# data[].attributes.headline
An Address to My Felllow Faculty Who Have Asked  Me to Speak About My Work

# data[].attributes.subject
An Address to My Felllow Faculty Who Have Asked  Me to Speak About My Work

# data[].attributes.body
by A. Patatya Bucak

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
My work is to write this sentence and revise it into that sentence. To take this word and replace it with that word.

My work is a novel I wrote from five to seven a.m. for more than two years and that will never be published.

My work is to be the person you trust to tell the truth, even though I am a known liar.

My work is to see who you are and who I think you could become. To notice the slate grey night lit by a full moon half behind a cloud. To know what it is to want more from someone than they are willing to give. To see the shadows cast by your secrets. To notice an ant that has drowned in a single drop of water in my sink.

My work is to explain my heart even though I cannot explain my heart. My work is to find the right word even though there is no right word.

My work is to remember that I always wanted to be a writer and that one day my father turned to a friend of his and said, "This is my daughter, she is trying to be a writer," and then he corrected himself and said, "She is a writer."

My work is to stop everything when a student-right in front of me-writes the line, "I think I would be a better dancer if only I had wings."

My work is to believe in grace even though I don't believe in God. To realize that all of my greatest fears are things that are definitely going to come true. My father will die, my mother will die, my brother will, my niece, my nephew, me.

My work is to pay attention when my mother says, "I cried all of my tears that first year I lived in Turkey." To pay attention when my mother says of her freshman roommate, "It was like Tigger rooming with Owl." To pay attention when my father says, "You should sit by my side and write down everything I say like the Prophet." To pay attention when my father says, "Chickens are braver than us." To pay attention when my nephew says to his sister, "All of your teeth are sweet teeth." To pay attention when my nephew says to me, "I'd like to see how long you'd last in Azkaban without a book."

My work is to tell you that without art we would be in a world without art.

My work is the blood on the heels of my socks in high school because I ran hard sometimes, but not always, so that my calluses came and went.

My work is to honor the glory of trash day, all of those cans lined up before dawn, an obedient nation in this one instance only.

My work is to believe in everybody's capacity for kindness.

My work is to believe in everybody's capacity for cruelty.

My work is the bird of dawn, the tale of my grief, the thief of love, the city of beauties, the nest of snakes, the helping animal, the animated doll, the transformative power of love, the juice of a single grape.

My work is to imagine a world without art so that there is never a world without art.

My work is to tell you this:

Years ago I was on the subway in Manhattan, and we stopped between stations, and the staticky voice came on the speaker and said there would be a delay of twenty minutes, and cursing ripped through the car, as if a tribe of the homeless mad had just swept into our presence. But then a young woman across from me took out a small pile of paper, and she started folding red origami swans, and each time she finished one, she handed it to one of us.

My work is my origami swans.

-

A. Papatya Bucak teaches in the MFA program at Florida Atlantic University. Her prose has been included in a variety of magazines, including Creative Nonfiction and The Normal School, and her short fiction has been selected for the O. Henry Prize Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies.
Photography by Liz Wuerffel

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
An Address to My Fellow Faculty Who Have Asked Me to Speak About My Work

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
My work is to write this sentence and revise it into that sentence. To take this word and replace it with that word. My work is a novel I wrote from five to seven a.m. for more than two years and that will never be published.

# data[].attributes.body
by Kristine Jepsen

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What do I need to know about jaw wiring?

This surgery, under general anesthesia, threads heavy-gauge wire around each of the teeth that survived a blow from your horse's hind hoof, after you fell off at dusk in mid-summer. You knew this could happen, given your inexperience. Slack in a horse's understanding of what you expect leaves ample rein for trouble.

The heavy wires will hold arch bars, like orthodontic braces, through which a second, lighter wire will be threaded top-to-bottom, stitching your upper jaw to your lower.

As a stern precaution, you will carry a pair of wire-cutters in the event of an emergency such as choking. Vomiting is not an emergency.

Note: Everything you learn here could be valuable if your husband says to you one night, out of the blue, his arm thrown over his eyes, where he lies beside you: "So, I haven't been true to you." You will press your hands along the condylar arms of your jaw and ask, through the ringing in your ears, "Wait. You have been? Or you haven't?"
What will happen during surgery?
Your healthcare provider(s) will guide the broken pieces back together and attach them by whatever means necessary to prevent you from moving them before they have healed.
What should I expect after jaw wiring?

When you wake up, you may not remember what has been done. The first thing to remind you will be the jagged edge of the broken molar, the one with two points missing and the enamel still flaking into the vault of your mouth, where your trapped tongue finds it, again and again.

Initially, you may have pain. Take prescribed medication as needed. Make sure you get food or a drink in your system before taking pain medication, as it can cause nausea.

It may be difficult to talk or be understood. You might find it easier to write or type on an electronic device.

You will consume only liquid foods-pureed to the clarity of broth-through a straw wedged between your molars and your cheek. Anything fibrous, such as a fleck of tomato skin, will clog the straw, or worse, catch in your wires like litter in a chain-link fence, sealing off air passage through your mouth. At times, the ache for some remembered texture will be so acute, you will stand with the refrigerator open, willing something more that you can swallow to appear. You may lose 10-15% of your body weight.

Your sleep may also be disrupted, as familiar positions may be painful.

What are the risks of jaw wiring?
You may be further damaged during the procedure, and you may not heal properly, even with this intervention.

Seek care immediately if you have:

Trouble breathing
Lightheadedness or shortness of breath
Discover your wires have come loose
Numbness
Pain that does not go away with medicine
When will healing be complete?
Your healthcare provider will remove your wires and arch bars when X-rays confirm your fracture has healed sufficiently, usually in 4-6 weeks. If you have healthy gums, your physician can pull out the heavy wires without anesthesia. This will cost thousands less than the recommended general anesthetic and will feel, at worst, like maniacal flossing.

Your physician may tell you, after it's over, that he would have chosen this method of removal for himself, and his confidence will make you smile-a nothing-but-teeth grin. You are cleared to get back in the saddle, too, he says. But you've already been at it, learning where your trust may have been faulty, where you need a firmer grip. You keep stumbling over bad behavior you accepted before and feeling out where your own habits allowed it.

The break itself, however, may not fully ossify for 4-6 months, perhaps a year. It will show up on X-rays for the rest of your life. You'll find, too, that the crown capping your broken molar will feel fake when you bite hard together, and your skull, under your fingers when you wash your hair, feels stretched in the direction of the blow. You will wonder if there's room, in the dark matter of your brain, for thoughts to circulate reliably or if they get hot and frantic as they squeeze too close to the point of impact.

The best practice, your physician will say, is to push yourself a little every day: Open as wide as you can, then a little wider.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What do I need to know about jaw wiring? This surgery, under general anesthesia, threads heavy-gauge wire around each of the teeth that survived a blow from your horse's hind hoof, after you fell off at dusk in mid-summer. You knew this could happen, given your inexperience.

# data[].attributes.body
by J.D. Schraffenberger

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Newborns can only see as far as the distance between their mother's nipples and her face. For weeks, touch is how they understand this bright new world. They feel the warm and the cold. They feel the suck of air scouring their flesh. Until the 1980s it was believed that babies didn't feel pain. When they required surgery, instead of anesthesia they were given muscle relaxers. They'd lie still and quiet, unable to move or cry as scalpels slipped their bodies open to the light of medical wisdom, a revelation of human anatomy in miniature.

* * *

In the Musti village of Solapur in western India, babies are dropped from the top of the temple's fifty-foot tower and then caught on an outstretched bed sheet held taut by a throng of dutiful and worshipful men below. The babies feel the quick, curious tug of gravity shift their newly churning organs. They feel the abrupt impact and rebound, the hard hands of men lifting and passing them back through the crowd toward their grateful mothers. It's a blessing, say the villagers, of good health and good luck.

* * *

The night my own baby cried through all my ritual efforts at rocking and bouncing and shushing and singing, she wouldn't take a bottle and wouldn't fall asleep. I shouted and shook her a little too forcefully and dropped her hard onto the new pink sheets of her crib.

I want to say it was only a few inches. I want to say I wasn't myself, but babies, especially your own, have a way of showing you exactly who you are, or at least what you're capable of in the middle of the night.

* * *

Every spring the villagers march together toward the temple tower singing and frantically playing their frame drums. It's a celebration, a festive moment for everyone. They've been dropping babies here for five hundred years, and it's said that not one of them has ever been hurt. They hold their babies out solemnly and let go. They offer them up, as we all must do, to the airy laws of chance.

* * *

The truth is I hadn't slept much. The truth is I just wanted to get some sleep.

* * *

When Michael Jackson dangled his new baby over a crowd of fans gathered below his hotel balcony in Berlin, he was laughing like a child himself, like it was a joke, just some silly dare. No one could see the baby's face hidden under the blanket, but his tiny, panicked legs kicked like a frog's before Michael hurried back inside. It was all so sudden and awkward. People chanted, "Hey Michael, meet the family!" until he emerged once more, hid his own face behind a sheer white curtain, and tossed the baby blanket down into the baffled crowd.

* * *

I hum another song into the warm, furled blossom of her left ear. I let the cool white noise of the vacuum cleaner crash over us like insistent waves. I rock in the chair until it seems we might lift into the inevitable flight of dreams.

* * *

Imagine the falling faces of these villagers' babies as their eyes go wild, and they open their writhing mouths to the faraway meaninglessness of the sky to make the only noise they know how.

I want to say the villagers are culturally backward. I want to say they're barbarous and superstitious. I want to say this ritual is another example of the stupid things a belief in god or gods compels otherwise reasonable people to do. But I know the truth is something else.

* * *

I swear it shut her up for a second, the shock of landing in the crib, but the surprise hovering in her eyes, like a sudden illumination of this dark new world, stripped all the hush of its silence.

J.D. Schraffenberger is the associate editor of the North American Review and an assistant professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the author of a book of poems, Saint Joe's Passion(Etruscan 2008), and his recent work appears or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Natural Bridge, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, and elsewhere. His essay "Full Gospel" appeared in Brevity 21 and Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 1.

Illustration by Marc Snyder

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Newborns can only see as far as the distance between their mother's nipples and her face. For weeks, touch is how they understand this bright new world. They feel the warm and the cold. They feel the suck of air scouring their flesh. Until the 1980s it was believed that babies didn't feel pain.

# data[].attributes.body
by Rachel Slivnick

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this informational text, Rachel Slivnick describes one of the planets in our Solar System, Venus.

# data[].attributes.body
by Brian Turner

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Did you know that the common housefly, like the one circling the room now in a wide, counter-clockwise circuit, hums in the key of F? It's true. They come in different sizes, of course, but their bodies scale so that the vibrations of their wings correlate to the pitch intervals in F major: F, G, A, B-flat, C, D, E. The octave above. Their wings are made for this.

I didn't know that back in 2015. There was so much I didn't know. That summer, I didn't know that you only had one year left to live. We stood beside each other in the tiny kitchen and prepared a dinner of rice and melted cheese, your favorite, as it reminded you of childhood, a rare pleasure from that time, and it helped ease the nausea from the row of pills you'd laid out on the table.

We told each other that we were living with cancer. That this was possible. The monsoon rains poured from the sky as thunder rolled over the peninsula from the Gulf Coast to the Atlantic Seaboard. We'd rented a cottage on our favorite beach, with sliding-glass doors opening onto a sandy path that wound through iceplant dunes and soon gave way to tufts of sea oats and, fifty meters out, the salt of the tide curling into the boom of the surf.

I drank from a bottle of coconut rum. The rum added a sugary sizzle to our lips when we kissed. I can feel the tips of my fingers at the small of your back even now. Your hair brushing the side of my cheek. The fragrance of your hair after floating in the warm waters of the gulf, hour after hour, earlier in the day. The salt of the ocean on your skin.

There were days like this. Whole afternoons lived in suspension. Floating. Ruin stalled-out and gliding on its own silence, somewhere off in the distance.

The housefly circles past and I've returned to another unlivable year, 2020, with this fly humming in B-flat as I stare out the kitchen window. Its flight-path is reminiscent of the Earth's orbit around the sun, and the note thrumming in the fly's wings has a bittersweet timbre to it. Vivaldi, I think. The Four Seasons. It was composed with the sound of flies written into a figuration of notes, in F major, maybe the only time flies have appeared in classical music. And this housefly, so singular in its hypnotic focus, banks around me as though trying to spin me backwards in time.

But that earlier fly, the one on the coast in our little love-nest on the ocean- that fly was drunk on the moment. Its wings hummed along to "The Girl from Ipanema" as it swooned its way through the damp ocean air, dizzy with circling two lovers who circled each other. With a lifespan of only fourteen days, it swam drunkenly around us as we danced in the kitchen and laughed, the thunder rolling over and past and on toward some day we hadn't landed in yet. Each grain of rice expanded with water as the heating element began to glow on the stove. Tree frogs sang to the storm outside. Inside, the two of us were multiplied in that fly's vision, as the common housefly has between 3,000 to 6,000 simple eyes that comprise each of their two complex eyes. So many versions of us walked barefoot through the doors and into the rain. Kissing each other. Dancing. Laughing. And that fly's tiny yet intricate brain gathered in each and every one of us. However incomplete. However fragmented. This a definition of love on planet Earth.

The fly would have these memories to think back on days later, when we packed up and drove home. That's when the fly, resting on the windowsill, stared at the blue-green swells of the ocean rolling in, the sound of it muffled by panes of glass. The muscles in its legs slumped forward, then gave out. And maybe that's when the fly remembered you saying that-as a young girl-you'd seen horses in the curling salt of the wave when it crashed, galloping toward shore. Uncountable horses. And when the fly looks for them, it's true, there they are-with manes of salt pulled back by the wind, the horses shoulder to shoulder, galloping in.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Did you know that the common housefly, like the one circling the room now in a wide, counter-clockwise circuit, hums in the key of F? It's true. They come in different sizes, of course, but their bodies scale so that the vibrations of their wings correlate to the pitch intervals in F major: F, G, A, B-flat, C, D, E.

# data[].attributes.body
from America's Library

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Susan B. Anthony: The female George Washington?

Susan B. Anthony Supports Women's Suffrage Amendment
March 8, 1884
You have probably heard about the new $1 coin with Sacajawea on it, but did you know that in 1979 the United States had another dollar coin? That year, the U.S. issued a silver coin worth $1 that had an image of Susan B. Anthony on one side. Who was Susan B. Anthony? Here's a hint: she helped pave the way to give American women the right to vote.

page 1 of 3

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Susan B. Anthony Supports Women's Suffrage Amendment

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Susan B. Anthony: The female George Washington? Susan B. Anthony Supports Women's Suffrage Amendment March 8, 1884 You have probably heard about the new $1 coin with Sacajawea on it, but did you know that in 1979 the United States had another dollar coin? That year, the U.S.

# data[].attributes.body
by Jason Huff

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Animagraphy

In 1904, Edward Sheriff Curtis took a photograph of Teddy Roosevelt. The photo shows him half in the light, against a dark background, pince-nez tethered to the shadows. Roosevelt stares directly into the lens-a boisterous presence more than a century later. He takes up most of the frame, crowding out the indistinguishable background. I wonder how long he held still for this simple picture, how long the chemical processes took to capture his presence.

Curtis also took many portraits of Native Americans against empty backgrounds, lonely landscapes, the void. The backgrounds make the subjects lonely, as if the last Native Americans on Earth, fighting against the inevitable, in sepia tones. Curtis's images have been criticized for the racism of pretending Native Americans no longer exist, or cannot survive, because of the superiority of white men. He was also known to bring costumes to make the pictures more authentic to the white idea of the indigenous people, dismissing the reality. The criticism is fair and accurate. But his images also allow for enormous amounts of detail. The people he photographed pop out of the frame because nothing else exists. In that time, photographs were developed on glass plates treated with silver salts, then exposed to light. They could be either wet or dry. Curtis used dry plates. When Curtis lived, glass plates only needed a second of exposure to achieve the desired result, but there was a time when the process could take several seconds. Even a minute. Can you imagine sitting perfectly still, looking in that glass eye for a minute?

As an autistic person, I appreciate the lack of noise in Curtis's photographs, the focus.

"People once believed taking a photograph was capturing a part of the soul." I think white people love to say this because it makes them feel superior to those they view as "savage" or "uncivilized."

I do believe that though. Photography captures a bit of soul one fragment of a second at a time. But why is that bad? Perhaps the soul is infinite. Perhaps photography lets us share our soul with others. That's why I take so many photos of my son. I want to capture every bit of soul he will give me.

My grandfather died weeks before my 26th birthday. I still remember the stillness of his face. In Latin, the closest translation of soul is animus which gives us animate. His soul left him unanimated. My father and I had the job of categorizing and distributing everything he left behind. At the time, he owned around 20 cameras. These cameras ranged from a Kodak Brownie he used to take pictures of his time in the Army in occupied Germany, to his first Nikon digital camera. When my father and I sifted through the remains of his life at his house in Amarillo, I was surprised at the obvious love for photography.

My father asked, "Where do you think I got it from?" Love of photography bequeathed to me by my father, bequeathed to him by his father. My father took some of the cameras for himself then gave the rest to me.

I don't remember the first time I saw my grandfather's hand shaking. They called it a benign tremor. A tremor would cause trouble when taking a photograph.

Technology is part voodoo and part science. The more science you know, the less voodoo. The more voodoo you see, the less you care about the science. But always a balance; never is technology 100% one way or the other. A friend I worked with at a doomed computer company told me about this when I was 25 and new to Boulder. I still think about it. I think about how we pray to computers, how we ritualize computers, how we use computers for revenge. Computers have become shrines in our homes. If we have questions, we don't ask a priest, we ask Google. We capture images on computer chips specially designed to take in light and create an image. Photography means "writing with light" because the light writes an image on a film with a light-sensitive chemical emulsion. Now it's all computers. But still magic.

My hands shake when I'm overwhelmed emotionally, an inability to be still. This is my autism.

In 2009, I struggled to look people in the eye. When my grandfather was dying, I flew to Amarillo while magic I didn't understand kept him alive in a hospital bed for as long as possible. The cancer ate almost all of him. Growing up he commanded any room he walked into. Even looking back now, he reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt. That presence: larger than life, boisterous, strong. In that hospital bed, he'd lost almost every ounce of fat and muscle. His eyes sunken and glassy, his tremor undeniable as he struggled to lift his head to look me in the eye. I tried-I really did-to stay still, to match his gaze. I could only stand a fraction of a second before I turned away. He died right after I left the room, as if he had been holding on to get one last look at me. I hated myself for being unable to look at him. But now I wonder if a fraction of a second was enough to capture a bit of his soul.

Jason Huff (he/him/they/them) is an MA candidate at the University of North Texas and lives in Denton with his wife, two children, and their cat. This is his first publication.

... return to Issue 12.3 Table of Contents.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 1904, Edward Sheriff Curtis took a photograph of Teddy Roosevelt. The photo shows him half in the light, against a dark background, pince-nez tethered to the shadows. Roosevelt stares directly into the lens-a boisterous presence more than a century later. He takes up most of the frame, crowding out the indistinguishable background.

# data[].attributes.body
by David Sedaris

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
WHEN MY FAMILY FIRST MOVED to North Carolina, we lived in a rented house three blocks from the school where I would begin the third grade. My mother made friends with one of the neighbors, but one seemed enough for her. Within a year we would move again and, as she explained, there wasn't much point in getting too close to people we would have to say good-bye to. Our next house was less than a mile away, and the short journey would hardly merit tears or even good-byes, for that matter. It was more of a "see you later" situation, but still I adopted my mother's attitude, as it allowed me to pretend that not making friends was a conscious choice. I could if I wanted to. It just wasn't the right time.

Back in New York State, we had lived in the country, with no sidewalks or streetlights; you could leave the house and still be alone. But here, when you looked out the window, you saw other houses, and people inside those houses. I hoped that in walking around after dark I might witness a murder, but for the most part our neighbors just sat in their living rooms, watching TV. The only place that seemed truly different was owned by a man named Mr. Tomkey, who did not believe in television. This was told to us by our mother's friend, who dropped by one afternoon with a basketful of okra. The woman did not editorializerather, she just presented her information, leaving her listener to make of it what she might. Had my mother said, "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard in my life," I assume that the friend would have agreed, and had she said, "Three cheers for Mr. Tomkey," the friend likely would have agreed as well. It was a kind of test, as was the okra.

To say that you did not believe in television was different from saying that you did not care for it. Belief implied that television had a master plan and that you were against it. It also suggested that you thought too much. When my mother reported that Mr. Tomkey did not believe in television, my father said, "Well, good for him. I don't know that I believe in it, either."

"That's exactly how I feel," my mother said, and then my parents watched the news, and whatever came on after the news.

Word spread that Mr. Tomkey did not own a television, and you began hearing that while this was all very well and good, it was unfair of him to inflict his beliefs upon others, specifically his innocent wife and children. It was speculated that just as the blind man develops a keener sense of hearing, the family must somehow compensate for their loss. "Maybe they read," my mother's friend said. "Maybe they listen to the radio, but you can bet your boots they're doing something."

I wanted to know what this something was, and so I began peering through the Tomkeys' windows. During the day I'd stand across the street from their house, acting as though I were waiting for someone, and at night, when the view was better and I had less chance of being discovered, I would creep into their yard and hide in the bushes beside their fence.

Because they had no TV, the Tomkeys were forced to talk during dinner. They had no idea how puny their lives were, and so they were not ashamed that a camera would have found them uninteresting. They did not know what attractive was or what dinner was supposed to look like or even what time people were supposed to eat. Sometimes they wouldn't sit down until eight o'clock, long after everyone else had finished doing the dishes. During the meal, Mr. Tomkey would occasionally pound the table and point at his children with a fork, but the moment he finished, everyone would start laughing. I got the idea that he was imitating someone else, and wondered if he spied on us while we were eating.

When fall arrived and school began, I saw the Tomkey children marching up the hill with paper sacks in their hands. The son was one grade lower than me, and the daughter was one grade higher. We never spoke, but I'd pass them in the halls from time to time and attempt to view the world through their eyes. What must it be like to be so ignorant and alone? Could a normal person even imagine it? Staring at an Elmer Fudd lunch box, I tried to divorce myself from everything I already knew: Elmer's inability to pronounce the letter r, his constant pursuit of an intelligent and considerably more famous rabbit. I tried to think of him as just a drawing, but it was impossible to separate him from his celebrity.

One day in class a boy named William began to write the wrong answer on the blackboard, and our teacher flailed her arms, saying, "Warning, Will. Danger, danger." Her voice was synthetic and void of emotion, and we laughed, knowing that she was imitating the robot in a weekly show about a family who lived in outer space. The Tomkeys, though, would have thought she was having a heart attack. It occurred to me that they needed a guide, someone who could accompany them through the course of an average day and point out all the things they were unable to understand. I could have done it on weekends, but friendship would have taken away their mystery and interfered with the good feeling I got from pitying them. So I kept my distance.

In early October the Tomkeys bought a boat, and everyone seemed greatly relieved, especially my mother's friend, who noted that the motor was definitely secondhand. It was reported that Mr. Tomkey's father-in-law owned a house on the lake and had invited the family to use it whenever they liked. This explained why they were gone all weekend, but it did not make their absences any easier to bear. I felt as if my favorite show had been canceled.

Halloween fell on a Saturday that year, and by the time my mother took us to the store, all the good costumes were gone. My sisters dressed as witches and I went as a hobo. I'd looked forward to going in disguise to the Tomkeys' door, but they were off at the lake, and their house was dark. Before leaving, they had left a coffee can full of gumdrops on the front porch, alongside a sign reading DON'T BE GREEDY. In terms of Halloween candy, individual gumdrops were just about as low as you could get. This was evidenced by the large number of them floating in an adjacent dog bowl. It was disgusting to think that this was what a gumdrop might look like in your stomach, and it was insulting to be told not to take too much of something you didn't really want in the first place. "Who do these Tomkeys think they are?" my sister Lisa said.

The night after Halloween, we were sitting around watching TV when the doorbell rang. Visitors were infrequent at our house, so while my father stayed behind, my mother, sisters, and I ran downstairs in a group, opening the door to discover the entire Tomkey family on our front stoop. The parents looked as they always had, but the son and daughter were dressed in costumesshe as a ballerina and he as some kind of a rodent with terry-cloth ears and a tail made from what looked to be an extension cord. It seemed they had spent the previous evening isolated at the lake and had missed the opportunity to observe Halloween. "So, well, I guess we're trick-or-treating now, if that's okay," Mr. Tomkey said.

I attributed their behavior to the fact that they didn't have a TV, but television didn't teach you everything. Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable. This was one of the things you were supposed to learn simply by being alive, and it angered me that the Tomkeys did not understand it.

"Why of course it's not too late," my mother said. "Kids, why don't you . . . run and get . . . the candy."

"But the candy is gone," my sister Gretchen said. "You gave it away last night."

"Not that candy," my mother said. "The other candy. Why don't you run and go get it?"

"You mean our candy?" Lisa said. "The candy that we earned?"

This was exactly what our mother was talking about, but she didn't want to say this in front of the Tomkeys. In order to spare their feelings, she wanted them to believe that we always kept a bucket of candy lying around the house, just waiting for someone to knock on the door and ask for it. "Go on, now," she said. "Hurry up."

My room was situated right off the foyer, and if the Tomkeys had looked in that direction, they could have seen my bed and the brown paper bag marked MY CANDY. KEEP OUT. I didn't want them to know how much I had, and so I went into my room and shut the door behind me. Then I closed the curtains and emptied my bag onto the bed, searching for whatever was the crummiest. All my life chocolate has made me ill. I don't know if I'm allergic or what, but even the smallest amount leaves me with a blinding headache. Eventually, I learned to stay away from it, but as a child I refused to be left out. The brownies were eaten, and when the pounding began I would blame the grape juice or my mother's cigarette smoke or the tightness of my glassesanything but the chocolate. My candy bars were poison but they were brand-name, and so I put them in pile no. 1, which definitely would not go to the Tomkeys.

Out in the hallway I could hear my mother straining for something to talk about. "A boat!" she said. "That sounds marvelous. Can you just drive it right into the water?"

"Actually, we have a trailer," Mr. Tomkey said. "So what we do is back it into the lake."

"Oh, a trailer. What kind is it?"

"Well, it's a boat trailer," Mr. Tomkey said.

"Right, but is it wooden or, you know . . . I guess what I'm asking is what style trailer do you have?"

Behind my mother's words were two messages. The first and most obvious was "Yes, I am talking about boat trailers, but also I am dying." The second, meant only for my sisters and me, was "If you do not immediately step forward with that candy, you will never again experience freedom, happiness, or the possibility of my warm embrace."

I knew that it was just a matter of time before she came into my room and started collecting the candy herself, grabbing indiscriminately, with no regard to my rating system. Had I been thinking straight, I would have hidden the most valuable items in my dresser drawer, but instead, panicked by the thought of her hand on my doorknob, I tore off the wrappers and began cramming the candy bars into my mouth, desperately, like someone in a contest. Most were miniature, which made them easier to accommodate, but still there was only so much room, and it was hard to chew and fit more in at the same time. The headache began immediately, and I chalked it up to tension.

My mother told the Tomkeys she needed to check on something, and then she opened the door and stuck her head inside my room. "What the hell are you doing?" she whispered, but my mouth was too full to answer. "I'll just be a moment," she called, and as she closed the door behind her and moved toward my bed, I began breaking the wax lips and candy necklaces pulled from pile no. 2. These were the second-best things I had received, and while it hurt to destroy them, it would have hurt even more to give them away. I had just started to mutilate a miniature box of Red Hots when my mother pried them from my hands, accidentally finishing the job for me. BB-size pellets clattered onto the floor, and as I followed them with my eyes, she snatched up a roll of Necco wafers.

"Not those," I pleaded, but rather than words, my mouth expelled chocolate, chewed chocolate, which fell onto the sleeve of her sweater. "Not those. Not those."

She shook her arm, and the mound of chocolate dropped like a horrible turd upon my bedspread. "You should look at yourself," she said. "I mean, really look at yourself."

Along with the Necco wafers she took several Tootsie Pops and half a dozen caramels wrapped in cellophane. I heard her apologize to the Tomkeys for her absence, and then I heard my candy hitting the bottom of their bags.

"What do you say?" Mrs. Tomkey asked.

And the children answered, "Thank you."

While I was in trouble for not bringing my candy sooner, my sisters were in more trouble for not bringing theirs at all. We spent the early part of the evening in our rooms, then one by one we eased our way back upstairs, and joined our parents in front of the TV. I was the last to arrive, and took a seat on the floor beside the sofa. The show was a Western, and even if my head had not been throbbing, I doubt I would have had the wherewithal to follow it. A posse of outlaws crested a rocky hilltop, squinting at a flurry of dust advancing from the horizon, and I thought again of the Tomkeys and of how alone and out of place they had looked in their dopey costumes. "What was up with that kid's tail?" I asked.

"Shhhh," my family said.

For months I had protected and watched over these people, but now, with one stupid act, they had turned my pity into something hard and ugly. The shift wasn't gradual, but immediate, and it provoked an uncomfortable feeling of loss. We hadn't been friends, the Tomkeys and I, but still I had given them the gift of my curiosity. Wondering about the Tomkey family had made me feel generous, but now I would have to shift gears and find pleasure in hating them. The only alternative was to do as my mother had instructed and take a good look at myself. This was an old trick, designed to turn one's hatred inward, and while I was determined not to fall for it, it was hard to shake the mental picture snapped by her suggestion: here is a boy sitting on a bed, his mouth smeared with chocolate. He's a human being, but also he's a pig, surrounded by trash and gorging himself so that others may be denied. Were this the only image in the world, you'd be forced to give it your full attention, but fortunately there were others. This stagecoach, for instance, coming round the bend with a cargo of gold. This shiny new Mustang convertible. This teenage girl, her hair a beautiful mane, sipping Pepsi through a straw, one picture after another, on and on until the news, and whatever came on after the news.

Copyright 2004 by David Sedaris

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Read 'Us and Them', an excerpt from 'Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.'

# data[].attributes.body
excerpts from Barack Obama

# data[].attributes.body
by Beth Ann Fennelly

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We didn't question. Or complain. It wouldn't have occurred to us, and it wouldn't have helped. I was eight. Julie was ten.

We didn't know yet that this blizzard would earn itself a moniker that would be silk-screened on T-shirts. We would own such a shirt, which extended its tenure in our house as a rag for polishing silver.

So I didn't make up the blizzard, though it sounds made up, the grimmest of Grimms, windchill forty below, three feet of snow and snow still falling. You had to shovel your drive daily. Later, a neighbor would tell of coming home after two nights away and having to dig down a foot to reach his own keyhole.

My dad had a snow blower, which spewed sheets of snow out of the side of its mouth. Sheets became mountains, and mountains became walls on either side of our front path, reaching almost to the sky. I could still view sky by tipping my head back, but seeing it was no relief because the sky was snow-white, tearing itself into pieces and hurling them at us.

And then the world began shutting down. The airports, which was bad because Mom was in Toronto, visiting her sister. The schools, which was great for the first day, and good for the second, and then less good and less good yet. Because the roads were impossible; the fridge, emptying. Does this smell OK to you? Couldn't watch Little House because Channel 5 covered the blizzard all day. A motorist, dead of exposure in a stranded car. A man, dead of a heart attack while shoveling snow; ambulance couldn't reach him. Coat drive, shelters for the homeless. Check in on your elderly neighbors, folks. If you can get out, that is. Amtrak trains abandoned. Hundreds of cars lining the highway, buried by snow, white lumps pierced by antennas. Family of five, killed when their roof collapsed. We were a family of four, but with Mom far away, we were only three. I got out of the bathtub to answer her crackling long-distance call.

Then it was Sunday, so Dad said get ready for mass. We didn't question. He helped us tug and wriggle into our snowsuits, and we slid our feet into plastic bread bags before yanking on our boots. He pushed open the door into the shrieking tunnel of white. We trudged between the walls of snow to the unplowed road. Follow me, Dad said. Step where I'm stepping; this part will hold our weight. Except sometimes we couldn't match his stride, or the snow wouldn't hold our weight and Julie's boot or my boot would crunch through crust and we'd plummet to the groin, feeling nothing below but more snow. On the count of three, Dad said, and hoisted us out, and we battled on, snow melting into our boots, heads lowered against the wind. When we reached the plowed road, we scrambled down, easier walking. I couldn't tell how far we had to go. It hurt to look up.

At last, the dark church loomed. We climbed the stone steps to the doors. Locked. My father raised his gloved fist and knocked. He must have known, even as he knocked, but still he knocked. There was no sign on the door saying that mass was cancelled. But why should the priests post a sign? Probably they couldn't even get out of the rectory themselves.

Righteo, said my father, slowly turning back the way we had come. Righteo. Whatever he felt then-gazing out over the tundra, the alien tundra, all the mailboxes and road signs and newspaper vending machines and parking meters blighted and buried-wasn't something he shared. What he shared was, Home again, home again, jiggety jig.

We descended the steps, back into the scouring wind. I knew now that white hurt worse than red. Where was everybody? Elderly couple, found in their basement, dead of hypothermia. Fourteen-year-old boy, poisoned by carbon monoxide as he sat in a running car his dad was trying to dig out from a snow bank. Another shoveler's heart attack. Volunteers with snowmobiles taking doctors to hospitals.

Every part of my body was scalding cold, but one part scalded coldest: my neck, my plump child's neck. The wind was wily, cupping my lowered chin and arrowing along the inch of skin before my parka's zipper. The wind, like a squirrel wielding knives. How much farther? I tried to step where my father was stepping. I tried to use his body as a shield. Family of three or four, frozen dead on the road, hadn't even gone to mass. It was a sin to skip mass. If you were a sinner when you died, you went to hell.

Finally, I did it, the thing I'd been contemplating for the last half mile. I shouted at my dad's back, asking for his scarf. I didn't want to ask. I wasn't a child who asked. And I knew he must be cold, too. Yet I asked, and when I did, he turned, already unwrapping his red-and-black striped scarf. He squatted and tied it around my neck, he wound it once, he wound it twice, he wound it three times, he smiled at me, his handsome Black Irish smile, and behind his scarf, which covered my neck all the way to the tip of my nose, I smiled, too. And thought I might make it, after all.

Why are people nervous about becoming parents? Children are so gullible. So stupid. For years, I'd think of this as a happy memory, my father snugging his scarf around my neck.

But eventually I corrected myself. First, I heard my parents' late-night argument, the barb about Dad dragging us to church in a blizzard, over two miles round trip. And in time, I recognized the catholicism of my father's rigidity, the Victorian strictures of our house. And eventually, I realized that if he were going to foot-slog us through a blizzard, he should have damn sure dressed us in scarves.

And so, with each year, with each time my thoughts are blown back to the Blizzard of '79, I unwind that scarf, unwind its loops around my neck. With my self-pity I unwind it; with my self-righteousness I unwind it; even with the care I take dressing my own soft children, I unwind it. The very care I take- Here are your mittens, kitten; here are your warmest socks -is a reprimand, and then the scarf is off my neck. Yet still I worry it: I pull out the threads, pluck and pull and release them to the wind, the wind that shall never again find the neck of my father, my handsome father, for he is shielded from it, as he is shielded from me, for he is below the earth and has been for years and cares not for the ways I remember him, or remember remembering him.
* Illustration by Seth LeDonne
Did you enjoy this essay? There's more where that came from. Less than 10% of CNF's content is available online. Don't miss a word of the best true stories, well told.
Subscribe today ››

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We didn't question. Or complain. It wouldn't have occurred to us, and it wouldn't have helped. I was eight. Julie was ten. We didn't know yet that this blizzard would earn itself a moniker that would be silk-screened on T-shirts. We would own such a shirt, which extended its tenure in our house as a rag for polishing silver.

# data[].attributes.body
by Maria Fernnanda Benavides

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Annotated by the Author: ‘Speechless’ (Published 2020)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Maria Fernanda Benavides, a winner of our 2019 Personal Narrative Contest, tells us how she hooks readers by dropping them into a scene.

# data[].attributes.body
by Arthur Miller

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An artist's answer to politics.

As I watched "The Crucible" taking shape as a movie over much of the past year, the sheer depth of time that it represents for me kept returning to mind. As those powerful actors blossomed on the screen, and the children and the horses, the crowds and the wagons, I thought again about how I came to cook all this up nearly fifty years ago, in an America almost nobody I know seems to remember clearly. In a way, there is a biting irony in this film's having been made by a Hollywood studio, something unimaginable in the fifties. But there they are-Daniel Day-Lewis (John Proctor) scything his sea-bordered field, Joan Allen (Elizabeth) lying pregnant in the frigid jail, Winona Ryder (Abigail) stealing her minister-uncle's money, majestic Paul Scofield (Judge Danforth) and his righteous empathy with the Devil-possessed children, and all of them looking as inevitable as rain.

I remember those years-they formed "The Crucible" 's skeleton-but I have lost the dead weight of the fear I had then. Fear doesn't travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory's truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next. I remember how in 1964, only twenty years after the war, Harold Clurman, the director of "Incident at Vichy," showed the cast a film of a Hitler speech, hoping to give them a sense of the Nazi period in which my play took place. They watched as Hitler, facing a vast stadium full of adoring people, went up on his toes in ecstasy, hands clasped under his chin, a sublimely self-gratified grin on his face, his body swivelling rather cutely, and they giggled at his overacting.

Likewise, films of Senator Joseph McCarthy are rather unsettling-if you remember the fear he once spread. Buzzing his truculent sidewalk brawler's snarl through the hairs in his nose, squinting through his cat's eyes and sneering like a villain, he comes across now as nearly comical, a self-aware performer keeping a straight face as he does his juicy threat-shtick.

McCarthy's power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not entirely based on illusion, of course; the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact. From being our wartime ally, the Soviet Union rapidly became an expanding empire. In 1949, Mao Zedong took power in China. Western Europe also seemed ready to become Red-especially Italy, where the Communist Party was the largest outside Russia, and was growing. Capitalism, in the opinion of many, myself included, had nothing more to say, its final poisoned bloom having been Italian and German Fascism. McCarthy-brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true-boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had "lost China" and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department-staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents-was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that.

If our losing China seemed the equivalent of a flea's losing an elephant, it was still a phrase-and a conviction-that one did not dare to question; to do so was to risk drawing suspicion on oneself. Indeed, the State Department proceeded to hound and fire the officers who knew China, its language, and its opaque culture-a move that suggested the practitioners of sympathetic magic who wring the neck of a doll in order to make a distant enemy's head drop off. There was magic all around; the politics of alien conspiracy soon dominated political discourse and bid fair to wipe out any other issue. How could one deal with such enormities in a play?

"The Crucible" was an act of desperation. Much of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a typical Depression-era trauma-the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power. But by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors' violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.

In any play, however trivial, there has to be a still point of moral reference against which to gauge the action. In our lives, in the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties, no such point existed anymore. The left could not look straight at the Soviet Union's abrogations of human rights. The anti-Communist liberals could not acknowledge the violations of those rights by congressional committees. The far right, meanwhile, was licking up all the cream. The days of " J'accuse " were gone, for anyone needs to feel right to declare someone else wrong. Gradually, all the old political and moral reality had melted like a Dali watch. Nobody but a fanatic, it seemed, could really say all that he believed.

President Truman was among the first to have to deal with the dilemma, and his way of resolving it-of having to trim his sails before the howling gale on the right-turned out to be momentous. At first, he was outraged at the allegation of widespread Communist infiltration of the government and called the charge of "coddling Communists" a red herring dragged in by the Republicans to bring down the Democrats. But such was the gathering power of raw belief in the great Soviet plot that Truman soon felt it necessary to institute loyalty boards of his own.

The Red hunt, led by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and by McCarthy, was becoming the dominating fixation of the American psyche. It reached Hollywood when the studios, after first resisting, agreed to submit artists' names to the House Committee for "clearing" before employing them. This unleashed a veritable holy terror among actors, directors, and others, from Party members to those who had had the merest brush with a front organization.

The Soviet plot was the hub of a great wheel of causation; the plot justified the crushing of all nuance, all the shadings that a realistic judgment of reality requires. Even worse was the feeling that our sensitivity to this onslaught on our liberties was passing from us-indeed, from me. In "Timebends," my autobiography, I recalled the time I'd written a screenplay ("The Hook") about union corruption on the Brooklyn waterfront. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, did something that would once have been considered unthinkable: he showed my script to the F.B.I. Cohn then asked me to take the gangsters in my script, who were threatening and murdering their opponents, and simply change them to Communists. When I declined to commit this idiocy (Joe Ryan, the head of the longshoremen's union, was soon to go to Sing Sing for racketeering), I got a wire from Cohn saying, "The minute we try to make the script pro-American you pull out." By then-it was 1951-I had come to accept this terribly serious insanity as routine, but there was an element of the marvellous in it which I longed to put on the stage.

In those years, our thought processes were becoming so magical, so paranoid, that to imagine writing a play about this environment was like trying to pick one's teeth with a ball of wool: I lacked the tools to illuminate miasma. Yet I kept being drawn back to it.

I had read about the witchcraft trials in college, but it was not until I read a book published in 1867-a two-volume, thousand-page study by Charles W. Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem-that I knew I had to write about the period. Upham had not only written a broad and thorough investigation of what was even then an almost lost chapter of Salem's past but opened up to me the details of personal relationships among many participants in the tragedy.

I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952; it was a sidetracked town then, with abandoned factories and vacant stores. In the gloomy courthouse there I read the transcripts of the witchcraft trials of 1692, as taken down in a primitive shorthand by ministers who were spelling each other. But there was one entry in Upham in which the thousands of pieces I had come across were jogged into place. It was from a report written by the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch-hunt. "During the examination of Elizabeth Procter, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam"-the two were "afflicted" teen-age accusers, and Abigail was Parris's niece-"both made offer to strike at said Procter; but when Abigail's hand came near, it opened, whereas it was made up into a fist before, and came down exceeding lightly as it drew near to said Procter, and at length, with open and extended fingers, touched Procter's hood very lightly. Immediately Abigail cried out her fingers, her fingers, her fingers burned. . . ."

In this remarkably observed gesture of a troubled young girl, I believed, a play became possible. Elizabeth Proctor had been the orphaned Abigail's mistress, and they had lived together in the same small house until Elizabeth fired the girl. By this time, I was sure, John Proctor had bedded Abigail, who had to be dismissed most likely to appease Elizabeth. There was bad blood between the two women now. That Abigail started, in effect, to condemn Elizabeth to death with her touch, then stopped her hand, then went through with it, was quite suddenly the human center of all this turmoil.

All this I understood. I had not approached the witchcraft out of nowhere, or from purely social and political considerations. My own marriage of twelve years was teetering and I knew more than I wished to know about where the blame lay. That John Proctor the sinner might overturn his paralyzing personal guilt and become the most forthright voice against the madness around him was a reassurance to me, and, I suppose, an inspiration: it demonstrated that a clear moral outcry could still spring even from an ambiguously unblemished soul. Moving crabwise across the profusion of evidence, I sensed that I had at last found something of myself in it, and a play began to accumulate around this man.

But as the dramatic form became visible, one problem remained unyielding: so many practices of the Salem trials were similar to those employed by the congressional committees that I could easily be accused of skewing history for a mere partisan purpose. Inevitably, it was no sooner known that my new play was about Salem than I had to confront the charge that such an analogy was specious-that there never were any witches but there certainly are Communists. In the seventeenth century, however, the existence of witches was never questioned by the loftiest minds in Europe and America; and even lawyers of the highest eminence, like Sir Edward Coke, a veritable hero of liberty for defending the common law against the king's arbitrary power, believed that witches had to be prosecuted mercilessly. Of course, there were no Communists in 1692, but it was literally worth your life to deny witches or their powers, given the exhortation in the Bible, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." There had to be witches in the world or the Bible lied. Indeed, the very structure of evil depended on Lucifer's plotting against God. (And the irony is that klatches of Luciferians exist all over the country today; there may even be more of them now than there are Communists.)

As with most humans, panic sleeps in one unlighted corner of my soul. When I walked at night along the empty, wet streets of Salem in the week that I spent there, I could easily work myself into imagining my terror before a gaggle of young girls flying down the road screaming that somebody's "familiar spirit" was chasing them. This anxiety-laden leap backward over nearly three centuries may have been helped along by a particular Upham footnote. At a certain point, the high court of the province made the fatal decision to admit, for the first time, the use of "spectral evidence" as proof of guilt. Spectral evidence, so aptly named, meant that if I swore that you had sent out your "familiar spirit" to choke, tickle, or poison me or my cattle, or to control my thoughts and actions, I could get you hanged unless you confessed to having had contact with the Devil. After all, only the Devil could lend such powers of invisible transport to confederates, in his everlasting plot to bring down Christianity.

Naturally, the best proof of the sincerity of your confession was your naming others whom you had seen in the Devil's company-an invitation to private vengeance, but made official by the seal of the theocratic state. It was as though the court had grown tired of thinking and had invited in the instincts: spectral evidence-that poisoned cloud of paranoid fantasy-made a kind of lunatic sense to them, as it did in plot-ridden 1952, when so often the question was not the acts of an accused but the thoughts and intentions in his alienated mind.

The breathtaking circularity of the process had a kind of poetic tightness. Not everybody was accused, after all, so there must be some reason why you were. By denying that there is any reason whatsoever for you to be accused, you are implying, by virtue of a surprisingly small logical leap, that mere chance picked you out, which in turn implies that the Devil might not really be at work in the village or, God forbid, even exist. Therefore, the investigation itself is either mistaken or a fraud. You would have to be a crypto-Luciferian to say that-not a great idea if you wanted to go back to your farm.

The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal. When Gentiles in Hitler's Germany, for example, saw their Jewish neighbors being trucked off, or farmers in Soviet Ukraine saw the Kulaks vanishing before their eyes, the common reaction, even among those unsympathetic to Nazism or Communism, was quite naturally to turn away in fear of being identified with the condemned. As I learned from non-Jewish refugees, however, there was often a despairing pity mixed with "Well, they must have done something." Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

I was also drawn into writing "The Crucible" by the chance it gave me to use a new language-that of seventeenth-century New England. That plain, craggy English was liberating in a strangely sensuous way, with its swings from an almost legalistic precision to a wonderful metaphoric richness. "The Lord doth terrible things amongst us, by lengthening the chain of the roaring lion in an extraordinary manner, so that the Devil is come down in great wrath," Deodat Lawson, one of the great witch-hunting preachers, said in a sermon. Lawson rallied his congregation for what was to be nothing less than a religious war against the Evil One-"Arm, arm, arm!"-and his concealed anti-Christian accomplices.

But it was not yet my language, and among other strategies to make it mine I enlisted the help of a former University of Michigan classmate, the Greek-American scholar and poet Kimon Friar. (He later translated Kazantzakis.) The problem was not to imitate the archaic speech but to try to create a new echo of it which would flow freely off American actors' tongues. As in the film, nearly fifty years later, the actors in the first production grabbed the language and ran with it as happily as if it were their customary speech.

"The Crucible" took me about a year to write. With its five sets and a cast of twenty-one, it never occurred to me that it would take a brave man to produce it on Broadway, especially given the prevailing climate, but Kermit Bloomgarden never faltered. Well before the play opened, a strange tension had begun to build. Only two years earlier, the "Death of a Salesman" touring company had played to a thin crowd in Peoria, Illinois, having been boycotted nearly to death by the American Legion and the Jaycees. Before that, the Catholic War Veterans had prevailed upon the Army not to allow its theatrical groups to perform, first, "All My Sons," and then any play of mine, in occupied Europe. The Dramatists Guild refused to protest attacks on a new play by Sean O'Casey, a self-declared Communist, which forced its producer to cancel his option. I knew of two suicides by actors depressed by upcoming investigation, and every day seemed to bring news of people exiling themselves to Europe: Charlie Chaplin, the director Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler, Donald Ogden Stewart, one of the most sought-after screenwriters in Hollywood, and Sam Wanamaker, who would lead the successful campaign to rebuild the Old Globe Theatre on the Thames.

On opening night, January 22, 1953, I knew that the atmosphere would be pretty hostile. The coldness of the crowd was not a surprise; Broadway audiences were not famous for loving history lessons, which is what they made of the play. It seems to me entirely appropriate that on the day the play opened, a newspaper headline read "ALL THIRTEEN REDS GUILTY"-a story about American Communists who faced prison for "conspiring to teach and advocate the duty and necessity of forcible overthrow of government." Meanwhile, the remoteness of the production was guaranteed by the director, Jed Harris, who insisted that this was a classic requiring the actors to face front, never each other. The critics were not swept away. "Arthur Miller is a problem playwright in both senses of the word," wrote Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune, who called the play "a step backward into mechanical parable." The Times was not much kinder, saying, "There is too much excitement and not enough emotion in 'The Crucible.' " But the play's future would turn out quite differently.

About a year later, a new production, one with younger, less accomplished actors, working in the Martinique Hotel ballroom, played with the fervor that the script and the times required, and "The Crucible" became a hit. The play stumbled into history, and today, I am told, it is one of the most heavily demanded trade-fiction paperbacks in this country; the Bantam and Penguin editions have sold more than six million copies. I don't think there has been a week in the past forty-odd years when it hasn't been on a stage somewhere in the world. Nor is the new screen version the first. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his Marxist phase, wrote a French film adaptation that blamed the tragedy on the rich landowners conspiring to persecute the poor. (In truth, most of those who were hanged in Salem were people of substance, and two or three were very large landowners.)

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, especially in Latin America, "The Crucible" starts getting produced wherever a political coup appears imminent, or a dictatorial regime has just been overthrown. From Argentina to Chile to Greece, Czechoslovakia, China, and a dozen other places, the play seems to present the same primeval structure of human sacrifice to the furies of fanaticism and paranoia that goes on repeating itself forever as though imbedded in the brain of social man.

I am not sure what "The Crucible" is telling people now, but I know that its paranoid center is still pumping out the same darkly attractive warning that it did in the fifties. For some, the play seems to be about the dilemma of relying on the testimony of small children accusing adults of sexual abuse, something I'd not have dreamed of forty years ago. For others, it may simply be a fascination with the outbreak of paranoia that suffuses the play-the blind panic that, in our age, often seems to sit at the dim edges of consciousness. Certainly its political implications are the central issue for many people; the Salem interrogations turn out to be eerily exact models of those yet to come in Stalin's Russia, Pinochet's Chile, Mao's China, and other regimes. (Nien Cheng, the author of "Life and Death in Shanghai," has told me that she could hardly believe that a non-Chinese-someone who had not experienced the Cultural Revolution-had written the play.) But below its concerns with justice the play evokes a lethal brew of illicit sexuality, fear of the supernatural, and political manipulation, a combination not unfamiliar these days. The film, by reaching the broad American audience as no play ever can, may well unearth still other connections to those buried public terrors that Salem first announced on this continent.

One thing more-something wonderful in the old sense of that word. I recall the weeks I spent reading testimony by the tome, commentaries, broadsides, confessions, and accusations. And always the crucial damning event was the signing of one's name in "the Devil's book." This Faustian agreement to hand over one's soul to the dreaded Lord of Darkness was the ultimate insult to God. But what were these new inductees supposed to have done once they'd signed on? Nobody seems even to have thought to ask. But, of course, actions are as irrelevant during cultural and religious wars as they are in nightmares. The thing at issue is buried intentions-the secret allegiances of the alienated heart, always the main threat to the theocratic mind, as well as its immemorial quarry. ♦

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From 1996: Arthur Miller shares the story behind his play about the Salem witch trials.

# data[].attributes.body
by Jason Pargin
*Geared toward mature readers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic." -Kevin Federline What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sens

# data[].attributes.body
Gary Soto

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gary Soto (Ft. Gary Soto) - Living Up The Street (Chapter 1: Being Mean)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We were terrible kids, I think. My brother, sister, and I felt a general meanness begin to surface from our tiny souls while living on Braly Street, which was in the middle of

# data[].attributes.headline
Plastics are showing up in the world’s most remote places, including Mount Everest

# data[].attributes.subject
Plastics are showing up in the world’s most remote places, including Mount Everest

# data[].attributes.body
by Carolyn Wilke

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Carolyn Wilke is a freelance science journalist based in Chicago and former staff writer at Science News for Students. She has a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from Northwestern University.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Microplastics are showing up in places as remote as Mount Everest | Science News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From the snow on Mount Everest to the guts of critters in the Mariana Trench, tiny fragments called microplastics are almost everywhere.

# data[].attributes.body
by Eric Eyre

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
780M pills, 1,728 deaths by Eric Eyre (Pulitzer Prize 2017 - investigative reporting)

# data[].attributes.body
by Jan Yolen

# data[].attributes.headline
Why barbed wire — yes, barbed wire — was as transformative as the telephone

# data[].attributes.subject
Why barbed wire — yes, barbed wire — was as transformative as the telephone

# data[].attributes.body
by Tim Hartford

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the settling of the western US, it fenced off farm acreage and kept out grazing cattle - and made the concept of land ownership in America a physical reality.

Late in 1876, so the story goes, a young man named John Warne Gates built a wire-​fence pen in the military plaza in the middle of San Antonio, Texas. He rounded up some of the toughest, wildest longhorns in all of the state, or that's how he described them. Others say that the cattle were docile. And there are those who wonder whether this story is true at all. But never mind.

John Warne Gates - a man who later won the nickname "Bet‐A‐Million Gates" - began to take bets as to whether these powerful, ornery longhorns could break through the fragile-​seeming wire. They couldn't. Even when Gates's sidekick, a Mexican cowboy, charged at the cattle, howling curses and waving burning brands, the wire held. Bet‐A‐Million Gates wasn't so worried about winning his wagers. He was selling a new kind of fence, and the orders soon came rolling in.

An advertisement from 1875 touted this fence as "The Greatest Discovery of the Age," patented by J. F. Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois. John Warne Gates described it more poetically: "Lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust."

We simply call it barbed wire.

Compared to the telephone, barbed wire wreaked huge changes on the American West and much more quickly.

To call barbed wire the greatest discovery of the age might seem hyperbolic, even making allowances for the fact that Alexander Graham Bell was about to be awarded a patent for the telephone. But while we think of the telephone as transformative, barbed wire wreaked huge changes on the American West and much more quickly.

Joseph Glidden's design for barbed wire wasn't the first, but it was the best. Glidden's design is the same as the barbed wire you can see today. The wicked barb is twisted around a strand of smooth wire; then a second strand of smooth wire is twisted together with the first to stop the barbs from sliding around.

Farmers snapped it up. Why? In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Homestead Act. It specified that any citizen - including women and freed slaves - could lay claim to up to 160 acres of land in America's western territories. All they had to do was build a home there and work the land for five years. The idea was that the Homestead Act would improve the land and improve the citizenry, creating free and virtuous hardworking landowners with a strong stake in the future of the nation.

It sounds simple. But the prairie was a vast, uncharted expanse. It had long been the territory of Native Americans. After Europeans arrived and pushed west, cowboys roamed free, herding cattle over the boundless plains. So settlers needed fences, not least to keep those free-​roaming cattle from trampling their crops. There wasn't much wood and certainly not enough to fence what was often called the "Great American Desert." Farmers tried growing thornbush hedges, but these were slow-​growing and inflexible. Smooth-wire fences didn't work either - the cattle pushed through them.

Barbed wire solved one of the biggest problems settlers faced, but it also sparked the ferocious "fence-cutting wars."

The US Department of Agriculture conducted a study in 1870 and concluded that until farmers could find fencing that worked, it would be impossible to settle the American West. The West, in turn, seethed with potential solutions: at the time, it was the source of more proposals for new fencing technologies than the rest of the world put together.

The idea that emerged from this intellectual ferment was barbed wire. It changed what the Homestead Act could not. Until it was developed, private ownership of prairie land wasn't common because it wasn't feasible.

While barbed wire spread because it solved one of the biggest problems settlers faced, it also sparked ferocious disagreements. The homesteading farmers were often trying to stake out property on the territory of Native American tribes. And 25 years after the Homestead Act came the Dawes Act, which forcibly assigned land to Native American families and gave the rest to white farmers. Philosopher Olivier Razac comments that the Dawes Act "helped destroy the foundations of Indian society." No wonder these tribes called barbed wire "the devil's rope."

Old-​time cowboys also lived by the principle that cattle could graze freely across the plains - the law of the open range - and they hated the wire. Cattle got nasty wounds and infections from running into it. When blizzards came, the cows would try to head south; sometimes they got stuck against the wire and died in the thousands. And while the attraction of the barbed wire was that it could enforce legal boundaries, many fences were illegal, too - attempts to commandeer common land for private purposes.

When barbed-​wire fences went up across the West, fights broke out. In the "fence-​cutting wars," masked gangs with names like the Blue Devils and the Javelinas cut the wires and left death threats warning fence owners not to rebuild. There were shoot-​outs, even a few deaths. Eventually, authorities clamped down. The fence-​cutting wars ended, and the barbed wire remained.

"It makes me sick," said one trail driver in 1883, "when I think of onions and Irish potatoes growing where mustang ponies should be exercising and where four-​year-​old steers should be getting ripe for market." And if the cowboys were outraged, the Native Americans suffered far worse.

Before barbed wire, Western settlers had legal rights over their land but no way of exerting practical control.

These ferocious arguments reflected an old philosophical debate. The 17th-​century English philosopher John Locke - a great influence on America's Founding Fathers - puzzled over the problem of how anybody might legally own land. Once upon a time, nobody owned anything; land was a gift of nature or of God. But Locke's world was full of privately owned land, whether the owner was the King or a simple yeoman. How had it become privately owned? Was it the result of a guy with a bunch of goons grabbing what he could?

If so, all civilization was built on violent theft. That wasn't a welcome conclusion to Locke or his wealthy patrons. He argued that we all own our own labor. So if you mix your labor with the land that nature provides - for instance, by plowing the soil - then you've blended something you own with something that nobody owns. By working the land, he said, you've come to own it.

This wasn't a purely theoretical argument. Locke was actively engaged in the debate over Europe's colonization of America. Political scientist Barbara Arneil, an expert on Locke, writes, "The question, 'How was private property created by the first men?' is for ... Locke the same question as, 'Who has just title to appropriate the lands of America now?'" Locke also made the claim that the land in the new world was unclaimed - that is, because the indigenous tribes hadn't "improved" the land, they had no right to it.

Not every European philosopher agreed. Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, an 18th-​century French philosopher, protested the evils of enclosure. In his "Discourse on Inequality" he lamented, "the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him." This man, said Rousseau, "was the real founder of civil society."

Rousseau did not intend that as a compliment. But it's true that modern economies are built on private property - on the legal fact that most things have an owner, usually a person or a corporation. Modern economies are also built on the idea that private property is good, because it gives people an incentive to invest in what they own, whether that's a patch of land in the American Midwest, an apartment in India, or even a piece of intellectual property such as the rights to Mickey Mouse. It's a powerful argument, and it was ruthlessly deployed by those who wanted to claim that Native Americans didn't have a right to their territory because they weren't actively developing it.

Nobody has invented virtual barbed wire that can fence off songs as well as physical barbed wire fenced off land, but it hasn't stopped people from trying.

However, legal facts are abstract. To get the benefits of owning something, you have to be able to assert control over it. Until barbed wire was developed, Western settlers had legal rights over their land but no way of exerting practical control.

Barbed wire is still used to fence off land across the world. And in other spheres of the economy, the battle to own in practice what you own in theory continues to rage. One example is digital rights management, or DRM. DRM systems are attempts to erect a virtual barbed wire around digital property, like a movie or a song, to prevent people from copying it illegally. Even though musicians may have copyright on their music, copyright is a weak defense against file-​sharing software.

Nobody has invented virtual barbed wire that can fence off songs as effectively as physical barbed wire fenced off land, but it hasn't stopped people from trying. And the "fence-​cutting wars" of the digital economy are no less impassioned today than they were in the Wild West: digital rights campaigners battle the likes of Disney, Netflix and Google, while hackers and pirates make short work of the digital barbed wire. When it comes to protecting property in any economy, the stakes are high.

The rewards can be high, too. The barbed-​wire barons - Bet‐A‐Million Gates, Joseph Glidden, and others - became rich. The year that Glidden secured his barbed-wire patent, 32 miles of wire were produced. Six years later, in 1880, the factory in DeKalb turned out 263,000 miles of wire, enough to circle the world ten times over.

Excerpted with permission from the new book Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy by Tim Harford, published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Copyright © 2017 Tim Harford.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why barbed wire - yes, barbed wire - was as transformative as the telephone

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Late in 1876, so the story goes, a young man named John Warne Gates built a wire-​­fence pen in the military plaza in the middle of San Antonio, Texas. He rounded up some of the toughest, wildest longhorns in all of the state, or that's how he described them.

# data[].attributes.body
Stephen F.Corfidi

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Published in National Weather Digest, Mar. 1996

Norman, OK 73069

March 1996; Updated December 2004

ABSTRACT

The origin and nature of warm season haze over the central and eastern United States is discussed. Summarizing the results of various studies dating back to the mid 1970s, the microphysical basis of haze is described, with emphasis on the fact that haze appears to be largely anthropogenic (man-made). The synoptic meteorology of haze in the United States is then presented. It is shown that haze forms primarily in modified polar air, not tropical air, as is commonly believed, and that its movement may be estimated by trajectories at the 850 mb level. A brief discussion of haze-free "tropical surges" along the East Coast follows, using synoptic charts to illustrate the evolution of typical surge events.

1. INTRODUCTION

During summer, the central and eastern United States is often blanketed by a veil of murky haze that can last for days. The haze shrouds the sky and dims the sun --- sometimes making it disappear altogether before the end of the day (Figure 1). Haze is so common in some areas that it is assumed to be natural and is accepted as a fact of life.

But most haze is, in fact, not natural, and its presence warrants our attention for many reasons. For example, it has been shown that haze directly affects human health. Researchers at the New York University Medical Center recently concluded that the acid droplets found in haze pose a serious hazard to exposed tissues of the lungs and breathing passages (Pendick 1993). The same study also concluded that when haze occurs in association with smog --- the brownish, photochemically-enhanced form of air pollution derived from automobile exhausts --- smog's destructive nature is significantly increased.

Haze also affects aviation. While not posing a serious threat to jet aircraft, haze does shroud visual cues important to small plane pilots and can significantly reduce visual range over thousands of square miles. The phenomenon was, in fact, likely a factor in the fatal crash which took the life of John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife and his sister-in-law near Martha's Vineyard in July 1999.

Haze, however, does more than limit visibility and impair health. Because the same airborne compounds resposible for haze also produce acid rain (Urone and Schroeder 1978, Husar 1990), haze is necessarily linked to the destruction of vast stands of Douglas fir by acid precipitation over the East in recent years (Mitchell 1994), as well as to the accelerated crumbling of concrete, mortar and statuary in many cities.

Numerous studies have shown that clouds which form in hazy air tend to produce less rainfall than those which form in less contaminated environments (Monastersky 1992). In addition, when oriented in patches or bands, haze can alter patterns of differential heating. This, in turn, can affect convective development, the location of thunderstorms and regional precipitation (Lyons 1980).

Evidence is also mounting that haze plays a significant role in determining the global energy balance, since it not only diminishes the amount of solar energy reaching the surface but also reduces the rate at which the atmosphere radiates longwave energy to space (Ball and Robinson 1982, Penner et al. 1994). One study even concluded that because of haze, some parts of the eastern United States experience an annual solar radiation deficit of about 7.5% (Ball and Robinson 1982). A more recent estimate by William Chameides of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Raloff 1999) suggests that the reduction of photosysnthesis due to haze in China could be robbing farmers there of more grain than the entire nation imports.

Figure 2. Appearance of supercell thunderstorm clouds seen at similar distances looking south southeast at about 6 p.m. local standard time on (a) a haze-free day (12 July 1986 near Sedalia, Missouri), and (b) on a day with moderate haze (7 June 1990 near Topeka, Kansas). Haze can hamper storm spotting: A distant wall cloud (mesocyclonic lowering) is visible at the lower left in (a), whereas cloud bases are shrouded by haze in (b). Tornadoes occurred shortly after both photos were made.

The reduction in visual quality caused by haze is, however, more than cosmetic. Campbell (1983), Evans and Cohen (1987) and Zeidner and Shechter (1988) all indicate that poor visual air quality causes heightened levels of anxiety, tension and depression in humans. In a similar study, Jones and Bogat (1978) linked increased interpersonal aggression and hostility to reductions in visual air quality.

In summary, the impact of haze, though sometimes subtle, is seen to be quite significant. Yet for many in the operational meteorological community, haze remains poorly understood despite its importance and frequent occurence. This paper addresses development and movement of haze over the central and eastern United States, with emphasis on its largely anthropogenic (man-made) origin. Much of the material has been presented elsewhere, but generally not from the perspective of an operational meteorologist.

2. WHAT HAZE IS

A. Haze as pollution

As was already noted, haze is often assumed to be natural. Evapotranspirative products from trees are probably the most often-cited source. Others attribute haze to the minute particles of salt which are released during the breaking of ocean waves. Popular meteorological works (e.g., Ludlum 1991) which use the term "haze" to refer to strictly natural obstructions to vision perpetuate this view.

Certainly natural forms of haze do exist. But, as the following pages show, the type of haze commonly seen over the eastern half of the United States during summer is not predominantly natural. It is in fact a vast blanket of man-made pollution. More specifically, this haze is a form of wet air pollution --- a veil of tiny droplets (aerosols) of condensed pollutants. ¹ The adjective "wet" is used to distinguish eastern haze from the dry forms of haze which consist of fine dust particles and are more commonly observed elsewhere in the world (e.g., the Harmattan haze of west Africa, or the shamal wind haze of the Persian Gulf).

Numerous studies since the mid 1970s (see, for example, Ferman et al. 1981, Wolff et al. 1982, Malm 1992, Husar and Wilson 1993) have consistently shown that warm-season haze over the eastern United States is composed primarily of sulfates ---- i.e., of sulfate aerosols. To understand the formation of sulfate aerosols, then, is to understand the formation of warm-season haze.

----------

1. Technically speaking, the term "aerosol" refers to a system consisting of particles suspended in a gas. Here, however, aerosol will be used in its more popular sense to refer to the particles themselves.

B. The chemistry of haze

(1) SO₂ and sulfates

Sulfates are sulfur-based compounds which contain sulfate ions (ions of the form SO ₄ ²⁻). The sulfates which comprise haze aerosols are derived mainly from the oxidation of sulfur dioxide (SO ₂) and may exist in solid or liquid form. Airborne sulfates also originate from bursting air bubbles in ocean waves and, over arid regions, from wind abrasion of sulfate-bearing soils (Wallace and Hobbs 1977). But these two sources produce comparatively large particles (over 2.0 um in diameter) which, like salt particles from ocean waves, settle out rather rapidly and do not represent a major source of haze aerosols.

Since haze-producing sulfates originate from SO ₂, a few words are in order regarding the origin and nature of atmospheric SO ₂. Sulfur dioxide is a colorless gas that has the odor of burning sulfur. It may be both natural or man-made (anthropogenic) in origin. Most natural SO ₂ is produced from the oxidation of hydrogen sulfide gas (H ₂S), a by-product of vegetative decay. Volcanoes are another significant natural source of SO ₂ (de Pena 1982).

Anthropogenic SO ₂ is produced in great quantity during the large-scale combustion of sulfur-bearing fossil fuels in power plants, oil refineries and steel mills. Lesser amounts are produced during the manufacture of pulp and paper. In this country, SO ₂ emissions are concentrated along the "industrial crescent" extending from the mid Mississippi Valley east into the lower Great Lakes and Mid Atlantic states (Figure 3). A separate SO ₂ source region is associated with oil production along the upper Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coasts.

Figure 3. Distribution of SO ₂ emissions during the summer over the eastern United States in metric tons per day (After Brueske 1990).

Nearly 2.7 x 10 ⁷ metric tons of SO ₂ are produced in the United States each year, about one fourth of the world's total output (Brueske 1990). Coal-burning power plants in the Ohio Valley alone yearly contribute 3 million tons (Malm 1992). Worldwide, man-made SO ₂ emissions increased nearly 30-fold between the mid 1800s and the mid 1900s as a result of industrial development (Heicklen 1976).

Even in highly polluted environments, the concentration of SO ₂ in the atmosphere rarely exceeds 1 part per million; over rural areas average concentrations are on the order of one part per billion. More than half, however, of the SO ₂ over continental areas is thought to be anthropogenic, compared to about one third for the atmosphere as a whole (de Pena 1982). This is especially true over the northern hemisphere, where more than 90% of the total man-made output is produced (Heicklen 1976). A more precise estimate of the total anthropogenic component of SO ₂ over a given area is difficult to ascertain because of lingering unknowns in the many sulfur budget equations involved.

(2) Formation of sulfate aerosols

The oxidation of SO ₂ in the atmosphere can occur in a number of different ways. Some of these paths include only gas-phase reactions, while others involve exclusively liquid-phase reactions or some combination of the two. Those paths which result in the formation of sulfate aerosols are known as "gas-to-particle conversions," since they involve the formation of liquid or solid aerosols from a gas.

For example, one gas-phase SO ₂ oxidation path involves oxidation of the SO ₂ to form gaseous sulfuric acid (H ₂SO ₄). The latter gas is then converted to a liquid sulfate aerosol either by contact with existing aerosols or by serving as a nuclei for the condensation of water vapor (Rogers and Yau 1989). In contrast, liquid-phase oxidation of SO ₂ occurs inside cloud droplets after the gas has become dissolved in them.

Because gas-to particle conversions typically require the presence of secondary pollutants such as ozone (O ₃), conversion reactions are usually enhanced by sunlight. Reaction rates also vary with relative humidity. For example, the oxidation rate of SO ₂ to sulfate increases by a factor of eight when the relative humidity increases from 70 to 80% (Wallace and Hobbs 1977).

The particular type of sulfate which forms during the oxidation of SO ₂ is dependent not only whether the reaction occurs in the gaseous or liquid phase, but also on the degree of neutralization which occurs during the oxidation process. Neutralization, in turn, is governed by the number and type of cations (positive ions) present during the reaction. Ammonium, calcium, sodium and magnesium are the most common neutralization ions. For example, complete neutralization by ammonium produces ammonium sulfate ((NH ₄)2SO ₄), whereas partial neutralization results in the formation of ammonium bisulfate ((NH ₄)HSO ₄). The production of sulfuric acid (H ₂SO ₄), meanwhile, represents a complete absence of neutralization.

Even with some neutralization, the sulfates found over the eastern United States tend to be very acidic. These particles generally exist as aqueous nitric and sulfuric acid, the result of gas-phase reactions during which gaseous acids are converted to liquid forms by the addition of water vapor. It is the downstream transport of these aerosols and their eventual elimination from the atmosphere in the form of acid rain and snow that results in the low pH (hydrogen ion concentration) characteristic of precipitation over the Appalachians and much of the remainder of the East. ²

----------

2. It should be noted that sulfate aerosols and gases also exit the atmosphere via dry deposition --- the deposit of airborne particles and gases on the earth in the absence of precipitation.

(3) Growth of sulfate aerosols and their appearance as haze

All sulfate aerosols, depending upon their degree of neutralization, are at least somewhat hygroscopic. This means that they adsorb water molecules from the environment, even when the relative humidity is below 100 percent. As a result, sulfates are excellent condensation nuclei. The aerosols grow (deliquesce) as water vapor condenses on them, and they continue to grow until they reach a size at which they are in equilibrium with their environment. ³

If the environment is supersaturated with respect to water, sulfate droplets eventually reach such a size that they become readily visible as a cloud. If, however, the humidity in their vicinity is somewhat lower, say around 85 percent, the droplets might grow to only about .5 um in diameter. This is about one tenth the size of most cloud droplets but may be twice the diameter of the aerosol before it was "wetted." Aerosols of this size are in the range (.1 um to 1 um) over which scattering efficiency per unit particle mass reaches a maximum (National Research Council 1990); in fact, particles of this size scatter visible sunlight a million times more effectively than air molecules. Figure 4 illustrates graphically the relationship between scattering by aqueous sulfate aerosols and increasing relative humidity.

The scattering of sunlight by molecules in the atmosphere is a form of Rayleigh scattering. Rayleigh scattering is a general term for the scattering produced by particles that are very small compared to the wavelength of the incident light. The degree of scattering which occurs is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength involved. Thus, since blue light is of a shorter wavelength than red (.39 vs. .76 um), a sky dominated by Rayleigh scattering by air molecules appears blue. ⁴

In contrast to the scattering of sunlight by air molecules, the scattering produced by hygroscopic sulfate aerosols is not wavelength-dependent. Because such particles are comparable in size to the wavelength of light, the scattering they produce is a complex function of particle size and wavelength. If the aerosols are all the same size, the sky might take on a faint red or blue hue depending on the size of the aerosols and whether the part of the sky being viewed is seen by scattered or transmitted light. But if a range of aerosol sizes exists, as is most often the case, no particular color is favored and the sky appears white. In addition, since the aerosols represent a net increase in the number of particles normally present in the atmopshere, the tendency for whitening is further increased. These extra particles also enhance the atmospheric absorption of sunlight -- and therefore reduce the amount of light that reaches the ground.

----------

3. Aerosol growth can also occur via coagulation, the process whereby droplets which bump together adhere to each other and them merge into one (Malm 1992).

4. Theoretically, Rayleigh scattering should produce a violet sky since that color has the shortest wavelength in the visible spectrum. But because human eyes are most sensitive to the middle part of the spectrum, a clear sky appears blue.

(4) The natural component

Because haze is such a familiar sight in the eastern U.S. and has no obvious source, casual observers find it difficult to believe that it is not natural in origin. Some will note that the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains were named long before the widespread industrial use of fossil fuels. Indeed, a small percentage of the particles found in haze are derived from volatile hydrocarbons such as terpenes that are released by certain trees (Chang 1990). In addition, atmospheric sulfates are not entirely anthropogenic.

But studies using data dating back to 1940 show an incontrovertible link between industrial sulfur emissions and the degree of haziness over the eastern U.S., as shown, for example, in Figure 5 (Husar 1990, Malm 1992). ⁵ And, research conducted in the Blue Ridge mountains has shown that naturally-occurring aerosols are responsible for no more than 20% of the total light extinction due to haze (Ferman et al. 1981). The primary reason for this is that most organic aerosols (such as those from trees) are relatively hydrophobic and therefore do not grow to such a size that they become visible as haze.

The Ferman study estimated that if all natural sources of pollution in the East were taken together, surface visibility would still exceed 25 miles --- well above the 4 to 6 mile visual range characteristic of summer afternoons over the region today. If any haze were visible at all, it would be of the thin, "blue" variety first noted by the Cherokees in the early 1700s (Powell 1968) --- not the murky pall that frequently obscures the Blue Ridge mountains today. Accounting for the mean warm-season airflow overthe East in summer, the study concluded that "observed airflow patterns are consistent with previous findings that Midwestern [sulfate] source areas are a major cause of widespread summertime haze in the eastern U.S."

More recent studies have continued to support these ideas, attributing more than three quarters of summertime light extinction in the central Appalachians to sulfates (Malm 1992, Sisler et al. 1993). This is perhaps not too surprising considering Malm's observation that the average sulfate concentration over the eastern states is some 5 to 10 times greater than the estimated natural backround value of approximately .8 ug/m ³ (Ferman 1981, Trijonis et al. 1991).

----------

5. Similar regional trends have been observed elsewhere in the world (e.g., western Europe and China).

3. THE CLIMATOLOGY OF HAZE

A. A summer phenomenon

Sulfate aerosols are both small and chemically stable. As a result, they settle out only very slowly and can remain airborne for days. Most are eventually washed from the atmosphere in the form of acid rain. Although sulfate aerosols are formed wherever the precursor gas-to-particle conversion reactions occur, it is synoptic- and regional-scale weather conditions that govern their overall concentration and, thus, the occurence and persistence of haze.

Because large scale atmospheric transport reaches a minimum during summer and boundary layer relative humidity tends to be high, sulfate haze is primarily a warm season phenomenon. As Figure 6 shows, haze in the United States is most common east of the Mississippi River. Note that haze is less frequently observed over south Florida and northern New England ---areas farther removed from major SO ₂ source regions and areas more likely to experience air of a less contaminated origin. The data also show an overall trend for increased haziness in recent years, especially over the Southeast. This reflects the increased summertime use of bituminous coal for electrical purposes such as air conditioning (Husar and Patterson 1980).

B. Why the East is hazy

Proximity to the semi-permanent Bermuda anticyclone makes the eastern third of the United States especially prone to prolonged episodes of synoptic-scale sulfate haze in summer. Large scale transport over the eastern states reaches a minimum during July and August. Moist air parcels originating over the lower Mississippi Valley may take 3 or 4 days to reach the eastern Great Lakes or mid Atlantic states. Vertical mixing is also often quite limited, especially east of the Appalachians where subsidence is enhanced closer to the mean position of the anticyclone. This increases the atmosphere's loading of both SO ₂ and its sulfate oxidation products. In addition, since summer days are long and large-scale cloudiness is at a minimum, photo-enhanced gas-to-particle conversions can proceed at a maximum rate.

The source region of the air commonly present over the Midwes and East in summer is another factor which fosters the development of haze. While the Gulf of Mexico is typically blamed for the regions's oppressive summertime combination of heat, haze and humidity ("The Three Hs"), careful examination of surface trajectories reveals that in most cases such air does not originate over the Gulf, but is rather continental polar in origin. Typically this air has undergone strong modification in the lowest layers and is returning poleward after having overspread the eastern states two or three days before.

Since these air masses have had a recent history of subsidence, an inversion is typically present around 850 or 900 mb. Because of the inversion, moisture added by evapotranspiration --- and haze --- remains trapped in the shallow boundary layer near the ground, while cleaner, drier conditions persist aloft. The low "lid" placed on top of the haze layer enhances its negative impact on visibility and encourages additional aerosol growth. True Gulf (or tropical) air, in contrast, typically lacks a low-level subsidence inversion and is characterized by thermodynamic instability through a comparatively deep layer. Any haze that may be present mixes through that deeper layer and is therefore less dense.

The top of a haze layer in a modified polar air mass is often quite distinct, and the resulting "haze horizon" is a familiar sight to airline passengers flying over the eastern United States in summer. The "horizon," of course, marks the top of the well-mixed boundary layer. Because relative humidity reaches a local maximum at the top of the boundary layer, haze is usually densest at an altitude just below that of the "horizon." ⁶

----------

6. The "haze horizon" can sometimes be observed indirectly from the ground as a dark band on the flanks of cumulus towers which penetrate beyond the boundary layer. The dark band marks the angle of maximum light extinction due to haze between the observer and the cloud.

C. Haze in the West

The western United States is largely free of sulfate haze since SO ₂ emissions are comparatively low and the climate is dry. In addition, since the air is often of recent oceanic origin, it tends to be "cleaner" (e.g., contains fewer background particles) than that found over the eastern United States. As Figure 6 shows, however, other forms of haze do occur in parts of the West. In particular, ozone smog and nitrate-based haze plague much of southern California in and around the Los Angeles basin. These forms of pollution are derived primarily from motor vehicle emissions (Sisler 1993).

4. HAZE FORECASTING

A. Introduction

The National Weather Service and WX-TALK (WeatherTalk) discussion group postings from the 1990s shown in Figure 7 capture some of the frustration and lack of understanding posed by haze from a forecasting perspective. Accurate forecasting of haze remains problematic to this day. Although studies dating back to the mid 1970s have documented the growth and movement of sulfate haze "blobs" over the eastern United States (see, for example, Hall et al. 1973, Gillani and Husar 1976, Lyons et al. 1978, Husar et al. 1981, Wolff et al. 1981, or Wolff et al. 1982), little of this material was written for or has found its way into the operational environment. The following sections offer a distillation of some of the more meteorologically-relevant material presented in those papers. Information is also provided on the how different synoptic patterns affect the development and movement of regional haze.

Figure 7 . Selected state forecast discussions mentioning haze from(a) WSFO Birmingham, Alabama (0900 UTC 21 July 1991), and (b) WSFO Taunton (Boston), Massachusetts (1930 UTC 21 July 1994 and 0140 UTC 22 July 1994);(c) excerpt from "WXTALK" list server chat board (14 August 1994). The Boston discussions reflect forecast thinking prior to and just after the passage of a typical "tropical surge" (See Section 5). Parts of discussions most relevant to haze in boldface.

From what has already been presented, it is apparent that haze forms wherever the sources of atmospheric sulfates overwhelm the sinks. This is why haze is usually associated with regions of large-scale stagnation. With both vertical and horizontal mixing at a minimum, whatever aerosols may be present will accumulate at first locally and then regionally over those areas experiencing minimal air flow and high relative humidity.

Favorable conditions for haze formation are realized on a regular basis each summer over the SO ₂ source regions of the central and eastern United States, a day or so after a polar air mass has settled over the area and the surface winds have become light. Under sunny skies, evapotranspiration can result in substantial moistening of the boundary layer in the previously dry air mass. Dewpoints, which may have dropped into the 40s soon after cold frontal passage, may rise into the upper 50s or low 60s by the end of the second day following frontal passage. Because conditions are favorable for rapid aerosol growth, and because the aerosol are confined to a shallow boundary layer, haze typically becomes noticeable about 48 hours after a polar air mass has stagnated over the eastern United States.

B. A typical example

Because eastern haze is generally confined to the lowest 7 or 8 thousand feet above the surface, its movement over a period of days is generally well-correlated with the streamlines of flow at 850 mb (Wolff et al. 1981). Figure 8 depicts the progress of a typical summertime haze event over the east-central United States, with the areas of haze plotted as shaded areas on the 850 mb charts. In this case, a mass of hazy air which formed over the Ohio Valley was first shunted south to the Gulf Coast states ahead of a weakening cold front.

Once over the Gulf Coast region, the air mass stalled and picked up an additional load of sulfates from the refineries of southeast Texas and Louisiana. The hazy air then made a return visit to the Ohio Valley as it was drawn northward ahead of a new cold front over the central Plains and upper Mississippi Valley. In this way, especially dense areas of haze may form as sulfate aerosols accumulate in a given mass of air that makes one or more return visits to an SO ₂ source region.

As is apparent in Figure 8, haze tends to concentrate in bands parallel to fronts. This might seem perplexing considering that the depth of the boundary layer tends to be greatest in the vicinity of fronts. But because large scale ascent and low-level convergence are maximized there as well, relative humidity is also at a maximum near fronts. Thus, sulfate production is enhanced and those aerosols which do form grow to a comparatively large size. Weak fronts are sometimes detectable in visible data satellite imagery when their associated haze bands appear as a discontinuities in the brightness field.

The case shown in Figure 8 also illustrates the importance of trajectory analysis to forecasting haze movement. Trajectory analysis is used to determine air parcel motions forward or backward in time from a specific point or region (Yarnal 1991). Since the formation of haze is not an instantaneous process, and since haze can be advected from one area to another, knowledge of an air mass' recent history is essential to making an accurate forecast of haze movement. For example, in this event, a forecaster in Peoria, knowing that haze was reported earlier in the week at Little Rock and Memphis, should not be surprised by the appearance of haze over northern Illinois on 18 August. Even though the 850 mb flow over Illinois on the 18th was rather strong and from the west --- conditions not normally associated with haze in that part of the country --- back trajectories reveal that the air mass entering the state was indeed the same one which had brought haze to Arkansas and Tennessee two days earlier.

In contrast to the mid Mississippi Valley, it is in fact not uncommon for brisk westerly winds to accompany haze over the eastern Great Lakes and New England. Indeed, some of the worst haze episodes in the Northeast occur in conjunction with mid-summer heatwaves and moderate to strong westerly flow on the northern fringe of an elongated Bermuda High. The enhanced westerly flow is frequently associated with the approach of a shortwave trough over the Saint Lawrence Valley. The winds, which are typically strongest in advance of an east-west cold front associated with the trough, tap dense haze areas that may have been developing under nearly perfect sulfate-forming conditions over the Ohio Valley for several days. When the "blobs" arrive in New York or New England, it is often just in time to produce a fall of acid rain as thunderstorms erupt along the front.

C. Early season haze

Observations show that surface dewpoints in the 60s are most often associated with the onset of haze in the summer, since lower dewpoints at that time of year are indicative of fresh outbreaks of polar air. But haze can occur with lower dewpoints, especially during spring and fall. A classic example of "low dewpoint haze" is illustrated in Figure 9. This event occurred in early April with surface dewpoints in the 40s and temperatures in the 60s. The haze was clearly not derived from natural sources such as trees since very little plant growth was in progress at the time of the event due to unusually cold weather during the preceding weeks.

D. Haze and tropical cyclones

Some of the worst haze episodes in this country are associated with the blocking of polluted air masses over the Ohio Valley or Midwest when tropical cyclones are present along the East Coast. Figure 11 shows how a mass of hazy air which formed over the Ohio Valley was forced to remain over that region for two additional days as Hurricane David (1979) moved up the Eastern Seaboard. Once David reached New England, northwest winds in the wake of the storm carried the heavy pollution burden southward behind a cold front into the Carolinas, Georgia and the Gulf Coast states. The GOES 7 depiction of a more recent hurricane-related haze event is shown in Figure 12. In this case (Emily 1993), northeast winds on the fringe of the tropical system drove a plume of dense haze that had been resident over the mid Atlantic states southwest into the Carolinas.

Even in the absence of tropical activity it is not uncommon for haze to follow the passage of weak cold fronts over the Gulf Coast region and the Southeast. This is because the post-frontal air typically originates over the Ohio Valley or mid Atlantic states. Embryonic sulfate aerosols born in these SO ₂ source regions move south with the subsident post-frontal flow, eventually growing into haze as they encounter increased humidity and sunshine over the Gulf and south Atlantic coastal states.

5. TROPICAL SURGES

One of the more pleasant though uncommon characteristics of the normally hazy summer months over the mid Atlantic States and the Northeast is the arrival of pure subtropical air from the western Atlantic in the form of a "tropical surge." These events occur when the main axis of the Bermuda High rotates clockwise from its usual east/west orientation along 30 or 35 degrees north latitude. This may happen in response to the development of a strong trough over the Mississippi Valley, or in response to the development of a closed circulation along the south Atlantic Coast. Both scenarios result in deep south to south-southwesterly flow over the mid Atlantic States and the Northeast (Figure 13).

Figure 13. Standard NCEP 500 mb analyses associated with tropical surge events over the mid Atlantic States. In(a), anomalous southerly flow along the eastern seaboard is related to an unusually deep trough over the Mississippi Valley (1200 UTC 4 August 1974). In(b), a closed circulation east of Georgia produces a south to southeast flow along the mid Atlantic Coast (1200 UTC 4 August 1988). Ridge axes depicted by serrated lines.

The doubling of visual range is significant since typically little or no afternoon visibility change is observed over this region during the summer in the absence of a frontal passage. In a sense, of course, there was a frontal passage --- strongly modified continental polar air with a high sulfate content was replaced by a cleaner air mass of Carribean or west Atlantic origin.

Surge "fronts," unfortunately, are not easily diagnosed by even the most sophisticated of today's objective analysis techniques. For example, the arrival of a surge generally produces no detectable change in surface equivalent potential temperature (theta-e). Automation of the surface observation network has exacerbated the detection problem since minimal information is now recorded rgearding visibility changes above 6 miles. While the advance of a tropical surge can sometimes be tracked by satellite ⁷, clouds often interfere with the view. Until observations of "airborne particulate mass" are routinely included in surface airway reports, it is probably safe to say that surge detection will remain problematic for some time to come.

&nbsp

a. &nbsp b.

&nbsp

c. &nbsp d.

Figure 16. Standard NCEP 500 mb analyses for 1200 UTC (a) 19 July,(b) 20 July, (c) 21 July and (d) 22 July 1994 showing evolution of mid-level flow during the tropical surge depicted in Figure 12. The surge reached Wilmington, Delaware on the 20th and reached southern New England the following day.

On average, tropical surges occur about once each summer along the mid Atlantic Coast. They are, however, notably absent in some years (e.g. 1992 and 1993), while several might occur in others (e.g., 1994 and 2004). Their frequency necessarily decreases from south to north along the eastern seaboard, and their effects usually do not extend west of the central and northern Appalachians. Tropical surges are also observed in the deep south, when the large scale circulation allows Caribbean or western Atlantic air to overspread the Gulf Coast states (Note comment regarding east-to-west flow in the forecast discussion shown in Figure 5a).

Surge events usually come to an end with the approach of a shortwave trough in the westerlies. When these systems are weak, their passage is marked by only a modest veering of the mean tropospheric flow. This shunts the maritime air mass east into the Atlantic, allowing hazy continental air from the lower Great Lakes or Ohio Valley to return. If the shortwave is seasonably strong, however, a more decided veering of the large scale flow will occur. This will usher in an air mass of a more northerly origin, and the haze-free maritime flow will be replaced by a relatively clean air mass from northern Canada.

----------

7. In cloud-free areas, the remote detection of haze and other forms of pollution improved significantly with the commissioning of next generation satellites GOES 8 and GOES 9 (See Menzel and Purdom 1994).

6. CONCLUDING REMARKS

The origin and nature of sulfate haze over the central and eastern United States have been discussed. Persistent misconceptions about haze have been examined, and information has been provided so that forecasters may better anticipate its formation and movement. Although the impact of haze as a meteorological phenomenon is not immediate like that of a tornado, flash flood or hurricane, its long-term affects are no less significant.

It is worth noting that there has been a slight decrease in the incidence of sulfate haze over some parts of the Midwest and the Northeast in recent years due to a reduction in the use of high-sulfur coal (Husar 1990). And, in the Southeast, SO ₂ emissions have decreased as a result of stricter air pollution standards imposed by the 1970 Clean Air Act and its subsequent amendments.

But continued population growth and the increased demand for electrical power suggest that large-scale haze will remain a problem for some time to come. In addition, regional haze which is not predominantly sulfate-based but is still traceable to anthropogenic sources has begun to affect visibility in other parts of the country, such as the scenic national parks of Arizona and Utah (National Research Council 1990, Sisler et al. 1993). Haze is also increasing in rapidly developing parts of the world such as China, India and southeast Asia.

7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

8. REFERENCES

Ball, R. J., and G. D. Robinson, 1982: The origin of haze in the central United States and its effect on solar radiation. J. Appl. Meteor., 21, 171-188.

Brueske, S. L., 1990: Forecasting Atmospheric Particulate Sulfur Concentrations Using National Weather Service Synoptic Charts. Master's thesis, The Pennsylvania State University, 132 pp.

Campbell, F. W., 1983: Ambient Stressors. Environ. Behavior, 15, 355-380.

Chang, J. S., 1990: Acid Deposition: State of the Science and Technology. Report 4. National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (especially pp 27-34).

Corfidi, S. F., 1993: Lost horizons. Weatherwise, 46, 12-17.

de Pena, R. 1982: Sulfur in the atmosphere and its role in acid rain. Earth and Mineral Sciences, 51, 62-66 (Available from College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park)

Evans, G. W., and S. V. Jacobs, 1981: Air pollution and human behavior. J. Social Issues, 37, 95-125.

Ferman, M. A., G. T. Wolff, and N. A. Kelly, 1981: The nature and sources of haze in the Shenandoah/Blue Ridge Mountains area. J. Air Pollut. Control Assoc., 31, 1074-1082.

Gillani, N. V., and R. B. Husar, 1976: Synoptic scale haziness over the eastern U.S. and its long range transport. Proceedings of the 4th National Conference on Fire and Forest Meteorology, St Louis, MO, 232-239.

Hall, F. P., C. E. Duchon, L. G. Lee, and R. R. Hagan, 1973: Long- range transport of air pollution: A case study, August 1970. Mon. Wea. Rev., 101, 404- 411.

Heicklen, J., 1976: Atmospheric Chemistry. Academic Press, 406 pp.

Husar, R. B., 1990: Historical visibility trends. Acid Deposition: State of Science and Technology. Report 24. National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, 68-76.

Husar, R. B., and D. E. Patterson, 1980: Regional scale air pollution: Sources and effects. Ann. NY Acad. Sci., 338, 399- 417.

Husar, R. B., and W. E. Wilson, 1993: Haze and sulfur emission trends in the eastern United States. Environ. Sci. Tech., 27, 12-16.

Husar, R. B., J. M. Halloway, D. E. Patterson , and W. E. Wilson, 1981: Spatial and temporal pattern of eastern U.S. haziness: A summary. Atmos. Environ., 15, 1919-1928.

Ludlum, D. M., 1991: The Audubon Field Guide to the Atmosphere. Alfred A. Knopf. 656 pp.

Lyons, W. A., 1980: Evidence of transport of hazy air masses from satellite imagery. Ann. NY Acad. Sci., 338, 418-433.

Lyons, W. A., J. C. Dooley Jr., and K. T. Whitby, 1978: Satellite detection of long-range pollution transport and sulfate aerosol hazes. Atmos. Environ., 12, 621-631.

Malm, W. C., 1992: Characteristics and origins of haze in the continental United States. Earth-Sci. Rev., 33, 1-36.

McNaughton, D.J., N. E. Bowne, R. L. Dennis, R. R. Draxler, S. R. Hanna, T. Palma, S. L. Marsh, W. T. Pennell, R. L. Peterson, J. V. Ramsdell, S. T. Rao, and R. J. Yamartino, 1994: Summary of the 8th Joint Conference on Applications of Air Pollution Meteorology. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 75, pp 2303-2311.

Menzel, W. P., and J. F. W. Purdom, 1994: Introducing GOES-I: The first of a new generation of geostationary operational environmental satellites. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 75, pp 757-781.

Mitchell, J. G., 1994: Legacy at risk. National Geographic, 186, 20-55 (October).

Monastersky, R., 1992: Haze clouds the greenhouse. Sci. News, 141, 232-233.

National Research Council, 1990: Haze in the Grand Canyon: An Evaluation of the Winter Haze Intensive Tracer Experiment. National Academy Press, 97 pp.

Pendick, D., 1993: Hazy summer days boost respiratory ailments. Sci. News, 143, pg 52.

Penner, J.E., R. J. Charlson, J. M. Hales, N. S. Laulainen, R. Lefier, T. Novakov, J. Ogren, L. F. Radke, S. E. Schwartz, and L. Travis, 1994: Quantifying and minimizing uncertainty of climate forcing by anthropogenic aerosols. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 75, 375-400.

Powell, W., 1968: North Carolina Gazeteer. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC.

Raloff, J., 1999: Sooty air cuts China's crop yields. Sci. News, 156, pg 356.

Rogers, R. R., and M. K. Yau, 1989: A Short Course in Cloud Physics. Pergamon Press. 290 pp.

Sisler, J. F., D. Huffman, and D. A. Latimer, 1993: Spatial and Temporal Patterns and the Chemical Composition of the Haze in the United States: An Analysis of Data from the IMPROVE Network, 1988-91. (Available from CIRA-Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, CO 80523)

Trijonis, J., R. Charlson, R. Husar, W. C. Malm, M. Pitchford, W. White, 1991: Visibility: Existing and Historical Conditions - Causes and Effects. In: Acid Deposition : State of Science and Technology. Report 24. National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program.

Urone, P. and W. H. Schroeder, 1978: "Atmospheric chemistry of sulfur-containing pollutants," Chapter 6 in Sulfur in the Environment, Part 1, J. O. Nriagu, ed. New York: Wiley Interscience.

Wallace, J. M. and P. V. Hobbs, 1977: Atmospheric Science: An Introductory Survey. Academic Press, 467 pp.

Wolff, G. T., N. A. Kelly and M. A. Ferman, 1981: On the sources of summertime haze in the eastern United States. Science, 211, 703-705.

Wolff, G. T., N. A. Kelly and M. A. Ferman, 1982: Source regions of summertime ozone and haze episodes in the eastern United States. Water Air Soil Pollut., 18, 65-81.

Yarnal, B., 1991: The climatology of acid rain. In: Air Pollution: Environmental Issues and Health Effects. S. K. Majumdar, E. W. Miller and J. Cahir, Eds. The Pennsylvania Academy of Science.

Zeidner, M., and M. Shechter, 1988: Psychological responses to air pollution: Some personality and demographic correlates. J. Environ. Psych., 8, 191-208.

Autobiographical data

Stephen Corfidi received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in meteorology from The Pennsylvania State University. Prior to becoming a Lead Forecaster at the NWS/NCEP Storm Prediction Center, he held various positions within the NCEP Hydrometeorological Prediction Center, the Baltimore-Washington NWS Forecast Office and the NWS Meteorological Development Laboratory. He has published previously on weather analysis and forecasting, mesoscale convective systems and severe local storms. Steve's interest in haze dates to sky watching as a youth in Baltimore.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Published in National Weather Digest, Mar. 1996 ABSTRACT The origin and nature of warm season haze over the central and eastern United States is discussed. Summarizing the results of various studies dating back to the mid 1970s, the microphysical basis of haze is described, with emphasis on the fact that haze appears to be largely anthropogenic (man-made).

# data[].attributes.headline
Tree Profile: Aspen - So Much More Than a Tree

# data[].attributes.subject
Tree Profile: Aspen - So Much More Than a Tree

# data[].attributes.body
by Hannah Featherman

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's hard to decide what is most memorable about aspen: the vibrant yellow in the fall, the tall, tube-like clusters of white stands or the sound of the "quaking" leaves. Regardless of what comes to mind when you think of aspens, they hold the title of the most widespread tree in North America. From the Midwest, across Canada, north into Alaska and across the West through to Arizona and New Mexico, quaking aspens dot the edge of conifer forests in clusters or "clones."

One aspen tree is actually only a small part of a larger organism. A stand or group of aspen trees is considered a singular organism with the main life force underground in the extensive root system. Before a single aspen trunk appears above the surface, the root system may lie dormant for many years until the conditions are just right, including sufficient sunlight. In a single stand, each tree is a genetic replicate of the other, hence the name a "clone" of aspens used to describe a stand.

Older than the massive Sequoias or the biblical Bristlecone Pines, the oldest known aspen clone has lived more than 80,000 years on Utah's Fishlake National Forest. Not only is the clone the oldest living organism, weighing in at an estimated 6,600 tons, it is also the heaviest. Even if the trees of a stand are wiped out, it is very difficult to permanently extinguish an aspen's root system due to the rapid rate in which it reproduces.

Among swaths of dark green conifers, the deciduous aspen stands thrive in a variety of environments. Aspens quickly colonize recently burned or bare areas to establish a stand of young trees given the proper conditions. They prefer moist soil but can survive near springs in desert conditions. Of the many variables for a healthy clone of aspens, the one that cannot waver is the need for abundant sunshine.

Aspens grow all the time-even in winter. Beneath the thin, white outer bark layer is a thin green photosynthetic layer that allows the tree to create sugars and grow when other deciduous trees would otherwise be dormant. During hard winters, the green, sugary layer provides necessary nutrients for deer and elk. Throughout the year, young aspens provide food or a variety of animals including moose, black bear, beaver, porcupine, ruffed grouse and rodents .

Although a soft wood, aspen is relatively strong and has been used in unique ways.

Matches - aspen wood is not as flammable as other species

Saunas - aspen wood does not splinter easily

Chopsticks - aspen is flexible and strong for your next tasty eggroll.

Ailments - historically used because aspen contains salicylates, chemicals similar to aspirin

Today, many places in the West have seen diebacks of aspen. In areas where grass is limited, deer and other ungulates are heavily feeding on young aspens, preventing the trees and clone from reaching maturity.

With support from Salt River Project, the National Forest Foundation helped provide fencing around 12 acres of key aspen stands on Arizona's Kaibab National Forest to prevent elk from eating the trees. In Utah, the NFF brought together various stakeholders to form the Utah Forest Restoration Working Group. The collaborative created the "Guidelines for Aspen Restoration on the National Forests in Utah," now used to standardize and implement restoration strategies for aspen across the state.

To support healthy trees and healthy forests, donate to the National Forest Foundation today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tree Profile: Aspen - So Much More Than a Tree

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's hard to decide what is most memorable about aspen: the vibrant yellow in the fall, the tall, tube-like clusters of white stands or the sound of the "quaking" leaves. Regardless of what comes to mind when you think of aspens, they hold the title of the most widespread tree in North America.

# data[].attributes.headline
Boots on the Ground: The History of Combat Boots

# data[].attributes.subject
Boots on the Ground: The History of Combat Boots

# data[].attributes.body
FRED POYNER IV

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"A-ten-hut!" Cue the sound of many warrior feet coming together at once.

One of the most important pieces of gear in a soldier's arsenal today, the U.S. Army's combat boot has been through many iterations over time. In fact, over the past two hundred years, the combat boot was updated for almost every new war.

Soldiers in the Continental Army under the command of General George Washington lacked cold weather clothing and boots during the frigid winter they spent at Valley Forge (1777- 1778). Their painful struggle showed just how vital basic equipment like footwear was to the success of any military conflict, at home or overseas.

The first true boot made for U.S. military service was the Jefferson Boot in 1816, which had the distinctive feature of not differentiating between the left and right foot. Through many conflicts, this original boot has been adapted, updated, and overhauled to produce the modern versions in use by the U.S. Army.

During the U.S. Army's engagement in World War I (April 6, 1917, to November 11, 1918), soldiers wore a "trench boot," also known as the Pershing boot (named after the American General of the Armies, John J. "Black Jack" Pershing). Before Americans sported the trench boot, it had been provided to French and Belgian soldiers at the start of the war, as early as 1914. The design replaced the Russet Marching Shoe, which was worn by American soldiers in earlier campaigns, including the Spanish-American War of 1898. While the trench boot boasted an iron plate in the heel and tanned cowhide in the sole, it lacked waterproofing, which became evident once it was in use in the field. Improvements to the design were made starting in January 1918, leading to heavier construction with leather and more water resistance, including a thicker sole. The tradeoff was that the new boots weighed considerably more, leading soldiers to nickname them "little tanks."

Over time, there have been some nuances to boot design. For example, paratroopers (e.g., 82nd Airborne Division and 101st Airborne Division) were authorized to wear "jump boots." Historically, these were the Corcoran brand that were made completely of leather and debuted during America's involvement in World War II (December 8, 1941, to September 2, 1945) with the advent of paratroopers as a fighting force. Officially called the "M1943 Combat Boot," this style was widely used by U.S. Army soldiers during the Korean War (June 25, 1950, to July 27, 1953). A combat boot was needed for protection from North Korea's mountainous terrain and brutally cold winters.

Another example of combat boot design for a specific environment was the "jungle boot," first tested in Panama prior to World War II. Formally adopted by the U.S. Army in 1942, the lightweight jungle boot used both a rubber sole and layers of fused Saran or PVDC (Polyvinylidene chloride) to create a ventilated mesh that allowed moisture to drain but prevented the entry of mud, sand, or insects. Two types were developed: the M-1942 canvas and rubber jungle boot and a later edition called the M-1945 tropical combat boot. These types were still in use by U.S. Army units deployed during the Vietnam War, with improvements made during that conflict to create the M-1966, or M-66, jungle boot. The improved design incorporated a nylon mesh reinforcement in the neck of the boot, along with leather for the toe and heel. The ventilating insoles original to the M-1942 design were also removable in the updated jungle boot. The army briefly tested two prototype designs for jungle boots again in 2016 but ultimately decided against widespread issue of the boots after field-testing was done by soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division in 2017 and 2018.

In the late twentieth century, when all black, all leather boots were a required part of the Army Combat Uniform, soldiers would have one set of field boots, which could get torn up during training, and one set of well-polished "spit-shined" boots for inspection, parades, or just garrison duty. These boots could be worn as part of the dress uniform, with the pants tucked into the tops of the boots.

As fighting environments change over time, so too does the promise of new and continually refined versions of the U.S. Army's footwear, with boots as a mainstay in the uniforms of privates and generals alike.

By the time of the first Gulf War (August 2, 1990, to February 28, 1991), the combat boot had changed to a "coyote-colored" boot to better reflect the desert field environment of Iraq. Along with the change in color scheme, the army relaxed its requirement to have these boots polished, making them both more comfortable and easier to maintain. By the mid-2000s, all U.S. Army soldiers had fully transitioned from the Vietnam-era jungle boot for combat operations to the desert-style boot.

The army's new combat boot has evolved to account for other potential environments beyond the desert. Cold weather boots have been designed for troops in frigid environments at higher elevations, such as Alaska and Afghanistan (the latter currently the site of the longest U.S. war on record, from October 7, 2001, to today).

Section AR670-1.18.4 in the U.S. Army manual defines the characteristics of modern combat boots in use today. Each solider is issued two hot weather (HW) and one temperate weather pair of boots. At their discretion, soldiers may acquire an additional set of boots for their own use, but these must meet several requirements in order to pass muster. Materials must be genuine leather, with only cow or cattle-hide leather qualifying. All combat boots also need to be a certain size: eight to ten inches tall, with a sole height of two inches or less. Meanwhile, the sole material must be either rubber or polyether polyurethane. All boots must be tan or coyote color throughout the boot design. Based on these specifications, the U.S. Army announced the testing in 2019 of three new boot types, designated Prototype A, B, and C, as possible replacements for the 1960s-era cold weather boots still in current use and nicknamed "Mickey Mouse Boots" due to their large size.

As fighting environments change over time, so too does the promise of new and continually refined versions of the U.S. Army's footwear, with boots as a mainstay in the uniforms of privates and generals alike.

Fred Poyner IV

danner, depth in the field, gear, history, military, product, unfailing goods

Filson Food: The Perfect Cast Iron Steak

There are many ways to cook an amazing steak, but none beat the simplicity of a cast-iron seared steak basted in herbed brown butter. Try it once and you will be convinced.

Read more

Filson x Danner Grouse Bottomland Boot

When two Pacific Northwest brands team up to create a hunting boot, the result is a rugged piece of craftsmanship. Constructed from full-grain leather and oil-finish Tin Cloth, the Grouse boot combines unique elements that have set both Filson and Danner apart for nearly a century-two brands synonymous with quality and durability. The Filson x Danner® Grouse Boots are built in Portland, OR and made to last a lifetime.

Read more

The 210th Air Rescue Squadron

The 210th Air Rescue Squadron, nicknamed "The Second 10th," is an elite peacetime and combat search and rescue (CSAR) unit based in Alaska that's on call for its citizens 24/7/365. Regarded as "the Guardians of the North," the unit has saved thousands of natives stranded in remote terrain, brutal snowstorms, and icy waters along the coast.

Read more

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
History of the Combat Boot | The Filson Journal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"A-ten-hut!" Cue the sound of many warrior feet coming together at once. One of the most important pieces of gear in a soldier's arsenal today, the U.S. Army's combat boot has been through many iterations over time. In fact, over the past two hundred years, the combat boot was updated for almost every new war.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Downside of Life in a Supertall Tower...

# data[].attributes.subject
The Downside of Life in a Supertall Tower...

# data[].attributes.body
By Stefanos Chen

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Downside to Life in a Supertall Tower_ Leaks, Creaks, Breaks - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.headline
Missouri Happiness Rank Reveals State's Mediocrity, Misery

# data[].attributes.subject
Missouri Happiness Rank Reveals State's Mediocrity, Misery

# data[].attributes.body
Abby Hugo (Copy Editor)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Bright smiles can be seen shining from sea to shining sea. Some states, though, have a few more smiles to see. And Missouri is apparently not one of them.

WalletHub ranked " 2019's Happiest States in America," and Missouri falls at a whopping 41st. That means there are only nine states less happy. Alternatively, there's also only 41 states between us and victory. And a good underdog story makes everyone happy.

With all the new windmills going up on this side of the state , it's only a matter of time until we blow the other states out of the water.

Then, no one will be playing Maroon 5's "I am in Misery" as they drive into the state.

WalletHub claims the listing is backed up by a lot of science, something proven to improve moods.

"Previous studies have found that good economic, emotional, physical and social health are all key to a well-balanced and fulfilled life," the WalletHub article said, explaining how it defined happiness.

It gave each state a ranking in three main categories "Emotional and Physical Well-Being," "Work Environment" and "Community Environment."

Apparently, WalletHub was unaware that I get to work for five hours straight in a cold basement every week and only make significantly less than if I was back home in Nebraska. Every once in a while, I even earn enough to buy a Whataburger. Oh, wait, we don't have those here.

Missouri garnered a spot in the top 33 in the physical well-being category, which makes sense, because I see so many people smiling during yoga at the fitness center. Then again, that's primarily during downward dog.

The United Health Foundation had an equally flattering rank when it named Missouri the 39th healthiest state in 2018. The correlation between attitude and health is obvious. 8-year-olds have never been happier than when they're sick, home from school and getting to watch all the daytime Disney shows they usually miss. Missouri has way more of those than over 50% of the other states.

Hawaiian children, who live in the state WalletHub ranked as the happiest and healthiest, probably never get to experience that joy. Instead, they're stuck hiking up volcanoes, exploring jungles and surfing on beaches.

Besides, when people refer to the "greatest thing since sliced bread," they're not talking about Hawaiian rolls. Thanks Chillicothe, home of sliced bread, for giving everyone a reminder of Missouri's superiority.

Since the attempt at making Missouri beachfront property by flooding Nebraska didn't quite pan out, we don't have to worry about the dangers of that cowabunga lifestyle.

Nebraska, with its fresh wetlands, and Iowa, with whatever it secretly has to offer, both ranked in the top 15. Honestly, getting beat out by Iowa is the most disheartening defeat since Missouri lost its No. 1 meth production crown in 2017.

Also, both have an unfair advantage in the community environment category when the community is predominantly cows. With only 24 people for every square mile of land and three cows for every person , Nebraska's community environment is more of a petting zoo than anything else.

In the competition for happiest state, the southeast region of the U.S. has the makings of a classic, stellar movie about a ragtag team of misfits coming together. Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Virginia and Alabama all join us in the 40s as well. We can all live unhappily ever after together.

Happiness isn't necessarily required to be the best. Despite being WalletHub's 41st happiest state, Missouri reigned at the 33rd best state to live in , according to a ranking published by WalletHub in June.

Tony Robbins, a renowned life coach aka professional happiness teacher, said, "It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives. It's what we do consistently."

And Missouri consistently falls right around that remarkably mediocre ranking of best states to live in. named Missouri 36th best, and World Population Review let Missouri break top 30, at 28th.

As Joseph Heller in Catch-22 said, "Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them."

In this moment, Missouri has had mediocrity thrust upon it. So, Show Me State, show me a smile, because we are living with a delightfully mediocre level of happiness.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Missouri Happiness rank reveals state's mediocrity, misery

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Bright smiles can be seen shining from sea to shining sea. Some states, though, have a few more smiles to see. And Missouri is apparently not one of them. WalletHub ranked " 2019's Happiest States in America," and Missouri falls at a whopping 41st. That means there are only nine states less happy.

# data[].attributes.body
Schutte Lumber

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Schutte Lumber | Wholesale and Contractor Supplier

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Douglas-Fir in Construction | Schutte Lumber

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lumber produced from Douglas-fir is recognized throughout the world for its strength and performance. It is an affordable softwood that is often used in woodworking and construction.

# data[].attributes.headline
Steamboat Marathon will Happen in 2021...

# data[].attributes.subject
Steamboat Marathon will Happen in 2021...

# data[].attributes.body
by Shelby Reardon

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS - The 2020 Steamboat Marathon was canceled for the first time in the event's history due to the pandemic. Next year, the city is determined to put on the event, even if it must be virtual.

Registration for the 2021 Steamboat marathon, half-marathon and 10K opens Jan. 1. The race will be held June 6 and will celebrate its 40th anniversary.

"We're just following all the protocols and guidance at this point," said race director Paul Sachs. "If it was tomorrow, we couldn't do it. By June, if we're able to, under whatever COVID guidance is available, we're hopeful we can do it. We're going to try. If we can't, we're going to do a virtual race."

To make the celebration more special, the race will take on a "Back to the '80s" theme, complete with an '80s band. That is, if the COVID protocols at the time permit it.

"That is still the hope," Sachs said. "Whether or not we'll be able to have people congregating at the finish line, I think is probably unlikely, but we're exploring options like having things on the course to the extent we're able. We'll probably have grab-and-go stuff at the finish line unless things change dramatically."

For the most updated information, visit the website at steamboatchamber.com/events/annual-events/steamboat-marathon.

When the race was canceled, registered racers were given the option to defer to the next year, and many did. Sachs said there are still plenty of spots left in the races, especially the 10K, which typically has unlimited spots.

The biggest conflicts will be in the half-marathon race, which is capped at 1,200 people and requires buses to transport racers up Elk River Road to the starting line.

Giving out water along the race route might look different as well, and buses might be capped at a smaller capacity and, therefore, take longer to transport runners to the start area.

Registered runners will be updated via email as June 6 gets closer and as health orders change.
To reach Shelby Reardon, call 970-871-4253, email sreardon@SteamboatPilot.com or follow her on Twitter @ByShelbyReardon.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Steamboat Marathon will happen in 2021, registration opens Jan. 1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS - The 2020 Steamboat Marathon was canceled for the first time in the event's history due to the pandemic. Next year, the city is determined to put on the event, even if it must be virtual. Registration for the 2021 Steamboat marathon, half-marathon and 10K opens Jan. 1.

# data[].attributes.body
by Emily Fullenkamp

# data[].attributes.body
by Chris Wissel Perotti

# data[].attributes.body
by Chris Terheggeb

# data[].attributes.body
from Colleen Maline

# data[].attributes.body
Ray Bradbury (1990)
*Not Middle School Appropriate

# data[].attributes.body
Nautilus (07/28/2016)

# data[].attributes.body
from Robert Laurie

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kami Export - Robert Laurie - Narrative Writers Use Techniques Such As... (1)

# data[].attributes.body
from Enrique Mejia

# data[].attributes.body
from Nieman Lab (01/19/2021)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The United States of America was founded on a conspiracy theory. In the lead-up to the War of Independence, revolutionaries argued that a tax on tea or stamps is not just a tax, but the opening gambit in a sinister plot of oppression. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were convinced - based on "a long train of abuses and usurpations" - that the king of Great Britain was conspiring to establish "an absolute Tyranny" over the colonies.

"The document itself is a written conspiracy theory," says Nancy Rosenblum, a political theorist emerita at Harvard University. It suggests that there's more going on than meets the eye, that someone with bad intentions is working behind the scenes.

If conspiracy theories are as old as politics, they're also - in the era of Donald Trump and QAnon - as current as the latest headlines. Earlier this month, the American democracy born of an eighteenth century conspiracy theory faced its most severe threat yet - from another conspiracy theory, that (all evidence to the contrary) the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Are conspiracy theories truly more prevalent and influential today, or does it just seem that way?

The research isn't clear. Rosenblum and others see evidence that belief in conspiracy theories is increasing and taking dangerous new forms. Others disagree. But scholars generally do agree that conspiracy theories have always existed and always will. They tap into basic aspects of human cognition and psychology, which may help explain why they take hold so easily - and why they're seemingly impossible to kill.

Once someone has fully bought into a conspiracy theory, "there's very little research that actually shows you can come back from that," says Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge whose research focuses on ways to combat misinformation. "When it comes to conspiracy theories, prevention is better than cure."

Counting conspiracies

When Joseph Uscinski began studying conspiracy theories a decade ago, he was one of only a handful of scholars - mostly psychologists and political scientists - interested in the topic. "No one cared about this at the time," says Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami in Florida. American Conspiracy Theories, the 2014 book he cowrote with political scientist Joseph Parent, became a landmark in conspiracy theory research.

To investigate how conspiracy beliefs have changed with time, Uscinski, Parent and a small army of research assistants analyzed more than 100,000 letters to the editors of The New York Times printed between 1890 and 2010. Among these, they identified 875 letters that dabbled in conspiracy talk - that some group was acting in secret to steal power, or bury the truth, or reap some other benefit at the expense of the common good.

Many of the letters alleged geopolitical conspiracies: In 1890, it was England and Canada conspiring to take back territory from the United States, and in 1906, Japan was supposedly sending soldiers in disguise to prepare to seize Hawaii. Others focused on domestic political conspiracies, such as President Harry Truman covering up Communist infiltration of the government in the 1950s, and the idea that the 9/11 attacks were coordinated by the US to smear the Saudis. Still others were just bizarre, such as a 1973 letter claiming that lesbianism is a CIA-inspired plot.

When Uscinski and Parent graphed the prevalence of such newspaper conspiracy-theory letters between 1890 and 2010, the result was a very jagged line that showed, if anything, a slight downward trend over time (the most prominent peak marks McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the early 1950s). More recent polling research by Uscinski suggests that this overall picture has remained the same - with belief in specific conspiracy theories rising and falling over time, but no evidence for an overall increase. "The general hypothesis that's put out there in the media is [that] everyone's becoming conspiracists, and now is the golden age of conspiracy theory," Uscinski says. "We find no such thing whatsoever."

Uscinski's research suggests that conspiracy thinking is more or less evenly distributed across the political spectrum, with Democrats becoming more vocal about conspiracy theories when Republicans are in power, and vice versa. Democrats tend to be suspicious of corporations and conservatives. Republicans are more likely to be suspicious of communists and liberals. In a chapter memorably titled "Conspiracy Theories Are for Losers," Uscinski and Parent write that conspiracies are a way for those who've lost or lack power to explain their losses, channel their anger, close ranks and regroup.

During his presidency, Donald Trump was the exception that proves the rule, Uscinski says. It's not easy for one of the most powerful people in the world to claim they're the victim of a conspiracy (it didn't work, for instance, when allies of Bill Clinton blamed a "vast right-wing conspiracy" for the president's troubles during his impeachment trial in the late 1990s). Trump, however, cast himself as a political outsider from the beginning, Uscinski says: "He sets himself up, not only as a victim of the other side, but of both parties and the entire system and what he calls the deep state...so everything is rigged against him." The Russia inquiry and his 2019 impeachment, Uscinski adds, helped to feed this narrative, which has continued through the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 election.

A new - and dangerous - form

Rosenblum argues that Trump epitomizes a new type of "conspiracy without theory" that relies on sheer assertion and repetition rather than evidence and reason. (Rosenblum is coeditor of the Annual Review of Political Science.) Trump's baseless tweets that the election was rigged, she says, stand in contrast to Kennedy assassination conspiracists obsessing over bullet trajectories or 9/11 conspiracists diving into data on the temperature at which jet fuel burns. "This conspiracy thinking that's going on today takes a very different and novel and dangerous form," she says, because it seeks to delegitimize political rivals, government agencies, the press and others who might stand in the way. "It unsettles the ground on which we argue, negotiate, and even disagree," she and coauthor Russell Muirhead wrote in their 2019 book, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. "It makes democracy unworkable - and ultimately, it makes democracy seem unworthy."

One of the most influential ideas in conspiracy theory scholarship is that people who identify themselves as politically conservative are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. In a widely cited 1964 essay in Harper's Magazine, Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter argued that a "paranoid style" runs through conservative political movements of the twentieth century, fed by distrust of "cosmopolitans and intellectuals." Uscinski says his polling research finds no evidence that conservatives are more prone to believe in conspiracy theories than liberals, but other researchers still think there's something to this idea.

In a recent series of studies, van der Linden and colleagues conducted online surveys of more than 5,000 Americans from across the political spectrum, asking them to rate their political preferences and respond to questions that were developed by psychologists to measure conspiratorial thinking and paranoia. One survey item, for example, asked participants to rate on a scale of 0 to 100 their agreement with the statement: "I think that events which superficially seem to lack a connection are often the result of secret activities."

People at both extremes of the political spectrum were more prone to conspiracy thinking than those in the middle, but conservatives tended to be more conspiratorial than liberals, the researchers reported in Political Psychology last year. "We think this is convincing evidence...of these differences between liberals and conservatives," van der Linden says. "I wouldn't say it's a large effect, but it wasn't tiny, either."

This difference, he thinks, may be rooted in group psychology. "There's a lot of research that shows that, whereas the liberals are a bit more extroverted and rebellious and so on, conservatives tend to be focused on managing uncertainty and threat and in-group values," he says. Conspiracy theories are one way to make sense of events that seem overwhelming and may feel as though they threaten the groups and values that people most identify with, he says. "It's definitely a mechanism to try to restore a sense of agency and control over the narrative."

Van der Linden is quick to note, however, that liberals aren't immune from conspiracy thinking. Conspiracy theories about technology seem more popular among liberals, for example, including ones involving pharmaceutical companies and genetically modified crops.

Mind hacks

One reason that conspiracy theories find fertile ground in the human mind has to do with epistemology - the philosophy of how we know what we know (or think we do). Because any individual can know only a tiny sliver of the world firsthand, we have no choice but to accept a great deal of information we can't verify for ourselves. Most people believe (correctly) that Antarctica is very cold and populated with penguins, despite never having been there. The assumptions and cognitive shortcuts we use to decide what's true make sense most of the time, but they also leave the door open for bad information, including conspiracy theories.

Since most of the information we encounter in everyday life (at least outside of social media) is true, that creates a bias toward accepting new information, says Nadia Brashier, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Harvard. And hearing a claim multiple times makes it seem even more true. "One of the most insidious influences on our judgment involves repetition," Brashier says.

Dozens of studies have documented this "illusory truth effect," mainly by asking participants to rate the veracity of trivia, rumors, product claims, fake news reports and other bits of information, Brashier and Duke University psychologist and neuroscientist Elizabeth Marsh write in a recent Annual Review of Psychology paper about how people determine what's true. Even people who recognize a statement as false the first time they see it are more likely to judge it as probably true after seeing it multiple times, Brashier says.

Ordinarily, it's rational to assume that the more times you hear something, the more likely it is to be true, she says. "But we're seeing bad actors hijack these shortcuts that we use that make sense in a lot of situations [but] that can lead us astray in others."

Conspiracy theories also take advantage of our tendency to look for patterns and explanations, says Karen Douglas, a psychologist who studies conspiracy thinking at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. Pattern detection serves us well in everyday life, Douglas says: It's how we piece together how people typically behave in given situations, for example. Believing in a bogus conspiracy theory amounts to seeing a pattern that's not really there.

In a 2018 paper, Douglas and colleagues recruited hundreds of volunteers online and quizzed them about their belief in various conspiracy theories, some well-known ones and some invented by the researchers. Participants who agreed more strongly with a sample of well-known conspiracy theories were more likely than others to also see meaningful patterns in a series of random coin tosses and in the chaotic, splotchy paintings of abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock. "It seems that seeing patterns in random phenomena such as coin tosses and abstract paintings relates to the tendency to see patterns in political and social events that are happening in the world," Douglas says.

Such studies reveal a human tendency to attribute events to the intentional actions of others rather than to pure chance, Douglas says. Work by others has shown that we also tend to assume that when something huge happens, something huge must have caused it. This also feeds into conspiracy thinking, Douglas says. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was too momentous an event to have been pulled off by a lone gunman, conspiracists argue. Surely the US government was involved - or the KGB, or the Mafia.

Social and emotional factors are likely at play as well. "People are most susceptible to conspiracy theories when particular psychological needs are frustrated," Douglas says. "Specifically, people need knowledge and certainty to feel safe, secure and in control, and to feel good about themselves and the social groups they belong to." When these needs are unmet - say, amidst the fear and uncertainty of a global pandemic - conspiracy theories might seem to offer consolation, Douglas says.

But her research suggests that they might actually do the opposite. "Reading about conspiracy theories, instead of making people feel more powerful, makes people feel less powerful," she says. It may even make people less likely to take actions that would give them more control over their situation. In experiments where volunteers read about conspiracy theories before answering questionnaires about their likelihood to engage in various behaviors, Douglas and others have found evidence that conspiracy theories reduce people's inclination to vote, to vaccinate their children, or to help fight climate change. The people in such studies also express greater prejudice and a greater inclination to commit petty crime, at least in their responses to researchers.

"Our reasoning is that if people perceive that others are conspiring and doing antisocial things, then it seems OK for people to do these things too," Douglas says. "Also, if they feel that the world is run by a select few and that everything is determined, why bother to go out and vote or engage with a corrupt system?" She adds, however, that more work is needed to determine whether these responses in conspiracy belief studies actually translate to antisocial behaviors in the real world.

Countering conspiracies

Talking a true believer out of their belief in a conspiracy can be nearly impossible. (The believer will assume you're hopelessly naïve or, worse, that you're part of the cover-up). Even when conspiracy theories have bold predictions that don't come true, such as QAnon's claim that Trump would win reelection, followers twist themselves in logical knots to cling to their core beliefs. "These beliefs are important to people, and letting them go means letting go of something important that has determined the way they see the world for some time," Douglas says.

As a result, some researchers think that preventing conspiracy theories from taking hold in the first place is a better strategy than fact-checking and debunking them after they do - and they have been hard at work developing and testing such strategies. Van der Linden sees inoculation as a useful metaphor here. "I think one of the best solutions we have is to actually inject people with a weakened dose of the conspiracy...to help people build up mental or cognitive antibodies," he says.

One way he and his colleagues have been trying to do that (no needles required) is by developing online games and apps. In a game called Bad News, for example, players assume the role of a fake news creator trying to attract followers and evolve from a social media nobody into the head of a fake-news empire. The 15-minute game is meant to teach people how fake news spreads so that they can recognize it more readily. (In one of the activities, players create and promote their own conspiracy theory.)

To assess the game's effects, van der Linden and colleagues recruited more than 14,000 people to play Bad News. Before and after playing, participants were asked to identify misinformation within a selection of real and made-up tweets and headlines. Playing the game improved players' resistance to fake news, the researchers reported in 2019: When presented with dubious tweets and news headlines, they were more likely to rate them as unreliable. The researchers termed the improvement "small to moderate." A follow-up study found that it persisted for at least three months after the game was played.

More recently, the researchers created a game based on Bad News that specifically tackles conspiracies and other misinformation related to Covid-19. Called Go Viral!, it was developed with support from the UK government and released in October. The World Health Organization and the United Nations have promoted the game as a resource for fighting misinformation, "so that we can hopefully reach millions of people around the world," van der Linden says.

Stopping the spread

The critical question - pushing the vaccine metaphor to its limits - is how to achieve herd immunity, the point at which enough of the population is immune so that conspiracy theories can't go viral. It might be difficult to do that with games because they require people to take the time to engage, says Gordon Pennycook, a behavioral scientist at the University of Regina in Canada. So Pennycook has been working on interventions that he believes will be easier to scale up.

His research suggests that people are pretty good at spotting fake news, including bogus conspiracy theories - but that doesn't mean they don't share fake stuff on social media. "People are sharing headlines that they could identify as being false if they bothered to think about it," he says.

To counter this, Pennycook and colleagues have been developing ways to nudge people to think more critically about the information they share without explicitly telling them to do so. In one recent study conducted online, they asked 856 volunteers to rate how likely they would be to share various Covid-19 news headlines - some true ones from credible sources, others that were bogus or debunked - if they saw them on social media. Before doing this, roughly half the participants were asked to rate the accuracy of a single, politically neutral headline unrelated to Covid-19 (one had to do with a neutron star discovery, another had to do with "Seinfeld" coming to Netflix). Taking a moment to contemplate accuracy made participants nearly three times more discerning in what they decided to share, the researchers reported in Psychological Science last year.

Social media companies have started to deploy similar strategies: An example is Twitter's recent rollout of a prompt that advises users to read an article before sharing it. Pennycook thinks that such moves are worthwhile. In a recent study, yet to be published, he and colleagues found that a 30-second video prompting people to think about accuracy cut viewers' willingness to share fake news in half (at least as reported on a survey - the researchers weren't able to track the actual social media behavior).

Even as researchers push to develop such measures, they acknowledge that eradicating bogus conspiracy theories may not be possible. Conspiracy theories flourished as far back as the Roman Empire, and they inspired an angry mob to storm the U.S. Capitol just last week. Specific theories may come and go, but the allure of conspiracy theories for people trying to make sense of events beyond their control seems more enduring. For better - and of late, very much for worse - they appear to be a permanent part of the human condition.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The United States of America was founded on a conspiracy theory. In the lead-up to the War of Independence, revolutionaries argued that a tax on tea or stamps is not just a tax, but the opening gambit in a sinister plot of oppression.

# data[].attributes.headline
Website Game About Process and Spread of Disinformation

# data[].attributes.subject
Website Game About Process and Spread of Disinformation

# data[].attributes.body
from Nathan Brandsma

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Play the fake news game! How bad are you? Become a fake news tycoon and get as many followers as you can.

# data[].attributes.body
from Nathan Brandsma

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

# data[].attributes.headline
Learning from the Stories Embedded in Nonfiction Texts

# data[].attributes.subject
Learning from the Stories Embedded in Nonfiction Texts

# data[].attributes.body
from Elizabeth Gentry

# data[].attributes.body
Scope Scholastic (04/2018)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On December 1, 1938-just a few weeks after Kristallnacht -the first train of the Kindertransport left Germany for England. By early 1939, nearly 300 children were arriving in England every week.

On April 14, 1939, Lore's mom and dad told her that they had arranged a place for her on the Kindertransport. Lore would have only four days to get ready to leave.

The rules were strict: Lore was allowed one suitcase, one piece of hand luggage, and 10 marks-about $70 today. The Nazis didn't want anything of value to leave Germany.

At the train station, Lore's parents insisted they would see her again. As the train hauled itself out of the station, all Lore could do was stare out the window until her mom and dad disappeared from sight.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Children Who Escaped the Nazis - Narrative Nonfiction | Scholastic Scope Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On December 1, 1938-just a few weeks after Kristallnacht -the first train of the Kindertransport left Germany for England. By early 1939, nearly 300 children were arriving in England every week. On April 14, 1939, Lore's mom and dad told her that they had arranged a place for her on the Kindertransport.

# data[].attributes.body
from Chris Wissel Perotti

# data[].attributes.body
The New Yorker - Malcolm Gladwell (8/30/2004)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Many years ago, one mustard dominated the supermarket shelves: French's. It came in a plastic bottle. People used it on hot dogs and bologna. It was a yellow mustard, made from ground white mustard seed with turmeric and vinegar, which gave it a mild, slightly metallic taste. If you looked hard in the grocery store, you might find something in the specialty-foods section called Grey Poupon, which was Dijon mustard, made from the more pungent brown mustard seed. In the early seventies, Grey Poupon was no more than a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year business. Few people knew what it was or how it tasted, or had any particular desire for an alternative to French's or the runner-up, Gulden's. Then one day the Heublein Company, which owned Grey Poupon, discovered something remarkable: if you gave people a mustard taste test, a significant number had only to try Grey Poupon once to switch from yellow mustard. In the food world that almost never happens; even among the most successful food brands, only about one in a hundred have that kind of conversion rate. Grey Poupon was magic.

So Heublein put Grey Poupon in a bigger glass jar, with an enamelled label and enough of a whiff of Frenchness to make it seem as if it were still being made in Europe (it was made in Hartford, Connecticut, from Canadian mustard seed and white wine). The company ran tasteful print ads in upscale food magazines. They put the mustard in little foil packets and distributed them with airplane meals-which was a brand-new idea at the time. Then they hired the Manhattan ad agency Lowe Marschalk to do something, on a modest budget, for television. The agency came back with an idea: A Rolls-Royce is driving down a country road. There's a man in the back seat in a suit with a plate of beef on a silver tray. He nods to the chauffeur, who opens the glove compartment. Then comes what is known in the business as the "reveal." The chauffeur hands back a jar of Grey Poupon. Another Rolls-Royce pulls up alongside. A man leans his head out the window. "Pardon me. Would you have any Grey Poupon?"

In the cities where the ads ran, sales of Grey Poupon leaped forty to fifty per cent, and whenever Heublein bought airtime in new cities sales jumped by forty to fifty per cent again. Grocery stores put Grey Poupon next to French's and Gulden's. By the end of the nineteen-eighties Grey Poupon was the most powerful brand in mustard. "The tagline in the commercial was that this was one of life's finer pleasures," Larry Elegant, who wrote the original Grey Poupon spot, says, "and that, along with the Rolls-Royce, seemed to impart to people's minds that this was something truly different and superior."

The rise of Grey Poupon proved that the American supermarket shopper was willing to pay more-in this case, $3.99 instead of $1.49 for eight ounces-as long as what they were buying carried with it an air of sophistication and complex aromatics. Its success showed, furthermore, that the boundaries of taste and custom were not fixed: that just because mustard had always been yellow didn't mean that consumers would use only yellow mustard. It is because of Grey Poupon that the standard American supermarket today has an entire mustard section. And it is because of Grey Poupon that a man named Jim Wigon decided, four years ago, to enter the ketchup business. Isn't the ketchup business today exactly where mustard was thirty years ago? There is Heinz and, far behind, Hunt's and Del Monte and a handful of private-label brands. Jim Wigon wanted to create the Grey Poupon of ketchup.

Wigon is from Boston. He's a thickset man in his early fifties, with a full salt-and-pepper beard. He runs his ketchup business-under the brand World's Best Ketchup-out of the catering business of his partner, Nick Schiarizzi, in Norwood, Massachusetts, just off Route 1, in a low-slung building behind an industrial-equipment-rental shop. He starts with red peppers, Spanish onions, garlic, and a high-end tomato paste. Basil is chopped by hand, because the buffalo chopper bruises the leaves. He uses maple syrup, not corn syrup, which gives him a quarter of the sugar of Heinz. He pours his ketchup into a clear glass ten-ounce jar, and sells it for three times the price of Heinz, and for the past few years he has crisscrossed the country, peddling World's Best in six flavors-regular, sweet, dill, garlic, caramelized onion, and basil-to specialty grocery stores and supermarkets. If you were in Zabar's on Manhattan's Upper West Side a few months ago, you would have seen him at the front of the store, in a spot between the sushi and the gefilte fish. He was wearing a World's Best baseball cap, a white shirt, and a red-stained apron. In front of him, on a small table, was a silver tureen filled with miniature chicken and beef meatballs, a box of toothpicks, and a dozen or so open jars of his ketchup. "Try my ketchup!" Wigon said, over and over, to anyone who passed. "If you don't try it, you're doomed to eat Heinz the rest of your life."

In the same aisle at Zabar's that day two other demonstrations were going on, so that people were starting at one end with free chicken sausage, sampling a slice of prosciutto, and then pausing at the World's Best stand before heading for the cash register. They would look down at the array of open jars, and Wigon would impale a meatball on a toothpick, dip it in one of his ketchups, and hand it to them with a flourish. The ratio of tomato solids to liquid in World's Best is much higher than in Heinz, and the maple syrup gives it an unmistakable sweet kick. Invariably, people would close their eyes, just for a moment, and do a subtle double take. Some of them would look slightly perplexed and walk away, and others would nod and pick up a jar. "You know why you like it so much?" he would say, in his broad Boston accent, to the customers who seemed most impressed. "Because you've been eating bad ketchup all your life!" Jim Wigon had a simple vision: build a better ketchup-the way Grey Poupon built a better mustard-and the world will beat a path to your door. If only it were that easy.

The story of World's Best Ketchup cannot properly be told without a man from White Plains, New York, named Howard Moskowitz. Moskowitz is sixty, short and round, with graying hair and huge gold-rimmed glasses. When he talks, he favors the Socratic monologue-a series of questions that he poses to himself, then answers, punctuated by "ahhh" and much vigorous nodding. He is a lineal descendant of the legendary eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi known as the Seer of Lublin. He keeps a parrot. At Harvard, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on psychophysics, and all the rooms on the ground floor of his food-testing and market-research business are named after famous psychophysicists. ("Have you ever heard of the name Rose Marie Pangborn? Ahhh. She was a professor at Davis. Very famous. This is the Pangborn kitchen.") Moskowitz is a man of uncommon exuberance and persuasiveness: if he had been your freshman statistics professor, you would today be a statistician. "My favorite writer? Gibbon," he burst out, when we met not long ago. He had just been holding forth on the subject of sodium solutions. "Right now I'm working my way through the Hales history of the Byzantine Empire. Holy shit! Everything is easy until you get to the Byzantine Empire. It's impossible. One emperor is always killing the others, and everyone has five wives or three husbands. It's very Byzantine."

Moskowitz set up shop in the seventies, and one of his first clients was Pepsi. The artificial sweetener aspartame had just become available, and Pepsi wanted Moskowitz to figure out the perfect amount of sweetener for a can of Diet Pepsi. Pepsi knew that anything below eight per cent sweetness was not sweet enough and anything over twelve per cent was too sweet. So Moskowitz did the logical thing. He made up experimental batches of Diet Pepsi with every conceivable degree of sweetness-8 per cent, 8.25 per cent, 8.5, and on and on up to 12-gave them to hundreds of people, and looked for the concentration that people liked the most. But the data were a mess-there wasn't a pattern-and one day, sitting in a diner, Moskowitz realized why. They had been asking the wrong question. There was no such thing as the perfect Diet Pepsi. They should have been looking for the perfect Diet Pepsis.

It took a long time for the food world to catch up with Howard Moskowitz. He knocked on doors and tried to explain his idea about the plural nature of perfection, and no one answered. He spoke at food-industry conferences, and audiences shrugged. But he could think of nothing else. "It's like that Yiddish expression," he says. "Do you know it? To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish!" Then, in 1986, he got a call from the Campbell's Soup Company. They were in the spaghetti-sauce business, going up against Ragú with their Prego brand. Prego was a little thicker than Ragú, with diced tomatoes as opposed to Ragú's purée, and, Campbell's thought, had better pasta adherence. But, for all that, Prego was in a slump, and Campbell's was desperate for new ideas.

Standard practice in the food industry would have been to convene a focus group and ask spaghetti eaters what they wanted. But Moskowitz does not believe that consumers-even spaghetti lovers-know what they desire if what they desire does not yet exist. "The mind," as Moskowitz is fond of saying, "knows not what the tongue wants." Instead, working with the Campbell's kitchens, he came up with forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce. These were designed to differ in every conceivable way: spiciness, sweetness, tartness, saltiness, thickness, aroma, mouth feel, cost of ingredients, and so forth. He had a trained panel of food tasters analyze each of those varieties in depth. Then he took the prototypes on the road-to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Jacksonville-and asked people in groups of twenty-five to eat between eight and ten small bowls of different spaghetti sauces over two hours and rate them on a scale of one to a hundred. When Moskowitz charted the results, he saw that everyone had a slightly different definition of what a perfect spaghetti sauce tasted like. If you sifted carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz learned that most people's preferences fell into one of three broad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky, and of those three the last was the most important. Why? Because at the time there was no extra-chunky spaghetti sauce in the supermarket. Over the next decade, that new category proved to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Prego. "We all said, 'Wow!' " Monica Wood, who was then the head of market research for Campbell's, recalls. "Here there was this third segment-people who liked their spaghetti sauce with lots of stuff in it-and it was completely untapped. So in about 1989-90 we launched Prego extra-chunky. It was extraordinarily successful."

It may be hard today, fifteen years later-when every brand seems to come in multiple varieties-to appreciate how much of a breakthrough this was. In those years, people in the food industry carried around in their heads the notion of a platonic dish-the version of a dish that looked and tasted absolutely right. At Ragú and Prego, they had been striving for the platonic spaghetti sauce, and the platonic spaghetti sauce was thin and blended because that's the way they thought it was done in Italy. Cooking, on the industrial level, was consumed with the search for human universals. Once you start looking for the sources of human variability, though, the old orthodoxy goes out the window. Howard Moskowitz stood up to the Platonists and said there are no universals.

Moskowitz still has a version of the computer model he used for Prego fifteen years ago. It has all the coded results from the consumer taste tests and the expert tastings, split into the three categories (plain, spicy, and extra-chunky) and linked up with the actual ingredients list on a spreadsheet. "You know how they have a computer model for building an aircraft," Moskowitz said as he pulled up the program on his computer. "This is a model for building spaghetti sauce. Look, every variable is here." He pointed at column after column of ratings. "So here are the ingredients. I'm a brand manager for Prego. I want to optimize one of the segments. Let's start with Segment 1." In Moskowitz's program, the three spaghetti-sauce groups were labelled Segment 1, Segment 2, and Segment 3. He typed in a few commands, instructing the computer to give him the formulation that would score the highest with those people in Segment 1. The answer appeared almost immediately: a specific recipe that, according to Moskowitz's data, produced a score of 78 from the people in Segment 1. But that same formulation didn't do nearly as well with those in Segment 2 and Segment 3. They scored it 67 and 57, respectively. Moskowitz started again, this time asking the computer to optimize for Segment 2. This time the ratings came in at 82, but now Segment 1 had fallen ten points, to 68. "See what happens?" he said. "If I make one group happier, I piss off another group. We did this for coffee with General Foods, and we found that if you create only one product the best you can get across all the segments is a 60-if you're lucky. That's if you were to treat everybody as one big happy family. But if I do the sensory segmentation, I can get 70, 71, 72. Is that big? Ahhh. It's a very big difference. In coffee, a 71 is something you'll die for."

When Jim Wigon set up shop that day in Zabar's, then, his operating assumption was that there ought to be some segment of the population that preferred a ketchup made with Stanislaus tomato paste and hand-chopped basil and maple syrup. That's the Moskowitz theory. But there is theory and there is practice. By the end of that long day, Wigon had sold ninety jars. But he'd also got two parking tickets and had to pay for a hotel room, so he wasn't going home with money in his pocket. For the year, Wigon estimates, he'll sell fifty thousand jars-which, in the universe of condiments, is no more than a blip. "I haven't drawn a paycheck in five years," Wigon said as he impaled another meatball on a toothpick. "My wife is killing me." And it isn't just World's Best that is struggling. In the gourmet-ketchup world, there is River Run and Uncle Dave's, from Vermont, and Muir Glen Organic and Mrs. Tomato Head Roasted Garlic Peppercorn Catsup, in California, and dozens of others-and every year Heinz's overwhelming share of the ketchup market just grows.

It is possible, of course, that ketchup is waiting for its own version of that Rolls-Royce commercial, or the discovery of the ketchup equivalent of extra-chunky-the magic formula that will satisfy an unmet need. It is also possible, however, that the rules of Howard Moskowitz, which apply to Grey Poupon and Prego spaghetti sauce and to olive oil and salad dressing and virtually everything else in the supermarket, don't apply to ketchup.

Tomato ketchup is a nineteenth-century creation-the union of the English tradition of fruit and vegetable sauces and the growing American infatuation with the tomato. But what we know today as ketchup emerged out of a debate that raged in the first years of the last century over benzoate, a preservative widely used in late-nineteenth-century condiments. Harvey Washington Wiley, the chief of the Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of Agriculture from 1883 to 1912, came to believe that benzoates were not safe, and the result was an argument that split the ketchup world in half. On one side was the ketchup establishment, which believed that it was impossible to make ketchup without benzoate and that benzoate was not harmful in the amounts used. On the other side was a renegade band of ketchup manufacturers, who believed that the preservative puzzle could be solved with the application of culinary science. The dominant nineteenth-century ketchups were thin and watery, in part because they were made from unripe tomatoes, which are low in the complex carbohydrates known as pectin, which add body to a sauce. But what if you made ketchup from ripe tomatoes, giving it the density it needed to resist degradation? Nineteenth-century ketchups had a strong tomato taste, with just a light vinegar touch. The renegades argued that by greatly increasing the amount of vinegar, in effect protecting the tomatoes by pickling them, they were making a superior ketchup: safer, purer, and better tasting. They offered a money-back guarantee in the event of spoilage. They charged more for their product, convinced that the public would pay more for a better ketchup, and they were right. The benzoate ketchups disappeared. The leader of the renegade band was an entrepreneur out of Pittsburgh named Henry J. Heinz.

The world's leading expert on ketchup's early years is Andrew F. Smith, a substantial man, well over six feet, with a graying mustache and short wavy black hair. Smith is a scholar, trained as a political scientist, intent on bringing rigor to the world of food. When we met for lunch not long ago at the restaurant Savoy in SoHo (chosen because of the excellence of its hamburger and French fries, and because Savoy makes its own ketchup-a dark, peppery, and viscous variety served in a white porcelain saucer), Smith was in the throes of examining the origins of the croissant for the upcoming "Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America," of which he is the editor-in-chief. Was the croissant invented in 1683, by the Viennese, in celebration of their defeat of the invading Turks? Or in 1686, by the residents of Budapest, to celebrate their defeat of the Turks? Both explanations would explain its distinctive crescent shape-since it would make a certain cultural sense (particularly for the Viennese) to consecrate their battlefield triumphs in the form of pastry. But the only reference Smith could find to either story was in the Larousse Gastronomique of 1938. "It just doesn't check out," he said, shaking his head wearily.

Smith's specialty is the tomato, however, and over the course of many scholarly articles and books-"The History of Home-Made Anglo-American Tomato Ketchup," for Petits Propos Culinaires, for example, and "The Great Tomato Pill War of the 1830's," for The Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin -Smith has argued that some critical portion of the history of culinary civilization could be told through this fruit. Cortez brought tomatoes to Europe from the New World, and they inexorably insinuated themselves into the world's cuisines. The Italians substituted the tomato for eggplant. In northern India, it went into curries and chutneys. "The biggest tomato producer in the world today?" Smith paused, for dramatic effect. "China. You don't think of tomato being a part of Chinese cuisine, and it wasn't ten years ago. But it is now." Smith dipped one of my French fries into the homemade sauce. "It has that raw taste," he said, with a look of intense concentration. "It's fresh ketchup. You can taste the tomato." Ketchup was, to his mind, the most nearly perfect of all the tomato's manifestations. It was inexpensive, which meant that it had a firm lock on the mass market, and it was a condiment, not an ingredient, which meant that it could be applied at the discretion of the food eater, not the food preparer. "There's a quote from Elizabeth Rozin I've always loved," he said. Rozin is the food theorist who wrote the essay "Ketchup and the Collective Unconscious," and Smith used her conclusion as the epigraph of his ketchup book: ketchup may well be "the only true culinary expression of the melting pot, and . . . its special and unprecedented ability to provide something for everyone makes it the Esperanto of cuisine." Here is where Henry Heinz and the benzoate battle were so important: in defeating the condiment Old Guard, he was the one who changed the flavor of ketchup in a way that made it universal.

There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Umami is the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother's milk, or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato. "Umami adds body," Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, says. "If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it's thicker-it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food." When Heinz moved to ripe tomatoes and increased the percentage of tomato solids, he made ketchup, first and foremost, a potent source of umami. Then he dramatically increased the concentration of vinegar, so that his ketchup had twice the acidity of most other ketchups; now ketchup was sour, another of the fundamental tastes. The post-benzoate ketchups also doubled the concentration of sugar-so now ketchup was also sweet-and all along ketchup had been salty and bitter. These are not trivial issues. Give a baby soup, and then soup with MSG (an amino-acid salt that is pure umami), and the baby will go back for the MSG soup every time, the same way a baby will always prefer water with sugar to water alone. Salt and sugar and umami are primal signals about the food we are eating-about how dense it is in calories, for example, or, in the case of umami, about the presence of proteins and amino acids. What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz's ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?

A number of years ago, the H. J. Heinz Company did an extensive market-research project in which researchers went into people's homes and watched the way they used ketchup. "I remember sitting in one of those households," Casey Keller, who was until recently the chief growth officer for Heinz, says. "There was a three-year-old and a six-year-old, and what happened was that the kids asked for ketchup and Mom brought it out. It was a forty-ounce bottle. And the three-year-old went to grab it himself, and Mom intercepted the bottle and said, 'No, you're not going to do that.' She physically took the bottle away and doled out a little dollop. You could see that the whole thing was a bummer." For Heinz, Keller says, that moment was an epiphany. A typical five-year-old consumes about sixty per cent more ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control. "If you are four-and I have a four-year-old-he doesn't get to choose what he eats for dinner, in most cases," Keller says. "But the one thing he can control is ketchup. It's the one part of the food experience that he can customize and personalize." As a result, Heinz came out with the so-called EZ Squirt bottle, made out of soft plastic with a conical nozzle. In homes where the EZ Squirt is used, ketchup consumption has grown by as much as twelve per cent.

There is another lesson in that household scene, though. Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived. There the three-year-old was, confronted with something strange on his plate-tuna fish, perhaps, or Brussels sprouts-and he wanted to alter his food in some way that made the unfamiliar familiar. He wanted to subdue the contents of his plate. And so he turned to ketchup, because, alone among the condiments on the table, ketchup could deliver sweet and sour and salty and bitter and umami, all at once.

Last February, Edgar Chambers IV, who runs the sensory-analysis center at Kansas State University, conducted a joint assessment of World's Best and Heinz. He has seventeen trained tasters on his staff, and they work for academia and industry, answering the often difficult question of what a given substance tastes like. It is demanding work. Immediately after conducting the ketchup study, Chambers dispatched a team to Bangkok to do an analysis of fruit-bananas, mangoes, rose apples, and sweet tamarind. Others were detailed to soy and kimchi in South Korea, and Chambers's wife led a delegation to Italy to analyze ice cream.

The ketchup tasting took place over four hours, on two consecutive mornings. Six tasters sat around a large, round table with a lazy Susan in the middle. In front of each panelist were two one-ounce cups, one filled with Heinz ketchup and one filled with World's Best. They would work along fourteen dimensions of flavor and texture, in accordance with the standard fifteen-point scale used by the food world. The flavor components would be divided two ways: elements picked up by the tongue and elements picked up by the nose. A very ripe peach, for example, tastes sweet but it also smells sweet-which is a very different aspect of sweetness. Vinegar has a sour taste but also a pungency, a vapor that rises up the back of the nose and fills the mouth when you breathe out. To aid in the rating process, the tasters surrounded themselves with little bowls of sweet and sour and salty solutions, and portions of Contadina tomato paste, Hunt's tomato sauce, and Campbell's tomato juice, all of which represent different concentrations of tomato-ness.

After breaking the ketchup down into its component parts, the testers assessed the critical dimension of "amplitude," the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that "bloom" in the mouth. "The difference between high and low amplitude is the difference between my son and a great pianist playing 'Ode to Joy' on the piano," Chambers says. "They are playing the same notes, but they blend better with the great pianist." Pepperidge Farm shortbread cookies are considered to have high amplitude. So are Hellman's mayonnaise and Sara Lee poundcake. When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt. You can't isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. But you can with one of those private-label colas that you get in the supermarket. "The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous," Judy Heylmun, a vice-president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says. "They have beautiful notes-all flavors are in balance. It's very hard to do that well. Usually, when you taste a store cola it's"- and here she made a series of pik! pik! pik! sounds-"all the notes are kind of spiky, and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out. And then the cinnamon. Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to vanilla, which is very dark and deep. A really cheap store brand will have a big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything."

Some of the cheaper ketchups are the same way. Ketchup aficionados say that there's a disquieting unevenness to the tomato notes in Del Monte ketchup: Tomatoes vary, in acidity and sweetness and the ratio of solids to liquid, according to the seed variety used, the time of year they are harvested, the soil in which they are grown, and the weather during the growing season. Unless all those variables are tightly controlled, one batch of ketchup can end up too watery and another can be too strong. Or try one of the numerous private-label brands that make up the bottom of the ketchup market and pay attention to the spice mix; you may well find yourself conscious of the clove note or overwhelmed by a hit of garlic. Generic colas and ketchups have what Moskowitz calls a hook-a sensory attribute that you can single out, and ultimately tire of.

The tasting began with a plastic spoon. Upon consideration, it was decided that the analysis would be helped if the ketchups were tasted on French fries, so a batch of fries were cooked up, and distributed around the table. Each tester, according to protocol, took the fries one by one, dipped them into the cup-all the way, right to the bottom-bit off the portion covered in ketchup, and then contemplated the evidence of their senses. For Heinz, the critical flavor components-vinegar, salt, tomato I.D. (over-all tomato-ness), sweet, and bitter-were judged to be present in roughly equal concentrations, and those elements, in turn, were judged to be well blended. The World's Best, though, "had a completely different view, a different profile, from the Heinz," Chambers said. It had a much stronger hit of sweet aromatics-4.0 to 2.5-and outstripped Heinz on tomato I.D. by a resounding 9 to 5.5. But there was less salt, and no discernible vinegar. "The other comment from the panel was that these elements were really not blended at all," Chambers went on. "The World's Best product had really low amplitude." According to Joyce Buchholz, one of the panelists, when the group judged aftertaste, "it seemed like a certain flavor would hang over longer in the case of World's Best-that cooked-tomatoey flavor."

But what was Jim Wigon to do? To compete against Heinz, he had to try something dramatic, like substituting maple syrup for corn syrup, ramping up the tomato solids. That made for an unusual and daring flavor. World's Best Dill ketchup on fried catfish, for instance, is a marvellous thing. But it also meant that his ketchup wasn't as sensorily complete as Heinz, and he was paying a heavy price in amplitude. "Our conclusion was mainly this," Buchholz said. "We felt that World's Best seemed to be more like a sauce." She was trying to be helpful.

There is an exception, then, to the Moskowitz rule. Today there are thirty-six varieties of Ragú spaghetti sauce, under six rubrics-Old World Style, Chunky Garden Style, Robusto, Light, Cheese Creations, and Rich & Meaty-which means that there is very nearly an optimal spaghetti sauce for every man, woman, and child in America. Measured against the monotony that confronted Howard Moskowitz twenty years ago, this is progress. Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference. But that makes it easy to forget that sometimes happiness can be found in having what we've always had and everyone else is having. "Back in the seventies, someone else-I think it was Ragú-tried to do an 'Italian'-style ketchup," Moskowitz said. "They failed miserably." It was a conundrum: what was true about a yellow condiment that went on hot dogs was not true about a tomato condiment that went on hamburgers, and what was true about tomato sauce when you added visible solids and put it in a jar was somehow not true about tomato sauce when you added vinegar and sugar and put it in a bottle. Moskowitz shrugged. "I guess ketchup is ketchup." ♦

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Malcolm Gladwell on the history of mustard and ketchup, the science and psychology of food testing, and how the best food products have "amplitude."

# data[].attributes.headline
Scientists Clone the First U.S. Endangered Species 

# data[].attributes.subject
Scientists Clone the First U.S. Endangered Species 

# data[].attributes.body
Assoicated Press (2/20/2021)

# data[].attributes.headline
Scientists Clone the first U.S. Endangered Species 

# data[].attributes.subject
Scientists Clone the first U.S. Endangered Species 

# data[].attributes.body
from Victoria Wilson

# data[].attributes.body
Scope Scholastic (10/2017)

# data[].attributes.body
from Emily Fullenkamp

# data[].attributes.body
The New Yorker (2/22/2021)

*Not intended for a MS audience.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Early in the Cuban Revolution, my mother made a consequential decision.

My mother was always asking my sister and me to do things-to call her union about her monthly pension checks (forty-nine dollars), to research the contraindications of a new prescription, to drive her to the wholesale distributor to pick up fifteen-pound boxes of frozen tilapia and some nice eye-of-round roasts. Six years ago, when she was eighty-seven, she wrote a letter outlining everything that we would need to tend to after her death. Her first request was that we send a hundred and fifty dollars to Tía Niña-our name for her sister Ada-every December, March, June, and September. She included the phone number and address of the man in Hialeah who would deliver the money to Cuba. "Even dead," she added in parentheses, "I will bug you." If we cooked the food she cooked and made sure that her granddaughters could play dominoes, she would be happy in Heaven. She would await our arrival there, she wrote. Buried in the middle of the letter was my mother's most fervent appeal, one we had heard before. "As to Poly, don't ever abandon him," she said. "He is the way he is because of me."

My half brother Poly, or Hipólito, was born in Havana in 1953. Our mother and his father were married only briefly, and, when Poly was still small, he and my mother went to live in the three-bedroom rental out of which her family ran a little restaurant. It sat half a block behind the city's military hospital and not far from Camp Columbia, Cuba's main military installation at the time. In 1957, as many Cubans were waging a revolution against Fulgencio Batista and his government, my mother met and fell in love with my father, an Army stenographer and a lunchtime regular.

In the early-morning hours of January 1, 1959, Batista fled the island in defeat, and Cubans poured into the streets to celebrate. Cars blasted their horns, churches rang their bells. Fidel Castro, who had been fighting Batista's troops in the mountains of eastern Cuba for more than two years, arrived in Havana a week later, to thunderous cheers. My mother was delighted, and distributed red T-shirts to her neighbors. My father, who was wary of the new regime and steered clear of revolutionary rallies and political organizations, immediately quit the Army and began to sell sandals in the park behind Havana's capitol. He moved into my mother's family home; every night he would count out his earnings in front of Poly and give him a small share.

In March, 1960, President Eisenhower approved a plan for the C.I.A. to train Cuban exiles in guerrilla warfare so that they might return to Cuba and topple Castro. Though the operation was supposed to be covert, the training camps in Central America and elsewhere made the headlines in the U.S. and Cuba. As John F. Kennedy took office, Castro was already preparing to repel an invasion. On April 15, 1961, exile pilots bombed Cuban airfields, missing many of their targets and killing at least seven people. Castro addressed the nation at a funeral for the victims, calling on Cubans to defend the revolution, which for the first time he defined as socialist. Across the country, the government began to arrest thousands of people who it suspected might side with the invaders.

That night, my father did not come home for dinner. My mother eventually found him, and many other detainees, at the Blanquita Theatre (later renamed the Karl Marx). He was still there on April 17th, when, in the early hours of the morning, exile troops landed on Cuba's southern shore, at the Bay of Pigs. The invasion failed spectacularly. A hundred and fourteen of the exiles were killed, and 1,189 were captured and imprisoned.

In the aftermath, the U.S. government severely tightened its economic embargo on Cuba, and Castro accelerated the country's transition to a one-party state. Every day, twelve hundred Cubans applied for entry to the U.S. The Kennedy Administration welcomed the arrivals, pointing to their growing numbers to discredit the revolution. In April, 1962, when my mother was seven months pregnant with me, my father left Cuba and settled in New York City, working as a short-order cook in a hotel in midtown Manhattan. As soon as he could, he began the paperwork for my mother, Poly, and me to join him.

But Poly was someone else's son, and his father, a member of the revolutionary police, wanted Poly to remain in Cuba. My mother, my aunts, and my grandmother begged him to let Poly leave with her, but he refused. Years later, my mother told me that one day, as she was walking with us near the docks in Old Havana, she saw a crowd gathered around an American ship-it may have been the S.S. African Pilot, which had arrived in Havana with medicine and other supplies to be exchanged for prisoners from the Bay of Pigs invasion. In a last-minute arrangement, relatives of the prisoners were allowed to board for the return journey. My mother said that the scene was chaotic, and that she saw passersby seizing the opportunity to flee Cuba. Holding me in her arms and my brother by the hand, she considered going, too, but she turned back. She hadn't been able to leave without saying goodbye to her mother.

Four months later, on April 29, 1963, she left Cuba with me, without saying goodbye to her son. We had left the house the evening before, at 6 p.m. Poly was out playing with friends. When he came home, my grandmother and my aunt Ada told him that my mother had gone to the countryside to care for an ailing relative. I don't know how long it was before they told him the truth. Decades later, when I met my aunt Ada, she explained that for weeks, maybe months, after we left Poly would clutch my mother's housedress at night and cry. He was nine years old.

My mother wore stiletto heels for the journey, her legs so skinny that her shinbones protruded. I was ten months old, a baby on her hip. At the airport in Havana, a customs agent almost confiscated the tiny gold posts in my ears, a gift from my grandmother. Direct flights to the U.S. had been suspended the year before, so we flew to Mexico City. A distant relative of my mother's was supposed to collect us from the airport, but he didn't show up. My mother had no money with her. "_¡Cómo pasamos trabajo tú y yo! _"-"How we struggled, you and I," she would say, taking my hand, as she told me the story of our departure. In the most consequential passage of her life, I had been her companion. She always kept an eight-by-ten portrait of my brother on her dresser.

Ours was not the only family torn apart by the revolution. Between 1960 and 1962, thousands of children were sent abroad alone, their parents fearing that Castro's government would ship them off to the Soviet Union for indoctrination. Young men of military age were forbidden from leaving. Some teen-agers stayed behind when their parents fled, committed to a cause that their families rejected. Revolutionaries were not supposed to communicate with people who had left, so family members often spent decades without contact.

I can explain how, amid the turmoil, my mother felt forced to take one child and leave another. She did not think a Communist revolution on an island less than a hundred miles from the U.S. could possibly survive. She assumed that we would return to Cuba before too long. She told herself that, once she was gone, Poly's father would relent and her son would join us. None of it-not the revolution, not our migration, not Poly's abandonment-was ever meant to be permanent.

Still, my mother's decision has always haunted me. After I had my own children, I sometimes found myself measuring the progress of their childhoods against my brother's. Alina is turning nine, I thought-Poly's age when we left him. Lucía's ten-by that age, Poly had spent almost a year without his mother. I would look at my daughters and wonder what could ever make me leave them. Could I have gone, as my mother had, in secret, without saying goodbye? I couldn't picture it at all.

At nine, Poly was a sweet, skinny boy, quick to smile, with large eyes and big ears. He was smart and liked to read, although he sometimes got into trouble; a neighbor had once jokingly advised my mother to enroll him in military school to keep him in line. As a teen-ager, he cut school, got into fights, and began committing petty crimes. More than once, someone denounced him to the state-sponsored neighborhood-surveillance network, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, for one infraction or another. Poly's father was, for the most part, absent. Poly dropped out of school, couldn't keep a job, had run-ins with the police. Maybe he expected to join us in the U.S.; maybe he feared that he never would. Only under exceptional circumstances would the government allow a man of military age to leave. Poly lived in the house where we had left him, with my grandmother, who tried to guide him, and my aunt Ada, who had no children of her own and became his de-facto mother. She made him write letters to my mother, to me, and to his new sister, Aixa, who was born in Brooklyn in 1964.

I remember Poly's letters, the way his "A"s looked like triangles. I usually responded on Saturdays, as I watched cartoons about English prepositions or how bills became laws. We lived in West New York, New Jersey, a working-class Cuban enclave across the Hudson River from midtown Manhattan, where my father had continued to work as a cook. My mother worked in a factory five blocks from our apartment, sewing collars onto winter coats. She taught us old Cuban songs, patriotic poems, the chants of street venders. At our church, priests led us in prayers for the release of Cuban political prisoners; once a year, we marched in a procession in honor of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. We ate mostly Cuban food, and we always kept a drawer full of clothes to send to Cuba. Most of our neighbors did the same, and many of them, too, expected to welcome loved ones to the U.S. I awaited Poly's arrival unambivalently. In my mind, he was like a brother in a Beverly Cleary novel, handsome and funny-maybe I would fall in love with his best friend. I speculated that the shape of his "A"s showed that he was a born architect, like the father in "The Brady Bunch."

No one in our family had gone to college, and few people in our community went away to do so, but my mother always insisted that I would. I was already browsing through college brochures when Castro's government agreed to allow Cuban exiles to return to the island for short visits. In 1979, my mother was one of more than a hundred thousand who participated in the family-reunification trips, as they were called. I remember her singing as she packed, writing Poly's name on the labels of the clothes she had bought for him. He was twenty-five by then. My grandmother had died, but most of my mother's eleven siblings were still living in Cuba, and had their own families. As she counted out five-dollar bills for nieces and nephews, I made her promise to take a photograph in front of the University of Havana, which, I explained to her, I would have attended had we stayed in Cuba.

My mother never told me what it felt like to return to the old house or to reunite with Poly. But I can see her there, laughing warmly, sadness be damned. My brother went with her to the university, and he must have taken the picture I have of her in which she stands in the distance, a blurred figure near the top of the university's steps. I have another photo of them from that trip, posing together on the capitol steps. In the image, Poly is unsmiling, with his arm around her shoulder.

In the spring of 1979, the Miami Herald estimated that the Cuban government might make as much as a hundred and fifty million dollars from the exiles that year alone. The government paid dearly in other ways. The cash, the gifts, and the tales of American plenty all fed the desire of many people on the island to leave. The following year, on April 1st, six Cubans stole a bus and crashed it through the gates of the Peruvian Embassy in Havana, demanding asylum and safe passage out of the country. When the Embassy refused to hand them over to the government, Castro ordered the removal of the security detail around the building. In the next forty-eight hours, nearly eleven thousand people flooded in, perching on eaves and tree branches, camping out with little food or water. According to one account, a baby was born there and an elderly woman died.

Pro-government protesters gathered outside, angrily chanting, wishing them good riddance: "_¡Que se vayan! _" But at first neither Peru nor Cuba could figure out how to evacuate so many people. The Cuban government gave the members of the crowd the option to go home and await instructions. Some stayed anyway, worried that, if they vacated the Embassy, they might never leave the country; others, hungry and exhausted, went home to find themselves subjected to state-sponsored harassment by their neighbors. About three weeks after the crisis began, the government settled on a plan. It would allow Cubans from the U.S. to pick up their relatives by boat at the port of Mariel, some twenty-five miles west of Havana, provided that they also collect Cubans from the Embassy.

The operation quickly took on its own momentum. Thousands of Cuban-Americans mobilized, hiring so many vessels that, as one observer remarked, had they lined up one behind the other, people would have been able to walk from Mariel to Key West. Castro insisted that those leaving were "antisocial elements." He routinely called them "scum." Soon, disgruntled Cubans embraced the label, and began appearing at local police stations, asking to be cleared for departure. The government also took the opportunity to expel from the country certain prisoners and psychiatric patients. By the time the boatlift ended, in October, some hundred and twenty-five thousand Cubans had reached Florida.

In May, my mother boarded a Greyhound bus at Port Authority and travelled to Miami, then caught a ride to Key West. She feared the sea and couldn't swim, but found a boat that was taking Cuban-Americans to Mariel, and paid the captain in cash. She spent the duration of the voyage, ten or twelve hours, clutching her purse and pretending to sleep. At one point, she told me, the captain had misgivings and announced that he was turning around. A passenger took a machete out of his duffel and threatened to kill him if he didn't continue on to Mariel. My mother reached for the rosary beads in her bag and led some of the passengers in prayer.

At Mariel, hundreds of boats jockeyed for position. Every captain was to give the Cuban officials a list of the people his passengers wanted to pick up. It took time for the government to locate them, and the boats sometimes had to wait for days, even weeks. A night club was set up aboard a government-owned ship to entertain impatient sailors. Other vessels patrolled the harbor while guards on the shore pointed their weapons toward the water. At night, floodlights illuminated the scene. My mother managed to disembark, find a phone, and call the house to let Poly know that she had come to collect him. My aunt answered and told her that he had already left. It had not been hard for Poly to convince someone that he should be banished. My mother returned to the crowded pier and talked her way onto a boat back to the U.S.

Poly told us that he arrived in Key West on May 11, 1980-Mother's Day. It was one of the busiest days of the boatlift, with more than forty-five hundred Cubans landing in Florida; one boat alone, the America, might have carried as many as seven hundred people. Sentiment in the U.S. was turning. The Times ran a front-page article titled "Retarded People and Criminals Are Included in Cuban Exodus." More than sixty thousand Cubans who arrived without family members were sent for processing to military bases across the country while the government determined what to do with them. Poly ended up at Eglin Air Force Base, in the Florida Panhandle. A plane circled the facility, flying a banner that read "The KKK is here." By mid-June, he had been cleared to enter the country; my mother and father flew down and brought him home.

My brother was not at all what I expected. He didn't talk much, and when he did his voice sounded loud and angry. My sister and I were used to having dinner in the living room in front of the TV, but after Poly arrived we began eating together in the small kitchen. I asked Poly continually about Cuba, until my mother told me that my questions were making him feel bad about not having an education or a career. My sister and I soon went back to the TV, while the adults ate alone at the dinner table, my mother trying to keep a conversation going with her husband, who was silent as usual, and her estranged son. At the end of that summer, I left for my first year at Vassar College.

My mother helped Poly rent an apartment in our building, and an uncle helped him get a job at an embroidery factory. Poly soon lost the apartment and moved back in with us, sleeping on the couch in the living room. When I came home on school breaks, the apartment smelled of beer and cigarettes. I spent as much time as I could at the riverfront park, reading on a bench with a bag of cherries. Poly had grown a thick mustache, and I hated it. At night, he would come home late. From my bedroom, I could hear him on the sofa next door making strange noises, sounding wounded and scary. Was he crying? Masturbating? Maybe sick or hungover? One afternoon, while my father was out, Poly got angry about something, and when he stormed off toward the kitchen I assumed that he was getting a knife. My mother suddenly collapsed, and all three of us-my sister, Poly, and I-rushed to help her, the altercation temporarily forgotten. My mother told me later that she had only pretended to faint.

The summer between my freshman and sophomore years, my parents took us on vacation to Miami. We stayed at the Bancroft, a modest hotel in South Beach where most of the guests were Cuban. Relatives came to see us, and Poly sat at the pool drinking beer with old friends from Havana, other Mariel arrivals. My sister and I spent our days swimming and tanning, our evenings playing Ping-Pong and pinball. One night, Poly slapped my sister after he thought he saw her flirting with a boy. I confronted him, and he threw me to the ground and began kicking me, stopping only when a cousin grabbed a phone to call the police. As I lay on the floor crying, he warned me that, if I told my father, " va a haber muertos "-there would be bodies. When I told my mother what he'd said, she asked me to keep it to myself. She didn't want my father to leave or to kick Poly out.

It was around this time that my mother first told me that Poly had threatened her, too, when she'd picked him up at Eglin Air Force Base. He told her that he was in the U.S. to ruin her life just as she had ruined his by leaving him in Cuba. I began to imagine all kinds of terrible scenes unfolding. I was reading a lot of Hardy and Balzac, and knew how the sins of parents were usually visited on their children.

In 1986, two years after I graduated, my parents moved to Miami with my sister, and Poly followed a year later. I moved to Austin, Texas, to begin a master's degree in Latin-American history. I spent Thanksgiving with Jeanne Claire, a new friend, and her brother, Gregg, a Ph.D. student, who was visiting from New York. He was handsome, and we were both reading books about revolutions. He was caring for his father, who was dying of AIDS and whose longtime lover had died earlier that year. Gregg and I fell in love, moved in together in New York, and, in 1989, got married at Columbia University, where his father had taught. We invited Poly to the wedding, and I prayed that he wouldn't attend. He didn't. My husband and I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I did my doctorate, and then to Washington, D.C. Eventually, we moved back to New York, and Alina and Lucía were born there in 1995 and 2001. We didn't invite Poly to their baptisms, in Miami Beach.

I became a history professor at N.Y.U., focussing my work on the history of Cuba and on revolutions. I often travelled to Cuba to conduct research in archives and libraries across the island. The flights left from Miami, so I would visit my parents on the way. My mother always gave me gifts for Tía Niña: clothes, shoes, medicine bottles sometimes full of medicine and sometimes stuffed with oregano and bay leaves or needles and thread. My aunt would open the packages with delight-" ¡Mira que mi hermana me conoce! " She would tell stories about my mother, my grandparents, and Poly as a boy. I met the cousins he had grown up with. I met another half brother, my father's son, whom I had learned about only as a young adult, and travelled to General Carrillo, a tiny town in central Cuba, to see where he lived and meet his family. He was a funny, soft-spoken high-school literature teacher with an elegant mustache like José Martí's. Late at night, as we walked around, he pointed out the Milky Way. That was the first time I heard its name in Spanish-Vía Láctea. By then, Cuba had become a kind of home for me. It also became a professional base; I won prizes writing about its history.

One time, I went to Cuba for a week with my mother. At the Havana airport, as we waited to board our return flight to Miami, I went to buy a carton of cigarettes for Poly. My mother had lost her voice from all the talking and laughing with her family, and when I got to our gate I found her sitting there, exhausted. She rested her head on my shoulder and looked at the cigarettes. Had she known what her departure would do to Poly, she said, she would never have left. I imagined that alternative, asking myself, for the first time, Was my good fortune built on Poly's suffering?

While I made my life in New York, my sister raised her daughter, Nailah, in Miami with the help of my parents, who joined the ranks of the elderly poor. When they could no longer afford the rent in South Beach, my husband and I bought them a small one-bedroom there. My mother spent most of her time at home, cooking, cleaning, and doing word-search puzzles, which she referred to as studying. She pored over mail-order catalogues, buying gifts for her three granddaughters. She read El Nuevo Herald and invariably supported Republicans.

In 2000, she became obsessed with the case of Elián González, a six-year-old Cuban boy who had been rescued alone at sea in November, 1999, three miles from the coast of Fort Lauderdale. He had been making the crossing with his mother and several other people on a small boat; she and most of the other passengers had perished after the boat capsized. Elián, who had drifted at sea for two days, was treated at a hospital and handed over to relatives in Miami. The boy's father and the Cuban government wanted Elián back on the island. His family in Miami wanted him to stay. My mother would often call to talk to me about the case, but she couldn't discuss the subject calmly, and our conversations sometimes grew heated. I remember hanging up on her at least once. When federal agents seized the boy from his Miami family, on April 22nd, my mother was furious. She took a newspaper photo of Bill Clinton's Attorney General, Janet Reno, and, using a pair of sewing scissors, poked out the eyes. Elián shared Poly's birthday, December 6th.

Poly lived in studio apartments in the poorest blocks of Miami's Little Havana and nearby Hialeah. He drank heavily and gained weight, his belly protruding. My mother routinely gave me updates on his life. He showed up drunk at a party for a friend's child and beat someone up. He did cocaine, grew his pinkie nail long, and ran drugs by boat. One of his best friends, another Marielito, was found in pieces in the trunk of a car. Once, someone shot Poly in the head, and somehow he survived. Another time, someone beat him with a pipe; surgeons reinforced his skull with metal. In 1991, he was arrested and charged with attempted murder, but a jury acquitted him. My mother and father went to the trial and made Aixa go with them. Other arrests followed-for petty larceny, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, driving under the influence. In 2002, he was arrested after stabbing a man in a bar and seriously wounding him.

Poly called my mother collect from jail at least once a day, often in a rage. He blamed her for all his troubles, for his inability to find love, to marry, and to have children. She visited him weekly, dragging Nailah with her on two city buses. Nearly two years after his arrest, Poly was convicted of attempted murder in the first degree, and sentenced to twelve years of probation. He lived at a court-approved facility and attended a compulsory rehabilitation program. After a few years, he was allowed to leave, provided that he wear a tracking device. My mother helped him rent a small studio in Hialeah, and called him every night. He often hung up or yelled at her. Sometimes he threatened suicide; sometimes he said that he would kill her and my father. If he did that, he said, he would be deported to Cuba, which was fine with him. One time, he sounded so desperate that my parents spent a night hiding in a hotel room with my sister, her husband, and Nailah. My father occasionally urged my mother to break ties with Poly, but he knew that she never would.

I mostly kept my distance. He would sometimes call me at home, to ask for money, or just to rant. When I visited Miami en route to Havana, I'd ask my mother not to tell Poly that I was there. At other times, I found myself putting off plans to visit Miami, booking flights only at the last minute. My family and I visited Poly twice a year, with my mother, who would ride in the back seat with the girls. I would leave my cell phone in the car, not wanting Poly to see it and ask me for the number. Before entering his apartment, I would remind my mother not to hold my hand, knowing that it made him jealous. I was glad that my daughters could distract themselves with Gordi, a stray Chihuahua he had adopted at some point. At the end of each visit, my husband would take a picture of Poly with the girls, I would give Poly a little cash, and we would all hug and kiss. I think my mother thought that if we went through these motions enough times Poly would find a way to forgive her. She had faith; she prayed for Poly all the time.

I prayed, too-mostly that Poly would change and find peace. But sometimes I wished that he would die, or that he would be deported without hurting anyone first. As my parents got older, I began to feel that it would be better for my mother to die before my father did: if he died first, Poly might move in with her. If we held her wake according to her wishes-with an open casket and mourners milling around for hours, murmuring prayers over rosary beads-we would need to hire security, in case my brother lost it and did something awful. Poly had not changed, and surely my mother's death would make everything worse. Perhaps sensing the same thing, my mother routinely elicited promises from my sister and me not to abandon him. He was our brother, and he would be our burden.

My aunt Ada died first, in April, 2017, in the house behind the military hospital. Poly kept a picture of her on his bedside table in his Hialeah apartment, and I knew that he would be devastated by the news. I called him-perhaps the first time I had ever done so when it wasn't his birthday. He didn't answer, and I left him a voice mail sending my love. He later told me that he had appreciated the call, but he never wanted to talk about our aunt; it hurt him too much, he said. I think her death changed us both a little. I saw him again as vulnerable, and he saw my mother that way, too, noting her ailments: hypertension, diabetes, heart failure. Her usually skinny feet were now always swollen and purple, her fingers crooked with arthritis.

A year later, my mother fell and broke her hip. To the astonishment of the entire family, as she recovered in a rehabilitation center, Poly visited three or four times a week, sitting by her side, sometimes for hours: a stocky, sixty-four-year-old man with trembling hands, his voice loud but less angry. He brought her sweets and an occasional scratch-off lottery ticket. After she was discharged, Aixa and I hired two caregivers to watch my parents, one for the daytime and one for the evening. My sister, who worked as an administrator at a big law firm, looked after them at night, sleeping on the couch. I made monthly trips to spell her. About six months later, my mother had heart surgery, and, not long afterward, a pleurodesis procedure on her left lung. Then my father fell and broke his hip. Poly visited my mother regularly the whole time, bringing groceries once a month. I think he may have purchased them with food stamps; she gave him cash. He was affectionate and eager to surprise her with the perfect pineapple, a Cuban tamal, his favorite ramen soup. She loved it when he brought Gordi, and called Poly every night after "Wheel of Fortune."

In March of last year, as New York City went into lockdown, Poly called to check on me, ending his voice-mail message as he had signed off his letters to me when I was a girl: Tu hermano que siempre te quiere. Your brother who always loves you. My mother's heart failure was worsening; her lungs kept filling with fluid. My sister and I arranged at-home hospice care. In May, I took my family to see her. Remarkably, she revived. Sometimes I lay down next to her, on the small hospital bed in her room, my head in the crook of her shoulder. Sometimes she sat in her wheelchair at the dining table, where she would talk the girls into sharing their Coke with her. With her first sip, she would sigh with loud and thorough satisfaction, like a character in a commercial. She was sometimes confused, but seemed happy and light. My daughters painted her nails and combed her hair. We played dominoes together, my parents sitting in their wheelchairs. Over and over, we listened to her new favorite song, Mercedes Sosa's rendition of "Gracias a la Vida." Every night, when I asked if she wanted to talk to Poly, she perked up and said "_¡Claro! _" I would dial the number, chat with him, and then hold the phone to her ear. She wanted to know how he was, what he had for dinner, what he was watching on TV. He called her mamita linda, encouraging her to eat well to regain her strength. When I returned home in late June, I called her almost every night, but she was often too sleepy to talk. I also began to call my brother every few weeks. We joked about our mother's new loopiness. One time, he complained of chest pain, attributing it to his new diabetes medicine, and I told him to get it checked out. I sent him money without his asking; it felt like love.

On August 4th, Aixa received a call from a Hialeah detective asking whether she was Poly's sister. The detective was on his way to her office. Aixa called me, worried that something had happened to Poly or that he had reverted to his old ways. At her office, the detective told her that Poly had been found dead, sitting on the toilet, at home. He had been there for days before a neighbor reported the smell. His body was so bloated that the medical examiner could not lift prints from his fingers, but the metal in his skull helped the forensics team to identify him. The medical examiner ruled out suicide and murder, recording hypertensive crisis as the cause of death. It was a horrible end, seeming to me almost designed to validate Poly's complaints-that we had never been there for him, that he was all alone.

Aixa and I discussed how best to break the news to our mother. I offered to be there via Zoom or FaceTime, but my mother's medical team thought it best not to tell her at all. She was confused and sleeping most of the time, and was no longer asking to call Poly. We postponed the decision. Her condition deteriorated. On the afternoon of August 16th, I flew to Miami, wearing blue rubber gloves and two masks beneath a face shield. I recall scolding a woman on the plane for wearing a mask under her nose. It was nightfall when I arrived at the apartment. My father and one of the caregivers were watching television in the living room. My mother was asleep in the bedroom, a male nurse seated by her side, the portrait of Poly as a boy on the dresser.

Late the next afternoon, one of the nurses gestured to us and we gathered around her bed: my sister, my niece, the caregiver, and me. My father lay on the other twin bed in the room, his eyes open, staring at the ceiling. I held my mother's left hand, Aixa her right. I bent down to her ear and told her what she had always told me, that everything would be all right. I promised to keep sending money to her nieces and nephews in Cuba. I said we would take care of our father. I told her she was the best mother in the world, that I adored her. My sister, holding her other hand, said the same things. Then, as I stroked her hair, I told her a lie. "We will take care of Poly," I said. "We won't abandon him." I think my sister nodded. My mother died a few minutes later. On this journey, she went with my brother, and I am the one left behind, wondering whether he ever forgave us. ♦

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Early in the Cuban Revolution, my mother made a consequential decision. My mother was always asking my sister and me to do things-to call her union about her monthly pension checks (forty-nine dollars), to research the contraindications of a new prescription, to drive her to the wholesale distributor to pick up fifteen-pound boxes of frozen tilapia and some nice eye-of-round roasts.

# data[].attributes.body
from Wendy White