The 25% Revolution

How Big Does a Minority Have to Be to Reshape Society?

Social change—from evolving attitudes toward gender and marijuana to the rise of Donald Trump to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements—is a constant. It is also mysterious, or so it can seem. For example, “How exactly did we get here?” might be asked by anyone who lived through decades of fierce prohibition and now buys pot at one of the more than 2,000 licensed dispensaries across the U.S.

A new study about the power of committed minorities to shift conventional thinking offers some surprising possible answers. Published this week in Science, the paper describes an online experiment in which researchers sought to determine what percentage of total population a minority needs to reach the critical mass necessary to reverse a majority viewpoint. The tipping point, they found, is just 25 percent. At and slightly above that level, contrarians were able to “convert” anywhere from 72 to 100 percent of the population of their respective groups. Prior to the efforts of the minority, the population had been in 100 percent agreement about their original position.

“This is not about a small elite with disproportionate resources,” says Arnout van de Rijt, a sociologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who studies social networks and collective action, and was not involved in the study. “It's not about the Koch brothers influencing American public opinion. Rather, this is about a minority trying to change the status quo, and succeeding by being unrelenting. By committing to a new behavior, they repeatedly expose others to that new behavior until they start to copy it.”

The experiment was designed and led by Damon Centola, associate professor in the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. It involved 194 people randomly assigned to 10 “independent online groups,” which varied in size from 20 to 30 people. In the first step group members were shown an image of a face and told to name it. They interacted with one another in rotating pairs until they all agreed on a name. In the second step Centola and his colleagues seeded each group with “a small number of confederates…who attempted to overturn the established convention (the agreed-on name) by advancing a novel alternative.”

For the second step, as Centola explains it, the researchers began with a 15 percent minority model and gradually increased it to 35 percent. Nothing changed at 15 percent, and the established norm remained in place all the way up to 24 percent.

The magic number, the tipping point, turned out to be 25 percent. Minority groups smaller than that converted, on average, just 6 percent of the population. Among other things, Centola says, that 25 percent figure refutes a century of economic theory. “The classic economic model—the main thing we are responding to with this study—basically says that once an equilibrium is established, in order to change it you need 51 percent. And what these results say is no, a small minority can be really effective, even when people resist the minority view.” The team’s computer modeling indicated a 25 percent minority would retain its power to reverse social convention for populations as large as 100,000.

But the proportion has to be just right: One of the groups in the study consisted of 20 members, with four contrarians. Another group had 20 members and five contrarians—and that one extra person made all the difference. “In the group with four, nothing happens,” Centola says, “and with five you get complete conversion to the alternative norm.” The five, neatly enough, represented 25 percent of the group population. “One of the most interesting empirical, practical insights from these results is that at 24 percent—just below the threshold—you don’t see very much effect,” adds Centola, whose first book, How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions, comes out this month. “If you are those people trying to create change, it can be really disheartening.” When a committed minority effort starts to falter there is what Centola calls “a convention to give up,” and people start to call it quits. And of course members have no way to know when their group is just short of critical mass. They can be very close and simply not realize it. “So I would say to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and all of these social change movements that approaching that tipping point is slow going, and you can see backsliding. But once you get over it, you’ll see a really large-scale impact.”

Real-life factors that can work against committed minorities—even when they reach or exceed critical mass—include a lack of interaction with other members, as well as competing committed minorities and what’s called “active resistance”—which pretty well describes the way many people in 2018 respond to political ideas with which they disagree. But even with such obstacles, Centola says the tipping point predicted in his model remains well below 50 percent.

Certain settings lend themselves to the group dynamics Centola describes in his study, and that includes the workplace. “Businesses are really great for this kind of thing,” he says, “because people in firms spend most of their day trying to coordinate with other people, and they exhibit the conventions that other people exhibit because they want to show that they’re good workers and members of the firm. So you can see very strong effects of a minority group committed to changing the culture of the population.”

by David Noonan, Scientific American |  Read more:
Image: Mitch Blunt/Getty

In Search of America's Best Hot Dog: 14 Supermarket Varieties, Taste-Tested

Life is full of tough choices. For instance: are you a burger person, or a hot dog person? While I tend to lean burger, there are times when only a hot dog will do: at the baseball game; on a New York City street corner; walking home tipsy as bacon-wrapped sausages perfume the night.

But no occasion is more perfect than the Fourth of July. It’s estimated Americans will eat 150m hot dogs on Independence Day alone, according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. Boiled or grilled, with mustard or ketchup, sauerkraut or relish – a frank in a bun is the best way to celebrate the holiday.

As with many American traditions, the hot dog’s origins lie in the immigrant story. Most agree it began with the frankfurter, brought by 19th-century Germans along with their love of all things sausage. Today’s supermarket aisles are stuffed with choice, making grocery shopping a daunting task. As a fellow shopper lamented just days ago, while I loaded my arms with cold meat for this contest: “Which damn hot dog do I buy? Nothing’s worse than biting into a bad hot dog.”

Which is why we decided to face down the ultimate challenge: 14 American supermarket varieties pitted side by side, so you can shop with confidence.

The ground rules

In pursuit of authenticity, we opted for a backyard barbecue, cooking on a charcoal grill. The tasting would be blind – judges would try the anonymous hot dog unadorned, and then, if they wished, dress it up with their favorite condiments. Each judge would score the hot dog on a scale of zero to 10, the final score being the average of all scores.

We opted to try 11 meat and three vegetarian/vegan-friendly varieties. And yes, we know processed meat is killing us, but we felt it killed the fun to disallow hot dogs that contain sodium nitrate and other preservatives (still, we do feature plenty of organic options).
The judges

We needed an expert. Luckily, Tim Milojevich, 37, the owner of Barrio restaurant and a longtime San Francisco chef, was on hand to help. Milojevich worked as a professional sausage and pastrami maker for several years, and he knew a hell of a lot more than most of us. Let’s just say he added the word “snap” (the pleasing resistance of a good sausage casing) and “emulsification” (how well the liquids and fat bind to lock in juiciness) to our hot dog vocabulary.

And what’s a cookout without the kids’ opinion? Our neighbors Kaylee, 12, and Genisse, 11, assured me 14 hot dogs was no challenge as they helped lay pickles on the table. Mix in hungry friends and family, and we were good to go.

The results, in the order we tried them

Ball Park beef franks – $4.99 for eight*
This whimsical brand dates back to 1950s Detroit. First off the grill, it didn’t disappoint. “Classic” was a word that came up. Tried plain, it was very salty, making us realize just how much work that bun does. And there was no denying this tasted highly processed, if delicious. “Definitely grocery-store,” commented one eater.
Average score: 7.2
Tim’s score: 7

365 organic uncured grass-fed beef hot dogs – $5.99 for six
Whole Foods’ own-brand, organic grass-fed beef dogs seemed promising, but didn’t quite deliver. “It’s OK,” said Kaylee, looking a little let down. “Do we have any more of the first one?” Most agreed that this had a milder, less smoky flavor but was lacking in juiciness, and that the casing had an odd way of separating from the meat itself.
Average score: 4.87
Tim’s score: 3

Trader Joe’s all natural uncured all beef hot dogs – $5.49 for eight
The checkout lady at Trader Joe’s assured me we were in for a treat, and the spice mix – mustard, pepper, nutmeg, allspice and paprika – promised big flavor. She was right: this was a pretty darn tasty dog, plump and with a pleasant hint of sweetness. “Almost too sweet,” noted Tim, who gave it high marks for “emulsification”, that sought-after juicy texture.
Average score: 7.4
Tim’s score: 7

Oscar Mayer classic beef uncured franks – $4.99 for 10
Would this classic deliver? One taster definitely thought so. “10 out of 10. Beefy smoky flavor, and juice that seems like broth!” There were definitely a lot of sevens and eights here, with Tim dubbing it “our juiciest so far”. The only downside: it felt a bit too skinny. “Leaves me wanting a bigger mouthful,” said one.
Average score: 7.2
Tim’s score: 7.5

Tofurky original sausage beer brats – $4.39 for four
I hoped our veggie options might fool judges in a blind tasting, but as soon as I began cutting into these hefty brats my hopes were dashed. They overcooked quickly, and the outer casing was tough while the inner flesh was distinctly bread-y. “Bland and bad texture” was the general consensus. “No snap,” Tim lamented.
Average score: 1.75
Tim’s score: 1.5

Nathan’s Famous skinless beef franks – $5.99 for eight
This Coney Island stalwart claims to be the world’s most famous hot dog. But when it came to taste, it slightly split the room. While I found it delightfully greasy and meaty, with a good, crispable skin, Tim described it as “more water than meat”. The expert was in the minority, though, with most deeming this a solid option.
Average score: 7.1
Tim’s score: 4 (...)

Caspers Famous hot dogs – $7.99 for six

This was our only pork-beef mix of the night, and people could taste the difference. “Pork rules!” crowed a happy taster. The combo was a winner with the kids, who scored it 100 out of 10. But for our sharp-palated chef, it was nothing special. “Non-assertive and mild. Not memorable” was Tim’s verdict, leaving this somewhere in the middle.

Average score: 7.1
Tim’s score: 4.5

Field Roast frankfurters (vegetarian) – $5.69 for six
This was the top veggie dog of the night. One taster appreciated the carrot-y undertones, while I picked up notes of sweet potato. But while zesty seasonings helped things along, we were still left craving something juicier, and, well, meatier. It seems the greasy, salty, trashy world of hot dogs may be one realm where veggies can’t compete.
Average score: 3.1
Tim’s score: 2.5

Wellshire Premium all-natural uncured beef franks – $7.99 for eight
This won the New York Times’ hot dog taste test, and it definitely found some fans here. The beefy-ness was there, as was the right amount of salt. One taster mistook it for her favorite hot dog, Hebrew National, which we viewed as a compliment. Tim called it “meaty and well balanced”, awarding it a score to tie Oscar Mayer for his highest of the night.
Average score: 7.4
Tim’s score: 7.5

by Charlotte Simmonds, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Talia Herman for The Guardian

Alla Mingaleva, Back to Work
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Paul Klee, Montagna in inverno, 1925
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Leafer Madness

By the time Courtney True found the Reddit thread about kratom in December 2016, she hadn’t touched an opioid for 48 hours. She was in bad shape — stomach cramps, diarrhea, jitters, hot sweats, cold sweats, and body aches that made even her teeth hurt. Sitting at her kitchen table hunched over a laptop, she recalled, “I felt like I wanted to rip my skin off and step out of it.”

True had been dependent on opioids since she was a 14-year-old growing up in Mississippi, when a doctor prescribed her Percocet to treat chronic migraines. By the age of 24, she was shooting OxyContin. A decade after that — after moving to Maine, becoming a nurse, and having two kids — the Drug Enforcement Administration cracked down on sketchy online pharmacies that sold pills, and True started on heroin.

She’d tried to quit many times over the years, using every conceivable remedy for the misery of withdrawal — Imodium A-D, quinine, valerian root. Nothing worked. So here she was, reading earnest online testimonials about an obscure leaf from Southeast Asia.

“It seemed kinda seedy, it seemed kinda underground, and kinda maybe like something I shouldn’t be doing,” True, now 41, told BuzzFeed News. “But at that point I was desperate enough to give it a try.”

Her husband drove her a half hour to a smoke shop in downtown Portland. She bought a little of everything: a small bag of crushed kratom leaves, some capsules, and two tiny bottles of extracts, all for about $100.

Back in the car, heater blasting, she swallowed some of the capsules and downed a bottle, then sat waiting, skeptically, to feel something like a high. She never did, but within 20 minutes her withdrawal symptoms had faded away. "It was like a fog had cleared," True said. "They were just gone."

Now 18 months have passed, and True has been heroin-free for 17. She drinks a murky kratom-grapefruit juice mix several times a day, and credits the plant for saving not only her own life, but also her family’s. Her husband, John Wolstenhulme, had a 20-plus-year opioid addiction, and her 27-year-old stepson, Jeff Wolstenhulme, used fentanyl. Both are now off of opioids — John for 16 months, Jeff for almost four — thanks to kratom, they say. True convinced her mother in Mississippi to use it to treat her irritable bowel syndrome. She even gives it to her dogs for their joint pain and anxiety. “Sometimes I just sprinkle it in their food,” she said, laughing.

True is part of a growing grassroots movement of former drug users who see kratom as the cheap, safe, “all-natural” way to curb the opioid epidemic killing more than 40,000 people in the US every year. The once-obscure botanical has become big enough to warrant its own lobbyists in Washington, DC — the American Kratom Association, which claims that kratom is a billion-dollar business, with thousands of vendors selling it to an estimated 3 million to 5 million people.

Its proponents range from Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch to bro podcaster Joe Rogan to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. In Facebook groups and Reddit threads, tens of thousands of people obsess over the best suppliers, dosages, recipes, and strains for every possible ailment, but mostly for kicking their opioid addictions. In March, the country’s first rehab facility to use kratom opened a few miles from True’s house.

There's just one problem. The government is in secret talks to possibly ban the plant, suspecting that kratom is not the answer to the opioid crisis, but the start of a new one.

At issue is its chemistry: Kratom latches on to some of the same brain receptors that heroin, morphine, and fentanyl do. From the government’s perspective, that makes kratom an opioid like any other, and too dangerous to leave unregulated.

“Claiming that kratom is benign because it’s ‘just a plant’ is shortsighted and dangerous,” FDA chief Scott Gottlieb said in a statement released earlier this year. The agency has circulated notices about kratom strains contaminated with salmonella and has linked the plant to the deaths of 44 people. Last month, the FDA sent warning letters to three distributors for making unproven claims about kratom’s ability to treat pain, opioid addiction, and cancer.

“We’re firing warning shots,” an FDA spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “You’re going to see us crack down.”

People struggling with addiction, Gottlieb said, should instead rely on FDA-approved medications like methadone and Suboxone. But kratom advocates point out that these drugs are too often inaccessible to the uninsured, don’t work for some people, and can be abused. When feeling conspiratorial, they go so far as to say that the FDA is in cahoots with Big Pharma to purge kratom from the market so they can hook addicts on more prescription opioids.

But beyond a few medical case reports and animal studies on kratom dependence, there isn’t much science to support the idea that the plant is safe — or that it’s dangerous. No one knows yet whether kratom really works long-term. Or whether the people who love it, like True’s family, have just swapped one opioid addiction for another.

One thing is clear: The battle over kratom is swiftly coming to a head. “We are at the foot of a revolution,” True said. “This is about to blow up.” (...)

The kratom obsessives discuss how to make the bitter plant palatable by stirring the green powder into juice, brewing it into a sweet tea, pouring it into capsules, or just chasing it with whatever liquid is on hand — water, Gatorade, warm Fanta, and even pickle juice. Armchair chemists discuss trial-and-error attempts at making kratom stronger with citric acid (“acidify when extracting, then basify before consumption”) or turmeric or black seed oil. Others suggest combinations of white, red, and green strains that will prompt wildly different effects (white is energizing, red calming, and green somewhere in the middle).

Real chemists have shown that at low doses, kratom — a tall, skinny tree in the coffee family — acts as a mild stimulant and mood booster, making it a popular herb for centuries among manual laborers on rubber plantations in Indonesia, Thailand, and other parts of Southeast Asia. At higher doses, kratom has a much more prized effect: It kills pain. The nerdier Reddit threads cite pharmacology studies to chronicle the plant’s 25 major chemicals, called alkaloids, some of which have been shown to bind to opioid receptors even more tightly than potent opioids like morphine.

These communities see kratom as a panacea for a bewilderingly broad set of problems. Some described how it got them through 12-hour shifts at Panera and Popeyes. One person said it helped them ace a math test. Others said kratom fixed their stutter, lifted the fog of a decadelong depression, cured insomnia, cured alcoholism, cured PMS, eased chronic pain caused by rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease, and was “a miracle drug” for erectile dysfunction.

Most of the threads, though, describe how the plant offers “freedom from opiates.” Users claim that it’s impossible to die from kratom — that it would force your body to vomit before you could overdose, and that it doesn’t slow breathing like heroin and prescription opioids do. (These claims have not been backed up by any clinical studies in people, since none exist.)

These threads often veer into rants about the pharmaceutical industry, which sparked the opioid crisis.

“The FDA is scared that kratom will take away from the profits of Big Pharma,” Mike Gill, an administrator of one of the bigger kratom Facebook groups, once posted. “Big Pharma funds the FDA...Big Pharma Lobbies the FDA = Big Pharma OWNS the FDA!”

by Azeen Ghorayshi, Buzzfeed | Read more:
Image: Yoon S. Byun

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Octopus Kites

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[ed. Reminiscent of The Matrix.]

Moving Day - Montreal

Montreal has a valiant knack for inconvenience. The winters are brutal, and when summer finally comes, one can safely bet that any well-attended park, shopping street or highway will become clogged with construction, as every builder in the province takes two weeks off at exactly the same time in July. The Quebecois love doing things all together, en famille – and in that spirit there is Moving Day: 1 July, when the majority of residential leases both begin and end.

To call Moving Day mayhem is to prettify the truth of trucks double-parked three deep on narrow two-way streets, amateurs humping fridges up the city’s legendarily winding outdoor staircases (partly because nobody can get a professional mover – they’re all quadruple-booked), and creative Quebeckers devising all sorts of methods for relocating their stuff. On Moving Day, you will see bicycles pulling gigantic, self-made wagons, and compact cars with so much furniture bungee-corded to the roofs that homemade bumpers made of pool noodles must be employed.

The mess of Montreal’s Moving Day is enhanced by the fact that it is not primarily a city of homeowners, but one of relatively cheap rents. Close to 63% of the city’s 1.6 million people rent their homes, and about 10% of the population are said to be moving house in any given year, or about 160,000 people. It is estimated that 130,000 of these will do so on Moving Day, according to the Montreal Gazette.

Prasun Lala, a technology researcher at McGill University and the École de Technologie Supérieure, argues that Montreal’s well-stocked rental market is to blame for the puzzling persistence of Moving Day.

“A landlord is always looking for a year lease,” Lala says. “So if everyone is always moving at the same time, landlords have a better market and the chances of having months where an apartment is empty are less. If you find a place on an off month – say, January – most Montreal landlords will make you sign a lease that takes you to July, and then sign another one, beginning on 1 July.”

Like so many aspects of Quebecois culture, including well-loved songs, recipes and turns of phrase long forgotten in France, Moving Day has its roots in the province’s colonial past. In 17th- and 18th-century Quebec, there was a fixed date – 1 May – for many legal agreements. It took until the 1970s for the Quebec government to abolish this law for housing leases, and then it moved all existing leases to 1 July because too many kids were being pulled out of school to help their parents move. Since 1973, then, Moving Day has not been law, but rather tradition – a problematic idea that refuses to peter out.

It is compounded by the fact that many Montrealers move frequently – even yearly. “If you compare Montreal to a city like New York, where decent living space is such a commodity that a couple might stay together for the sake of the apartment they share, in Montreal, you have the opposite syndrome,” says Lala. “People are breaking up over and over again, because they found something more enticing down the block.”

Kristian Gravenor, a local journalist, historian and author of Montreal: 375 Tales of Eating, Drinking, Living and Loving, says Moving Day has a political dimension as well: “It’s impossible not to realise that 1 July is also Canada Day.”

In the rest of Canada, 1 July is popularly known as Canada’s birthday: a federal statutory holiday, formerly named Dominion Day, replete with fireworks, parades, street parties and a scary percentage of Canadians wearing red maple leaf-branded baseball caps with built-in beer can holders and umbilical drinking straws.

Gravenor says making Quebec’s Moving Day happen on Canada Day is nothing short of the francophone province – which has held referendums on separating from the rest of Canada not once, but twice – “punching [English] Canada in the eye”.

by Mireille Silcoff, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Ryan Remiorz/AP

Harlan Ellison (May, 1934 – June, 2018)

Harlan Ellison is dead. He was 375 years old. He died fighting alien space bears.

Harlan is dead. He exploded in his living room, in his favorite chair, apoplectic over the absolute garbage fire this world has become. He's dead, gone missing under mysterious circumstances, leaving behind many suspects. He went down arguing over the law of gravity with a small plane in which he was flying. Harlan took the contrary position. He won.

Harlan Ellison, science fiction writer and legendarily angry man, died Thursday. He exited peacefully (as far as such things go) at home and in his sleep. He was 84 years old.

Any one of those first lies seems to me more likely than the truth of the last one. Hard enough to believe that Ellison is gone — that something out there finally stilled that great and furious spirit and pried those pecking fingers from the keyboard of his Olympia typewriter (without, apparently, the aid of explosives). But a quiet farewell to this life that he loved so largely and this world that he excoriated so beautifully? If someone had asked me, I would've bet on the space bears.

Ellison brought a literary sensibility to sci-fi at a time when the entire establishment was allergic to any notion of art, won awards for it, and held those who'd doubted him early in a state of perpetual contempt.

Harlan Ellison was, after all, one of the most interesting humans on Earth. He was one of the greatest and most influential science fiction writers alive (until yesterday), and now is one of the best dead ones. He was a complete jerk, mostly unapologetically, and a purely American creation — short, loud, furious, outnumbered but never outmatched — who came up in Cleveland, went to LA and lived like some kind of darkside Forrest Gump; a man who, however improbably, however weirdly, inserted himself into history simply by dint of being out in it, brass knuckles in his pocket, and always looking for trouble.

In his youth, he claims to have been, among other things, "a tuna fisherman off the coast of Galveston, itinerant crop-picker down in New Orleans, hired gun for a wealthy neurotic, nitroglycerine truck driver in North Carolina, short-order cook, cab driver." He was the kid who ran off and joined the circus. Bought the circus. Burned the whole circus down one night just to see the pretty lights.

Stone fact: He marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, lectured to college kids, visited with death row inmates, and once mailed a dead gopher to a publisher. He got into it with Frank Sinatra one night in Beverly Hills. Omar Sharif and Peter Falk were there. Ellison was shooting pool, and in walks Sinatra, who laid into Ellison because he didn't like the kid's boots.

And look, this is Sinatra in '65. Sinatra at the height of his power and glory. A Sinatra who could wreck anyone he felt like. But Ellison simply did not care. He went nose-to-nose with Sinatra, shouting, ready to scrap. Gay Talese was there, working on a story, so Ellison became a tiny part of what, among magazine geeks, stands as the single greatest magazine profile of all time: "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold." "Sinatra probably forgot about it at once," Talese wrote, "but Ellison will remember it all his life."

And that was absolutely true.

But that moment? It encapsulated Ellison. His luck, his deviltry, his style and violence. He lived like he had nothing to lose, and he wrote the same way. Twenty hours a day sometimes, hunched over a typewriter, just pounding. He published something like 1,800 stories in his life and some of them (not just one of them or two of them, but a lot of them) are among the best, most important things ever put down on paper.

Ellison brought a literary sensibility to sci-fi at a time when the entire establishment was allergic to any notion of art, won awards for it, and held those who'd doubted him early in a state of perpetual contempt. He wrote "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman." But everyone knows that, right? He wrote "A Boy and His Dog," which became the movie of the same name and still stands as one of the darkest, most disturbing, most gorgeously weird examples of post-apocalyptica on the shelves.

His anthology, Dangerous Visions, gave weight and seriousness to the New Wave movement that revitalized sci-fi in the '70s. That kicked open the door for everyone who came after and the scene we have today. He wrote a flamethrower essay about hating Christmas and the script for "City on the Edge of Forever," the Star Trek episode that most nerds who lean in that direction will tell you was the best of the series. He wrote for comics, for videogames, for Hollywood, got fired from Disney on his first day for making jokes about Disney porn.

He was ... science fiction's Hemingway. Its Picasso. Talented and conflicted, both, and with a fire in him that sometimes came out as genius and sometimes as violence and no one ever knew which one they'd get.

"My work is foursquare for chaos," he once told Stephen King. "I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping the soup boiling. Gadfly is what they call you when you are no longer dangerous; I much prefer troublemaker, malcontent, desperado. I see myself as a combination of Zorro and Jiminy Cricket. My stories go out from here and raise hell."

And he followed those stories right out the door. Did he get in fights? He did. And bragged about every one of them. Filed lawsuits like they were greeting cards. He assaulted book people with frightening regularity, went to story meetings with a baseball bat back in the day. He groped the author Connie Willis on stage during a Hugo Award ceremony, for which some people never forgave him.

And there's nothing to say to normalize that. He wasn't just some curmudgeon or crank to wave off. I once called him "America's weird uncle," but that almost seems too gentle because he was more than that. He was an all-American a**hole, born and bred. Science fiction's Hemingway. Its Picasso. Talented and conflicted, both, and with a fire in him that sometimes came out as genius and sometimes as violence and no one ever knew which one they'd get.

by Jason Sheehan, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Barbara Alper/Getty Images
[ed. I read the Glass Teat in college and have been an Ellison fan ever since. See also: Controversial Author Harlan Ellison Remade Sci-Fi.]

Mom, in Touch

Every morning, just before heading out into the predawn light to her job as a dentist for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, my mom would hunch over the laminate countertop in our dimly lit kitchen and scribble a note for me. She would neatly place it in my lunch box, which she also packed each day. Later, when I would plop down on a long bench in the cafeteria at Huntsville’s Gibbs Elementary School, I would rummage through my smooshed turkey sandwich, Dole fruit cup, Ruffles potato chips, and single Hershey’s Kiss, and—without fail—find an extra napkin marked with her unkempt cursive.

Often she wrote to tell me, as she always did before I left the house, to be “gentle, sweet, and kind.” Other times, prompted by my teachers, she urged me to stay quiet in class, despite the fact that she adored my tendency to randomly break out in song. On Fridays she would remind me of our weekly ritual: an after-school trip to King’s Candies, downtown on the Huntsville square, where we celebrated the beginning of the weekend with a BLT and a bag of pastel-colored mints we plucked out of rows of giant glass candy jars. It didn’t much matter what the note said, though. It was my mom’s way of reminding me that she was always there.

Of course, other kids got occasional notes in their lunch boxes: encouragement for a math test, a simple “I love you” in flowery script, goofy renderings of smiley faces, the occasional lip-mark in a shade of red that could only have belonged in an East Texas cosmetics bag. But for my mother, who found order in quotidian rituals, the extra napkin wasn’t simply an afterthought; it was as much a part of my lunch box as the meal itself.

My mom had a particular attachment to handwritten notes. The joke among the blue-haired ladies at First Baptist Church was that if you ever did anything nice for my family, you’d better hurry home if you wanted to beat Cinde Johnston’s thank-you card. Years ago I found a note tucked into one of my dad’s college textbooks, A History of Soviet Russia. It was an apology written by Mom, then a newlywed, for losing her temper the night before.

So it wasn’t all that surprising when a letter arrived in our mailbox a few weeks after her funeral. It was addressed to me, a third-grader at the time. It was a note from Mom.

My first memory is of my mom. I was around four, spending the day in Houston with my paternal grandparents, who had traveled from Arlington to help my dad during one of Mom’s extended stays at MD Anderson Cancer Center. We made our way to the top of a multistory parking garage so I could glide along the empty expanse of concrete on my tricycle and roller skates. Granddad, who had been staring off into the distance as Mimi watched me turn circles, eventually called me over to the edge. Mimi followed, bracing herself against the concrete barrier as Granddad hoisted me onto his hip and pointed. It took several moments for me to spot a woman waving—her short, curly, dark-brown hair gone, completely shaved—behind one of the hundreds of shiny glass squares in front of me. It was the first time I’d seen my mother in weeks. I don’t know how long both of us lingered like that, waving to each other, but in my memory I can still hear my grandmother start to cry.

Many of my childhood memories are set in Houston, an hour and a half from home. I made regular trips there with my mother, and I looked forward to those car rides to the city. When we left, hours before the sun came up, it felt like we were somehow sneaking away from something, embarking on an adventure together, just Mom and me. She would stop and buy me doughnut holes at the first open bakery she spotted, and I would happily munch on them as I gazed at the stars still in the morning sky, wondering how the dark could persist if we had entered a new day.

She often scheduled her hospital appointments on weekends so we could visit the Houston Zoo or Six Flags AstroWorld (my mother, even during her weakest moments, remained a roller coaster enthusiast). And she would frequently go out of her way to drive by Rice University. She firmly insisted that one day I would be among the throngs of students strolling across its verdant campus, suggesting more practical majors than the French and journalism degrees I would eventually pursue.

Other memories of Mom—those outside the context of an endless succession of doctor’s visits and chemo treatments and breast scans—are harder to come by. They exist in short, blurry flashes, like an old home movie that fades and flickers over time. I remember sitting with her on the banks of the Comal River in New Braunfels when I was seven years old, watching inner tubes tumble down the Prince Solms Park chute, the waterslide carved into the side of the city’s dam. During our annual trips to the river, we typically rode the chute together, me in her lap, but that year the port in her chest, which had been implanted for chemo treatments, kept her from getting into the water. Instead, as children of family friends rode the rapids over and over, we were both content to watch from the sidelines. I buried my face in her neck, taking in the scent of sunscreen on her tanned skin, and asked if next year we’d be able to ride the chute again. Mom, her hair only just starting to sprout back, could only offer me, “Maybe, honey. We’ll have to see.”

Another memory: we’re wading through a creekbed on the outskirts of Huntsville, dappled sunlight filtering through the towering East Texas pines. As I bounded ahead, Mom, whose body was starting to slow, shouted after me, reminding me to be vigilant in watching for water moccasins. I recoiled in horror, rushing back and clinging to her waist, but she took my hand and said, “I’ll look out for them too.” We spent most of the day splashing and lounging along sandy stretches of the creek, my mind completely at ease, making whistles out of blades of grass.

I have managed to hold on to some other specifics. I remember her clear alto ringing out both in church (particularly prominent on her favorite hymn, “On Eagle’s Wings”) and in the car (she preferred the Beatles and the blues outside of the sanctuary). I remember her absurd hats lining a wall of our guest bedroom—my favorite was an electric-blue sequined beret. I can feel the comfort of her arms wrapped around me after getting my finger pricked by a cactus in the basin of Big Bend National Park. And I can still replicate our special whistle—starting high, then a quick slide down the scale before leaping back up to the original note (if she wanted my attention when I was small, it was as good as a dog whistle).

But these memories are difficult to preserve. The main truth that I hold about Mom, which will inevitably come up in every conversation I ever have about her, was that she was very sick. And then she died.

On May 12, 1999, a week after my ninth birthday and three days after Mother’s Day, my mom left this world at age 43. Breast cancer, which had slowly spread through her body for seven years, finally overtook her, and she died at home, in her bed, with my father next to her. Of all of the things I struggle to call to mind about her, it seems cruel that I remember that first morning without her so clearly. My dad lightly tousled my hair, the lights still off in my bedroom, a soft glow coming from the hallway. I blearily glanced at the clock—it was around seven in the morning—and then bolted upright, panicked that I was late for school. He grabbed me by the shoulders as if bracing me against something. His eyes were filled with tears for the first time I could ever recall. He leaned in and whispered, “She’s gone.”

When the letter from Mom arrived a few weeks later, it was postmarked from heaven. I imagined that after she’d written it, stuffed it into an envelope, and let it slip from high above, the letter had dodged fluffy cumulus clouds on its way to our home. It took me years to understand that my dad had placed it in the mailbox. (At least, I assume it was my dad. Nearly two decades later, he’s still not one to talk about these things.)

In the first days and weeks and months after Mom’s death, I did my best to maintain a shred of normalcy amid funeral planning, the parade of family members and friends, and navigating my first summer without her. The note from Mom, not unlike the ones she stuffed in my lunch box, helped. The need to impose order is something my mom would have understood instinctively. After a troubled childhood and a cancer-stricken adulthood, she regimented every possible aspect of her life to try to maintain some sense of control. Looking back, I realize it’s a coping mechanism that I developed as well.

In the letter, Mom assured me that she was no longer hurting, that her death had been a release. It’s precisely the thing that our friends and family had told themselves—and me—to make her death feel like less of an injustice. At the time, I readily accepted her explanation. My frustration came when I realized I had no way to write her back.

That was the only time a letter from her showed up in the mailbox, but I gradually began to stumble across handwritten notes elsewhere. In the year leading up to her death, Mom, ever the fastidious planner, had strategically hidden them all over the house. I found one that December, my first Christmas without her—the same year Dad got me a puppy, something Mom had always forbidden—hidden in a tiny mailbox ornament. (She must have known the holidays were going to be especially hard.) Over the years I found them secreted away in jewelry boxes and stashed among toys. There were many in my favorite books; Mom knew it was better to hide them there than in my neglected box of Barbies. When I was fifteen, while searching for childhood photos of myself for a project with my dance team, I found another tucked inside a photo album that had been sitting at the top of my closet for years. The notes came unexpectedly, and with them, electric shocks of realization: they often turned up when I wasn’t searching for anything at all. The few times I tore through my possessions in moments of desperation or longing, trying to apply logic to her hiding spots, they never surfaced.

Yet they appeared frequently enough that, as a child, I never lost faith that another note awaited me somewhere, that Mom had left one in yet another random nook I’d never think to search. After all, until she died, Mom wrote to me in some form every day, even if it was a command scrawled on a church bulletin to stop fidgeting as I sat on the pew next to her. The hidden notes felt like a natural extension of that communication.

But as I grew older, as more birthdays passed without her, I came to the realization that the notes eventually had to end. In my teenage years, I was gripped with anxiety each time I encountered one, fearing that it was the last vestige of our shared history. I’d grown increasingly conscious of the fact that my memories of Mom were slipping, like a foreign language fading in stagnation. I’d forgotten what her perfume smelled like. I could no longer map the constellation of moles on the back of her neck, and even the details of her face began to blur in my mind’s eye.

At the same time, I was morphing from an oval-faced kid into something resembling an adult, one who looked and behaved much like my dad (I still chuckle every time I see my parents’ wedding photos—my twenty-year-old father was, essentially, me in a tux). At every milestone I was becoming ever more distant from the girl that my mom knew. Those notes felt like our only remaining connection.

I discovered the last of them as I packed for graduate school, in 2013. I was headed to study journalism at the University of Missouri, a far cry from the law or medical degree she had hoped for. In my South Austin apartment—my first address after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin—I sorted through the parts of my life that I wanted boxed up and hauled, along with my cat, to Columbia, Missouri. I’m both hopelessly sentimental and a pack rat, so moving is a particularly painful process—every tchotchke was a reminder of family, friends, or the home state I was about to leave behind. As I turned out the contents of a plastic storage box filled with Christmas ornaments, a tiny scrap of paper floated to the floor, alongside the gaudy felt doves and nutcrackers made by my great-grandmother. It had been ripped from a small spiral memo pad and adorned with the soft ink of an already-failing pen. It was creased and folded many times over, but I recognized the handwriting instantly:

Hi!

by Abby Johnston, Texas Monthly |  Read more:

Image: Abby Johnston

Why Women’s Friendships Are So Complicated

When Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University, was in grade school, one of her best friends abruptly stopped talking to her. Tannen and the friend, Susan, had done everything together: They had lunch together, made trips to the library together, did afterschool activities in their New York City neighborhood of Greenwich Village together. Then, one day, Susan cut her off. They wouldn’t speak again until more than half a century later.

Tannen recounted this story as part of a talk Tuesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which the Aspen Institute co-hosts with The Atlantic, about the sociology of friendships. Specifically, her lecture was about the gender differences that inform how people relate to and engage with others close to them, as based on her new book You're the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women's Friendships.

As distressing as it was, Tannen’s estrangement from Susan—and, namely, the mysteriousness that surrounded it—wasn’t unusual. Women, Tannen has found in her research, are far less inclined than men to explain their reason for breaking up with a friend. Women are more likely to avoid confrontation; they don’t want to give their friend the opportunity to defend herself.

This is where women’s friendships—which because of their emotional intimacy can, according to Tannen, be far more gratifying than those between men—get especially complicated: Not knowing why a friend is ending her relationship with you, she said, “is really hurtful because knowing what’s going on is a big part of friendship.”

It’s a common belief that men are more competitive than women, but Tannen’s findings suggest that the reality is less clear-cut. Women are simply competitive in a way that’s less obvious—they’re competitive about connection. Among women, prized is the degree to which one is privy into the details of her friends’ lives.

This, Tannen says, makes them more prone to “gossip,” but it also means they can serve as immense, unmatched sources of support for someone who is going through something difficult and needs to vent or seek help. For example, say a woman gets into a series of disagreements with her roommate that culminate in an explosive falling-out; now she’s debating whether to break her lease and move out. If she were to confide about in a male friend, chances are he’d respond by giving his advice right off the bat; he might not know how to engage with her emotionally. If the woman were to vent to a female friend instead, though, that friend would likely request more context and ask how the issue makes her feel before jumping into her feedback. That willingness to take the time to hear her out first sends her what Tannen calls a “meta-message”—it tells her that her friend cares. One of Tannen’s interview subjects described this dynamic when reflecting on how she mourned the death of a close girlfriend: The hardest part of her dying is that “I can’t call her and tell her how terrible I feel about her dying.”

by Alia Wong, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Sol De Zuasnabar Brebbia/Getty

Cy Twombly, Souvenir 1992

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Calvinballing

Mitch McConnell’s Politics of Shamelessness Have Won

When Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pulled a new rule of American politics out of thin air and said there could be no vote on a replacement during a hotly contested election year. When Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement Wednesday afternoon, McConnell pulled a distinction out of thin air and said that the autumn of a midterm election was a perfect time to confirm a new Supreme Court justice.

It is, yes, hypocritical.

And McConnell’s great strength as a politician is that he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care that it’s hypocritical, he doesn’t care that I think it’s hypocritical, and he doesn’t care that Chuck Todd thinks it’s hypocritical. He just waives the objection away with a sniff and sneer and on we go.

It works for McConnell because he’s not interested in being thought of as a high-minded guy or in being well-regarded by high-minded people. He wants to be thought of as an effective party politician, and he is an effective politician. Ask me, ask Chuck Todd, ask anyone.

There’s a perfect alignment between the reputation he wants, the reputation he has, and the reputation he deserves in a way that’s unequalled among American politicians and that allows him to conduct himself with an even greater degree of shamelessness than Donald Trump himself since unlike the all-id Trump, McConnell isn’t out of control he’s just willing to be utterly ruthless in pursuit of his political objectives.

It would be wrong to see this as a zero-cost strategy. Most people who get into electoral politics do it, on some level, because they want to be liked and admired, and McConnell does not. A 2018 paper by Vanderbilt political scientist Larry Bartels shows that McConnell is strikingly disliked by both Democrats and Republicans, with Dems rating him about on par with the National Rifle Association and Republicans liking him less than college professors, environmentalists, or people on food stamps. But nevertheless, he persisted.

McConnell pioneered the unprecedented use of obstructionist tactics in 2009 and 2010 — going so far as to block action on even measures Republicans didn’t disagree with — in order to make American politics as contentious as possible, knowing that an ineffective policy response to the Great Recession would redound to Republicans’ benefits. He blocked a bipartisan statement on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, implicitly partnering with Vladimir Putin to put Trump in the White House. He held Scalia’s seat open until it could be filled with Neil Gorsuch, and he greeted Gorsuch’s vote to uphold Trump’s discriminatory travel ban with a sneer.

Now the odds are overwhelming that not only will he get to replace the slightly moderate Justice Kennedy with another hardline right-winger, but that he’ll be able to reap some partisan gain for his trouble.

Part of the genius of his shameless Calvinballing is that it not only blocks the opposition party, it frustrates them. Angry and frightened by the prospect of the Supreme Court moving further rightward, much of the progressive base is inevitably going to take out their rage not on Trump, McConnell, and vulnerable Senate Republicans like Dean Heller (R-NV) but on Democrats for not being able to make the right tactical choices to block him — just as much of the progressive rank-and-file reacted to disappointment with Democrats’ legislative productivity in 2009-2010 by sitting out the midterms.

by Matthew Yglesias, Vox | Read more:

Image: Twitter
[ed. The slimiest of the slime. See also: This Is the World Mitch McConnell Gave Us]

Unlocked And Loaded

Families Confront Dementia And Guns

With a bullet in her gut, her voice choked with pain, Dee Hill pleaded with the 911 dispatcher for help.

“My husband accidentally shot me,” Hill, 75, of The Dalles, Ore., groaned on the May 16, 2015, call. “In the stomach, and he can’t talk, please …”

Less than four feet away, Hill’s husband, Darrell Hill, a former local police chief and two-term county sheriff, sat in his wheelchair with a discharged Glock handgun on the table in front of him, unaware that he’d nearly killed his wife of almost 57 years.

The 76-year-old lawman had been diagnosed two years earlier with a form of rapidly progressive dementia, a disease that quickly stripped him of reasoning and memory.

“He didn’t understand,” said Dee, who needed 30 pints of blood, three surgeries and seven weeks in the hospital to survive her injuries.

As America copes with an epidemic of gun violence that kills 96 people each day, there has been vigorous debate about how to prevent people with mental illness from acquiring weapons. But a little-known problem is what to do about the vast cache of firearms in the homes of aging Americans with impaired or declining mental faculties.

Darrell Hill, who died in 2016, was among the estimated 9 percent of Americans 65 and older diagnosed with dementia, a group of terminal diseases marked by mental decline and personality changes. Many, like the Hills, are gun owners and supporters of Second Amendment rights. Forty-five percent of people 65 and older have guns in their household, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey.

But no one tracks the potentially deadly intersection of those groups.

A four-month Kaiser Health News investigation has uncovered dozens of cases across the U.S. in which people with dementia used guns to kill or injure themselves or others.

From news reports, court records, hospital data and public death records, KHN found 15 homicides and more than 60 suicides since 2012, although there are likely many more. The shooters often acted during bouts of confusion, paranoia, delusion or aggression — common symptoms of dementia. They killed people closest to them — their caretaker, wife, son or daughter. They shot at people they happened to encounter — a mailman, a police officer, a train conductor. At least four men with dementia who brandished guns were fatally shot by police. In cases where charges were brought, many assailants were deemed incompetent to stand trial.

Many killed themselves. Among men in the U.S., the suicide rate is highest among those 65 and older; firearms are the most common method, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These statistics do not begin to tally incidents in which a person with dementia waves a gun at an unsuspecting neighbor or a terrified home health aide.

Volunteers with Alzheimer’s San Diego, a nonprofit group, became alarmed when they visited people with dementia to give caregivers a break — and found 25 to 30 percent of those homes had guns, said Jessica Empeño, the group’s vice president.

“We made a decision as an organization not to send volunteers into the homes with weapons,” she said.

At the same time, an analysis of government survey data in Washington state found that about 5 percent of respondents 65 and older reported both some cognitive decline and having firearms in their home. The assessment, conducted for KHN by a state epidemiologist, suggests that about 54,000 of the state’s more than 1 million residents 65 and older say they have worsening memory and confusion — and access to weapons.

About 1.4 percent of those respondents 65 and older — representing about 15,000 people — reported both cognitive decline and that they stored their guns unlocked and loaded, according to data from the state’s 2016 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey. Washington is the only state to track those dual trends, according to the CDC.

In a politically polarized nation, where gun control is a divisive topic, even raising concerns about the safety of cognitively impaired gun owners and their families is controversial. Relatives can take away car keys far easier than removing a firearm, the latter protected by the Second Amendment. Only five states have laws allowing families to petition a court to temporarily seize weapons from people who exhibit dangerous behavior.

But in a country where 10,000 people a day turn 65, the potential for harm is growing, said Dr. Emmy Betz, associate research director at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, a leading researcher on gun access and violence. Even as rates of dementia fall, the sheer number of older people is soaring, and the number of dementia cases is expected to soar as well.

By 2050, the number of people with dementia who live in U.S. homes with guns could reach between roughly 8 million and 12 million, according to a May study by Betz and her colleagues.

“You can’t just pretend it’s not going to come up,” Betz said. “It’s going to be an issue.”

Polling conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation for this story suggests that few Americans are concerned about the potential dangers of elders and firearms. Nearly half of people queried in a nationally representative poll in June said they had relatives over 65 who have guns. Of those, more than 80 percent said they were “not at all worried” about a gun-related accident. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

Dee Hill had ignored her husband’s demands and sold Darrell’s car when it became too dangerous for him to drive. But guns were another matter.

“He was just almost obsessive about seeing his guns,” Dee said. He worried that the weapons were dirty, that they weren’t being maintained. Though she’d locked them in a vault in the carport, she relented after Darrell had asked, repeatedly, to check on the guns he’d carried every day of his nearly 50-year law enforcement career.

She intended to briefly show him two of his six firearms, the Glock handgun and a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver. But after he saw the weapons, Darrell accidentally knocked the empty pouch that had held the revolver to the floor. When Dee bent to pick it up, he somehow grabbed the Glock and fired.

“My concern [had been] that someone was going to get hurt,” she said. “I didn’t in my wildest dreams think it was going to be me.”

by JoNel Aleccia and Melissa Bailey, Kaiser Health News via: Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Alao Yokogi, 1998

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Jimmy Carter for Higher Office

Sunday mornings in Plains, Georgia, Mr. Jimmy wakes in his unchanged ranch home with the '70s appliances and same old Formica countertops at the usual hour of 5 A.M., and inevitably scribbles some Bible-lesson notes that he mostly never refers to, and then, after his ablutions and 7 A.M. breakfast with Rosalynn—oatmeal is a favorite—the Secret Service ferries him through town in a black car, past the gas station that was once his brother's, past his old campaign headquarters in a little warehouse, past the home Rosalynn was born in, to Maranatha Baptist Church.

The church is the bull's-eye of his stomping grounds—the verdant flatland upon which Plains sits, where he hunts and fishes. He receives vegetables from the farm where he grew up, a few miles outside town, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He visits every so often, and there's the old bedroom that belonged to Mr. Jimmy, with a model wooden ship and weathered copy of War and Peace, and there's the dining-room table at which the Carter family—two girls and two boys—sat to eat, or sat to read and eat, as Mr. Jimmy's mother, Lillian, insisted that her children always be reading. And there's the scrubby red-dirt tennis court built by Mr. Jimmy's daddy, Earl, a Sunday-school teacher himself, who employed a wicked slice to always beat his son.

About 40 Sundays a year, Mr. Jimmy materializes from thin air, flickering before us at Maranatha to lead Bible study, to say, No, the world's not going to end. Not just yet. Though he's elfin with age, you'd still instantly recognize him as our 39th president: with those same hooded ice-blue eyes, the same rectangular head, the same famous 1,000-watt smile. But when he teaches like this, he transforms from whatever your vision of Jimmy Carter is into someone different, some kind of 93-year-old Yoda-like knower, who in his tenth decade on earth still possesses that rarest of airy commodities: hope.

Hope is something that Mr. Jimmy thinks about a lot—and faith, too, from which hope rises in the first place. It's something that you're born with, faith, but also something you must re-apply every day, like a gel or cream. He says first you have faith in your mama, when you're suckling at her breast. And then you have faith in your people: the tight-knit circle of kin and neighbors in your town. Then—your country. He says what might be most important, though, is faith in a creator of some sort. Mr. Jimmy says you can fill in the blank: Muhammad, Buddha, Jesus…Gaia, Martians, T'Challa, king of Wakanda…

In front of the congregation—in spring and summer, autumn and winter—he perambulates the green carpet like old people sometimes do, as if on the deck of a ship on a rolling sea. He wears a turquoise bolo, somewhere between groovy and huh? His face is still elastic, the zygomatic muscles reflexively drawing his mouth into that smile, but his voice sometimes turns phlegmy without notice—and he starts coughing. His mind is a churning thing of wonder. His recall is sharp, his barbs of humor unexpected.

“So you didn't put 'em to sleep, right?” he says to the pastor, Brandon Patterson, on one April morning when he steps up to the lectern, flashing a mischievous grin. He turns to the overflow crowd. “You like our pastor okay?” Murmurings of assent. “Well, he just passed his 24th birthday and he got married and he got a dahwg.” Mr. Jimmy hangs on the word, and bends it, to laughter. “He and I used to argue about who loved their wife more, but now he's divided his love between a dahwg and his wife, so I think I'm ahead of him!”

Among ex-presidents, Mr. Jimmy blazes on. Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, both men who sandwiched him in office, are dead; George senior teeters; Bill Clinton tremors when tired and, at 71, has begun to fade before our eyes. (Meanwhile, Bill and Hillary have pocketed over $150 million from speeches.) George W. has retreated to a more low-profile, patrician life of painting and occasional aid trips to Africa, while Obama is just beginning a post-presidency that some have projected could be worth roughly $250 million in personal gain and includes the recent announcement of a multi-year production deal with Netflix.

With Carter now in his fourth decade as ex-president, his actual presidency feels more like a footnote, an aberration in the life of a holy man. The public servant in him, the impulse that led him to the presidency in the first place, has thrived in the aftermath of his former Beltway imprisonment. While he rejects pay-to-play speechmaking and appearances, his net worth—reportedly $7 million to $8 million—has come from the 30-plus books he's written, many of them spiritual in nature. His activism and advocacy across the globe—in particular his success in eradicating Guinea worm in Africa and Asia, from 3.5 million estimated cases in 1986 to 30 last year—led to the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. (...)

If one were to judge by the sustained Sunday crowds, Maranatha Baptist Church has turned into an unlikely American pilgrimage site. Perhaps we're afflicted by a deeper national need, or lack, the kind that inspires searchers to travel hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles and begin lining up in the dark, but it raises a bunch of personal and collective questions. After all, soul-searching is a by-product of having temporarily lost one's soul.

On one of my Sunday visits, last November, I arrived around 4:30 A.M. and was handed a scrap of paper with the number 15 scrawled on it, meaning I was 15th in line. The man doing the handing out was named George, dressed in blue slacks and a checked shirt with a red ball cap on his head. He said that some Sundays, if you're not there four or five hours ahead of time, you don't get in. The Sunday after Mr. Jimmy announced he had cancer, in August 2015, 1,800 people came to Plains, beginning to queue on Saturday night. (The highway patrol shut down the road out front; Mr. Jimmy did two lessons, one in a nearby auditorium, and still they turned people away.)

Today, George had arrived at his usual time, around 4 A.M., to find a young man—twitchy, half-awake, and chilled—in a suit, no tie, white shirt, standing out there on the front porch of the church in the dark, here to see Mr. Jimmy before it's too late. Everything at that hour seemed special in Plains to someone coming from the North, as I had. George's honeyed drawl, for one. And the silence was special, in the hour when the Muscogee ghosts give up night on the southern coastal plain, and everything is deep and still. George had his eye on the special sky now, scanning the canopy of stars.

“Last week we saw it three times,” he said. “We won't see it again for about ten days.”

He was talking about the International Space Station, which you could track with an app on your phone. On his phone, too, George showed some pictures of yesterday's fishing trip with Mr. Jimmy. No artifice, no braggadocio: just another fishing trip with Mr. Jimmy—who you can almost forget is ex-president of the United States down here—to add to the others. (...)

Our America, as summed up recently by The New York Times, is a place where “life expectancy has declined, suicide rates have risen, the opioid crisis has worsened, inequality has grown, and confidence in government has fallen.” But our democracy has survived ragged, if not broken, times before. In 1971 the Times asked in a headline, IS AMERICA FALLING APART? Then put a fine point on it: “America is a prewar country, psychologically unprepared for one thing to go wrong,” wrote Anthony Burgess. “Now everything [seems] to be going wrong. Hence the neurosis, despair, the Kafka feeling that the whole marvelous fabric of American life is coming apart at the seams.”

If we were fully unraveling in 1971, what was 1974, then? What were 1776 and 1862? We were coming apart at the seams in 1929 and 1942, 1963 and 2001. It's possible we've been coming apart since our inception. Perhaps it's a shortcoming of our American imagination, or national narcolepsy—and part of our volcanic creation story, too—to believe that this moment, right now, may be the worst moment ever, over and over and over again. If we forget other dysfunctional presidents, from John Quincy Adams and John Tyler to LBJ and Nixon, we might believe that this president is the most irrational, unstable, and narcissistic of all. The potential split atom of our democracy forever threatens to be our annihilation.

But it doesn't mitigate these times to say there have been times like them before. It only begs the question: To whom might we appeal, or where might we find not just a voice of reason but one to remind us that—despite division and gun violence, deep-seated issues of race and class—the experiment is still worthy and vital?

Perhaps this is why people come to Plains. Because to gaze upon Jimmy Carter, to look upon a face marked by time—the charismatic handsomeness of his 50s has softened, hollowed, and transformed into the weatherworn visage of his 90s—is to see someone shorn of ambition, trying to tell a truth, or his truth. Somewhere inside the man we knew as president, there's always been Mr. Jimmy, the seeker, who over time grew in concentration, no longer caring for our approval but, in a weird way, for the state of our national soul. If he was once criticized as a politician for being egomaniacal or sanctimonious, it's easier, with his presidency in the deep past, to accept Jimmy Carter as a human being whose heart might have always been in the right place. In church, teaching from the Bible, Mr. Jimmy becomes to his followers the purest distillation, then, of some post-presidency ideal, some secular saint. On the hallway bulletin board are pinned pictures of community events, the Carters beaming with locals. The butterfly garden out back was built by Rosalynn. And at these Sunday-school meetings, her husband steadies our twitchiness in singsong tones, with a personal psalm of history, Bible study, current events, and autobiography.

“There's no way to separate completely the responsibilities of public service and also some basic moral and ethical principles on which we base the finest aspects of our life,” Mr. Jimmy says, “and we cure the problems in our society.” He likes to quote a favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who said, “The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.” Carter says, for better or worse, he tried. In the Oval Office every morning before beginning his day's work, he would stand before the huge globe situated by the Resolute desk and touch his finger on Moscow, trying to put himself in Brezhnev's shoes. He would think: How can I not provoke him today?

“We never shot a bullet, we never dropped a bomb, we never launched a missile,” says Mr. Jimmy of his time in office. It's a fact he's proud of, especially given that since World War II, America's been at war with about 20 countries. China, on the other hand, hasn't been in a major war since 1979. “What they have done is to use their enormous resources to benefit their own people,” he says. “China has 14,000 miles of fast-speed rail.”

Look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he tells us one Sunday morning: “Thirty little, tiny paragraphs that you can read over in five minutes.… A lot of them are not being honored by our country in particular.… That's why we have wars today. All of those 30 paragraphs guarantee that women and men should have equal pay and equal opportunity for advancement and equal rights.… We have a long way to go.”

If we as a nation suffer from thin-skinned righteousness, or ideological arrogance, he says he himself has suffered the sins of pride, thinking himself superior at times—to women, to those of different background. He's not proud of this in the least, but he has the courage to admit it.

“Who decided whether you'd be kind or filled with hatred?” he asks on another morning. “Who decided whether you would forgive other people or not? Who decided whether you'd be honest and tell the truth or not? Who decided whether you would be generous or not? Who decided whether you'd be filled with love or not?”

Then he answers his own questions: “Every one of us,” says Mr. Jimmy, “has our own free decision to answer the question This is the kind of person I'm going to be. It's not a decision that your parents can make for you, or your wife can make for you, or your husband or your friends. Everybody in here has the right to decide This is the kind of person I'm going to be. And if you haven't been the kind of person that you are proud of so far, you're free from now on the rest of your life to correct your mistakes.”

by Michael Paterniti, GQ |  Read more:

Image: Matt Martin

[ed. A decent man in an indecent profession.]

Donald Hall’s Life Work

In 2011, the poet Donald Hall—who passed away at his home in rural New Hampshire, on Saturday, at age eighty-nine—received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama, the highest award granted to an artist by the American government. For several years, I have kept the above photo of the ceremony, which takes place in the East Room of the White House, saved to my phone. Looking at it makes me instantly glad: Hall appears pleasingly nuts, with scraggly wisps of gray hair sticking out every which way. Obama has such a wide and earnest grin. They are both laughing, as if to say, “What a wild and beautiful thing!”

Hall, who was the first poetry editor of The Paris Review, beginning in 1953, and the Poet Laureate of the United States, from 2006 to 2007, published more than fifty books in his lifetime, across several genres. He had fixations: baseball, loss, devotion, New England. He spent much of his later life at Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire, in a white clapboard house with green shutters—the same house where his grandmother was born, in 1878, and his mother, in 1903. “Only in the rural south, and in rural New England, do American houses willfully contain the history of a family,” he wrote in the introduction to “Eagle Pond,” a tender and elegiac book.

Much like the poet and essayist Wendell Berry, Hall had deeply held beliefs about how our attachments to our native places were being systematically cleaved, at great spiritual and practical cost. Hall, too, could be a little crabby. I always loved this about him—the earned misanthropy of a person who has witnessed too many absurdities, and endured the relentless commodification of what was once pure. He was especially agitated by the existence of Vermont. (I understood this to be a delightful interstate spat, in the grand tradition of New York vs. New Jersey, or any other number of semi-inscrutable regional feuds.) In an essay titled “Reasons for Hating Vermont,” he cites the state’s urban pilgrims—born-rich city-dwellers who voyage north on long weekends to get their hands dirty, but not really—as loathsome, a plague on the landscape. “In Vermont when inchling trout are released into streams, a state law requires that they be preboned and stuffed with wild rice delicately flavored with garlic and thyme,” he writes. Touché, Hall!

Hall’s essays are often polemical, and frequently very funny. His book “Life Work,” from 1993, is a meditation on the nature and practice of work (“I’ve never worked a day in my life,” it opens) and the strange rituals that humans devise to navigate our days (he subscribes to Baudelaire’s notion that work is actually less boring than having to amuse yourself). The goal of work—the bliss of writing, for Hall—is in the way it collapses time. “In the best part of the best day, absorbedness occupies me from footsole to skulltop. Hours or minutes or days—who cares?—lapse without signifying.” He couldn’t much abide reading “junk prose,” or watching television or movies, but he was mesmerized and thrilled by sports, and especially the Red Sox: “I sit with my mouth open, witlessly enraptured.”

Hall was born in Connecticut, in 1928, and moved to New Hampshire in 1975, with his second wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. She died at Eagle Pond, in 1995, from leukemia. They met at the University of Michigan (she was a student there, and he was a professor, nineteen years her senior) and married shortly thereafter. Following her death, Hall wrote deeply and endlessly about his grief, the way it erased everything. “The year endures without punctuation,” he writes in “Without,” a poem from 1995, “the body is a nation tribe dug into stone / assaulted white blood broken to fragments.” Years ago, I pressed a bit of a New Hampshire fern—the green frond of an Interrupted Fern, to be more precise—into my copy of “Without.” Each time I open it, and the fern falls out, and I inevitably think of Kenyon’s poem “Let Evening Come,” in which she suggests that we should submit to endings with grace and assurance:

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come

It’s good advice, if difficult to metabolize, and harder still to follow. I have certainly bucked, wildly and without dignity, against loss. How to quiet the panic that arises when you believe you’ve been involuntarily divested of love?

by Amanda Petrusich, New Yorker | Read more:

Image:Charles Dharapak / AP / REX / Shutterstock

[ed. See also: Between Solitude and Loneliness]

Secret Settings Hidden in Your Android Phone Will Make it Feel Twice as Fast

Modern Android phones are so much faster and smoother than they used to be even a few short years ago. Of course, speed on a smartphone is just like battery life: you can never have enough. The latest-generation Qualcomm Snapdragon processor has been combined with extra RAM in 2018 Android flagship phones to create the smoothest and most powerful Android experience to date. In fact, technology has progressed so much that a couple of recent Android flagship phones have been found to be even faster than current-generation iPhone models running iOS 11. That’s right, the Samsung Galaxy S9 and OnePlus 6 both actually managed to beat the iPhone X in real-life speed tests on YouTube.

Phones like the OnePlus 6, Samsung’s latest flagships, the LG G7 ThinQ, and the new HTC U12+ are all wonderfully fast right out of the box. But what you might not know is that there’s a simple secret setting hiding inside all of these phones that can make them even faster. And the best part is this hidden setting can be found on every single Android phone out there. So whether you have a brand new OnePlus 6 or an old Galaxy S7, there’s a wonderfully easy way to speed up your phone — and all it takes is a few seconds.

We’ve covered this trick before here on the site. In fact, we cover it at least a couple of times each year. Why? Because more and more people learn about these secret settings each time we write about them, and we receive tons of thankful feedback each and every time. People can’t believe how much of an impact tweaking three simple settings on a smartphone can have. But believe us when we tell you, the impact is huge.

Here’s how it works: each time you open an app, close an app, switch between apps, and so on, your phone displays a transition animation to take you from one screen to the next. It’s the sort of thing that fades to the background as you use your phone, so you probably don’t even notice these transition animations anymore. But playing these transition animations on your phone’s display takes time, so speeding up the animations results in faster app loads.

We’re sure that you see where we’re going by now.

Inside every Android phone is a secret Settings menu called “Developer options” that’s filled with all sorts of advanced options. There’s a simple trick to enable this special section of the Settings app, and here’s how to do it:

1. Open the Settings app on your phone
2. If your handset runs Android 8.0+, tap System (skip this step if you’re on an earlier version of Android)
3. Scroll down and tap About phone
4. Scroll down again and tap Build number 7 times consecutively

Important note: if you’re not a savvy user, we recommend that you don’t mess with any of the settings in this section other than the ones we’re about to show you. You can’t do any real damage to your phone, but better safe than sorry.

Once you’ve enabled the Developer options section, open it and scroll down until you see the following three settings:

• Window animation scale
• Transition animation scale
• Animator animation scale

You’ll see a “1x” next to each of those settings by default, and that’s what we’re going to adjust to speed up your phone. Simply tap on each of those three settings and change “1x” to “.5x,” then exit the Developer options section. To ensure that we’re clear, you want to select “.5x” and not “5x.” This means each animation will take half as long to play, so things will move twice as fast as you do things like open and close apps. Needless to say, we spend a ton of time opening and closing apps on our phones, so the impact is huge.

by Zach Epstein, BGR | Read more:
Image: Zach Epstein, BGR
[ed. This really works.]