# data[].attributes.body
Google Doc of My Ideas

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Google Docs - create and edit documents online, for free.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There are different categories of bailing. There is canceling on friends. This seems to follow a bail curve pattern. People feel free to bail on close friends, because they will understand, and on distant friends, because they don't matter so much, but they are less inclined to bail on medium-tier or fragile friends.

Then there is professional bailing. This tends to have a hierarchical structure. A high-status person will frequently bail on a lower-status colleague, but if an intern bails on a senior executive, it is a sign of serious disrespect.

Finally, there's the networker flake. In the information age, the highly ambitious are masters of acquaintanceship - making a zillion useful contacts, understanding the strength of weak ties and bailing on a networking prospect with a killer-eyed coldness when a better offer comes along.

I've been reading the online discussions to understand the ethics and etiquette of bailing. I'm struck by how many people are quick to bail and view it as an unproblematic act.

They argue that we all have a right to control our own time and achieve mastery over our own life. Bailees have a duty to understand that sometimes other people are just too frazzled to follow through on their promises.

And it's true that sometimes bailing doesn't hurt. I'm delighted half the time when people bail on me. They've just given me an unexpected block of free time.

But we should probably make bailing harder. Technology wants to make everything smooth, but friendship is about being adhesive. As technology pushes us toward efficiency, we should probably introduce social rules that create friction.

We could, for example, create three moral hurdles every bail must meet.

First, is it for a good reason (your kids unexpectedly need you, a new kidney became available for your transplant) or is it for a bad reason (you're tired, you want to be alone)?

Second, did you bail well (sending an honest text, offering another date to get together) or did you bail selfishly (ghosting, talking about how busy your life is, as if you were the only person who matters)?

Third, did you really think about the impact on the other person? (I've learned it's almost always a mistake to bail on somebody's life event - wedding, birthday party, funeral - on the grounds that your absence won't be noticed.)

My own sin is that I have a genius for sloppily double booking myself and forgetting to write stuff down on the calendar. I bail when crushed by work.

I could probably use some social norms that punished the bail, and thereby encouraged me to be discriminating about making commitments in the first place, intentional about how I spend my time and wary of overpromising and underdelivering.

There was a time, not long ago, when a social commitment was not regarded as a disposable Post-it note, when people took it as a matter of course that reliability is a core element of treating people well, that how you spend your time is how you spend your life, and that if you don't flake on people who matter you have a chance to build deeper and better friendships and live in a better and more respectful way.

Of course, all that went away with the smartphone.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There are different categories of bailing. There is canceling on friends. This seems to follow a bail curve pattern. People feel free to bail on close friends, because they will understand, and on distant friends, because they don't matter so much, but they are less inclined to bail on medium-tier or fragile friends.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I have spent most days since then getting the news mainly from print, though my self-imposed asceticism allowed for podcasts, email newsletters and long-form nonfiction (books and magazine articles). Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news - I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.

It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins.

Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I'm embarrassed about how much free time I have - in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.

Most of all, I realized my personal role as a consumer of news in our broken digital news environment.

We have spent much of the past few years discovering that the digitization of news is ruining how we collectively process information. Technology allows us to burrow into echo chambers, exacerbating misinformation and polarization and softening up society for propaganda. With artificial intelligence making audio and video as easy to fake as text, we're entering a hall-of-mirrors dystopia, what some are calling an "information apocalypse." And we're all looking to the government and to Facebook for a fix.

But don't you and I also have a part to play? Getting news only from print newspapers may be extreme and probably not for everyone. But the experiment taught me several lessons about the pitfalls of digital news and how to avoid them.

I distilled those lessons into three short instructions, the way the writer Michael Pollan once boiled down nutrition advice: Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.

Get news.

I know what you're thinking: Listening to a Times writer extol the virtues of print is like taking breakfast suggestions from Count Chocula. You may also wonder if I am preaching to the choir; doesn't everyone reading this story already appreciate print?

Probably not. The Times has about 3.6 million paying subscribers, but about three-quarters of them pay for just the digital version. During the 2016 election, fewer than 3 percent of Americans cited print as their most important source of campaign news; for people under 30, print was their least important source.

I'm nearly 40, but I'm no different. Though I have closely followed the news since I was a kid, I always liked my news on a screen, available at the touch of a button. Even with this experiment, I found much to hate about print. The pages are too big, the type too small, the ink too messy, and compared with a smartphone, a newspaper is more of a hassle to consult on the go.

Print also presents a narrower mix of ideas than you find online. You can't get BuzzFeed or Complex or Slate in print. In California, you can't even get The Washington Post in print. And print is expensive. Outside New York, after introductory discounts, seven-day home delivery of The Times will set you back $81 a month. In a year, that's about the price of Apple's best iPhone.

What do you get for all that dough? News. That sounds obvious until you try it - and you realize how much of what you get online isn't quite news, and more like a never-ending stream of commentary, one that does more to distort your understanding of the world than illuminate it.

I noticed this first with the deal Democrats made to end the government shutdown late in January. On the Jan. 23 front pages, the deal was presented straight: "Shutdown Ends, Setting Up Clash Over 'Dreamers,'" ran The Times's headline on the news story, which appeared alongside an analysis piece that presented the political calculations surrounding the deal.

Many of the opinions in that analysis could be found on Twitter and Facebook. What was different was the emphasis. Online, commentary preceded facts. If you were following the shutdown on social networks, you most likely would have seen lots of politicians and pundits taking stock of the deal before seeing details of the actual news.

I want to see the government re-open as much as anyone, but this bill fails to fix the moral issue we must solve. That's why I voted against it.
- Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) Jan. 22, 2018

This is common online. On social networks, every news story comes to you predigested. People don't just post stories - they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right, so readers are never required to delve into the story to come up with their own view.

There's nothing wrong with getting lots of shades of opinion. And reading just the paper can be a lonely experience; there were many times I felt in the dark about what the online hordes thought about the news.

Still, the prominence of commentary over news online and on cable news feels backward, and dangerously so. It is exactly our fealty to the crowd - to what other people are saying about the news, rather than the news itself - that makes us susceptible to misinformation.

Not too quickly.

It's been clear that breaking news has been broken since at least 2013, when a wild week of conspiracy theories followed the Boston Marathon bombing. As I argued then, technology had caused the break.

Real life is slow; it takes professionals time to figure out what happened, and how it fits into context. Technology is fast. Smartphones and social networks are giving us facts about the news much faster than we can make sense of them, letting speculation and misinformation fill the gap.

It has only gotten worse. As news organizations evolved to a digital landscape dominated by apps and social platforms, they felt more pressure to push news out faster. Now, after something breaks, we're all buzzed with the alert, often before most of the facts are in. So you're driven online not just to find out what happened, but really to figure it out.

This was the surprise blessing of the newspaper. I was getting news a day old, but in the delay between when the news happened and when it showed up on my front door, hundreds of experienced professionals had done the hard work for me.

Now I was left with the simple, disconnected and ritualistic experience of reading the news, mostly free from the cognitive load of wondering whether the thing I was reading was possibly a blatant lie.

Another surprise was a sensation of time slowing down. One weird aspect of the past few years is how a "tornado of news-making has scrambled Americans' grasp of time and memory," as my colleague Matt Flegenheimer put it last year. By providing a daily digest of the news, the newspaper alleviates this sense. Sure, there's still a lot of news - but when you read it once a day, the world feels contained and comprehensible rather than a blur of headlines lost on a phone's lock screen.

You don't need to read a print newspaper to get this; you can create your own news ritual by looking at a news app once a day, or reading morning newsletters like those from Axios, or listening to a daily news podcast. What's important is choosing a medium that highlights deep stories over quickly breaking ones.

And, more important, you can turn off news notifications. They distract and feed into a constant sense of fragmentary paranoia about the world. They are also unnecessary. If something really big happens, you will find out.

Avoid social.

This is the most important rule of all. After reading newspapers for a few weeks, I began to see it wasn't newspapers that were so great, but social media that was so bad.

Just about every problem we battle in understanding the news today - and every one we will battle tomorrow - is exacerbated by plugging into the social-media herd. The built-in incentives on Twitter and Facebook reward speed over depth, hot takes over facts and seasoned propagandists over well-meaning analyzers of news.

You don't have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news. But, for goodness' sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook. In the long run, you and everyone else will be better off.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here's What I Learned.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I have spent most days since then getting the news mainly from print, though my self-imposed asceticism allowed for podcasts, email newsletters and long-form nonfiction (books and magazine articles). Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news - I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The world turned upside down: Armed law enforcement officers dawdled outside during the shooting, but a 15-year-old kid without any weapon at all used himself as a human shield to protect his classmates. More broadly, the Florida high school students have argued maturely for sensible gun laws, while Florida state legislators have acted like frightened toddlers, first passing a two-year moratorium on sales of AR-15 rifles and then undoing it 15 minutes later.

And now it seems that the grown-up world is again going to fail Anthony and other young Americans. Congress and President Trump have stalled on a push to pass meaningful gun legislation that has overwhelming public support. The grown-ups are once more loitering in a crisis, leaving kids to be shot.

President Trump said that if he had been on the scene, he would have rushed into the building to confront the shooter. "I'd run in there even if I didn't have a weapon," he said.

Really? Even though when he is armed with the power of the White House he still doesn't have the guts to confront the N.R.A. in a sustained way?

Given that gun owners largely trust Trump, he could hammer out a bipartisan deal for universal background checks - the single step that would make the most difference, one supported overwhelmingly even by gun owners - but the White House is AWOL on the issue.

Congress may pass "Fix NICS" legislation to improve the F.B.I. database used to screen gun buyers, and maybe the federal government will ban "bump stocks." But those are baby steps that probably won't have a measurable impact on American mortality (right now, one American dies every 15 minutes from a gun, including murders, accidents and suicides).

Incredibly, Congress seems as likely to ease gun laws as to tighten them. One measure backed by Donald Trump Jr. would legalize silencers, which have been rigorously controlled since the 1930s. Advocates had the gall to call it the Hearing Protection Act.

"It's about safety," Trump Jr. explains in a video. "It's about hearing protection. It's a health issue, frankly, for me. Getting little kids in the game." In fact, the unmuffled crack of a gunshot is a warning of danger and draws the police; silencers would be a gift to criminals.

Even worse, the N.R.A. is pushing concealed-carry reciprocity, allowing people to carry concealed guns with them from places that permit them, like Alaska or Wyoming, to any other part of the country, regardless of local prohibitions.

This measure has already passed the House of Representatives, but attorneys general are fighting it. They warn that it would let a stalker, domestic abuser or suspected terrorist from a low-regulation state tote concealed weapons at will around the country.

All this is infuriating. But even if the federal government won't pass meaningful new gun laws, states are doing so. Polls show that voters overwhelmingly favor universal background checks, a 21-year-old age restriction on buying firearms and a ban on high-capacity magazines.

Since the 1970s, the U.S. has engaged unintentionally in an international experiment, relaxing gun laws as the rest of the world has tightened access. Gun advocates argued that more guns would make us safer, but instead the U.S. now has 25 times the gun murder rate of other advanced countries.

Indeed, since 1970, more Americans have died of gun violence, including murders, suicides and accidents (1.4 million), than in all the wars in American history (1.3 million).

Whenever there is a mass shooting, there are inspiring individual stories like Anthony's. But the larger picture is disgraceful: the president and congressional leaders dillydallying on the sidelines, sending "thoughts and prayers" and nothing else.

This will change only when politicians are more afraid of voters than of the N.R.A. ☐

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
murders  attempted murders and homicides

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Mr. Trump, Here's a Teenage Hero; It's Your Turn!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The world turned upside down: Armed law enforcement officers dawdled outside during the shooting, but a 15-year-old kid without any weapon at all used himself as a human shield to protect his classmates.

# data[].attributes.body
Mr. Trump, Here’s a Teenage Hero; It’s Your Turn!

# data[].attributes.body
Columnist Editorial

# data[].attributes.body
Student Editorial

# data[].attributes.body
Relevant to our world today

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This story has been updated. Visit this page to see the latest.

It has happened yet again: Inevitably, predictably, fatefully, a gunman shot dead 26 people in a Texas church on Sunday. These incidents are peculiarly American tragedies, and what's particularly heartbreaking is that they aren't shocking. People all over the world become furious and try to harm others, but only in the United States do we suffer such mass shootings so regularly; only in the U.S. do we lose one person every 15 minutes to gun violence.

Two of the deadliest mass shootings in modern American history have occurred in the last six weeks. So let's not just mourn the dead, let's not just lower flags and make somber speeches. Let's also learn lessons from these tragedies, so that there can be fewer of them. In particular, I suggest that we try a new approach to reducing gun violence - a public health strategy.

America Has More Guns Than Any Other Country

The first step is to understand the scale of the challenge America faces: The U.S. has more than 300 million guns - roughly one for every citizen - and stands out as well for its gun death rates. At the other extreme, Japan has less than one gun per 100 people, and typically fewer than 10 gun deaths a year in the entire country.

We Have a Model for Regulating Guns: Automobiles

Gun enthusiasts often protest: Cars kill about as many people as guns, and we don't ban them! No, but automobiles are actually a model for the public health approach I'm suggesting.

We don't ban cars, but we work hard to regulate them - and limit access to them - so as to reduce the death toll they cause. This has been spectacularly successful, reducing the death rate per 100 million miles driven by 95 percent since 1921.

Take a look at the history of motor vehicle safety since World War II:

The Liberal Approach Is Ineffective. Use a Public Health Approach Instead.

Frankly, liberal opposition to guns has often been ineffective, and sometimes counterproductive. The 10-year ban on assault weapons accomplished little, partly because definitions were about cosmetic features like bayonet mounts (and partly because even before the ban, such guns were used in only 2 percent of crimes).

The left sometimes focuses on "gun control," which scares off gun owners and leads to more gun sales. A better framing is "gun safety" or "reducing gun violence," and using auto safety as a model-constant efforts to make the products safer and to limit access by people who are most likely to misuse them.

What would a public health approach look like for guns if it were modeled after cars? It would include:

If someone steals my iPhone, it's useless, and the same should be true of guns. Gun manufacturers made child-proof guns back in the 19th century (before dropping them), and it's time to advance that technology today. Some combination of smart guns and safe storage would also reduce the number of firearms stolen in the U.S. each year, now about 200,000, and available to criminals.

We also need to figure out whether gun buybacks, often conducted by police departments, are cost-effective and help reduce violence. And we can experiment more with anti-gang initiatives, such as Cure Violence, that have a good record in reducing shootings.

Fewer Guns = Fewer Deaths

In Texas on Sunday, it seems that a man living near the church grabbed his gun and confronted the shooter after he left the church. It may be that this defensive use of a weapon saved lives, and the N.R.A. often hails this view that guns are necessary to counter gun violence.

But really? Can anybody possibly see what unfolded in Texas as a success of gun policy?

It is true that guns are periodically used defensively. One study by the Violence Policy Center found that in 2012 there were 259 justifiable homicides by a private citizen using a firearm.

But the problem is that lax laws too often make it easy not only for good guys to get guns, but also for bad guys to get guns. The evidence is overwhelming that overall more guns and more relaxed gun laws lead to more violent deaths and injuries. One study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that a gun in the house was associated with an increased risk of a gun death, particularly by suicide but also apparently by homicide.

In 2015, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas tweeted that he was " embarrassed " that his state was ranked second (behind California) in requests to buy new guns, albeit still with one million requests. "Let's pick up the pace Texans," he wrote. Abbott apparently believes, along with the N.R.A., that more guns make a society more safe, but statistics dispute that. Abbott should look at those charts.

Greg Abbott‏

I'm EMBARRASSED: Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind CALIFORNIA. Let's pick up the pace Texans.@NRA 10:53 AM - 28 Oct 2015

Mass Shootings Are Not the Main Cause of Loss of Life

Critics will say that the kind of measures I cite wouldn't prevent many shootings. The Las Vegas carnage, for example, might not have been prevented by any of the suggestions I make.

That's true, and there's no magic wand available. Yet remember that although it is mass shootings that get our attention, they are not the main cause of loss of life. Much more typical is a friend who shoots another, a husband who kills his wife - or, most common of all, a man who kills himself. Skeptics will say that if people want to kill themselves, there's nothing we can do. In fact, it turns out that if you make suicide a bit more difficult, suicide rates drop.

Here are the figures showing that mass shootings are a modest share of the total, and the same is true of self-defense - despite what the N.R.A. might have you believe.

America Is Moving in the Wrong Direction

Yet while we should be moving toward sensible regulation, in fact we've been moving in the opposite direction. Gun laws have been loosened in many parts of the country. Check out these maps:

Tightening Gun Laws Lowered Firearm Homicide Rates

For skeptics who think that gun laws don't make a difference, consider what happened in two states, Missouri and Connecticut. In 1995, Connecticut tightened licensing laws, while in 2007 Missouri eased gun laws.

The upshot? After tightening gun laws, firearm homicide rates dropped 40 percent in Connecticut. And after Missouri eased gun laws, gun homicide rates rose 25 percent.

One of the lessons of gun research is that we often focus just on firearms themselves, when it may be more productive to focus on who gets access to them. A car or gun is usually safe in the hands of a 45-year-old woman with no criminal record, but may be dangerous when used by a 19-year-old felon with a history of alcohol offenses or domestic violence protection orders.

Yet our laws have often focused more on weapons themselves (such as the assault weapons ban) rather than on access. In many places, there is more rigorous screening of people who want to adopt dogs than of people who want to purchase firearms.

In these two states, the laws affected access, and although there's some indication that other factors were also involved in Connecticut (and correlations don't prove causation), the outcomes are worth pondering.

There Is a Shocking Lack of Research on Guns

There's simply a scandalous lack of research on gun violence, largely because the N.R.A. is extremely hostile to such research and Congress rolls over. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did try to research gun violence, Congress responded by cutting its funding.

Here is the American toll from four diseases and firearms over the years 1973-2012 - and the number of National Institutes of Health research grants to explore each problem over that same time.

The Right Type of Training Could Go a Long Way

One approach that could reduce the abuse of guns is better training. As a 13-year-old farm boy in Oregon, I attended a N.R.A. gun safety class (which came with a one-year membership to the N.R.A., making me an N.R.A. alum who despises what that organization has become). These classes can be very useful, and audits found that more than 80 percent cover such matters as checking the gun to see if it's loaded, keeping one's finger off the trigger until ready to fire and being certain of the target.

Yet the audits also suggest that trainers are more likely to advocate for the N.R.A. or for carrying guns than for, say, safe storage. This is a missed opportunity, for all classes should cover the risks of guns and alcohol, the risks of abuse with suicide and domestic violence, the need for safe storage, and so on. Here's what researchers found that the gun classes they audited actually covered:

A Way Forward: On Some Issues, Majorities Agree

It may sometimes seem hopeless to make progress on gun violence, especially with the N.R.A. seemingly holding Congress hostage. But I'm more optimistic.

Look, we all agree on some kinds of curbs on guns. Nobody believes that people should be able to drive a tank down Main Street, or have an anti-aircraft gun in the backyard. I've been to parts of northern Yemen where one could actually buy a tank or an anti-aircraft gun, as well as fully automatic weapons - and that area's now embroiled in a civil war - but fortunately in America we have agreed to ban those kinds of weaponry.

So the question isn't whether we will restrict firearms, but where to draw the line and precisely which ones to restrict.

Check out these polling numbers as a basis for action on gun safety:

Looking ahead, I'm optimistic that there can be progress at the state level, and some of the necessary research funding will come from private foundations. Maybe some police departments will put in orders for smart guns to help create a market.

But the real impetus for change will come because the public favors it. In particular, note that 93 percent of people even in gun households favor universal background checks for gun purchases.

The terrible truth is that Wednesday's school shooting was 100 percent predictable. So is the next one. After each such incident, we mourn the deaths and sympathize with the victims, but we do nothing fundamental to reduce our vulnerability.

Some of you will protest (as President Trump did the last time) that it's too soon to talk about guns, or that it is disrespectful to the dead to use such a tragedy to score political points. Yet more Americans have died from gun violence, including suicides, since 1970 (about 1.4 million) than in all the wars in American history going back to the Revolutionary War (about 1.3 million). And it's not just gang members: In a typical year, more preschoolers are shot dead in America (about 75) than police officers are.

Yes, making America safer will be hard: There are no perfect solutions. The Second Amendment is one constraint, and so is our polarized political system and the power of the gun lobby. There's a lot of talk about banning assault weapons, for example, but the 10-year assault weapons ban didn't accomplish much for reducing gun violence, partly because defining assault weapons proved to be much more complex than anybody had anticipated (in the end, the definition depended partly on cosmetic features). And new restrictions have limited effectiveness because we have delayed so long that there are already so many guns out there. So it's unclear how effective some of my suggestions will be, and in any case this will be a long, uncertain, uphill process.

But automobiles are a reminder that we can chip away at a large problem through a public health approach: Just as auto safety improvements have left us far better off, it seems plausible to some gun policy experts that a sensible, politically feasible set of public health steps could over time reduce firearm deaths in America by one-third - or more than 10,000 lives saved each year.

So let's not just shed tears for the dead, give somber speeches and lower flags. Let's get started and save lives. Let's not accept that school classrooms can turn any moment into war zones.
I invite you to sign up for my free, twice-weekly email newsletter. Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter (@NickKristof).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This story has been updated. Visit this page to see the latest. It has happened yet again: Inevitably, predictably, fatefully, a gunman shot dead 26 people in a Texas church on Sunday. These incidents are peculiarly American tragedies, and what's particularly heartbreaking is that they aren't shocking.

# data[].attributes.body
Winning Editorials

# data[].attributes.body
More Op-Eds from NYT and The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I often go out and talk to people who are interested in getting Op-Eds published in The Times. I do it because we need you, the reader, the writer. People certainly don't write for us for the money; the payment, frankly, is peanuts. They write for the influence, for the chance to reach an audience, to say something that's been bothering them, driving them crazy, something that no one else seems to be saying.

We appreciate that, and we need you. We need a diversity of voices and opinions about a range of topics. Anything can be an Op-Ed. We're not only interested in policy, politics or government. We're interested in everything, if it's opinionated and we believe our readers will find it worth reading. We are especially interested in finding points of view that are different from those expressed in Times editorials. If you read the editorials, you know that they present a pretty consistent liberal point of view. There are lots of other ways of looking at the world, to the left and right of that position, and we are particularly interested in presenting those points of view.

As we become more international, we need you more than ever. Not long ago, Op-Ed meant just the two or so articles by outside writers that ran each day on the print page. Now, Op-Ed includes Sunday Review, a section with longer reported, opinionated pieces, and Opinionator, one of the most popular blogs at The Times and home to series like The Stone, on philosophy, Disunion, on the Civil War, Draft, on writing, and Private Lives, personal perspectives of universal matters.

We get a flood of submissions, but there's never too much good writing in the world. There is always room for more. So what makes the cut? That's what people always ask me, so I'll try to explain the process. Most pieces we publish are between 400 and 1200 words. They can be longer when they arrive, but not so long that they're traumatizing. Submissions that are reacting to news of the world are of great value to us, especially if they arrive very quickly. Write in your own voice. If you're funny, be funny. Don't write the way you think important people write, or the way you think important pieces should sound. And it's best to focus very specifically on something; if you write about the general problem of prisons in the United States, the odds are that it will seem too familiar. But if you are a prisoner in California and you have just gone on a hunger strike and you want to tell us about it - now, that we would like to read. We are normal humans (relatively speaking). We like to read conversational English that pulls us along. That means that if an article is written with lots of jargon, we probably won't like it.

We don't just wait for articles to arrive. Every day we have a meeting to discuss the news, to toss around ideas, to think about which writers might be good on which subjects. Whether we then reach out to a writer and ask for a piece, or take on something that was submitted to us, all articles are written on spec - no article is guaranteed publication. But once we have accepted a piece, we will do everything we can to make sure it runs on one of our platforms. Sometimes, that happens months after a piece is written, an occurrence that must be absolutely maddening to writers. We wait for what seems like a good peg, the moment when the greatest number of readers are likely to find a piece relevant and interesting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I often go out and talk to people who are interested in getting Op-Eds published in The Times. I do it because we need you, the reader, the writer. People certainly don't write for us for the money; the payment, frankly, is peanuts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Contests

One of our 2017 editorial winners wrote about China's unofficial ban on Korean cultural exports, such as the boy band Exo. Credit... Starnews, via Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

The challenge is fairly straightforward. Choose a topic you care about, gather evidence from sources both within and outside The Times and write a concise editorial (450 words or less) to convince readers of your view.

Because editorial writing at newspapers is a collaborative process, you can write your entry as a team effort or by yourself. When you're done, submit it using the contest form below by Thursday, April 5, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. Be sure to read the rules, also below, before posting.

Our judges will then use this rubric (PDF) for selecting winners to publish on The Learning Network.

As teachers know, the persuasive essay has long been a staple of high school education, but the Common Core standards seem to have put evidence-based argumentative writing on everybody's agenda. You couldn't ask for a more real-world example of the genre than the classic newspaper editorial - and The Times publishes, on average, two of them a day.

And at a time when breaking out of one's "filter bubble" is more important than ever, we hope this contest also encourages students to broaden their news diets by using multiple sources, ideally ones that offer a range of perspectives on their chosen issue.

So what issue do you care about? Gun violence? Sexual harassment? Social media? You decide.

Good luck, and please post any questions you might have in the comments. We'll answer you there.

_________
Note: The submission form has been removed from this page. The contest is closed.
_________

Video

The New York Times's editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal provides seven tips for writing an effective editorial.

To help with this challenge, Andrew Rosenthal, in his previous role as Editorial Page editor of The Times, detailed seven pointers in the video above. And we have published related lesson plans, including " For the Sake of Argument: Writing Persuasively to Craft Short, Evidence-Based Editorials," " I Don't Think So: Writing Effective Counterarguments" and " 10 Ways to Teach Argument-Writing With The New York Times," that offer additional teaching ideas.

We have also culled a list of 401 prompts for argumentative writing organized by category, to help inspire you - although, of course, you are not limited to those topics.

We encourage you to look at both our comments on last year's winners and the winning essays themselves. They can serve as excellent models, and they cover topics from active-shooter school lockdowns to Korean television shows in China.

In addition, you can watch our free, archived webinar, featuring the Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof and Kabby Hong, a high school English teacher.

1. Use at least one Times source. You can write your editorial about any topic, as long as you use at least one source from The Times. That should pretty much open the whole world to you, as you may be surprised how much you can find in The Times.

Be advised that nytimes.com has a digital subscription system in which readers have access to five free articles each month, but after that you will be asked to become a digital subscriber. The Times also offers K-12 digital subscription plans for schools. But all Learning Network activities for students, including our daily writing prompts, as well as Times articles linked from them, are free, so you can access them without exceeding the five-article limit.

2. Use at least one non-Times source. But make sure that the source you use is a reliable one. We encourage you to find sources that offer different perspectives on an issue.

3. Always cite your sources. Our submission form contains a required field for entering your citations. We include an example as well, though you can use M.L.A. or A.P.A. styles, or just list the website URLs. Even if you use a print source or an expert interview, you must provide a citation. Readers (and judges) should always know where you got your evidence.

4. Be concise. The editorial must not exceed 450 words. Your title and list of sources are separate, however, and do not count as part of your 450-word limit.

5. Have an opinion. Editorials are different from news articles because they try to persuade readers to share your point of view. Don't be afraid to take a stand.

6. Write your editorial by yourself or with a group. If you are working as a team, just remember to submit all of your names when you post your entry. But please submit only one editorial per student. If you're submitting as part of a team, you should not also submit as an individual.

7. Be original and use appropriate language. Write for a well-informed audience, but include enough background information to give context. Be careful not to plagiarize: Use quotation marks around lines you take verbatim from another source, or rephrase and cite your source.

8. Submissions must be from students who are 13 to 19 years old, and they may come from anywhere in the world. Unlike in previous years, students can now use their entire name if they want.

9. All entries must be submitted by April 5 at 11:59 p.m. Easternusing the contest form above. If you have questions about the contest, feel free to post them in the comments section, and we'll respond to you there.

10. Follow these instructions if you need proof that you entered this contest. Within an hour of submitting your editorial, you should receive an email from "The New York Times" with the subject heading "Thank you for your submission to our Student Editorial Contest." If you don't receive the email within an hour, even after checking your spam folder, then you can resubmit your entry. Be sure your settings allow emails from nytimes.com.

After two attempts and waiting over one full day, if you still have not received a confirmation email, you can contact us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com with the email address you used in the contest form. Use the subject heading "Please send me an email confirmation for my editorial contest submission." Be sure to include your name and editorial title (or subject) in your email. You may have to wait up to a week for a reply.

11. We will use this rubric (PDF) to judge entries, and the winning editorials will be featured on The Learning Network.

" Writing an Editorial" Unit Plan, by Lindsay Thompson

" Reader Idea | He Said, She Said, I Say: A Researched Argument Essay," by Danielle Harms

" Reader Idea | Using an Op-Doc Video to Teach Argumentative Writing," by Allison Marchetti

" Reader Idea | Using Room for Debate to Teach Argumentative Writing and Discussion Skills," by Gerard Dawson and Justin Rex

" Reader Idea | An Argument-Writing Unit: Crafting Student Editorials," by Kayleen Everitt

Good luck and have fun. We welcome your questions and comments if we have omitted details that might be useful. Let us know how we can help.

_________
The Learning Network runs contests for teenagers all year long. See our full calendar.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Our Fifth Annual Student Editorial Contest: Write About an Issue That Matters to You (Published 2018)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Contests The challenge is fairly straightforward. Choose a topic you care about, gather evidence from sources both within and outside The Times and write a concise editorial (450 words or less) to convince readers of your view. Because editorial writing at newspapers is a collaborative process, you can write your entry as a team effort or by yourself.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
LEAD: Hence, loathed Melancholy; the country will not be weakened, nor the Presidency ruined, nor the causes of arms reduction and conservatism set back, by pitiless publicity. After a messup comes the cleanup and then the glory of a new election.

# data[].attributes.body
Mr. Kristof's Op-Eds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times Op-Ed Columnist, writes about human rights, women's rights, health, global affairs.

# data[].attributes.body
Reliable Sources

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Library Guides: Evaluating resources: Home

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Library Guides: Evaluating resources: Home

# data[].attributes.body
Phone Addiction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Chris Matthews is host of MSNBC's "Hardball" and author of "Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit."

Fifty years ago, CBS's Walter Cronkite stepped from his role as objective TV anchor to call for a negotiated settlement of America's war in Southeast Asia.

"We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds," he said in his broadcast of Feb. 27, 1968. ". . . For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate."

Coming from Cronkite, those words came as a shocker, not least to the man leading us in the war. After watching, President Lyndon B. Johnson is famously reported to have told aides: If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America.

What gave Cronkite such credibility was his years as a calm, reassuring presence on the evening news. He was the anchorman most remembered for telling us the news that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. More than deliver the news, he seemed to share it with us. In addition to being a reporter, he was an American, carrying both our history and national feeling.

There was something else about Cronkite: his authenticity. It lay in his backstory. Many of us knew his history as a wire-service reporter in World War II. We knew that his recent tour of Vietnam was that of a seasoned war correspondent, someone who knew the look and horror of the battlefield. This wasn't an armchair general's assessment.

Who, on this half-century anniversary of Cronkite's commentary, can match his credibility and authenticity?

I nominate the students and teachers of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association has attacked the "media." But his real targets are the eyewitnesses to the horror at that school. Those are the people who have brought a new credibility in the national discussion. They are the young veterans with back-from-the-front authenticity.

Consider the Parkland, Fla., teacher Greg Pittman and what he has had to say about carrying a handgun into class with him: "One, where do I put the gun? Do I put it in my pocket in a holster? In my desk? Is it locked up somewhere? . . . I am in the profession to teach. I did not sign up to be SWAT, to be a policeman."

Or the student Chris Grady on how he'd react to a teacher coming to class with a concealed weapon: "That's pretty much all I would be thinking about. You know, I know most teachers are incredible people who just want to teach, but you never know when a teacher might have a bad day or if one of them snaps and they take it out on their students. It's just a very uncomfortable thought knowing that my teacher has a weapon that could cause death."

What caught my attention early about these witnesses to tragedy - the shooting deaths of 17 students and adults in their midst - was the language they employed. It hasn't been left vs. right or even gun control vs. "the right to bear arms." It has been something different. The survivors of Parkland don't criticize lawmakers for disagreeing with them. They nail them for speaking so dishonestly.

Cronkite spoke of politicians selling us on the "silver linings" in the nightly body counts from Vietnam. The eyewitnesses from the high school in Parkland call the talk of arming teachers "BS." And there's a reason their witness resonates. They are the students who will never forget what it felt like to see their classmates shot dead. They are the teachers who devote their careers to the education and well-being of these teenagers.

It's not "the media" the NRA is worried about. It's these students and teachers. They are the country's trusted correspondents. They are the Cronkites of this story. They are the ones telling us, as he did, "the way it is."

Read more on this topic:

Elizabeth Bruenig: The best strategy for the Parkland students: Go on strike

Colbert I. King: You can do something about guns. In the voting booth.

Catherine Rampell: We know who really rules the Gunshine State

Christine Emba: We all know what guns are really for

Eugene Robinson: Don't let the absurd ploy to arm teachers distract you

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | The Parkland shooting victims are the most trusted people in America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Chris Matthews is host of MSNBC's "Hardball" and author of "Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit." Fifty years ago, CBS's Walter Cronkite stepped from his role as objective TV anchor to call for a negotiated settlement of America's war in Southeast Asia.

# data[].attributes.body
Importance of my learning about African American culture--I'll use anecdotes and some of the following research.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
According to a post on the Well blog, people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier. How much of your time do you spend having substantive conversations? With whom are you most likely to have these kinds of conversations, and what do you talk about?
"Talk Deeply, Be Happy?" describes the findings of a psychologist in Arizona:

It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject.

"We found this so interesting, because it could have gone the other way - it could have been, 'Don't worry, be happy' - as long as you surf on the shallow level of life you're happy, and if you go into the existential depths you'll be unhappy," Dr. Mehl said.

But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.

[...]The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, involved 79 college students - 32 men and 47 women - who agreed to wear an electronically activated recorder with a microphone on their lapel that recorded 30-second snippets of conversation every 12.5 minutes for four days, creating what Dr. Mehl called "an acoustic diary of their day."

Researchers then went through the tapes and classified the conversation snippets as either small talk about the weather or having watched a TV show, and more substantive talk about current affairs, philosophy, the difference between Baptists and Catholics or the role of education. A conversation about a TV show wasn't always considered small talk; it could be categorized as substantive if the speakers analyzed the characters and their motivations, for example.

Students: If you kept an acoustic diary over a few days, how many "deep" or "substantive" conversations would it show that you have? With whom are you most likely to have these kinds of discussions, and what kinds of things do you talk about? Do you think having these kinds of conversations contribute to your overall happiness? How?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment below. Please use only your first name. For privacy policy reasons, we will not publish student comments that include a last name.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Often Do You Have 'Deep Discussions'?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
According to a post on the Well blog, people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier. How much of your time do you spend having substantive conversations? With whom are you most likely to have these kinds of conversations, and what do you talk about?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The bestselling young-adult book by Angie Thomas looks at police violence through the eyes of a teen girl.

Balzer + Bray / HarperCollins

"They finally put a sheet over Khalil. He can't breathe under it. I can't breathe."

The last words of Eric Garner, adopted and amplified by the Black Lives Matter movement, echo again in the early pages of Angie Thomas's young-adult novel The Hate U Give. By the time she's 16, Starr Carter, the protagonist of the book, has lost two of her childhood friends to gun violence: one by a gang drive-by, and one by a cop.

As the sole witness to her friend Khalil's fatal shooting by a police officer, Starr is overwhelmed by the pressure of testifying before a grand jury and the responsibility of speaking out in Khalil's memory. The incident also means that the carefully built-up boundary between Starr's two worlds begins to crumble. For years, she has spent her weekdays at a private, majority-white school, where she explains, "I'm cool by default because I'm one of the only black kids there." Back at home, she lives with her father "Big Mav," a former gang-member who wants to make their crime-ridden neighborhood a better place, and her mother Lisa, who wants to move away in order to keep her family safe.

Related Story

Black-ish and How to Talk to Kids About Police Brutality
Now in its third consecutive week at number one on The New York Times bestseller list for young-adult novels, Thomas's debut novel offers an incisive and engrossing perspective of the life of a black teenage girl as Starr's two worlds converge over questions of police brutality, justice, and activism.

Thomas's book derives its title from the rapper Tupac Shakur's philosophy of THUG LIFE-which purportedly stands for "The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody"-and it's a motif the novel returns to a few times. The acronym tattooed across Tupac's abdomen could be read as an embrace of a dangerous lifestyle. But, as Khalil explains to Starr, just minutes before the cop pulls them over, it's really an indictment of systemic inequality and hostility: "What society gives us as youth, it bites them in the ass when we wild out."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'The Hate U Give' Enters the Ranks of Great YA Novels

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The bestselling young-adult book by Angie Thomas looks at police violence through the eyes of a teen girl. "They finally put a sheet over Khalil. He can't breathe under it. I can't breathe." The last words of Eric Garner, adopted and amplified by the Black Lives Matter movement, echo again in the early pages of Angie Thomas's young-adult novel The Hate U Give.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Washington Post Opinions section features opinion articles,newspaper editorials and letters to the editor on the issues of the day. Offerings include the Post Partisan blog by Washington Post opinion writers, as well as political cartoons and political cartoon animations by editorial cartoonists Tom Toles and Ann Telnaes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I decided to go natural in 1991, during my junior year in college. It was a difficult choice, and it was possible only in a context of black female friendships and the shared epiphanies of a feminist collective called The Rag. The women on The Rag (yes, we thought we were quite clever) met on the Radcliffe campus to discuss our emerging understandings of feminism, and black feminism in particular. Paramount for us, as in the #MeToo movement now, was the emboldening recognition that we were not alone.

When I stopped straightening my hair - as a way of affirming my worth despite mainstream messages to the contrary - I had the support of an emotional, intellectual and political community. My college roommate, Keiko Morris, and I enacted this ritual together: cutting off tresses made foreign by chemical "beauty" products and choosing how we would relearn what our nappy hair could mean to us.

Keiko, who went on to become a journalist, and I wrote about the experience, as did Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Pearl Cleage, Bell Hooks and the many other black female writers before us who have made hair a recurring theme. Our essay, "The Straight and Narrow," was published in the book "Testimony," edited by our college classmate Natasha Tarpley, who would later publish the uplifting children's picture book "I Love My Hair!" Keiko and I wrote that as young girls, "we saw white women, not ourselves, in the images that America chose to project - we heard family members comment that so and so's baby had been born with good hair and they 'hoped it would stay that way.' "

Our undergoing the "big chop" disappointed family members and lessened our value in the heterosexual dating market, but we were determined to endure recrimination and rejection, together.

The early 1990s was a long time ago. So much seems to have changed in the decades since I stopped straightening. There is a rich and varied digital discussion of black natural hair care, thanks in part to the early-aughts natural-hair movement, when digital innovators like Curly Nikki (Nikki Walton) and Afrobella (Patrice Yursik) recorded their transition from straightened to natural styles and offered hair care tips to thousands of followers. Chris Rock released the HBO documentary "Good Hair" (2009) and expressed the wish that his daughter would treasure what is inside her head instead of what grows on it.

Fewer white strangers today tell me that I look just like Whoopi Goldberg because I wear dreadlocks (though it happened in Montana last summer) or have the nerve to reach out and touch my hair without permission (though it happened in Michigan last fall).

Despite this progress, hair remains a raw nerve for young black women. I learned this when I began offering a course on hair in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan three years ago. The students in my classes were telling stories much like those my college friends and I had shared. They were still describing the pain and humiliation they felt as women with nappy or "bad" hair, or the preferences and privilege they knew as women with wavy or loosely curled "good" hair.

A black trans man recounted the freedom that he felt when he transitioned in high school and no longer had to control his hair as a black girl would, fearfully running away from the rain and avoiding swimming pools. Students talked about high school teachers who said their hair was blocking others' view of the board. Female students said potential romantic partners saw only straighter hair, and lighter skin, as attractive and assumed that any dark-skinned woman with long hair was a "fake"; they wrote about despising themselves because their hair made them alien and ugly. They had reclaimed natural hair despite self-doubt and rampant rejection.

Going natural is still hard for many black women with kinky hair. The choice means risking the mantle of respectability for which middle-class African-Americans have long fought and relinquishing a dream of beauty that popular culture prizes. Professional costs remain as well, as demonstrated by a United States Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2016 affirming a company's right not to hire applicants with dreadlocks.

Now, it seems to me, a cultural tide is meeting the more individualized, self-care focus of the natural-hair movement. In 2017, Colin Kaepernick defended his Afro by implying that the former quarterback Michael Vick - who said Mr. Kaepernick should trim his hair to look "clean cut" and "presentable" - suffered from Stockholm syndrome; the "Black Panther" actress Lupita Nyong'o criticized Grazia U.K. magazine for retouching a cover photo to remove her natural hair; and Davina Bennett, Miss Jamaica, won second runner-up in the Miss Universe pageant while daring to wear a spectacular sundial Afro.

The record-breaking "Black Panther" is the sensational popular example, a visual anthem for this moment. The hair director for the film, Camille Friend, said in an interview with The Cut that she insisted on natural hair for the actors and drew on Zulu, Masai, Hima and Afropunk looks. But the movie does not stand alone.

The fiber artist Sonya Clark has produced the elegantly stylized Hair Craft Project, which features black hairdressers as craftswomen whose intricate art form is the braid. Regis and Kahran Bethencourt of the Creative Soul studio in Atlanta have created an "Afro Art" series featuring African-American children with sculpted natural hair and elaborate costumes. The children in these images face the camera with a deep-down, dare-me beauty complemented by glistening Afros, voluptuous rolls and undulating braids with cowrie shell accessories that enhance the texture of a proud and voluminous birthright.

In the mid-1990s, soon after I stopped relaxing my hair, the prescient race and gender theorist Angela Davis warned about the devolution of natural black hair from a strong statement of political solidarity to an empty sign of consumerist acquisition. The Afro was being resuscitated as "revolutionary glamour," she said, black chic in a bottle, denuded of political potency.

Angela Davis lamented fashion masquerading as politics, but the pendulum has swung back, reflecting what the historian Tanisha Ford has called "a revolutionary politics of style." Natural black hair is again a sign of political intention, visually cuing a culture of resistance that asserts the value of difference, of conviction in the face of adversity, of the intrinsic worth of all human beings. The ultra-Afro, the meta-cornrow, the rocket-shaped twists springing out into space. Africa has produced a hair type with an innate capacity to defy gravity. It demonstrates to us all in these times: And still we rise.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Black Hair's Blockbuster Moment

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I decided to go natural in 1991, during my junior year in college. It was a difficult choice, and it was possible only in a context of black female friendships and the shared epiphanies of a feminist collective called The Rag.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This resource outlines the generally accepted structure for introductions, body paragraphs, and conclusions in an academic argument paper. Keep in mind that this resource contains guidelines and not strict rules about organization. Your structure needs to be flexible enough to meet the requirements of your purpose and audience.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
These OWL resources will help you conduct research using primary source methods, such as interviews and observations, and secondary source methods, such as books, journals, and the Internet. This area also includes materials on evaluating research sources.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
These OWL resources will help you develop and refine the arguments in your writing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Illustration by Paul Sahre and Jonas Beuchert

Have you been knocking your head against the proverbial wall trying to teach - or learn - expository writing skills? New York Times models can help writers learn how to write an expository essay that is compelling, convincing and authoritative as well as engaging to read - not to mention authentic. Try a fresh approach with these 10 tips.

1. Ditch the five-paragraph essay and embrace authentic essay structure. New York Times news and feature articles are excellent models for structure, including transitions and organization. Look at the guide to forms of Times news coverage to get started, and then deconstruct some articles to get a feel for how they are organized.

Classic news stories like this one about conflicts over rebuilding ground zero and this one on how the case of the Russian spies is being resolved are written in the "inverted pyramid" format, starting with the most important information - the first paragraph or two answers the questions "Who?" "What?" "Where?" "When?" Why?" and "How?" - and proceeding with the most important details, filling in the less important information as the article proceeds. This can be a useful structure for, say, newspaper articles based on the events in a play or novel, or relatively short research reports.

Feature stories pull the reader in with an engaging introduction and develop from there to explain a topic, issue or trend. Examples of this structure: this article on gauging the national mood by tracking popular songs, blog posts and the like, and Rob Walker's "Consumed" column on the blankets-with-sleeves fad.

A sub-genre of the feature, the personality profile, is also a useful expository writing model, as we discuss in our lesson on Dickens, which suggests using a profile of Bernie Madoff as a model for writing a literary character profile, and this lesson on the literature Nobelist Naguib Mahfouz.

To take the idea of using newspaper story structures further, try this lesson on comparing classic storylines with news reports.

2. Two traditional essay writing bugaboos are introductions and conclusions (or "ledes" and "kickers"). The Times is full of creative ways to open and end a narrative, and these can help developing writers learn to avoid clichéd openings and repetitive endings. Here are some of the approaches Times writers take to begin and end their stories, together with examples of each one:

Looking for more inspiration? Read John Noble Wilford's retrospective article about covering the 1969 moon landing, focusing on the section "Moonfall Eve," in which he recounts trying to figure out how to start his article. The upshot: Simple is often best.

3. Informing and explaining - how things work or how to do something - is part of journalism's bread and butter. Good Times models for information/explanation essays include articles on how dark energy works, why and how Twitter can be useful, how to make a soufflé and how to avoid heatstroke. To find more examples, good starting places are the recipes in the Dining section, the Science and Health sections, and many Technology section features, including posts on Gadgetwise and Pogue's Posts.

One specific type of explanation essay is analysis - an examination of why and how an issue is significant. If you're looking for good models, The Times runs many pieces under the rubric "news analysis," such as this article on the significance of steroid use in baseball and this one on President Obama's remarks on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates. Read these, or other articles marked "news analysis," and then try writing your own analysis of an event - perhaps something that happened at school, or perhaps something that happened in a piece of literature or in history.

4. In addition to information and explanation, there are a few other key expository patterns. Here are the most common ones, together with a Times models of each one, each paired with a related (PDF) handout:

For more fun with definitions, see the Schott's Vocab blog.

5. Whether you're writing a descriptive piece or incorporating description into a larger expository essay, specific details are vital, as in this piece on a city mural and this one about Michael Jackson's signature dance moves.

Of course, one of the best places to find colorful descriptions is the Times' Sports pages, as in this article about a tennis match played by Rafael Nadal. Use our Play-by-Play Sports Descriptions sheet (PDF) and our lesson Getting in the Game: Modeling Descriptive Writing on Sports Reporting to get a closer look at descriptive phrases in this or other sports articles.

6. "I've said all I have to say." "How can I possibly write three pages on this topic?" "What do you mean, develop my ideas?" Essay writers often struggle with adequate development. Times features are perfect examples of how to fully develop ideas. For example, you might read "Drivers and Legislators Dismiss Cellphone Risks" or Michael Pollan's polemic on cooking shows and the decline of home cooking in the Sunday Magazine. Then create a "reverse outline" to reveal how the writer developed the piece.

7. Like development, smoothly incorporating supporting material and evidence - including introducing and integrating quotations - can be a challenge for young writers. Add the requirement to follow MLA or APA style for citations, and for many students the challenge is insurmountable. Part of the problem may be that most students see few articles or other texts with academic citations in their daily lives. Using The Times for models can help.

You might suspend traditional academic style requirements, and instead try newspaper-style attribution or even the Web protocol of linking to the source of information - such as this article on digital curriculum materials, which, among many, many others, shows both approaches. Other articles, like this one about government recommendations to schools regarding swine flu, are good examples of how to integrate both partial and full quotations, as well as how to include paraphrases.

8. Subject-verb and noun-pronoun agreement can trouble even established writers at the newspaper of record itself, as the After Deadline blog has "Watching Whales, Watching Us", a Sunday Magazine article in which the reporter included personal experience alongside research, and "Finally, the Spleen Gets Some Respect", Natalie Angier's scientific report on the spleen, in which she characterizes herself as splenetic

Second person - "Party On, but No Tweets", and the Gadgetwise blog post on a smartphone app for stargazers, which explains how the tool works, both of which repeatedly refer to "you," avoiding the clunky and unnecessarily distancing "one"

Third person with a clear voice/personality - Rob Walker's "Consumed" column in the Sunday Magazine, such as the one on the yoga "lifestyle" shop Lululemon and the Style feature "Hair, Hair, Hair, Hair, Hair, Hair"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
10 Ways to Develop Expository Writing Skills With The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Illustration by Paul Sahre and Jonas Beuchert Have you been knocking your head against the proverbial wall trying to teach - or learn - expository writing skills? New York Times models can help writers learn how to write an expository essay that is compelling, convincing and authoritative as well as engaging to read - not to mention authentic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Update: Jan. 22, 2014
The Times is full of persuasive language every day. Editorials, Op-Eds, Room for Debate and even the Dining section use rhetoric, or persuasive language, to persuade readers to believe an idea or try something.

In this edition of Skills Practice, students explore how writers use the rhetorical devices of logos, ethos and pathos to appeal to an audience. They then try out their own use of rhetoric to make a persuasive argument.
Your Task
1. Read the Opinion article "Rap Lyrics on Trial," in which Erik Nielson and Charis E. Kubrin argue that lyrics are wrongly being used against amateur rappers in court.

2. As you read, highlight examples of logos, pathos and ethos used in the Op-Ed article. (See the definitions below if you are not familiar with these terms.) You might want to use a different color highlighter for each rhetorical appeal.

3. Write your own persuasive argument using rhetorical devices to convince an audience. Choose any topic that interests you, and write a speech or editorial that employs logos, pathos and ethos. You can use our archive of Student Opinion questions if you are having trouble finding a topic.
Before You Do This Task, You Might ...
Become familiar with rhetorical devices.

There are three types of rhetorical strategies, as categorized by the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle. He believed that speakers needed to look at these three elements to compose a convincing argument.

logos (rational appeal): Appeal to the audience's logical reasoning ability. Examples of logos include facts, statistics and anecdotes.

pathos (emotional appeal): Appeal to an audience's heart and emotions. An author or speaker using pathos seeks to persuade someone emotionally using personal connections, stories or testimonials, and maybe spirituality. Pathos can aim to evoke hopes and fears and often employs figurative language.

ethos (ethical appeal): Appeal to the credibility and authority of a speaker. Using ethos, a writer can convey trustworthiness through tone and style as well as by establishing her credentials in a field. An author's reputation can also influence pathos.

Then think of something you tried to persuade a parent or friend to do. Maybe you wanted to borrow money or buy a new phone. What kinds of arguments did you use to try to persuade this person? Did you use statistics and logic? Did you try to present yourself as responsible? Did you attempt to make the person feel bad in order to persuade him or her? Which appeals worked best? Turn and talk to a partner about your experiences.

Going Further
1. Editorials: Read Times editorials that take a stand on a wide range of issues and practice looking for the use of the logos, pathos and ethos. Some editorials that might interest students include:

2. Speeches: Rhetorical devices are not just used in writing; they also play a large role in speaking. Read important speeches, political and otherwise, and practice identifying the speaker's use of rhetorical devices.

Students can also analyze rhetorical devices used by politicians using social media.

Last year, Sarah Gross, Michelle Lampinen and Jonathan Olsen ran a Twitter chat during the presidential election. They wrote about their experience here. Using hashtags, they brought their students together to analyze rhetoric in the presidential debates alongside students in other states.

Students in grades 9-12 took a "crash course" in rhetoric thanks to Ms. Lampinen. Then they practiced recognizing rhetoric by looking for it in the newspaper before the debate. Finally, during the debate they participated on Twitter, blogs, Todaysmeet and a private Ning (wherever they felt most comfortable), discussing how the candidates used rhetoric to try to sway voters.

3. Advertisements: Recognizing rhetoric is an important skill for students who are surrounded by advertisements and media all day. They are inundated with information on a minute-by-minute basis, and understanding how the media is trying to persuade them is an important step in thinking critically about the world around them.

Students can use a critical eye to watch advertisements and examine how rhetoric is being employed to persuade the audience. One place to start is to analyze some of the commercials included in this NPR post on memorable political ads from 2013.

4. More About Rhetoric: Draft is a Times series about the art and craft of writing, and this post, "Other Men's Flowers," is all about rhetoric and how it works. Here is a paragraph from the post:

It does help to keep in mind that, as Aristotle wrote, you have three forms of power over the reader: ethos, pathos and logos. That is, roughly: selling yourself, swaying the emotions and advancing your argument. Any sentence you write should be pulling one or more of those levers; the best will do all three. Even apparent decoration works to a purpose - if a phrase is beautiful, funny or memorable, it is doing work on its audience.

Read the whole post and apply some of the author's observations and ideas to your own persuasive writing.

Update: A New Yorker article, "The Six Things That Make Stories Go Viral Will Amaze, and Maybe Infuriate, You," identifies ethos, pathos and logos as elements:

In 350 B.C., Aristotle was already wondering what could make content-in his case, a speech-persuasive and memorable, so that its ideas would pass from person to person. The answer, he argued, was three principles: ethos, pathos, and logos. Content should have an ethical appeal, an emotional appeal, or a logical appeal. A rhetorician strong on all three was likely to leave behind a persuaded audience. Replace rhetorician with online content creator, and Aristotle's insights seem entirely modern. Ethics, emotion, logic-it's credible and worthy, it appeals to me, it makes sense. If you look at the last few links you shared on your Facebook page or Twitter stream, or the last article you e-mailed or recommended to a friend, chances are good that they'll fit into those categories.

Invite students to find and analyze viral content from their social networks and analyze it to see which of these principles apply.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Skills Practice | Persuading an Audience Using Logos, Pathos and Ethos

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Update: Jan. 22, 2014 The Times is full of persuasive language every day. Editorials, Op-Eds, Room for Debate and even the Dining section use rhetoric, or persuasive language, to persuade readers to believe an idea or try something. In this edition of Skills Practice, students explore how writers use the rhetorical devices of logos, ethos and pathos to appeal to an audience.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A weekly round-up of our favorite student comments on recent news and issues.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We published an updated version of this list, "401 Prompts for Argumentative Writing," as well as a companion piece, "650 Prompts for Narrative and Personal Writing." We also now have a PDF of these 200 prompts.

Sign up for our free weekly newsletter and get five new Student Opinion questions delivered to you every week.

What issues do you care most about? What topics do you find yourself discussing most passionately, whether online, at the dinner table, in the classroom or with your friends?

Our annual Student Editorial Contest invites you to write an evidence-based persuasive piece on an issue that matters to you. To help jump-start your brainstorming, we have gathered a list of 200 writing prompts from our daily Student Opinion feature that invite you to take a stand.

Though you won't be limited to these topics for the contest, you'll see that our list touches on every aspect of modern life, from politics to sports, culture, education and technology. We hope the range inspires you, and we hope the fact that each question links to at least one related Times article gives you a starting point for finding evidence.

So skim the list below to think about the topic you'd most like to take on.

For more information, here are links to our spring 2014 editorial-writing contest, a list of winners from that contest and a related lesson plan on argumentative writing.
Education

1. Is Cheating Getting Worse?

2. Should Students Be Able to Grade Their Teachers?

3. Does Your School Hand Out Too Many A's?

4. Should Middle School Students Be Drug Tested?

5. Should Reading and Math Be Taught in Gym Class Too?

6. How Seriously Should We Take Standardized Tests?

7. How Well Do You Think Standardized Tests Measure Your Abilities?

8. Do You Spend Too Much Time Preparing for Standardized Tests?

9. Should Schools Offer Cash Bonuses for Good Test Scores?

10. Should We Rethink How Long Students Spend in High School?

11. Do Schools Provide Students With Enough Opportunities to Be Creative?

12. What Are You Really Learning at School?

13. How Important Is Arts Education?

14. Does Gym Help Students Perform Better in All Their Classes?

15. Who Should Be Able to See Students' Records?

16. Are Children of Illegal Immigrants Entitled to a Public Education?

17. What Is the Right Amount of Group Work in School?

18. Is Your School Day Too Short?

19. Do You Think a Longer School Calendar Is a Good Idea?

20. Should the Dropout Age Be Raised?

21. Should Students Be Allowed to Skip Senior Year of High School?

22. How Does Your School Deal With Students Who Misbehave?

23. Should Schools Be Allowed to Use Corporal Punishment?

24. How Big a Problem Is Bullying or Cyberbullying in Your School or Community?

25. How Should Schools Address Bullying?

26. Should Schools Put Tracking Devices in Students' ID Cards?

27. What Do You Think of Grouping Students by Ability in Schools?

28. Do We Need a New Way to Teach Math?

29. Does Class Size Matter?

30. Should All Students Get Equal Space in a Yearbook?

31. Is Prom Worth It?

32. How Important Are Parent-Teacher Conferences?

33. Should All Children Be Able to Go to Preschool?

34. Should Colleges Use Admissions Criteria Other Than SAT Scores and Grades?

35. What Criteria Should Be Used in Awarding Scholarships for College?

36. Do You Support Affirmative Action?

37. Do College Rankings Matter?

38. How Necessary Is a College Education?

39. Should Engineers Pay Less for College Than English Majors?
Technology and Social Media
40. Are the Web Filters at Your School Too Restrictive?

41. Does Technology Make Us More Alone?

42. Are You Distracted by Technology?

43. Do Apps Help You or Just Waste Your Time?

44. Do You Spend Too Much Time on Smart Phones Playing 'Stupid Games'?

45. Has Facebook Lost Its Edge?

46. Does Facebook Ever Make You Feel Bad?

47. Should What You Say on Facebook Be Grounds for Getting Fired?

48. Should People Be Allowed to Obscure Their Identities Online?

49. What Should the Punishment Be for Acts of Cyberbullying?

50. Is Online Learning as Good as Face-to-Face Learning?

51. Do Your Teachers Use Technology Well?

52. Should Tablet Computers Become the Primary Way Students Learn in Class?

53. Can Cellphones Be Educational Tools?

54. Should Computer Games Be Used for Classroom Instruction?

55. How Young Is Too Young for an iPhone?

56. Should Companies Collect Information About You?

57. Would You Trade Your Paper Books for Digital Versions?

58. Are Digital Photographs Too Plentiful to Be Meaningful?

59. Do You Worry We Are Filming Too Much?

60. Would You Want a Pair of Google's Computer Glasses?

61. How Would You Feel About a Computer Grading Your Essays?

62. What Role Will Robots Play in Our Future?

63. How Many Text Messages Are Too Many?

64. How Much Do You Trust Online Reviews?
Arts and Media: TV, Music, Video Games and Literature
65. Why Do We Like to Watch Rich People on TV and in the Movies?

66. Do TV Shows Like '16 and Pregnant' Promote or Discourage Teenage Pregnancy?

67. Does TV Capture the Diversity of America Yet?

68. Is TV Too White?

69. Is TV Stronger Than Ever, or Becoming Obsolete?

70. Does Reality TV Promote Dangerous Stereotypes?

71. What Current Musicians Do You Think Will Stand the Test of Time?

72. What Artists or Bands of Today Are Destined for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

73. What Musician, Actor or Author Should Be a Superstar, but Hasn't Quite Made It Yet?

74. Will Musical Training Make You More Successful?

75. Should Video Games Be Considered a Sport?

76. Should Stores Sell Violent Video Games to Minors?

77. Can a Video Game Be a Work of Art?

78. Do Violent Video Games Make People More Violent in Real Life?

79. When Should You Feel Guilty for Killing Zombies?

80. What Game Would You Like to Redesign?

81. What Were the Best Movies You Saw in the Past Year?

82. To What Writer Would You Award a Prize?

83. Do You Prefer Your Children's Book Characters Obedient or Contrary?

84. Where Is the Line Between Truth and Fiction?

85. Can Graffiti Ever Be Considered Art?

86. Do We Need Art in Our Lives?

87. What Makes a Good Commercial?

88. Why Did a Cheerios Ad Attract So Many Angry Comments Online?

89. Does Pop Culture Deserve Serious Study?
Gender Issues
90. Do Parents Have Different Hopes and Standards for Their Sons Than for Their Daughters?

91. Is School Designed More for Girls Than Boys?

92. Is There Too Much Pressure on Girls to Have 'Perfect' Bodies?

93. How Much Pressure Do Boys Face to Have the Perfect Body?

94. Do Photoshopped Images Make You Feel Bad About Your Own Looks?

95. Is It O.K. for Men and Boys to Comment on Women and Girls on the Street?

96. What Should We Do to Fight Sexual Violence Against Young Women?

97. How Do You Feel About Rihanna and Chris Brown Getting Back Together?

98. Do Fraternities Promote Misogyny?

99. Why Aren't There More Girls in Leadership Roles?

100. Why Aren't More Girls Choosing to Pursue Careers in Math and Science?

101. Should Women Be Allowed to Fight on the Front Lines Alongside Men?

102. Do You Believe in Equal Rights for Women and Men?

103. Are Women Better at Compromising and Collaborating?

104. Do Boys Have Less Intense Friendships Than Girls?
Sports and Athletics
105. If Football Is So Dangerous to Players, Should We Be Watching It?

106. Should Parents Let Their Children Play Football?

107. Should College Football Players Get Paid?

108. When Do Pranks Cross the Line to Become Bullying?

109. Has Baseball Lost Its Cool?

110. Are Some Youth Sports Too Intense?

111. Is It Offensive for Sports Teams to Use Native American Names and Mascots?

112. Where Should Colleges and Sports Teams Draw the Line in Selling Naming Rights?

113. Should Colleges Fund Wellness Programs Instead of Sports?

114. Is Cheerleading a Sport?

115. How Big a Deal Is It That an N.B.A. Player Came Out as Gay?

116. Should There Be Stricter Rules About How Coaches Treat Their Players?

117. Should Athletes Who Dope Have to Forfeit Their Titles and Medals?

118. Should Sports Betting Be Legal Everywhere?

119. Should Home-Schoolers Be Allowed to Play Public School Sports?

120. Would You Want a Bike Share Program for Your Community?
Politics and the Legal System
121. What Local Problems Do You Think Your Mayor Should Try to Solve?

122. If You Were Governor of Your State, How Would You Spend a Budget Surplus?

123. When Is the Use of Military Force Justified?

124. What Is More Important: Our Privacy or National Security?

125. California Notice

126. Should the U.S. Be Spying on Its Friends?

127. Do You Trust Your Government?

128. What Do You Think of the Police Tactic of Stop-and-Frisk?

129. Do Rich People Get Off Easier When They Break the Law?

130. Should Rich People Have to Pay More Taxes?

131. Do Laws That Ban Offensive Words Make the World a Better Place?

132. Is It Principled, or Irresponsible, for Politicians to Threaten a Shutdown?

133. Do Leaders Have Moral Obligations?

134. Do Great Leaders Have to Be Outgoing?

135. How Should We Prevent Future Mass Shootings?

136. Should Guns Be Permitted on College Campuses?

137. Would You Feel Safer With Armed Guards Patrolling Your School?

138. What Is Your Relationship With Guns?

139. Do You Support or Oppose the Death Penalty?

140. When Should Juvenile Offenders Receive Life Sentences?
Parenting and Childhood
141. Do We Give Children Too Many Trophies?

142. When Do You Become an Adult?

143. When Should You Be Able to Buy Cigarettes, Drink Alcohol, Vote, Drive and Fight in Wars?

144. Should the Morning-After Pill Be Sold Over the Counter to People Under 17?

145. Should Birth Control Pills Be Available to Teenage Girls Without a Prescription?

146. Is Modern Culture Ruining Childhood?

147. Are Adults Hurting Young Children by Pushing Them to Achieve?

148. How, and by Whom, Should Children Be Taught Appropriate Behavior?

149. What Can Older People Learn From Your Generation?

150. Do 'Shame and Blame' Work to Change Teenage Behavior?

151. How Should Children Be Taught About Puberty and Sex?

152. Is Dating a Thing of the Past?

153. How Should Parents Handle a Bad Report Card?

154. Should Children Be Allowed to Wear Whatever They Want?

155. How Should Educators and Legislators Deal With Minors Who 'Sext'?

156. Do You Think Child Stars Have It Rough?
Health and Nutrition
157. Is Smoking Still a Problem Among Teenagers?

158. Are Antismoking Ads Effective?

159. Is Drinking and Driving Still a Problem for Teenagers?

160. Do You Think a Healthier School Lunch Program Is a Lost Cause?

161. How Concerned Are You About Where Your Food Comes From?

162. Is It Ethical to Eat Meat?

163. Do You Prefer Your Tacos 'Authentic' or 'Appropriated'?

164. Should the Government Limit the Size of Sugary Drinks?

165. Should Marijuana Be Legal?

166. Should Students Be Required to Take Drug Tests?
Personal Character and Morality Questions
167. Do Bystanders Have a Responsibility to Intervene When There is Trouble?

168. Should You Care About the Health and Safety of Those Making Your Clothing?

169. Can Money Buy You Happiness?

170. Does Buying and Accumulating More and More Stuff Make Us Happier?

171. Are We Losing the Art of Listening?

172. Do People Complain Too Much?

173. Can Kindness Become Cool?

174. Which Is More Important: Talent or Hard Work?

175. How Important Is Keeping Your Cool?

176. When Should You Compromise?

177. Is Your Generation More Self-Centered Than Earlier Generations?

178. Can You Be Good Without God?

179. Have Curse Words Become So Common They Have Lost Their Shock Value?

180. What Words or Phrases Should Be Retired in 2014?

181. What Words or Phrases Do You Think Are Overused?

182. Should Couples Live Together Before Marriage?

183. How Important Do You Think It Is to Marry Someone With the Same Religion?

184. How Long Is It O.K. to Linger in a Cafe or Restaurant?

185. Does Keeping a Messy Desk Make People More Creative?

186. How Important Is Keeping a Clean House?
Science
187. Should Scientists Try to Help People Beat Old Age So We Can Live Longer Lives?

188. Given Unlimited Resources, What Scientific or Medical Problem Would You Investigate?

189. When Is It O.K. to Replace Human Limbs With Technology?

190. Do You Think Life Exists - or Has Ever Existed - Somewhere Besides Earth?

191. Should Fertilized Eggs Be Given Legal 'Personhood'?

192. How Concerned Are You About Climate Change?
Other Questions
193. Is It Wrong for a Newspaper to Publish a Front-Page Photo of a Man About to Die?

194. What Causes Should Philanthropic Groups Finance?

195. Should Charities Focus More on America?

196. Should the Private Lives of Famous People Be Off Limits?

197. Did a Newspaper Act Irresponsibly by Publishing the Addresses of Gun Owners?

198. Would You Rather Work From Home or in an Office?

199. What Time Should Black Friday Sales Start?

200. Do You Shop at Locally Owned Businesses?

201. How Much Does Your Neighborhood Define Who You Are?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We published an updated version of this list, "401 Prompts for Argumentative Writing," as well as a companion piece, "650 Prompts for Narrative and Personal Writing." We also now have a PDF of these 200 prompts. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter and get five new Student Opinion questions delivered to you every week.

# data[].attributes.body
Handouts

# data[].attributes.body
need to categorize

# data[].attributes.body
Students Answering Call To Action

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Opinion analysis and political endorsements from The New York Times editorial board.

# data[].attributes.body
Logos, Ethos, Pathos

# data[].attributes.body
Persuasive Appeals in Commercials

# data[].attributes.body
Washington Post Article re: Joshua Bell

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Joshua Bell - The Four Seasons "Summer" III. Presto (Video)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Joshua Bell's 'Stop and Hear the Music' metro experiment | The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Often referred to as the "poet of the violin," Joshua Bell is one of the world's most celebrated violinists. He continues to enchant audiences with his breathtaking virtuosity, tone of sheer beauty, and charismatic stage presence.
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher ofAlexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics,government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality, aesthetics,logic, science, politics, and metaphysics.
Aristotle's Rhetoric is an ancient Greek treatise on the art of persuasion, dating from the 4th century BC. The English title varies: typically it is titled Rhetoric, the Art of Rhetoric, or a Treatise on Rhetoric.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Aristotle and Joshua Bell can teach us about persuasion - Conor Neill

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Imagine you are one of the world's greatest violin players, and you decide to conduct an experiment: play inside a subway station and see if anyone stops to appreciate when you are stripped of a concert hall and name recognition. Joshua Bell did this, and Conor Neill channels Aristotle to understand why the context mattered.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Art of Rhetoric: Persuasive Techniques in Advertising

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Compilation of Junk Food Commericials Aimed

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
persuasive techniques used in commercials

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Uploaded by skyler schmidt on 2015-11-08.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Image

Credit Credit Kathy Willens/Associated Press

Let's play a game: The next time you're sitting among a group of friends or out on a date, measure how much time passes before someone grabs their phone to look at it.

How long can you last?

"If that happens, that's when dinner ends," said Judith Martin, the Washington Post writer whose Miss Manners column is syndicated to 200 newspapers a week.

"I don't think anyone would dare do that to me," she said.

Most of us don't have the authority that comes with 40 years of being Miss Manners, but no matter who you are it can be near impossible to pry anyone away from their mobile playthings. (Harder still: Are your friends or partner more into their smartphone than they are into you?)

The problem of looking at our devices nonstop is both social and physiological.

The average human head weighs between 10 and 12 pounds, and when we bend our neck to text or check Facebook, the gravitational pull on our head and the stress on our neck increases to as much as 60 pounds of pressure. That common position, pervasive among everyone from paupers to presidents, leads to incremental loss of the curve of the cervical spine. "Text neck" is becoming a medical issue that countless people suffer from, and the way we hang our heads has other health risks, too, according to a report published last year in The Spine Journal.

Posture has been proven to affect mood, behavior and memory, and frequent slouching can make us depressed, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. The way we stand affects everything from the amount of energy we have to bone and muscle development, and even the amount of oxygen our lungs can take in. Body language, perceptions of weakness versus power - it's all real.

And the remedy can be ridiculously simple: Just sit up.

Social psychologists like Amy Cuddy claim even standing in a confident posture, with your head up and shoulders back, can heighten testosterone and cortisol flow in the brain, preventing much of the above. So, why aren't we heeding these signs? It might be simple denial.

Some 75 percent of Americans believe their smartphone usage doesn't impact their ability to pay attention in a group setting, according to the Pew Research Center, and about a third of Americans believe that using phones in social settings actually contributes to the conversation.

But does it?

Etiquette experts and social scientists are adamantly united: Nope.

That "always-on" behavior that smartphones contribute to causes us to remove ourselves from our reality, experts said. And aside from the health consequences, if we're head down, our communication skills and manners are slumped, too. But, ironically, that might not be how most of us see ourselves.

"We think somehow that this antisocial behavior is not going to affect me," said Niobe Way, professor of applied psychology at New York University.

Ms. Way studies technology's role in shaping adolescent development. These head-down interactions take us away from the present, no matter what group we're in, she said. And it's not just a youth problem. It's ingrained, learned, copied and repeated, much of it from mimicking adults. When kids see their parents head down, they emulate that action. The result is a loss of nonverbal cues, which can stunt development.

"What's happening more and more is we're not talking to our children," Ms. Way said. "We put them in front of the tech when they're young, and when we're older, we're absorbed in our own tech."

You've seen it: Think of how some parents deal with screaming toddlers. "Here kid, take this iPhone and go to town," according to Ms. Way - not, "Let's talk this out, what seems to be the problem, son?'"

She added: "We think, 'Somehow my kids will know what's a good and bad interaction, they'll have empathy.' But when I go upstairs into my son's room and seven teens are all looking at their phones, none of them saying a word, there's all sorts of disengagement happening. It's not Facebook that's the problem, it's how we're using Facebook."

A study in 2010 found that adolescents ages 8 to 18 spent more than 7.5 hours a day consuming media. Since then, our digital addictions have continued to, in some ways, define our lives: In 2015, the Pew Research Center reported that 24 percent of teenagers are "almost constantly" online.

Adults aren't any better: Most adults spend 10 hours a day or more consuming electronic media, according to a Nielsen's Total Audience Report from last year.

The National Safety Council reports cellphone use makes drivers more accident prone than drunk driving, causing 1.6 million crashes annually, mostly from young people ages 18 to 20. One out of four accidents in the United States are caused by texting and talking on the phone while driving.

"Mobile devices are the mother of inattentional blindness," said Henry Alford, the author of "Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That: A Modern Guide to Manners." "That's the state of monomaniacal obliviousness that overcomes you when you're absorbed in an activity to the exclusion of everything else."

The social scientist Sherry Turkle analyzed 30 years of family interactions in her book "Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other." She found that children now compete with their parents' devices for attention, resulting in a generation afraid of the spontaneity of a phone call or face-to-face interaction. Eye contact now seems to be optional, Dr. Turkle suggests, and sensory overload can often mean our feelings are constantly anesthetized.

Researchers at the University of Michigan claim empathy levels have plummeted while narcissism is skyrocketing, with emotional development, confidence and health all affected when we tuck our chins in and let our heads hang like human ostriches.

Facebook's former president, Sean Parker, recently said the platform was designed to be addictive and to "consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible," which he characterized as boosting our self-esteem, ever-present in the dopamine hit of likes.

"It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other," he said. "It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains."

That said: You're probably reading this story on a mobile device right now. And that's O.K.! (As long as you're not behind the wheel.) We're not here to tell you to throw away your iPhone and abandon digital media. But like many addictions, admitting a problem is the first step to treatment. And, mercifully, the fix isn't anti-tech - it's pro-conversation, according to Dr. Turkle.

Digital detoxes have never been so popular, but they're no cure-all, and realistically, there simply isn't a black-and-white fix.

The simplest answer for all of us is biblical: Do unto others - and maybe do it without clutching your smartphone. Next time you're in the checkout lane or stopped at a red light, look around. How many people are really there with you?

"Actual human beings, in the flesh, take precedence," Ms. Martin chided. "To ignore people you're with is rude, whether you ignore them for virtual friends or distant friends by snubbing them."

It sounds so obvious it almost borders on stupid. But like Dr. Turkle's hope of building dialogue, not denigrating the digerati, it's an obvious dialogue we're not having enough of.

Mr. Alford, who used to write a monthly manners column for The New York Times, described the issue as a "monomaniacal obliviousness" of being absorbed in an activity to the exclusion of the rest of the world.

"To treat the person standing in front of you as secondary to your phone, is usually, as the kids say, a micro-aggression," he said.

Many Silicon Valley pundits go to war when anyone so much as suggests that tech's merits aren't uniformly positive. But in light of the brutal schoolyard that social media has become, that approach now appears moot.

Young or old, we're all a generation of literal test cases. Etiquette, manners, body language, the way we respond, interact and even look is changing. We're missing a whole life happening a mere 90 degrees above our smartphones. Start looking up.

"Never be the first person in the group to whip out his phone," Mr. Alford said. "Don't be Patient Zero."
Correction 1/30/2018: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of car accidents attributed to the use of smartphones. About one quarter of car accidents in the United States are caused by texting and talking on the phone while driving, not solely by texting.

Adam Popescu is a writer living in Los Angeles who contributes frequently to the Times. He can be reached on Twitter at @adampopescu

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Keep Your Head Up: How Smartphone Addiction Kills Manners and Moods

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Let's play a game: The next time you're sitting among a group of friends or out on a date, measure how much time passes before someone grabs their phone to look at it. How long can you last?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
With the Super Bowl on Sunday, the N.F.L. is about to finish one of the most trying seasons in its century-long history. The league was pulled into a polarizing debate about players protesting during the national anthem. Television ratings fell for the second straight year, including in the playoffs. Players were knocked out and paralyzed on national television, renewing concerns about the game's safety.

Not everyone is as flip as Rubio when it comes to assessing the dangers of the game. The number of children who play tackle football has dropped significantly during the past decade, though participation rates have fallen in many sports for various reasons, including the popularity of video games and the trend of children specializing in one sport.

For years, the N.F.L., with $14 billion and counting in revenue, brushed aside safety concerns, and even created fake science to discredit the growing body of research that linked the repeated head hits to long-term brain disease. Then participation in youth football began to slide. The league awoke to the idea that the pipeline of potential players and future fans was in jeopardy. In 2014, the N.F.L. gave $45 million to USA Football to spread the gospel of football to jittery moms and dads.

The group has introduced a flurry of initiatives, from teaching coaches how to get children not use their helmets as weapons, to introducing a modified version of tackle football, to holding clinics for moms to reassure them that their children were not in mortal danger.

"The biggest risk is the mental and emotional safety to those who are playing it," said Trent Dilfer, the former N.F.L. quarterback. "The player safety concern is real, but it pales in comparison."

Mark Murphy, chief executive of the Green Bay Packers and a former N.F.L. player, said the current moment was crucial for the sport.

"I don't want to sound like President Trump, but the liberal media has got football in its cross hairs," he said. Murphy added that the sport's leaders had to make the right decisions to make the game safer but added, "it is a mistake to focus solely on the risks associated with football and not to focus on the tremendous benefits."

The pronouncements came as researchers continue to publish studies showing a correlation between the total number of years one plays tackle football and the likelihood of developing brain disease later in life. State legislators have introduced bills to ban youth tackle football. Some school districts and youth leagues are dissolving teams because of a lack of players.

So, amid the dozens of seminars on football strategies during the three-day conference here, youth football coaches and administrators heard from speakers about ways to combat what they said was an unfair perception that tackle football is too brutal for children to play.

"We have to combat the negatives with positives," said John Sprinkle, who four years ago helped start a spring youth tackle football at the First Baptist Church Indian Trail near Charlotte, N.C.

The speakers made an occasional reference to concussions, but almost no one mentioned chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the brain disease linked to repeated head hits that is a far bigger risk to the sport. Few experts on brain injury were invited to speak, only a parade of fellow coaches, players and cheerleaders for the sport.

As N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell has done for years, the speakers tried to dilute the danger by noting that children can get hurt playing other sports, too.

Tell parents the dangers can be managed with better equipment, rule changes, alternatives like flag football and modified games with seven, instead of 11 players, the speakers insisted. Scott Hallenbeck, the executive director of USA Football, said the game was evolving, its leaders were getting better at learning and "following science wherever we can."

Fearful that football could turn into boxing, a once-popular sport that fell off the media map, USA Football, and the N.F.L. are now pushing flag football as a safe way to get children to play some version of the game. A few miles from the USA Football convention, there was an N.F.L.-sponsored flag football tournament for teams from around the country.

On the sidelines, Reggie Neal, his wife, Lynnette, and their 10-year old son, Braylon, were watching a game. Reggie played football and now coaches in his son's tackle football league in Palm Beach County. He remembers the days when "you grow up thinking it's all about the big hit."

Those days are gone, he said, and that's not a bad thing. Football is facing challenges, he acknowledged. The movie, "Concussion," was a wakeup call for many parents, he said. If coaches do not address those fears, the game could be in jeopardy.

When he and other coaches were told in coaching clinics to learn more about player safety and concussions, "we wondered, why are we doing this," he said of the training courses. But, he added, "we have to get the public to know we're addressing this."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Football's True Believers Circle the Wagons and Insist the Sport Is Just Fine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With the Super Bowl on Sunday, the N.F.L. is about to finish one of the most trying seasons in its century-long history. The league was pulled into a polarizing debate about players protesting during the national anthem. Television ratings fell for the second straight year, including in the playoffs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
David Hogg, a 17-year-old student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., has called on lawmakers to enact tougher restrictions on guns. Credit Credit Jonathan Drake/Reuters

The teenagers of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., who a week ago lost 17 of their classmates and school staff members in a mass shooting, have emerged as passionate advocates for reform, speaking openly of their anger in the hope of forcing a reckoning on guns.

But in certain right-wing corners of the web - and, increasingly, from more mainstream voices like Rush Limbaugh and a commentator on CNN - the students are being portrayed not as grief-ridden survivors but as pawns and conspiracists intent on exploiting a tragedy to undermine the nation's laws.

In these baseless accounts, which by Tuesday had spread rapidly on social media, the students are described as "crisis actors," who travel to the sites of shootings to instigate fury against guns. Or they are called F.B.I. plants, defending the bureau for its failure to catch the shooter. They have been portrayed as puppets being coached and manipulated by the Democratic Party, gun control activists, the so-called antifa movement and the left-wing billionaire George Soros.

The theories are far-fetched. But they are finding a broad and prominent audience online. On Tuesday, the president's son Donald J. Trump Jr. liked a pair of tweets that accused David Hogg, a 17-year-old who is among the most outspoken of the Parkland students, of criticizing the Trump administration in an effort to protect his father, whom Mr. Hogg has described as a retired F.B.I. agent.

Mr. Hogg, the high school's student news director, has become a sensation among many liberals for his polished and compelling television interviews, in which he has called on lawmakers to enact tougher restrictions on guns. Just as quickly, Mr. Hogg attracted the disdain of right-wing provocateurs like The Gateway Pundit, a fringe website that gained prominence in 2016 for pushing conspiracies about voter fraud and Hillary Clinton.

In written posts and YouTube videos - one of which had more than 100,000 views as of Tuesday night - Gateway Pundit has argued that Mr. Hogg had been coached on what to say during his interviews. The notion that Mr. Hogg is merely protecting his father dovetails with a broader right-wing trope, that liberal forces in the F.B.I. are trying to undermine President Trump and his pro-Second Amendment supporters.

Others offered more sweeping condemnations. Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist behind the site Infowars, suggested that the mass shooting was a "false flag" orchestrated by anti-gun groups. Mr. Limbaugh, on his radio program, said of the student activists on Monday: "Everything they're doing is right out of the Democrat Party's various playbooks. It has the same enemies: the N.R.A. and guns."

By Tuesday, that argument had migrated to CNN. In an on-air appearance, Jack Kingston, a former United States representative from Georgia and a regular CNN commentator, asked, "Do we really think - and I say this sincerely - do we really think 17-year-olds on their own are going to plan a nationwide rally?" (He was quickly rebuked by the anchor Alyson Camerota.)

Conspiracies, wild and raw online, are often pasteurized on their way into the mainstream. A subtler version of the theory appeared Tuesday on the website of Bill O'Reilly, the ousted Fox News host. Mr. O'Reilly stopped short of saying the students had been planted by anti-Trump forces. But, he wrote: "The national press believes it is their job to destroy the Trump administration by any means necessary. So if the media has to use kids to do that, they'll use kids."

Some of those who have been spreading the conspiracies are facing consequences.

Benjamin Kelly, an aide to a Florida state representative, Shawn Harrison, emailed a Tampa Bay Times reporter on Tuesday accusing Mr. Hogg and a classmate, Emma Gonzalez, of being actors that travel to the sites of crises.

Mr. Kelly was soon fired.

"I made a mistake whereas I tried to inform a reporter of information relating to his story regarding a school shooting," Mr. Kelly tweeted. "I meant no disrespect to the students or parents of Parkland." His boss, Mr. Harrison, said on Twitter that he was "appalled" by Mr. Kelly's remarks.

But by Tuesday evening, a new conspiracy was dominating Gateway Pundit's home page. "Soros-Linked Organizers of 'Women's March' Selected Anti-Trump Kids to Be Face of Parkland Tragedy," read the headline. Within an hour, it had been shared on Facebook more than 150 times.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Dubious Theories on Shooting In Florida Find an Audience. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Right-Wing Media Uses Parkland Shooting as Conspiracy Fodder

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The teenagers of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., who a week ago lost 17 of their classmates and school staff members in a mass shooting, have emerged as passionate advocates for reform, speaking openly of their anger in the hope of forcing a reckoning on guns.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For some teens, the constant potential feedback loop from notifications and messaging might create a fear of missing out, or FOMO. And although there is currently no official medical recognition of "smartphone addiction" as a disease or disorder, the term refers to obsessive behaviors that disturb the course of daily activities in a way that mirrors patterns similar to substance abuse.

Here are some questions to ask: Does your teenager's mood suddenly change and become intensely anxious, irritable, angry or even violent when the phone is taken away or unavailable for use? Does your teen skip or not participate in social events because of time spent on the phone? Another red flag is spending so much time on a smartphone that it affects personal hygiene and normal daily activities (most notably, sleep). Lying, hiding and breaking family rules to spend more time on a smartphone can be cause for alarm, said Hilarie Cash, a psychotherapist and the chief clinical officer at reSTART, an internet addiction rehabilitation program outside of Seattle.

In my work with students, I've found that even teenagers who want to curb their phone use may find it difficult to self-regulate without parental guidance. Creating daily and weekly offline time as part of the family routine is helpful, and finding a way to have a once- or twice-yearly extended period of time off - at a summer camp or outdoor expedition without Wi-Fi, or on a family trip - may provide the reset teens need to break negative habits.

South Korean researchers developed and tested a 10-item questionnaire to determine adolescent smartphone addiction. The brief questionnaire, published in the journal PLOS One in December 2013, asks users to answer statements like whether they have missed work because of smartphone use, have had a hard time concentrating in class because they were thinking about their phones and whether they became impatient when not using a smartphone.

For parents thinking of getting their kids smartphones, providing incremental and compartmentalized access can help establish good habits and prevent problematic dependency. Parents sometimes hand down their old iPhones as a first phone for a child in elementary school. I encourage parents to get their kids flip phones first, and wait until they have developed good overall habits before giving them a smartphone.

Just as kids learn to ride bikes with training wheels or get junior licenses when they learn to drive, kids shouldn't be expected to manage their first smartphones all by themselves. Fortunately, there are ways to manage use and help kids develop better tendencies, and much of it requires a delicate balance of parental modeling and involvement.

Make a Plan

Taking the time to discuss appropriate use, establish guidelines and come up with a family agreement before kids get a phone is ideal, because it can be harder to put rules in place afterward. Family agreements can include rules about when and how the phone may be used, and potential consequences for broken rules. Agreements are more likely to be successful if they are followed consistently and revisited frequently as kids grow older and new apps become available.

Monitor Use

For parents of teens who have smartphones, making the effort to understand how, where and why kids are spending time on their phone is critical.

It can be helpful to think about imbalances over a span of time rather than on a single evening or weekend. After all, binge-watching a television series on a smartphone while feeling sick or heartbroken isn't the same as lying about phone use over an extended period of time. An app like Moment can help track usage and display the time spent in each app.

Take a Time Out

Apple's Family Sharing and Google Play have settings to help parents monitor use, and most phone carriers have their own parental control options. Devices like Circle and apps like OurPact give parents the ability to automate access, disable access to certain apps after a certain hour and build in structured time off to promote rest. The psychologist Larry Rosen, who has researched technology and the brain and is a co-author of "The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World," said one of the most important steps is to remove the phone from the bedroom at night.

Be a Role Model

Of course, parents trying to set healthy guidelines for smartphone use may themselves be struggling with similar issues: The 2015 Pew survey found that 46 percent of American adults believed they could not live without their smartphones. Teens aren't the only ones we need to worry about when it comes to smartphone addiction - adults should consider their habits as well.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For some teens, the constant potential feedback loop from notifications and messaging might create a fear of missing out, or FOMO. And although there is currently no official medical recognition of "smartphone addiction" as a disease or disorder, the term refers to obsessive behaviors that disturb the course of daily activities in a way that mirrors patterns similar to substance abuse.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At that session one Blue said she was really grateful to hear a Red acknowledge the Republican history on race. When Blues are asked about the stereotypes thrown at them, they tend to list "against religion and morality," "unpatriotic" and "against personal responsibility" among their responses. They, too, relish the chance to clear the air.

After the stereotypes are discussed, the room feels different. As one Red in Ohio told Lawson, "I think we are all pretty clear on one thing: Don't tell us who we are and what we think." Another Red was moved almost to tears by the damage categories do. "We're not just cookie-cutter people; we're individuals. Just because you don't like something, you don't have to ridicule it - you probably don't understand it," she said. "When someone's heart is full up with something, and then you demean it without even listening to them - I hate that."

The discussions reveal other sensitivities. Some Blues didn't want to enter a venue that had a "Don't Tread on Me" flag on the wall. To Reds that was a neutral flag from American history, but to Blues it carried all sorts of nasty associations. Reds were offended by the lawn signs that said, "Hate Has No Home Here." The implication: Hate has no home in my house, but it does in yours.

In another exercise, Reds and Blues ask each other honest, nonleading questions. Blues may ask Reds, "Name a safety-net program you can support." Reds may ask Blues, "How do you balance having a heart with keeping health care costs under control?"

By the end of the conversations, the atmosphere has changed. Nearly always somebody will say that the discussion was easy because only moderates were in the room, not the people who post crazy stuff on Facebook. The staff tries not to smile, knowing that some of the people were selected precisely because of the intense stuff they posted on Facebook.

"This is not a civility organization," Blankenhorn told Lawson. Better Angels is aiming to build a group of people whose personal bonds with their fellow citizens redefine how they engage in the political system.

We don't really have policy debates anymore. We have one big tribal conflict, and policy fights are just proxy battles as each side tries to establish moral superiority. But just as the tribal mentality has been turned on, it can be turned off. Then and only then can we go back to normal politics and take reasonable measures to keep our children safe.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Respect First, Then Gun Control

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At that session one Blue said she was really grateful to hear a Red acknowledge the Republican history on race. When Blues are asked about the stereotypes thrown at them, they tend to list "against religion and morality," "unpatriotic" and "against personal responsibility" among their responses.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Because most of the G.O.P. members of Congress who do the N.R.A.'s bidding care about only one thing: their jobs. The pay of a typical congressman is $174,000 - and free parking at Reagan National Airport - and they will sell themselves to whoever can generate the votes to enable them to keep both.

Are some Democratic lawmakers cowards, too? You bet. But I can show you plenty who have bucked their party's orthodoxies on education and trade and who insisted that their much-admired colleague Senator Al Franken had to resign over sexual harassment allegations. And most of them have long dared to lose elections to oppose the N.R.A. This is primarily a G.O.P. problem today.

How do we know that? Read the paper or the web. The G.O.P., which claimed to stand for conservative family values, has prostrated itself before the most indecent person to ever occupy the White House - a man who lies as he breathes, smears poor, nonwhite nations and reportedly had sex with a porn star shortly after his wife delivered their son. But G.O.P. lawmakers are mute on this because President Trump energizes their base and ensures their $174,000-a-year jobs and free parking at Reagan National Airport.

This is a party whose evangelicals have been telling us for decades that life is so sacred the G.O.P. must oppose abortion - even in the case of rape, incest or risk to the mother's life. But Republicans won't back common-sense gun laws that would protect fully developed human beings - because the N.R.A. energizes their base and funds their campaigns and ensures their $174,000-a-year jobs and free parking at Reagan National Airport.

This is a party whose "Freedom Caucus" was so obsessed with our rising national debt that it tried to prevent Barack Obama from spending a dime to stimulate our economy after it went deep into recession - but just voted to add $1 trillion to the debt for a corporate tax cut without regard for the burden put on our kids. Republicans did so because Trump energizes their base and ensures that they keep their $174,000-a-year jobs and free parking at Reagan National Airport.

Trying to embarrass them to act on principle is wasted breath. I suspect they're already embarrassed. When these G.O.P. lawmakers are alone at home contemplating the pictures of all these kids gunned down in Florida - thinking about what it'd be like to be one of their parents - plenty of them probably feel filthy for doing the N.R.A.'s bidding.

They know full well that most voters are not asking to scrap the Second Amendment, but for common-sense gun laws that could prevent or reduce more school shootings and would not interfere with any decent Americans' right to own guns for hunting, sports or self-protection.

They know full well that a common-sense banning of all military assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, or mandating universal background checks for gun buyers or to prevent terrorists and the mentally ill from buying guns, would not curb the constitutional right to bear arms.

They know full well that they're in the grip of an N.R.A. cult, whose heart is so frozen, it's content to watch innocent children and adults get gunned down weekly - rather than impose common-sense gun limits. They know all of this - but they suppress it, because they also know if they vote for common-sense gun laws, the N.R.A. will fund their next opponent. Like I said, this is just about raw naked power, and that is what sensible gun control advocates have to generate more of now - in the form of votes and campaign funding. Otherwise nothing changes.

Keep speaking out, Cameron - but never underestimate what some people will do for a $174,000 job and free parking at Reagan National Airport.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Get Out of Facebook and Into the N.R.A.'s Face

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Because most of the G.O.P. members of Congress who do the N.R.A.'s bidding care about only one thing: their jobs. The pay of a typical congressman is $174,000 - and free parking at Reagan National Airport - and they will sell themselves to whoever can generate the votes to enable them to keep both.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | I’m Republican. I Appreciate Assault Weapons. And I Support a Ban. (Published 2018)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I’m a congressman who was in the Army. I know how lethal these weapons are because I used them in combat.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Why would we think someone who has those kinds of problems is going to make rational decisions based on the fact that someone in the school might be armed?" Chief Magnus said.

And then there's this inescapable reality: Teachers are human. It means they would most likely react to stress-induced fear the same as anyone else, with unintended consequences that could put even more people in peril.

You want people highly trained in the use of firearms? The New York Police Department has about 36,000 of them. Generally, despite an impression held by some people, they are restrained in firing their weapons. But in high-stress situations, they're human, too. "Police officers miss a lot in combat situations," said John Cerar, a former commanding officer of the department's firearms and tactics section.

Nationwide statistics on police shooting accuracy are not to be found. But if New York is typical, analyses show that its officers hit their targets only one-third of the time. And during gunfights, when the adrenaline is really pumping, that accuracy can drop to as low as 13 percent. While Mr. Cerar thinks armed teachers could provide some deterrence, he said that experience shows, "Whatever you do, there's going to be a problem associated with it."

One problem is shooting bystanders. It isn't routine, but it does happen. To cite just one example, from 2012, two New York officers shot and killed a gunman on a busy street outside the Empire State Building. But they also wounded nine other people who were hit directly or struck by shrapnel from ricochets.

It takes little imagination to foresee a situation in which a frightened teacher, thrown into a combat situation - in a crowded space like a school hallway or classroom - wounds students in the process of trying to take out a gunman.

The best way to prevent the threat of a bad guy with a gun is to keep him from getting the sort of battlefield weapon the Parkland killer used, by banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and by tightening background checks.

In his remarks, the mendacious Mr. LaPierre said gun restriction advocates seek to "eradicate all individual freedoms." In fact, sensible gun laws would give people, especially children, a better chance to enjoy the first of the inalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence: life.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Why would we think someone who has those kinds of problems is going to make rational decisions based on the fact that someone in the school might be armed?" Chief Magnus said. And then there's this inescapable reality: Teachers are human.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mass Shooters Are All Different. Except for One Thing: Most Are Men. (Published 2018)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The perpetrators of mass shootings in the United States come from varying backgrounds, with different mental health diagnoses and criminal histories.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
All of this has provided fertile soil for a two-decade dosing with opioids - promoted by drug companies, prescribed by doctors, demanded by many of us - that led a national explosion of addiction and death.

I was a newspaper reporter for almost 30 years before writing that book. I covered seven mass murders - six involving guns. I was in Tucson after Jared Loughner shot 19 people, six of whom died, including a federal judge; among the wounded was Gabrielle Giffords, a member of the House of Representatives at the time. Over the phone, I covered the shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

Long before all that, I covered perhaps the first school shooting of our era of gun massacres - in Stockton, Calif., in 1989. I was the crime reporter for The Stockton Record when a loner with an AK-47 opened fire on a playground full of children at recess at Cleveland Elementary School. Five of them died; some 30 others were wounded.

My job was to find out as much about each assailant as possible. As years passed, I realized I was telling the same story over and over - a lost, isolated, unbalanced (usually white) young man with legal access to firearms.

Now, Nikolas Cruz, who has been charged with the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, has taken his place among those lost boys, all products of our searing American isolation and ready supply of guns.

I learned writing my book that when you unleash a vast new supply of potent legal drugs on a population as bereft of community as ours, the consequences are painful, enduring and nationwide. Enormous supply creates enormous abuse.

That's the lesson we should take from our gun scourge as well.

It's not just that each gunman procured these weapons legally, but that our supply is so immense that finding a gun - legally or not - is easy. Mass shootings plague us, but so does a decades-old torment of gun violence and suicide.

Most gun owners are law abiding, just as many people have no trouble taking narcotic painkillers according to the prescribed instructions. Yet when guns, or opioids, are accessible in plentiful supply to everyone, without much monitoring of consumers' backgrounds, and are then mixed with the isolation and disconnection in American culture today, havoc results.

The end to our opioid addiction epidemic, I believe, will come from a symphony of small solutions, many of them unsexy: expanding treatment options, using jails as recovery centers, creating syringe exchanges, broadening the use of Narcan and widening the curriculums in medical schools to include pain and addiction studies. Law enforcement's role is crucial. Recovering addicts need supply reduced. The supply of opioids on our streets is so vast and potent that when a recovering addict relapses, the result is often death. Insurance companies, meanwhile, need to reimburse for non-opioid pain treatment, as they once did. Up to now, we've lowered pain pill prescribing but without raising the numbers of pain strategies available for chronic-pain patients, and for which doctors are trained. Those patients thus turn to the black market for pills, but also for heroin and fentanyl, the supply of which is booming.

All this, in other words, is a community approach to a plague feeding on our isolation.

Mass murder calls for the same.

Restoring the ban on assault rifles is essential, as is banning gun ownership among people convicted of domestic abuse, those with domestic abuse restraining orders, and the mentally ill. So is banning gun possession among those repeatedly convicted of driving while intoxicated. We need to change the law to let the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study gun violence as a public health issue. We need longer prison terms for stealing a gun or possessing one that's stolen; possessing a stolen gun has very different potential consequences from possessing a stolen X-Box.

The problem is, both the opioid epidemic and mass murder are bedeviled by our isolation. Some treatment advocates, stung by the war on drugs, won't recognize law enforcement's necessary role in our attack on addiction as a robust player in a multipronged approach. The Republican Party - which understands that an enormous opioid supply fuels our addiction scourge - fails, or doesn't want, to understand that the supply of firearms is at the root of our problem of mass shootings. Moreover, the party's response to each horror, apart from the by-now rote "thoughts and prayers," has been the claim that this or that proposed reform wouldn't have stopped the shooter. If one grand and easy answer wouldn't have saved the day then we're narcotized to inaction.

To get beyond all that, we must again act as bold, resilient Americans, tackling a problem with a can-do attitude. We must stop believing in one easy answer to complicated problems, and shamefully giving up when one doesn't magically appear.

Those attitudes are just more symptoms of our culture of isolation, in which we've lost the habit of collaborating with our neighbors. And that, in turn, is the natural habitat not just of heroin but of that next young killer now planning to roam a school corridor.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Guns and Opioids Are American Scourges Fueled by Availability

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
All of this has provided fertile soil for a two-decade dosing with opioids - promoted by drug companies, prescribed by doctors, demanded by many of us - that led a national explosion of addiction and death. I was a newspaper reporter for almost 30 years before writing that book.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Let's consider for a moment the imbecility of the suggestion that teachers be armed and ready to return fire in the event of another school shooting. If the perpetrator is a student at the school, the teachers would be firing at a child; how many teachers do you know who would actually do this?

In the event of a firefight, there is the possibility of friendly-fire casualties; how many teachers would be willing to take that risk?

We already ask too much of teachers: We ask them to work for little pay in underfunded, overflowing classrooms, and they do. They do because they are committed to their mission to educate, nurture and help the next generations succeed.

To our president and members of Congress: Go ahead and ask that same person to take on the responsibility of potentially killing a student, friendly-fire or otherwise, and see what response you get.

BROOKE JONES, HONOLULU
To the Editor:
I am trying to picture myself as I am teaching "a thing of beauty is a joy forever" with a gun holster on my hip.

RUTH CANDEUB, EDISON, N.J.
The writer is a retired English teacher. To the Editor:
I recently learned that a kindergarten student told her mother that she had been instructed on how to survive an in-school shooting: Hiding under a desk and playing dead were advised.

Not wanting to leave anything to chance, the mother ordered a bulletproof backpack, to be used as a shield. Is this what we are coming to?

Is the possession of an assault weapon so important to some of our citizens that they are willing to risk the psychological traumatization of an entire generation?

CHARLES GOODSTEIN, TENAFLY, N.J.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Arming Teachers? The Idea Gets an F

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Let's consider for a moment the imbecility of the suggestion that teachers be armed and ready to return fire in the event of another school shooting. If the perpetrator is a student at the school, the teachers would be firing at a child; how many teachers do you know who would actually do this?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What if a history teacher had also been armed? And an English teacher, and a math teacher, and the janitorial staff members? In this National Rifle Association fever dream, a high school would concentrate so much firepower in the hands of its employees that no deranged individual with a weapon would dare enter the premises.

This sort of thinking also has no grounding in reality. People attack heavily armed institutions all too often, as with the mass shootings in 2009 at Fort Hood in Texas and in 2013 at the Washington Navy Yard. Assailants in such cases aren't typically worried about losing their lives in the process. Usually, losing their lives is part of the plan.

A few days ago, the lunacy of the suggestion to arm teachers was driven home to me as I prepared to teach my undergraduate creative writing class. I arrived uncharacteristically early and sat down with a few students to banter about this and that.

Suddenly, there was a loud bang outside. Everyone froze, until we realized it was a campus utility truck backing up to a loading dock. Then the students relaxed again.

But I spent the next few minutes before class thinking about whether the windows opened fully and would enable 20 kids to escape an active shooter. I checked: They did not open at all. I noticed to my dismay that the door to the classroom opened out, not in, which thwarted my plan to throw my heavy table up against the door in case a shooter blasted his way down the hall. Even after class began, I found myself fantasizing about inventing a bulletproof Kevlar curtain that I could have at the ready to affix to the door frame if the need arose.

Here is something I didn't think about: I did not think about arming myself to protect my students. President Trump on Thursday specified that he wants only certain teachers - "highly adept people, people that understand weaponry" - to be armed. I will immodestly state that among professors in the United States, I am almost certainly one of the best shooters. But I would never bring a weapon into a classroom. The presence of a firearm is always an invitation to violence. Weapons have no place in a learning environment.

Last month, the State Legislature in West Virginia, where my university is located, introduced the Campus Self-Defense Act. This would prohibit colleges and universities from designating their campuses as gun-free zones. If this act becomes law, I will resign my professorship. I will not work in an environment where professors and students pack heat.

When I was a young Marine, I had to learn how to use many weapons. It was part of my mission to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States." My mission these days is to write books and teach literature and creative writing. It's a noble calling, too. But no one should be asked to put his life on the line for it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | I Was a Marine. I Don't Want a Gun in My Classroom.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What if a history teacher had also been armed? And an English teacher, and a math teacher, and the janitorial staff members? In this National Rifle Association fever dream, a high school would concentrate so much firepower in the hands of its employees that no deranged individual with a weapon would dare enter the premises.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
William Bernbach, a titan of Madison Avenue who died in 1982, said, "If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic." The spinmeisters for Ram trucks must have taken Mr. Bernbach's admonition to heart. With a Super Bowl commercial on Sunday that used as its soundtrack a sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 50 years earlier to the day, they got the notice they wanted. Much of the reaction, though, amounted to a richly deserved thumbs-down.

The sermon was Dr. King's " Drum Major Instinct " speech, given in Atlanta in 1968 two months before his assassination. Everybody, he said, had this instinct - "a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first." But it had to be harnessed, he said as he went on to equate greatness with service to others. Ostensibly, the Ram commercial was an appeal for people to serve. But who's kidding whom? The goal was to sell trucks, with Dr. King's voice as pitchman.

The sheer crassness led to instant condemnation on social media, including speculation about what might be next - maybe trotting out James Baldwin to hawk "The Firestone Next Time"? Critics were hardly mollified by word that Ram had the blessing of Intellectual Properties Management, the licenser of Dr. King's estate. The estate has not always been his staunchest guardian against posthumous commercialization.

It might serve history a tad more faithfully to note other appeals that Dr. King made in that Feb. 4, 1968, sermon. For one thing, he was appalled by the way many people went into hock to buy vehicles they couldn't possibly afford: "So often, haven't you seen people making $5,000 a year and driving a car that cost 6,000? And they wonder why their ends never meet."

While we're at it, he also didn't think highly of advertising gurus - "you know, those gentlemen of massive verbal persuasion." He continued: "They have a way of saying things to you that kind of gets you into buying. In order to be a man of distinction, you must drink this whiskey. In order to make your neighbors envious, you must drive this type of car. In order to be lovely to love, you must wear this kind of lipstick or this kind of perfume. And you know, before you know it, you're just buying that stuff."

For that matter, Dr. King might well have been talking about a president a half-century in the future when he expounded on the need to rein in the drum major instinct, for otherwise it becomes "very dangerous" and "pernicious."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Making Dr. King a Pitchman, Turning His Words Upside Down

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
William Bernbach, a titan of Madison Avenue who died in 1982, said, "If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic." The spinmeisters for Ram trucks must have taken Mr. Bernbach's admonition to heart. With a Super Bowl commercial on Sunday that used as its soundtrack a sermon delivered by the Rev.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Let's say you run a multibillion-dollar football league. And let's say the scientific community-starting with one young pathologist in Pittsburgh and growing into a chorus of neuroscientists across the country-comes to you and says concussions are making your players crazy, crazy enough to kill themselves, and here, in these slices of brain tissue, is the proof. Do you join these scientists and try to solve the problem, or do you use your power to discredit them?

On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner's office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player. Omalu did not, unlike most 34-year-old men living in a place like Pittsburgh, have an appreciation for American football. He was born in the jungles of Biafra during a Nigerian air raid, and certain aspects of American life puzzled him. From what he could tell, football was rather a pointless game, a lot of big fat guys bashing into each other. In fact, had he not been watching the news that morning, he may not have suspected anything unusual at all about the body on the slab.

The coverage that week had been bracing and disturbing and exciting. Dead at 50. Mike Webster! Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. "Iron Mike," legendary Steelers center for fifteen seasons. His life after football had been mysterious and tragic, and on the news they were going on and on about it. What had happened to him? How does a guy go from four Super Bowl rings to...pissing in his own oven and squirting Super Glue on his rotting teeth? Mike Webster bought himself a Taser gun, used that on himself to treat his back pain, would zap himself into unconsciousness just to get some sleep. Mike Webster lost all his money, or maybe gave it away. He forgot. A lot of lawsuits. Mike Webster forgot how to eat, too. Soon Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck, one of its windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape.

It bothered Omalu to hear this kind of chatter-especially about a dead guy. But Omalu had always fancied himself an advocate for the dead. That's how he viewed his job: a calling. A forensic pathologist was charged with defending and speaking for the departed-a translator for those still here. A corpse held a story, told in tissue, patterns of trauma, and secrets in cells.

In the autopsy room, Omalu snapped on his gloves and approached the slab. He noted that Mike Webster's body was sixty-nine inches long and weighed 244 pounds. He propped up the head and picked up his scalpel and sliced open the chest and cracked open the ribs. He took out the heart and found everything he expected of a man who was believed to have died of a heart attack, as was the case with Webster. Then he made a cut from behind the right ear, across the forehead, to the other ear and around. He peeled the scalp away from the skull in two flaps. With the electric saw he carefully cut a cap out of the skull, pulled off the cap, and gently, like approaching a baby in the birth canal, he reached for the brain.

Omalu loved the brain. Of all the organs in the body, it was easily his favorite. He thought of it sort of like Miss America. Such a diva! So high-maintenance: It requires more energy to operate than any other organ. The brain! That was his love and that was his joy, and that's why his specialty was neuropathology.

Omalu stared at Mike Webster's brain. He kept thinking, How did this big athletic man end up so crazy in the head? He was thinking about football and brain trauma. The leap in logic was hardly extreme. He was thinking, Dementia pugilistica? "Punch-drunk syndrome," they called it in boxers. The clinical picture was somewhat like Mike Webster's: severe dementia-delusion, paranoia, explosive behavior, loss of memory-caused by repeated blows to the head. Omalu figured if chronic bashing of the head could destroy a boxer's brain, couldn't it also destroy a football player's brain? Could that be what made Mike Webster crazy?

Of course, football players wear helmets, good protection for the skull. But the brain? Floating around inside that skull and, upon impact, sloshing into its walls. Omalu thought_: I've seen so many cases of people like motorcyclists wearing helmets. On the surface is nothing, but you open the skull and the brain is mush._

So Omalu carried Mike Webster's brain to the cutting board and turned it upside down and on its side and then over again. It appeared utterly normal. Regular folds of gray matter. No mush. No obvious contusions, like in dementia pugilistica. No shrinkage like you would see in Alzheimer's disease_. _He reviewed the CT and MRI scans. Normal. That might have been the end of it. He already had a cause of death. But Omalu couldn't let it go. He wanted to know more about the brain. There had to be an answer. People don't go crazy for no reason.

He went to his boss, pathologist Cyril Wecht, and asked if he could study the brain, run special tests, a microscopic analysis of the brain tissue, where there might be a hidden story.

There was nothing routine about this request. Another boss might have said, "Stick with the protocol," especially to a rookie such as Omalu, who had not yet earned a track record, who was acting only on a hunch. But Wecht was famously never one to shy away from a high-profile case-he had examined JFK, Elvis, JonBenét Ramsey-and he said, "Fine." He said, "Do what you need to do."

A deeply religious man, Omalu regarded Wecht's permission as a kind of blessing.

It was late, maybe midnight, when Bob Fitzsimmons, a lawyer working in a renovated firehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, got a call from the Pittsburgh coroner's office. It was not unusual for him to be at the office that late; he was having a bad week. He struggled to understand the man's accent on the phone, jutted his head forward. "Excuse me? You need what?"

The brain. Permission from the Webster family to process Mike Webster's brain for microscopic examination.

Oh brother was Fitzsimmons's initial thought. As if the Webster case wasn't already complicated enough.

Fitzsimmons had first met Webster back in 1997, when he showed up at his office asking for help untangling his messed-up life. Webster was a hulk of a man with oak-tree arms and hands the size of ham hocks. Fitzsimmons shook his hand and got lost in it, mangled fingers going every which way, hitting his palm in creepy places that made him flinch. It seemed like every one of those fingers had been broken many times over. Mike Webster sat down and told Fitzsimmons what he could remember about his life. He had been to perhaps dozens of lawyers and dozens of doctors. He really couldn't remember whom he'd seen or when. He couldn't remember if he was married or not. He had a vague memory of divorce court. And Ritalin. Lots of Ritalin.

"With all due respect, you're losing your train of thought, sir," Fitzsimmons said to Webster. "You appear to have a serious illness, sir." Not a pleasant thing to tell anyone, and here was a hero, a famous football player Fitzsimmons once bowed to, as did all young guys worth the Terrible Towels they proudly waved in the 1970s. The Dynasty! The black and the gold! It fueled optimism here, up and down the rivers, mill towns held tight in the folds of the Allegheny Mountains. And here was Iron Mike himself.

As a personal-injury lawyer, Fitzsimmons thought what he saw in Webster was an obvious case of a man suffering a closed-head injury-the kind he'd seen plenty of times in people who had suffered through car crashes and industrial accidents. No fracture, no signs of physical damage to the skull, but sometimes severe psychiatric problems, memory loss, personality changes, aggressive behavior.

"Please help me," Mike Webster said.

It took Fitzsimmons a year and a half to hunt down all of Webster's medical records, scattered in doctors' offices throughout western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He sent Webster for four separate medical evaluations, and all four doctors confirmed Fitzsimmons's suspicion: closed-head injury as a result of multiple concussions.

Fitzsimmons filed the disability claim with the NFL. There are several levels of disability with the NFL, and Mike Webster was awarded the lowest one: partial, about $3,000 a month.

Fitzsimmons said, "Oh, please." He said if ever there was a guy who qualified for the highest, it was Mike Webster. The highest level was "total disability, football-related," reserved for those who were disabled as a result of playing the game. It would yield Webster as much as $12,000 a month. Fitzsimmons said to the NFL, "Four doctors-all with the same diagnosis!"

The NFL said no. Four doctors were not enough. They wanted Webster seen by their own doctor. So their own doctor examined Webster...and concurred with the other four: closed-head injury. Football-related.

The NFL pension board voted unanimously for partial disability anyway.

Fitzsimmons said, "You have got to be kidding me." He filed an appeal with the U.S. District Court in Baltimore, where the pension board is headquartered. The judge reversed the decision of the NFL pension board-the first time in history any such action had been taken against the NFL.

And yet still the NFL fought. They took the case to federal court. They said Mike Webster-who had endured probably 25,000 violent collisions during his career and now was living on Pringles and Little Debbie pecan rolls, who was occasionally catatonic, in a fetal position for days-they said Mike Webster didn't qualify for full disability.* ****

Mike Webster and Bob Fitzsimmons grew close during those days. In fact, Mike Webster clung to Fitzsimmons like a baby to his mamma. He took to sleeping in the parking lot, waiting for Fitzsimmons to show up for work. He would stay there all day, just watching, waiting, and when Fitzsimmons would go home, Mike Webster would go back to his truck and write him letters. Hundreds and hundreds of letters. "Dear Bob, Thank you for helping me. We've got to keep up the fight. We have to see this thing through." And then he would start talking about wars. And blood splattering. The letters would inevitably trail off into the mutterings of a madman.

And now he was dead.

Bob Fitzsimmons did not know what in the world to say, in 2002, to the man with the thick accent who called from the Pittsburgh coroner's office, four days after Mike Webster died of a heart attack, asking to study Webster's brain. Fitzsimmons was, in truth, grieving his client's death deeply; Mike Webster had been living for nothing but the case, the appeal, the last victory against a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry that seemed to have used him, allowed him to become destroyed, and then threw him away like a rotten piece of meat.

And now he was dead.

"Yes," Fitzsimmons said. And he gave Omalu the brain.

Days and nights went by. Weekends. Slicing, staining, ordering slides. It got so Omalu was embarrassed in front of his co-workers at the morgue. "He's gone mad!" he imagined them reasonably thinking. "He won't stop looking at that brain! He's here at 2 a.m.!"

So Omalu put Mike Webster's brain in a plastic tub and took it home to his condo in the Churchill section of Pittsburgh. He put it in the corner of his living room, where he set up a table, a cutting board, some knives, and a microscope, where he could work without shame as long as he wanted and as hard as he wanted, no one looking over his shoulder except Prema, his sympathetic wife. "What the mind does not know, the eye cannot see," he would say to her, explaining the piles of books and journal articles cluttering the house, the sheer volume of research on trauma, on football, on helmets, on Alzheimer's disease, on concussions, on impact, on g-force, on protein accumulation, on dementia pugilistica. He had to learn more so he could see more so he could learn more so he could see. For months it's all he thought about. It became for him a calling. He was after all a spiritual man, and he came to know Mike Webster in the most personal way. "Help me" is what he heard Mike Webster say.

One day he started on a new set of slides, prepared for him by a lab at the University of Pittsburgh where he had ordered specialized staining. He was ordering so many slides, he had to start paying for this out of his own pocket. He put the first slide from the new set under his microscope and looked in.

"What is this?" he said out loud. "Geez. Gee! What is this?"

Brown and red splotches. All over the place. Large accumulations of tau proteins. Tau was kind of like sludge, clogging up the works, killing cells in regions responsible for mood, emotions, and ecutive functioning.

This was why Mike Webster was crazy.

Omalu showed the slides to Wecht and to scientists at the University of Pittsburgh. Everyone agreed: This was a disease, or a form of it, that no one had ever seen before. Omalu wondered what to call it. He wanted a good acronym. Eventually, he came up with CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. He wrote a paper detailing his findings. He titled it "Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player" and put it in an envelope and sent it to the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Neurosurgery. He thought NFL doctors would be pleased when they read it. He really did. He thought they would welcome a finding as important as this: scientific evidence that the kind of repeated blows to the head sustained in football could cause severe, debilitating brain damage. He thought they could use his research to try and fix the problem.

"I was naive," he says now. "There are times I wish I never looked at Mike Webster's brain. It has dragged me into worldly affairs I do not want to be associated with. Human meanness, wickedness, and selfishness. People trying to cover up, to control how information is released. I started this not knowing I was walking into a minefield. That is my only regret."

Nothing was welcoming, nothing was collegial, about the NFL's reaction to Omalu's article that appeared in the July 2005 edition of Neurosurgery. In a lengthy letter to the editor, three scientists, all of whom were on the NFL payroll, said they wanted Omalu's article retracted.

"We disagree," they said.

"Serious flaws."

"Complete misunderstanding."

The scientists, Ira Casson, Elliot Pellman, and David Viano, were all members of the NFL's Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee. In tone their letter to the editor struggled to remain calm, but everyone could read the subtext: We own this field. We are not going to bow to some no-name Nigerian with some bullshit theory.

The attack against Omalu was that he had misinterpreted his own neuropathological findings. In his calmer moments, Omalu considered the fact that neither Casson, Pellman, nor Viano were neuropathologists. He wondered, How can doctors who are not neuropathologists interpret neuropathological findings better than neuropathologists?

But mostly Omalu did not remain calm. In fact, he sweated profusely when he heard that the NFL had written demanding a retraction. It took a couple of shots of Johnnie Walker Red before he could even summon the courage to read their letter, after which he tore it up in disgust.

Omalu began to question the integrity of the MTBI committee. It was one thing to not even put a neuropathologist on the committee, quite another to have the committee headed by...a rheumatologist, as was the case with Pellman.
A rheumatologist? You picked a joint guy to lead your brain study?
What the NFL couldn't have known then, of course, is that by the time Omalu's article was published, he had already gotten a second brain, that of former Steelers guard Terry Long, who died at 45 after drinking antifreeze.

Same morgue. Same slab. Same story. Terry Long had a clinical history similar to Webster's. Depression. Memory loss. Crazy behavior. In and out of psych wards. He was bankrupt, living destitute and alone. He tried rat poison. He tried other cocktails. Nothing worked until finally he got it right.

Omalu took Terry Long's brain home, sliced it, sent it in for stains, ran the same tests, found the same splotches, the same tau proteins. "This stuff should not be in the brain of a 45-year-old man," he said. "This looks more like a 90-year-old brain with advanced Alzheimer's."

So Omalu wrote another paper. He called it "Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player: Part II" and put it in an envelope and sent it to Neurosurgery, the prestigious peer-reviewed journal that did not, in the end, accept the NFL's request to retract the first one and went ahead and published the second.

The news of CTE, of retired athletes possibly suffering debilitating brain damage, was now hitting the mainstream press. The NFL responded with denial and attack against the young pathologist in Pittsburgh, who surely had no idea what he was talking about.

"Preposterous," they said to reporters.

"It's not appropriate science."

"Purely speculative."

Omalu did not like the education he was receiving. He felt he was learning something very ugly about America, about how an $8 billion industry could attempt to silence even the most well-intentioned scientist and in the most insidious ways. He was becoming afraid. Friends were warning him. They were saying, "You are challenging one of the most powerful organizations in the world. There may be other things going on that you're not aware of. Be careful!"

Then came a bright spot. Maybe the best day of his life. Omalu got a phone call from Julian Bailes, a neurosurgeon of considerable renown who had for a decade worked as a Steelers team doctor. Bailes, chairman of neurosurgery at West Virginia University Hospitals, had known Mike Webster well, was friends with the family. And he knew Terry Long. He knew brains. He knew concussions. In his lab in West Virginia he was concussing rats, examining the resulting damage to brain tissue. He knew retired football players, was co-chairing a study at the University of North Carolina's Center for the Study of Retired Athletes, suggesting a link between concussions and clinical depression. Bailes had experience that touched and intersected and paralleled Omalu's research in the way of all fascinating coincidences.

On the phone, Bailes introduced himself. He said, "Dr. Omalu, I'm calling to tell you I believe you."

It was the first time anyone who ever had anything to do with the NFL had validated Omalu's work. He ran home and told his wife. She said, "How do you know? It could be a trick!" They were becoming increasingly fearful. From his village in Nigeria, Omalu's father would call. "Stop doing this work, Bennet. I have heard not nice things about the NFL; they are very powerful, and some of them not nice!" It didn't much help that one day Omalu got a visit from a sports reporter who had come for some quotes, who saw Webster's and Long's brains sitting in tubs in the living room and had said, "Get these out of your house! Someone could come in and kill you and steal these brains! Do you know what you're dealing with?"

In the end, Omalu sent all his brain tissue to Bailes to store in his lab in West Virginia. Bailes met Fitzsimmons, and that became the team, a kind of brotherhood with a mission: to learn more about the disease, to understand the NFL's obstinate, perilous denial, and to break them of it.

The third case was Andre Waters-hard-hitting safety for the Philadelphia Eagles-who was denied disability under the NFL retirement plan despite numerous concussions, constant pain, and crippling depression. On November 20, 2006, at 44, he shot himself in the mouth.

Omalu got the brain, examined it, and found CTE.

The fourth case was Justin Strzelczyk, the youngest of all, just 36 when he died a most dramatic death. Offensive lineman for the Steelers through most of the 1990s, Strzelczyk was popular in the locker room, a big mountain man of a guy with a banjo at the ready. Just a few years after his retirement, the downward spiral began. He started hearing voices from "the evil ones," who he believed were in constant pursuit. He stopped at a gas station on a highway outside Buffalo, New York. He tried to give some guy 3,000 bucks, told him to head for the hills! The evil ones are coming! Then he got in his truck and sped away, ninety miles an hour, eventually with the cops chasing him for forty miles. The cops threw metal spikes, blew out his tires, but he kept going and kept going, until finally he swerved into opposing traffic and smashed into a tanker carrying corrosive acid, and everything, everything, exploded.

Omalu got the brain, examined it, and found CTE.

_Why these guys? _Omalu and Bailes wondered. Why not other guys? Not every retired NFL player, after all, goes crazy and kills himself. How many had died young and had never been diagnosed? Why were so many retired players suffering from depression and signs of Alzheimer's? Omalu and Bailes would sit and think and talk and think. Head trauma, sure. But what else? Did these guys take steroids? Other drugs? Were there genetic markers? Did it matter when the head injuries occurred? It was a fascinating puzzle from a medical point of view-and they thought it would have been fascinating from the NFL's point of view, too. Omalu had, in fact, asked. Way back after diagnosing Webster, he'd sent a letter to the Hall of Fame proposing a comprehensive, longitudinal study-take every Hall of Famer, get his genetic profile, get a baseline, monitor him every six months for depression and other neuropsychiatric symptoms, and look at his brain when he died.

Omalu did not get a response to that letter. So he sent a follow-up six months later. No answer.

Omalu, Fitzsimmons, and Bailes formed an organization, the Sports Legacy Institute, with the intention of studying CTE, furthering the science. They were joined by a fourth, Chris Nowinski, who had been helping broker brain deals with families-getting brains for Omalu to study. Nowinski was not like the others. He seemed to be on a different mission. It was hard to put your finger on it, exactly. "We must not go running to the press with every new case!" Omalu would tell him. "We need to study, we need to learn." Nowinski had bigger ideas. He said CTE was a public-health issue and the public had a right to know. He believed the Sports Legacy Institute-SLI-could and should make headlines.

No one could blame Nowinski, really, if he was on some sort of crusade. He was not a scientist. He was a former WWE wrestler who had fought under the stage name Chris Harvard-the only Harvard-educated wrestler in the WWE. He had played football in college, but it was the head bashing as a wrestler that did him in, especially that last one, at the Pepsi Center in Albany, when a Dudley Death Drop ("3D") engineered by the Dudley Boyz sent poor Chris Harvard's head smashing through a table to the cheers of thousands.

Vision loss, ferocious migraines, loss of balance, memory problems; he was 24 years old and feeling some days like a feeble old man. He went to eight doctors before anyone took the time to tell him what was going on. Those were concussions. All those times. Not just the times he had become unconscious. But all those times, perhaps one hundred times, that he saw stars, suffered a "ding"-any loss of brain function induced by trauma was a concussion, and all of them were serious, all of them were brain injuries, all of them required attention, not the least of which was the time to heal before suffering another one. No one had ever told him that. No one had ever told him that the job he returned to each day was potentially brain damaging. No one until Nowinski met a world-renowned concussion expert who explained it all, and so Nowinski quit the WWE.

He wrote a meticulously researched book, Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis, got himself on a lot of TV shows, and took the Chris Nowinski CTE show on the road.

Omalu did not understand what was happening. Bailes and Fitzsimmons did. They would look at each other and say, "Uh-oh."

In the summer of 2007, Roger Goodell, the new NFL commissioner, convened a meeting in Chicago for the first league-wide concussion summit. All thirty-two teams were ordered to send doctors and trainers to the meeting. It would be a chance for the NFL to talk about this and hear from independent scientists, many of whom they also invited to the meeting-300 participants in all.

They asked Bailes to come. They did not ask Omalu.

"Why did they not invite me?" Omalu said to Bailes. "Why does the NFL not want to speak to Dr. Omalu?"

Bailes had no easy answer. He knew those guys. He knew who was in and who was out and how dirty the politics could get. "They were trying to blackball him, lock him out, marginalize him," Bailes says. "He was the whistle-blower."

"You will present my work, then," Omalu said to Bailes. "You will take my slides. You will take my research. You will show them what Dr. Omalu has found!" Not that it was news. He had already published the papers. Why weren't they listening?

So that's what Bailes did. Packed up Omalu's slides and downloaded his PowerPoint presentation and headed to Chicago.

By this point, the NFL had made some progress in admitting to a concussion problem. For one thing, Pellman, the rheumatologist, had stepped down as chair of the committee. Also, the committee announced a new concussion study that would blow everyone else's out of the water. (It involved a battery of clinical testing on 120 retired NFL players and would take at least until 2012 to finish. Bailes, in fact, was already working on a similar study, due out next year.)

But there was real, actual progress. The NFL instituted standards for concussion management: "Medical decisions must always override competitive considerations." They would do neuropsychological baseline testing on all NFL players-use that as a tool to assist in determining when, after a head injury, a player could return to the field.

(On hearing of the NFL's concussion guidelines, Omalu said: "You mean they never had any concussion guidelines before now? Geez.")

Perhaps most encouraging was the 88 Plan, a display of humanity on the part of the NFL and its treatment of retired players suffering dementia. The 88 Plan grew out of a letter written by Sylvia Mackey, wife of Hall of Famer John Mackey, who wore number 88 for the Colts. His existence, she said, had become a "deteriorating, ugly, caregiver-killing, degenerative, brain-destroying tragic horror," and the $2,450 per month pension he was receiving from the NFL could not begin to cover the institutionalization he needed. And so the 88 Plan, which offered up to $88,000 per year to former players with dementia.

Not that the NFL accepted any actual responsibility for this mess. Its MTBI committee published scientific studies claiming that repeated head bashing did not cause brain damage. On a 2007 HBO special, co-chair Casson was asked six different ways if repeated football-related concussions could result in brain damage, dementia, or depression. Six times he said no.

In Chicago, Bailes stood up there with evidence to the contrary. Scientific proof. Tissue damage in the brain. He saw guys rolling their eyes. He heard the exasperated sighs. He thought about Omalu and why he was doing this-how he had nothing against the NFL, how he had barely known what the NFL _was _before he looked at Webster's brain. He thought about how Omalu was about as pure a scientist as anyone could bring into this equation, and how he had spent $100,000 of his own money to get to the bottom of this.

So Bailes stood up there and he showed slides of Webster's seemingly perfect brain on the cutting board. He showed the slices. He showed the tau, that sludge that did him in. He showed Long, and he showed Waters, and he showed Strzelczyk. He showed that he believed in Omalu's work.

The meeting was closed to media, but Bailes remembers it well. "They didn't say, 'Thanks, Doc, that's great.' They got mad at me. We got into it. And I'm thinking, 'This is a new disease in America's most popular sport, and how are its leaders responding? Alienate the scientist who found it? Refuse to accept the science coming from him?' "

At a press briefing afterward, Omalu's name kept coming up, and so Casson responded: "The only scientifically valid evidence of chronic encephalopathy in athletes is in boxers and in some steeplechase jockeys. It's never been scientifically, validly documented in any other athletes."

A total dismissal of Omalu's work.

And what about the other studies? What about Bailes's report in 2003 out of the University of North Carolina with Kevin Guskiewicz, a leading expert in sports medicine, which, based on surveys of thousands of retired players, found that players who had suffered multiple concussions were three times more likely to suffer clinical depression?

The NFL concluded that that study was "flawed."

And what about the UNC follow-up study in 2005 that showed that repeatedly concussed NFL players had five times the rate of "mild cognitive impairment," or pre-Alzheimer's disease. That study showed retired NFL players suffering Alzheimer's disease at an alarming 37 percent higher rate than the average guy walking down the street.

"Flawed."

The only experiments that were not flawed, then, were the studies conducted by the scientists paid by the NFL, which just happened to disagree with a growing number of researchers. "That's just unprecedented in science," says Bailes. "That would be like the American Heart Association saying, 'Hey, if it's not our sponsored research, we don't acknowledge it or comment on it. Only _we _can figure out heart disease!' "

Or it would be like the tobacco industry in the 1980s-everyone saying cigarettes caused cancer except for the people making money off cigarettes.

It would have been laughable, if it weren't so irresponsible.

At stake, after all, were people's lives. Athletes suffering head injuries, pressured anyway by a culture of machismo that says: Get back in the game! _Man up! Don't ever show it hurts. _To say nothing of the college football players, the high school football players, the Pee Wee leaguers, who dreamt of going pro.

On this point alone Bailes goes ballistic:

"Here we have a multi_billion-_dollar industry. Where does their responsibility begin? Say you're a kid and you sign up to play football. You realize you can blow out your knee, you can even break your neck and become paralyzed. Those are all known risks. But you don't sign up to become a brain-damaged young adult. The NFL should be leading the world in figuring this out, acknowledging the risk. They should be _thanking _us for bringing them this research. Where does their responsibility begin?

"Look, there was a seminal study published by the University of Oklahoma two years ago. They put accelerometers, which measure acceleration, in the helmets of University of Oklahoma players. And they documented the g-force. So we know the g-force for a football player being knocked out is about sixty to ninety g's. To compare, a fighter pilot will pass out at five or six g's, but that's over a long period of time. These football g-forces are just a few milliseconds, very brief- boom! And they found that in the open field, the dramatic cases of a receiver getting blindsided is about one hundred g's. It knocks them out. Very dramatic, everybody sees it. But the linemen? They were actually getting twenty to thirty g's on every play. Because they start out and they bang heads. Every play.

"Helmets are not the answer. The brain has a certain amount of play inside the skull. It's buoyed up in the cerebral spinal fluid. It sits in this fluid, floats. When the head suddenly stops, the brain continues, reverberates back. So when I hit, boom, my skull stops, but my brain continues forward for about a centimeter. Boom, boom, it reverberates back. So you could have padding that's a foot thick. It's not going to change the acceleration/deceleration phenomenon. And a lot of these injuries are rotational. The fibers get torn with rotation. You've got a face mask that's like a fulcrum sitting out here: You get hit, your head swings around. That's when a lot of these fibers are sheared-by rotation. A helmet can't ever prevent that.

"And have you seen helmets lately? In the old days of football, you had this leather cap to protect your ears. That was it. You'd never put your head in the game. You'd be knocked out after the first play! Even in the '60s, the helmet was a light shell. The modern helmet is like a weapon.

"So I told the NFL, I said, 'Why don't you take the head out of the game? _Just take it out of the game! _Let the linemen start from a squatting position instead of getting down for head-to-head. Have them stand up like they do on pass protection. So there's not this obligatory head contact.'

"Nothing. They had nothing to say. Who am I? I'm only a guy who has concussed hundreds of rats in the lab, a player for ten years, and a sideline doctor for twenty years. What do I know? Some stupid neurosurgeon.

"Instead of answering anything we bring to them, the NFL is ducking and shooting arrows at us. Criticizing us. Saying our work is a bunch of bunk. They have only attacked us."

The sixth case was Tom McHale, offensive lineman for nine seasons, most of them with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Depression and chronic pain in his joints had led him to discover oxycodone and cocaine. On May 25, 2008, at age 45, he died of a lethal combination of both.

Omalu got his brain, examined it, and found CTE.

He decided not to release the McHale case to the press. The NFL was already plenty pissed off. They had refused to acknowledge CTE or any of Omalu's research or, really, Omalu himself. It seemed they wanted to simply pretend Omalu did not exist, and he was sick of it, sick of insisting that _yes, Bennet Omalu is a real person who has discovered a real disease that is really damaging real people even as you sit there denying it. _The public debate with the NFL was a distraction from his research. He would continue his work quietly, examining brains. He would set his sights on curing the disease. He would prepare scientific papers; the proof would be in the science.

Ideas like that caused the Nowinski connection to crumble. Continue the work quietly? But Nowinski was building SLI; he was making a name for himself. The split was abrupt, ugly, and to this day neither side agrees on what happened. Nowinski took SLI and teamed up with the Boston University School of Medicine to create the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. He started a brain bank under the direction of Ann McKee, an expert in neurodegenerative diseases, and they went on to do important work, diagnosing more cases of CTE and starting a registry of over one hundred athletes who have agreed to donate their brains for study after they die.

Indeed, the casual observer who wants to learn more about CTE will be easily led to SLI and the Boston group-there's an SLI Twitter link, an SLI awards banquet, an SLI Web site with photos of Nowinski and links to videos of him on TV and in the newspapers. Gradually, Omalu's name slips out of the stories, and Bailes slips out, and Fitzsimmons, and their good fight. As it happens in stories, the telling and retelling simplify and reduce.

History gets written. People shout and claim turf. Heroes get invented.

The Boston group wanted to see the Tom McHale brain, and at the request of the family Omalu agreed. So he sliced the brain in two and sent one half via UPS to Boston. He said please don't release the diagnosis to the press; he was preparing a scientific paper identifying CTE subtypes. Nowinski remembers this conversation very differently. He says Omalu never returned calls, and to this day he vehemently defends his decision to go ahead and announce the McHale diagnosis anyway, in Tampa, during the week of the 2009 Super Bowl. He made national headlines announcing that the Boston group, and not Omalu, had diagnosed CTE in yet another NFL player. (Nowinski says he was acting on behalf of the McHale family.)

"Geez," Omalu said, watching the CNN coverage. "That's my brain! They are lying about who diagnosed that brain!"

It was enough to tempt a man to become wicked, to lead him to thoughts of lawsuits and vengeance.

But Omalu did not become wicked. He reminded himself of who he was. "I perform autopsies on dead people every day, so every day I'm reminded of my mortality. It has made me become very religious. I know I'm going to die someday, I know I'm going to be judged by God, and I have work to do while I am here on the earth."

Morgantown, West Virginia, is surrounded by blue firs and green hardwoods, a town tucked in the folds of the Appalachian Basin, where coal still moves sleepily in and out on barges along the slim Monongahela River. The university-and its world-class health care complex-is by far the biggest thing going.

In Bailes's office, Becky, his secretary, just accepted a package and is digging through Styrofoam peanuts. It used to disturb her to reach into a cardboard box and pull out a jar full of brains, but by now she is used to it.

In the jar is Omalu's fifteenth confirmed case of CTE-the most dramatic he's seen. He is not ready to release it to the press.

"Your brain made it," Becky says to Omalu, who has himself just arrived. He doesn't like traveling with brains. He trusts UPS. "You had a good trip?"

"Sure, sure, sure," Omalu says. His face is walnut dark and boyishly round. His movements are smooth, calm, and efficient; the overall effect is of a nattily dressed man who might at any moment start whistling. "But my tailor was not in!" he tells Becky. Omalu moved to California two years ago-where he accepted a post as chief medical examiner of San Joaquin County-but he still buys all his suits from one tailor in Pittsburgh. Nearly all of them are wide blue pinstripe, vaguely flashy, with impeccable fit. Custom-made. Shirts, too. He does not like pockets. If you have a shirt with a pocket, you run the risk of lint collecting at the bottom of the pocket. That is his position. Do away with the pocket-no lint. This is simply logical.

Fitzsimmons arrives, slim with a broad grin and quiet attire. "How you doing, buddy?" he says to Omalu. "Got the red tie going today, huh?" The two men embrace, slap each other's backs.

Eventually, Bailes comes flying in, still in scrubs, just out of surgery, his mask hanging half off. He is carrying a Diet Coke. "You guys want nuts? Something to eat? Crackers? I haven't eaten."

They stretch out in the conference room, visit like country people, tell jokes, and forget about time.

"And so this guy, he calls from some smart-guy science magazine," Omalu is saying. "And he says, 'Dr. Omalu, you are a brilliant man! Why did you fizzle?' And I told him, I said, 'Dr. Omalu did not fizzle!' "

"Fizzle," Bailes says, shooting a grin at Fitzsimmons. The admiration the two share for Omalu is protective and fatherly. Even his vocabulary is raw innocence.

Then they get down to business, and Fitzsimmons pulls out the papers.

"Do I need to read it?" Bailes says.

"I'm your lawyer, and I say sign it," Fitzsimmons says, and all three men get out their pens and find their names, which together are "hereinafter referred to as 'The Brain Injury Group.' "

A brain bank. The Rockefeller Foundation. A brand-new $30 million research facility. The Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute opened a year ago across the street from Bailes's office-a slick building, 78,000 square feet of state-of-the-art laboratory space. It's the only nonprofit independent institute in the world exclusively dedicated to the study of human memory and memory disorders, a partnership with West Virginia University and Johns Hopkins University. Senator Jay Rockefeller named it after his mom, Blanchette, who had Alzheimer's and died in 1992. And now, on the first floor, will be Webster's brain and Long's brain and all the rest-a whole laboratory dedicated to brain injuries and the study of CTE. They are gathering more brains, and more still; they would like to get Steve McNair's brain, and the boxer Roy Jones Jr. just signed on to donate his brain when he dies. The new center launches this month.

Omalu has set his sights on curing CTE. And why not? "You pop a pill before you play, a medicine that prevents the buildup of tau," he says. "Like you take an aspirin to prevent heart disease." Why not? "This is how we now need to talk. Not this back-and-forth of human selfishness. Not this NFL politics and meanness. Anybody still denying the disease is out of his mind. The issue now is treatment. That is my next step, now that I understand the pathology."

The Brain Injury Group is preparing seven new scientific papers. New findings. Subcategories of CTE. A possible genotype. Omalu has anything but fizzled. He took the conversation out of the public domain, got to work, and Fitzsimmons got to work on the Rockefeller deal, and Bailes on the scientific papers, and really, what they want is the NFL to join them in trying to figure this thing out.

It appears highly unlikely. The last they heard from the NFL was when the NFL called in 2008 in what seemed like a final attempt to disprove Omalu's work. We have been speaking to a scientist. The world's leading authority on tau proteins. We would like to send him to West Virginia to look at your work.

Bailes agreed.

Neuropathologist Peter Davies of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York has been studying Alzheimer's and tau proteins for more than thirty years. He receives no money from the NFL, not even parking fare. He was more than a little doubtful about what he would find in West Virginia. He had examined thousands of brains, and he'd never seen anything even close to the degree of tau accumulation that Omalu was describing in his papers. He believed that Omalu was well-intentioned but naive and mistaken. "I was very skeptical," he says. "I didn't think there was anything there."

So when Davies got to West Virginia in October 2008, he smiled politely and walked into Bailes's lab, and Omalu handed him the first slide, and he looked in the microscope, and he said, "Whoa." He said, "Wow." He said, _"What the hell is this?" _

It went on like this for two days, slide after slide. It got to the point where the only doubt Davies had left was on the staining of the slides themselves. Perhaps the technicians were not using state-of-the-art equipment and solutions. He asked Omalu if he would give him tissue samples, pieces of brain to take back to his lab in New York, where he could make new slides with his own equipment, his own technicians, his own sophisticated stains.

"Sure, sure, sure," Omalu said. "You take some pieces home, talk to your guys, see what you think."

In his lab in New York, Davies ran his tests, and when he looked in the microscope, he was stunned. The tau pathology was even worse-even more pronounced-than what he'd seen in West Virginia. "Come look at this!" he said, calling in his team of researchers. "What the hell am I looking at? This will blow your socks off! And it's not just in one case. I have three separate cases here. Bucket loads of tau pathology, and the one guy wasn't even 40 years old...." It was far more severe than anything they'd ever seen in the most advanced Alzheimer's cases-and in completely different regions of the brain.

"My God, this is extraordinary," Davies said. "We have to get involved." He wrote to Bailes and Omalu. He said Omalu was right.

"The credit must go to Bennet Omalu," he says today, "because he first reported this and nobody believed him, nobody in the field, and I'm included in that. I did not think there was anything there. But when I looked at the stuff, he was absolutely right. I was wrong to be skeptical."

The NFL never released Davies's report, never made it public. And they never talked to Omalu, Bailes, or Fitzsimmons again.

They called another meeting, much smaller than the Chicago summit, in May 2009, to talk again about concussions and the progress of the MTBI committee's work. They invited researchers from the Boston group. They invited Davies, who told them about what he saw in West Virginia.

"There is no doubt there is something there," Davies said. But he differs on the conclusion. He does not believe the main cause of CTE is concussion or trauma. He has even designed studies, principally on rats, to test his own hypothesis that the main cause is steroid use. He admits freely, however, that he is not a trauma expert, like Bailes, that he has not spent his career, like Omalu, looking at brains that have suffered repeated trauma. He's an Alzheimer's guy who believes that there has to be some reason he's never seen brains like this, and he believes the reason is steroid use. Plenty of people, after all, suffer concussions-not just athletes. Wouldn't he have seen _some _evidence of CTE in brains of regular folks over all these years? But only athletes take steroids, and so that is the link he is following.

Bailes, who co-authored a book on steroids and sports, does not rule out steroids or any other contributing factor to CTE, but points out that synthetic steroids were not even invented until 1959-thirty years after brain changes were first identified in boxers in the form of dementia pugilistica.

Either way, the steroid theory is not, in itself, a cheerful hypothesis for the NFL to consider. What of its vaunted drug-testing policy? What of the way fans have been coad to blithely accept that the reason these big fast guys keep getting bigger and faster every year is...natural. Not because of performance-enhancing drugs.

Whether it's concussions or steroids or a combination of both, the NFL has a problem to solve that is becoming impossible to deny.

Ira Casson, co-director of the MTBI, was at the May meeting, and he came away from it still committed to the NFL's talking points-the ones he had first put out in 2005 when he co-authored the letter asking for the retraction of Omalu's article in Neurosurgery.

Has Casson's position changed, now that scientists from across the country have come to accept the research as sound?

"No," he says. "Nothing has happened that has changed any of our opinions about what we wrote in those letters. Is there a relationship between professional football, a career in the NFL, and changes in the brain? Well, we don't know. Maybe."

So why does he think so many independent scientists are saying there is?

"I think there are a lot of...gaps," he says. The main problem, as he sees it, is that all scientists have really looked at, after all, are dead people. There has been very little clinical data, he says, collected on living people-which is what the MTBI committee's study is designed to do.

"Essentially," he says, "if you look at the cases that have been reported in the medical literature-and I don't include The New York Times as medical literature-for the most part, the clinical data was collected posthumously: interviews with families, 'people told me this,' and so forth. You don't see any data that says, well, here's what a doctor found when they examined him; here's what their psychiatric evaluation showed; here's what their neurologist found. There's none of that!

"To me that creates a question of what exactly is the clinical picture? I don't think it's fair to jump from a couple cases that were suicides to assume that some of the others that, well, the guy was driving fast down the highway, it must have been a suicide. Well, we don't know that. I don't think anybody can tell you that unless you had a psychiatrist who was treating the person. I think there's a lot of people jumping to conclusions."

"Very little clinical data."

Fitzsimmons and Bailes and Omalu are sitting in Bailes's conference room in West Virginia, contemplating what Casson has said.

"Very little clinical data?" Fitzsimmons says. But he had five doctors, including one from the NFL, who examined Mike Webster and concluded he had a closed-head injury. "I had a file this thick of clinical data."

"Why is he doing this?" Bailes says. "I just don't understand why the NFL is doing this. You know, pick up a textbook." He picks up a textbook, the kind you'd find in any neurosurgery department of any medical school. "Here's The Neuropathology of Dementia. It describes, in great detail, tau pathology. There's a whole chapter here about trauma causing dementia. That's why this is very quixotic to me that's there's even any resistance. It's well-known that brain trauma is a risk for dementia. Why are we arguing this? Why can't we accept this and move on and try to prevent it?"

"Clinical data?" Omalu says. "_Clinical _data? Pardon me, but what is the gold standard for diagnosis? Autopsy! That is the gold standard for diagnosis. Only when you open up the body, look at the tissues, do you find proof of disease."

They have proof of the fifteenth case right here, sitting in a jar, a story still to tell.

And then there is the sixteenth case: Gerald Small, Dolphins cornerback in the 1980s. He was found dead at 52 in Sacramento, California, where he was unemployed, living with an aunt, drunk. The Sacramento coroner sent the brain to Omalu, who is by now well-known on the coroners' circuit.

Omalu got the brain, examined it, and found CTE.

The seventeenth case is Curtis Whitley, center for the Chargers, Panthers, Raiders, in the 1990s. He was just 39 when he was found facedown in the bathroom of a rented trailer in West Texas, shirtless, shoeless, wearing blue warm-up pants.

Omalu got his brain, examined it, and found CTE.

"You would think that sooner or later, like most things in life, you have to deal with the truth," says Bailes. "I think that was part of the NFL's intent on sending their expert to Morgantown. Maybe they're planning their strategy now, I don't know."

*On December 13, 2006, seven years after the initial filing and four years after Webster's death, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the ruling that Webster had been totally and permanently disabled as a result of brain injuries from playing professional football. The ruling, a 3-0 decision, resulted in an award of more than $1.5 million to Webster's four children and former wife.

DON'T MISS THIS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Game Brain: Football Players and Concussions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Let's say you run a multibillion-dollar football league. And let's say the scientific community-starting with one young pathologist in Pittsburgh and growing into a chorus of neuroscientists across the country-comes to you and says concussions are making your players crazy, crazy enough to kill themselves, and here, in these slices of brain tissue, is the proof.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The N.F.L. also remains immensely influential, despite a recent decline in television ratings and mounting worries about the long-term health of players subjected to years of head hits. It is the largest sports league in the country, with $14 billion in revenue, and its games draw more viewers than nearly everything else on broadcast television.

The reintroduction of the New York bill comes as research increasingly shows a correlation between long-term brain disease and the age at which children begin playing tackle football. Last week, a study published in the journal, Brain, showed evidence of the degenerative brain disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., in teenage athletes who sustained head impact injuries.

Doctors note that head hits absorbed by young players are more damaging because their brains are not fully developed, and are less capable of fully repairing themselves. Younger players also have weaker neck muscles, and therefore are less capable of bracing for impact and supporting the weight of a football helmet.

"Some of my colleagues quibble that the science has not determined which age is the right age, but they don't seem to realize that health experts set age minimums for all sorts of activities like drinking, smoking and driving, and the science is never purely black and white," said Dr. Robert Cantu, the co-founder and medical director of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, who has studied head trauma in children for years.

Cantu and a growing number of other experts recommend that children play flag football, and take up the tackle version of the game only when they reach 14. Some former N.F.L. players have endorsed this approach.

Nick Buoniconti, a Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker with the New England Patriots and Miami Dolphins, estimates that he absorbed more than half a million hits during his playing days, which began on sandlot football fields when he was nine, and ended when he left the N.F.L., in 1976, when he was 36 years old.

"I made a mistake by starting my career at 9 years of age, with an ill equipped helmet," Buoniconti, who now suffers from dementia, said last week. "I beg all parents to please don't let your children play football until high school. "That is my message."

Stung by a decline in number of children playing youth tackle football, the N.F.L., USA Football and other organizations have also begun promoting flag football as a safer alternative for children interested in the game. Flag football participation rates have risen sharply.

In recent years, youth sports organizations have introduced safety initiatives to address the dangers of head hits, but the responses have been far from uniform. In 2015, the United States Soccer Federation banned players age 10 and younger from heading the ball, and will reduce headers in practice for those from ages 11 to 13. But the regulations only address U.S. Soccer youth national teams and academies, including Major League soccer youth teams.

National organizations governing youth hockey and lacrosse have also made rule changes to minimize potential head trauma.

Pop Warner, one of the largest youth football leagues in the country, has also changed rules to prevent concussions and potential long-term cognitive problems. In 2016, the organization eliminated kickoffs in its three youngest divisions, which includes players between 5 and 10 years old. It also further reduced the amount of contact time in practice in all age groups, to 25 percent from 33 percent.

Benedetto's bill would ban the sport entirely for preteens, which would effectively shut down Pop Warner and other youth organizations in New York state. Lawmakers in other states, he said, are looking to introduce similar legislation.

Benedetto named his amended bill the John Mackey Youth Football Protection Act, after the New York-born N.F.L. star tight end who developed severe dementia and died in 2011. After pressure from Mackey's widow, Sylvia, the N.F.L. started a benefits program, the 88 Plan, for families caring for former players with dementia. Mackey wore the number 88 on the Baltimore Colts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New York Legislator Renews Effort to Bar Tackle Football for Children

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The N.F.L. also remains immensely influential, despite a recent decline in television ratings and mounting worries about the long-term health of players subjected to years of head hits. It is the largest sports league in the country, with $14 billion in revenue, and its games draw more viewers than nearly everything else on broadcast television.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Several changes to the N.F.L.'s concussion safety protocol, including requiring the presence of an unaffiliated neurotrauma consultant at the league command center for all games, were revealed by league officials on Sunday.

The changes, backed by the N.F.L. and its players union, were agreed upon Dec. 11 by the league's head, neck and spine committee. They went into effect the following weekend.

"We are constantly looking at the protocol and how it's applied and trying to get better. The process happens throughout the season," said Allen Sills, the N.F.L.'s chief medical officer.

A controversial Dec. 10 injury involving Houston quarterback Tom Savage and a misstep in the concussion protocol for Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson in Week 10 - which resulted in a $100,000 fine for the franchise - were among the controversies that motivated the late-season changes.

The consultant at the command center will monitor games by broadcast coverage and assist in implementing protocol, including contacting team medical staffs on the sidelines to ensure they are aware of situations as they develop.

An extra neurotrauma consultant will be at all NFL playoff games and February's Super Bowl in Minnesota so that one will be available even if another is occupied with a previously injured player.

Among other changes, an impact seizure will be treated as a loss of consciousness and force removal of a player from a game.

A player who stumbles or falls to the ground trying to stand, unrelated to an orthopedic injury, will be sent directly to the locker room for examination. If a player passes the exam, he could be allowed to return to the game.

Injured players are to be taken directly to a medical team member for a concussion assessment.

All players who undergo any concussion evaluation in games will have a follow-up evaluation conducted the next day by a member of the medical staff.

Entering Sunday, there had been 540 game day concussion evaluations conducted this season with two reviews.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Several changes to the N.F.L.'s concussion safety protocol, including requiring the presence of an unaffiliated neurotrauma consultant at the league command center for all games, were revealed by league officials on Sunday. The changes, backed by the N.F.L. and its players union, were agreed upon Dec.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
And it's precisely this argument that's been marshaled lately in response to a new reminder of the fleshly realities of abortion: The conversations, videotaped covertly by pro-life activists posing as fetal organ buyers, in which officials from Planned Parenthood cheerfully discuss the procedures for extracting those organs intact during an abortion and the prices they command.

It may be disturbing to hear those procedures described: " ... we've been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I'm not gonna crush that part, I'm gonna basically crush below, I'm gonna crush above, and I'm gonna see if I can get it all intact."

It may be unseemly to hear a Planned Parenthood official haggle over pricing for those organs: "Let me just figure out what others are getting, and if this is in the ballpark, then it's fine, if it's still low, then we can bump it up. I want a Lamborghini."

But in the end, Planned Parenthood's defenders insist, listening to an abortionist discuss manipulating the "calvarium" (that is, the dying fetus's skull) so that it emerges research-ready from the womb is fundamentally no different than listening to a doctor discuss heart surgery or organ transplants. It's unsettling, yes, but just because it's gross doesn't prove it's wrong.

Which is true, but in this case not really true enough. Because real knowledge isn't purely theoretical; it's the fruit of experience, recognition, imagination, life itself.

And the problem these videos create for Planned Parenthood isn't just a generalized queasiness at surgery and blood.

It's a very specific disgust, informed by reason and experience - the reasoning that notes that it's precisely a fetus's humanity that makes its organs valuable, and the experience of recognizing one's own children, on the ultrasound monitor and after, as something more than just "products of conception" or tissue for the knife.

That's why Planned Parenthood's apologists have fallen back on complaints about "deceptive editing" (though full videos were released in both cases), or else simply asked people to look away. And it's why many of my colleagues in the press seem uncomfortable reporting on the actual content of the videos.

Because dwelling on that content gets you uncomfortably close to Selzer's tipping point - that moment when you start pondering the possibility that an institution at the heart of respectable liberal society is dedicated to a practice that deserves to be called barbarism.

That's a hard thing to accept. It's part of why so many people hover in the conflicted borderlands of the pro-choice side. They don't like abortion, they think its critics have a point ... but to actively join our side would require passing too comprehensive a judgment on their coalition, their country, their friends, their very selves.

This reluctance is a human universal. It's why white Southerners long preferred Lost Cause mythology to slaveholding realities. It's why patriotic Americans rarely want to dwell too long on My Lai or Manzanar or Nagasaki. It's why, like many conservatives, I was loath to engage with the reality of torture in Bush-era interrogation programs.

But the reluctance to look closely doesn't change the truth of what there is to see. Those were dead human beings on Richard Selzer's street 40 years ago, and these are dead human beings being discussed on video today: Human beings that the nice, idealistic medical personnel at Planned Parenthood have spent their careers crushing, evacuating, and carving up for parts.

The pro-life sting was sweeping; there are reportedly 10 videos to go. You can turn away. But there will be plenty of chances to look, to see, to know.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
planned parenthood federation of america

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
video recordings  downloads and streaming

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
And it's precisely this argument that's been marshaled lately in response to a new reminder of the fleshly realities of abortion: The conversations, videotaped covertly by pro-life activists posing as fetal organ buyers, in which officials from Planned Parenthood cheerfully discuss the procedures for extracting those organs intact during an abortion and the prices they command.

# data[].attributes.headline
EXAMPLES OF PEOPLE WHO LOOK AT BOTH SIDES 

# data[].attributes.subject
EXAMPLES OF PEOPLE WHO LOOK AT BOTH SIDES 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Veterans And Peace Activists Seek To Find Common Ground' on ViewPure

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Dropouts And Graduates: Is College Worth It?' on ViewPure

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Liberals And Conservatives Fight Labels And Stereotypes' on ViewPure

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Liberals And Conservatives Fight Labels And Stereotypes' on ViewPure

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - They shouted into a microphone until their voices became hoarse. They waved handmade signs. They chanted.

And sometimes, in the middle of it all, they choked up.

At the federal courthouse here on Saturday, students - including many of the very people who had to endure the trauma of a shooting on campus - continued to speak out about guns. Since Wednesday, when a gunman killed 14 students and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., their youthful voices have resonated where those of longtime politicians have largely fallen flat.

And on Saturday, another young woman's words captivated the nation.

Speaking publicly at the rally, Emma González, a senior, pledged that her school would be the site of the nation's last mass shooting. How could she know? Because, she said, she and her peers would take it upon themselves to "change the law."

"The people in the government who are voted into power are lying to us," she said. "And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call B.S."

"They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence - we call B.S.!" she continued as a chorus of supporters echoed her. "They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun - we call B.S.! They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars - we call B.S.! They say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred - we call B.S.! That us kids don't know what we're talking about, that we're too young to understand how the government works - we call B.S.!"

She wiped her eyes aggressively. Then, she urged the people in the crowd to register to vote - and to give their elected officials "a piece of your mind."

Just hours later, one video of the speech had been viewed more than 100,000 times.

In a telephone interview early Sunday, Ms. González, 18, said she was surprised by the enthusiastic reaction to her speech.

"I just got off the phone with Demi Lovato," she said. "That's not normally something that ever should have happened."

Ms. González said she was encouraged to speak out, in part, by other supportive people in her community, especially those who she said do not yet feel comfortable talking publicly.

"This is my whole world now," she said. "I cannot allow myself to stop talking about this."

A person Ms. González met at a party was killed in the shooting, she said; another person she has known for "an incredibly long time" is still in the hospital.

"Everybody needs to understand how we feel and what we went through, because if they don't, they're not going to be able to understand why we're fighting for what we're fighting for," Ms. González said.

She noted that some have criticized students for raising their voices, suggesting that they take the time to grieve instead.

"This is the way I have to grieve," Ms. González said. "I have to make sure that everybody knows that this isn't something that is allowed to happen."

Here are the voices of some other students who, like Ms. González, have spoken out in recent days.

David Hogg, 17: 'We're children. You guys are the adults'

While David Hogg, 17, and dozens of his Stoneman Douglas classmates were hiding in the dark in the school chef's office, he interviewed them on camera about their views on gun policy. Mr. Hogg, a senior and the student news director, later told The New York Times that lawmakers must make schools safer.

"We need to do something," he said. "We need to get out there and be politically active. Congress needs to get over their political bias with each other and work toward saving children's lives."

Referring to politicians, Mr. Hogg told CNN: "We're children. You guys are the adults."

Carly Novell, 17: 'This IS about guns'

Hours after the mass shooting, surviving students turned to social media to discuss gun control. They addressed the prevalence of such attacks and why someone with a mental illness can buy a gun.

"Guns give these disgusting people the ability to kill other human beings," Carly Novell, a 17-year-old senior who is an editor for the school's quarterly magazine, wrote on Twitter. "This IS about guns."

In a video interview with The Times, Ms. Novell said she was trying to use her anger fruitfully.

"People always talk about gun control and how things need to change, but nothing ever does," she said. "And that is so frustrating."

Tyra Hemans, 19: 'I want to talk with' Trump

The public outcry from some Stoneman Douglas students was vastly different from the response of survivors of the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. Those students two decades ago did not turn to activism as they grieved.

In contrast, Tyra Hemans, a senior at Stoneman Douglas, brought a poster featuring the word "ENOUGH" to a funeral for one of her classmates on Friday. She said she also wanted to deliver a message to President Trump.

"I want our politicians to stop thinking about money and start thinking about all these lives we had lost," she said. "I want to talk with him about changing these laws."

Daniela Palacios, 16: 'Change is going to come of this'

Among those who attended Saturday's rally was Daniela Palacios, 16, a sophomore at another Broward County high school, Cypress Bay.

This was her first protest, she said, and she stood with her mother, a tiny gold cross on a chain around her neck.

Returning to school after the shooting at Stoneman Douglas had been difficult, she explained, and she said she was there to call for a ban on firearms like the semiautomatic AR-15 rifle used by the gunman.

"Wherever you bump into someone, there is the fear that they're the next shooter," she said, "and every bell is a gunshot."

"I feel like some change is going to come of this," she went on, her voice barely audible amid the roar of the crowd. "I feel hopeful."

Ellie Branson, 16: 'Can you include the names of the victims?'

When the protest ended, a group of teenagers stayed behind, chanting and hugging - and chanting again.

"It could have been us," one sign read. "My friend died for what?" said another.

"No more guns! No more guns! No more guns!" they yelled.

Among those leading the group was Ellie Branson, 16, a junior from South Broward High School. She wore a yellow and white T-shirt, her cheeks wet with tears.

When the protest finally ended, she texted a reporter.

"Can you include the names of the victims?" she asked. "Their names are more important than mine."
Julie Turkewitz reported from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Matt Stevens and Jason M. Bailey from New York. Jack Begg contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Grieving but Galvanized, Students Declare They Will 'Change the Law'. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Emma González Leads a Student Outcry on Guns: 'This Is the Way I Have to Grieve'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - They shouted into a microphone until their voices became hoarse. They waved handmade signs. They chanted. And sometimes, in the middle of it all, they choked up. At the federal courthouse here on Saturday, students - including many of the very people who had to endure the trauma of a shooting on campus - continued to speak out about guns.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Our 100 Most Popular Student Questions for Debate and Persuasive Writing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Here are the 100 most-commented-upon questions we’ve ever asked that call for persuasive writing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For our Second Annual Student Editorial Contest, in which teenagers are invited to write on an issue they care about, we have gathered a list of 301 writing prompts that may help — an update to last year’s popular list of 200.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Though this piece, " And Now a Word From Op-Ed," is from 2004, it still provides a useful and quick overview of The Times's Opinion section, even if the section then was mostly a print product. It begins this way:

Here at the Op-Ed page, there are certain questions that are as constant as the seasons. How does one get published? Who chooses the articles? Does The Times have an agenda? And, of course, why was my submission rejected? Now that I've been Op-Ed editor for a year, let me try to offer a few answers.

This 2013 article, " Op-Ed and You," also helps both readers of the section, and potential writers for it, understand how Times Opinion works:

Anything can be an Op-Ed. We're not only interested in policy, politics or government. We're interested in everything, if it's opinionated and we believe our readers will find it worth reading. We are especially interested in finding points of view that are different from those expressed in Times editorials. If you read the editorials, you know that they present a pretty consistent liberal point of view. There are lots of other ways of looking at the world, to the left and right of that position, and we are particularly interested in presenting those points of view.

After students have read one or both of these overviews, invite them to explore the Times's Opinion section, noting what they find and raising questions as they go. You might ask:

* What pieces look most interesting to you? Why?

* What subsections are featured in the links across the top of the section ("Columnists"; "Series"; "Editorials"; "Op-Ed"; "Letters"; etc.) and what do you find in each? How do they seem to work together?

* How do you think the editors of this section decide what to publish?

* What role does this section seem to play in The Times as a whole?

* Would you ever want to write an Op-Ed or a letter to the editor? What might you write about?

If your students are confused about where and how news and opinion can sometimes bleed together, our lesson plan, News and 'News Analysis': Navigating Fact and Opinion in The Times, can help.

And to go even deeper, this lesson plan from 2010 focuses on a special section produced that year, " Op-Ed at 40: Four Decades of Argument and Illustration." It helps students understand the role the Op-Ed page has played at The Times since 1970, and links to many classic pieces.

__________
2. Know the difference between fact and opinion.
In our lesson plan Distinguishing Between Fact and Opinion, you'll find activities students can use with any day's Times to practice.

For instance, you might invite them to read an Op-Ed and underline the facts and circle the opinion statements they find, then compare their work in small groups.

Or, read a news report and an opinion piece on the same topic and look for the differences. For example, which of the first paragraphs below about the shooting in Las Vegas is from a news article and which is from an opinion piece? How can they tell?

Paragraph A: After the horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas, the impulse of politicians will be to lower flags, offer moments of silence, and lead a national mourning. Yet what we need most of all isn't mourning, but action to lower the toll of guns in America. (From " Preventing Mass Shootings Like the Vegas Strip Attack ")

Paragraph B: A gunman on a high floor of a Las Vegas hotel rained a rapid-fire barrage on an outdoor concert festival on Sunday night, leaving at least 59 people dead, injuring 527 others, and sending thousands of terrified survivors fleeing for cover, in one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history. (From " Multiple Weapons Found in Las Vegas Gunman's Hotel Room ")

__________

Do your students know what ethos, pathos and logos mean? The video above, " What Aristotle and Joshua Bell Can Teach Us About Persuasion," can help. We use it in this lesson plan, in which students explore the use of these rhetorical devices via the Op-Ed " Rap Lyrics on Trial " and more. The lesson also helps students try out their own use of rhetoric to make a persuasive argument.

In the post, we quote a New Yorker article, "The Six Things That Make Stories Go Viral Will Amaze, and Maybe Infuriate, You," that explains the strategies in a way that students may readily understand:

In 350 B.C., Aristotle was already wondering what could make content - in his case, a speech - persuasive and memorable, so that its ideas would pass from person to person. The answer, he argued, was three principles: ethos, pathos, and logos. Content should have an ethical appeal, an emotional appeal, or a logical appeal. A rhetorician strong on all three was likely to leave behind a persuaded audience. Replace rhetorician with online content creator, and Aristotle's insights seem entirely modern. Ethics, emotion, logic - it's credible and worthy, it appeals to me, it makes sense. If you look at the last few links you shared on your Facebook page or Twitter stream, or the last article you e-mailed or recommended to a friend, chances are good that they'll fit into those categories.

Take the New Yorker's advice and invite them to choose viral content from their social networks and identify ethos, pathos and logos at work.

Or, use the handouts and ideas in our post An Argument-Writing Unit: Crafting Student Editorials, in which Kayleen Everitt, an eighth-grade English teacher, has her students take on advertising the same way.

Finally, if you'd like a recommendation for a specific Op-Ed that will richly reward student analysis of these elements, Kabby Hong, a teacher at Verona Area High School in Wisconsin, who will be our guest on our "Write to Change the World" webinar, recommends Nicholas Kristof's column " If Americans Love Moms, Why Do We Let Them Die?"

__________

The Common Core Standards put argument front and center in American education, and even young readers are now expected to be able to identify claims in opinion pieces and find the evidence to support them.

We have a number of lesson plans that can help.

Finally, if you're looking for a fun way to practice, we often hear from teachers that our What's Going On in This Picture? feature works well. To participate, students must make a claim about what they believe is "going on" in a work of Times photojournalism stripped of its caption, then come up with evidence to support what they say.

__________
Charles M. Blow David Brooks Frank Bruni Roger Cohen Gail Collins Ross Douthat Maureen Dowd Thomas L. Friedman Michelle Goldberg Nicholas Kristof Paul Krugman Andrew Rosenthal Bret Stephens
We have heard from many teachers over the years that a favorite assignment is to have students each "adopt" a different newspaper columnist, and follow him or her over weeks or months, noting the issues they focus on and the rhetorical strategies they use to make their cases. Throughout, students can compare what they find - and, of course, apply what they learn to their own writing.
6. Explore v isual argument-making via Times Op-Art, editorial cartoons and Op-Docs.
For example, here is a sample assignment we found online called "Summer Reading Columnist Project." If you would like to try it with The Times, here are the current Op-Ed columnists:

__________
7. Use our student writing prompts to practice making arguments for a real audience. Does Technology Make Us More Alone? Is It Ethical to Eat Meat? Is It O.K. for Men and Boys to Comment on Women and Girls on the Street? Are Some Youth Sports Too Intense? Does Reality TV Promote Dangerous Stereotypes? When Do You Become an Adult? Is America Headed in the Right Direction?
The New York Times regularly commissions artists and cartoonists to create work to accompany Opinion pieces. How do illustrations like the one above add meaning to a text, while grabbing readers' attention at the same time? What can students infer about the argument being made in an Op-Ed article by looking at the illustration alone?

Recently, Clara Lieu, a teacher at the Rhode Island School of Design, told us how she uses that very idea to help her student-artists to create their own pieces. To see some of their work, check out " Finding Artistic Inspiration in The New York Times's Opinion Section."

Another way to use visual journalism to teach argument-making? Use Op-Docs, The Times's short documentary series (most under 15 minutes), that touches on issues like race and gender identity, technology and society, civil rights, criminal justice, ethics, and artistic and scientific exploration - issues that both matter to teenagers and complement classroom content.

Every Friday during the school year, we host a Film Club in which we select short Op-Docs we think will inspire powerful conversations - and then invite teenagers and teachers from around the world to have those conversations here, on our site.
8. Participate in our annual Student Editorial Contest.

And for a great classroom example of how this might work in practice, check out Using an Op-Doc Video to Teach Argumentative Writing, a Reader Idea from Allison Marchetti, an English teacher at Trinity Episcopal School in Richmond, Va. She details how her students analyzed the seven-minute film "China's Web Junkies" to see how the filmmakers used evidence to support an argument, including expert testimony, facts, interview, imagery, statistics and anecdotes.

Ideas for Writing Opinion Pieces

Every day during the school year we invite teenagers to share their opinions about questions like these, and hundreds do, posting arguments, reflections and anecdotes to our Student Opinion feature. Last year, we created a list drawn from this feature of 401 Prompts for Argumentative Writing on an array of topics like technology, politics, sports, education, health, parenting, science and pop culture.

Teachers tell us they use our writing prompts because they offer an opportunity for students to write for an "authentic audience." But we also consider our daily questions to be a chance for the kind of "low-stakes" writing that can help students practice thinking through thorny questions informally.

This school year, we've also begun calling out our favorite comments weekly via our Current Events Conversation feature. Will your students' posts be next?

_________

What issues matter most to your students?

Every year, we invite teenagers to channel their passions into formal pieces: short, evidence-based persuasive essays like the editorials The New York Times publishes every day.

The challenge is pretty straightforward. Choose a topic you care about, gather evidence from sources both within and outside of The New York Times, and write a concise editorial (450 words or less) to convince readers of your point of view.
9. Take a dvice from writers and editors at the Times's Opinion section.
Our judges use this rubric (PDF) for selecting winners to publish on The Learning Network.

And at a time when breaking out of one's "filter bubble" is more important than ever, we hope this contest also encourages students to broaden their news diets by using multiple sources, ideally ones that offer a range of perspectives on their chosen issue.

This school year, as you can see from our 2017-18 Student Contest Calendar, the challenge will run from Feb. 28 to April 5, 2018.
10. Use the published work of young people a s mentor texts.
And, as we mentioned above, we have published two lesson plans to help guide every step:

* For the Sake of Argument: Writing Persuasively to Craft Short, Evidence-Based Editorials and

* I Don't Think So: Writing Effective Counterarguments
Update: Oct. 10: Links from Our Oct. 10 Webinar
_________
Nicholas Kristof's Ten Tips for Writing Op-Eds
How can you write a powerful Op-Ed or editorial?

Well, over the years, many Times editors and writers have given the aspiring opiners advice. In the video above, for instance, Andrew Rosenthal, in his previous role as Editorial Page editor, detailed seven pointers for the students who participate in our annual Editorial Contest,

This summer, the Times Op-Ed columnist Bret Stephens wrote his own Tips for Aspiring Op-Ed Writers.

And on our Oct. 10 webinar, Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof suggests his own ten ideas. (Scroll down to see what they are, as well as to find related Op-Ed columns.)

Finally, if you'd like to get a letter to the editor published, here is what Tom Feyer, the longtime head of that section, recommends. Right now, from Oct. 9-Oct. 16, 2017, that section is offering a special letter-writing challenge for high school students. Submit a letter to the editor in response to a news article, editorial, column or Op-Ed essay in The Times from the past week, and they will pick a selection of the best entries and publish them on Sunday, Oct. 22.

_________

Last year, five students of Kabby Hong, the teacher who joined us for our Oct. 10 webinar, were either winners, runners-up or honorable mentions in our Student Editorial Contest.

How did he do it? First, he helps his students brainstorm by asking them the questions on this sheet. (The first page shows his own sample answers since he models them for his students.)

*" In Three and a Half Hours, an Alarm Will Go Off "

*" Redefining Ladylike "

*" Why I, a Heterosexual Teenage Boy, Want to See More Men in Speedos "

_________

On our Oct. 10 webinar (still available on-demand), Nicholas Kristof talked teachers through ten ways anyone can make their persuasive writing stronger. Here is a list of his tips, along with the columns that relate to each - though you'll need to watch the full webinar to hear the stories and examples that illustrate them.

1. Start out with a very clear idea in your own mind about the point you want to make.

Related: Preventing Mass Shootings Like the Vegas Strip Attack

2. Don't choose a topic, choose an argument.

Related: On Death Row, but Is He Innocent?

3. Start with a bang.

Related: If Americans Love Moms, Why Do We Let Them Die?

4. Personal stories are often very powerful to make a point.

Related: This is What a Refugee Looks Like

5. If the platform allows it, use photos or video or music or whatever.

Related: The Photos the U.S. and Saudi Arabia Don't Want You to See

6. Don't feel the need to be formal and stodgy.

Related: Meet the World's Leaders, in Hypocrisy

7. Acknowledge shortcomings in your arguments if the readers are likely to be aware of them, and address them openly.

Related: A Solution When a Nation's Schools Fail

8. It's often useful to cite an example of what you're criticizing, or quote from an antagonist, because it clarifies what you're against.

Related: Anne Frank Today Is a Syrian Girl

9. If you're really trying to persuade people who are on the fence, remember that their way of thinking may not be yours.

Related: We Don't Deny Harvey, So Why Deny Climate Change?

10. When your work is published, spread the word through social media or emails or any other avenue you can think of.

Related: You can find Nicholas Kristof on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, his Times blog, and via his free newsletter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
10 Ways to Teach Argument-Writing With The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Though this piece, " And Now a Word From Op-Ed," is from 2004, it still provides a useful and quick overview of The Times's Opinion section, even if the section then was mostly a print product. It begins this way: Here at the Op-Ed page, there are certain questions that are as constant as the seasons.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Then after the game, my blood pressure lowers and I watch recaps and become wildly concerned for the health of players 30 years from now.

In Philly, it's easy to ignore what science seems to suggest for a few passion-filled hours. I'll cover up my true feelings by saying things like, "That's why they make millions." We mask minor guilt with major passion. Before the N.F.C. championship game against the Vikings, city workers greased street poles with Crisco so that fans wouldn't climb them in celebration or disappointment. This weekend, the city may have to grease the Art Museum Steps.

I was raised in a sports household in a sports town. Nothing gave my father more joy then when the Dallas Cowboys, our rivals, were losing. He didn't say the words "I love you" often. So to end a phone conversation, instead of saying "I love you," I'd say, "Hey, Dad, the Cowboys are losing." And he'd reply, "I know, son ... the Cowboys are losing, too."

Two weeks ago, the Patriots' Rob Gronkowski took a brutal helmet-to-helmet blow and got knocked out. It was pure, unadulterated violence. If I had seen this hit 25 years ago, my living room would've erupted with animalistic joy.

But today, my family cheers, then winces when we see the replay. We try to ignore the shame boiling up inside, knowing what affect it could have on the player's future. We say things like, "That's a shame." And keep watching.

To prohibit defenders from behaving like assassins, referees penalize players on the field and fine them off it, but the game won't really change. And part of me doesn't want it to change. The chance of violence is why we tune in.

In Philadelphia, we enjoy the carnage as long as it's not on our team. If there were a chance the players' heads would literally pop off like Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots', we'd still watch. Maybe even more. We're like spectators in the Colosseum watching gladiators in A.D. 200, saying, "If it's not to the death, it won't be the same sport!"

I was trained since Pee Wee football to strike with precision and power. The Drexel Hill Raiders was an athletic boot camp for kids who were currently reading "Where the Wild Things Are." We sat on our hands, keeping our legs straight and heels six inches off the ground until a fire burned away our bellies. Everyone ran laps when one kid fumbled. If you were overweight, they wrapped you in trash bags and made you run.

We had a drill where two of us would lay on our backs, helmet to helmet. Then a "coach," who for 22 other hours a day was a carpenter, would blow a whistle. We'd scurry to our feet in fear and race to smash each other first. We'd run full speed and slam foreheads into each other until things tasted different for a few hours.

Playing football, I got the wind knocked out of me about once a week for a decade. I'd lie on my back and struggle to suck in air while looking at the clouds, thinking, "As soon as this is over, I'll finish my fruit roll-up." Coach Millison would run on the field and kneel over me with a lit cigarette, snowing ashes all over my face. He'd pull my waist a foot off the ground to allow air back into my lungs and I'd slowly come back to life while my friends stood over me like little football angels.

The game is changing and I feel bad for kids who will never know what it feels like to make a big hit or score a game-winning touchdown. Once when I was 10, both happened. I ran down the sideline and just as I approached the goal line, I was hit so hard I blacked out. I awoke on the sideline to see Coach and asked, "Did I get in?" He smiled and said: "Yeah, kiddo. You scored." The pain disappeared as the team lifted me to the sky.

On Super Bowl Sunday, if you want to discuss C.T.E., I'll be screaming at the television in a bar, with strangers dressed in green. Regardless of the score, I just want the sport of football to know ... the Cowboys are losing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | A Very Conflicted Football Fan's Notes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Then after the game, my blood pressure lowers and I watch recaps and become wildly concerned for the health of players 30 years from now. In Philly, it's easy to ignore what science seems to suggest for a few passion-filled hours. I'll cover up my true feelings by saying things like, "That's why they make millions."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When I first met him in 2007, Rob had this gentle, endearing way about him that caught me off guard. I had never watched a full game of football in my life, but still believed the stereotypes: Players were tough and abrasive. He was neither. I had never met a man who was so sensitive and tenderhearted. I loved that he wasn't afraid to be vulnerable and to show tears.

When we married in 2009, I already knew he was an amazing father. He could play dollhouse with my stepdaughter for hours without a hint of boredom. This continued when we had two children of our own. When our son was born and I was focused on taking care of a baby, he would bathe the girls, brush and blow-dry their (tangled!) hair, then put them to bed. Afterward he would wash the dishes. He brought me coffee in bed each morning. I was spoiled rotten.

But since I had known him, he had trouble sleeping, and he has been prone to mood swings and depression. In 2010, things got worrisome, so I arranged for him to be evaluated by neurologists so that he could apply for disability benefits. We traveled from Ohio, where we were living at the time, to North Carolina for full cognitive evaluations and testing. There were seemingly endless amounts of paperwork and record keeping.

I was right to be concerned.

Over time, I had started to notice changes. But this was different and, around 2013, things had become much more frightening.

He lost weight. It seemed like one day, out of the blue, he stopped being hungry. And often he would forget to eat. I'd find full bowls of cereal left around the house, on bookshelves or the fireplace mantel. The more friends and family commented on his gaunt frame, the more panicked I became. By 2016, he had shrunk to 157 pounds. That's right, my 6-foot-2 football-player husband weighed 157 pounds (down from around 200 when he was in the N.F.L.). People were visibly shocked when we told them he had played the game professionally.

Besides damage resulting from football-related concussions, my husband has never had a diagnosed brain injury. He's never been in a car accident or fallen off a roof. He never took steroids. After struggling in retirement with alcohol abuse for about six years, off and on, he hasn't had a drink in eight years. And he's only 43.

When you live with someone with brain damage, you become highly attuned to your environment and develop an intimate relationship with your senses and intuition. Your hearing becomes excellent, almost unbearably keen, like a movie character who develops supernatural abilities overnight. Rob's mood swings scare me sometimes, and I always have to be in tune with early signs of his agitation. I try to protect him from stress so he won't be overwhelmed. It's exhausting.

Our fights went in bizarre circles and were never resolved. He would be irrationally upset about one thing but would quickly lose track and begin rambling about something that had no connection to the topic at hand. Every argument we had ended with me thinking: "This isn't normal. This is not what couples fight about. Something's wrong."

And the arguments were always the same. It was as if our lives were on a loop, like some song that's been left on repeat for years. That sort of repetition has a tremendous ability to make you feel like you're going insane. And maybe, you wonder, you are.

He was losing touch with reality and was getting more and more paranoid. The first time he accused me of stealing loose change from his nightstand I was speechless. And when I told him how illogical it would be for me to do such a thing, he looked at me with even more suspicion. But his paranoia didn't end there. It would leave me with a heaviness in my chest that made me sob without warning.

He went from being a devoted and loving father and husband to someone who felt like a ghost in our home. For a couple of months one winter he was so depressed and detached, he couldn't muster up the energy to speak. My questions went unanswered until I simply stopped asking them. The silence was unnerving.

So we were relieved when, in January 2013, we were told that the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle N.F.L. player retirement plan and supplemental disability plan had awarded him total and permanent disability benefits. His benefits were listed as "degenerative," which establishes that his "disability arises out of league football activities" and had manifested within 15 years of his last season. He is entitled to monthly payments for the rest of his life. (These payments are separate from the estimated $1 billion settlement of concussion-related lawsuits with thousands of retired players, for which we have registered.)

The examining clinician found that "repeated concussion is very likely to have caused Mr. Kelly's neuropsychological dysfunction," and also that his prior alcohol abuse may have been a factor. But he has not had a single drop of alcohol for eight years, and his condition continues to deteriorate.

After years of little to no sleep, he alternated between sleeping either three hours a night or 20. I'd wake up to find every blind and curtain in the house closed and Rob sitting on the sofa with a blank expression on his face. He no longer felt comfortable driving, refused to leave the house and cut off contact with everyone.

Specific details about how he wanted his funeral to be, and his demand that he be cremated, were brought up with excruciating frequency. One particularly dark time, he went five days without eating anything; he drank only water and a few swigs of chocolate milk. He was suffering deeply and barely surviving. My love and affection seemed to offer no comfort or solace. I felt helpless.

It wasn't until I joined a private Facebook group of more than 2,400 women, all connected in some way to current or former N.F.L. players, that I realized I wasn't alone.

Our stories are eerily similar, our loved ones' symptoms almost identical: the bizarre behavior I had tried to ignore, the obsessive laundering of old clothes - our washing machine ran from morning till night.

It was comforting and terrifying all at the same time. Why did so many of us see the same strange behaviors? "Our neurologist said they do it to calm their brains," one friend told me.

Symptoms consistent with C.T.E. are a recurring topic in the Facebook group. They include memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, aggression, depression and anxiety. These problems become apparent sometimes years or even decades after a player hangs up his helmet.

One woman may write a post, desperate and afraid of the man her husband is becoming - the rage, mood swings, depression, memory loss. A man so drastically different from the one she once knew. Hundreds of comments will follow, woman after woman confirming that she is going through the exact same thing.

While the symptoms and behaviors are telling, C.T.E. can be conclusively diagnosed only posthumously, because it requires the close examination of brain tissue. But many of us, including me, are convinced our husbands suffer from the disease. We try to comfort one another with the same words: "Just know you're not alone."

I don't think the public has any idea how widespread this problem truly is. Rob and I hope that, in telling our story, we might help other families. There are likely to be hundreds of wives and partners of football players, maybe more, who live a life like mine. Sadly, there is a feeling of shame among those affected, in both the men and their families.

But who these men have become is not who they are, and I write that with conviction. The symptoms they display are beyond their control and occur through no fault of their own. These men chose football, but they didn't choose brain damage.

I used to read all the articles about C.T.E., all the stories about football players committing suicide. I'd skim the comments to see remarks like: "They know what they signed up for" and "Of course football is bad for the brain, everyone knows that."

But when all those big hits happened and the fans cheered, did they cheer despite knowing a man just greatly increased his risk for dementia? Was anyone worried about an A.L.S. diagnosis or a C.T.E.-related suicide at 40 after their favorite player suffered repeated blows to the head on the field? No, they cheered and they celebrated because they didn't know. And neither did we.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | I'm the Wife of a Former N.F.L. Player. Football Destroyed His Mind.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When I first met him in 2007, Rob had this gentle, endearing way about him that caught me off guard. I had never watched a full game of football in my life, but still believed the stereotypes: Players were tough and abrasive. He was neither.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Between 2006 to 2010, the last period for which more comprehensive annual data on the denial of firearm applications by the background check system are available, there were 377,283 denials. But the federal government prosecuted only 460 of those cases, leading to 209 convictions, mostly on charges of providing false information. There was a similarly small number of state prosecutions resulting from the gun purchase denials.

Why didn't more of those denials lead to perjury prosecutions? According to my analysis, the reason is simple: a high percentage of cases are dropped because the applicant was wrongly denied clearance to buy a gun.

Many of those people are trying to buy guns to protect themselves. "This incredibly high rate of false positives imposes a real burden on the most vulnerable people," said Reagan Dunn, the first national coordinator for Project Safe Neighborhoods, a Justice Department program started in 2001 to ensure gun laws are enforced.

The system also does a poor job of accounting for people who have had their rights to buy a firearm taken away and then restored. In the 1990s, Frank Wise of Jacksonville Beach, Fla., was convicted of check fraud after his employer went bankrupt. When his paycheck bounced, two checks he sent to his mortgage company also bounced. Nearly 20 years later, Mr. Wise was able to get his record cleared, but that information wasn't entered into the background check system for three years. Getting this fixed cost him $3,600 in legal fees.

Even more people would face such problems if background checks were made "universal," meaning to include the private sale or transfer of firearms, which are exempt from checks in most states.Many people consider this a common-sense policy, but there would be a cost: Background checks involve fees that drive up the price of guns in private sales and make it harder for poor people to defend themselves.

To get some idea of what background checks add to the price of a weapon, look at the fees for checks on private transfers in states that already impose checks. In New York City and Washington, those fees cost at least $125 for private gun sales.

If people believe that background checks reduce crime and benefit everyone, everyone should pay for it, out of general government revenue. Pushing background checks on private transfers as proposed during the hearing disarms many law-abiding poor people.

So what should be done when the background check system fails to stop mass killers from attacking? One answer is to have more civilians carry permitted concealed handguns. Those law-abiding gun owners can help protect places where there are no police. In 2013, PoliceOne, a news and resource site for active and retired law enforcement officers, released a survey finding that over 91 percent of the more than 15,000 "verified law enforcement professionals" who responded supported concealed carry.

We do need to fix the background check system. But let's really fix it. Let's make sure that rare cases like Devin Kelley can't slip through the cracks, but let's also make sure that the government stops preventing millions of law-abiding citizens from buying guns for protection. Adding more names without fixing these problems will only disarm law-abiding Americans.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
sutherland springs  tex  shooting (2017)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Background Checks Are Not the Answer to Gun Violence

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Between 2006 to 2010, the last period for which more comprehensive annual data on the denial of firearm applications by the background check system are available, there were 377,283 denials. But the federal government prosecuted only 460 of those cases, leading to 209 convictions, mostly on charges of providing false information.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
These days, electronic cards called E.B.T.s, which can be used like credit cards at checkout, eliminate the awkward process of fumbling with booklets. But that doesn't make it any less painful to be so poor that you need help paying for food. Being poor means getting shamed and criticized for each minor decision you make, both by politicians and your neighbors standing in line behind you at the grocery store.

Federal guidelines already dictate what can and cannot be purchased with food stamps, yet poor people are subjected to endless commentary and condemnation from cable news pundits to Facebook friends over their grocery selections. Are they picking items with enough nutrition? Are they choosing products that are more expensive, or more enjoyable, than they deserve?

Americans of all income levels occasionally make food choices that aren't the healthiest or most economical, but it's the poor - who often have few other ways to indulge themselves and their children - who are judged most harshly when they do so.

As a result, poor people are constantly required to explain their circumstances, and justify their every choice. This is especially true for parents who must rely on social programs to feed their children. The proposed Harvest Box further reinforces the notion that low-income parents can't be trusted to determine what's best for their own children. The implication is that wiser authority figures should dictate what these families should and can eat.

It's hard to imagine that many of the people who create or oversee these programs have any actual experience with poverty. This lack of insight into the real lives of poor people leads those in charge to come up with ideas that are ridiculously impractical, unrealistic and even laughable.

They're as out of touch as celebrities who've tried to do the "food stamp challenge" - surviving for a week or a month on the food they can buy with an amount equal to the benefits poor people receive - and end up blowing their entire budget on limes and black licorice. I'm curious how what should go into these prearranged packages would be determined. I also want to know what accommodations will be made for those with food allergies or dietary restrictions.

Until recently, my mother was eligible for a similar monthly food package as part of a program for the elderly. Transportation issues made it difficult for her to even pick up these boxes, but when she did get them, she ended up giving away at least half the items because they were foods doctors told her not to eat or that she simply didn't like.

Harvest Boxes would inevitably lead to significant waste for similar reasons. I've heard this proposed model compared with popular services like Blue Apron or Fresh Direct (services that I, as a working-class person, have never used because they are way too expensive). But the only thing the Trump proposal has in common with these services, which wealthy people use to expand rather than limit their dining choices, is the box. Beyond that, I cannot even imagine the logistics involved with trying to manage a food-package program of this magnitude - and given the Trump administration's disappointing record when it came to delivering meals in post-hurricane Puerto Rico, I'm not at all hopeful that the quality of the food would be as promised or that people who need it would actually receive it.

Assessing the SNAP system to identify ways to improve efficiency and reduce fraud is a good thing. But making a major change that deprives low-income people of much of the already limited control they have over one of the most basic elements of their daily existence is not only cruel, it is a recipe for huge waste.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Poor People Deserve Better Than Food in a Box

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
These days, electronic cards called E.B.T.s, which can be used like credit cards at checkout, eliminate the awkward process of fumbling with booklets. But that doesn't make it any less painful to be so poor that you need help paying for food.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Contests

One of this year's winners wrote about school lockdown drills. Related Article Credit... Alec Soth/Magnum, for The New York Times

Update | Read the work of _________ this year's 10 winners here and this year's runners-up here.
For the past four years we've invited students to write short editorials about issues they care about, and each year thousands take up the challenge.

Students often start with thoughtful questions from their own lives: Why is my school's athletic program better funded than its music program? Why do we hide in the corner of our classroom during active shooter drills? Why don't my classmates stand during the Pledge of Allegiance? And they develop sophisticated, sincere and well researched answers in response.

Students look at the nation's and world's problems and hunt for solutions - to improve the plight of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in China, for example, or to reduce recidivism rates for U.S. prisons.

We really like this contest because it asks students to look closely at their world and find something, large or small, they want to change. So, if you don't like being last in line all the time because your surname starts with "Z," then take a stand. If you want more characters in books and movies to be more like you, then write about it. If you want society to be less wasteful or more tolerant, then tell the world. Change starts with noticing, thinking critically, and starting meaningful conversations - and that's what these students have done in their editorials.

But winning this contest? It's no easy task being selected as a winner out of 7,895 entries, a record. How do you make your writing stand out from the piles of other editorials submitted to our contest - especially when you have no more than 450 words to get your point across?

Here's one way: Start strong. Grab our attention in the first few sentences, but don't take too long to state your argument.

Here's another: Pick a fresh topic, or a new angle on a popular topic, and be very clear about what you are arguing. Often when students narrow in on a specific concern, their editorial becomes more persuasive.

What else? Write with an original, confident voice and avoid formulaic language and structure. And if appropriate, acknowledge, and deftly dispatch, counterarguments.

Below, we list 10 winners, 15 runners-up and 45 honorable mentions. We also include a PDF of all the finalists, including 58 who made the cut to the third round of judging, but didn't quite reach the winner's circle.

Starting May 22, we will be publishing one of the Top 10 essays each weekday in posts that we hope you will spread on social media, hang on school bulletin boards and perhaps even use as "mentor texts" for next year's contest.

Thank you for participating - and we hope you'll take part in our Summer Reading Contest, starting June 16.

_________

Each category below lists our favorites in alphabetical order by title. Where titles were missing, we came up with our own.
Top 10 Winners
" A Psychedelic Cure?" by Reagan Briere, age 16
" In Nothing We Trust" by Francesca Kelley, age 18
" Leave the Citizens to Their TV Shows" by Yijia Hu, age 17
" Losing the Internet" by David Scharts, age 15
" Reform the Prison, Then the Prisoner" by Katherine Leonard, age 16
" Stopping Bullets With Locked Doors and Silence Is Already Pulling the Trigger" by Daina Kalnina, age 15
" The Anguish of the Rich" by Yiqi Wang, age 17
" The Asian Misnomer: What the Affirmative Action Debate Misses" by Matteo Wong, age 16
" The Collateral Damage of Defending Democracy" by Sarah Heiland, age 18
" The Missing Anthropological Exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History " by Alec Farber, age 16
_________ Runners-Up
"America First" by Safa Saleh, age 17
"America? More Like Ameri-Can't Vote" by Gianni Carcagno, age 17
"Climate Literacy: A Critical Step Toward Climate Stability" by Ella Shriner, age 14 and Hannah Witscher, age 15
"Cultural Appropriation: A Measure of Empathy" by James Chang, age 16
"Discourse Is Democracy: Allowing Uncensored Speech on College Campuses" by Abigail Hogan, age 17
"Drone Warfare: The Failing Fight Against the Modern Hydra" by Michael Levinger, age 16
"Generation Code Red" by Grace Scullion, age 16
"Humane Human Zoo?" by Ella Ward, age 15
"Paper or Plastic? How About a Paper ON Plastic!" by Melody Markert, age 17
"The Future Disintegration of American Democracy Through Athletics" by Julianne Yu, age 16
"The Case for Teaching News Literacy" by Mary Hannah Grier, age 17
"The Unspoken Alphabet Problem" by Stephanie Zhang, age 14
"The 'War on Drugs' Will Never Work; Legalization Will" by Kristina Vakhman, age 18
"There Is No Happily Ever After Without Once Upon a Time" by Bridget O'Leary, age 17
"When Will This Class Be Useful?" by Casey Stark, age 15
_________ Honorable Mentions
"#WorldChanger" by Joyce Zhou, age 17
"A Case for Impassiveness" by Lea Marchl, age 16
"A Scoop in the Right Direction" by Emma S., age 18
"AP Tests Don't Leave Enough Room for the Human Side of History" by Tom Malmgren, age 16
"Are My Shoulders Distracting You?" by Mairi Alice Dun, age 17
"Autism: Educated and Extraordinary" by Isabella Zhang, age 17
"Bittersweet" by Rena Rachlin, age 15 "Child Labor in the U.S. Today" by Jasmine Campos, age 16 and Charlotte Principal, age 16
"China Needs Silver Lining" by Wangchen Zhou, age 17
"Colleges Should Abandon Race-Based Affirmative Action to Achieve True Diversity" by Eric Davis, age 18
"Embrace the Mess" by Chi Yu, age 14
"Fast Fashion Is Destroying Our World" by Melissa Wang, age 17
"Food Stamps Need a Change" by Patrick Meara, age 17
"Governor Cuomo Frees the Plastic Bagss" by Jiayan Chen, age 17
"Help Wanted: Moderate Politicians" by Ireland Degges, age 17
"High School Should Not Just Be About Sports" by Swathi Kella, age 16
"How Far Can Post-Truth Democracy Take Us?" by Jiahe Yang, age 18
"How to Revitalize the Public Education System" by Dhara Yu, age 18
"Last Man Standing" by Kathryn Porter, age 16
"Leave Me Alone" by Celia Silver, age 17
"More Than a Morning Kick" by Emma Cary, age 16
"Multiple Choice: Not Multiple Enough" by Yi-Mei Templeman, age 17
"Picking Cotton: An Immigrant's Perspective" by Allan Njomo, age 16
"Post-Democracy" by Nadav Ziv, age 17
"Should Juvenile Offenders Receive Life Sentences Without Parole on Their First Offense?" by Tayler Gavetti, age 16
"Should Obamacare Be Repealed?" by William Pharo, age 16
"Single Payer: A Cure for America's Healthcare Woes" by Akshay Manglik, age 13
"Streaky Friendship" by Yuxin Long, age 16
"Technology: A Hindrance to Learning" by Zachary Weiss, age 17
"Teens, Technology, and The Pursuit of Happiness" by Sam Jagolinzer, age 17
"The Bluest Note" by Nicholas Dasoveanu, age 18
"The College Conspiracy" by Serenity W., age 17
"The Cost of Health Care May Be in Your Genes" by Sophia Lo, age 16
"The Demoralizing of the Elizabethan Language" by Olivia Seymour, age 14
"The Disposable Nightmare" by Tianxin Guo, age 14
"The Education Gap" by Adam Traweek, age 16 "The Environment in the Age of Trump" by Elliot Tuttle, age 17
"The Growing Problem of Screen Addiction" by Kaitlin Craig, age 16
"The Picture of Education We Must Change" by Danielle Naidrich, age 17
"Tipping the Pay Scale" by Ruhee Damle, age 14
"Untitled" by Melinda Hartz, age 16
"We Should Be Teaching Rap Music in Schools" by Jack Zuckerman, age 19
"What Do You Call Someone That Only Speaks One Language? An American." by Paige Patton, age 16
"Where Are All the Rainbows?" by Storm Viridian Murray, age 17
"Where Trump's Ban Stands Legally" by Marcus Linde, age 16
_________ And All the Finalists, Including 58 More Great Editorials That Made It to Round 3 (PDF) Judges: Amanda Christy Brown, Shannon Doyne, Caroline Crosson Gilpin, Michael Gonchar, Annissa Hambouz, Thomas Houston, Shira Katz, Willow Lawson, Linda Leavitt, Sue Mermelstein, Anna North, Roxie Salamon-Abrams, Katherine Schulten, Matt Schwarzfeld, Natlie Shutler and Kate Spence-Ado

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Call to Action: Winners From Our Fourth Annual Student Editorial Contest (Published 2017)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Contests Update | Read the work of _________ this year's 10 winners here and this year's runners-up here . For the past four years we've invited students to write short editorials about issues they care about, and each year thousands take up the challenge.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Overview | How can writing change people's worldview? How can it influence public opinion? How can it lead to meaningful action?

The persuasive essay is a quintessential high school writing assignment. With the Common Core standards, it seems to have taken on a new urgency in many school districts and classrooms. But students should know that evidence-based persuasive writing is more than just an academic exercise - it is very much alive in the real world. Perhaps one of the best and most widely recognized examples of persuasive writing in action is the classic newspaper editorial, three to four of which The New York Times publishes every day.

In this lesson, we offer suggestions on how to guide students through the writing process when writing editorials - from brainstorming a topic to publishing their work - and all the steps in between. This lesson can be used in conjunction with our Student Contest on editorial writing, or with any argumentative writing project you do with students.

Materials | Computers with Internet access. Optional copies of one or more of these three handouts: Debatable Issues (PDF), Problem-Solution Organizer (PDF), and the rubric for our Student Editorial Contest (PDF).

Step 1 | Brainstorming: What Do You Care About?

Finding the right topic is essential. Students should pick something that a) they genuinely care about; b) other people would want to read about; c) they can make an argument about; and d) they can find evidence about to support their claim.

You might get students started brainstorming ideas by having them journal about or discuss with partners questions like:

What would you like to change if you could? What problems or policies do you think should be addressed - whether something global, like climate change, or something closer to home, like a later start time for your high school classes? Make as long a list as you can.

What issues, topics and fields are you passionate about? Make a list. Your list might included fields as broad as "music" or as specific as "the early days of hip-hop." What questions or controversies in these fields do experts or fans often argue? Where do you stand?

What do you do outside of school? What are some things you're an expert on? What aspects of those hobbies or interests do you find yourself having to explain to others? Why?

What issues or ideas do you often find yourself discussing or arguing about with friends, your family or online?

What issues or controversies have you followed recently in current events? What are your opinions about them? What might you need more information about?

Students can then share their ideas and, as a whole class, compile a list on the board or on a class blog or wiki.

To open the class to even more ideas, you might then invite students look through our list of 200 Student Opinion questions that invite argument. Not only can this list help students pick a topic, but each question links to a relevant New York Times article, which may be very helpful when students begin to look for evidence.

A Note on Collaboration: The editorial writing process at The New York Times is done collaboratively. That means, a team of writers works together from choosing a topic through researching it and drafting the writing. Teachers may want to give students opportunities to collaborate on their editorials as well, whether for only one step of the project, such as research, or from beginning to end.
Step 2 | Modeling: What Is An Editorial?
To help students envision what they will be writing, it is worth spending time discussing what an editorial is and looking at some examples.

Ask students: What is an editorial? Have you ever read any? Where would you find one? What do you think is the purpose of an editorial?

We selected three recent examples from the Times editorial page that students can look over as models, though you or your students may pick others from the thousands in the Opinion archives:

Have students choose an editorial to read on their own or as a whole class. As they read, have them note:

What is the opinion or call to action in this editorial?

What evidence does it use to make its argument?

How persuasive do you find the editorial? Is it effective?

What do you notice about the language and tone of the editorial? About other choices the writer(s) have made?

Students may want make annotations or use highlighters as they read, then discuss their findings as a class.

Note: You may want students to look at the rubric you will be using to grade their editorials before they start the research and writing process. Here is our the rubric (PDF) that we are using for our Student Contest.
Step 3 | Researching: What Do the Experts Say?
Once students have selected a topic, they should begin their research by gathering background information. That might mean reading newspaper articles, consulting an encyclopedia, finding reliable websites or reaching out to an expert to make sure they have enough context about why their topic is important to write a strong persuasive essay.

As they do their research, students can take notes using index cards or in a notebook, or they can use our Debatable Issues (PDF) handout. Alternatively, if students plan to offer a solution to a problem in their editorial, they may want to use our Problem-Solution Organizer (PDF).

For more detail about the nitty-gritty of the research process, the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University provides a guide to conducting research that can be helpful with areas such as evaluating source reliability and doing Internet searches.

Students can find articles in The Times by using the search feature. For our contest, we ask that students have at least one Times and one non-Times source for their evidence, although of course we hope most will read far beyond that requirement as they learn about the topic.

Students might be grouped by common interests to work together during the research portion of this process, then write individual editorials, or they might do the entire assignment in partners or as a group.
Steps 4 and 5 | Outlining and Drafting; Revising and Editing: How Do You Write an Editorial?
Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor at The Times, explains in this brief video that a good editorial consists of "a clear position that is strongly and persuasively argued." He then goes on to recommend seven pointers for students.

1. Know your bottom line. "You have to know what you want to say. You have to have a clear opinion - what we call a bottom line."
2. Be concise. "You need to get to the point of your editorial quickly. You have to state it clearly and you have to be concise."
3. Give an opinion or solution. "There are basically two kinds of editorials. One expresses an opinion about a situation, like if you want to write about human rights abuses in some part of the world or the country that you're concerned about. The other kind of editorial proposes a solution to a specific problem. For example, if you want to write about traffic congestion in northern New Jersey, where I live and there's a lot of traffic, you should have an answer to how to fix the traffic problem."
4. Do your research. "Everyone is entitled to their opinion, you're not entitled to your own facts. Go online, make calls if you can, check your information, double-check it. There's nothing that will undermine your argument faster than a fact you got wrong, that you did not have to get wrong."
5. Write clearly. "Good writing is important. Make your writing clear and easy to understand. Write as if you're sending a letter to a well-informed friend who cares about what you think. But don't use any slang. OMG - no. Use examples whenever you can. It's better to use an example than just to use a word or an adjective that describes something. If you want to say that the mayor's pre-K policy is wrong, explain how - don't say it's just stupid. In fact, never use the word stupid."
6. Every writer needs an editor. "After you've written your editorial, give it to someone you trust to read and listen to what they say. If they don't understand it, that means it's probably not clear."
7. Be prepared for a reaction. "When you write something and you publish it, be prepared for a reaction. If you write a good editorial, people are going to respond to it. And if you criticize people, they definitely are going to respond. So if someone writes you a letter, write them back. Be prepared to defend your position. Don't get defensive, just explain why you said what you had to say. And if they question your facts, be ready to show that you were right."

The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University has a guide to writing argumentative essays that may also be helpful for students as they think about organizing their editorial and developing a logical argument.
Step 6 | Publishing: How Can My Editorial Reach an Audience?
Students will have the chance to publish their editorials as comments on the Learning Network on or before March 17, 2014, as part of our Student Contest. Along with our partner, the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University, we will then choose the best to publish in a separate post. But even if your students aren't writing for our contest, the genre is meant to have an audience. That audience can start with the teacher, but it ideally shouldn't end there.

Students can read their editorials to the class or in groups. Classmates can have a chance to respond to the author, leading to a discussion or debate. Students can try to publish their editorials in the school newspaper or other local newspapers or online forums. It is only when editorials reach a wider audience that they have the power to make change.

Teachers: How do you teach the persuasive essay? Let us know, below. And if you ever use The New York Times to do it, consider writing in to our Reader Ideas column.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
For the Sake of Argument: Writing Persuasively to Craft Short, Evidence-Based Editorials

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Overview | How can writing change people's worldview? How can it influence public opinion? How can it lead to meaningful action? The persuasive essay is a quintessential high school writing assignment.