Will > Books: nonfiction‎ (504)

Within groups, selfish individuals win against altruists, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals.

So when Benjen Stark throws a de

Within groups, selfish individuals win against altruists, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals.

So when Benjen Stark throws a defeated Jon Snow onto his horse and sacrifices himself to an onslaught by a crazed zombie horde, it is an action that is advantageous to House Stark. Uncle Ben will not be making any little Bennies, but his sacrifice helps allow at least the possibility that his nephew might generate little Jon-Snow-flakes someday, thus keeping the Stark gene machine rolling along, the Red-Wedding be damned.

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Image from Mashable.com

a process in which populations of two closely related species, after first coming into contact with each other, undergo rapid evolutionary differentiation in order to minimize the chances of both competition and hybridization between them. – from the Britannica profile

The very gears that make Facebook socially wonderful—its ease of connecting and sharing—are the same ones that facilitate trolling, the flourishing

The very gears that make Facebook socially wonderful—its ease of connecting and sharing—are the same ones that facilitate trolling, the flourishing of hate groups, the dissemination of fake news, and dirty political tricks. In a similar way, the gears that make science work—the fact that it is done by collectives, is abstract, and always open to revision--also provide fuel for science deniers…The chapters that follow will explain how the current state of affairs came about, and what will be necessary to change it. Aristotle, one of the most practical and wise of all philosophers, wrote that, while it is easy to become angry, it is harder to be angry “with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way.” This book is about how to get angry about science denial in the right way.

Factual truth is essential to the public space and the ability to act. “Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.” She concludes: “Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.” To threaten facts is to threaten human existence, and freedom itself.

US politicians who attack science are like the Islamic State militants who bulldozed archaeological treasures and smash statues. Is such a comparison really over the top? Science is a cornerstone of Western culture, not only to ward off threats but also to achieve social goals. In seeking to destroy those tools science deniers are like ISIS militants in that they’re motivated by higher authority, believe mainstream culture threatens their beliefs, and want to destroy the means by which that mainstream culture survives and flourishes, If anything, ISIS militants are more honest, for they openly admit that their motive is faith and ideology, while Washington’s cultural vandals do not. It’s disingenuousness, prevents honest discussion of the issues, and falsely discredits and damages American institutions. At debates and press conferences, such politicians should be asked: “Explain the difference between ISIS religious extremists who attack cultural treasures and politicians who attack scientific process.” How they respond will reveal much about their values and integrity.

As a student, realizing that my biology books were of little help explaining chimpanzee behavior, I picked up a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. I

As a student, realizing that my biology books were of little help explaining chimpanzee behavior, I picked up a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. It offered an insightful, unadorned account of human behavior based on real-life observations of the Borgias, the Medici, and the popes. The book put me in the right frame of mind to write about ape politics at the zoo.

We know our own inner states imperfectly and often mislead both ourselves and those around us. We’re masters of fake happiness, suppressed fear, and misguided love. This is why I’m pleased to work with nonlinguistic creatures. I’m forced to guess their feelings, but at least they never lead me astray by what they tell me about themselves.

The anthropomorphism argument [that we merely project our emotions onto the animals being studied] is rooted in human exceptionalism. It reflects the desire to set humans apart and deny our animality. To do so remains customary in the humanities and much of the social sciences, which thrive on the notion that the human mind is somehow our own invention…Modern neuroscience makes it impossible to maintain a sharp human-animal dualism.

We have trouble imagining fairness as an evolved trait partly due to how we depict nature. Using evocative phrases such as “survival of the fittest” and “nature red in tooth and claw,” we stress nature’s cruelty, leaving no room for fairness, only the right of the strongest. In the meantime, we forget that animals often depend on each other and survive through cooperation. In fact, they struggle far more against their environment or against hunger and disease than against each other.

The idea that we can achieve optimal sociality only by subduing human biology is antiquated. It doesn’t fit with what we know about hunter-gatherers, other primates, or modern neuroscience. It also promotes a sequential view—first we had human biology, then we got civilization—whereas in reality the two have always gone hand in hand.

We may not be in full control of our emotions, but we aren’t their slaves either. This is why you should never say “my emotions took over” as an excuse for something stupid you did, because you let your emotions take over. Getting emotional has a voluntary side. You let yourself fall in love with the wrong person, you let yourself hate certain others, you allowed greed to cloud your judgment or imagination to feed your jealousy. Emotions are never just emotions, and they are never fully automated. Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding about emotions is that they are the opposite of cognition. We have translated the dualism between body and mind into one between emotion and intelligence, but the two actually go together and cannot operate without each other.

I will only rarely refer to other species as “other animals” or “non-human animals.” For simplicity’s sake, I will mostly call them just “animals,” even though for me, as a biologist, nothing is more self-evident than that we are part of the same kingdom. We are animals. Since I don’t look at our species as emotionally much different from other mammals, and in fact would be hard-pressed to pinpoint uniquely human emotions, we had better pay careful attention to the emotional background we share with our fellow travelers on this planet. - Frans De Waal

It became clear quickly that suburban kids feared violence inside their school—once in a lifetime, but horrific—and the Chicago kids feared violenc

It became clear quickly that suburban kids feared violence inside their school—once in a lifetime, but horrific—and the Chicago kids feared violence getting there. At the bus stop on their porch, walking out of church. It could happen anywhere, and it did… Martin Luther King had preached six principles of nonviolence…The Parkland kids were embarking on #4: “Suffering can educate and transform.”

Archbishop [Desmond] Tutu described March for Our Lives as one of the most significant youth movements in living memory. “The peaceful campaign to demand safe schools and communities and the eradication of gun violence is reminiscent of other great peace movements in history,” he said. “I am in awe of these children, whose powerful message is amplified by their youthful energy and an unshakable belief that children can—no, must—improve their own futures.

Hogg, in fact, was frequently not on the bus but traveling separately in a black SUV accompanied by bodyguards. If he were a politician, one of the staffers told me, the intensity of interest in him would merit 24-hour Secret Service surveillance. “We get people armed to the teeth showing up and saying, ‘Where’s David Hogg?’ ” Deitsch told me. An outfit called the Utah Gun Exchange had been following the kids on tour all summer — on what it called a pro–Second Amendment “freedom tour” — sometimes in an armored vehicle that looks like a tank with a machine-gun turret.
The NRA seems to take Hogg’s existence as an affront, having tweeted out his name and whereabouts and inciting its approximately 5 million members by perpetuating the falsehood that the Parkland kids want to roll back the Second Amendment. Hogg’s mother, Rebecca Boldrick, says that in June she received a letter in the mail that read, “Fuck with the NRA, and you’ll be DOA.” - from Lisa Miller’s New York Magazine article, David Hogg, After Parkland

Less than a week after creating her Twitter account, Emma would surpass a million followers—about double that of the NRA. By the summer, Cameron would amass 400,000 followers, David twice that, and Emma at 1.6 million towered over them all.

The Peace Warriors arrived at just the right moment. They helped shape the MFOL policy agenda and the tenor of their approach. They all kept talking: by email, phone, and text. The Parkland kids peppered the Peace Warriors with questions about the six principles, and then burrowed deeper on their own. The more they learned, the more they found it was like listening to themselves—a better, wiser version of the selves they were fumbling toward. How liberating to discover Martin Luther King Jr. had already done all that work. Brilliantly. He had drawn from Gandhi, and it was amazing how well the principles stood up across time, space, and cultures.

reached back fifty years, and drew a straight line to Martin Luther King Jr., assuring us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but tends toward justice”—but adding a stern corollary” “That arc doesn’t bend on its own.” Bending it takes a whole lot of us, bending in with every ounce of strength we’ve got.

The war over press freedom was not going to be a fight about changing America’s laws. It was going to be a fight about the very nature of truth…I

The war over press freedom was not going to be a fight about changing America’s laws. It was going to be a fight about the very nature of truth…I should have seen it coming. In a decade and a half at The Times I had had my moments with Trump and his lawyers. I knew how they played the game.

For much of the past half-century, a balance had been struck. Both sides lived in an imperfect world of discretion…News organizations tried to make informed decisions about what to publish, weighing the risks to the nation and the benefits to the public, and the government held back from tracking down and prosecuting leakers except in the rarest of cases.

It doesn’t really matter how much freedom the press has in a society if the press is not believed. A distrusted press is little different from a shackled press. It lacks the authority to mobilize public opinion against wrongdoing, corruption and misguided policy. It has no voice to hold governments accountable. It gets ignored. And I was pretty sure that at some point a disregard for the press would translate into a disregard for the law of press freedom.

I had resisted, in my raging moderate style, all those overheated comparisons to Nazi Germany that too many of my liberal friends offered up much too easily. Now I was no longer sure.

“A distrust of power is the ultimate conservative value,” McCraw says. “It used to be, at least.” In high school, McCraw attended a speech by Peter Arnett, the famed Vietnam war correspondent, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Listening to what the reporters were going through to overcome disinformation coming from the Pentagon and military commanders, I found that really inspiring,” McCraw says.

In the time that he's president, he has really taken a different strategy, or expanded on a strategy he had used outside of lawyer letters before, and that is simply challenging the facts, and doing so publicly. As much as Donald Trump has talked about changing libel laws so it would be easier for people to sue, in fact, I think the greater danger is his attempts at delegitimizing the press, at encouraging people not to believe.

Hamilton said, “The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the country is by flattering the prejud

Hamilton said, “The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the country is by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion…” Throughout American history, those confusions and commotions have sprung forth in the form of rebellions, clashes, and civil war. Yet America had never been tested with a leader who had the same mindset of King George III; a monarch who ignored the voice of the majority, who ruled as he lived above the rest, and cared not a whit about the traditions of the free society in America.

Based on my knowledge working in this field for years and the secret intelligence manuals of the KGB, Trump was the kind of quality recruit that spies always sought. Every Russian spy knew that it was the greedy, narcissistic, and self-absorbed conservatives that made for the best assets. Almost invariably, they thought they could handle any situation and rarely looked deeper than their financial pockets. Putin was going to push back against any chance that Hillary Clinton would become president. If that meant having to risk going from a cyber war to a hot war, so be it. Maybe it was time to just introduce a little chaos in America. The American Republican Party had been shifting to the far-right for more than two decades. Many of them supported a strong man and powerful national leader like Vladimir Putin. Putin’s own contacts with the religious right presented him with the opportunity to co-opt an entire party. It was far too tempting to avoid. If it could be done in the United States, it could be done everywhere else in the world—save China. A successful co-option of the American right would lead to an entire “wing of supporters operating the most powerful nation on earth and viewing Putin as its closest ally. Russian intelligence would go back and scrub every document and contact about Donald Trump from his overtures made in the late 1980s. If they could pull it off, why not try?

These European xenophobic parties have the universal characteristic of openly aligning themselves with Moscow and accepting their overt and covert political patronage including being openly funded by Moscow. As a sign of their gratitude, Moscow has become the de facto capitol of the anti-Atlantic, anti-globalization, white conservative world. These groups all have the same ideological worldview. They see themselves as the opponents to the NATO-European world order. They want to realign the world with Moscow as the Christian cultural protector who helps them smash the establishments that kept stability since WWII.

Populist dictators and strongmen use divisive techniques and attacks to foster splits in their societies and to break the hold of establishment norms in order to rise to national leadership through a negative form of “people power”—to assert that the system “is rigged against you,” where in many cases, the system is built and working properly for these very same people. The populist authoritarian is the master of the rant, a demagogue of the highest order, and runs an agenda which generally brings about ruin.

Chernobyl was not a single event but was instead a point on a continuum; the radioactive contamination of Polesia lasted more than three decades. C

Chernobyl was not a single event but was instead a point on a continuum; the radioactive contamination of Polesia lasted more than three decades. Chernobyl territory was already saturated with radioactive isotopes from atomic bomb tests before architects drew up plans for the nuclear power plant. And, after Chernobyl as before Chernobyl, the drumbeat of nuclear accidents continued at two dozen other Ukrainian nuclear power installations and missile sites. Sixty-six nuclear accidents occurred in Ukraine alone in the year after Chernobyl blew. More nuclear mishaps transpired after the Soviet Union collapsed, including the fires in the Red Forest in 2017.

Calling Chernobyl an “accident” is a broom that sweeps away the larger story. Conceiving of the events that contaminated the Pripyat Marshes as discrete occurrences blur the fact that they are connected. Instead of an accident, Chernobyl might be better conceived of as an acceleration on a time line of destruction or as an exclamation point in a chain of toxic exposures that restructured the landscape, bodies, and politics.

In August 1986, the Ukrainian Ministry of Health issued five thousand copies of a pamphlet addressed to “residents of population points exposed to radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl atomic station. The pamphlet begins with assurances:
Dear Comrades! Since the accident at the Chernobyl power plant, there has been a detailed analysis of the radioactivity of the food and territory of your population point. The results of the investigation show that living and working in your village will cause no harm to adults or children. The main portion of radioactivity has decayed. The composition of the radioactivity in water, air, forest and shrubs is tens of times lower than the established norms. For this reason, you have no reason to limit your consumption of local agricultural produce. If villagers persisted in reading beyond the first pages, they found that the pamphlet’s confident tone trails off, like the telling of an unfunny joke: [offering a list of things they should not eat, and other actions they should take to minimize risk] The pamphlet is actually a survival manual, one that is unique in human history. There had been nuclear accidents before which left people living on territory contaminated with harmful levels of nuclear fallout, but never before Chernobyl had a state been forced to admit to the problem and issue a manual for the new reality.

…in 1972…a team of scientists from a closed military research lab tried to use a nuclear bomb to put out an underground gas fire in a pipeline near Kharkiv. The gas fire raged out of control for the better part of a year. Arriving to help, physicists from a top-secret bomb lab drilled a hole down two kilometers next to the burning gas well and planted a 3.8 kiloton nuclear bomb in the shaft. Soviet bomb designers had detonated peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs) in other parts of the USSR to smother gas fires. They were confident that this secret “Operation Torch” would work. [All went as planned, for about twenty seconds.] And then something went awry. A scorching jet mixed with earth and stone from the gas well shot up improbably high. The blaze rose higher than any skyscraper to pierce the summer sky. A minute later, witnesses ducked from the force of a blisteringly hot shock wave. Radiation levels in nearby communities climbed to harmful levels.

The wool workers did not know that picking up the radioactive bales was like embracing an X-ray machine while it was turned on.

What happened was that people I talked to gave me more questions and insights. You have to weigh all of your sources and crosscheck them. You can have an archival source and cite it, but it may not be right. And someone can be drawing from their memory, and he or she might be wrong, and memories are often wrong. But using both sources to cross-reference one another is an effective way to get a richer story than if you just use one source.

There is a large body of research and anecdotal information, built up by therapists, about the resolution of personal crises. Could the resulting c

There is a large body of research and anecdotal information, built up by therapists, about the resolution of personal crises. Could the resulting conclusions help us understand the resolution of national crises?

Successful coping with either external or internal pressures requires selective change. That’s as true of nations as of individuals. The key word here is “selective.” It’s neither possible nor desirable for individuals or nations to change completely, and to discard everything of their former identities. The challenge…is to figure out which parts of their identities are already functioning well and don’t need changing and which parts are no longer working and do need changing.

…individual crises are more familiar and understandable to non-historians. Hence the perspective of individual crises makes it easier for lay readers to “relate to” national crises, and to make sense of their complexities.

Today, the risk that we’re facing is not of societies collapsing one by one, but because of globalization, the risk we are facing is of the collapse of the whole world.

…one thing that we can learn is to look at other countries as models and disabuse ourselves of the idea that the United States is exceptional and so there’s nothing we can learn from any other country, which is nonsense.

The ability to view the results immediately after exposure is one of the great advantages of digital capture…But immediate feedback has at least one real drawback. It’s called chimping. Take a picture, look at the screen. Take another picture. Look at the screen again. Like a chimpanzee.

…America seems to remain fearful of strategic adaptability in any setting. We are wedded to the notion that we shouldn’t change a policy until it h

…America seems to remain fearful of strategic adaptability in any setting. We are wedded to the notion that we shouldn’t change a policy until it has failed, unwilling to ask ourselves how we can do better. Clinging to the status-quo is, in the short-term, an easy course of action, but it is also a dangerous one.

Conflicts breed like tribbles, and the international community is proved powerless to stop them. This growing entropy signifies the emergence of a new global system that I call “durable disorder,” which contains rather than solves problems. This condition will define the coming age. The world will not collapse into anarchy; however, the rules-based order we know will crumble and be replaced by something more organic and wild.

Cyber is important, but not in ways people think. It gives us new ways of doing old things: sabotage, theft, propaganda, deceit, and espionage. None of this is new. Cyberwar’s real power in modern warfare is influence, not sabotage. Using the internet to change people’s minds is more powerful than blowing up a server, and there’s nothing new about propaganda…Weaponized information will be the WMD of the future, and victory will be won in the influence space.

From the weakening European Union to the raging Middle East, states are breaking down into regimes or are manifestly failing. They are being replaced by other things, such as networks, caliphates, narco-states, warlord kingdoms, corporatocracies, and wastelands. Syria and Iraq may never be viable states again, at least not in the traditional sense. The Fragile States Index, an annual ranking of 178 countries that measures state weakness using social science methods, warned in 2017 that 70 percent of the world’s countries were “fragile.” This trend continues to worsen…But the Westphalian Order is dying.

One can begin to see a medieval universe unfolding, in which nations, churches, and the wealthy each pursue global ambitions as world powers. They will all use force when necessary because it can be bought once again, as in the Middle Ages. The use of private force will expand in the decades to come, because nothing is in place to stop its growth, and in so doing, it will turn the super-rich into potential superpowers.

Stay where you are and simply feel the panic without trying to distract yourself. Place the palm of your hand on your stomach and breathe slowly and deeply. - recommendation from the NHS

…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - Franklin Delano Roosevelt Inaugural address – March 4, 1933

Real power is—I don’t even want to use the

…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - Franklin Delano Roosevelt Inaugural address – March 4, 1933

Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear. - Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump in an interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa on March 31, 2016

It was no less than an administrative coup d’état, an undermining of the will of the president of the United States and his constitutional authority.

In addition to coordinating policy decisions and schedules and running the paperwork for the president, Porter told an associate, “A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas.”
Another strategy was to delay, procrastinate, cite legal restrictions, Lawyer Porter said, “But slow-walking things or not taking things up to him, or telling him—rightly, not just as an excuse—but this needs to be vetted, or we need to do more process on this, or we don’t have legal counsel clearance—that happened 10 times more frequently than taking papers from his desk. It felt like we were walking along the edge of the cliff perpetually.

…the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.

We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American Eagle in order to feather their own nests.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, State of the Union Address, Jan. 9, 1941

I'm standing next to my table, everything neatly lined up, and I'm just hoping that my professors can see how much effort I've put into making my desi

I'm standing next to my table, everything neatly lined up, and I'm just hoping that my professors can see how much effort I've put into making my designs practical and ergonomic and sustainable. And I'm starting to get really nervous, because for a long time, no one says anything. It's just completely silent. And then one of the professors starts to speak, and he says, "Your work gives me a feeling of joy."…I asked the professors, "How do things make us feel joy? How do tangible things make us feel intangible joy?” They hemmed and hawed and gestured a lot with their hands. "They just do," they said… So this got me thinking: Where does joy come from? I started asking everyone I knew, and even people I just met on the street, about the things that brought them joy. On the subway, in a café, on an airplane, it was, "Hi, nice to meet you. What brings you joy?" I felt like a detective. I was like, "When did you last see it? Who were you with? What color was it? Did anyone else see it?" I was the Nancy Drew of joy. - from the author’s TED talk

Seeing it all laid out, it was clear that joy was not a mysterious, intuitive force; it emanated directly from the physical properties of the objects. Specifically, it was what designers called aesthetics—the attributes that define the way an object looks and feels—that gave rise to the feeling of joy.

A body of research is emerging that demonstrates a clear link between our surroundings and our mental health. For example, studies show that workers with sunny desks are happier and more productive than their peers in dimly lit offices.

We all have an inclination to seek joy in our surroundings, yet we have been taught to ignore it. What might happen if we were to reawaken this instinct for finding joy?

Wonders never cease, as long as we are willing to look for them.

Jess was hardly alone in continuing to believe the canard that Obama was a Muslim.

Jess was hardly alone in continuing to believe the canard that Obama was a Muslim.

Off at Barnard, Habib felt liberated. “I was surprised that people think I’m pretty! It was shocking to me. Or that people like that I’m smart. I never looked back.” She thinks many whites in Luzerne County view issues such as drugs, welfare, and crime through a racial prism. “There is this sense among a lot of people that blacks and Latinos are getting more benefits than they are—to the town and county’s detriment. This is a very widely held view. A sense that ‘they are taking from people like us’—taking jobs and safety in the community—and that’s consciously or unconsciously part of what Trump spoke to. And Wilkes-Barre has a crime problem that is understood in racial terms. Newcomers are seen as drug dealers or benefit scammers. I think this informed people’s vote, and there was no sense that the Democrats helped them—just people of color.

Despite delivering for his supporters in the culture wars, Trump’s policies as president have not always been in his supporters’ economic interests.

Trump’s base continues to love him anyway, mostly because, on his Twitter feed and at his ongoing campaign rallies, he has fed them a steady diet of entertaining, rhetorical red meat. They love his feistiness, how he never apologizes, how he stands up for their values, and how he sticks it to his enemies every day.

To win back Trump voters in Luzerne County and many places like it around the country, Democrats will need to more clearly define what they are for, rather than who and what they are against: Trump the man and everything he stands for. And the party, whose base has shifted away from the working class to the middle, upper-middle, professional, and creative classes, will need to make more room for centrist voices if it wants to reach voters who now feel culturally alienated from its prevailing liberal orthodoxy. In addition, the Democratic Party, which has long prided itself on its tolerance, will have to curb the tendency of many of its leaders to use a broad brush to paint most Trump voters as bigots.

Though a mix of urban and rural, Luzerne is covered by parts of the Appalachian mountain range and is on the whole more rural in character. While there are pockets of well-heeled suburbia, Luzerne is less Northeast Corridor than Appalachia.

“Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.”
– Maya Angelou

“Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.”
– Maya Angelou

It is a community unlike any in America. Here live people so isolated for so long that they have their own style of speech, a singsong brogue of old words and phrases, twisted vowels, odd rhythms. Its virtually amphibious men follow a calendar set by the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, and they catch more of the prized delicacy than anyone else. It is a near-theocracy of old-school Christians who brook no trade in alcohol, and kept a major movie from filming in their midst over scenes of sex and beer. And not least, this is one big, extended family: All but a few islanders can trace their lineage to a single man.

For 240 years they’ve occupied a speck of mud and marsh that nowhere reaches more than five feet above the tide, seldom tops three, and most often fails to clear one. Now it is washing ever faster into a bay on the rise.

…little Tangier is important in one respect. As the Scientific Reports article concluded, it’s likely to be the first to go. That experience—and the uncomfortable questions it forces the country to confront—will inform what the rest of us on and near coasts can expect in the decades to come. What makes a community worth saving? Will its size alone prompt the nation to fight for its survival—or are other, less tangible factors as important? Which such factors count the most? And if size is the chief consideration, what’s the cutoff, the minimum population, that’s worth rescue? What, in short, is important to us?
And there’s the matter of the Chesapeake Bay blue crab: Without Tangier, big-city restaurants will be serving a lot less softshell, and many more will have to substitute imported crabmeat for the genuine article in their crabcakes.

As individuals, the islanders are fiercely independent and self-sufficient—modern-day cowboys, or so they like to think. As a group, however, they show precious little initiative.

…objectively speaking, islanders were poor stewards of their island and its waters. The marshes were studded with their discarded kitchen appliances, bicycles. And outboard motors. Litter made eyesores of the ridges. Watermen routinely threw trash, including motor oil, overboard; the harbor’s shallows had acquired a sharp-smelling and colorful sheen. And Tangiermen had nothing but enmity for environmentalists, who warned that the bay’s blue crab population was overfished, teetering on collapse, and would rebound only with tighter regulation of the commercial harvest.

What I have tried to do is provide something between a potted history [which would be more relevant to a compendium of plant colors] and a character sketch for the 75 shades [maybe Dante could help] that have intrigued me the most.

Vantablack, a carbon nanotube technology created in Britain in 2014, traps 99.965 percent of the spectrum, making it the blackest thing in the world. In person it is so dark it fools the eyes and brain, rendering people unable to perceive depth and texture. - NY times TV reviewers?

That summer I hunted the serial killer at night from my daughter’s playroom. For the most part I mimicked the bedtime routine of a normal person. Teet

That summer I hunted the serial killer at night from my daughter’s playroom. For the most part I mimicked the bedtime routine of a normal person. Teeth brushed. Pajamas on. But after my husband and daughter fell asleep, I’d retreat to my makeshift workspace and boot up my laptop, that fifteen-inch-wide hatch of endless possibilities…I rarely moved but I leaped decades with a few keystrokes. Yearbooks. Marriage certificates. Mug shots. I scoured thousands of pages of 1970s-era police files. I pored over autopsy reports. That I should do this surrounded by a half-dozen stuffed animals and a set of miniature pink bongos didn’t strike me as unusual. I’d found my searching place, as private as a rat’s maze. Every obsession needs a room of its own. Mine was strewn with coloring paper on which I’d scribbled down California penal codes in crayon. - from the prologue

[Her] fascination with the grisly began when she was just 14, when a young woman named Kathleen Lombardo, whom McNamara knew from church, was murdered while jogging a block and a half away from McNamara’s home in Oak Park, Illinois. The man who slit Lombardo’s throat was never found. McNamara would be forever haunted by what she’d later describe as “the specter of that question mark where the killer’s face should be.” - From Vulture article

falling for a suspect is a lot like the first surge of blind love in a relationship. Focus narrows to a single face. The world and its practical sounds are a wan soundtrack to the powerful silent biopic you’re editing in your mind at all times. No amount of information on the object of your obsession is enough. You crave more. Always more. You note his taste in shoes and even drive by his house, courtesy of Google Maps. You engage in wild confirmation bias. You project. A middle-aged white man smiling and cutting a cake decorated with candles in a picture posted on Facebook isn’t celebrating his birthday, but holding a knife.

That’s what we all do. All of us. We make well-intentioned promises of protection we can’t always keep.
I’ll look out for you.
But then you hear a scream and you decide it’s some teenagers playing around. A young man jumping a fence is taking a shortcut. The gunshot at three a.m. is a firecracker or a car backfiring. You sit up in bed for a startled moment. Awaiting you is the cold, hard floor and a conversation that may lead nowhere: you collapse onto your warm pillow, and turn back to sleep.
Sirens wake you later.

The case had a profound impact not just on fear and public safety in California, but also on the way that rapes were investigated and how rape victims were treated, said Carol Daly, a detective in the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office at the time…Rape victims were seen and cared for faster, and pubic hair, scratches and other evidence were examined and preserved, she said. Rape kits were standardized. “Every victim went through the process,” she said. - From 4/25/18 – NY TIMES article

He was a compulsive prowler and searcher. We, who hunt him, suffer from the same affliction. He peered through windows. I tap “return.” Return. Return. Click Mouse click, mouse click…The hunt is the adrenaline rush, not the catch. He’s the fake shark in Jaws, barely seen so doubly feared.

A week after Michelle’s death, we gained access to her hard drive and began exploring her files on the Golden State Killer. All 3,500 of them. That was on top of dozens of notebooks, the legal pads, the scraps of paper, and thousands of digitized pages of police reports. And the thirty-seven boxes of files she had received from the Orange County prosecutor, which Michelle lovingly dubbed the Mother Lode.

Yesterday my brother texted: “I have a different feeling driving around the neighborhood today. It was always in the back of my mind that he could still be living around here. In a weird way it feels safer.”
It does. The fear is gone. But the shadows remain.

“…I want to ask you many things. I want to know who you are and how you came to be a slave; and to what part of Africa do you belong, and how you fare

“…I want to ask you many things. I want to know who you are and how you came to be a slave; and to what part of Africa do you belong, and how you fared as a slave, and how you have managed as a free man?”…when he lifted his wet face again he murmured, Thankee Jesus! Somebody come ast about Cudjo! I want tellee somebody who I is, so maybe dey go to tell everybody whut Cudjo says, and how I come to Americky soil since de 1859 and never see my people no mo’. “

Barracoon - An enclosure in which black slaves were confined for a limited period.
-Oxford English Dictionary

Last fall, on the PBS genealogy series Finding Your Roots, the musician Questlove learned that he descends from people brought over on the Clotilda. Then an Alabama reporter named Ben Raines found a wreck that looked to be the scuttled ship; it wasn’t, but the story made national news….[while] Kossola’s relevance goes beyond any headlines, [there are also] noteworthy links there: one of Kossola’s sons is killed by law enforcement, and his story holds a message about recognizing humanity echoed by Black Lives Matter. - from Time Magazine article

“Oh Lor’, I know it you call my name. Nobody don’t callee me Kossula, jus’ lak I in de Affica soil!”

Tracy Sherrod is the editorial director of Amistad at Harper Collins, which is now publishing the book. She says Hurston tried to get it published back in the 1930s, but the manuscript was rejected. "They wanted to publish it," Sherrod says, "but they wanted Zora to change the language so it wasn't written in dialect and more in standard English. And she refused to do so."

Hurston refused, says Deborah Plant, because she understood that Lewis's language was key to understanding him. "We're talking about a language that he had to fashion for himself in order to negotiate this new terrain he found himself in," she says. "Embedded in his language is everything of his history. To deny him his language is to deny his history, to deny his experience — which ultimately is to deny him, period. To deny what happened to him."