunch of spaghetti-like threads, which Fields informed me were nerve fibers. The myelin was harder to see, a faintly undulating fringe on the edge of the neurons. I blinked, refocused, struggled to imagine how this stuff might help my golf game.

Fields proceeded to explain that myelin is a sausage-shaped layer of dense fat that wraps around the nerve fibers - and that its seeming dullness is, in fact, exactly the point. Myelin works the same way that rubber insulation works on a wire, keeping the signal strong by preventing electrical impulses from leaking out. This myelin sheath is, basically, electrical tape, which is one reason that myelin, along with its associated cells, was classified as glia (Greek for "glue"). Its very inertness is why the first brain researchers named their new science after the neuron instead of its insulation. They were correct to do so: neurons can indeed explain almost every class of mental phenomenon-memory, emotion, muscle control, sensory perception and so on. But there's one question neurons can't explain: why does it take so long to learn complex skills?

"Everything neurons do, they do pretty quickly; it happens with the flick of a switch," Fields said. "But flicking switches is not how we learn a lot of things. Getting good at piano or chess or baseball takes a lot of time, and that's what myelin is good at."

To the surprise of many neurologists, it turns out this electrical tape is quietly interacting with the neurons. Through a mechanism that Fields and his research team described in a 2006 paper in the journal Neuron, the little sausages of myelin get thicker when the nerve is repeatedly stimulated. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates and the faster and more accurately the signals travel. As Fields puts it, "The signals have to travel at the right speed, arrive at the right time, and myelination is the brain's way of controlling that speed."

It adds up to a two-part dynamic that is elegant enough to please Darwin himself: myelin controls the impulse speed, and impulse speed is crucial. The better we can control it, the better we can control the timing of our thoughts and movements, whether we're running, reading, singing or, perhaps more to the point, hitting a wicked topspin backhand.

Back at Spartak, the Little Group lined up outside the service box, rackets at the ready. Preobrazhenskaya stood at the net, a shopping cart of balls at her hip. She waited for silence, then started: forehand, backhand, back to the end of the line. One by one, the kids took their swings - to my eye, pretty nice-looking swings. But not to hers. Preobrazhenskaya frequently stopped them, had them do it over. More follow-through. More turn. Watch. Feel.

Pravil'no, she said. Correct.

Molodets. Good job.

If Preobrazhenskaya's approach were boiled down to one word (and it frequently was), that word would be tekhnika - technique. This is enforced by iron decree: none of her students are permitted to play in a tournament for the first three years of study. It's a notion that I don't imagine would fly with American parents, but none of the Russian parents questioned it for a second. "Technique is everything," Preobrazhenskaya told me later, smacking a table with Khrushchev-like emphasis, causing me to jump and reconsider my twinkly-grandma impression of her. "If you begin playing without technique, it is big mistake. Big, big mistake!"

I thought of something Dr. Fields had said: "You have to understand that every skill exists as a circuit, and that circuit has to be formed and optimized." To put it in Spartak terms, myelin is a slave to tekhnika - and so, in turn, was the Little Group. Preobrazhenskaya didn't instruct them on tactics or positioning or offer any psychological tips; rather, every gesture and word was funneled to teaching the elemental task of hitting the ball clean and hard. Which they did, one by one. A few of the kids had located that magical-seeming burst of leverage that makes the ball explode off the strings with a distinctive thwock.

"What do good athletes do when they train?" George Bartzokis, a professor of neurology at U.C.L.A., had told me. "They send precise impulses along wires that give the signal to myelinate that wire. They end up, after all the training, with a super-duper wire - lots of bandwidth, high-speed T-1 line. That's what makes them different from the rest of us."

As the Little Group continued its lesson, I found myself picturing myelin. I'd seen a highly magnified image on one of Fields's computer screens, and it looked like a deep-sea photograph: bright colors against a field of black. The oligodendrocytes - oligos, in lab lingo, are the cells that form the myelin - resembled glowing green squids, their tentacles reaching toward a set of slender nerve fibers. Once they seize hold, each tentacle begins to curl and extend, as the oligo squeezes the cytoplasm out of itself until only a cellophane-like sheet of membrane remains. That membrane proceeds to wrap over the nerve fiber with machinelike precision, spiraling down to create the distinctive sausage shape, tightening itself over the fiber like a threaded nut.

"It's one of the most intricate and exquisite cell-cell interactions there is," Fields said. "And it's slow. Each one of these wraps can go around a nerve fiber 40 or 50 times, and that can take days or weeks. Imagine doing that to an entire neuron, then an entire circuit with thousands of nerves."

So each time Alexandra or Denis or Gunda swings the racket properly - or, for that matter, each time we practice a chip shot or a guitar chord or a chess opening - those tiny green tentacles sense it and reach toward the thousands of related nerve fibers. They grasp, they squish, they make another wrap, thickening the sheath. They build a little more insulation along the wire, which adds a bit more bandwidth and precision to the circuit, which translates into an infinitesimal bit more skill and speed. Myelin is both practice and mastery, cause and effect. As Bartzokis had said: "Myelin is our Achilles strength, and it's our Achilles' heel. It's what makes us human."

All this myelin talk, combined with jet lag, left me feeling slightly changed. I wandered Moscow as if I were seeing the world through myelin-colored glasses. Emerald-green squids and snowy white sausages were everywhere I looked. A TV highlight of a Ronaldinho goal? Pure myelin! That violinist playing Mozart in the subway? What incredible oligodendrocytes that guy must have! A poster for the 2008 Olympics? An international myelin cultivation contest! My repeated ability to get lost within a few blocks of my hotel? Myelin again! (Rather, my lack of it.)

It also left me thinking about the clusters on the talent map. Specifically, wondering whether these places quietly possess myelin-accelerating factors: i.e., forces and conditions that promote what Fields would call "circuit optimization." Might those factors help explain the success of these superior athletes?

The rise of the South Korean golfers, who won almost one-third of the events last year on the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour, has usually been explained by citing two factors: the country's formidably driven parents, and the rock-star status of Se Ri Pak, who has won 23 tournaments and is one of the nation's biggest sports celebrities. Yet the logic of this formula has always been confounded by a puzzling fact: South Korea happens to be a nation where it is singularly difficult for a young person to play golf. There are only 200 golf courses in the entire country, compared with 17,000 in the United States.

Viewed through the prism of myelin, however, the situation makes more sense. The lack of public courses sends golf-hungry parents and kids to South Korea's abundant driving ranges, which are Elysian fields of myelination compared to the relative randomness of course play. Were South Korea to increase access to courses, it could be argued, the country might wind up producing fewer top golfers.

Then there's the Dominican Republic, which has historically produced more Major League Baseball players than any other country outside the United States. Conventional wisdom holds that this remarkable record arises from the fruitful collision of a baseball-mad culture and grinding poverty. The equation is undeniably true, but it's also true of several nearby countries that don't achieve a fraction of the Dominican Republic's success.

There is one way, however, in which the Dominican Republic is historically unique. It's the first place where Major League Baseball teams built training academies - two dozen of them, starting in the mid-1970s. While academies provide players with obvious advantages like good nutrition and housing, not to mention regular exposure to scouts, they also provide a daily structure of drills and practices that, like the South Korean driving ranges, would presumably be a ripe environment for building myelin.

The most impressive myelin collection I encountered during my Moscow trip belonged to a woman encased in a sheepskin coat, fur-trimmed boots and a fuzzy white hat. Elena Dementieva, 25, represented the acme of the Spartak product. She stood 5-foot-11, weighed 141 pounds and emanated a vibration of such unearthly physical perfection that crowds parted as she moved down the sidewalk. Seeing Dementieva walk into the Russian Army sports club, where she trains between tournaments, I flashed to an image of the Spartak kids and felt a brief parental pang of disbelief. Such a transformation seemed impossible.

Sitting down on a set of courtside bleachers (level gaze, warm laugh, no hint of divahood), Dementieva told her story. Surprisingly, she had been rejected by several other clubs as too slow before landing at Spartak. She spoke fondly, if a little vaguely, of her days at the club: dodging stray dogs, washing dirty tennis balls in the sink, doing homework on the long subway ride. Her first instructor was the renowned Rausa Islanova (the mother of Dinara Safina and of the men's 2000 United States Open winner, Marat Safin), who was known for her strictness and her elimination system in which students competed for a constantly shrinking number of slots. Dementieva's group started with 25 students; within a year it was down to 7. Of those 7 kids, 4 became world-class players (Myskina, Kournikova and Safin were the other 3).

"Spartak was good for me, I think," Dementieva said, squinting as if she were peering into her hazy past. "I always had a feeling that I was going forward, getting better technique."

When Dementieva took the court to practice, she began with a set of those Jack LaLanne-style warm-ups - sidesteps, jumping jacks, high steps. She looked as if she were still a member of the Little Group, so much so that, watching from the bleachers, I was momentarily unsure whether it was her or some beginner. Dementieva did imitatsiya; she practiced each stroke in slow motion. Then, when her male sparring partner showed up, she proceeded to hit the ball so hard, accurately and consistently that it seemed she was playing a sport I'd never seen before. Again and again, her body rose to the ball in a twist of ballistic force, the power betrayed only by the snakelike rise of her thick blond braid. The ball hissed.

Trying to wrap my head around the metamorphic process through which a too-slow kid could become . . . her, well, it left me utterly at a loss, able only to fumble for such useful scientific terms as "magic" and "miracle."

Fortunately, there are more rational people to consult, and perhaps the most rational is K. Anders Ericsson, who has devoted much of his life to studying phenomena like Dementieva and Spartak. Ericsson, a native of Sweden and a professor of psychology at Florida State University, is co-editor of "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," published in 2006. If talented people can be thought of as a singular species, then Ericsson is its John J. Audubon, and the handbook is his painstakingly annotated field guide.

The handbook runs to 901 pages, so, in the interest of time, allow me to sum up. Every talent, according to Ericsson, is the result of a single process: deliberate practice, which he defines as "individuals engaging in a practice activity (typically designed by teachers) with full concentration on improving some aspect of their performance." In a moment of towering simplification, "The Handbook" distills its lesson to a formula known as the Power Law of Learning: T = a P-b . (Don't ask.) A slightly more useful translation: Deliberate practice means working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback and focusing ruthlessly on improving weaknesses.

"It feels like you're constantly stretching yourself into an uncomfortable area beyond what you can quite do," Ericsson told me. It's hard to sustain deliberate practice for long periods of time, which may help explain why players like Jimmy Connors succeeded with seemingly paltry amounts of practice while their competitors were hitting thousands of balls each day. As the tennis commentator Mary Carillo told me, "He barely practiced an hour a day, but it was the most intense hour of your life."

Ericsson also discusses the Ten-Year Rule, an intriguing finding dating to 1899, which shows that even the most talented individual requires a decade of committed practice before reaching world-class level. (Even a prodigy like the chess player Bobby Fischer put in nine hard years before achieving his grandmaster status at age 16.) While this rule is often used to backdate the ideal start of training (in tennis, girls peak physically at around 17, so they ought to start by 7; boys peak later, so 9 is O.K.), the Ten-Year Rule has more universal implications. Namely, it implies that all skills are built using the same fundamental mechanism, and that the mechanism makes physiological demands from which no one is exempt.

This is not to suggest that the only difference between an average Joe and Michael Jordan is a few thousand hours of deliberate practice. Almost all of the scientists I spoke with agreed that inheritance is a huge factor in potential, if perhaps not in quite the way we've commonly assumed. (Perhaps, as George Bartzokis suggests, Jordan's greatest natural gift was his powerful oligodendrocytes.)

All in all, Ericsson's theory sounds logical and appealing, but part of me rises up in rebellion. What about geniuses? What about young Mozart's famous ability to transcribe entire scores on a single hearing? What about Shakespeare or Leonardo or those 14-year-old Ph.D. candidates? What about savants, who walk up to the piano or a Rubik's cube and are magically brilliant?

T = a P-b would be the reply. In his 1999 book, "Genius Explained," Michael Howe of the University of Exeter speculates that Mozart studied some 3,500 hours of music with his instructor father by his sixth birthday, a number that places his musical memory into the realm of impressive but obtainable party tricks. Savants, it is pointed out, excel within narrow domains that feature clear, logical rules (classical piano, math, occasionally art - as opposed to, say, jazz clarinet). Furthermore, savants typically possess prior exposure to those domains, such as listening to music around the home. Savants' true expertise, the research suggests, is in their ability to practice obsessively, even when it doesn't look as if they're practicing. As Ericsson succinctly put it, "There's no cell type that geniuses have that the rest of us don't."

So let's return to the initial question: how does Spartak do it? If the new science is right and myelination is to talent as photosynthesis is to plant growth, then Spartak makes it abundantly clear that photosynthesis alone is never enough; you also need soil, water, air, sunlight, luck. The question becomes, which variables are helping Spartak's myelin grow to such riotous abundance? Four factors stand above the rest:

1. Driven Parents. The hunger and ambition of Russian parents is uniquely strong, particularly when one considers how hard life is in Russia right now and also that the patron saint of Russian tennis parents is the ex-Siberian oil-field worker Yuri Sharapov, who came to America with less than $1,000 and his 7-year-old daughter, Maria, who now earns an estimated $30 million a year in endorsements. On the other hand, while they are intense, Russian parents aren't all that different a group from the parents in Serbia, the Czech Republic or Mission Viejo, Calif.

2. Early Starts. The kids here start young and specialize early. They are tennis players, and not much else competes for their attention (only a handful owned video games, according to my informal poll), and they also benefit from a Russian culture that's built to select athletes and shield them from academic pressures. Incidentally, there were indeed elite athletic genes floating around at Spartak: Alexandra's parents were famous figure skaters, and another kid was Myskina's cousin. So good genes probably play a role, or (just as likely, to my mind) there's a beneficial effect to growing up in an environment of working athletes.

3. Powerful, Consistent Coaches. Most tennis coaches I saw were treated with a respect reserved for university professors. The tennis clubs I visited were patrolled by a squad of Brezhnev lookalikes who offered advice that seemed hewed from stone. Their institutional specialty is biomechanics, but the point is perhaps not so much in the details of that coaching, but rather in the passion, rigor and uniformity with which that coaching is delivered. This, incidentally, is the opposite of the entrepreneurial system in which many American tennis coaches operate, as they often compete with one another, relying on their ability to sell their services to sometimes anxious parents. American coaches have to be unique to survive; Russian coaches are mostly the same.

4. Cultural Toughness. As poets have pointed out, the intrinsic hardiness of the Russian woman is legendary. Historically, this might have something to do with the hardships of life under Communism and the loss of 11 million soldiers in World War II. Whatever the cause, the immediate effect is a tangible mental toughness and a work ethic second to none. After all, at Spartak, they don't speak of "playing" tennis. The verb they like to use is borot'sya - to struggle.

If I gave in to the uncontrollable Ericssonian urge to put Spartak's success into a formula, it would read something like:

Intense Parents + Young Kids + Rigorous Technique + Toughness = Talent

Alongside it, we could write another equation:

Deliberate Practice + Time = Myelin = Talent

But in the end, as I look around the court, it can't come down to a formula because formulas are rational, and whatever Spartak is, it isn't entirely rational. It's a bunch of kids in a dumpy club who are burning to be here, for whom every swing is meaningful, who wake up in the morning and say, "Today is my day with Larisa Dmitrievna!" It's deeply and purposefully irrational, because it's built on a love of sport and country that can't be explained but holds everything together anyway. Spartak is not science; what happens here is not analogous to what happens in a factory or a laboratory. It's closer to what happens in a garden, a forgotten, rundown garden that somehow produces marvelous tomatoes, summer after summer.

Thwock . . . thwock . . . thwock . . . thwock.

The Little Group was smacking it now, the balls zipping over the net and ricocheting off the far wall. Preobrazhenskaya, the gardener, watched with a smile, occasionally correcting a backswing or a grip, nudging the kids on with a murmur of praise and instruction: "Clever boy." "Good girl." "No." "Correct." "Not there." "That's it."

On my last day at Spartak, I met one more player. Her name was Kseniya; she was 5, and she'd come for a tryout. Her parents, an upscale pair, ducked through the low door and asked Larisa Dmitrievna if she might have a moment. Kseniya had black pigtails held in place with pink ribbons. She wore new silver tennis shoes. She walked solemnly, one step behind her parents, carrying a tiny pink racket. Something in the precision of her walk, in her air of self-possession, reminded me of my daughter Zoe.

Preobrazhenskaya put her arm on Kseniya's shoulder and walked her to the corner of the court, out of the parents' earshot. The girl looked up into the coach's face. "She has good eyes," Preobrazhenskaya said later.

Preobrazhenskaya rotated Kseniya's arms in a wide circle, feeling for looseness in her muscles, which she regarded as a good sign. Preobrazhenskaya then showed Kseniya a new tennis ball, and told her what was about to happen. Kseniya listened closely, and nodded. Then the coach tossed the ball lightly, and Kseniya, her small body coming alive at once, ran to catch it.

* * *
FOOTNOTES
1 In September, as part of an ongoing effort to revive American tennis, the United States Tennis Association plans to centralize its player development program at the Evert Tennis Academy in Boca Raton, Fla., a new complex that will feature 23 courts (14 lighted), dormitories, a state-of-theart video lounge and a staff of 30, including a mental-conditioning coach. Tuition with room and board will cost as much as $42,000 a year. By comparison, the Russian Tennis Federation's total youth-development budget is estimated to be between $300,000 and $400,000.

2 Timing is vital because neurons are binary: either they fire or they don't - no gray areas. Their firing depends solely on whether the incoming impulse is strong enough to exceed the neuron's threshold of activation. To explain the implications of this effect, Fields had me imagine a skill circuit in which two neurons need to combine their impulses to make a third, high-threshold neuron fire - for, say, a golf swing. In order to combine properly, those two incoming impulses must arrive at nearly exactly the same time - sort of like two people running at a heavy door to push it open. The time window turns out to be about four milliseconds, or roughly the time it takes a bee to flap its wings once. If the first two signals arrive more than four milliseconds apart, the door stays shut, the crucial third neuron doesn't fire and the golf ball soars into the rough (or, as I was reflexively picturing, Zoe swings and misses the purple ball). "Your brain has so many connections and possibilities that your genes can't code the neurons to time things so precisely," Fields said. "But you can build myelin to do it."

3 These studies shine a new light on the neuro-anatomist Marian C. Diamond's 1985 finding that the left, inferior parietal lobe of Albert Einstein's brain, though it had a typical number of neurons, had significantly more glial cells than her other samples, a study that neurologists at the time considered so meaningless as to be nearly comical but that now seems to make sense, bandwidth-wise.

4 The list of myelin-related pathologies is long and, Bartzokis believes, includes multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's as well as a wider range of conditions, like schizophrenia, dyslexia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism, all of which can be understood as disorders of impulse timing.

5 Venezuela is a more recent example of this phenomenon. In 1989, the Houston Astros opened the first of what are now nine major-league academies there, and a few years later, the number of Venezuelans in the big leagues started to rise. Since 1995, 125 Venezuelans have broken into Major League Baseball, 51 more than had appeared in all the years up to that point.

6 In children, myelin arrives in a series of waves, some of them determined by biological code, some of them dependent on activity. These waves last into young adulthood. Until this time, the brain is extraordinarily receptive to learning new skills. Though adults retain the ability to myelinate throughout life (thankfully, 5 percent of our oligos remain immature, ready to answer the call), anyone who has tried to learn a language or musical instrument late in life can testify that it costs a lot more time and sweat to build the requisite circuitry. The effortlessness is the first thing to go.

7 Replicating the Spartak system in the United States (or, for that matter, installing Dominican-style baseball academies or forcing young golfers to practice only at driving ranges) would likely not create a sudden wellspring of stars. The reasons that the United States is losing ground on the talent map have less to do with training mechanisms and more to do with bigger factors: a highly distractive youth culture, a focus on the glamour of winning rather than on the brickwork of building technique and a sporting environment that is gentler than those found in many of the world's harder corners.

"You can't keep breast-feeding them all the time," Robert Lansdorp, a tennis coach in Los Angeles, told me. "You've got to make them an independent thinker." Lansdorp, who is in his 60s, has coached Sharapova, along with the former No. 1-ranked players Pete Sampras, Tracy Austin and Lindsay Davenport, all three of whom grew up in the same area and played at the same run-of-the-mill tennis clubs near Los Angeles. "You don't need a fancy academy," he said. "You need fundamentals and discipline, and in this country nobody gives a damn about fundamentals and discipline." Lansdorp also mentioned that he'd visited Spartak last year to teach a clinic. "It was a pretty different place," he said. "But that Larisa, she sure knows her stuff."

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Canada, for instance, is predictably cluttered with hockey players, but significant concentrations also pop up in Sweden, Russia and the Czech Republic. The United States accounts for many of the top players in women's golf, but South Korea has just as many.

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To the Editor:
Re " Fine Lines Be Gone (at Least Temporarily) " (Me Time column, ThursdayStyles, March 1):

As an 88-year-old woman, I deeply resent the implication that my naturally lined face is something I should be ashamed of and need to fix. Since when, and by whose decree (the cosmetics industry, doctors whose specialty is plastic surgery), is it shameful and unbecoming to look your age?

In some societies the elderly are revered. I don't wish to be revered, only to be accepted as I am, for who I am, an 88-year-old woman who holds the wisdom of her years and looks it.

BETTY COHEN, PRINCETON, N.J.

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To the Editor: Re " Fine Lines Be Gone (at Least Temporarily) " (Me Time column, ThursdayStyles, March 1): As an 88-year-old woman, I deeply resent the implication that my naturally lined face is something I should be ashamed of and need to fix.

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Yale's Most Popular Class Ever: Happiness

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Yale's Most Popular Class Ever: Happiness

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Jennifer Chen, left, and Sean Guo are among the almost 1,200 students taking Laurie Santos's "Psychology and the Good Life," at Yale. The class was recently moved to Woolsey Hall, the university's concert venue, from Battell Chapel, which could only accommodate a crowd of 800. Credit... Monica Jorge for The New York Times

NEW HAVEN - On Jan. 12, a few days after registration opened at Yale for Psyc 157, Psychology and the Good Life, roughly 300 people had signed up. Within three days, the figure had more than doubled. After three more days, about 1,200 students, or nearly one-fourth of Yale undergraduates, were enrolled.

The course, taught by Laurie Santos, 42, a psychology professor and the head of one of Yale's residential colleges, tries to teach students how to lead a happier, more satisfying life in twice-weekly lectures.

"Students want to change, to be happier themselves, and to change the culture here on campus," Dr. Santos said in an interview. "With one in four students at Yale taking it, if we see good habits, things like students showing more gratitude, procrastinating less, increasing social connections, we're actually seeding change in the school's culture."

Dr. Santos speculated that Yale students are interested in the class because, in high school, they had to deprioritize their happiness to gain admission to the school, adopting harmful life habits that have led to what she called "the mental health crises we're seeing at places like Yale." A 2013 report by the Yale College Council found that more than half of undergraduates sought mental health care from the university during their time there.

"In reality, a lot of us are anxious, stressed, unhappy, numb," said Alannah Maynez, 19, a freshman taking the course. "The fact that a class like this has such large interest speaks to how tired students are of numbing their emotions - both positive and negative - so they can focus on their work, the next step, the next accomplishment."

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Prof. Laurie Santos delivering one of her twice-weekly lectures. She says the course aims to not only make individual students happier, but also to change the culture at Yale. Credit... Monica Jorge for The New York Times

Students have long requested that Yale offer a course on positive psychology, according to Woo-Kyoung Ahn, director of undergraduate studies in psychology, who said she was "blown away" by Dr. Santos's proposal for the class.

Administrators like Dr. Ahn expected significant enrollment for the class, but none anticipated it to be quite so large. Psychology and the Good Life, with 1,182 undergraduates currently enrolled, stands as the most popular course in Yale's 316-year history. The previous record-holder - Psychology and the Law - was offered in 1992 and had about 1,050 students, according to Marvin Chun, the Yale College dean. Most large lectures at Yale don't exceed 600.

Offering such a large class has come with challenges, from assembling lecture halls to hiring the 24 teaching fellows required. Because the psychology department lacked the resources to staff it fully, the fellows had to be drawn from places like Yale's School of Public Health and law school. And with so many undergraduates enrolled in a single lecture, Yale's hundreds of other classes - particularly those that conflict with Dr. Santos's - may have seen decreased enrollment.

At the start of the semester the class was divided between a live lecture in the 844-seat Battell Chapel, a historic place of worship on campus, converted to a lecture hall, and one or two smaller auditoriums where several hundred more students watched a live stream of Dr. Santos. After several weeks, the decision was made to move the lectures to Woolsey Hall, usually the site of events like symphony performances, which can accommodate the entire class.

The course focuses both on positive psychology - the characteristics that allow humans to flourish, according to Dr. Santos - and behavioral change, or how to live by those lessons in real life. Students must take quizzes, complete a midterm exam and, as their final assessment, conduct what Dr. Santos calls a "Hack Yo'Self Project," a personal self-improvement project.

Offering such a large course is not without challenges: It requires 24 teaching fellows drawn from various departments and may have driven down enrollment in other courses whose times conflict with it. Credit... Monica Jorge for The New York Times

Some students admit that they see the course as an opportunity to take a relaxed lecture with few requirements.

"I wouldn't have known about the course if not for word of mouth, but it's low-pressure, and maybe I'll learn a few tricks to having a less stressful life," said Riley Richmond, 22, a senior who enrolled in the class with several of his friends.

Charlotte Emerson, 18, a freshman in the course, says she worries some students will take advantage of the lack of accountability that comes with a lecture of this size. For example, Dr. Santos is not monitoring whether students complete weekly "rewirement" assignments, like performing acts of kindness and forming new social connections, Ms. Emerson said.

But while others might see easy credits, Dr. Santos refers to her course as the "hardest class at Yale": To see real change in their life habits, students have to hold themselves accountable each day, she said.

She hopes that the social pressures associated with taking a lecture with friends will push students to work hard without provoking anxiety about grades. Dr. Santos has encouraged all students to enroll in the course on a pass-fail basis, tying into her argument that the things Yale undergraduates often connect with life satisfaction - a high grade, a prestigious internship, a good-paying job - do not increase happiness at all.

"Scientists didn't realize this in the same way 10 or so years ago, that our intuitions about what will make us happy, like winning the lottery and getting a good grade - are totally wrong," Dr. Santos said.

College courses on positive psychology have a track record of attracting scores of students. At Harvard, about 900 students enrolled in a lecture titled Positive Psychology in 2006. What distinguishes Dr. Santos's course from the one at Harvard in 2006, she said, is that it also focuses on behavioral change.

Still, Dr. Santos says she does not plan to offer the course again. Dr. Ahn, of the psychology department, said, "Large courses can be amazing every once in a while, but it wouldn't be fair to other courses and departments to take all of their students away."

She added, "It causes conflict, and we can't afford to offer this every year in terms of teaching fellows and resources."

Dr. Santos said a multipart seminar-style series on the course material - filmed last year in her home and titled the Science of Well-Being - will soon be available for free on Coursera, an online education platform. For now, she is eager to see whether her teachings alter campus life.

"We have this moment where we can make a difference in Yale's culture, where students feel like they are part of a movement and fighting the good fight," she said.

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Yale's Most Popular Class Ever: Happiness (Published 2018)

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NEW HAVEN - On Jan. 12, a few days after registration opened at Yale for Psyc 157, Psychology and the Good Life, roughly 300 people had signed up. Within three days, the figure had more than doubled. After three more days, about 1,200 students, or nearly one-fourth of Yale undergraduates, were enrolled.

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Keep Your Head Up: How Smartphone Addiction Kills Manners and Mood

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Keep Your Head Up: How Smartphone Addiction Kills Manners and Mood

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Miss Lucas

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Credit Credit Kathy Willens/Associated Press

Let's play a game: The next time you're sitting among a group of friends or out on a date, measure how much time passes before someone grabs their phone to look at it.

How long can you last?

"If that happens, that's when dinner ends," said Judith Martin, the Washington Post writer whose Miss Manners column is syndicated to 200 newspapers a week.

"I don't think anyone would dare do that to me," she said.

Most of us don't have the authority that comes with 40 years of being Miss Manners, but no matter who you are it can be near impossible to pry anyone away from their mobile playthings. (Harder still: Are your friends or partner more into their smartphone than they are into you?)

The problem of looking at our devices nonstop is both social and physiological.

The average human head weighs between 10 and 12 pounds, and when we bend our neck to text or check Facebook, the gravitational pull on our head and the stress on our neck increases to as much as 60 pounds of pressure. That common position, pervasive among everyone from paupers to presidents, leads to incremental loss of the curve of the cervical spine. "Text neck" is becoming a medical issue that countless people suffer from, and the way we hang our heads has other health risks, too, according to a report published last year in The Spine Journal.

Posture has been proven to affect mood, behavior and memory, and frequent slouching can make us depressed, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. The way we stand affects everything from the amount of energy we have to bone and muscle development, and even the amount of oxygen our lungs can take in. Body language, perceptions of weakness versus power - it's all real.

And the remedy can be ridiculously simple: Just sit up.

Social psychologists like Amy Cuddy claim even standing in a confident posture, with your head up and shoulders back, can heighten testosterone and cortisol flow in the brain, preventing much of the above. So, why aren't we heeding these signs? It might be simple denial.

Some 75 percent of Americans believe their smartphone usage doesn't impact their ability to pay attention in a group setting, according to the Pew Research Center, and about a third of Americans believe that using phones in social settings actually contributes to the conversation.

But does it?

Etiquette experts and social scientists are adamantly united: Nope.

That "always-on" behavior that smartphones contribute to causes us to remove ourselves from our reality, experts said. And aside from the health consequences, if we're head down, our communication skills and manners are slumped, too. But, ironically, that might not be how most of us see ourselves.

"We think somehow that this antisocial behavior is not going to affect me," said Niobe Way, professor of applied psychology at New York University.

Ms. Way studies technology's role in shaping adolescent development. These head-down interactions take us away from the present, no matter what group we're in, she said. And it's not just a youth problem. It's ingrained, learned, copied and repeated, much of it from mimicking adults. When kids see their parents head down, they emulate that action. The result is a loss of nonverbal cues, which can stunt development.

"What's happening more and more is we're not talking to our children," Ms. Way said. "We put them in front of the tech when they're young, and when we're older, we're absorbed in our own tech."

You've seen it: Think of how some parents deal with screaming toddlers. "Here kid, take this iPhone and go to town," according to Ms. Way - not, "Let's talk this out, what seems to be the problem, son?'"

She added: "We think, 'Somehow my kids will know what's a good and bad interaction, they'll have empathy.' But when I go upstairs into my son's room and seven teens are all looking at their phones, none of them saying a word, there's all sorts of disengagement happening. It's not Facebook that's the problem, it's how we're using Facebook."

A study in 2010 found that adolescents ages 8 to 18 spent more than 7.5 hours a day consuming media. Since then, our digital addictions have continued to, in some ways, define our lives: In 2015, the Pew Research Center reported that 24 percent of teenagers are "almost constantly" online.

Adults aren't any better: Most adults spend 10 hours a day or more consuming electronic media, according to a Nielsen's Total Audience Report from last year.

The National Safety Council reports cellphone use makes drivers more accident prone than drunk driving, causing 1.6 million crashes annually, mostly from young people ages 18 to 20. One out of four accidents in the United States are caused by texting and talking on the phone while driving.

"Mobile devices are the mother of inattentional blindness," said Henry Alford, the author of "Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That: A Modern Guide to Manners." "That's the state of monomaniacal obliviousness that overcomes you when you're absorbed in an activity to the exclusion of everything else."

The social scientist Sherry Turkle analyzed 30 years of family interactions in her book "Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other." She found that children now compete with their parents' devices for attention, resulting in a generation afraid of the spontaneity of a phone call or face-to-face interaction. Eye contact now seems to be optional, Dr. Turkle suggests, and sensory overload can often mean our feelings are constantly anesthetized.

Researchers at the University of Michigan claim empathy levels have plummeted while narcissism is skyrocketing, with emotional development, confidence and health all affected when we tuck our chins in and let our heads hang like human ostriches.

Facebook's former president, Sean Parker, recently said the platform was designed to be addictive and to "consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible," which he characterized as boosting our self-esteem, ever-present in the dopamine hit of likes.

"It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other," he said. "It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains."

That said: You're probably reading this story on a mobile device right now. And that's O.K.! (As long as you're not behind the wheel.) We're not here to tell you to throw away your iPhone and abandon digital media. But like many addictions, admitting a problem is the first step to treatment. And, mercifully, the fix isn't anti-tech - it's pro-conversation, according to Dr. Turkle.

Digital detoxes have never been so popular, but they're no cure-all, and realistically, there simply isn't a black-and-white fix.

The simplest answer for all of us is biblical: Do unto others - and maybe do it without clutching your smartphone. Next time you're in the checkout lane or stopped at a red light, look around. How many people are really there with you?

"Actual human beings, in the flesh, take precedence," Ms. Martin chided. "To ignore people you're with is rude, whether you ignore them for virtual friends or distant friends by snubbing them."

It sounds so obvious it almost borders on stupid. But like Dr. Turkle's hope of building dialogue, not denigrating the digerati, it's an obvious dialogue we're not having enough of.

Mr. Alford, who used to write a monthly manners column for The New York Times, described the issue as a "monomaniacal obliviousness" of being absorbed in an activity to the exclusion of the rest of the world.

"To treat the person standing in front of you as secondary to your phone, is usually, as the kids say, a micro-aggression," he said.

Many Silicon Valley pundits go to war when anyone so much as suggests that tech's merits aren't uniformly positive. But in light of the brutal schoolyard that social media has become, that approach now appears moot.

Young or old, we're all a generation of literal test cases. Etiquette, manners, body language, the way we respond, interact and even look is changing. We're missing a whole life happening a mere 90 degrees above our smartphones. Start looking up.

"Never be the first person in the group to whip out his phone," Mr. Alford said. "Don't be Patient Zero."
Correction 1/30/2018: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of car accidents attributed to the use of smartphones. About one quarter of car accidents in the United States are caused by texting and talking on the phone while driving, not solely by texting.

Adam Popescu is a writer living in Los Angeles who contributes frequently to the Times. He can be reached on Twitter at @adampopescu

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Keep Your Head Up: How Smartphone Addiction Kills Manners and Moods

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Let's play a game: The next time you're sitting among a group of friends or out on a date, measure how much time passes before someone grabs their phone to look at it. How long can you last?

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More College Students Seem to be Majoring in Perfectionism

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More College Students Seem to be Majoring in Perfectionism

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Miss Lucas

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Perfectionism is a personality trait or characteristic that is innate in many people. It is nurtured in some environments, notably in families where personal accomplishment, academic or otherwise, is rewarded: "Where self-esteem is earned, not just given out with a trophy for participation," said Steve Codling, a high school teacher in Seattle who believes in pushing his students as well as his college-age sons to excel and praising them when they do. But for other parents, it's often difficult to know when perfectionism in their kids is cause for concern: After all, the high standards they set for themselves probably got them into college.

The researchers looked at more than 41,000 students' responses on the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale, which not only measures degrees of perfectionism but also distinguishes among its three aspects: self-oriented, other-oriented and socially prescribed. And while self-prescribed perfectionism is associated with greater productivity, conscientiousness and career success, many parents are concerned when they see signs that it is affecting their child's mood and behavior.

"Sometimes it's paralyzing," Katherine Dieckmann, a filmmaker and professor at Columbia University, said of the perfectionist tendencies she sees in her 20-year-old daughter, a college sophomore. "I understand, because we were both born that way."

As an artist, Ms. Dieckmann herself has difficulty letting go of a project or task unless it's perfect. Like her daughter, she worries it to death, "believing it can be better, which so often is worse." She recognizes that her daughter's habit of procrastination is not from lack of motivation but more from a sense that "if she can't finish it perfectly, she'd rather not do it." That characteristic carries over into other areas of her life, Ms. Dieckmann said. "She's the same way about her hobbies, like photography."

Another parent, whose son is a student at an Ivy League college, said: "He's not striving to meet our standards, they're his own." The father, whom I cannot name because he is my patient, said: "I keep reminding him that perfect is the enemy of good, and he says, 'Yeah, but good's not enough to get into med school.'"

Hannah Miller, a Columbia graduate student, is candid about her perfectionism. "When it's not out of control, it's a good thing to have. When it overwhelms me, which is less often than it did when I was an undergraduate, I have to force myself to step back and make an accurate assessment of how important the task is and consider it thoughtfully rather than emotionally - like, how good does it have to be?"

When she finds herself procrastinating until a deadline, she repeats a maxim favored by a high school teacher: Do the best that you can in the time that you have.

Ms. Miller said that when she's stressed and anxious she turns to her close friends for comfort and support, and also to her mother, whose perfectionism, like her own, is mostly self-prescribed. Mother and daughter share a kind of presentational perfectionism, especially about public speaking. Ms. Miller said that her mother "gets over it the same way she tells me to: Prepare thoroughly and it will carry you through."

If you are a parent concerned about perfectionist tendencies in your child, the questions posed by the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale, used in the study, may be informative. Among its 44 items, scaled from 1 (disagree) to 7 (agree), are statements like these: When I am working on something, I can't relax unless it's perfect; The people around me expect me to succeed at everything I do; The better I do, the better I am expected to do. The scale is not a clinical instrument, but the questions might be a good starting point for discussion.

It's hard to tell how much social media is affecting your child's self-image; many feel enormous pressure to be perfect off line, too. And it's difficult to know what, if anything, parents can do about it, beyond offering empathy, reassurance and emotional support.

If they've been here before, remind them that perfect wasn't the goal; good enough was, and it did the trick. ("Remember the way you felt before your SATs, and how well you did?") Make sure it's their perfectionism you're worried about, not yours. And stay in touch without hovering. If they seem really anxious for more than a week, suggest they seek counseling, or contact the school to ask whether the department of student life might sponsor a program about perfectionism.

And meanwhile, send care packages. It's fine if they're not perfect - they will still brighten your student's day.

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More College Students Seem to Be Majoring in Perfectionism

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Perfectionism is a personality trait or characteristic that is innate in many people. It is nurtured in some environments, notably in families where personal accomplishment, academic or otherwise, is rewarded: "Where self-esteem is earned, not just given out with a trophy for participation," said Steve Codling, a high school teacher in Seattle who believes in pushing his students as well as his college-age sons to excel and praising them when they do.