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This extraordinary profile of Clarence and Ginni Thomas—he a Supreme Court justice, she among other things an avid supporter of the January 6 insurrection—is a masterclass in everything from mustering archival material to writing the hell out of a story:
There is a certain rapport that cannot be manufactured. “They go on morning runs,” reports a 1991 piece in the Washington Post. “They take after-dinner walks. Neighbors say you can see them in the evening talking, walking up the hill. Hand in hand.” Thirty years later, Virginia Thomas, pining for the overthrow of the federal government in texts to the president’s chief of staff, refers, heartwarmingly, to Clarence Thomas as “my best friend.” (“That’s what I call him, and he is my best friend,” she later told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.) In the cramped corridors of a roving RV, they summer together. They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift. Bonnie and Clyde were performing intimacy; every line crossed was its own profession of love. Refusing to recuse oneself and then objecting, alone among nine justices, to the revelation of potentially incriminating documents regarding a coup in which a spouse is implicated is many things, and one of those things is romantic.
“Every year it gets better,” Ginni told a gathering of Turning Point USA–oriented youths in 2016. “He put me on a pedestal in a way I didn’t know was possible.” Clarence had recently gifted her a Pandora charm bracelet. “It has like everything I love,” she said, “all these love things and knots and ropes and things about our faith and things about our home and things about the country. But my favorite is there’s a little pixie, like I’m kind of a pixie to him, kind of a troublemaker.”
A pixie. A troublemaker. It is impossible, once you fully imagine this bracelet bestowed upon the former Virginia Lamp on the 28th anniversary of her marriage to Clarence Thomas, this pixie-and-presumably-American-flag-bedecked trinket, to see it as anything but crucial to understanding the current chaotic state of the American project. Here is a piece of jewelry in which symbols for love and battle are literally intertwined. Here is a story about the way legitimate racial grievance and determined white ignorance can reinforce one another, tending toward an extremism capable, in this case, of discrediting an entire branch of government. No one can unlock the mysteries of the human heart, but the external record is clear: Clarence and Ginni Thomas have, for decades, sustained the happiest marriage in the American Republic, gleeful in the face of condemnation, thrilling to the revelry of wanton corruption, untroubled by the burdens of biological children or adherence to legal statute. Here is how they do it.
The National Wildfire Coordinating Group glossary gives this definition of an anchor point:
An advantageous location from which to start building a fire break or line. If done properly, this will prohibit fire from establishing itself on the other side of an unsuspecting crew who could otherwise end up being surrounded, with little chance for escape.
The first thing you learn at fire school is the acronym, LCES. LCES stands for Lookouts, Communications, Escape routes, and Safety zones. You will repeat it to yourself while sharpening your Pulaski and your chainsaw. You’ll say it again while wearing your stiff new boots into the shower, and later when you hike up steep trails with your new crewmates, each of you carrying around 40 pounds of gear strapped to your backs in 100-degree temperatures. It’s printed on the back page of every firefighter’s pocket guide, and on stickers handed out, which will later show up on helmets, bunks, notebooks, and water bottles.
Next comes the video you’ll sit through at the beginning of every fire season until you retire. Short, low-budget clips featuring interviews with survivors of tragic fires. Close-ups of haunted faces recall having spent interminable moments pressed tight to the ground in their foil shelters taking shallow breaths, breathing prayers against the dirt to their families and Gods while roaring flame fronts consumed the oxygen outside.
The camera pans away from the faces of the survivors to several small, white, weathered crosses high on a lonely mountainside that soon fade to black, and you can practically taste the ash and smell the faintest whiff of burning flesh coming from the bodies of firefighters who lived just long enough to stop thinking or feeling anything.
You are going to need a mantra. Throughout your career, you will have many. “LCES’ is as good as any to start with. The “L” in LCES stands for “lookouts.”
Post a lookout, whenever there is a need for one. There is always a need for a lookout.
Now, if you can, imagine another kind of fire; the kind of fire that starts within a human being. Alcoholism is that kind of fire.
Trying to control alcoholism is as complex and harrowing as learning to fight wildland fire, and because I happened to undertake both labors at the same time, the lessons I learned from each informed the other until I eventually rose from the ashes of my former self.
Barely into my first fire season, I began to notice I was no longer able to rocket out of bed in the mornings after nights spent drinking with the crew, no matter how much water I drank or how hard I exercised in an attempt to sweat it out. I was tired all the time. At thirty-six, I was the oldest firefighter in a close-knit fire crew of twenty and thirty-somethings. Maybe I was just too old to be playing with fire.
Older though I was, I was the happiest I could remember having been because I had finally stumbled into the work I was born to do.
Still, the beginnings of more serious health problems related to my alcohol consumption began to show themselves and by autumn there was a persistent hollow ache in my stomach.
When you decide to stop drinking only to discover that your willpower can’t keep you stopped, posting the analog of a fire lookout is a good idea. Survivors of tragic fires and late-stage alcoholism each told me in the early days that retreating into a survival shelter to wait out the fire is a tactic one should never rely on. Sure, you might survive fire or early sobriety by insulating yourself from the world in a hot, airless cocoon, but the ultimate goal is to expand your world by developing healthy interdependence with others. Together and connected, everyone increases their chances of surviving whole and resilient, instead of suffering alone beneath a heavy blanket of smoky darkness.
The first step I took toward sobriety was accepting that the fire had been there for a long time, quietly burning my life down.
The “C” in LCES stands for communications. Many tragedies could have been prevented had supervisors listened to lookouts’ warnings, or if someone—anyone—had spoken up in time to retreat from oncoming disaster.
Similarly, many alcoholics could have avoided lost time and opportunities, and later grave injuries to health and relationships, if they had only listened when their friends and family told them, “we’re beginning to worry about you.”
Abstinence isn’t sexy, no matter which social media influencer decides to take a public journey on the wagon. Although moderating is no big deal for a person whose alcohol problem is minor or temporary, for a real alcoholic, “dry January” is edge play.
When I fully removed alcohol from my life, I suddenly felt skinless, with all my nerves exposed to the air wherever I went. My body and mind felt like riverbanks being overrun by waves of unprocessed grief and trauma. It was necessary to find or create alternative escape routes and safety zones until new pathways developed through my interior moonscape of fading fire scars, which at some point miraculously began to fill in with new green growth.
The “E” in LCES stands for escape routes. What is an escape route? In wildland firefighting, it’s simple: Pick two directions. Face the danger. Make sure your pathway is clear, even if you have to cut your own path through chest-high brush with your saw. When first becoming sober, finding an escape route seems impossible: Alcohol is everywhere, and it feels like a social mandate. Work, sports, vacations, and activities of every kind involve the ever-present friend that one must now treat like the traitor it has become.
At first, sobriety feels at once like a death of a best friend, loss of comfort, and a beloved version of one’s self. On some level, it is exactly these things; it is also another kind of deceptively simple escape route from the need to use a substance to deal with life’s pain. You’ve probably known people who have ultimately chosen one of the others; sickness, insanity, or death.
Phone numbers of friends who can be counted on to call back, and taking my own car to social gatherings were among the first and most effective escape routes and safety zones I developed early on. Years later, I still rely on them although recovery no longer is about the fear of drinking again. These days, I use my tools to help remain steady in a world that is often on fire and in an upheaval of its own.
The “S” in LCES stands for “safety zones.” Safety zones are meant to be large, well-considered areas easily accessed from the fireline, but in reality, they rarely are. On the ground and in life, crews learn to prepare the best they can with the resources and time they have.
When fighting fire, the last step is called cold trailing. I learned to take off my thick gloves designed to protect firefighter’s vulnerable hands from burns and feel for any remaining heat around the blackened edges of the former blaze where it bumps up against the green. Where heat is found, the hot dirt is dug up and spread, allowing it to cool. Unbelievable amounts of heat can be found sometimes in deep pockets of warm soil. All it takes is a breath of wind and one spark for a drowsing fire to be reawakened.
While I still occasionally stumble upon hidden hot spots in my sober life, it’s been many years since I’ve stopped trying to put my own fires out with alcohol. I regularly invite other seasoned sober people to help me cold trail the edges of the old burns. Together, we take up our collective tools and legacy knowledge to open up the haunted ground, exposing our still-smoldering secrets to sunlight and air. Somehow, this is how we stay sober.
It took years from the time I realized I wanted to be a wildland firefighter for me to begin to walk toward that goal, while also leaving the biggest obstacle to achieving it behind.
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Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, interviews, and book reviews we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.
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Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen
A two-day conference to be held at Queen Mary, University of London, 21-22 February 2024
Keynote by Professor Raewyn Connell
Deadline for abstracts: Monday 4 September 2023
Masculinity needs changing. As a manifestation of patriarchy, a predictor of violence, and a straight-jacket of identity, masculinity is widely identified as a culprit and symptom: problematic, traditional, ‘hyper’ and toxic. In response a loose network of feminists and allies, public health professionals, scholar-activists, social workers, civil society groups, international organisations and military and police forces have sought to reform masculinity for the better. Their efforts range from positive fatherhood campaigns to counter-terrorism measures, and from religious role models to queer theory. ‘Masculinity’ as a concept and configuration of practices is at the same time undergoing another round of crisis and change, split along axes of class, nation, racialisation, sexuality, gender identity and culture, torn between projects of restoration and abolition.
This two-day conference will gather academics, practitioners and activists to critically interrogate contemporary masculinity interventions in local, national and transnational layers. What new governance arrangements and sciences of public health are being formed? What power relations are at work, especially across shifting boundaries of global north and south? What is the role of specific political, economic and cultural institutions in propagating new varieties of good masculinity? How are these new masculine subjectivities being produced? And with what effects, whether generative, perilous or ambivalent? We hope that the conference will address these questions in relation to the production and/or policing of masculinity in its many variants, including (but not limited to) its traditional, trans, Black, ally, alt-right, postcolonial, hegemonic, survivor, migrant, postconflict, inclusive, violent, and toxic forms.
We invite contributions in three formats:
The conference will take place at Queen Mary, University of London on Wednesday 21 and Thursday 22 February 2024. We are able to support a small number of international participants with flights, accommodation and visa costs, and to provide accommodation and travel support for a larger number of UK participants. Applicants are asked to indicate if they require flight, accommodation and/or visa support (if from abroad) or travel and/or accommodation support (if within the UK). For UK participants, priority will be given to early career and precariously employed participants.
Please submit abstracts by Monday 4 September 2023 to Paul Kirby ([email protected]) and/or Chloé Lewis ([email protected]). Inquiries in advance are welcome.
This call is also available as a PDF document.
This conference is an event of the UKRI GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub (http://thegenderhub.com / https://twitter.com/TheGenderHub).
thepamphleteer
Montblanc normally does quite a few special releases over the calendar year. Mostly, those releases are different designs of pen bodies.
In the recent time, however, Montblanc has also started to release special edition pens with speciality nibs, such as the MB 146 Calligraphy Flex nib – or now the MB 149 Calligraphy curved nib.
It is fantastic to see that companies such as Leonardo, Aurora, and now also Montblanc, bring back the variety of nibs that were commonplace back in the days – and that in the modern days we were only used to from specialty nib makers such as Sailor.
But let’s now have a look at what the Montblanc Diplomat 149 Calligraphy Curved nib is all about!
Before we hop into the review, I would like to take the opportunity to thank Appelboompennen for supporting the review of this pen. You can also buy the Montblanc 149 Calligraphy Curved Nib in their webshop (no affiliate – just a friendly pointer).
Check out the video-review below, which is as always preceded by some quick facts. Again, I hope the review is helpful and that you enjoy watching it!
Click on the photos to enlarge.
The post Video-Review: Montblanc 149 Calligraphy Curved Nib (Special Edition) appeared first on Scrively - note taking & writing.
“Fearless progress toward justice often meets ferocious pushback from the oldest and most sinister of forces,” President Biden told Howard University’s graduating class.
Ben Vinson III is a historian, with his focus cast outside of the United States.
Founded in 2012, Political Violence @ a Glance is an award-winning, peer-reviewed online magazine that explores timely topics and scholarly research on political violence and its alternatives. PV@Glance has an international readership, with thousands of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of annual page views. It is among the premier venues through which scholars of political violence communicate the relevance of their findings to a wider scholarly and public audience.
The current editors of PV@Glance, Erica Chenoweth, Barbara Walter, and Joseph K. Young, seek applications for a new editorial team. The new editorial team would assume editorial and management responsibilities for PV@Glance in September 2023, with the existing team providing transitional support during summer 2023.
Successful applicants will hold secure positions at one or more academic institutions and receive sufficient resources from their home institutions to support their editorial tasks.
Those interested in assuming editorship of PV@Glance should submit CVs of proposed editorial team members along with a brief letter that addresses the team’s qualifications and experience, institutional support, and aims and vision for PV@Glance going forward.
Proposals must be received by May 25, 2023, for full consideration. Applications (or questions about the role or application process) should be submitted to PVG Managing Editor Lindsay Morgan at [email protected].
Marketing is a go-to solution but sometimes masks deeper issues.
Robert Harington talks to Annie Callanan, Chief Executive of Taylor & Francis, in this new series of perspectives from some of Publishing’s leaders across the non-profit and profit sectors of our industry.
The post Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table — Annie Callanan appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Enlarge / Sony's PlayStation 5. (credit: Sony)
UK regulators reviewing Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard reversed their stance on a key question today, saying they no longer believe Microsoft would remove the Call of Duty franchise from Sony's PlayStation consoles.
Last month, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) tentatively concluded that a combined Microsoft/Activision Blizzard would harm competition in console gaming. At the time, the CMA said evidence showed that "Microsoft would find it commercially beneficial to make Activision's games exclusive to its own consoles (or only available on PlayStation under materially worse conditions)." The agency also raised concerns about the merger affecting rivals in cloud gaming.
The preliminary finding was a victory for Sony, which has consistently expressed doubts about Microsoft's promise to keep putting Call of Duty games on PlayStation. But Microsoft argued that the CMA's financial model was flawed and was able to convince the agency to reverse its conclusion. In an announcement today, the CMA said it "received a significant amount of new evidence."
"The book is about the importance of film for enabling audiences to connect to the most remote environment on the planet."
The post Filming the Deep: Margaret Cohen on Underwater Film Technologies appeared first on Public Books.
inkophile
Board leaders, search chairs, chief communications officers and presidents-elect can all benefit from understanding the communications considerations of a presidential search.
When I was a kid, our house flooded. Twice. During heavy summer rains, water from the creek in our front yard flooded the basement and then the first floor, ruining almost everything we owned. Soggy couches, mud-encrusted carpets, and moldy mattresses filled our manicured front lawn. It felt like weeks that my family spent our days breathing moldy air and sitting on the floor, surrounded by buzzing high-speed fans and gurgling dehumidifiers hammering at floor tiles till they cracked and came up. Everything was mold coated and had to be removed. A few years later, when I was in high school, I was home alone for what was almost a third flood. My parents were out of town when it rained hard for two solid days. On the third day, the creek began creeping slowly toward the house. I felt sick to my stomach as it rose above the front step and lapped at the front door. I was planning my escape through waist-high water when the rains miraculously stopped, and the creek receded.
So I know a few things about how we humans deal with an impending, slow-arriving disaster. When the water first begins to rise, we tell ourselves it’s not going to happen. We are firm in our disbelief. Thirty minutes later, as the water rises higher, we tell ourselves it will stop. When the water is a foot away from the front door, we think about leaving, but we wait. We deny. We bargain. We hope. Maybe we pray. Only as the water crosses the threshold and begins to consume our furniture do we decide that now is the time to leave. But the water is now so high that we must wade or even swim to safety.
Deciding to be honest with ourselves during hard times is like watching floodwaters rise. We don’t face ourselves when we should, but we wait, deny, bargain, hope. By the time we’ve run through these feeling states, the only remaining option is to act; if we don’t, we will be subsumed in our own psychic floods, forced to swim through the muddy water of our minds, desperate for safe shores. We will flail.
As I drove across the golden moonscape that is the Judean Desert, with its wide-lens views of the barren Judean Hills, resembling massive breaching whales, the water of my life was lapping at my door. Having waited too long for a calm and sensible self-rescue, I was scrambling desperately for high ground. Every time I blinked, I saw Paul’s dead body lying on the hallway carpet, then my own. Blink. Paul. Blink. Brad. I couldn’t touch the memory of our last conversation, when Paul told me, in so many words, that he planned to end his own life. I couldn’t face the seven years I’d just wasted in a miserable, drugged-out haze. That floodwater had filled the basement, and I was terrified to open the door and look down into that watery darkness. It was time to swim to safety. I needed hope. I couldn’t say exactly how traveling across Palestine, how following in Jesus’s footsteps, how baptizing myself was going to lead to my healing. I just knew that this was what I needed to do. Some deeper part of my psyche—my soul?—was guiding me. Perhaps it was steering the car. Was the road back to me out there somewhere in this moonscape?
At the same time, I did feel ready to get real with myself. I knew I had to make corrections in how I was moving through the world, but I didn’t know how. I was confused about my life, particularly my experience with my own family. As I drove, I fell into melancholy self-pity. I felt like an orphan. It’s painful not having the support of family; it’s worse when they really don’t like you. After I grew up, my outspokenness about my family’s issues made me their enemy. Slowly, I was pushed out and treated like a pariah. When I did return home for an occasional holiday visit, I faced a family that seemed to see me and my desire for openness and honesty as “the problem.” I had been in weekly therapy since I was twenty-five, and I’d read countless self-help books about how to heal my codependency and other effects of growing up with my dysfunctional family. But the one thing I didn’t learn—or I was in denial about—was just how reluctant dysfunctional families can be to look at themselves. And how in denial I was about my family. I get it now. Most people don’t desire radical honesty. But that more naive Brad, who came home at Thanksgiving or Christmas hoping for a different family experience, couldn’t fathom that they didn’t want to talk about feelings or relationships, let alone discuss a path to healing ourselves. And although my father had learned to drink less, he still drank, and, in my experience, he never did a thing to face his own emotional issues or to repair the damage he’d done to our family. At holiday dinners, I sat at the table, sipping my sparkling water and listening to everybody present blather on about trivial things I didn’t know or care about, feeling unseen, frustrated, and angry at the lack of emotional intimacy. By dessert, we had all removed our gloves. Insults flew freely, and my mother cried.
And yet I knew I couldn’t heal all by myself. I needed community—even advice, maybe fatherly advice. But there was nobody I trusted. My father and the rest of my family was off the table. They treated me like a fraud as if I’d never led the life of a successful magazine editor and adventure writer, though that’s how I’d made my living for fifteen years. They laughed and rolled their eyes when I said anything about my successful travel-writing career.
I now understand the dynamic better. Or I think I do. My family needed to see me as a Walter Mitty, the ordinary guy who fantasized constantly about a more adventurous life than the one he lived. When those Dos Equis beer commercials featuring the Most Interesting Man in the World appeared on television, they laughed and said that’s you, Brad. In my family’s narrative, like the Most Interesting Man in the World, I was a raging narcissist, a ridiculous liar, and my years of success as an editor, adventure travel writer, columnist, and author of a collection of my nature writings by a major publisher was a figment of my imagination.
This narrative, as hurtful as it was, later became an essential piece of information in my reaching an understanding about what had happened to me: to my life, my spirit, my sense of self. It also highlighted the denial, the dysfunction, the extreme masculine power struggle, and perhaps the toxic narcissism that formed our familial paradigm. Later still, after Donald Trump became president, I found more insight. Trump and his supporters referred to facts as “fake news,” which was exactly the way I felt my family had treated the facts of my life and, essentially, who I was as a person, as a man: in their eyes, I was a fake. Whatever was going on with my family, I appeared to have become fake news to them. My stories became fake. I was fake. Ironically, they cast me as the family scapegoat to avoid looking at themselves, their own patterns of behavior. s
And yet, looking back on this time, I can see that I was causing myself more suffering by not accepting the reality of this family tragedy. Perhaps they wished they had a different son–and I wished I had a different family. I couldn’t yet accept this about them–about me–and save myself from the toxicity by walking away.
By the time I arrived in Palestine, I was struggling to regain my own story. I had been willing to abandon myself, my own truth, and the memories of the things I had accomplished. I had believed others’ version of me more than I trusted my own. Now, in this holy place, I wondered, What was the true story about my life? I honestly didn’t know. Coming here to walk in Jesus’s footsteps was my way of seeking a new model, a different paradigm, a solid story to lean on. Jesus was a vital figure from my youth. When you take away the religious aspects of the story, he was the ideal man. He was accepting, generous, kind, and sought justice for all. He was someone that we imperfect humans, driven by impulses and fragilities beyond our control, could strive to emulate. Jesus was strong, compassionate, merciful, outspoken, and he wasn’t a pushover in the face of powerful men and social organizations. He spoke his mind, and he faced the ultimate consequences. Who wouldn’t want to be like Jesus?
With all of this in my mind and heart, I drove across the Judean Desert. Could this weird journey through history, sacred religious scriptures, and my own past show me anything useful about how to rebuild my life? I had to find out.
I saw the turnoff for the baptismal site at Qasr el Yahud on the western bank of the Jordan River, slowed down, exited the highway, and pulled into the parking area.
I was mesmerized—not by the meaning I believed I was about to experience but by the red sign posted on the barbed-wire fence to my right: “Danger Mines!” Beyond the sign and fence was what you’d expect a minefield to look like: acres upon acres of dirt built up into little gopher-like mounds. After the 1967 war, when Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, the army placed four thousand explosive devices in the ground to prevent anyone from taking back the land.
Qasr el Yahud was also the site of significant Old Testament events; this bend in the river was the place where, according to Jewish tradition, the Israelites crossed the Jordan and entered the Promised Land for the first time. It’s also the place where tradition says the prophet Ezekiel ascended to heaven.
Wow, I thought as I stepped out of the car and onto the hot pavement. A minefield next to the site where Jesus experienced his spiritual rebirth and where the Jewish people first entered the Promised Land?
I walked toward the cluster of palm trees that lined the river. The pavement stuck to my flip-flops like chewing gum. The minefield disturbed me deeply, even if it was on the other side of a fence and I could easily steer clear. That wasn’t possible with another frightening thing, parked under a palm tree: a massive bus with a sign in the windshield indicating its passengers were members of a church in Dallas, Texas.
I couldn’t help but smile.
The church folks from Texas mobbed the visitor’s center, though I admit they were less scary in person than in theory. It was a quiet, sweet, multiracial group of men and women huddled on the wooden steps, all descending to the water. I smiled and waved to an older woman who looked so ecstatic—as if she’d just won the Texas Powerball. I kept moving to the far side of the steps to sit and take in the scene.
That’s when I noticed John the Baptist standing chest-high in the middle of the narrow, easy-moving river. A heavyset, blond man with a matching goatee, I figured he was the pastor, playing the part for the group. He wore a white robe that exposed his hairy chest. It wasn’t a camel-hair shirt like the original John the Baptist was said to have worn, but this modern John fit the part perfectly. His face beamed.
A middle-aged woman with a boyish haircut stood in the water next to modern John. His hand rested on the crown of her head, and he was reciting a prayer that I couldn’t make out. She was crying joyfully and appeared to be in a state of blissful spiritual overwhelm. Then he looked her in the eye and seemed to ask, Are you ready? She nodded. He placed one hand on her shoulder and the other against her lower back. He pushed her back gently until she disappeared under the water for a full second. After helping her resurface, he cupped his hands and poured three successive palmfuls of water over her head. By now, she was weeping loudly. He hugged her, and then, with one hand resting on his own heart, he gestured with the other hand that it was time for her to wade back to shore. She climbed out of the water and back onto the wood steps, at which time another church member—an elderly man with short gray hair, wearing horn-rimmed glasses—stepped gingerly off the riser into the water and waded out.
The baptisms continued, but I had seen enough. I moved to a dry patch of grass far enough away that I couldn’t hear the others. I reflected on the story of Jesus’s baptism, which I still knew quite well a good thirty years after I’d studied it so intently.
Sometime around his thirtieth birthday, Jesus left his home in Nazareth and traveled on foot roughly a hundred miles to Jerusalem. It was there he learned about John the Baptist, a renegade, wild man figure who had made a reputation for himself performing a new type of spiritual cleansing in the Jordan River, an adaption of the longstanding Jewish ritual of frequently purifying oneself by bathing in blessed water. Jesus walked east, toward the Jordan, to receive this purification. John doused him and blessed him. Then, according to the biblical narrative, the heavens opened, and the Holy Spirit descended “like a dove,” landing on Jesus. It was then that Jesus fully embraced his identity as the Son of God.
Now, thousands of years later, I was sitting on a patch of grass at the location where Jesus received his first hit of divine inspiration and launched his world-changing spiritual crusade. I had felt a pressure in my body, a necessity, to see this place with my own eyes and to experience it in my own body. I hoped it would help me see something new about myself or remember something—I wasn’t sure which. Could I find divine inspiration here, too, like Jesus had? I was no savior, I knew that. Far from it. I lacked a job, let alone purpose. But I was still a seeker, and I came here seeking something. I’d been housebound for so many years, slowly trying to rid myself of all that ambition and ego that had driven me to be an adventure writer.
The word “ego” is confusing. In Eastern spirituality, it has a negative connotation: it is the selfish part of us that gets in the way of achieving enlightenment. But the ego has a far different meaning—and purpose—in the Western psychological tradition. Ego is how we relate to the world. We need a sufficiently strong ego to earn a living, negotiate relationships, live with meaning and purpose, and so on. Many people who show up in treatment for mental illnesses have an undeveloped or fractured ego. Our ego is the part of our minds that must face the bumps and curves of the real world. After my collapse, all that high-test ambition drained away, revealing the truth that ambition and grandiosity overcompensating for my toxic shame and unworthiness had functioned as my ego. What was left of me when you took away the career, the relationship, the family, the pills? I felt as murky as the muddy Jordan.
I wouldn’t have described it like this in 2012, but I now see that I needed to build a healthy ego, which had been squashed during my childhood years. I needed to rebuild myself, but there was no map because I was unsure of starting point—me. I knew I did not want to become just another asshole American man, overly focused on achievement, money, acquisition, competition, woefully disconnected from his feelings apart from anger. I had played that game, and I wasn’t interested in rebuilding my life, only to fall back into the same traps that led to my breakdown in the first place.
The only thing I knew—a small, quiet part of my gut knew—was that spirituality might play a significant part in what I needed to structure a life that mattered to me. Every spiritual path I was aware of asked the same thing of its followers: humility. I was ready for that. I didn’t have any reason not to be humble. I had very little going for me. Everything I’d done to try to feel better had failed: sex, travel, drugs, self-help books, relationships, psychiatrists, life coaches. How was it that I was forty-six years old and felt no better than I did during those sleepless nights of my youth when I remember reading the Bible after walking my drunk dad to bed?
Full of self-pity, I tossed a small stick into the river and watched it float southward toward the Dead Sea. I knew it would never arrive there. I’d read that the Jordan River was drying up; a few miles from here, this gently flowing stream slowed to a trickle and eventually became sandy riverbed. I felt like doing a disappearing act myself.
I had hoped I would feel differently here; I’d hoped to feel inspired, invigorated, ready to take on the next chapter of my life. Even if I didn’t believe in Jesus Christ, I’d hoped that if I sat by the Jordan, maybe I might feel the Holy Spirit entering me—or some kind of spirit. I’d hoped for so much, but writing this now, I understand that hope—is useless. On that day, I was still leaning too heavily on hope.
As the stick I’d tossed disappeared around the bend, I noticed that it was quiet and I was alone. The Texans had left the river and were back at the bus waiting to board. I felt a little prickle of heat move through me. A small sense of excitement about being alone in this popular sacred spot pushed through the lethargic, deadening weight of my hopeless thoughts.
I don’t think I consciously decided to do what I did next.
I looked around once more to make sure I was truly alone. I removed my sandals and shirt. I pulled my shorts up around my waist and removed my sunglasses, setting them on top of my sandals. Then I turned my gaze to the center of the river to the deep spot where the contemporary John the Baptist had just been standing, blessing his flock with gentle dunks in the water. I stepped off the wooden stairs and into the river. Ankle high. I took another step. Knee high. And another. Thigh high. And then waist high. Until I was standing in the middle of the Jordan River up to my chest. The water was tepid and murky, unlike the fresh, cool streams from Colorado near my home. But at this moment, that didn’t matter. It felt deeply cleansing, even life preserving. Unlike the floodwaters of my youth, I welcomed the murkiness, too, as the water rose against my torso. Instead of fleeing these waters, I wanted the stream to fill me up, replace my own blood.
I looked up toward Jerusalem. I was still alone, which felt like a small miracle in and of itself. I inhaled. I exhaled. And then again. I felt nervous. But why? What was the point of any of this? And then I took a breath so big I thought I might float into space. I bent my knees and let my feet off the river floor. My head dropped under water. I stayed there. I paused, my eyes squeezed tight against the muddy water, my breath slowly exiting my nose.
Do I have to come up? My mind drifted back to that May afternoon of my childhood on the White River in Arkansas where I almost drowned, and my father made no motion to save me. I felt the hard, rough log against my skinny-kid torso. I felt the broken branches dig into my skin. I felt the upriver current pushing me hard into the log. I felt the downriver current pulling at my spindly limbs. In that weird way in which so much can happen in an instant, I found myself wondering how big a container I’d need to hold all the pills I’d stuffed down my throat over the years with the hope that they would save me, make me different, make me whole. A pickup? A dump truck? A garbage truck? Then I imagined the drugs, which still were in my bloodstream at a disturbingly high level, being washed away downriver. I imagined my sins washed away. All of them.
I found my footing on the sand and stood up. As my head emerged from the water, I felt a wellspring of emotion rise from my belly through my chest, neck, and jaw, and then tears burst from my eyes. I wept loudly.
Jesus Christ, where the hell are you? Where’s the love? Where’s the kindness? Where’s the fucking grace?
As I stepped out of the river, a new vitality pulsated through my body, warm and full. It moved like energy but felt solid at the same time. Strong, too. This current streamed through my legs and then my torso. It felt like hot, liquid steel was being poured into the mold of my body. It felt like power but without the edge. It was directed at nobody. It simply was. I tried to make sense of it with words: it felt like survival. I was here. Still here. I was alive, in this body, in this river, in this moment, right now. I had made it through the darkest days when I was convinced that I might not make it through the night, too confused about who I was, why I felt so alone. At times, I had felt like I was truly dying from the inside.
But I didn’t die. And I was not going to. Not now. I was going to find my way back home. Not to Kansas. To me.
Back in my car, the hot vinyl seats seared the skin on my legs. My clothes felt swampy after the river dunk. I started up the car and drove slowly past the sign “Land Mines!” How enthusiastic, this sign, and how deeply sad. I rolled past the barbed wire and mounds of dirt and rejoined the highway.
I was confused about what I’d just done, and yet I felt hopeful that it had been more than a silly recreation or a passing moment of folly or fear. I desperately wanted it to mean something more, to mark what I craved to be true: No more chaos. No more shame. No more suffering. Admittedly, I was a little too hopeful. I was again placing my hopes on something external that might save me, contain me, heal me. But this time, that thing wasn’t a pill or a woman or a promotion or a hot story or an accolade. That, I knew, I believed, was a start and a deeply important one. The trance of my life—the shame, the avoidance, the escapism, the cocktail of medication—hadn’t been washed away. I was still in that trance. The difference was that I’d spotted the exit. Now the only question was, How do I open the door?
***
An excerpt from Into the Soul of the World, forthcoming later this month.
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Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, interviews, and book reviews we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.
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Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen
Chicago, IL – November 16-17, 2023
Climate change affects all aspects of the agricultural sector, from technology and input choices, to the wages and welfare of workers, to the prices consumers pay for food and agricultural products. To promote research on the distributional impacts of climate change, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with the generous support of the Economic Research Service at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), will convene a research conference in Chicago on November 16-17, 2023. The conference will be organized by Ellen Bruno and Meredith Fowlie of the University of California, Berkeley, and Danae Hernandez-Cortes of Arizona State University.
Research submissions that explore the distributional implications of climate change in an agricultural context are encouraged. Potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
The organizers welcome submissions of both empirical and theoretical research, including papers by scholars who are early in their careers, who are not NBER affiliates, and who are from groups that are under-represented in the economics profession. The program will prioritize research on the U.S. agricultural sector and economy. To be considered for inclusion on the program, papers must be uploaded by midnight (EDT) on Thursday, June 15, 2023 via the following link: http://conference.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=AEf23
Complete papers are preferred, but extended abstracts may also be submitted. Please do not submit papers that have been accepted for publication and that will be published by November 2023. Authors chosen to present papers will be notified in early July. A virtual pre-conference meeting will be convened in August 2023. The organizers will consider publishing the papers presented at this meeting in an edited NBER proceedings volume, or in a special issue of a refereed journal, subject to the interest of the paper
Questions about this conference may be addressed to [email protected].
Mistorqued bolts may need to be fixed in some Model Y second rows. (credit: Tesla)
Rivian was not the only electric vehicle startup to feature in my weekly recall email from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration this morning. Electra Mecchanica and Lordstown are recalling a small number of EVs, but, more significantly, Tesla has issued yet another recall, and this time there's no software patch that can remedy the problem; affected cars have to be physically inspected.
Tesla is recalling 3,470 Model Y crossovers built between May 2022 and February 2023 to check that the bolts that secure the frame of the second-row seats are properly torqued. Those that aren't could potentially increase the risk of injury to occupants of the second row during a crash.
For owners worried their cars may be affected, Tesla says that a "second-row seat back frame that has this condition may not fold properly or may be loose and rattle during normal vehicle operation."
Enlarge / The recall affects both the Rivian R1S (pictured) and the R1T pickup truck. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)
Rivian is in the process of recalling nearly 13,000 R1T trucks and R1S SUVs due to a potential seatbelt problem. It believes that in some vehicles, a sensor within the seatbelt system is missized or "dimensionally out of tolerance," which could prevent the automatic locking retractor from working properly. That, in turn, could lead the front passenger airbag to believe the seat was unoccupied during a crash and fail to trigger.
Last July, Rivian and its supplier were investigating a vehicle displaying a message that the front passenger airbag was off despite having a passenger in that seat. Rivian and its supplier, Autoliv, worked on the problem until January, collecting more potentially suspect parts from other Rivian EVs. In February, the startup determined that vehicles with the suspect parts would not be compliant with federal safety regulations and initiated the recall.
Unlike many problems we see on new EVs, this one is not the sort that can just be fixed with a software patch. Although Rivian thinks that only 1 percent of the 12,716 affected cars have a defective part, it will inspect and, if necessary, replace the passenger seatbelt components in those affected vehicles.
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
Last fall, it looked like trouble for Microsoft when the European Union launched an in-depth investigation into its acquisition of Activision, but it now seems that Microsoft will emerge victorious. Three people familiar with the European Commission’s opinion on the matter told Reuters that, by agreeing to make a few more concessions, Microsoft will likely win EU antitrust approval on April 25.
According to Reuters, the European Commission is not expected to ask Microsoft to divest large parts of Activision—like separating out its Call of Duty business—to win approval. Instead, long-term licensing deals of lucrative games that Microsoft has offered to rivals could suffice, in addition to agreeing to “other behavioral remedies to allay concerns of other parties than Sony,” one insider told Reuters.
Microsoft declined Ars' request to comment, but the company told Reuters that it is "committed to offering effective and easily enforceable solutions that address the European Commission's concerns." Microsoft has previously opposed any proposed remedies forcing the merged companies to sell the Call of Duty franchise.
When considering effective models for managing marketing and communications across institutions, structure should follow strategy.
As an allied association, AAEA has invited AARES to organize a symposium at the 2023 Annual Meeting of AAEA to be held in Washington, D.C., July 23- 25, 2023 at the Marriott Marquis. Located just a mile from the National Mall, in the heart of the city.
AARES is seeking Expressions of Interests (EoI) from members to participate in this opportunity.
Electronic EoIs (in pdf format), addressing the following criteria, will be received as an email to Mersine Dandas at [email protected] until Sunday, May 5, 2023.
At least one proposer for the organized symposium must be a member of AAEA, and all presenters, speakers, and/or discussants at the Annual Meeting must be members of AAEA and registered for the Annual Meeting by Thursday, May 17, 2023.
Selection Process
A committee chaired by the Immediate Past President will assess the EoIs and a recommendation made to the AARES Executive.
The successful team will be notified by March 10, 2023.
Submission Deadlines and Details
AARES endorsed submission need to reach AAEA by March 20, 2023.
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