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Hyperthetical Writing Prompt September 4th

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ELA 9 - Independent Reading and Writing Project

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CASA Humanities - Plan for Learning and Growth

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How is "ghosting" used as a technique for humanity and perseverance here?

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Look how the author utilizes font and technique to help develop character and setting.

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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

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A breakup with the American Dream...

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One Day We Will Have Always Been Against This

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Madness (The Intersection of Race and Mental Illness)

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Madness (The Intersection of Race and Mental Illness)

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America Redux (Great Visual Textbook for Social Studies)

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America Redux (Great Visual Textbook for Social Studies)

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Great article for these unsettling times...

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A long article but a great one!

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The way a fire starts is simple. When a flammable material is exposed to a high enough temperature and fed by an oxidizer, you get flame. It's called the fire triangle, the chemical combination of oxygen, fuel, and heat, which generates the first wisp of burning. Take one of these elements away, and the fire goes out, or doesn't ignite in the first place.

Then there's fire behavior, or the way it moves. By nature, fire seeks to keep itself alive. It unfurls from the center of its own heat and consumes a forest or structure or city by way of the trinity of fuel, weather, and topography. If more combustible material can be licked by flame, and wind can direct and feed its heat, a fire can rage. It can burn so hot it melts aluminum. It can move so fast that it destroys a town in minutes. It can clog the air with so much smoke, there is nothing left to breathe.

Fire cannot exist or move without all of these elements in place and in the right proportions. Like anything, fire is a set of conditions ignited by chance. It fuels change.

This is where it stops being simple.

When the Camp Fire started, Berlin was dark and cold and wet. It was November 8, and I was sitting at the kitchen table of a small sublet apartment when my dad sent a photo to our family chat of a massive cloud of black smoke ringed with a burning glow, hanging over the Northern California canyon I call home.

Big fire moving from Concow to Paradise , he wrote. Jumped from 500 to 1000 acres in an hour. High winds.

My mom added: It'll have to get through Paradise to get us, so we're most likely ok.

I grew up in wildland, an open patch of pasture ringed by woods in the hollow of Butte Creek Canyon outside of Chico, California. On top of the canyon's southeastern ridge sat the tiny town of Paradise, an inconsequential detail for most of my life. In the hot and dry summers of this corner of the world, wildfire shaped my life as much as a river carves a canyon. To assume this one was not an immediate threat was not ignorant. We'd made it through so many.

A river carved a canyon and that canyon is carved in me. From childhood, I've known each of its curves like I know the shape of my own body.

But this one was different. The fire reached Paradise and blew through the city before anyone knew what to do. In my darkening apartment, I watched videos from inside the firestorm fill Facebook, and read reports of people fleeing their burning cars on the Skyway, which was the only road out of town and ran along the ridge that made my canyon. I refreshed fire maps, watching red blots edge closer to the thin lines drawing the shape of home. I fell into a panic, updating my family of the evacuation orders while they packed to flee - my parents from my childhood home and one of my sisters from her own canyon home, where she lived with her fiance and 1-year-old daughter.

Two hours after my dad's text, Paradise was gone. The fire tipped down into the canyon. My family left.

In Chico, residents and evacuees watched noon turn dark. Cold settled over the city as the thick, toxic smoke from the fire blotted out the day. Street lamps switched on. Cars drove with headlights. Ash fell like snow. The sun peeked through the sky like a blurry orange moon.

On the other side of the world, I looked at this darkness through the window of my computer screen, a wall of night behind me. For a brief moment in time, California and Berlin looked not unalike: two nights pulling at the edges of an expanse of light stretched over the earth. And me - a tether between the two, taut with the force of home.

When asked why I moved to Berlin, I start with the simple answer: I fell in love with the city. But that's just part of the story. I had to fall out of love with something else first.

After spending the first 20 years of life in Chico, I moved a few hours away to Oakland, where I spent nearly a decade. At the time, Oakland's popular image didn't extend much further than crime reports. But I loved it, for a while. It was cheap. It held the tinge of possibility without the cliches of New York and L.A. and San Francisco. I spent my first years working in cafes, going to school, renting small rooms in big homes, going to parties in warehouses.

But then, things changed. Foreclosed craftsman bungalows were bought cheap and flipped at a massive profit to new Silicon Valley spillovers. Barbershops and historic delis shuttered to make way for fusion restaurants and third-wave coffeehouses. Landlords kicked out old tenants and gave their homes to the highest bidder. In 2014, the New York Times the "Brooklyn by the Bay," and the city took on a similar veneer of cool. It became a caricature of itself, and (mostly white) young people flooded the city along with (mostly white) tech commuters, forcing out the historically black and lower-income residents that had been there for decades.

The rest is well-known: The Bay Area is now one of the most expensive places to live in the world, and the ensuing housing crisis has caused a chain reaction of uninhabitability. By the time I left, my boyfriend and I were paying $2,850 for a duplex apartment in East Oakland and called ourselves lucky for even finding a place. As one writer : "Oakland in every aspect of the word is no longer what it used to be "

Then there were the fires.

In 2015, the illegally converted warehouse turned artist space known as the Totally Intense Fractal Mindgaze Hut caught fire in the night and burned. Two people were killed. One was Davis, my sister's ex-boyfriend, who was like my brother. We called ourselves cosmic twins.

Less than two years later, the illegally converted warehouse turned artist space known as the Ghost Ship caught fire during a party and burned. Thirty-six people were killed. One was my friend from back home, Donna. Everyone in my extended community lost their people.

Later, arsonists started fires across the city in the night, charring new developments that longtime residents didn't want.

The city was at war with itself, burning with its own greed. A housing crisis, stagnant wages for most, apathetic city officials - pushing everyone out. A place, reshaped.

I move to Oakland, young and naive. I pay the high rent. I buy the $12 cocktails. I feed the flames. I move across the world. We change the world's shape, then wonder why it burns.

Eventually, I left. I got rid of a lifetime of possessions, ended a five-year relationship, bought a one-way ticket across the world. I kept saying I was burning down my life. In reality, I'd endured a slow-burn kind of disaster, the kind that I absorbed into my life ember by ember almost without notice until it burned me out.

The Camp Fire was set off by electrical transmission lines belonging to Pacific Gas & Electric, the state's largest electricity utility company. On that day - one with high winds and high heat - the company was supposed to shut off power to prevent wildfire. It didn't. One spark and then the rest.

At its height, the fire moved at 80 acres per minute, equivalent to a football-field length of town or forest or pasture per second. In the ensuing chaos, hundreds of people were marked missing, and stayed that way for weeks. The death toll steadily rose. The fire burned so hot that it was hard to even find the remnants of bodies. I heard stories of final phone calls, half-burned animals hanging on to life, a woman who had just given birth and took refuge in the garage of an evacuated house while nurses fought the flames. But still, the fire raged on. The winds changed course, firefighters were stretched thin. In my own small corner of the disaster, it was days before we knew if anything had survived.

On the other side of the world, day became a footnote to the long northern nights. When I should have been sleeping, dreams of fire burned me awake. I'd check my text messages, call home, refresh Twitter for updates. During my day, California slept. I wandered in a haze beneath the ashen sky, unmoored, waiting for something to happen. And what happened was, I no longer knew what was home.

I used to live in a tiny cabin behind my parent's home. Set back in the pasture across the stream that ran through our property in spring, I felt alone. I liked it this way. Close to wildland, on the edge of our human sphere.

At night I would sometimes hear foxes yowling with the sound of women screaming. They too lived a solitary life.

It was thought that the Sacramento Valley red fox that populated my homeland was an introduced species. Researchers only recently discovered that they're native, related to the nearly extinct High Sierra fox, whose natural habitat lies farther north. Both are endangered. Loss of habitat, hybridization.

Not long after the Camp Fire, I learned about Berlin's foxes. Influenced by human habits, they've become scavengers and have adopted an urban life and their population has exploded. Now there are more fox dens within the city limits than in the surrounding forests. In the deep of winter, I spotted my first one. It skittered like a flame across the bare field of snow behind my building. It was midday, but the sky was low and dark. I held my breath until it disappeared like a flash of something familiar.

I spent the winter wondering why we're both here.

In 1983, my parents drove from the Bay Area to visit their new land, traveling into a mass of smoke that ended in the canyon. Flames consumed the northwestern ridge across from their home, the picturesque one that gave their canyon valley its view. It was the Fourth of July, and they stood on their new patch of land and watched as the fire crackled up pine trees, their cones popping like dazzling, sinister fireworks.

In 1999, a fire slipped over that same ridge and burned the butte for days. I remember standing at the end of our driveway and watching flames move slowly across the blackening rockface, taking down trees. The firemen stationed themselves in our field. When it ended, the ridge was bare.

In 2007, a fire careened up the canyon in a matter of hours and burned that ridge again. I was leaving for Mexico for a month and put a box of my things by the door in case my parents had to evacuate while I was gone.

In 2017, I woke up in Oakland to brown skies. In the night, the Tubbs Fire had torn through Santa Rosa - a city 58 miles north - and consumed neighborhoods in minutes. It was described over and over as a fireball. Twenty-two people were killed and 5,600 structures were destroyed. It held the title as the most destructive wildfire in California for just one year.

I watch it all burn with numb recognition, my affinity with my home replaced with an intimacy with its destruction. California is burning. I'm not sure that will ever not be true.

The day after the Tubbs Fire, another one started a mile from my sister's home. She packed, swept the dry leaves off the roof of the house, waited. After it was over, I wrote about imagining the fire ripping through her house, then tearing across the canyon to reach my parent's home.

Six weeks before the Camp Fire, I spent my last few days in the U.S. at my childhood home. At 3 a.m., a neighbor tore up our driveway, flashing his headlights, honking and yelling that there was a fire on the ridge behind us. My parents and I panicked, started making a plan. My dad called a local firefighter who told us the fire was between us and Paradise, but small - nine acres and nearly contained, nothing to worry about. We wandered around the house in the dark for a few hours wondering what to do, feeling for wind. At daybreak, I fell asleep, a faraway city smoldering on the edge of my dreams.

My current home rests a block from the most contentious point of what was the Berlin Wall. Running along Bernauer Strasse, the barrier ran flush against buildings on the East Berlin side of the street - my side of the street. After the wall rose overnight, residents in these border buildings tried to flee. They slid down ropes or jumped out of windows. Eventually, the buildings were evacuated. Residents were forced to resettle deeper into East Berlin, and the windows and doors of the buildings were bricked up. A second wall was built some 160 yards away, and the space between the two became known as the Death Strip. It was full of traps, guard dogs, and obstacles, lined with watchtowers where the guards were ordered to shoot anyone who attempted to cross.

It's here that the first East Berlin defector was killed, and many more after. It's also here where the most successful escape tunnels were dug, and where protests and acts of resistance were staged.

The wall stood for nearly 30 years. In that time, storylines stopped. Lives were reshaped. Everything changed. A history folded in on itself, barred from unfurling.

What goes unwritten in the undone history of disaster?

In the first four days of its burning, the Camp Fire becomes the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. By the time it ends three weeks after the first spark, flames scorched an area of 240 square miles and destroyed over 18,800 structures . people died, including one in my canyon. A year later, one person is still missing.

In the canyon, some 80% of the homes burned. My sister's was one of them. My childhood home was not.

In the absence of firefighters, a group of men I grew up with in our small, close-knit community went into the fire and fought it themselves . They saved my homeland. Black scars of the fire's path trace the back edge of my parent's property, drawing an unfinished storyline: It was supposed to burn.

Back in Berlin, I slip into the space formed by the dissonance of relief and grief.

There is a ghost in all of this: the man I was dating when the fire started. When I woke up in the middle of the night to call my family or check the news, he woke up with me. When my family was certain our home was gone and I sat on the couch with my dad on the phone in one hand and my head in the other, he sat next to me, arms around my shoulders.

We'd only been seeing each other a few weeks when the fire came. We met and fell fast. He told me on our second or third date that I felt like home and I settled into it. Then, before the fire was even out, he ended things, saying he wasn't emotionally capable of being in a relationship. I stayed in bed for days, not sure if I was crying about the fire or the loss or home, realizing eventually they were all the same. A triangle of pain.

When I returned to California for Christmas, I found out through social media that he was back with his ex, captioning photos with proclamations about how his love for her felt like home.

Before flying back to Berlin, I saw the boyfriend I'd left when I burned down my life. Needing to be wanted, or wanting to be home, I asked him if he missed me. It's complicated , he said.

When I wonder enough about the foxes, I write to a conservation officer at one of the oldest and largest environmental associations in Germany. I ask if I can talk to her about them and, saying her English isn't very good, she offers to answer a few questions by email.

I start with the basics.

Are the foxes native?

What's their breed?

What is their population?

I move to the deeper questions, the ones I return to when the foxes fill my mind.

Are the foxes no longer nocturnal? Is it healthy for them to be out during the day?
They've learned that there is no danger from humans. They can hunt during the day or gather food.
Is the city doing anything to reintroduce them to the wild or to control their population?
No.
Are they being allowed to exist as they are?
Yes.
And finally, the complicated one.

Do you think the foxes would be happier if they were not urbanized?
The foxes have decided to do it themselves! Obviously, they can live well! They have adapted well!
I read the email on my phone while standing over the stove in my kitchen, making soup. Is it a decision when loss of habitat forces a move? Is adaptation anything more than survival? And is survival truly a life?

I eat my soup, contemplate belonging.

Would you be happier if you were not urbanized?
You decided this yourself.
Does the day sometimes feel like a dream because the other side of the world is shrouded in night?
Yes.
Is this where you belong?
You have adapted well.
When you leave one home and build another, which is more real?
This is not known.
Before there was a canyon there was a river. Starting as an ancient mudflow, the water spent millennia washing its bed of basalt and sandstone until it carved the cragged and fractured walls that became the brackets around my home. A river carved a canyon and that canyon is carved in me. From childhood, I've known each of its curves like I know the shape of my own body. Every tree, every cavern, every structure. Every bend in the river, every story buried behind the seen.

When I come home six weeks after the fire, I find my geography unstitched. It's a disorienting drive up the winding canyon road. Each burned lot, each fallen tree, undoes the map in me. I knew to expect the mangled remnants of houses and the blackened, barren buttes, but I failed to imagine the disorientation that comes with the absolute reshaping of home. I see new angles of the river I never saw before, revealed by burned-out groves of trees, new caves scooped out of the buttes. When we visit the site of my sister's home, I can't reconcile the wreckage with what stood before. The floor plan suddenly seems too small, the lot a wholly different terrain. Further up the canyon, my mind tries to restring the historic covered bridge between the banks of the river, but the space where it stood for 130 years remains blank. It's like encountering a ghost, or the film negative to an image. Reality untethers.

For a brief moment in time, California and Berlin looked not unalike: two nights pulling at the edges of an expanse of light stretched over the earth. And me - a tether between the two, taut with the force of home.

But then I think about Berlin, a city seething with ghosts and built on the bones of destruction. How I scrawl my own map of the place, overlaying my history on top of the invisible ones floating where a wall or a building once stood. How many missing monuments hang heavy in the air or in memory, easy for me to ignore. We forget what has changed, a dissonance between and . Imperceptibly, the river is still carving the canyon. History is still reshaping. The maps in us still unfolding.

Less than a year after the Camp Fire, my sister leaves her fiance. They never recover from the grief of the fire. She and her daughter move in with my parents. She struggles against an 8-year-old addiction.

A week later, I learn that my aunt's cancer has progressed. She has to have another surgery. She starts talking about her death.

What do fire, addiction, and cancer have in common? They grow and spread. They seethe. They are a fight you sometimes lose. They destroy.

What do a fox and me have in common? A fox adopts a new life in the day. I transform my day to night. We alter our roots, distortion by force or choice.

Somewhere along the way, I absorb a line from an Audre Lorde poem. Places do not change so much as what we seek in them . What happens when both are true?

Condition: The year Oakland became a national hotspot was the year California's drought became a national emergency. Even then, in 2014, it was the worst drought in 1,200 years, and it stretched on for another five. At the same time, the untenable expense of California's major cities pushes the housing crisis out into the rest of the state. The shortage leads developers to carve into farmland and wildland to build subdivisions. It's a cultural and environmental war, often waged over water. State officials make plans to build new dams. Southern California vies for Northern California's water supply. Trees die en masse, setting the parched and arid state up to burn. On the edge of the state, rising sea levels threaten to sink cities. People continue to water their lawns.

Condition: The year I was born was the year the Berlin Wall fell. After three decades of war with itself, a reconciliation. In the haste to erase the influence of the East, the West tears down the barrier along with buildings and monuments that signified the regime. The wall becomes a ghost, haunting only memory. The city breaks open with emptied spaces, which fill with the influence of a new culture: clubs, galleries, collectives. It rises, blooming out of the frenetic need to forget what was.

Condition: The human habit of carving space. Cities built in deserts, water flooding rice fields in the Central Valley, homes edging out and out. A wall divides a city and writes a new history, then buries it beneath another one. I move to Oakland, young and naive. I pay the high rent. I buy the $12 cocktails. I feed the flames. I move across the world. We change the world's shape, then wonder why it burns.

In January, I'm walking home on a rough brick sidewalk strewn with snow when a fox rounds the corner and faces me. I stop in the middle of the sidewalk, hold my breath, look around to find myself alone.

In Becoming Animal , David Abram writes about the reciprocal experience between humans and the natural world. When we witness an animal or a landscape, it in turn witnesses us. A mutual sensory perception, reminding us of our connection. "The terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain," he writes. See and be seen. Be and belong.

Without breaking his stride, the fox continues in my direction, then steps off the sidewalk into the street to pass me. I turn my body to witness him go by. The fox keeps his eyes forward. He steps back onto the sidewalk, rounds the opposite corner, and disappears. See and be seen. Be and belong.

I start walking again, knowing I'm heading home.

Just two weeks before the one-year anniversary of the Camp Fire, the cycle repeats itself. In October, wildfires consume California from north to south, even amid rolling blackouts meant to protect the state from more disaster. In the Bay Area, the fires edge into urban zones once considered safe from the yearly threat of burning. It's the new normal, come to greet us with unceasing wind, uncontained flames, smoke-choked air, and the declaration of a statewide emergency.

I watch it all burn with numb recognition, my affinity with my home replaced with an intimacy with its destruction. California is burning. I'm not sure that will ever not be true.

This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you about the regenerative power of fire, how from destruction comes regrowth. This is the part where I say that fire is necessary and preventative, essential to the lifecycle of ecosystems, clearing out and making room, allowing new beings to emerge. It's here that I tell you about the concept of serotiny, the ecological adaptation in which certain plants require a trigger to release their seeds, and how that trigger is often fire, or fire followed by rain. How death is needed for life.

I take this and apply it to my life. I tell you how, on the drive up the canyon in April when I return home after the winter, the buttes are carpeted in neon green and burning with the orange of California poppies. How I stop to take a photo of this fiery bloom and post it on Instagram with the caption like it's some kind of reconciliation. How when I return to Berlin, the trees have grown leaves and the days have lengthened, and I feel at home. How I don't see another fox again. How life after disaster can be like that - you burn it all down to build it back up, and doesn't that make the pain so beautiful?

Imperceptibly, the river is still carving the canyon. History is still reshaping. The maps in us still unfolding.

But I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'll tell you about standing on the Paradise ridge in the depth of summer, star thistle scratching the parched air in the hundred-degree heat. How the only thing I found growing there in the wide median of the highway was 86 white crosses, jutting out of the dusty earth to hold the names of the dead. How each one was covered in flowers and photos, I love you, mom s, and the metal tags of pets that perished with them. I'll tell you how my face burned under the sun while I walked the length of this memorial. How at first I felt numb until something sparked inside me and I cried in the heat. A trigger. A seed.

Instead, I'll tell you that researchers are discovering that some wildfires burn so hot, they destroy the seeds they were supposed to regenerate and the elements that give any surviving seeds a chance, and nothing grows back. That some scars don't heal. That home is not a complete idea, just like a wildfire is not a whole but a collection of small burnings, erratic and fluid. That the chemistry of change has no set conditions.

How sometimes, things are not so simple. But that's when life begins.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler

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The way a fire starts is simple. When a flammable material is exposed to a high enough temperature and fed by an oxidizer, you get flame. It's called the fire triangle, the chemical combination of oxygen, fuel, and heat, which generates the first wisp of burning.

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Idea in Brief

The Challenge

Managers today are bombarded with calls to give feedback-constantly, directly, and critically. But it turns out that telling people what we think of their performance and how they can do better is not the best way to help them excel and, in fact, can hinder development.

The Reality

Research shows that, first, we aren't the reliable raters of other people's performance that we think we are; second, criticism inhibits the brain's ability to learn; and, third, excellence is idiosyncratic, can't be defined in advance, and isn't the opposite of failure. Managers can't "correct" a person's way to excellence.

The Solution

Managers need to help their team members see what's working, stopping them with a "Yes! That!" and sharing their experience of what the person did well.

The debate about feedback at work isn't new. Since at least the middle of the last century, the question of how to get employees to improve has generated a good deal of opinion and research. But recently the discussion has taken on new intensity. The ongoing experiment in "radical transparency" at Bridgewater Associates and the culture at Netflix, which the Wall Street Journal recently described as "encouraging harsh feedback" and subjecting workers to "intense and awkward" real-time 360s, are but two examples of the overriding belief that the way to increase performance in companies is through rigorous, frequent, candid, pervasive, and often critical feedback.

A version of this article appeared in the March-April 2019 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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Why Feedback Rarely Does What It's Meant To

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For years managers have been encouraged to candidly praise and criticize just about everything workers do. But it turns out that feedback does not help employees thrive. First, research shows that people can't reliably rate the performance of others: More than 50% of your rating of someone reflects your characteristics, not hers.

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NYC Midnight hosts inspiring challenges for storytellers around the world. Writers receive prompts and have a limited amount of time to create flash fiction, microfiction, screenplays, and short stories.

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How does technique inform meaning in this photograph?

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How does technique inform meaning in this photograph?

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They're lightning quick poachers - small aerodynamic head, long slender body, oversized respiratory system; lean, highly concentrated fast-twitch muscle groups. Not for long distances, but short bursts of blurring velocity; down to the black glare-reducing stripes under their eyes. This is nature's speed machine.

© 2021 Copyright Animagraffs.

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Cheetah: Nature's Speed Machine - Animagraffs

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They're lightning quick poachers - small aerodynamic head, long slender body, oversized respiratory system; lean, highly concentrated fast-twitch muscle groups. Not for long distances, but short bursts of blurring velocity; down to the black glare-reducing stripes under their eyes. This is nature's

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The Distribution of Young People Around the World

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The Distribution of Young People Around the World

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What’s Going On in This Graph? | March 27, 2024

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Over the next quarter-century, what is projected to happen to the distribution of young people around the world? What benefits and challenges might result because of this shift?

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Nineteen by George Bogin On the first day of Philosophy 148, a small girl walked in, freckled, solemn, cute, whom I liked right off. ...

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I Will Not Let an Exam Result Decide My Fate...

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I Will Not Let an Exam Result Decide My Fate...

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Suli Breaks -  I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate (Spoken Word)

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Wanna teach Kendrick Lamar's Halftime Performance???

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Wanna teach Kendrick Lamar's Halftime Performance???

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Decoding Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl Show

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Wonderful spoken word poem!!!

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It's Important to Talk About Learning Accommodations With Your Students...

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It's Important to Talk About Learning Accommodations With Your Students...

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Ryan Brazil is teaching a lesson about fairness-at least that's what it seems like.

First, she asks a tall child to retrieve a ruler she's stashed above her whiteboard; he succeeds easily. Next, she calls on a shorter student to do the same, and he can't reach. "What does Alex need?" Brazil asks her fourth-grade class. "We can give him a stool, right?"

Tasks that are easy for some kids can be difficult for others, and "not all of you are going to need the same things," Brazil explains to her students. "But fair doesn't mean everyone gets the same thing. I want you to stop and think about what you need versus what another classmate might need."

Talking to students about accommodations can stretch many educators beyond their areas of expertise, requiring them to navigate sensitive conversations about disability while avoiding disclosing private information, especially when kids are unaware of a diagnosis. "I wish I knew the right thing to say," wrote Dallas-based elementary science teacher Amy Banks when we asked teachers where they need guidance for supporting students with learning disabilities. "I don't know what to say to my students when they ask things like 'Why do I have copies of the notes in my folder?' or 'Why do I need to listen to the test questions being read aloud?'"

The ability to frame accommodations in a positive way-both for the children who need them and for classmates who are curious or even judgmental about learning supports-is a critical part of creating a classroom where kids respect each other and advocate for their own needs. When teachers avoid the topic entirely or gloss over it quickly, says Rachel Lambert, a disability researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, "kids will make meaning of it on their own." Students with disabilities who feel stigmatized at school, she says, may struggle as adults to "construct a positive identity around their disability."

We interviewed veteran educators to gather their best tips for discussing learning accommodations with students across the grade levels.

ELEMENTARY SCHOOL: BUILDING CULTURE AND RELATIONSHIPS

The idea of treating a broken bone with a Band-Aid is obviously ridiculous and hilarious to Jeremiah Kim's fourth- and fifth-grade students, but "I have to be fair," says Kim, making a show of putting a Band-Aid on a student's clearly unbroken leg.

This is Kim's Band-Aid lesson, and after a quick discussion about fairness, he asks several students to act out different physical injuries-a bleeding nose and a broken arm, for example. "I gave Audrey a Band-Aid, so I'm going to have to give you a Band-Aid too," he adds, as giggles ripple through the classroom.

By treating each student with the same remedy, Kim is making a point about learning accommodations. "I was treating everyone exactly the same... is that helpful?" he asks. "Throughout the school year, you're going to notice that some students might be treated a little differently than you. Some students work with teachers that you don't; some students even get rewards that you don't. When you see that, I want you to remember this activity."

For Kim and Brazil, conversations about accommodations track throughout the school year. Brazil keeps an anchor chart on her wall reminding students to ask key questions: What do I not know about this situation? Does someone need something that I don't? Kim regularly references the Band-Aid lesson. "I have students who complain about not getting a reward, and I'll say, 'That's not your Band-Aid.'" Beyond setting classroom culture, the Band-Aid metaphor-though Kim does acknowledge that it can be problematic to equate physical injury with disability-gives kids "language they can use to communicate with me about their needs."

Kids will be curious: When questions about accommodations come up in class, some teachers reflexively protect students' privacy, hoping to shield them from potentially uncomfortable conversations. "That's his plan. Thank you for being on your plan," said a teacher in a sub-Reddit thread, describing his typical classroom response.

Responding this way, while understandable, can inadvertently signal that there's something wrong with students who have accommodations that shouldn't be discussed, cautions Amanda Morin, an educator and coauthor of the book Neurodiversity-Affirming Schools: Transforming Practices So All Students Feel Accepted & Supported. Instead, says Morin, when students ask about a peer's accommodation, turn it around and ask if they might need support themselves. "That could sound like 'Tell me why you think you need this accommodation and what can we do to make things work for you,'" Morin says.

Drawing on the familiar helps. When her fourth graders ask about accommodations, Brazil often references eyeglasses. "Everybody needs different tools to be successful," she tells students. And Morin tells students, "I have a really hard time with planning, so I use the calendar on my phone."

Know your students: To set kids up for success, find time to discuss accommodations in private, but without sharing a diagnosis-at the elementary level, some may not be aware of their learning disability, individualized education program (IEP), or 504 plan. "Talk about why you're providing this and ask if there's something that would work better," Morin suggests. "Ask if they need it at all times. And I would advise teachers not to force the accommodation if a student is fine without it. Say instead, 'If you need this, it's there for you.'"

Before students use an accommodation for the first time, consider explaining how it works. Some of Banks's students, for instance, use an app to listen to test questions. After a quick demo, she tells them, "You have an opportunity you can use or not. I'm giving a science test, but I'm not testing reading. So let's take the reading part out."

These conversations land best when you know your students-Brazil waits a few weeks into the school year before teaching her fairness lesson. "I want to be sure the kids are comfortable with each other and me," she notes. Kim surveys his students at the beginning of the year to ask about their preferences. "There's a lot of shame around diagnoses. And so I had to learn the hard way that it isn't a conversation every student wants to have," he admits. "It comes down to knowing your students and their needs."

Middle school is an important time for students to learn how to advocate for themselves and become more involved in their accommodations, says former middle school English teacher Cathleen Beachboard. "In sixth grade, students might know they have accommodations but don't know why," she says. "By eighth grade, I recommend they sit in on IEP meetings and be allowed to ask questions."

To lay the groundwork for this step, start by gathering basic intel, says Rachel Fuhrman, a former middle school math and special education teacher. "It's helpful to ask them what they find hard. Sometimes you have to lead them a little bit and ask, 'Do you feel like you're running out of time on tests? Are you distracted by other students? Do you need a break to go for a walk?'" Ask students to identify their strengths and weaknesses, says Lambert, the disability researcher. As a middle school math and special education teacher, she'd say, "Some things are harder for you; let's list them. Some things are easier for you; let's list them," she says. At this age, "building their metacognition is the most important thing."

Help kids get comfortable: For middle school students, who interact with many teachers during the day, part of self-advocacy is getting comfortable reminding teachers about their accommodations. "I'd say, 'Hey, when you go to science class and I'm not there, you can ask for these things. Every teacher has a lot of students, and they may forget for a second that you need a read-aloud or a scribe,'" says Fuhrman.

Because middle school students are undergoing cognitive changes that make identity and social connections all-important, Fuhrman says, they might need help managing self-consciousness about their learning differences. "Some of my students were embarrassed about their accommodations-like using a calculator when other kids didn't for math testing." A quick private conversation with a student can help. "I would say, 'You deserve to have this. We don't want you to waste time futzing with calculating when we know you can do the bigger conceptual work.'"

Meanwhile, because students' needs can evolve as the school year progresses, teachers told us they recommend checking in from time to time to see how accommodations are working and discuss changes.

Use a storytelling lens: Read alouds, though less common in middle school, can expose students to new ideas and help them develop an understanding of others, says middle school English teacher Kasey Short. Some teachers told us they use reading to lay the groundwork for class discussions about disability. One of Lambert's colleagues created a reading-based activity with sixth graders during which the class read Freak the Mighty and discussed the characters' strengths and weaknesses.

Beachboard also recommends reading biographies of famous people with disabilities, like Greta Thunberg and Muhammad Ali. "That allows kids to see that these people have taken a variety of paths to complete their education," she says. "Then it's not the teacher telling them this, but the stories of other people. That's important for middle school students."

HIGH SCHOOL: BUILDING ADVOCACY SKILLS FOR THE REAL WORLD

In high school, students can and should attend their IEP meetings and start making decisions about accommodations, an important step in preparing for young adulthood. "The goal is for them to speak up when they need something different," says Morin. "At some point we can't advocate for them, legally. When they become adults, they have to advocate for themselves."

The tone of these conversations should be "empowering and encouraging independence," says Beachboard, who currently teaches high school English. "Every high school kid should have a chance to run their IEP meeting by 12th grade. They need to be comfortable presenting to other people and knowing what they need."

High school is also an opportunity to begin preparing students for what's next. "I talk to them about how accommodations might look in college or the workplace," says Donna Phillips, a special education teacher at a Nevada high school. "I always emphasize that asking for support is a strength, not a weakness."

Teach kids how to prep: By age 16, under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, students must be involved in planning for their post-high school transition. "I do think that gives more structure to these conversations," says Jordan Lukins, a former special educator who trains preservice teachers. "We have to start talking about their goals and preparing them for the fact that they don't get an IEP in the real world."

Helping students prepare for IEP meetings is part of that. Lukins suggests giving students a graphic organizer where they can write out what they're good at, what they like at school, where they want to improve, and questions they want to ask in the meeting. Ask students to look at their grades and suggest changes to their accommodations, Beachboard suggests. This work can be ongoing, notes Daniel Vollrath, a special education teacher at a New Jersey high school. His students keep weekly journals where they "track their progress over time and talk about their achievements," he says.

Check in: Finding one-on-one time for conversations isn't easy in high school; Vollrath tries to catch kids in class, but he's careful to avoid singling them out. "I'll say to the class, 'I'll come around quickly and check in with you all to make sure everyone is doing all right.' Then I'll sit next to their desk and talk to them. And then usually I'll walk around and talk to a few other students."

During these check-ins, he'll ask, "How do you feel about your accommodations?" and "Is anything bothersome about how your teacher is following the accommodations?" To ensure that students understand an accommodation, he might say, "OK, draw out this accommodation and tell me a story about it."

Consider gathering information up front, says former high school English teacher Tarn Wilson, who asked students to fill out note cards with information about themselves, including their accommodations, in the first weeks of school. Then she followed up privately with students. "I'd say, 'I want to be a good teacher for you. I'm curious to learn more about how you learn. What helps you?' Many won't know, but they appreciate the conversation and know that your door is open."

Be flexible and build autonomy: A number of educators told us that as students mature, they try to offer more flexibility, giving students a say in how their accommodations are implemented in class, for example. If Wilson noticed that students weren't using a particular support, she'd check in, saying, "I notice you're not using your accommodation-that's great. And if that ever changes, we can follow up on that."

Because giving students the opportunity to make decisions in their learning builds buy-in and motivation, Beachboard offers all her high school English students a range of options on most assignments-a strategy that also prevents kids with accommodations from feeling singled out. "I say, 'Hey, guys, on this next assignment some of you might want to listen, and some of you might want to read aloud in small groups, or you can read by yourself,'" she says. "Make it a normalized thing for the whole class." In Vollrath's class, he'll often extend accommodations to the whole class, because "depending on the support, it can help everyone," he says. "I'm a very flexible teacher, and I've found that to be very helpful."

Responses are generated by artificial intelligence. AI can make mistakes.

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It's Important to Talk About Learning Accommodations With Your Students-Here's How to Do It

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From metaphors for elementary school kids to mindset shifts and graphic organizers for teens, here are teacher-tested tips for normalizing learning accommodations across grade levels.

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Great short film to use with junior high or high school kids. Great symbolism and technique throughout.

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Will You Sprint, Stroll, or Stumble Into a Career

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Will You Sprint, Stroll, or Stumble Into a Career

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Great mentor text for high school kids!

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Will You Sprint, Stroll or Stumble Into a Career? (Published 2016)

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For today’s emerging adults, a college degree is essential, but it’s not the only factor separating the successful from the drifters.

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These Teens Started Podcasting as a Hobby, Then It Turned Into Serious Journalism

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These Teens Started Podcasting as a Hobby, Then It Turned Into Serious Journalism

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Twin brothers Erin and Evan Addison had never heard a podcast before joining the podcasting club at their school. And they managed to convince their best friend, Andrew Arevalo, to join as well.

"We were just looking for a hobby and Erin was like, 'Hey, you know we could do podcasting - it will be fun,' " Arevalo says.

That was two years ago, when the three boys were in seventh grade at Steel City Academy, a charter school in Gary, Ind. But in March of 2018, their reporting took a serious turn. Students learned about a proposal to build a waste management facility next to their school - and they weren't happy about it.

They started interviewing classmates and teachers. They learned how to submit a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. They also attended informational meetings and peppered representatives from Maya Energy, the company behind the plant, with questions - their recorders rolling, of course.

At one protest outside a Gary City Council meeting, about 150 students showed up to demand that the council reject the proposal. Student Malik Hubbard told Erin, "I really want Steel City to stay here. And that dump gotta go somewhere else."

Maya Energy disputes the use of the term "dump" to describe the facility and claims that the project will create as many as 124 full-time jobs. In a statement to NPR, Maya Energy also writes: "The Maya Facility will recycle about 90% of the incoming waste and will divert the waste from it going to landfill, resulting in a positive environmental impact: reduction in greenhouse gas!"

But school administrators, teachers and other students were not convinced by Maya Energy's statements. In interviews the boys conducted, many people were worried about noise and air quality. The company says it won't burn anything at the facility, but hundreds of trucks a day could be needed to bring all the waste into the facility.

"It's exhibit A for environmental injustice," says Kim Ferraro, senior staff attorney at the Hoosier Environmental Council, a nonprofit environmental group in Indiana that has opposed the facility. "You have well-resourced industries that have political connections and the ability to run roughshod over existing communities that don't have the resources to fight back." (More than a third of residents live below the poverty line in Gary.)

Initially, all of the student activism seemed to have an impact. In October of last year, citing the concerns of Steel City Academy students, the Gary City Council voted 8-0 to reverse their earlier zoning approval for the Maya Energy project. Steel City Academy students were elated. One student activist, Danielle Sipp, told the Steel City Podcast, "People say young people can't accomplish but yeah, we can do these things if we put our minds together and act as a unit."

But Maya sued the council in February and Gary City Council reversed back, clearing the way for Maya to build the plant. In March, the state's Department of Environmental Management awarded Maya its solid waste permit.

Still, podcaster Erin Addison told NPR's Audie Cornish the experience hasn't diminished his pride in his city. "I've seen Gary for all of what it is. With the good and bad you take it all together, and you'd get so much more good than you get bad. And I just love Gary, honestly."

The boys all say the reporting has also increased their pride in themselves and shown them how much power they have. "I was always told to stay in a child's place," Evan says. "But now I know there are times where you have to tell people that they're wrong."

"We are definitely going to keep on the story," Erin Addison adds. Evan and Andrew agree: The reporting will continue.
Producer Bill Healy leads the podcasting club at Steel City Academy and helped produce this story.

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These Teens Started Podcasting As A Hobby, Then It Turned Into Serious Journalism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Twin brothers Erin and Evan Addison had never heard a podcast before joining the podcasting club at their school. And they managed to convince their best friend, Andrew Arevalo, to join as well. "We were just looking for a hobby and Erin was like, 'Hey, you know we could do podcasting - it will be fun,' " Arevalo says.

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7 Surprising Health Benefits of Reading Every Day

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7 Surprising Health Benefits of Reading Every Day

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Might make for a mentor text for your kids, or something you can share with parents in a literacy newsletter.

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7 Surprising Health Benefits of Reading Every Day

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Reading can help your mental and physical health. See seven benefits of reading and how to use it to improve your life.

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Custodian Claudene Wilson is the Lifeblood of her Missouri School.  So they named it after her.

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Custodian Claudene Wilson is the Lifeblood of her Missouri School.  So they named it after her.

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Custodian Claudene Wilson is the ‘lifeblood’ of her Missouri school. So they named it after her

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Claudene Wilson drove and cleaned up after multiple generations of students in the Swedeborg School District. As she enters a partial retirement, the district voted to honor her commitment by naming a K-8 elementary building in her honor.

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Can Dogs Understand the Meaning of Words?

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Can Dogs Understand the Meaning of Words?

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Can dogs understand the meaning of words? Scientists are trying to figure it out : Short Wave

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Last year, a dog named Bunny went viral on TikTok for pressing buttons with words on them to “communicate” with her owner. But can dogs even understand those words on a soundboard in the first place? A new study in the journal PLOS One seeks answers. Host Regina G. Barber and producer Rachel Carlson break down that story and more of the week’s news with the help of All Things Considered’s Ari Shapiro. Have other viral headlines that you want us to put to the test for its scientific truth? Email us at shortwave@npr.org — we might cover it on a future episode!

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South Sudan Basketball Win Unites Every Single Tribe

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South Sudan Basketball Win Unites Every Single Tribe

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Olympic basketball: South Sudan team a “shining light” to the nation

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South Sudan’s win over Puerto Rico in the men’s Olympic basketball competition has “united” the country, according to forward Bul Kuol.

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Funny obituary that could serve as a cool mentor text with high school kids.

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Renay Mandel Corren

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

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

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

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

RIP RENAY MANDEL CORREN 10 MAY 1937 - 11 DEC 2021

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Obituaries in Fayetteville, NC | Fayetteville Observer

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

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Excellent essay about Marvin Gaye's activism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Marvin Gaye and the unlikely patriotism of resistance.

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Great essay about our hearts...

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Since this short essay by Brian Doyle was published in the Scholar 15 years ago, it has been read hundreds of thousands of times on our website and often borrowed for classroom use. It is the lead piece in a just-published collection of Brian's essays called One Long River of Sound: Notes on Wonder. Brian died at the age of 60 in 2017.
Listen to a narrated version of this essay:
Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmet-crests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles-anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end-not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.

Brian Doyle, an essayist and novelist, died on May 27, 2017. To read Epiphanies, his longtime blog for the Scholar, please go here.

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Since this short essay by Brian Doyle was published in the Scholar 15 years ago, it has been read hundreds of thousands of times on our website and often borrowed for classroom use. It is the lead piece in a just-published collection of Brian's essays called One Long River of Sound: Notes on Wonder.

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Opinion: The Rich Are Not Who We Think They Are...

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Opinion: The Rich Are Not Who We Think They Are...

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Great definition essay...

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Opinion | The Rich Are Not Who We Think They Are. And Happiness Is Not What We Think It Is, Either.

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There is still a lot we can learn from big data.

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On oldie now, but a nice graphic text.

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You should've asked. Illustration: Emma

The French comic artist Emma illustrates the concept of the 'mental load'. When a man expects his partner to ask him to do things, he is viewing her as the manager of their household chores

Fri 26 May 2017 08.00 EDT Last modified on Fri 9 Dec 2022 12.03 EST

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The gender wars of household chores: a feminist comic

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French comic artist Emma introduces the concept of the mental load. When a man expects his partner to ask him to do things, he is viewing her as the manager of their household chores

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They Played Football as Children.  Now Their Families Mourn./

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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They Played Football as Children. Now Their Families Mourn

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These football players gave it up after high school but the damage was seemingly done. Now, their families look for answers about chronic traumatic encephalopathy

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Comma splices and run-on sentences.

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Mini-Mentors for Fixing Run-Ons + Comma Splices

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Great research essay for junior high kids!!!

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Great imagery and symbolism in this poem! Check it out.

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This would make for a great open ended writing assignment for the beginning of the semester.

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How Do You Forgive the People Who Killed Your Family by Clint Smith

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How Do You Forgive the People Who Killed Your Family by Clint Smith

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Great new article by Clint Smith

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How Do You Forgive the People Who Killed Your Family by Clint Smith

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The Collectors - Annotating and Daily Journaling

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Great podcast episode that examines the realities of AI technology from a medical perspective. Lots of humour and pathos!

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Conan talks to Jules and Maria in Miami about Jules’ diagnosis with ALS, how AI has helped retain his voice, challenges and inspirations in day-to-day life, and

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Really great modern play for high school kids.

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Great visual text to inspire some discussion and writing from your students!

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Read 102 reviews from the world’s largest community for readers. How far would you go to keep a promise? Told from alternating points of view, Hidden Truth…

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Read 264 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Everyone knows the two Sophies are best friends. One is in elementary school, and one is ....

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This book is absolutely amazing and a must-read for all English teachers.

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This book is EXCELLENT and a must-read for all English teachers!!!

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The Writing Teachers Guide to Pedagogical Documentation

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The Writing Teachers Guide to Pedagogical Documentation

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The Writing Teachers Guide to Pedagogical Documentation Angela Stockman

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I didn't like this text as much as I thought, but I imagine there are a lot out there who would resonate with this.

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Excellent Canadian graphic novel!

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Can this friendship weather the seasons? Mia knows her family is very different than her best friend’s.Kim Spencer, Ts’msyen Nation, is the author of Weird Rules to Follow.In the 1980s, the coastal fishing town of Prince Rupert is booming. There is plenty of sockeye salmon in the nearby ocean, which means the fishermen

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Great poem! Enjambment!!!

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100 Canadians Shaping the Country this year

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Very powerful narrative essay!

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

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A LOT to unpack in this film. Begin with the filmmaker's use of colour!

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CGI Animated Short Film HD "Alike " by Daniel Martínez Lara & Rafa Cano Méndez | CGMeetup

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Fast Car by Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs

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Fast Car by Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs

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Powerful performance, but could provide some good lyrical analysis.

1) What happens? Did they "leave tonight" or "die this way"?

2) Write about a time when you wanted a "fast car" so you could "fly away."

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@ 2024 - Recording Academy. All rights reserved.

Some of the content on this site expresses viewpoints and opinions that are not those of the Recording Academy and its Affiliates. Responsibility for the accuracy of information provided in stories not written by or specifically prepared for the Academy and its Affiliates lies with the story's original source or writer. Content on this site does not reflect an endorsement or recommendation of any artist or music by the Recording Academy and its Affiliates.

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tracy chapman & luke combs deliver gripping performance of "fast car" | 2024 grammys | grammy.com

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Tracy Chapman & Luke Combs Deliver Gripping Performance Of "Fast Car" | 2024 GRAMMYs | GRAMMY.com

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A bit of heavy poem, but great lessons around voice, tone, speaker, and authorial intent.

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Great lessons around personification and symbolism.

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An oldie but a goodie. A very powerful poem!

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Lamont Carey (I Can't Read) HBO Def Jam Poetry

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This is a cool graphic, but could be used as a mentor text for students to create their own around any text they're reading! Could be serious, funny, whatever!

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Discretion Advised! Great mentor text, but for high school only.

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Read all of the posts by Xochitl Bentley on moving writers

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A great article that could work for Math, Social Studies, and ELA.

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This text could be used as a PLC with your school or department.

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This could serve as the basis of a cool class project around a particular theme or setting.

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What Harvey Weinstein's Overturned Conviction Means for Donald Trump

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What Harvey Weinstein's Overturned Conviction Means for Donald Trump

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An oldie but a goodie...

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Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’

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How time-wasting video games escaped the arcade, jumped into our pockets and took over our lives.

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Letter to My Younger Self | The Players' Tribune | The Voice of the Game

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The Players' Tribune is a new media company that provides athletes with a platform to connect directly with their fans, in their own words. Founded by Derek Jeter, The Players' Tribune publishes first-person articles from athletes, providing unique insight into the daily sports conversation.

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White People Don't Always Know I'm Black

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White People Don't Always Know I'm Black

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I'm a Trans Runner, and you Might Not Like What I Have to Say

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I'm a Trans Runner, and you Might Not Like What I Have to Say

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Opinion | I’m a Trans Runner, and You Might Not Like What I Have to Say (Published 2021)

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Trans athletes are trapped in a culture war. I’m not a cheater, but I may have an unfair advantage.

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"God creates the world and say on Saturday afternoon he must separatethe animals from man so he creates a sudden chasm like an earthquake that leaves man on one side and the animals on the other. And while the chasm's open, dog jumps over and stands by man. And that's the way it's gonna be. That's the way it's gotta be."-Barry Hannah

C h arles Thomas didn't so much jump a chasm as crawl out from under a single-wide in Cherokee, North Carolina, in desperate need of an orthodontist. Mouth closed, his teeth protrude from all sides like some wild boar-sand tiger shark love child gooned out on methamphetamine. It's those teeth and a mouth not fit to chew that make eating a full-time job. Every day's the sa me old struggle: Grab five pieces of kibble, drop four, swallow one, over and over, till the bowl's empty.

I live in an old white clapboard farmhouse on forty acres of pasture where the owners keep two horses and fifteen head of cattle. All his life, Charles-a.k.a. Charlie, Stinkpot, Chuck, Chuckwagon, Charlie Britches, Charles T, and Chaz-has had the run of the place. Mornings are for napping, flat on his back with his feet sprawled toward the sky. Late afternoon, he takes a soak like an old man in the horse trough. Soon as the sun's down, he's ready to run anything that moves-foxes, possums, coons, and twice last summer, a skunk that either loved him like Pepé Le Pew or absolutely hated my guts.

I guess Charlie's my stepson in that I was lucky enough to fall in love with the woman who raised him. Ashley always jokes that the real reason I'm with her is because of her dog, and while that's not entirely true, I will say I love that wiry bastard about as much as a man can love anything.

Charlie was indeed found beneath a trailer, part of a litter that was brought to an animal rescue, where he and twenty-one other puppies were set to be euthanized. A woman at the shelter put them all in a box and took it upon herself to find them homes. It was the middle of January, and Ashley was at a bonfire party and that's where the puppies wound up. She picked Charles out of the box, primarily on account of his crooked teeth, and he slept curled against her that night in the back of her SUV. They woke the next morning with two inches of snow on the ground, each keeping the other warm, and he's had her heart ever since.

The woman who rescued Charles from the shelter remembers his mother being a Jack Russell-beagle mix, and as a pup he carried those brown and tan markings. When I first saw him at eight years old, however, no telltale signs of breed remained. He's pink skinned, bronze eyed, wirehaired, and tinged white, the color of heavy cream, twenty-seven pounds of questionable lineage built for slipping beneath barbed-wire fence at twenty miles an hour. Since the day Chaz and I met three years ago, the two of us have been inseparable. I walk the farm; he's right beside me. I lie down at night; he's a few feet away. I hop in the truck; he's riding shotgun. Charlie holds to my heels like a shadow.

When Chaz came into my life, I was seeing a psychologist twice a week to work my way through a depression and anxiety I've carried since I was a kid. One of the main reasons I started going was because my life as a novelist requires that I do things outside my comfort zone. I don't like crowds or being surrounded, because I can't keep eyes on everyone around me. I prefer my back to the wall. I don't like traveling to unfamiliar places, or being in a room where I don't know the exits. I always have to have a plan to get out. For the most part, I don't like interacting with people. Unfortunately, those traits make it hard to tear off on a book tour spanning nineteen cities in twenty-one days, so I've done my best to cope.

I grew up to a country people who'd been swallowed by a city. My father's family settled in and around Charlotte, North Carolina, in the late 1700s. Most of my ancestors worked tobacco and cotton, dirt-poor sharecroppers who broke their backs to survive. When I was a kid, in the shadows of skyscrapers, my uncle still kept a kennel of hounds to run rabbit each fall. I grew up tromping across a pasture of chest-high field grass to fish a farm pond most evenings. Where I lived was a tiny holdout spot of country in an ever-expanding cityscape. Drugs and violence were just a stone's throw away, and I found myself slap-dab in the middle of it most my life.

I was twelve or thirteen the first time I had a gun put to my head. I was in eighth grade. I was at school. The science teacher had sent me outside to find things we could look at under a microscope-dried leaves, empty snail shells, dirt clods, dead bugs. I can't really remember what the man looked like. I think he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt. What I remember clearly is the gun. A small snub-nosed revolver. Black handle. Brushed-steel frame. A black hole that looked like it stretched on forever. He walked right up and shoved that wheel gun into my temple and what I felt in that moment has hung around my neck ever since.

Here's the thing about trauma: No one experiences the same event in the same way. Everyone processes things differently so that the moments that impacted me most as a child might not have affected others near as severely.

For Chaz, I think the trigger event might have been being abandoned as a puppy underneath that trailer. He doesn't like being left alone. If I'm on the road, he doesn't eat. He doesn't sleep. He waits anxiously, watching the spot in the driveway where my truck should be.

When Charlie was a few years old, he fell asleep underneath a pickup. The driver unknowingly ran Chaz over and crushed one of his hind legs, an injury still evident in the way that back leg slings woppyjawed every time he barrels off wide-ass open after a rabbit. As a result of that experience, though, Charles doesn't like when folks touch his hindquarters. He's fine if you scratch his back, but don't reach for that leg. He gets awfully spooky around cars. Truth is he's awfully spooky most the time.

What I'm getting at is that the two of us aren't all that different. I tell folks that Chaz and I are two peas in an anxiety-ridden pod, and I guess we're codependents in that way. He takes me on walkabouts through the pasture where I can smell flowers, and I take him on rides to the dump where he can sniff trash. He shows me the red fox in field grass, and I show him thirty-pound flathead catfish that could eat him alive. In winter, I set my rabbit boxes by trails he uncovers nose to ground.

In the summer, I lead him to mountain streams filled with speckled trout and let him collapse along edges of current to cool off.

Loneliness is the root of the anxious heart. It's that helpless feeling, that lack of control, that I'm-all-alone-in-this-spinning-world-and-there's-nothing-to-stop-its-whirling sort of feeling that bears down with an unfathomable weight and holds the anxious hostage. But when I look across the cab of my truck and see Chaz with his head out the window, the wiry hairs of his beard licking about his face like the tail of a white-hot comet, I don't feel the way I used to feel. When it's just the two of us, everything that I once carried has been laid aside.

Looking at the relationship man has had with the natural world, the domestication of dog may be the only thing we ever got right. Scientists don't agree on when and how it happened. Some say as far back as thirty thousand years ago, others say ten thousand. Some argue there was a single event, all dogs following a solitary lineage, while others argue multiple events occurred, various groups of wolves becoming domesticated by different people in different places. However it happened, the greatest truth to come from that moment is what I know every time Chaz rams his dirty face into the side of my leg and offers up that crooked-toothed smile. Ever since dog jumped the chasm and stood at our side, this has been the gift given by dog to man, a gift that, when we're lucky, we can return: Never again must we be alone.

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"God creates the world and say on Saturday afternoon he must separatethe animals from man so he creates a sudden chasm like an earthquake that leaves man on one side and the animals on the other. And while the chasm's open, dog jumps over and stands by man.