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For many elementary school kids, music class will be the only chance to fall in love with the tuba, discover they love singing alto in a choir, or to experience the rewards of learning and performing as a group.

But those opportunities are continuing to decline in Ontario classrooms because fewer schools have the trained teachers, instruments or spaces to teach music, says a new report released Monday.

A survey of 1,000 schools by People for Education found that only 41 per cent of elementary schools have a full-time or part-time specialist music teacher this year. (Lucas Oleniuk / Toronto Star file photo)

A survey of 1,000 schools by People for Education found that only 41 per cent of elementary schools have a full-time or part-time specialist music teacher this year.

Ten years ago, 48 per cent of schools had a music teacher, the research and advocacy group said. And it's down from 58 per cent in 1998.

Longtime arts advocate Holly Nimmons calls the decline "criminal" because not having access to music robs kids of vital opportunities in the name of short-term budgets.

"Music education is endangered and this is a wake-up call," says Nimmons, executive director of the Coalition for Music Education.

Among other findings, the report said children in smaller and rural schools are the least likely to get a chance to try the violin or rehearse the melody for a choral piece, as a result of too few teachers and funds to hire them.

Schools in the GTA are more than twice as likely to have music teachers than those in eastern and northern Ontario.

Budget cuts have had a negative impact on teaching other arts as well, including dance, drama and visual arts, the report says, despite the Ministry of Education's recognition that the arts play a vital role in creativity, academic achievement, leadership and problem-solving.

Of schools with Grade 7 and Grade 8 students, only 15 per cent have a visual arts teacher and 8 per cent have specialist drama teachers.

The report cites lack of space, instruments and arts supplies as roadblocks, on top of "an underlying perception that other curriculum areas take priority over the arts."

Eastern Ontario music teacher Jim Palmer said he fears the decline is more grim than the numbers show, because it was up to principals to determine who are "specialist teachers" and in many cases they may not even have qualifications outlined by the ministry and the Ontario College of Teachers.

Palmer, also director of advocacy with the Ontario Music Educators' Association, said his group wants the province to require anyone providing music instruction in the public system to a become properly certified music teacher.

Without music classes, kids lose "an organized opportunity" they may not otherwise get to learn an instrument, create and perform with others, and be exposed to a creative and critical processes that are key to "21st-century skills," said Palmer.

Few are actually against music and the arts, he added, but those subjects have been allowed to languish over the years because of other academic priorities taking the spotlight, such as math and literacy.

The decline of music education is "an unintended consequence," said Palmer, who teaches at Athens District High School near Brockville, where students have an instrumental and band program, and an extracurricular blues band.

The association has been lobbying for a meeting between the ministry, teachers, school boards and other supporters of the arts to come up with a solution.

Advocates also stress that when exposure and learning about the arts aren't provided in the classroom, it creates have and have-not schools, with students in more affluent communities benefitting from outside fundraising while other kids miss out.

That issue was highlighted in a 2013 report from People for Education, which noted that elementary and high schools able to fundraise were filling the gaps by using those dollars to supplement costs of instruments and supplies, and pay for kids to see live performances or exhibits.

The report calls on the province to put in place policy and funds that ensure all elementary students have the opportunity to learn and instrument and perform in a choir, band or orchestra. It also wants all students regardless of where they live or their family income to receive arts instruction during school hours.
Corrections - May 15, 2017: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated Holly Nimmons' surname.

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Fewer Ontario students get music classes due to lack of funds, staff, report says | The Star

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Only 41 per cent of elementary schools have music teachers, rural students least likely to learn band or choir

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I agree with you and the author about voting being an easy thing. Like you said the reason that many youth do not vote is that there is a multi-step process to vote. To even being eligeble and being able to just registeer to vote. 

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SARA PENTLICKY
Philadelphia, Feb. 20, 2012
To the Editor:
"If you want more of something, subsidize it. If you want less of something, tax it." This is taught in all basic government courses. Yet in the abortion debate, this logic is turned on its head. People who claim to want safe, legal and rare abortions are the very ones who clamor for public subsidies for the abortion industry.

According to the Government Accountability Office, the federal government gave almost a billion dollars to the abortion industry between 2002 and 2009, most notably to Planned Parenthood, the country's largest abortion provider.

If we really want to make abortions rare, we should stop subsidizing them.

MAURA MUDD
Greenwich, Conn., Feb. 19, 2012
The writer is on the board of the Susan B. Anthony List, a pro-life organization dedicated to electing pro-life representatives. To the Editor:
As an obstetrician-gynecologist, I object to "a prophylactic in every bedroom drawer," Ross Douthat's summary of the approach my colleagues and I take to preventing unintended pregnancy.

Birth control isn't that simple. Having access to condoms isn't the same, in effectiveness or ease of use, as being able to afford an intrauterine device. IUDs have a typical failure rate of 0.2 percent. Condoms? Eighteen percent. The pill? Nine percent.

Indeed, a Guttmacher Institute study of 10,000 women who had abortions in 2000-1 showed that 54 percent had been using contraceptives in the previous month; 28 percent, condoms; 14 percent, the pill.

I am so frustrated each time I see a patient who became unintentionally pregnant because she couldn't afford the contraceptive that was right for her. Every woman deserves the best medical care, including full coverage of all approved contraceptives. It should be her medical need, not her pocketbook, that determines the care she gets.

NANCY STANWOOD
New Haven, Feb. 20, 2012
The writer is a board member of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health. To the Editor:
Ross Douthat writes, "Monogamy, not chemicals or latex, is the main line of defense against unwanted pregnancies." This is the highest order of absurdity. Monogamy doesn't prevent pregnancies. Monogamous women become pregnant all the time, both accidentally and deliberately. Accidental pregnancies take place either from failure to use birth control or from a birth control method that has failed.

Even the best, most loving families may do everything possible to short-circuit an unwanted pregnancy, and why not? That birth will probably cause a major deterioration in the lifestyle of everyone affected. Major expenditures of money, time and labor will be required for a very long time if there is a new baby.

When the baby isn't planned and birth control has failed, abortion becomes the primary mechanism for avoiding this immense disruptive happening. Despite the many times one sees it argued in print, a very large portion of the people in this country see nothing morally wrong with abortion.

W. MOSELEY
Towson, Md., Feb. 19, 2012

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Opinion | Hearing Strong Views About Abortion

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Readers respond to a column by Ross Douthat.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/opinion/letters/dear-abby-foreign-names.html
Foreign names should be left alone and be left up for the parents to decide weather they want to use a foreign name or not as John Eligon states in his article. The parents may want to provide their child with a unique pronunciation and spelling due to their cultural background which is alright. If anyone has a hard time pronouncing the name they can at least try to and show some effort which the person with the name can correct afterwords.

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Race/Related

Eight months pregnant, Valarie Kaur is in the process of selecting a name for her second child, a girl.

Ms. Kaur, an author and activist, is a third-generation Sikh from California. She named her son Kavi, which means poet, because two of his great-grandfathers were poets.

She said she planned to choose a similarly meaningful name for her unborn daughter. So Ms. Kaur was furious when she saw on Twitter this week that the long-running syndicated advice column Dear Abby had encouraged readers to avoid giving their children "unusual" names.

"Not only can foreign names be difficult to pronounce and spell, but they can also cause a child to be teased unmercifully," wrote the Dear Abby columnist, Jeanne Phillips. "Sometimes the name can be a problematic word in the English language. And one that sounds beautiful in a foreign language can be grating in English."

The heated reaction to the column - which has been a staple in American households for decades and was started by Ms. Phillips's mother, who used the pen name Abigail Van Buren - has inspired a fresh debate about identity, acceptance and inclusion.

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Jeanne Phillips, the daughter of the original advice columnist Dear Abby, in 2007. Her advice about avoiding "unusual" names for children drew some criticism. Credit Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press

"Abby's column was deeply infuriating and also revelatory," Ms. Kaur said. "Abby is clinging to an old America, where white is considered the norm and everything else deviant and inferior." Ms. Kaur added that she and her partner believed it was more important for a child's name to connect them to their heritage than for it to be easy to pronounce.

Ms. Phillips did not respond to a request for comment.

For some readers, Ms. Phillips's advice was simply practical. "She's right. Get over it," Ike J. Awgu, a lawyer from Ottawa, wrote on Twitter.

Mr. Awgu, whose father is from the former Biafra and whose mother is from Antigua, said that while his given first name was Ikechukwu, certainly not the easiest name to pronounce, his middle name is Jonathan. He goes by "Ike," he said, because it is easier for Canadians to understand. Yet he snickered at the suggestion that he was in any way abandoning his culture by using a simplified version of his real name.

[For more coverage of race, sign up here to have our Race/Related newsletter delivered weekly to your inbox.]
The reality, Mr. Awgu, 34, said, is that long, foreign-sounding names do not end up sticking. "The practical effect of that is nobody calls them that," he said. "So they end up with some truncated name that is Anglicized any way."

The issue for some people, however, is making an effort.

Marwa Balkar, who does humanitarian work, is from California but has Circassian heritage. On the first day of a job she once had, she told her manager her name, which is pronounced phonetically, just like it looks. The manager asked her if she went by any other name.

"Is my five-letter, perfectly phonetic name too difficult for you," Ms. Balkar recalled thinking.

In other instances, Ms. Balkar said that people just shorten her name or give her nicknames that they make up, like Mars or Mar. "I think it's a combination of physical appearance, foreign name and fear of mispronouncing it," Ms. Balkar, 25, said of why people were reluctant to call her by her proper name. "I don't mind mispronunciation at all. What I do love is just effort, whether you nail it or not."

During a recent conversation with a radio host, Anand Giridharadas, a writer, said the host kept mispronouncing his name. He eventually tried to correct him.

"You know, you all have no problem saying Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky," he recalled saying. The host responded by pointing out that he learned to pronounce Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky because both were famous.

"The reality is that a lot of this has to do not with names but with whiteness," Mr. Giridharadas, 37, said. "There are a lot of complicated names from Polish and Russian and Italian and German backgrounds that have become second nature to Americans." The "unusual" names referred to in the Dear Abby column aren't unique in their complexity, he said. They just tend to come from places where people aren't white.

And they tend to have real-world consequences. An abundant amount of research has shown that job applicants who submit résumés with white-sounding names were more likely to get responses than those with black-sounding names.

This discrimination has caused Aaron Rahsaan Thomas to lean into his full name. A television writer and producer, Mr. Thomas said he once wrote a script for a major Hollywood director and got positive feedback on it. The director's only criticism was to ask Mr. Thomas to remove his middle name from the title page because it was an easy tell that Mr. Thomas was black and that might influence someone's opinion of the script.

Mr. Thomas kept his full name on the title page.

"I feel anyone who would judge the project or the person behind it through a stereotypical lens was someone I wouldn't want to be in business with anyway," he said.

Mr. Thomas wants people to know he is black, especially other aspiring black writers. He also wants to honor the reason his father, a theologian, named him the way he did - giving him a Jewish first name, a Muslim middle name and a Christian last name.

"I can think of nothing more American than a name that combines the three biggest western religions," he said.

Follow John Eligon on Twitter @jeligon.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Advice From Dear Abby on Baby Names Touches a Nerve. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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No 'Foreign' Names for Children, Dear Abby Advised. Furious Parents Replied.

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A reader sought guidance on the issue from an advice columnist, sparking a heated debate about American identity, heritage and acceptance.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/opinion/hearing-strong-views-about-abortion.html
When dealing with the topic of abortion it seems challenging to stand on one side yet after looking at this topic for quite some time I would have to say I side with Douthat. I agree with his point on that there should be less abortions and I agree even more when he stated research data from the Alan Guttmacher Institute showing that only 12% of 10000 women who took on abortion had problems obtaining birth control. This takes abortion to a different topic, one in which irresponsible adults make lifechanging and deadly decisions for new lives because their option of using contraceptives did not come to mind during sexual intercourse.

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AMID the sound and fury of the latest culture-war battles - first over breast cancer dollars and Planned Parenthood, and then over the White House's attempt to require that religious employers cover contraception and potential abortifacients - it's easy to forget that there is at least some common ground in American politics on sex, pregnancy, marriage and abortion.

Even the most pro-choice politicians, for instance, usually emphasize that they want to reduce the need for abortion, and make the practice rare as well as safe and legal. Even the fiercest conservative critics of the White House's contraception mandate - yes, Rick Santorum included - agree that artificial birth control should be legal and available. And both Democrats and Republicans generally agree that the country would be better off with fewer pregnant teenagers, fewer unwanted children, fewer absent fathers, fewer out-of-wedlock births.

Where cultural liberals and social conservatives differ is on the means that will achieve these ends. The liberal vision tends to emphasize access to contraception as the surest path to stable families, wanted children and low abortion rates. The more direct control that women have over when and whether sex makes babies, liberals argue, the less likely they'll be to get pregnant at the wrong time and with the wrong partner - and the less likely they'll be to even consider having an abortion. (Slate's Will Saletan has memorably termed this " the pro-life case for Planned Parenthood.")

The conservative narrative, by contrast, argues that it's more important to promote chastity, monogamy and fidelity than to worry about whether there's a prophylactic in every bedroom drawer or bathroom cabinet. To the extent that contraceptive use has a significant role in the conservative vision (and obviously there's some Catholic-Protestant disagreement), it's in the context of already stable, already committed relationships. Monogamy, not chemicals or latex, is the main line of defense against unwanted pregnancies.

The problem with the conservative story is that it doesn't map particularly well onto contemporary mores and life patterns. A successful chastity-centric culture seems to depend on a level of social cohesion, religious intensity and shared values that exists only in small pockets of the country. Mormon Utah, for instance, largely lives up to the conservative ideal, with some of America's lowest rates of teenage pregnancies, out-of-wedlock births and abortions. But many other socially conservative regions (particularly in the South) feature higher rates of unwed and teenage parenthood than in the country as a whole.

Liberals love to cite these numbers as proof that social conservatism is a flop. But the liberal narrative has glaring problems as well. To begin with, a lack of contraceptive access simply doesn't seem to be a significant factor in unplanned pregnancy in the United States. When the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed more than 10,000 women who had procured abortions in 2000 and 2001, it found that only 12 percent cited problems obtaining birth control as a reason for their pregnancies. A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of teenage mothers found similar results: Only 13 percent of the teens reported having had trouble getting contraception.

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Opinion | The 'Safe, Legal, Rare' Illusion

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Conservatives and liberals agree about reducing the number of abortions, but argue about how to do that.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/letters/archive/2018/10/readers-respond-rise-insta-poet/573835/

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Social media is turning an art form into an industry.

Tom spent his days as a clerk, two floors below ground level in the cellars of Lloyds Bank. He worked in the foreign-transactions department from 9:15 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. each day, and in his free moments between filing and tabulating balance sheets, he wrote.

Tom was better known to the world as T. S. Eliot. By the time he started as a clerk in 1917, his most popular poem- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock-had been published to great acclaim. But even then, despite his bank salary, the man who has often been called the greatest poet of the 20th century struggled to make ends meet. He accepted money from relatives to buy underwear and pajamas, and anxiety over his finances drove him to breakdowns.

Poetry has always been an art form, but it has rarely been a career even for the most legendary poets. William Carlos Williams was a doctor. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. Charles Bukowski held a bevy of odd jobs, including work as a dishwasher, a truck driver, a gas-station attendant, and a postal clerk. The poet's story has long been one of a double life, split between two urgent duties: making a living and making art.

Rupi Kaur is a case study in how dramatically the world of poetry has changed since then. The 25-year-old Canadian poet outsold Homer two years ago: Her first collection, milk & honey, has been translated into 40 languages and has sold 3.5 million copies, stealing the position of best-selling poetry book from The Odyssey.

It wasn't always like this for Kaur. She started her career by posting her work to Tumblr in 2012 and then gradually switched to Instagram, but her social-media strategy wasn't yet making her nearly enough money to live. "My mind-set was: No way can poetry pay your rent," she told us. Then milk & honey was published in 2014 and hit the New York Times best-seller list in 2016. Kaur realized, It's not stopping. It's getting bigger. Maybe this can sustain me. Her success doesn't seem to be slowing. Within the past year, she appeared on Jimmy Fallon, made the Forbes 30 under 30 list, and sold out a " World Tour de Force" across India and the U.K. This month, she finishes her sweeping American tour. Kaur now has 3 million Instagram followers.

Since the publication of milk & honey, the poetry genre has become one of the fastest-growing categories in book publishing. According to one market-research group, 12 of the top 20 best-selling poets last year were Insta-poets, who combined their written work with shareable posts for social media; nearly half of poetry books sold in the United States last year were written by these poets. This year, according to a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Census Bureau, 28 million Americans are reading poetry- the highest percentage of poetry readership in almost two decades. Kaur's publisher, Kirsty Melville, has seen it happen firsthand: "It used to be that poetry was down in the back of the store next to the bathrooms, and now it's out front," she told us. "And that naturally helps sales of all poets. The classics and other contemporary poets are selling."

Read: Poetry is everywhere.

The rise of the Insta-poet didn't start with Rupi Kaur. In 2013, Melville noticed that a Cambodian-Australian poet named Lang Leav was becoming popular on the internet, her work passed around on social media. Melville took a leap of faith and signed her to a book deal with Andrews McMeel, her publishing company. That book, Love & Misadventure, sold more than 150,000 copies. "We thought, Huh, there's something going on here ... For a poetry book-a love poetry book-to sell 150,000 copies was notable."

Five years later, the poetry world has been rocked by myriad other social-media stars. Cleo Wade, the 29-year-old known for her inspirational mantras ("You want love? Be love. You want light? Be light"), has her words on billboards in Los Angeles and Times Square. Atticus, who wears a mask to keep his identity hidden, can count Emma Roberts, Alicia Keys, and Karlie Kloss as fans; his upcoming fall tour will include 12 performances in cities across the U.S. and Canada. R. M. Drake, who first began sharing his poetry in 2011 using Tumblr and DeviantArt, now has 1.8 million followers on Instagram; he's also published 12 books in print, several of them international best sellers.

In 2010, the editor of n+1 magazine, Chad Harbach, famously wrote that there were two distinct and rival literary cultures in America: the institutional, university-driven M.F.A. track and the New York-centered publishing world. But now there is a third option: the fast-paced, democratizing, hyper-connected culture of the internet. The poets of this third category often have little formal training, and their publishers are strewn across the country. Andrews McMeel, for instance, is an indie publisher in Missouri. Social media seem to have cracked the walls around a field that has long been seen as highbrow, exclusive, esoteric, and ruled by tradition, opening it up for young poets with broad appeal, many of whom are women and people of color.

Social-media poets, using Instagram as a marketing tool, are not just artists-they're entrepreneurs. They still primarily earn money through publication and live events, but sharing their work on Instagram is now what opens up the possibility for both. Kaur, the ultimate poet-entrepreneur, said she approaches poetry like "running a business." A day in the life can consist of all-day writing, touring, or, perhaps unprecedented for a poet, time in the office with her team to oversee operations and manage projects.

Building their own mini brands, poets can harness e-commerce to supplement their income. Some sell merchandise such as mugs printed with their poetry and, in a mimicry of the aestheticized square of Instagram, "hand-typed poems of your choice" in shadow box frames. Atticus's website features a shop called the Atticus Collective, where customers can purchase products inscribed with his words, from a massive $35 poster to a $174 "talisman."

The ever-growing popularity of these poets also makes them valuable to other brands, providing newer and bigger ways to commodify their words. Cleo Wade's poetry has been featured in Gucci advertisements, emblazoned on Nike sneakers, and scrawled across dishes sold by boutique homeware stores. During last February's New York Fashion Week, the designer Tracy Reese had models strut to poetry readings on the catwalk. Even the insurance firm Nationwide is getting in on the trend; it recently released a series of commercials in which poets wax on about the miracle of a mortgage.

Perhaps this was inevitable with the nature of quick consumption on Instagram, where you can come across a pithy statement, double-tap the square it's in, and reflexively scroll past it all in a matter of seconds; the pithier the statement, the better. The limited confines of an Instagram post incentivize the bite-size lyric, the tidy aphorism, the briefly deliverable quote. Most Instagram poems advise how to live a better life-how to move on from a broken heart, how to believe in one's self, how to pursue one's dreams. On a platform full of idealized lifestyles in food, travel, and fashion, poetry presents yet more aspirational philosophies.

Earlier this year, in a divisive, scorched-earth essay, the poet Rebecca Watts criticized the popular Instagram poet Hollie McNish's work as that not of a poet, "but of a personality." She derided Instagram poetry as amateurish and craftless commercial fodder that anyone can breezily snack on. "Artless poetry sells," she wrote. "The reader is dead: Long live consumer-driven content and the 'instant gratification' this affords."

But poetry, like any other art, must adapt to the world changing around it.
Read: How poetry came to matter again
Poetry, in particular, is often imagined as existing in a vacuum, dashed off on parchment by a reclusive writer shut in to ponder at all hours the eternal truths and greatest mysteries of our existence. But in fact, poetry has always been affected by shifting technologies. Rachael Allen, the poetry editor of Granta, noted this in explaining why she doesn't find Insta-poetry cause for alarm. "Poetic form has always been affected by the medium in which it's presented ... There are whole movements built out of poems embedded in landscape, or carved into stone," she said.

According to Allen, Granta is still getting plenty of lengthy poetry submissions; the magazine has been publishing several multipage poems as of late, with one on the way that spans five pages. And Granta still gets about 2,000 yearly poetry submissions in total. "I think it just goes to show," she said, "that all these forms, all these ways of reading, are able to coexist with each other quite peacefully." Enrollment in poetry M.F.A. programs is still healthy as well. Elizabeth Willis, who directs the poetry branch of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, received 343 applications in 2018; compare that with 426 applicants in 2010, and you'll see that the number has indeed gone down, but certainly not so drastically that one could claim the M.F.A. obsolete.

It's impossible to predict, while the first Instagram poets are still at work, how radically the industry is being changed by social media and whether the transformations will be lasting. But the triumphs of poets like Rupi Kaur-the world tours, the book sales, the frenzy of fans-are undeniable. The word poetry originates from the Greek word poesis, which means the process of creation, of composition, of production. From the very beginning, the art was tied to the labor. Now, because of a movement of rookie poets on the internet, it is reaping its rewards.

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Social media is turning an art form into an industry. Tom spent his days as a clerk, two floors below ground level in the cellars of Lloyds Bank. He worked in the foreign-transactions department from 9:15 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. each day, and in his free moments between filing and tabulating balance sheets, he wrote.

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President Trump has asserted that he will sign an executive order seeking to end the right to U.S. citizenship for children born in the U.S. to noncitizen parents.

Despite his insistence to the contrary, Trump can't unilaterally end birthright citizenship. It's a right, and it's enshrined in the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment. Constitutional amendments can't be overridden by a presidential executive order.

Certainly, Trump won't be able to stop birthright citizenship before the midterm elections (although the timing of this announcement suggests he's using it as a political cudgel to boost turnout among the anti-immigrant elements in his base).

But Trump's threat represents more than just one man's passing political whim.

Birthright citizenship has been a contentious issue among Republican politicians for years.

While some Republican leaders, like outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., aren't interested in getting rid of birthright citizenship, plenty are eager to restrict or end it.

That list includes senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller and powerful U.S. senators like Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. After Trump's statement, Graham immediately announced he would introduce legislation to end birthright citizenship.

Should a potential Trump executive order spark a legal case over citizenship, there's also a path for the U.S. Supreme Court to end U.S. citizenship for the children of noncitizens.

The last time the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on birthright citizenship was the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark, a San Francisco-born cook of Chinese descent. After a trip to China, Wong was denied re-entry to the United States - so he sued, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor.

Since then, courts and lawmakers have relied on the view that even the children of noncitizens are U.S. citizens, by constitutional right, as long as they're born in this country.

But Wong's parents were authorized to be in the United States.

So it's possible that the Supreme Court, especially one with a newly seated Justice Brett Kavanaugh, could rule narrowly that the children of unauthorized immigrants aren't subject to the same rights of citizenship as the children of legal immigrants.

This can't be allowed to happen. The language of the 14th Amendment is plain: All persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens.

Furthermore, the spirit of the 14th Amendment - which was passed during Reconstruction to enfranchise the children of former slaves - was to provide a legal bulwark for minorities against violent bigotry. As we've seen over the past terrible week in this country, the need for that bulwark remains as strong as ever.
This commentary is from The Chronicle's editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.

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Editorial: Trump's attack on birthright citizenship is unconstitutional

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President Trump has asserted that he will sign an executive order seeking to end the right to U.S. citizenship for children born in the U.S. to noncitizen parents. Despite his insistence to the contrary, Trump can't unilaterally end birthright citizenship. It's a right, and it's enshrined in the U.S.

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In the public high school where I taught, 37 students in a history class was common, and we had five classes a day. It was easy for students to be anonymous in those large groups and fall so far behind that it was impossible to catch up. Maintaining classroom discipline sometimes became the goal of the day.

Later, I taught in two private schools. What a difference numbers can make. My middle school classes had between 12 and 16 students, all of whom worked hard and did their homework (granted, their parents were greatly involved in their education). The number of students in the room affected their attitude toward what was going on there. If someone was falling behind or struggling with anything, I could deal with it quickly.

The students in a small class actually get to know each other and can work together much better than in large classes. This kind of socialization that has been a goal of public schools for decades is sorely missing today in districts like Los Angeles Unified.

We must share the advantages that privileged children get with our public school students. Our country will be much better off if we do.

To the editor: Although small classes are optimal for learning, the presence of an effective teacher produces greater benefits than having fewer students, according to the latest research on the matter.

In fact, the U.S. Department of Education found a weak relationship between achievement and a reduction in class size. To date, there is no formula to determine what size is most conducive to learning.

The writer taught for 28 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

To the editor: Way back in 1948-49, a social studies teacher at the middle school I was attending induced such a large number of students to take Latin that they had to form two beginning classes. As a result, I was in the smallest class that I had ever attended in a public school; the back half of the classroom was empty.

I worked harder than I ever had, trying to shine for my teacher.

The next year some students must have dropped out, because the two Latin classes were combined. I found myself in a seat in the back of the room, the excitement all gone. I studied just enough to pass.

To the editor: If your boss gave you 15 hours of work to do in eight hours, how would you cope? Would you stay late to finish, or would you cut corners?

When I was an English teacher, it was clear to me that for students to improve their writing skills, they had to practice their writing, which they and their parents expected me to thoroughly evaluate. If I had three classes of 25 students, and each had to write a two-page paper, you can see how much reading I had to do after 3 p.m.

What if class size goes up to 35? What if the two-page essay becomes three pages? And how much less comfortable is a room with 35 students than one with 25?

Now you see why your kid comes home and complains about school.

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Private schools keep class sizes low. Kids and teachers in public schools deserve the same benefit - Los Angeles Times

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A teacher who worked in both public and private education highlights the ways having fewer students in each class improved the quality of teaching and the kids' experiences.

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Read: Has the tide turned against partisan gerrymandering?
In Michigan, from 2010 through the post-redistricting elections of 2012 and 2016, the average-median difference jumped by four points in favor of Republicans. It was as if starting in 2012, 4 percent of Michigan Democratic voters suddenly started voting for Republicans. Except they didn't; the map did it for them. This difference means that whatever seats Democrats could win in 2010 with a 50-50 split would, two years later, have required 54-46 support, an eight-point split.

The Michigan gerrymander led to a gain of two additional congressional seats for Republicans that would not have occurred under a more neutral plan.

But voters in three states-Michigan, Colorado, and Utah-have the opportunity to implement redistricting commissions that take away this power. Voters in a fourth state, Missouri, can choose to assign the initial drafting process to a nonpartisan demographer who must follow principles of partisan fairness and competitiveness.

In each case, the redistricting commissions will be instructed to respect city and county boundaries, take into account ethnic and community interests, and avoid partisan bias. When these priorities are met, districts often become more competitive. After California adopted such a commission in 2010, five out of 46 incumbents from the state's congressional delegation lost their reelection bids.
Automatic and election-day voter registration
Nationwide, approximately 76 percent of the voting-eligible population is registered to vote. Automatic or same-day registration could help bring in the remaining 24 percent-57 million people. ( Automatic means that when eligible citizens interact with certain government agencies, such as the Department of Motor Vehicles, voter registration is opt-out instead of opt-in; those agencies transfer registration information electronically to election officials.)

In 2016, when only a fraction of the voting-age population cast a ballot, nine out of the top 10 voter-turnout states used either automatic voter registration or same-day registration. This pattern suggests that simply removing the need to plan ahead can boost turnout considerably.
Read: Online voting won't save democracy
Automatic or election-day registration is on the ballot in Maryland, Michigan, and Nevada. Automatic registration is particularly important in Nevada, which in 2016 ranked a dismal 44th out of 50 states for voting-age-population turnout. Raising Nevada's participation level to the average in automatic and same-day states would translate to a nine-percentage-point bump. By comparison, behavioral interventions such as face-to-face canvassing lead at best to a bump of a few percentage points.
Restoration of voting rights
Felons in many states permanently lose the right to vote-more than 6 million people nationwide. In Florida, people convicted of a felony (which could be failing to remit sales tax, possessing a fake identification card, or purchasing marijuana) can only regain the right by appealing to the Executive Clemency Board. Republican Governor Rick Scott has made that process difficult by imposing a minimum waiting period of five years and requiring a lengthy application process.

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The Longterm Solution to Voter Suppression

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Efforts to expand the franchise could ultimately counteract efforts to shrink it.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/10/24/bomb-sent-bill-hillary-clintons-home-new-york-city-suburb/?utm_term=.dbdaf8f5eab8

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Is there an election coming up, or something?

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

Image

Credit Credit Lily Padula

There he goes again.

With Republicans struggling to keep their grip on Congress, President Trump is dialing up the demagogy. At campaign rallies and on social media, he's spewing dark warnings about a Democratic mob clamoring to usher in an era of open borders, rampant crime, social chaos and economic radicalism.

As is so often the case, Mr. Trump is not letting reality interfere with his performance. At a rally in Nevada this weekend, the president told the crowd that Californians were rioting to "get out of their sanctuary cities." (They aren't.) He also suggested that Democrats will soon be looking to hand out free luxury cars to illegal immigrants. (They won't.) "Give 'em a driver's license. Next thing you know, they'll want to buy 'em a car," he riffed. "Then they'll say the car's not good enough, we want - how about a Rolls-Royce?"

Mr. Trump's Twitter feed has been electrifying as well, full of statements intended to thrill his fans - and, better still, bait his opponents into a partisan rage. In recent days, he has dubbed Stormy Daniels " Horseface," escalated his taunting of Senator Elizabeth Warren as " Pocahontas" and grumbled about the fact that Bruce Ohr, one of Mr. Trump's nemeses in the "rigged" Russian "witch hunt," is still employed by the Department of Justice. He has asserted that the Democratic nominee for governor in Florida, Andrew Gillum, is looking to turn the state into " the next Venezuela." He has threatened to dispatch troops to shut down the southern border and renewed his vow to cut off the "massive foreign aid" sent to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras for those nations' failure to stop their people from flocking to the United States.

In particular, the caravan of Honduran migrants making its way north has emerged as a focus of his fantasies. Mr. Trump has repeatedly implied that Democrats are paying Honduran youth to join the caravan. On Monday, he claimed, based on nothing, that the caravan is awash in "criminals and unknown Middle Easterners."

On Sunday, news broke of y et another move by the Trump administration to assault L.G.B.T. rights. According to a draft memo leaked to The Times, the Department of Health and Human Services is leading the charge to establish a legal definition of "sex" based strictly on "immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth," eliminating the category of transgender individuals in the eyes of the federal government. In cases when a person's birth sex was in dispute, genetic testing would be used to settle the matter.

Such a shift has been in discussion among administration officials for more than a year, and the memo in question has been floating around since the spring. Health and Human Services is expected to present its official case to the Department of Justice by year's end. Yet, like Mr. Trump's prior reversals of Obama-era policies that expanded transgender rights, the news understandably sent a ripple of fear and anguish through the community of 1.4 million transgender Americans, their loved ones and anyone who cares about civil rights.

Mr. Trump plays the polarization game because he enjoys it - he does love a brawl - and because he doesn't appear to care about much beyond his political and personal fortunes. And, more practically speaking, these days he doesn't have much else to talk about.

It's not that this president has failed to achieve anything in his first couple of years in office. The economy is chugging along right now, and many Republican candidates would be happy for him to play that up on the campaign trail.

But his most notable achievements do not resonate beyond Mr. Trump's base. He has overseen a conservative overhaul of the federal judiciary, seating a record number of judges, including two Supreme Court justices. And he has been an aggressive deregulator in areas ranging from education to transportation to health care to the environment.

Meanwhile, the Republicans' much-ballyhooed tax cut hasn't proved especially popular. The party failed to repeal and replace Obamacare, as it had been promising for seven years. The president's big talk about infrastructure investment has devolved into a bad political joke. His tariffs and trade war talk are giving even members of his own team migraines. And that's without even getting into all the foreign policy drama.

It is notable if not surprising that two of the widely popular policy issues Mr. Trump has been talking up - his commitment to protecting health care coverage for people with pre-existing conditions and his promise to put forward "a very major tax cut" for middle-income people in the next few weeks - have no basis in reality. This administration has specifically declined to defend pre-existing conditions against pending legal challenges. And with Congress out of session until after the elections, there can be no serious movement on tax policy until the lame-duck session.

Thus, as Mr. Trump moves to make the case for Republicans in the midterms, he has few options beyond revving up his base. Which might be motivating - possibly even energizing - for some die-hard partisans on both sides of the battle. But it is more than a little dispiriting for the millions of Americans already exhausted by seemingly endless outrage. And it is really bad for the country.

More on the Trump administration and transgender Americans

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Opinion | Donald Trump Is Lyin' Up a Storm

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Is there an election coming up, or something?

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For too many Americans, registering to vote is an obstacle course.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

Image

Credit Credit Jackie Ferrentino

Election Day is less than three weeks away. Are you registered to vote? If not, you may still have a chance. Or you may be out of luck. At this point, it all depends on where you live.

In New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Kentucky, the registration deadline has passed. Alabamians and South Dakotans have until next Monday. Other states, like Minnesota and Idaho, are more generous, allowing citizens to register right up until the election and, increasingly, letting them vote on the same day.

This patchwork is a result of America's highly decentralized electoral process, which is a good design in many ways, but which leads to a wide variety of voting laws and policies from state to state. Call it the democracy gap.

In the places on the wrong side of that gap, it's confusing and discouraging to potential voters, especially those most likely to have difficulty getting registered and to the polls in the first place. It's unnecessary, because states have already shown that it's not difficult to register voters up until - and on - Election Day. And it's the opposite of what the world's oldest and richest democracy should be doing, which is simple: Make voting as easy and accessible as possible.

Registration is a key to that effort, because once people register, they are very likely to vote. In 2016, 87 percent of registered voters surveyed said they cast their ballot, as compared with 61 percent of all eligible voters. And while federal laws like the National Voter Registration Act have made registration and voting somewhat easier, they don't go far enough.

Why can't every state get with the program? Partly it's bureaucratic inertia. Partly it's incumbents protecting "their" electorate. And partly, it's that our elections are run by partisan political officials - a terrible idea, as most other modern democracies have figured out. In those countries, election administration is the job of independent commissions or other bodies that are insulated from partisan politics. Here in America, it's the job of people like Brian Kemp.

Mr. Kemp is Georgia's secretary of state, a post he's held since 2010. He's also the state's Republican candidate for governor, which means he has spent the past eight years setting the electoral rules and practices for the same people who will decide his fate in November.

During that time, Mr. Kemp has pursued multiple investigations into minority voter-registration drives, alleging voter fraud even though he's found virtually none. He purged 1.5 million voters from Georgia's rolls from 2012 to 2016, more than double the number than in the previous two election cycles. And last week, The Associated Press reported that Mr. Kemp has suspended the registrations of 53,000 voters, 70 percent of whom are African-American, for failing the state's unusually strict "exact match" policy, which requires a voter's name on his or her registration to be identical to that on other state records. If it isn't - either because of a minor typo or a clerical error - the registration is suspended until the voter resolves the discrepancy.

The Justice Department blocked the first version of the exact-match policy, in 2009, for discriminating against black, Asian and Latino voters in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Four years later, the Supreme Court gutted the heart of the act and paved the way for the policy and other discriminatory measures like it.

In the absence of meaningful federal oversight of voting laws, states can take the lead. Many have already taken steps to modernize and streamline their voter-registration systems. It's not hard, as long as your goal is ensuring that as many people as possible can participate in the political process.

The gold standard is automatic voter registration, which has become law or policy in 13 states since 2015, with more likely to adopt it soon. In states with automatic registration, which cross the political spectrum, an interaction with a government agency, like the Department of Motor Vehicles, automatically registers an eligible citizen to vote, unless he or she affirmatively opts out. This increases voter turnout, saves money and increases the accuracy of voter rolls.

In Oregon, the first state to adopt automatic registration, the rate of new registrations quadrupled in the first year, to 272,000; by one estimate, more than 116,000 of those Oregonians were unlikely to have registered otherwise. Nationwide, automatic registration could add as many as 22 million voters to the rolls in a year, which would translate into roughly eight million more people casting a ballot, according to a study by the Center for American Progress.

Another common-sense innovation is same-day registration - letting voters register and vote during a single trip to the polls, whether on Election Day or in an early-voting period, as 17 states and the District of Columbia now offer. This lifts the pressure of early registration deadlines and is especially relied on by groups who move frequently or struggle to make multiple visits to election offices - like minorities, young voters and working parents.

There's also online registration, which is cheaper, more accurate, more convenient and more intuitive to a generation of Americans who have grown up in front of computer screens. Speaking of the younger generation, four million Americans turn 18 every year, and getting them preregistered when they're 16 or 17 increases the likelihood that they'll vote.

Of course, registration doesn't mean much if people don't get out and vote. And lack of time or opportunity to get to the polls is one of the biggest hurdles to voting for people who are registered. The good news is that more and more states are coming to realize that there's nothing sacred about voting on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia offer a period of early voting, and more than one-third of all voters now vote on a day other than Election Day.

Beyond its convenience to voters, early voting makes for shorter lines, which eases pressure on poll workers and reduces chances for error. The same goes for voting by mail, as Oregon, Washington and Colorado now require for all voters, and no-excuse absentee ballots.

All of these advances are intuitive and easy to carry out. And yet one in four eligible Americans - roughly 50 million people - remain unregistered. Some of these people are uninterested in politics or disillusioned with the candidates or the process. But many others would most likely register - and vote - if doing so were easier.

Voting in a democracy shouldn't be a test of your mettle or perseverance. It shouldn't depend on how much time you can take off from work, away from child care or other obligations. And in 2018, there's no reason it can't be made as easy as possible for everyone.

More from the Tune In, Turn Out series

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Opinion | Voting Should Be Easy. Why Isn't It?

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For too many Americans, registering to vote is an obstacle course.

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Re " Depression Obscures Recovery " (Science Times, Oct. 23):

News that 50 percent recover after an episode of depression and 10 percent "flourish" is encouraging. Now we need to look at what contributes to flourishing.

My 50 years of clinical practice, advances in brain biology and research that the Center for Mind-Body Medicine has published on the use of self-care and group support to address psychological trauma, stress and depression offer a more hopeful picture. Some take-home points:

Depression can be an opportunity to assess imbalances in our biology and our lives and a call to change rather than a dispiriting endpoint.

Self-care techniques, including meditation, improved diet, and movement and exercise, raise levels of neurotransmitters that may be compromised in depression.

Using these approaches - acting on one's own behalf - is itself therapeutic.

Social support can help us make best use of these skills.

Partnership with a compassionate and skillful clinician who encourages our strengths as well as welcomes our vulnerability is invaluable.

Anyone who is depressed can embrace these and other possibilities. And so can our health care system.

James S. Gordon
Washington
The writer, a psychiatrist, is the author of "Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression" and the founder and executive director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine.

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A psychiatrist offers some concrete steps.

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is social media ruining our kids? (opinion)  - cnn

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Is social media ruining our kids? (Opinion) - CNN

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The more we promote social technology to our kids as a competition to be the best, the more we fuel disaster.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/us/grave-convict-lease-texas.html?module=inline
The remains of dozens of African-American people were found buried in a construction site in Texas.They are bodies of slaves who were forced into labor, which was most likely a plantation. It was estimated that this plantation was used from 1878 to 1911.

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A historic cemetery was discovered on the construction site of a new school outside Houston. Archaeologists have found the remains of about 95 people who they believe were African-Americans forced to work as laborers after slavery ended. Credit Credit Fort Bend Independent School District

The remains of dozens of people found at a construction site in Texas this year are most likely those of African-Americans who were forced to work on a plantation there around the turn of the 20th century, officials said this week.

That finding, announced Monday, opens a window onto a little-remembered period in which black people in certain Southern states were essentially treated like slaves post-emancipation.

The remains of about 95 people were discovered early this year on a construction site outside Houston, where the Fort Bend Independent School District is building a new school, according to school district officials and court records.

This week, archaeologists announced that the bones were most likely those of African-American laborers who worked as part of the so-called convict lease system, in which the state of Texas outsourced prisoners to work and live on plantations. The researchers estimated that the cemetery, which was on the plantation's grounds, was used from 1878 to 1911.

About half of the bodies have been exhumed, and more than 20 have been analyzed. Of those analyzed, archaeologists said, all but one were male, ranging in age from about 14 to 70. All were African-American, and some may have been former slaves.

It is rare to discover an African-American cemetery from this time period, but rarer still to find a grave site of black prisoners from the convict lease era, said Ken Brown, a professor at the University of Houston who specializes in African-American archaeology.

"You have a chance to study what the actual bone material has to say about what life was like - we know it was crappy, we know it was tough - but what impact does all of that have on the body?" he said.

Researchers hope to run tests that could tell which diseases the prisoners lived with, what kind of foods they ate and where they grew up.

"It really does change the history books in Texas," said Reign Clark, a lead archaeologist on site.

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery in 1865, except as punishment for a crime. Several Southern states, including Texas, used this exception to outsource prisoners for labor, Mr. Brown said.

Texas first "leased" out prisoners for caretaking on plantations and later took over the land as state-run prison farms, Mr. Brown said.

It was "more or less slavery by a new name," said Reginald Moore, a historian and prison reform advocate who has studied convict leasing in the Houston area.

He noted that vagrancy laws at the time made it so that blacks were often convicted of minor offenses, such as loitering, and sentenced to years of hard labor in the fields. White prisoners, he said, were often assigned easier work indoors.

From 1870 to 1912, 60 percent of prisoners in Texas were black, according to the Texas State Historical Association. During this time, prisoners helped build the Capitol building in Austin and constructed part of the Texas State Railroad.

Today, the Fort Bend Independent School District is building a technical high school on the site of a former sugar plantation that later served as a state-run prison farm.

After construction workers spotted human bones in February, archaeologists eventually discovered the cemetery on the site, according to court records. In June, a judge granted permission to exhume the remains.

So far, the results show that the men who were buried there lived difficult lives, researchers said. Their bones show stress from poor health during childhood, such as fever and malnutrition, and stress from repetitive work later in life.

"They were really doing a lot of heavy labor from the time that they were young," said Catrina Banks Whitley, a bioarchaeologist who is analyzing the bones.

Because of that, she said, it is possible that some were former slaves.

The discovery was particularly gratifying for Mr. Moore, who lives nearby and had long suspected such graves might be hidden there. He has been fighting for recognition for African-American convict laborers, whose role in Texas history, he said, has been mostly forgotten.

He said he hoped the new findings would encourage Texas to remember them and include their stories in history books and memorials.

"When I went out there and seen those bodies, I felt so elated that they would finally get their justice," Mr. Moore said. "It was overwhelming for me. I almost fainted."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Black Prisoners' Remains Tell a Part of Texas' History. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Remains of Black People Forced Into Labor After Slavery Are Discovered in Texas

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A cemetery found on a construction site is believed to contain remains of African-Americans forced to work on plantations through the so-called convict lease system.

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Newly declassified documents show why the Americans and the Soviets came so close to war in 1973.

By Sergey Radchenko

Mr. Radchenko is a professor of international relations at Cardiff University.

Image

President Richard Nixon speaking with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger about the Middle East crisis during a meeting at the White House in October 1973. Credit Credit Harvey George/Associated Press

A nuclear standoff. One leader is drunk. The other is delirious. The underlings scramble to avoid the worst. This is not an end-of-the-world Hollywood thriller, or an episode in President Trump's erratic diplomacy. It is a story of how the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves on a collision course in the Middle East.

The Yom Kippur War, fought over several weeks in October 1973, was a tumultuous conflict between Israel and a coalition of Arab states, led by Egypt and Syria. The war ended with a decisive victory for Israel, but even 45 years later, questions about the roles played by the two Cold War superpowers remain.

Now, new documents, collected and translated by the Wilson Center, show the Kremlin in disarray, desperately trying to help Egypt, one of its most important client states. For many years we thought the aggressive Soviet behavior during the war was a ploy to undercut American influence, or gain access to oil or warm-water ports. The new evidence suggests it was simply a case of bad crisis management.

On the morning of Oct. 6, 1973, taking advantage of Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria began a coordinated assault on Israel in a bid to retake the territories lost in the Arab-Israeli War six years earlier. Bolstered by a Soviet airlift, the Egyptians and the Syrians made early gains before Israel reclaimed the initiative on the battlefield. Ignoring a United Nations Security Council call for a cease-fire, the Israelis pressed on.

Two weeks later in Washington, while the war continued, President Richard Nixon forced out his attorney general and deputy attorney general, then fired the special prosecutor Archibald Cox. This Saturday Night Massacre unleashed a political firestorm and Mr. Nixon, bending in the face of all the fury, sought solace in drink.

Late in the evening of Oct. 24, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger received an alarming letter from the Soviet general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, addressed to the president. The situation in the Middle East had reached a dangerous point, Mr. Brezhnev told Mr. Nixon. Moscow and Washington had to act jointly to rein in the Israelis. And if the Americans demurred, the Soviets might act unilaterally and send in troops.

When Mr. Brezhnev's message arrived, Mr. Nixon was reported to be indisposed; Mr. Kissinger and the White House chief of staff, Alexander Haig, decided not to wake him up. Instead, Mr. Kissinger called together a meeting of principals to consider America's response. They moved the nuclear alert level to Defcon 3, the highest since the Cuban missile crisis.

Declassified documents reveal that the move was not just a reaction to mounting Soviet naval presence in the Mediterranean, as was long reported, but to intelligence reports of a Soviet ship with nuclear cargo heading for the Egyptian port of Alexandria.

The obvious conclusion was that Moscow was opportunistically using the Watergate scandal to make inroads at Mr. Nixon's expense. As Mr. Kissinger put it, "The Soviets see that he is, in their mind, nonfunctional." As American forces around the world went on heightened alert, there were unanswered questions: Why would Mr. Brezhnev do something like this? Was he just bluffing?

Some of these questions now have answers. We know today that Mr. Brezhnev's threat to send in troops was not the only crazy idea he had. At the height of the crisis, prodded by incessant pleas for help from Egypt's president, Anwar el-Sadat (calls came in the middle of the night), the irate Soviet leader asked the Politburo to consider additional measures, like parking a Soviet naval force off Tel Aviv, or allowing Egypt to strike deep inside Israel with Soviet-supplied rockets.

These aggressive moves were very uncharacteristic of Mr. Brezhnev's generally cautious approach to foreign policy. What happened? His daily schedule - recently declassified - tells a part of the story.

Since the outbreak of the fighting, Mr. Brezhnev often worked virtually around the clock, holding Politburo meetings during the day, receiving delegations at night and speaking to Cairo on the phone in between. On Oct. 22, he went to his favorite hunting lodge, Zavidovo, to recuperate. But according to his secretaries he stayed up at night, even calling his Kremlin office at 2 a.m. It was at Zavidovo that Mr. Brezhnev composed his letter to Mr. Nixon, and also his requestto the Politburo, calling for tougher measures.

The letter was sent. But the tougher measures were quietly torpedoed. Someone in the Soviet leadership realized that the general secretary was going off the rails.

Then, on Oct. 29, the head of the K.G.B. (and Mr. Brezhnev's eventual successor), Yuri Andropov, sent his boss a curious letter, warning him that the Americans and Mr. Sadat had conspired to overwork him by constantly keeping him engaged in difficult decision-making. This was "sabotage," Mr. Andropov argued, pure and simple. The Americans and the Egyptians were trying to "keep us focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict, creating overstrain for all, and especially for you."

Mr. Andropov knew what Mr. Kissinger did not: Mr. Brezhnev had developed an addiction to sleeping pills that, combined with alcohol, was undermining his ability to think straight. Mr. Andropov learned of the addiction weeks before the war in the Middle East but refused to intervene. Mr. Brezhnev's erratic behavior during the war convinced Mr. Andropov of the dangers of inaction. Some of the details remain murky but Mr. Andropov and possibly other senior leaders evidently played a quiet role in keeping their country's leader from sleepwalking into a world war.

Mr. Brezhnev soon recovered his mental faculties. The American escalation to Defcon 3 had a sobering effect on him. The last thing he wanted was a nuclear war with the United States courtesy of an unreliable, trigger-happy Middle Eastern client.

Before too long, however, the Soviet Union was embroiled in conflicts in Africa and in 1979 invaded Afghanistan. It is doubtful that Mr. Brezhnev, his health worsening by the day, even realized the gravity of the situation. When he died, in November 1982, the Soviet empire was impossibly overextended and internationally isolated. All of that happened on Mr. Brezhnev's watch, or, rather, while he slumbered.

Forty-five years ago, the United States and the Soviet Union managed to avoid a war. Some of that was thanks to intervention by Mr. Andropov and others, but at least some, undoubtedly, was pure luck for the Soviets. If there is a lesson today's leaders should heed, it is that in the end, luck always runs out.

Sergey Radchenko (@DrRadchenko) is a professor of international relations at Cardiff University.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/opinion/bloomberg-stop-frisk-racial-injustice.html

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In another blow to the crime-fighting legacy of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the City Council voted Thursday to override his earlier vetoes of two measures designed to curtail the city's use of stop-and-frisk.

The override votes come less than two weeks after a US District Court ruled the New York Police Department 's signature crime-fighting tool was being employed in an unconstitutional manner.

The federal judge found the city's practice of stop-and-frisk - in which officers stop and sometimes search anyone they believe may be involved in criminal activity - illegally targeted minorities and unreasonably subjected citizens to searches. The city is appealing the ruling.

But Thursday's override votes establish as law permanent checks on a tactic Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly have described as a matter of "life and death." The two measures, known together as the Community Safety Act, attempt to reign in what lawmakers earlier perceived as ongoing abuses of the tactic.

One of the measures creates a permanent independent inspector general, who would be a new officer in the city's Department of Investigation. The inspector general would monitor police policies, conduct investigations, and recommend changes.

The federal judge, Shira Scheindlin, has already appointed a temporary independent monitor to oversee changes in NYPD policies. She also ordered some police precincts to use body-worn cameras during their use of stop-and-frisk. This federal oversight runs for a year.

The other City Council measure allows citizens to sue the NYPD in state court if they believe they have been illegally profiled. This includes not only instances of individual profiling, but also class actions from any groups of minorities who feel illegally targeted by police. The law also expands the definitions of such groups to include age, gender, housing status, and sexual orientation.

"Make no mistake: the communities that will feel the most negative impacts of these bills will be minority communities across our city, which have been the greatest beneficiaries of New York City's historic crime reductions," Bloomberg said in a statement after the vote.

"Both bills outsource management of the NYPD to unaccountable officials, making it harder for the next mayor and police commissioner to make the decisions they believe necessary to keep our city safe," he continued. "Today's vote is an example of election year politics at its very worst and political pandering at its most deadly."

With the mayoral primary weeks away, the override comes as a rebuke to the outgoing administration, which has doubled down on stop-and-frisk despite intense opposition from minority groups and civil liberties activists.

The council voted 39 to 10 to override Bloomberg's veto of the inspector general bill, and 34 to 15 on the expanded ability to sue the NYPD.

"I worry for my kids and I worry for your kids. I worry for you and I worry for me," Bloomberg said after the federal judge issued her ruling last week. "Crime can come back any time the criminals think they can get away with things. We just cannot let that happen."

And when NBC "Meet the Press" host David Gregory asked Commissioner Kelly whether "people will die" if the city abandons its stop-and-frisk policies, Kelly responded, "No question about it, violent crime will go up."

"This is something that's integral to policing," he continued. "This happens throughout America in any police jurisdiction. You have to do it."

Critics say the administration's intransigence on the issue has caused needless conflict.

"Rather than recognize that there was serious problems with the policy, they're just digging their heels in," says Randolph McLaughlin, co-chair of the civil rights practice group at Newman Ferrara LLP in New York. "But what's really silly, to be frank, is this notion that, 'we're going to appeal this decision,' when the person who's appealing it will be out of office in January. I seriously doubt that if any of the Democrats come in, they will continue the appeal. So it's really more wasting of the city's scarce resources."

Democratic candidates for mayor came out forcefully against the stop-and-frisk policy in a spirited debate Wednesday evening.

The new laws will take effect in January, 2014, when a new mayor is sworn in.

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Stop-and-frisk: NYC council overrides Bloomberg vetoes, curbing policy

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The override votes establish as law permanent checks on stop-and-frisk, a tactic Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly have called a matter of 'life and death.'

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The president has birthright citizenship all wrong.

By Eric Foner

Mr. Foner is a historian who specializes in the Reconstruction period.

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Part of the Fourteenth Amendment as posted on the wall of Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site in Little Rock, Ark. in 2014. Credit Credit Paul Natkin/Getty Images

In an interview with the news program "Axios on HBO," President Trump announced that he plans to issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship, the principle that everyone born in the United States, with a handful of exceptions, is automatically a citizen of the United States.

"It was always told to me," the president declared, "that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don't."

In fact, such an order would undoubtedly be unconstitutional. It would also violate a deeply rooted American idea - that anybody, regardless of race, religion, national origin, or the legal status of one's parents, can be a loyal citizen of this country.

Birthright citizenship is established by the Civil Rights Act of 1866, still on the books today, and by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified two years later. The only exceptions, in the words of the amendment, are persons not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. Members of Congress at the time made clear that this wording applied only to Native Americans living on reservations - then considered members of their own tribal sovereignties, not the nation - and American-born children of foreign diplomats. (Congress made all Native Americans citizens in 1924.)

Embedding birthright citizenship in the Constitution was one of the transformative results of the Civil War and the destruction of slavery. Before the war, no uniform definition of citizenship existed. Soon after the conflict ended, members of Congress asked Horace Binney, a prominent lawyer and a former congressman, to explore the meaning of citizenship.

"The word citizen," he responded, "is found ten times at least in the Constitution of the United States, and no definition of it is given anywhere." States determined who was a citizen and the rules varied considerably. Massachusetts recognized free African-Americans as citizens; many other states did not. For persons immigrating from abroad, moreover, racial distinctions were built into federal law.

The first Naturalization Act, in 1790, limited the process of naturalization to "white persons." In 1857, on the eve of the Civil War, the Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott decision, declared that no black person, slave or free, could be a citizen of the United States or part of the national "political community." Echoes of this outlook persist to this day, including in Mr. Trump's long campaign to deny the birthright citizenship status of President Barack Obama.

Long before the Civil War, abolitionists black and white had proposed an alternative understanding of national citizenship severed from the concept of race, with citizens' rights enforced by the federal government. Gatherings where northern free blacks agitated for equal rights called themselves conventions of "colored citizens" to drive home this idea. And by the conclusion of the war, the end of slavery and the service of nearly 200,000 African-Americans in the Union army and navy propelled the question of black citizenship to center stage of American politics.

The Fourteenth Amendment was meant to provide, for the first time, a uniform national definition of citizenship, so that states would no longer be able to deny that status to blacks. It went on to require the states to accord all "persons," including aliens, the equal protection of the laws, as part of an effort to create a new egalitarian republic on the ashes of slavery.

The birthright citizenship provision, explained Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, one of the founders of the Republican Party and the floor manager of the amendment's passage in the Senate, was intended to "settle the great question of citizenship once and for all." The amendment formed part of a constitutional revolution that, in the words of George William Curtis, the editor of the Republican magazine Harper's Weekly, transformed a document "for white men" into one "for mankind." In 1870, Congress amended the naturalization laws to allow black immigrants to become citizens. The bar to Asians, however, persisted; they could not be naturalized until well into the 20th century.

Mr. Trump's prospective order would deny citizenship to children born in the United States to noncitizens. It is especially aimed at undocumented immigrants who supposedly pour into the country to have "anchor babies" - one of the president's numerous exaggerations when it comes to the dangers posed by immigration. When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, the category of illegal or undocumented immigrants did not exist. The closest analogy to children born today to such immigrants were the American-born offspring of newcomers from China. At the time, their parents could not become citizens, but in 1898, following the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court affirmed that a person of Chinese origin born in the United States was a citizen by birthright.

In the interview in which he discussed his plan to issue the executive order, Mr. Trump claimed that the United States is "the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States." This, too, is an exaggeration, as many in the Western Hemisphere do recognize birthright citizenship. But it is true that in the past decade or two the nations of Europe have retreated from this principle. All limit automatic access to citizenship in some way, making it depend not simply on place of birth but also on ethnicity, culture, religion or extra requirements for the children of parents who are not citizens.

That has not been our way. Adopted as part of the effort to purge the United States of the legacy of slavery, the principle of birthright citizenship remains an eloquent statement about the nature of American society, a powerful force for assimilation of the children of immigrants and a repudiation of our long history of racism.

Mr. Trump's order, if issued, will not only violate both the Constitution and deeply rooted American ideals, but also set a dangerous precedent. If the president can unilaterally abrogate a provision of the Constitution by executive order, which one will be next?

Eric Foner is the author of many works of American history, including "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1866-1877." His latest book, "The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Forged a Constitutional Revolution," will appear next year.
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Opinion | Donald Trump's Unconstitutional Dreams

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The president has birthright citizenship all wrong.

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Why European elites are worrying about African babies.

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A man from Nigeria held his 6-month-old baby, en route to Italy after being rescued while attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea in 2017. Credit Credit Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press

Emmanuel Macron, the youthful and ambitious president of the French, likes to talk about African birthrates. In the summer of 2017, he answered a question about why there couldn't be a Marshall Plan for Africa by calling the continent's problems "civilizational," and lamenting that African countries "have seven or eight children per woman."

This was attacked by some as racist, defended by others as hardheaded realism about development economics. Macron obviously felt comfortable with what he'd said, because he returned to the idea last month at a Gates Foundation conference. (Bill Gates himself has also been talking a lot lately about population control and development in Africa.) "I always say," Macron told the assembled do-gooders, "'present me the woman who decided, being perfectly educated, to have seven, eight or nine children.'"

This time there was a specifically female response: A Catholic University of America professor, Catherine Pakaluk, posted a photo of six of her eight children under the Twitter hashtag #postcardsforMacron, and soon there was a flood of female Ph.Ds posting pictures of their broods.
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As a pro-natalist, I am in full sympathy with the Macron-tweaking mothers, but as a descriptive matter the French president is basically correct. It's a law of modern Western and East Asian history (we'll call it Macron's Law hereafter) that with wealth and education birthrates fall - and fall, and fall. The existence of occasional exceptions only highlights how exceptional they are.

This plunge has happened without population-control interventions as well as with them, and because Western-supported population control efforts in the developing world tended to be inhumane and not-so-mildly racist, over the last couple of decades they have fallen somewhat out of fashion, with Gatesian philanthropists and politicians alike.

So why are they creeping back into the discussion? For three reasons: Because African birthrates haven't slowed as fast as Western experts once expected, because European demographics are following Macron's Law toward the grave, and because European leaders are no longer nearly so optimistic about assimilating immigrants as even a few short years ago.

In 2004, the U.N. projected that Africa's population would level off by 2100 around two billion. Today it projects that it will reach 4.5 billion instead. This change in the expected trend is more likely a result of sluggish economic growth than proof of an African exception to Macron's Law - though it holds open the possibility that Africa could be such an exception. But whatever the explanation, by century's end two in five human beings could be African.

This trend would have revived a certain kind of population-bomb anxiety no matter what, but the anxiety in Europe is a little more specific than that - because over the same period, Europe's population is likely to drop by about one hundred million. (Western Europe's leaders are a vanguard here: Neither Macron nor Angela Merkel nor Theresa May have any biological children.) In the late 1990s Europe and Africa had about the same population; a hundred years later there could be seven Africans for every European. And the experience of recent refugee crises has demonstrated to European leaders both how easily populations can move northward, and how much harder assimilation may be than they once hoped.

So Macron is not likely to be alone in his fixation on large African families. An Afrophobia that a decade ago was confined to white-identitarians is likely to become an obsession of Europe's technocratic center as well as its nationalist parties. The fixation will be genteel and diplomatic and couched in the language of development but the upshot will be clear: We must find a way to convince African women to stop having so many babies.

However, in addition to being cruel, past population control campaigns were often ineffective, so it's likely that Macron and his successors will mostly fail in their anti-natal efforts. And even the thing that might lead to the falling birthrate they desire, rapid African economic growth, might also accelerate migration in the short term - because poor people who suddenly get richer also gain the means and opportunity to move to somewhere richer still.

Which is why anyone who hopes for something other than destabilization and disaster from the Eurafrican encounter should hope for a countervailing trend, in which Europeans themselves begin to have more children. This would not forestall the near-inevitable northward migration, but it would make it easier to assimilate immigrants once they arrived - European economies would be stronger, ethnic polarization would not fall so dramatically along generational lines, and in politics youthful optimism and ambition might help counteract the fear and pessimism of white Europeans growing old alone.

Of course government efforts to raise the Western birthrate, France's included, have been no more obviously successful than Western-sponsored efforts to cut birthrates elsewhere in the world.

But focusing on European fertility has at least one moral advantage over Macron's finger-wagging at African babymaking: It's the part of the future that Europeans actually deserve to control.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author of several books, most recently, "To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism."

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Why European elites are worrying about African babies.

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news analysis

More and more politicians are calling for single-payer health care. Is it just talk?

By Elisabeth Rosenthal and Shefali Luthra

Dr. Rosenthal was an emergency room doctor before becoming a journalist. Ms. Luthra is a correspondent for Kaiser Health News.

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Credit Credit The Heads of State

After decades in the political wilderness, "Medicare for all" and single-payer health care are suddenly popular. The words appear in political advertisements and are cheered at campaign rallies - even in deep-red states. They are promoted by a growing number of high-profile Democratic candidates, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Representative Beto O'Rourke in Texas.

Republicans are concerned enough that this month President Trump wrote a scathing op-ed essay that portrayed Medicare for all as a threat to older people and to American freedom.

It is not that. But what exactly these proposals mean to many of the people who say they support them remains unclear.

As a renegade candidate for the 2016 Democratic nomination for president, Bernie Sanders opened the door to such drastic reform. Now, with Republicans showing little aptitude for fixing an expensive, dysfunctional health system, more voters, doctors and politicians are walking through it.

Here's how Medicare for All could save money compared with private plans, but also shed features that some might miss.

But some worry the terms "Medicare for all" and "single payer" are at risk of becoming empty campaign slogans. In precise terms, Medicare for all means bringing all Americans under the government's insurance program now reserved for people 65 and over, while single-payer health care would have the government pay everyone's medical bills. But few are speaking precisely.

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, said, "People read into 'Medicare for all' what they want to read into it."

For every candidate with a clear proposal in mind, another uses the phrases as a proxy for voter frustration. The risk, some critics say, is that "Medicare for all" could become a Democratic version of the Republican "repeal and replace" slogan - a vote-getter that does not translate to political action because there is neither agreement about what it means nor a viable plan.

"If you're on the left, you have to have something on health care to say at town halls," said David Blumenthal, president of the Commonwealth Fund. "So you say this and move on. That's part of the motivation."

Dr. Carol Paris, the president of Physicians for a National Health Program, an advocacy group, said she has fielded a number of calls from candidates asking for tutorials on Medicare for all.

"I'm heartened, but not persuaded" that all the high-profile talk will result in any action, she said. She worries about what she called "faux 'Medicare for all' plans" that don't live up to the mantra.

Polling highlights health care as a top voter concern, and pressure is building for politicians to take meaningful action that could redress the pain caused by personal health care costs that continue to rise faster than inflation.

Maybe that action would be negotiating lower drug prices or fixing flaws in the insurance system that allow for surprise medical bills and high out-of-pocket costs. Republican candidates mostly continue to bad-mouth "Obamacare" as the root of all problems in American health care (of course, it's not), and some still push to repeal it. They tend to offer only vague assurances that, for example, they will guarantee that people with pre-existing conditions can find affordable insurance - proposals that do not withstand expert scrutiny.

But more and more voters seem to think the country needs more radical change.

In polling this year, 51 percent of Americans and 74 percent of Democrats said they support a single-payer plan. Surveys suggest growing enthusiasm among doctors, too, with more than half in favor.

Yet experts suggest voter support may not withstand warnings of tax increases or changes to employer-sponsored insurance. A 2017 poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that support for Medicare for all dropped when respondents were told that their taxes might increase or that the government might get "too much control over health care" - a common Republican talking point.

Despite initial enthusiasm, Vermont's governor let a state single-payer plan die in part because it was calculated that it would would equire an 11.5 percent payroll tax on businesses and a state income tax of up to 9.5 percent.

The broader goal - affordable, universal health care - could be achieved by a range of strategies. For models, we can look to nations that have generally achieved better health outcomes, for less money, than the United States.

Canada and Britain come particularly close to true single-payer. Their governments pay medical bills with money raised through taxes and have monopolistic negotiating power over prices. But after that, the systems differ.

In Canada, which is Mr. Sanders's inspiration, the government provides health insurance for most medical needs, with no out-of-pocket costs. People can, and often do, buy a second, private plan for any unmet health needs, such as prescription drugs.

Britain goes a step further. Its government owns hospitals and employs many specialists via the National Health Service. A small private system exists, catering mainly to wealthier people seeking faster access to elective procedures.

Other countries achieve universal health care (or nearly so), but without single-payer. France and Germany have kept an insurance system intact but heavily regulate health care, including by setting the prices for medical procedures and drugs, and requiring all citizens to purchase coverage.

These more incremental options have not captured the American imagination to the same extent as Medicare for all. But adopting such a system would require the biggest shift, with significant implications for taxes, patient choice, doctors' salaries and hospital revenue.

Enthusiastic politicians sometimes gloss over those consequences. For example, Liz Watson, a Democrat running in Indiana's Ninth Congressional District, suggested the impact on doctors' income was not much of a concern, because they would see a "huge recovery" on expenses since they would no longer need to navigate the bureaucracy of insurance paperwork. But analysts across the board agree single-payer would cut revenue for doctors - many say by about 12 percent on average.

And many voters seem confused by the fundamentals. In polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation, about half of Americans said they believed they would be able to keep their current insurance under a single-payer plan, which is not the case.

Optimism without specifics carries risk, as Barack Obama learned after promising that people wouldn't lose their doctors under the Affordable Care Act. That promise haunted the Obama administration - it was singled out as PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" in 2013 and is still mocked by members of the Trump White House.

There's also the thorny issue of how Medicare for all would affect the thousands of jobs at private insurers. "We have an insurance industry in Omaha, and people say, 'I worry about those jobs,'" said Kara Eastman, a Democrat running on Medicare for all in Nebraska's Second District. She suggested people could be retrained, saying there would have to be "repurposing of positions."

Critics of Medicare for all, on the other hand, tend to exaggerate the costs of single-payer: "Denmark's top tax bracket is nearly 60 percent!" (True, although that's largely not because of health care.) "Doctors' incomes will drop 40 percent!" (True, specialists in private practice would probably see pay cuts, but primary care doctors could well see an increase.)

Canadians generally pay higher taxes than Americans do - specifically a goods and services tax, and higher taxes on the wealthy. In Germany, working people pay 7.5 percent of income as a contribution toward comprehensive insurance.

But many Americans pay far more than that when you count premiums, deductibles, co-payments and out-of-network charges. Estimates of the tax increases required to support a Medicare-for-all or single-payer system are all over the map, depending on how the plan is structured, the prices paid to providers and drug makers, and the generosity of benefits.

As a politician famously noted, "Nobody knew health care could be so complicated."

Some candidates do have clear proposals in mind. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, for example, running for the House from New York's 14th District, is firm: a single, government-run health plan that covers everyone with no co-payments or deductibles and perhaps allows Americans to buy supplemental private coverage. It's the Canadian approach, textbook single-payer.

But many who back Medicare for all are vague or open toincremental approaches, like a "public option" that maintains the current insurance structure while allowing people to buy into Medicare.

Mr. O'Rourke casts Medicare for all as a starting point for discussion. But he said that what matters most is "high-quality, guaranteed universal health care." Getting there, he added, "will inevitably require some compromise" - like a public option. Notably, he has not signed on as a co-sponsor of the Medicare for all bill because that plan does not allow for-profit providers to participate.

Jared Golden, a Democratic House candidate from Maine's Second District, says in his campaign materials that he favors "something like Medicare for all," but he clarified that at least initially, he would argue to lower the Medicare eligibility age, a change that wonks often call "Medicare for more."

And the Wisconsin Democrat Randy Bryce, who is running to replace Speaker Paul Ryan in the House, said he would support a public option or lowering the eligibility age for Medicare. "I don't want to say that there's only one way to go about it," Mr. Bryce said.

But many other candidates - both for Congress and for governorships - who are talking "Medicare for all" on the campaign trail either did not acknowledge or declined multiple requests to be interviewed on the subject. They include Andrew Gillum, who is running for governor in Florida; Gina Ortiz Jones of the Texas 23rd; the California candidate for governor Gavin Newsom; the Massachusetts Seventh candidate Ayanna Pressley; and the Pennsylvania First District candidate Scott Wallace.

Ms. Lake, the pollster, suggested that policy details simply aren't as relevant in a midterm year and that for now we shouldn't expect a candidate's support for Medicare for all to be anything more than a way to signal his or her values. But she suggested that will change in the run-up to 2020, adding, "When we head into the presidential election, people will probably be pickier and want more details."

That gives politicians and voters a few years to decide what they mean and what they want when they say they support Medicare for all or single-payer health care. For now, it's hard to read too much into promises.

Dr. Paris, who lives in Nashville, said she was surprised and excited to hear that her representative, Jim Cooper, a Blue Dog Democrat, had signed up as a co-sponsor of the Medicare for all bill.

"I told him, 'I'm dumbfounded,'" she recalled.

His answer? "Don't get too excited."

Elisabeth Rosenthal, a former New York Times correspondent, is the author of "An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back" and editor in chief of Kaiser Health News. Shefali Luthra is a Washington-based correspondent for Kaiser Health News.
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Opinion | 'Don't Get Too Excited' About Medicare for All

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More and more politicians are calling for single-payer health care. Is it just talk?

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Mind

Most research on depression focuses on the afflicted, a new paper argues, overlooking a potentially informative group: people who have recovered.

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Credit Scott Menchin

A generation ago, depression was viewed as an unwanted guest: a gloomy presence that might appear in the wake of a loss or a grave disappointment and was slow to find the door. The people it haunted could acknowledge the poor company - I've been a little depressed since my father died - without worrying that they had become chronically ill.

Today, the condition has been recast in the medical literature as a darker, more permanent figure, a monster in the basement poised to overtake the psyche. For decades, researchers have debated the various types of depression, from mild to severe to "endogenous," a rare, near-paralyzing despair. Hundreds of studies have been conducted, looking for markers that might predict the course of depression and identify the best paths to recovery. But treatment largely remains a process of trial and error. A drug that helps one person can make another worse. The same goes for talk therapies: some patients do very well, others don't respond at all.

"If you got a depression diagnosis, one of the most basic things you want to know is, what are the chances of my life returning to normal or becoming optimal afterward?" said Jonathan Rottenberg, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida. "You'd assume we'd have an answer to that question. I think it's embarrassing that we don't."

In a paper in the current issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, Dr. Rottenberg and his colleagues argue that, in effect, the field has been looking for answers in the wrong place. In trying to understand how people with depression might escape their condition, scientists have focused almost entirely on the afflicted, overlooking a potentially informative group: people who once suffered from some form of depression but have more or less recovered.

Indeed, while this cohort almost certainly exists - every psychiatrist and psychologist knows someone in it - it is so neglected that virtually nothing is known about its demographics, how well its members are faring and, fundamentally, how many individuals it contains.

"We know that many people with bipolar disorder, for instance - a serious, lifetime condition - do very well after treatment, and end up in creative jobs," said Sheri Johnson, director of the mania program at the University of California, Berkeley. "But we can't predict who. So it would be very important to have this kind of information, to know more about that group. Imagine if doctors could give you some sense of what's possible."
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In the new paper, Dr. Rottenberg and his co-authors, Todd Kashdan and David Disabato of George Mason University, and Andrew Devendorf of the University of South Florida, argue that the effort to understand how people recover from depression is stunted by the kind of evidence available. Treatment trials typically last six to eight weeks, and they focus on reducing negative symptoms, such as feelings of worthlessness, fatigue and thoughts of suicide. What happens in the subsequent months and years - and which positive developments occur, and for whom - is largely unknown.

"I think it's fine - it's a good idea - to look at people who do well after a period of depression, over the longer term," said Dr. Nada Stotland, a psychiatrist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. "But we might simply find that they're the people who were doing better in the first place."

In a forthcoming analysis, to be published in Clinical Psychological Science, the same team of psychologists make a rough estimate of the number of post-depression "flourishers," using data from a periodic national survey called the Midlife Development in the United States. The survey includes more than 6,000 people between the ages of 25 and 75 and more than 500 who met criteria for depression. About half of the people who had received a diagnosis recovered afterward, meaning they had been symptom free for at least a year, the researchers found. One in five of those - 10 percent of the total - were thriving a decade later. The research team based that judgment on an assessment that includes measures of how people feel, how well their relationships are going, and their work.

That 10 percent number might look disappointingly low, or encouragingly high, depending on one's perspective. The best comparison is the portion of people who were rated as thriving who never had depression: 20 percent.

"That is, having depression cuts in half your chances of ending up in this group" at the high end of the well-being scale, Dr. Rottenberg said. He added: "But we really don't know for sure, until we have better evidence."

To gain that evidence, the ideal approach would be to follow a large cohort of people who had recovered from depression, over many years, to tease apart the differences between the 10 percent or so who thrived and those who did not. Such studies would be costly, the authors acknowledge, and likely would require collaboration among many large clinical centers.

Still, individuals who've routed what Winston Churchill called his "black dog" and built a full life have a collective knowledge that others do not. And researchers can only speculate about what that vanquishing entailed until they ask, systematically and empirically.

The answers won't necessarily fall into a straightforward pattern. Whereas some people who thrive after depression might swear by daily pills, others may depend on weekly talk therapy. Good friends, good opportunities, and good genes are likely to play a role. And there very well may be many people who have developed idiosyncratic methods of their own, a kind of daily self-therapy or routine not found in any manual, textbook or study.

"If so, it would be exciting to find out what those are," Dr. Rottenberg said. "You'd not only be giving people with depression some hope, by studying this group. You might also be able to give them something they could use."

For now, said Dr. Stotland, the Chicago psychiatrist, the fact that depression can be chronic, and recurrent, hardly means that people are doomed by the diagnosis. "I've never told patients that," she said. " I tell them they're likely to get better, and I suspect that most of my colleagues do the same."

Benedict Carey has been a science reporter for The Times since 2004. He has also written three books, "How We Learn" about the cognitive science of learning; "Poison Most Vial" and "Island of the Unknowns," science mysteries for middle schoolers.

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What's Life Like After Depression? Surprisingly, Little Is Known

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Most research on depression focuses on the afflicted, a new paper argues, overlooking a potentially informative group: people who have recovered.

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If this were simply about wearing kilts or liking Ed Sheeran, these ads could be dismissed as, well, ads. They're just trying to sell stuff, shrug. But marketing campaigns for genetic-ancestry tests also tap into the idea that DNA is deterministic, that genetic differences are meaningful. They trade in the prestige of genomic science, making DNA out to be far more important in our cultural identities than it is, in order to sell more stuff.

First, the accuracy of these tests is unproven (as detailed here and here). But putting that aside, consider simply what it means to get a surprise result of, say, 15 percent German. If you speak no German, celebrate no German traditions, have never cooked German food, and know no Germans, what connection is there, really? Cultural identity is the sum total of all of these experiences. DNA alone does not supersede it.

Listening to 99 Luftballons or rooting for Germany in the World Cup is fairly trivial as these things go. But this wave of marketing campaigns encourages a way of thinking-that you can pick and choose which fractional parts of genetic identity to highlight when it makes for good cocktail-party conversation.

At a recent genetic-genealogy meeting I attended, an audience member asked how to convince people to upload their DNA results to more genealogy sites. "Tell them they'll find they're Native American and they'll all go," another person in the audience joked. The whole room laughed in recognition. Native American ancestry is an enduring fascination among Americans, and genetic-ancestry tests tap into an idea that something interesting, something unknown, might be buried in the past.

That's the annoying version of conflating DNA and cultural identity. The even more insidious version is using genetic ancestry to game programs set up to address past injustices. As a demonstration of how that could be done, a man in Washington State cited a DNA test as evidence of his African (4 percent) and Native American (6 percent) ancestry.

When I previously spoke to Kim TallBear, a professor at the University of Alberta, about the case, she said it showed a grave misunderstanding of Native American identity. "It might be all these people have Native American ancestry," she said. "My question is: Who cares?" Native American tribes usually require identifying relatives for membership. "If there's a particular ancestor that is close enough you can find living family, then you can do that," TallBear added. "If there's nobody for you to find and no tribal community that's going to claim you, it doesn't really mean anything." Nevertheless, she says, as genetic-ancestry tests have become popular, people have been showing up at tribal-enrollment offices with their results.

The most charged criticism against genetic-ancestry tests is that they emphasize people's genetic differences, ultimately reifying race as a meaningful category when it is in fact a social construct. A 2014 study found that when people read a newspaper article about genetic-ancestry tests, their beliefs in racial differences increased. And white nationalists have taken to DNA ancestry tests to prove their European heritage.

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A Spotify playlist tailored to your DNA is the latest example of brands cashing in on people's search for identity.