Deseret Magazine - October 2022

M AGAZ I NE

WHY EQUALITY BEGINS AT THE BALLOT BOX

THE MIDTERMS AND THE

PRECARIOUS EFERENCE FUTURE OF

R

ELECTIONS

MAY

PLUS:

ROBERT P. GEORGE ON FREE THINKING

OCTOBER 2022 VOL 02 | NO 18

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CONTENTS

46

“Just because political seats are changing doesn’t mean everyone’s attitude is, too. Yet.”

WE, THE WOMEN WOMEN ARE HOLDING OFFICE IN RECORD NUMBERS, BUT THINGS ARE FAR FROM EQUAL. by nicole mcnulty

52

HOW TO STOP THE NEXT MASS SHOOTING

A SYMPOSIUM FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE POLITICAL AISLE. by ethan bauer , mya jaradat , alexandra rain and genevieve vahl

42 THE BATTLE OVER THE BIG LIE IN ARIZONA, THE FUTURE OF ELECTIONS IS ON THE BALLOT. by ethan bauer

O N THE COVE R : I L LUSTR ATIO N BY N A DIA R A D IC

60 THE MAN WHO SAW TOO MUCH DON DUFF’S DISCOVERY IN OCTOBER 1962 HELPED PUSH THE WORLD TO THE BRINK OF NUCLEAR WAR. by ethan bauer

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT GUNS

54

DO GOOD GUYS WITH GUNS REALLY STOP BAD GUYS WITH GUNS?

56

HOW GUN RIGHTS ADVOCATES PROPOSE TO STOP MASS SHOOTINGS

55

THIS IS THE AMERICAN MIND ON GUNS

57

58

WHY THE SECOND AMENDMENT IS SO IMPORTANT TO CONSERVATIVES

55

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO SURVIVE A MASS SHOOTING WHAT AR-15s DO TO CHILDREN’S BODIES

59

WHAT WOULD AN ASSAULT RIFLE BAN REALLY LOOK LIKE?

56

WHY CAN’T CONGRESS PASS MEANINGFUL GUN LEGISLATION?

59

OCTOBER 2022

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CONTENTS

MAGAZINE

“Try to think of a solution instead of adding to a conflict.

There’s no use in complaining about something that’s out of your control.”

24 LEADERSHIP

CRASHING THE BOARDS Natalie Williams is treading on unfamiliar terrain. Again. by ethan bauer

LETTERS FROM THE FIELD

THE DISTANT FAMINE

34

FINDING OUR BEARINGS

80

Can the invention behind Stonehenge help repair a fractured society?

War in Ukraine is pushing Sudan to the brink. by james l . walker

by scott carrier

IDEAS

SECULARISM AS SCAPEGOAT

68

In the 21st century, has faith become too easy — and fragile? by terryl givens and nathaniel givens

MODERN FAMILY

THE UNCHARTED WATERS OF MORAL INJURY

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

16

LOST BOYS

38

The internet is fertile ground for racism. What can stop it?

FREEDOM AND ABUNDANCE

How global population growth spurs growth in resources and ideas.

Turns out, the internal storm we are weathering has a name.

by benjamin bombard

by marian l . tupy

by lauren steele

THE WEST

CULTURE

CHURCH AND STATE Is the future of education in America private? by mya jaradat

20

AN OPEN LETTER

72

28

BREAKING BREAD

Signed. Sealed. Not delivered.

What’s wrong with the post office?

A Portland food cart bridges divides and unites generations.

by benoît morenne

by ethan bauer

COMMENTARY

A GENUINE INDEPENDENCE 76

14

Helping young people think for themselves. by robert p . george

THE LAST WORD

84

by lois m . collins

OCTOBER 2022

7

THE VIEW FROM HERE

IN SEARCH OF A MORE PERFECT UNION

T

his month we asked our staff writers to tackle one of the most vexing problems facing our country: how to stop mass shootings.

Because we live in the West, we know how contentious this topic is, that where one stands on guns has become a sort of Rorschach test that determines tribal loyalties, identity even. It’s heated, emotional. I know from personal experience it’s hard to even begin a conversation. But we wanted to push past that, to stop talking past each other and begin, at least, with some understanding of where both sides are coming from.

Regardless of our political affiliation, we all want to stop mass shootings.

But how? That conversation begins on page 52, and will continue in person later this month with an event at the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute involving policymakers and leading voices on the gun debate from across the political spectrum.

This issue also features on-the-ground reporting from Arizona (page 42), where the future of elections is on the ballot in the upcoming midterms. As staff writer Ethan Bauer details, the outgoing Arizona speaker of the house, Rusty Bowers, a lifelong Republican and a staunch conservative, has paid dearly for standing on principle in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.

He lost his bid for the state senate and has become a pariah in his own party. And yet, for now, people like Bowers are holding the line, preserving our democracy. “It is not hyperbolic to say that democracy is on the ballot in 2022, and that the outcome of these elections will determine the future of free and fair elections in our country,” Arizona’s current 8

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Secretary of State Katie Hobbs told the magazine. I found Bowers’ decision to choose his country over his own interests inspiring and I hope you will too.

For our cover story (page 46), Nicole McNulty writes about efforts to improve women’s equality in the West, from wage disparity to getting a college degree. Susan Madsen, a professor at Utah State University, has studied women’s leadership for two decades and says the best way to close the gender gap is to get more women involved in politics. McNulty found that my home state of Nevada is actually leading the way.

Journalism often asks us to look at our world as it is, not as we wish it were, and at times what we see can all feel a little bleak, overwhelming even. I know people who have stopped reading the news altogether. But this, I believe, is a mistake. To participate in a democracy, to safeguard a republic, we have to stay engaged, especially with the thorniest and most difficult issues of our day. Some of these issues are complex, they’re not straightforward, but it’s our job as citizens to engage with them in their complexity and to work together to find solutions.

As I read other stories in this issue I didn’t feel overwhelmed or hopeless. Instead, I felt empowered, reminded that we are blessed to be part of a system that depends on us. Standing on principle, getting involved, this is the lifeblood of a representative democracy. At Deseret Magazine, we hope we can be a small part of the solution and inspire you to get involved in any way you can to make the world a kinder and — JESSE HYDE more honest place.

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CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

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Deseret Magazine, Volume 2, Issue 18, ISSN PP324, is published 10 times a year by Deseret News Publishing Co., with double issues in January/ February and July/August.

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Informed by our heritage and values, Deseret Magazine covers the people and culture of that territory and its intersection with the broader world.

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CONTRIBUTORS

ROBERT P. GEORGE

JAMES L. WALKER

TERRYL GIVENS

NICOLE MCNULTY

George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, where he is also director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

He served on the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, United States Commission on Civil Rights and is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His commentary on the conformity of college students is on page 14.

Walker holds a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and works as a foreign affairs journalist based in the United Kingdom. His work has appeared in The Economist, The Guardian, Vice and The New Statesman. Walker is the recipient of the MHP+ (30 To Watch) Gold Award for International Affairs Reporting. His article on the causes of the food shortage in Sudan is on page 34.

Givens is a Neal A. Maxwell senior fellow at Brigham Young University.

He was previously a professor of literature and religion and the Jabez A. Bostwick Professor of English at the University of Richmond. His publications center around literary theory, intellectual history, British and European Romanticism and Mormon studies. An excerpt from the book “Into the Headwinds. Why Belief Has Always Been Hard — and Still Is,” co-written with his son, Nathaniel Givens, is on page 68.

Since graduating from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism with a master’s degree, McNulty has worked as a podcast reporter/producer at Western Sound. Her podcast reporting has appeared on CNN and Pushkin Industries. Her writing has appeared in Boulder Weekly, West Side Rag and Columbia News Service.

Additionally, McNulty is a Hearst Award nominee. Her article on the political influence of women is on page 46.

MARIAN L. TUPY

KIMBERLY MORRIS

NADIA RADIC

JON KRAUSE

Tupy is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. The editor of HumanProgress.org, Tupy received a doctorate in international relations from the University of St. Andrews in Great Britain. His essay on page 72 highlights findings from his latest book: “Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.”

Based in the United Kingdom, Morris is a multidisciplinary artist who studied graphic design at the Norwich School of Art and Design.

She worked for editorial branding, gift product and packaging design agencies prior to starting her own illustration brand: Inku Design.

Morris explores her half Chinese and half English heritage through her art and combines illustration with hand lettering. Her work is on page 34.

Self-described as “an artist in a constant search,” Radic is a visual artist based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She began her work as a photographer before establishing herself as a digital collagist. Her work has been globally recognized in the Museum Te Papa (New Zealand) initiative of the Paris Collage Collective, as well as exhibitions in Uruguay, the United Kingdom and Italy. Her illustration is on the cover and page 46.

Krause studied at the Tyler School of Arts at Philadelphia College of Art. His work has appeared in collections and exhibitions across the United States and in Japan.

Krause illustrates for editorial clients including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time and others. He is the recipient of a Gold Award from the Society of Illustrators and was featured in Communication Arts magazine.

His work is on page 52.

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THE BUZZ

OUR READERS RESPOND

In the JULY/AUG UST special issue, “The Fight to Save Democracy,” New York Times bestselling author and Deseret Magazine writer-at-large Michael J. Mooney wrote about how a changing Wyoming and national Republican Party could impact Congresswoman Liz Cheney’s political future (“The Agony of Liz Cheney”). “So what did Cheney do to lose so much political favor in her home state? What did she do to lose so many friends and allies? A hot-mic gaffe? A tabloid scandal?”

Mooney wrote. “No, something much worse. Liz Cheney has made an enemy of Donald Trump.” Many readers accurately predicted Cheney’s fate — losing the Republican primary on August 16 because of her outspoken opposition against election deniers, including Trump. Nils Bergeson remarked, “It may well end her political career, but there are many things more important in this life than another term or two serving in Congress. Integrity matters. Character matters. ... Thank you, congresswoman, for showing us a better example of what could be.” Others were skeptical that Cheney’s loss signals a change within the Republican Party at large. Reader Brett Miller observed, “This isn’t about the future of the Republican Party. This is the future of one Republican politician in Wyoming.”

Deborah Farmer Kris’ exploration into how helping children identify and name their emotions can help them grow into well adjusted adults (“Inside Out”) generated significant social media buzz. Mind Shift, an innovative educational company, shared the article with their 448,000 Twitter followers, along with this confirming advice: “Emotional granularity is the ability to name what we are feeling with a high degree of precision and specificity. Parents need emotional granularity most when it comes to anger: to children and our own.” The article was also internationally acknowledged by Lust For Life, an Irish well-being organization: “There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ emotions, just emotions we all feel at some point.” Susan David, an award-winning Harvard psychologist, commented, “I love @dfkris’s exploration of our kids’ emotions as signal flares” to her 46,5000 Twitter followers.

The choice to marry young has been a particular area of debate among peers and scholars alike. An article by one of those scholars, Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, argues that success and marrying young are not mutually exclusive (“Put A Ring On It”). Jimmy Scroggins, author and pastor, noted on Twitter that the piece had “great data” and the American Enterprise Institute shared the story to its 158,000 Twitter following, commenting, “trends show millennials are waiting longer to tie the knot, but Brad Wilcox makes the case for marrying sooner rather than later.”

Staff writer Lois M. Collins interviewed Tomicah Tillemann, global chief policy officer for Haun Ventures and blockchain advocate, about his views in rebooting the internet from Web2 to Web3 (“The Digital Fix”). The story is recommended reading for Rachael Horwitz, a leading Silicon Valley veteran who worked at Twitter in its startup phase. She urged her 17.7K followers, “Please read this Q&A with my brilliant friend and colleague.” And Dante Disparte, chief strategist and global policy leader for digital payments company Circle, said the interview had “brilliant insights.”

Many praised and took lessons from Matthew S. Holland’s essay on how Christian charity can foster civic virtue and heal the country’s partisan divide (“Our Founding Affection”). Reader Bob Anderson commented, “Great article. Civility begins with me.”

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It will get brighter.

OPTIMISM

COMMENTARY

A GENUINE INDEPENDENCE YOUNG PEOPLE ARE NOT NATURAL REBELS. WE CAN HELP THEM THINK FOR THEMSELVES

BY R O B E RT P. G E O R G E

T

here is a widely believed myth that young people — especially college students — are “natural rebels” and “nonconformists.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

I have taught thousands of young men and women in my 37 years as a professor at Princeton. The vast majority (although there are notable exceptions) are the opposite of free-thinking nonconformists. Young people tend more or less uncritically to subscribe to the dominant beliefs on their campuses and among their peers. They avoid being out of step. They believe what they think they are supposed to believe, what people who are regarded in their communities as “smart” and “sophisticated” believe. After all, they themselves want to be — and to be regarded as being — smart and sophisticated.

The desire among young people for acceptance, which, truth be told, is obvious, manifests itself on multiple levels. Pause for a second to consider the sense of embarrassment and even dread a typical teenager feels when he realizes that the sneakers he’s wearing are not the ones all his friends are wearing. Horrors!

Such fear of being out of step is dramatically amplified on college campuses, where what has 14

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come to be known as “woke” ideology is dominant and seems every day to become more extreme. Woke ideologues and activists are aware of young people’s deep desire not to be outliers and they do not hesitate to take full advantage of it. Of course, they don’t acknowledge that they are doing anything like that, for the simple reason that they massively benefit from the pre-

GENUINE INDEPENDENCE OF MIND IS NOT UNHEARD OF AMONG THE YOUNG, BUT IT IS THE EXCEPTION RATHER THAN THE RULE.

tense that conformity to ideological fashion has nothing to do with their success.

Ideologues and activists have developed clever techniques for spreading their ideas and pressuring students to conform to them — or at least

to speak and act as if they are fully on board with them. For example, woke activists in leadership positions in clubs and organizations, from the ballet club to the volleyball team, post negative messages about dissenters (e.g. people who decline to “state their pronouns” or wear rainbow insignia on their costumes or uniforms) on social media sites, and even threaten to harm them when they apply to graduate programs in their academic fields or for jobs.

Ultimately, the intimidation tactics create a miserable environment for any student who refuses to toe the line by publicly offering some sort of affirmation of the ideological dogma du jour. This culture of fear prompts students to self-censor both in and outside of the classroom — something toxic to the educational enterprise.

And it’s not just fellow students who collaborate in creating a climate of fear for the sake of pressuring potential dissenters into conformity. Many universities themselves advance woke ideology through institutional mechanisms of various sorts. For example, the college experience begins at many institutions with indoctrination sessions disguised as “freshman orientation” programs, during which new students are bombarded with presentations designed to make clear to them what the party

line is on questions of race, class and, especially, sexuality.

Almost never do these programs so much as acknowledge the existence of competing ideas — traditional or conservative views about sexuality and sexual morality, for example — and if such ideas are mentioned, then they are represented in a disparaging way or intentionally mischaracterized. Students are left in no doubt about what they must believe — or at least pretend to believe — if they are to “fit in.” There are certain beliefs they are taught they must accept if they themselves wish to be accepted.

Even worse: Many universities lack meaningful formal commitments to free speech, viewpoint diversity and academic freedom that would provide students with mechanisms for legal recourse when they are discriminated against for their dissent or sanctioned or deprived of opportunities for expressing dissenting ideas.

ILLU STR ATION BY JA M E S ST E I N BE R G

Indeed, at some universities efforts are made to discredit freedom of thought, inquiry and expression as “right-wing tropes.”

You read that last sentence correctly: The basic freedom to think for oneself and speak one’s mind — a freedom that not long ago people on the liberal side of the political divide prided themselves on holding as sacrosanct — is now derided as “right wing.”

Don’t get me wrong: Genuine independence of mind is not unheard of among the young, but it is the exception rather than the rule. Standing up to the ideologues and the various university bureaucracies and bureaucrats whose job it is to promote woke orthodoxy on campus takes courage. It requires a willingness to endure the opprobrium that comes with being known as a campus dissenter. And when in human history have courage and the willingness to endure opprobrium been in ample supply?

Nor are these virtues much in evidence among the adults — especially faculty members — who should be modeling them for students.

There is one thing all professors can and should do — though even this takes a bit of courage these days — that is, make clear in writing (on the course syllabus, for example) that students in their classes are permitted and, indeed, encouraged to think for themselves and speak their minds, even when their views dramatically contradict campus orthodoxies. Let students know that free-thinking and nonconformity are welcome in your classes and will certainly not be punished.

Professors rightly insist on civility in class discussions. Students shouldn’t be allowed to hurl epithets at each other or call each other names.

They should be told that they are to do business in the proper currency of intellectual discourse — a currency consisting of reasons, evidence and arguments. But they should also be assured that there will be no ideological litmus tests and no policing of language of the sort that forces students to accept the terms of discussion (such as “birthing people” rather than “pregnant women”) that function as tools of ideologies they do not accept.

Young people are not natural rebels or nonconformists. Quite the reverse. But professors (and parents and other supporters) can help them become truly independent thinkers — people who are not at the mercy of intellectual fads and fashions, genuine truth-seekers and truth-speakers — by modeling and encouraging our young men and women to think deeply, think critically (including self-critically) and think for themselves.

R O B E RT P. G E O R G E I S T H E M C C O R M I C K P R O F E S S O R O F J U R I S P RU D E N C E A N D D I R E C T O R O F T H E JA M E S M A D I S O N P R O G RA M I N A M E R I C A N I D E A LS A N D I NS T I T U T I O N S AT P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y.

OCTOBER 2022

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MODERN FAMILY

THE UNCHARTED WATERS OF MORAL INJURY TURNS OUT, THE INTERNAL STORM WE’RE WEATHERING HAS A NAME

BY L AU R E N STE E L E

I

stopped leaving my phone in the bedroom at night a few months ago. After reading time and time again that rolling over and beginning a new day with a runaway scroll through messages, notifications and news is a bad idea, I put a charger in the kitchen and resolved to have more than a few mere inches between my unconscious brain and everything I can’t control during my resting hours.

But I still wake up some days, listlessly examine the walls of the room, and feel ambiguously doomed.

There’s the war. There’s the financial strife. There’s the disease. There’s the politics.

There’s the drought and wildfires. There are the everyday heartaches of life that march on regardless of social, political, natural or economic stability. And, of course, there’s a bottomless chasm of information about it all just a few clicks away. The reasons why so many people are collectively feeling levels of grief in their day-to-day lives are apparent. But what we call this feeling isn’t as clear.

Generally speaking on a practical level, I have no reason to feel threatened by a sludgy cloud of hovering melancholy. I have a home that I feel secure in. More than enough food to eat. Good health. Two very cute dogs. Family and friends who are supportive (and still on this earth). An exercise routine. A career.

Outdoor spaces that are welcoming and safe.

Access to information and opportunity. I am very privileged. But a few times over the past couple of years, it — whatever “it” is — has floated in and loomed around.

I know I’m not the only one. Recently, 16

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a poem by Mari Andrew was widely shared online. As I saw it make the rounds on social media and in podcasts, a few lines struck me as very relatable — a way to say that this low-level grief and anxiety was far-reaching. “I am washing my face before bed while a country is on fire,” the poem opens. “It feels dumb to wash my face, and dumb not to. It has never been this way, and it has always been this way.”

It gave words to something I was feeling, others are feeling, and maybe you’re feeling.

In the Harvard Business Review, David Kessler, co-author of “On Grief and Grieving”

WE’RE SCARED OF OUR OWN HEAVY FEELINGS ASSOCIATED WITH GRIEF SO WE OFTEN PUSH AWAY FROM THEM.

with Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, described collective grief as one phenomenon we’ve been experiencing. For more than two years, there has been a widespread loss of safety, normalcy, financial security, relationships, imagined futures and loved ones. And what connects each loss is a fear of whether all will one day be OK. On top of that, we’re exposed to tangible evidence of the losses of millions of other people, global conflict and crises every day.

That’s a heavy weight to carry as we still

attempt to get up, get out, log on and carry out daily responsibilities. It’s not rocket science that all of this together leads to something that is more than just stress or grief.

“On top of the grief and the fear is a sense of trauma,” says Anna Darbonne, a licensed clinical psychologist who specializes in grief and bereavement in Las Vegas, Nevada. “We’ve been exposed to frequent and persistent distressing images and stories both directly and indirectly. ... For some, that results in sadness and discomfort; for others, it can cause vicarious trauma.”

The outcome? Many of us feel helpless and, to some degree, hopeless. And that malaise, Darbonne says, is borne from a specific type of trauma that has a name: moral injury.

The term refers to the emotional, psychological, behavioral and even spiritual aftermath that can happen after a violation of our ethics code and moral beliefs, Darbonne explains. Moral injuries occur when an experience dispels what we believe about the world, people and life.

“The pandemic and its waves of variants, divided and contentious socio-political situations, and global conflicts all occurring simultaneously shattered most people’s perceptions of safety, community, and peace. We don’t know who to trust, how to make it better and how best to protect ourselves and others.”

And although you can find nearly anything you want (and everything you don’t) on the internet, it can’t give us these answers. Google “how best to protect ourselves and others,” and you’ll end up with a lot of advice about

ILLU STR ATION BY G I U LI A N E R I

OCTOBER 2022

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MODERN FAMILY

washing your hands. Andrew was right when she said that thing about how it has always — and never — been this way.

Civilization has been exposed to calamity and devastation through the ages, whether via narrow or wide lenses, past or present tenses. Plague struck Athens in 430 B.C. amid the (equally horrific) Peloponnesian War and killed between 25-30 percent of Athenians. The epidemic was documented by ancient Greek historian Thucydides while he witnessed the crumbling of his community and suffered the disease himself. In A.D. 79, the eruption of Vesuvius was reported by Roman author Pliny the Younger, who watched the certainly terror-inducing detonation of a mountain ablaze and fled from fire, ash and horror that enveloped his city and killed his uncle.

After studying the documentation of these two archaic gents, researchers found conclusions that eerily parallel how we’re dealing with catastrophes today. “The victims of these disasters were plunged into confusion and uncertainty about what to do to survive,” the study, published in the book “Forces of Nature and Cultural Responses,” reads. “In many cases, social cohesion dissolved, and individuals broke norms and traditions. Some sought help from the gods, and others felt there were no gods.”

Both empires eventually dusted off and moved on, led by what study author and former professor of history J. Donald Hughes surmises as leaders, “responding with measures intended to help people, restore the body politic, and rebuild.” And although “frustrated by physical and social barriers, they achieved a degree of success.”

As we can see in the stories, records, and Greek and Roman myths that followed, a collective memory was passed down to mourn, make sense of disasters and remember the mistakes made — together — to reduce moral injury.

Learning from the past and encouraging communal grieving are things other societies seem to have on American culture. “As Western societies, particularly the United States, move away from the direct experience of a mourner, the rites and customs of other cultures offer valuable lessons,” Daniel Wojcik and Robert Dobler, both professors of folklore, co-wrote in “The Conversation.”

But those valuable lessons are yet to be embraced. We are a moral injury-averse society, says Darbonne. “We’re scared of our own heavy feelings associated with grief — like longing, despair, helplessness, being out of 18

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control — so we often push away from our feelings. In that vein, we don’t want to hear about anyone else’s grief, fear and trauma because we don’t know how to respond to them — like what to say or do.”

It doesn’t help that the term “moral injury” isn’t really used in the everyday American lexicon. Other cultures have had words to describe what these morose-y, malaise-y, I’mnot-OK feelings are.

Once while staying in a ridiculous mansion in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, under circumstances in which I was the guest of friends of friends and felt a little out of place, I thumbed through the pages of a book titled “Lost in Translation.” The too-long subtitle said something about words from around the world that are untranslatable, but according to the pages, they were illustratable.

WHEN A CULTURE DOESN’T HAVE THE RIGHT WORDS TO EXPRESS WHAT PEOPLE ARE FEELING, IT KEEPS A DISTANCE BETWEEN EXPERIENCING THOSE FEELINGS AND UNDERSTANDING THEM.

There was saudade, a Portuguese word describing “a vague, constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, a nostalgic longing for someone or something loved and then lost.” Maybe right now there is a little collective longing for the rose-colored “good old days.”

Then I found Hi Fun Kou Gai (ひふんこうが い), a Japanese description for a specific righteous anger over a situation that is terrible but cannot be changed. Yup, that checks out, too.

There’s​​ghoseh ( ‫)هصغ‬, a Farsi word that, by some English-speaking translator’s definition, describes having sadness, but in an embodied sense. One Farsi speaker defined it as having emptiness, or “to practice holding sadness.”

When a culture doesn’t have the right words to express what people are feeling, it keeps a distance between experiencing those feelings and understanding them. That’s a problem in our psychological culture, Darbonne says, and can lead to normal human reactions being maligned as medical conditions. “The DSM-5 (the diagnostic manual for

mental health providers) just pathologized grief that lasts longer than a year,” she explains.

“The inclusion of the diagnosis turned a very normal and necessary reaction into one that can now be medicated and medicalized.”

So what to do with our moral injuries, big and small?

We have the history to learn from, even though we’ve heard ad nauseam that these times are indeed unprecedented. World Wars I and II provided amplified exposure to suffering and sad news, which may have felt similarly overwhelming to our current stream of incoming global information. And — thanks to science — we now know that the more we expose ourselves to news, the higher our anxiety becomes and the more likely we are to catastrophize the future.

Besides ending the daily doomscroll, Darbonne gently reminds us that acknowledging our negative feelings about what we can’t control is critical in being able to find joy in what we can control. How we deal with it is personal, but acknowledging it should be more common.

“In some ways, it creates greater openness for folks to say that they’re struggling — which is beautiful and exactly what our society needs,” Darbonne says. “There is still a lot of work to be done to acknowledge that ... we all respond to those feelings differently, that those feelings impact how we view and interact with the world, and that we need each other to heal individually and collectively.

“Folks have such different reactions,” she adds. “Some feel solace knowing that others feel the same as them or struggle in similar ways to them. Others feel deep despair when they realize that so many other people are suffering. A lot of people feel scared to burden others with their grief. ... There are also pragmatic grievers who feel their grief and then move forward without a hiccup. It’s important that we make space for everyone to grieve the way that they need to without comparing.”

So whether the term “moral injury” ever catches on or not, calling our feelings as we see them (or feel them, rather) is one step toward lifting the shroud of uncertainty that surrounds the moments or days that feel tough. And while saudade is a much more elegant way of describing a certain sadness that’s tough to put a finger on, the next time my partner asks me how I’m doing on a day that I’m not doing so great, I’m probably going to respond with the (less-dignified) untranslatable word that continues to make the most sense for me: blah.

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CHURCH AND STATE IS THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION IN AMERICA PRIVATE?

BY M YA JA R A DAT

W

hen Amy Carson and her husband, David, decided to sue their state, they didn’t set out to be part of a landmark Supreme Court ruling. It was much simpler than that. “Our town has an elementary and middle school, just no high school,” Carson says of where the family lives in Maine.

And the private school the Carsons wanted to send their daughter to in the neighboring city of Bangor just so happenwed to be Christian.

The Carsons’ hometown of Glenburn, a town of 4,500 situated on the emerald shore of a warm-water lake in rural Maine, is so tiny it doesn’t have its own ZIP code. There are 143 districts like theirs in Maine: rural areas that lack public high schools, a deficit the state makes up for by paying to send children to local private schools instead — but only if they’re “nonsectarian,” that is, nonreligious.

While the Carsons wanted to send their daughter to Bangor Christian, religion wasn’t the appeal. Carson told me that the family doesn’t go to church “as much as we should,” explaining that she doesn’t go at all and that her husband goes only a few times a year. “We really do work seven days a week,” she says. Her husband is a general contractor and she keeps the books for the business.

The draw of Bangor Christian was that it’s a great school. “You’re talking small 20

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class sizes and things like that, and it really helped her,” says Carson.

There was also an emotional appeal: It happened to be the school both Amy and David Carson attended. All of David’s siblings went there, too, and his mom had been a teacher there.

Tuition was expensive — $5,950 annually — and they’d been girding themselves for the financial sacrifice for years, but Carson says

THE RULING HAS HUGE IMPLICATIONS FOR BOTH AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND THE SEPARATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE.

they were happy to pour their resources into their daughter. There’d been another child before her, Carson says, but that one had died young. So their girl was all they had and they were going to give her the best that they could.

Besides, parents in their district had eight other private schools to choose from, Amy says. Why shouldn’t Bangor Christian be among the choices? It seemed like the state

was discriminating against religious schools; that nonsectarian clause was a hit on families’ First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. And that’s what their lawsuit took aim at.

The Carsons didn’t even bother asking Maine to pay their daughter’s tuition at Bangor Christian because they knew the state wouldn’t fund education at a nonsectarian school, Carson says. Instead, they joined a lawsuit against the state’s commissioner of education, Pender Makin — a case that was decided by the Supreme Court this summer.

C ARS ON V. MAK IN has been called “the sleeper case.” Flying under the radar, it barely made the headlines as justices issued landmark decisions on abortion and prayer in schools. But stakeholders on all sides argue that the ramifications of the Carson decision will prove just as important. The ruling has huge implications for America’s public schools as well as the separation between church and state.

After lower courts ruled against the families, the case made its way to the Supreme Court, where, in a 6-3 ruling, justices sided with the three families, declaring that the state of Maine’s “nonsectarian” stipulation does indeed discriminate against religion. While advocates of religious liberty considered the decision a victory, in the dissenting opinion,

ILLU STR ATION BY H A N N A H D E C KE R

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Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “This Court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers fought to build.”

While that’s up for debate, the case may have broader implications for K-12 education. The decision expands on two previous Supreme Court rulings that support the privatization of education and the use of public funds for religious schooling: the 2020 decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, which says that tax-funded scholarships could be used at private, religious institutions, and the 2002 landmark ruling in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which allowed Ohioans to use publicly funded vouchers to send their children to religious schools in certain circumstances.

Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center and a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder School of Education, says this trend toward privatization represents a hollowing out of the country’s public schools — slowly transforming a system that was designed to be a great equalizer into one that Welner likened to a developing country.

But advocates of educational freedom — a catchall for a variety of different programs, including school choice, vouchers and public funding of private, religious schools — say that providing parents with a wider range of choices benefits children and will energize the educational system. “I would think that (competition) would encourage schools — public schools and other schools — to become better,” says Carson. Educational freedom also allows parents to send their children to schools that will reinforce the values they’re teaching at home, Carson adds. freedom say that the justices’ decision doesn’t explicitly support religious schools. “The Carson … ruling didn’t say that states have to fund religious schools,” says Andrew Handel, director of the Education and Workforce Task Force of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative nonprofit that drafts model legislation to share with state legislatures across the country.

Asked if, in the wake of Carson, there might be a flurry of state legislation that would secure states’ rights to channel public funds toward private, religious schools, Handel says

P R O P O N E N TS O F E DUCATI ONAL

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that such legislation isn’t necessary. “That being said, I think that the case makes it easier for state legislatures to pass expansive programs in educational freedom.”

Further, proponents of educational freedom argue that the so-called “wall of separation between church and state” came from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote and doesn’t actually appear in the Constitution.

The public school system was also never meant to be completely secular, says Rick Hess, the American Enterprise Institute’s director of education policy studies. “The public school system as we know it was created in the 1830s and 1840s (as) the common school” in part because “Horace Mann and his buddies wanted to stop Catholic kids from being Catholic and make them read the Protestant Bible in school,” Hess says, referring to Mann, who is widely known as the father of American education.

As for the argument that school choice will hollow out public education, proponents of educational freedom point out that even without formal school choice, the free market creates options for families with means: Those with the money to do so choose to move into certain neighborhoods that are home to certain schools, public or otherwise. “The question is who is going to have school choice,” says Michael McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, a nonprofit that aims to advance educational freedom and choice. “It’s not whether or not there’s going to be school choice or whether or not it exists. It’s ‘Who is going to have it right now?’”

On top of that, public schools are already segregated and suffer from the problems that come with concentrated poverty, McShane acknowledges. And there’s no silver bullet.

So rather than trapping students in public schools, why not offer parents the option of sending their children elsewhere, including private, religious schools?

Educational freedom initiatives “can’t solve poverty. They can’t cure racism, so all of those things are still going to impact kids and the options that they have,” McShane says. “The idea, though, is to try and give as many kids as possible more choices.”

BUT, F OR S OME Americans, school choice doesn’t mean more options. It means fewer, says Alison Gill, vice president for legal and policy matters at American Atheists, because

it opens the door to public funding for institutions that discriminate on the basis of religion and students and families from LGBTQ backgrounds.

“We’re moving away from public school systems designed to serve the entire community and we’re moving toward publicly funded schools operated by churches … and other providers outside of community control,” Welner says.

In the long run, those who are advocating now for increased public funding for private schools will probably want to decrease those subsidies, Welner says, explaining, “The goal of privatization … is also to reduce tax burden.”

This means that we’ll eventually move away not only from public funded education but a system “where families will be bearing the cost of the burden,” says Welner, leading to even more stratification and discrimination than already exists in the country. Like India and other developing countries, some American families “will be able to afford quality education for children but some will not,” Welner says.

“Education provides a private benefit and a public benefit. When my daughter goes to school, the schools are providing her and my family with private benefits by helping her to succeed in life. But our schools also serve a public benefit; they serve our economy, they serve our democracy,” Welner says. “Education in the U.S. is being transformed — and the transformation is one that puts a lot of benefits at risk.”

Amy Carson disagrees.

She pointed out that, prior to 1981, Maine did offer parents the option of sending their children to private religious schools if there was no public school in the area. That “nonsectarian” clause was imposed in 1981, so, as she sees it, the recent ruling restores the previous system. “These types of programs have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years and we (the country) managed just fine,” she says.

If the Supreme Court ruling is read narrowly, she adds, it will only apply to 2 percent of the state’s population.

With their daughter already in university, the ruling won’t apply to the Carsons. But their individual situation was never really the point — joining the lawsuit was always less about them and more about the good of the community, Carson says, “Any time you can help families out, it’s a win.”

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LEADERSHIP

CRASHING THE BOARDS LESSONS ON RISK AND SECOND ACTS FROM A PIONEER IN WOMEN’S SPORTS

BY E TH A N B AU E R

T

he way natalie williams tells it, the idea came from Holly Rowe. The former BYU student and University of Utah alum had already been working with the Utah Jazz as a broadcast analyst — in addition to her sideline reporter duties for ESPN’s marquee college football crew — when she reached out to Williams with an opportunity. She was recruiting a team of women to become the first all-female broadcast unit in Jazz history.

She’d also reached out to Krista Blunk, a Pac12 Network and ESPN sports analyst who, like Rowe and Williams, is from Utah. But Williams differed from both Rowe and Blunk in a very important way: She’d never done any broadcast work before.

That made little difference to Rowe, who figured Williams’ basketball bona fides made her a no-brainer regardless. She was, after all, a four-time WNBA All-Star and three-time all-WNBA first-team selection; an Olympic gold medalist and a Hall of Famer. Not to mention her deep Utah roots. She grew up in Taylorsville and graduated from Taylorsville High School, and she played for the WNBA franchise formerly known as the Utah Starzz.

She lived in Utah until earlier this year, managing a program called the Natalie Williams Basketball Academy that, by Williams’ estimates, has helped nudge about 65 young women into college basketball. She once owned a sports bar in town, too, and was one of the torchbearers ahead of the 2002 Salt Lake Olympic Games. Still, broadcasting?

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Williams knew plenty about basketball and about Utah, but she didn’t know a thing about television production.

Nevertheless, she said yes. She always says yes. She’s learned to say yes and embrace the unfamiliar time and time again during her long and varied career in the orbit of basketball. For this particular opportunity, that meant studying players from the Jazz and the visiting Los Angeles Clippers, learning fun facts or special skills that might provide viewers with unknown insights. It meant studying when she, as

SHE’S LEARNED TO SAY YES AND EMBRACE THE UNKNOWN TIME AND TIME AGAIN DURING HER LONG AND VARIED CAREER.

a color commentator, was supposed to talk vs. the play-by-play person. She credits Rowe and the rest of the team for helping bring her up to speed, but don’t you dare suggest she was nervous. Natalie Williams doesn’t get nervous.

She’s learned to channel nervousness into preparation, and preparation into the hope and belief that whatever new opportunity she takes on will work out. “Luckily, I handle challenges well,” she explains. “I kind of like the excitement of being under pressure.”

On March 18, that attitude served her well during the all-women Jazz broadcast. But as the new NBA season gets underway on October 19, Williams doesn’t — for the moment, at least — have plans to reprise that role. Her focus is needed elsewhere, with the chance to take on another new, far more complex opportunity. to seizing opportunity is perhaps best understood through the lens of failure. To be clear, Williams hasn’t failed much; even back in her college days, she was a standout two-sport athlete at UCLA — the first woman to ever earn All-America honors in both basketball and volleyball in the same season. She led the Bruins to NCAA volleyball titles in 1990 and 1991, and she was recognized as the best collegiate volleyball player in the country. Which is why after graduating from UCLA in 1994, she set a goal of making the 1996 Olympic women’s volleyball team.

She trained for years, enduring morning practices at San Diego’s Balboa Park until the games were just three months away. That’s when she got a call telling her that coach Terry Liskevych wanted to speak with her before practice. She walked into his office around 7 a.m., knowing that the news likely wasn’t good.

“Unfortunately,” he told her, “we’re going to be cutting you.” Even now, Williams calls that moment “heartbreaking.” Rather than look for a new opportunity, though, she dove into one that was old and new at once: basketball. That same year, she made the Team USA roster for WIL L IAMS ’ DE DIC AT ION

PHOTOGR AP H Y BY DAV I D JAY BE C K E R

OCTOBER 2022

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the Taiwan-hosted Jones Cup, which put her on the Olympic radar once more. That wasn’t in the front of her mind at the time, but after she led Team USA in rebounds and ranked fourth in scoring, the dream of an Olympic berth started to take shape once more. “I might have a shot at this,” she told herself.

Over the next few years, she embraced an outlook of positivity — especially in regard to getting along with her teammates. “When you travel with the team, and you’re going all over the world, there’s always crazy things that happen where things don’t always go your way,” she says. “And to always be the person that makes the best of situations, that’s what I’ve always learned. … Try to think of a solution instead of adding to a conflict. There’s no

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use in complaining about something that’s out of your control. Just make the best of it, and figure out a way to make things better.” That particular lesson is one she’s tried to impart to her four children, and one that served her well when she eventually did make Team USA and headed to Sydney, Australia, for the 2000 Olympics. With 7.6 points and 5.9 rebounds per game, Williams ranked fourth and third on the team, respectively, while coming off the bench for a squad that included other established greats like Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes.

Unfortunately, Williams’ WNBA career was relatively short given her late start. The pounding from playing two sports for a large portion of her life caught up with her. “My body let me know,” she explains of deciding to retire

from the WNBA after the 2005 season. She needed ice baths after every game, after every practice. Once she realized that — and decided she wanted to be able to walk when she reached her 50s — she stepped away and thus encountered the most challenging question of her professional life: What’s next?

“When you leave an organization like the WNBA and USA Basketball, and you’re no longer around amazing peers and people,” she says, “and you just don’t know what you’re going to do in life next as a profession — I mean, I think that’s the biggest and most challenging thing.” It’s a reality for almost all athletes, but it’s especially acute for veterans of the WNBA; unlike former NFL or NBA players, there are no pensions and relatively few retirement

benefits. Williams chose to try coaching other young women, which she did for over a decade, culminating in the Society of Health and Physical Educators naming her its 2020 recipient of the Guiding Woman in Sports Award.

A year later, in the summer of 2021, she headed to Las Vegas, where the Aces planned to honor the franchise’s alumni (the Las Vegas Aces franchise used to be the San Antonio Stars, which used to be the Starzz, which is why Williams was included despite never having played for the Aces). “At that time,” she admits, “I didn’t realize that I was in an interview process.” rather than Rowe, the impetus was Nikki Fargas. The former head coach of Louisiana State’s women’s basketball program had recently been hired by Aces owner Mark Davis as team president. She happened to start a conversation during the alumni celebration with Williams, who happened to mention how she hoped to get back into the WNBA some day. Their chat ended there, and over the next few months, Fargas managed to make a big splash with her new team: She lured Becky Hammon, a former WNBA All-Star who in 2014 became the first woman to take on a fulltime assistant coach position in the NBA, away from Gregg Popovich and the San Antonio Spurs, naming her head coach of the Aces in December. She wasn’t done.

Around the same time Williams was preparing to make her broadcasting debut, she got a call from Fargas. “We would love to ask,” Williams remembers Fargas telling her, “if you would be interested in being our general manager.” Williams couldn’t believe her luck. She’d been hoping for a change — “You know when you have that feeling in life where you feel like you’re ready for something new?” she explains — but this one wouldn’t come easily. Taking on the role of general manager — which in this particular case encompasses running the day-to-day operations of the team, from coordinating media appearances to negotiating contracts to resolving coaching needs and player disputes — would mean once again embracing something completely new; Williams had never worked in a front office before. It would also mean moving her immediate family from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas, while leaving much of her extended family behind. “It was just overwhelming for me at first,” she admits.

She took a weekend to think about the offer, then called Fargas back on Monday with her decision. On April 8, the Aces announced her as their new GM. When we spoke in late THI S T IME ,

A F TE R A N O UTSTA N DI NG F O UR -YE A R CO L LE GE C AR E E R AT UC LA , N ATA LIE W IL LIA M S S P E N T A DE C A D E P L AY IN G P R O F E SSIONAL B ASK E TB A L L. SHE WAS A F O UR -TIME WN B A A L L- STA R A N D MA DE THE A L L-W N B A F IR ST TEAM T HR E E TIME S. SHE HAD N E VE R WO R K E D IN A F R O N T O F F IC E B E F ORE J OIN IN G THE LAS V EGAS AC E S E A R L IER T HIS YE A R .

July, she’d been on the job for just over three months and had just recently started to feel comfortable. At first, it was an “information overload,” she says. But the more she’s listened to and observed Fargas and others, the more she’s caught on, and the more confident she’s grown. She knows she’ll still have plenty to learn about the offseason, but for now, she’s

“I’M JUST TRYING TO KEEP AN EYE ON EVERYONE AND MAKE SURE THEY FEEL SUPPORTED.”

feeling optimistic. The Aces finished the 2022 regular season tied with the defending champion Chicago Sky for the best record in the WNBA, and advanced to the WNBA Finals in September. Williams has re-signed standout guards Chelsea Gray and Kelsey Plum. And, as with every other new challenge, she’s trying to stay positive and pass that attitude on.

“I try to see how people are feeling, see how they’re doing,” she says. “You never know the struggles and the battles that everybody goes through every day. So I’m just trying to keep an eye on everyone and make sure they feel supported and always know that I’m there for them if they need me.”

Back when she was trying to make Team USA, Williams focused more than anything on becoming an elite rebounder. “That’s kind of my claim to fame,” she says with a tinge of pride, all these years later. “People would say Natalie Williams was an amazing rebounder — probably one of the best ever in the history of women’s basketball.” She knew that’s how she could most add value to her team, so she cultivated that skill. Worked on it daily.

Nowadays, that lesson still serves her well, but rebounding has been replaced with networking. With her players. With her coaches. With others in the industry. That person-first attitude, she believes, is how she got this job. “So many opportunities in life come from who you know,” she explains. “And just making sure that you are treating people the right way and are a great person.”

She tries to keep that relentless attitude in mind as a general manager — as well as in embracing whatever opportunities could come her way next.

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AN OPEN LETTER WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE POSTAL SERVICE FAILS RURAL AMERICA?

BY B E N O Î T MO R E N N E

S

tate route 361 draws a winding, 62mile line through the barren, buff landscape of central Nevada, unfurling across the empty rangeland of Mineral, Nye and Churchill counties. Just when you think it couldn’t get more desolate, Gabbs appears at the base of the Paradise Range, the unforgiving Nevada sun rumbling off its metal roofs.

The town of Gabbs was founded by a private magnesium mining company in 1941.

During its heyday in the 1970s, there were more than 1,500 residents. Today, it has a population of only 75. There was once a grocery store. A hair salon. A laundromat. But that’s all gone now. Houses in various states of disrepair host a mostly elderly population. Whatever public venues remain open rely mostly on volunteers’ goodwill: the community library, the school, the senior center.

But drive down Brucite Street — past the decrepit St. Michael’s Catholic Church, and past a grassy lot filled with rusty cars. There, on the corner of Brucite and 4th Street, is a sign of life: a post office. It’s one of the only businesses in town, alongside R&D’s Bar and Grill, where mine employees clad in safety vests mingle with residents.

Gabbs’ current state — as well as its boomand-bust history — is that of many mining towns in the West. But it’s not the businesses that have gone out that have folks talking. It’s the post office.

In early 2022, the Nevada-Sierra postal district, which includes Gabbs’ residents and 28

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about three million others, saw mail deliveries take an average of 3.52 days, a 33.5 percent increase from the same period two years ago, according to data collected by Steve Hutkins, a prominent U.S. Postal Service expert and the editor of Save the Post Office, a blog that tracks the agency’s performance.

Over this same period, urban centers like Salt Lake City, Portland, Seattle and Sacramento saw mail delays increase around 30 percent on average. “The whole country is suffering as a result of bad service,” says Paul

WHEN SOME WAYS OF LIFE DISAPPEAR, A COMMUNITY ADAPTS. BUT THERE’S NO SUBSTITUTE FOR THE POST OFFICE WHEN IT FAILS RURAL AMERICANS.

Steidler, a fellow at the Lexington Institute, a center-right think tank based in Virginia.

But the impact of late mail is felt even more acutely in rural areas like Gabbs, which host a higher proportion of low-income and senior residents. These populations are less likely to have internet access and more likely to rely on the mail to pay bills, receive medical prescriptions and correspond with the government.

The woes of the Postal Service led Congress to pass the Postal Service Reform Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden in April. But will it be enough to propel the agency into the 21st century and help regain the trust of rural American towns?

In Gabbs, residents aren’t holding their breath — or onto much hope — that it will.

T H E RE ’S NO ONE RE AS O N why the USPS has fallen so far behind. Instead, it’s a tangled root ball of issues that got us here.

The USPS is self-funded by the sale of the USPS’ products, services and postage — zero tax dollars go to its cause. In 2006, the USPS was in a healthy financial situation. So healthy, in fact, that Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act — mandating that the agency set aside a portion of revenue specifically for future retiree health benefits for current employees. “This advance funding requirement places a burden of about $6.6 billion on the Postal Service that would not exist if they followed a pay-as-you-go approach,” James O’Rourke, a teaching professor of management at the University of Notre Dame, told the Poynter Institute in 2020.

“This burden has quite nearly bankrupted the USPS over a 15-year period.”

Soon after the bill passed, the USPS’ package-delivery component started facing rising competition from privately owned shipping companies, which started lobbying to eliminate the USPS and nab its market share.

LLOYD GERULF, A SENI OR RE S IDE NT OF GAB B S , NE VADA, RE L IE S ON T H E LOC AL P OST OF F IC E FOR MEDI CATI ONS. THEY HAV E N’T ALWAYS ARRIV E D ON T IME — OR AT AL L , F OR T H AT MAT T E R.

PHOTOGR AP H Y BY WE STO N CO LTO N

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Separately, the rise of the internet caught the Postal Service’s mail delivery flat-footed. People began sending fewer letters and packages, and when packages were shipped, the majority were no longer going through the USPS. Unlike Amazon — which has fully automated inventory tracking that allows the company to know the dimensions and weight of whatever you buy the moment you click a button and pack delivery trucks as efficiently as possible — the USPS has continued to depend on postal workers to work face to face with customers bringing in, well, whatever they bring in to ship that day.

Amid the competition and modernization of correspondence, the USPS continued to operate on the same lean revenue model propped up on the sale of stamps and first-class mail, limiting its ability to make the investments needed to create new infrastructure, products, fleet management and generally modernize its operations to compete in the new market. So, mail continues to move at the same rate, or slower than, it has in the past.

Altogether, it has created a system that seems clunky to customers, an agency that relies on highly specific points of sale with lowering demand and a human workforce that has 30

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to compete with Amazon technology.

From 2005 to 2021, the total annual volume of mail handled by employees dropped by 82.8 billion pieces. A corresponding decline in revenue decimated its bottom line. In 2005, the USPS achieved a net income of $1.4 billion; in 2010, it reported a net loss of $8.5 billion. To survive, the USPS would have to become “smaller, leaner and more competitive,” then-Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said in 2011. That year, the agency announced out of a total of about 35,600 post offices, it had targeted 3,652 for closure.

Gabbs’ was on the list, along with 13 others in Nevada — most in rural areas. Dozens of residents gathered on the K-12 school’s gym bleachers, taking turns to denounce the closure project. “It will kill the town,” Hazel Dummar, a longtime resident, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Eventually, the USPS walked back its plan and instead moved to cut hours at 13,000 rural mail facilities.

The agency hobbled through the 2010s, with the percentage of one-day, two-day and three- to five-day first-class mail delivered on time improving before leveling off and declining between 2011 through 2014, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

TOP : P RE MIE R MAGNE S IA MINE , T H E B U S INE SS RE S P ONS IB L E F OR GAB B S ’ F OU NDING. B OT TOM: E V E N WIT H NE W STANDARDS , T H E U S P S H AS FAIL E D TO ME E T ITS ON-T IME DE L IV E RY GOAL ONC E S INC E L AST OC TOB E R.

Between 2014 and 2019, first-class mail in the three- to five-day category was delivered on time at a rate of 82 percent, largely missing the USPS’ self-determined target of 95.25 percent, according to the Postal Regulatory Commission, which oversees the agency.

Today, mail services are slowly improving, but they aren’t better than they have been in the past. Last year, the agency announced it was pushing deliveries back by up to two days for first-class mail traveling more than 1,908 miles. The change is part of a 10-year plan by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy that calls for additional cutbacks he says will put the agency back in the green. Rather than study why standards have suffered in recent years, and what can be done to improve them, the USPS is saying, “If you just give us more time to deliver stuff, we’ll deliver stuff on time.”

In the third quarter of 2022 — which ended June 30 — the agency reported an average delivery time for mail across the network as 2.4 days, with 93.5 percent of first-class mail delivered on time.

Even with these new standards, the agency has failed to meet its 95 percent on-time delivery goal once since last October, which is when these new standards kicked in. The West is the region that’s going to be the most affected by these changes, according to a Washington Post analysis. This is in part because the USPS is shifting from using planes for shipping long-distance mail to trucks, which increases the delivery time, says Hutkins. “If you live in a place where the distances are greater from the rest of the country, then more of your mail is going to take four or five days because of the longer time it takes to move the mail around on trucks.”

The Postal Service Reform Act could give the agency a breather, says Christopher Shaw, the author of “First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat.” The bill releases the USPS from financial obligations to pre-fund retiree health care for its employees — which could save the agency nearly $50 billion over the next 10 years — and provides new avenues to generate revenue through entering agreements with other government agencies (like the Department of Motor Vehicles or tribal governments) to provide nonpostal products and services at post offices — possibly fishing licenses, driver’s license renewals or hunting permits.

But there’s a gaping hole in the bill: mail delivery standards.

is parked in front of the post office in Gabbs, the odds are April Stewart is standing behind the counter inside.

She’s held a job as one of Gabbs’ two part-time postmasters since last year. Blue-eyed with blond hair, she has a no-nonsense air to her, favoring a snappy “yup” to a “yes.”

That Stewart, 31, would end up working as a part-time postmaster didn’t surprise her.

In Gabbs, there wasn’t much to do growing up, and retrieving the mail was akin to a mini-adventure. Stewart’s grandmother would pick her and her siblings up on her way to the post office and all would caper to the wooden building where it was then housed. Inside,

I F A B RONZ E F ORD TAU RU S

H A ZE L A N D R AY DUMMAR ONCE OW N E D TH R E E B U S I N E SS E S I N GABBS, AND H AV E S E E N T H E TOW N T H R O U G H B O O M A N D B U ST.

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dozens of brass mailboxes lined the wall.

The outings inspired the precocious young Stewart. One year for Halloween, as the kids of Gabbs dressed as pumpkins and ghosts, an eight- or nine-year-old Stewart skipped about town dressed as a book of stamps.

When she was hired last year, much had changed in the Gabbs post office compared to when she was a fourth grader — let alone when the location was founded 80 years ago.

The mailboxes’ brass doors have been replaced by gray ones, unlocked with a key. Mail can now be scanned and tracked. Rural mail carriers deliver Amazon packages in addition to first-class envelopes. What hasn’t changed is the outsized role the post office plays in rural communities — and, by extension, the postmaster. Stewart considers the role as nothing less than a public service. “I was raised to learn that you have to help people, especially in a place like (this),” she says.

Four days a week she opens the counter window and logs the previous day’s trickle of

THE MAIL OF GABBS’ 75 RESIDENTS IS A DROP IN AN OCEAN OF 425 MILLION PIECES HANDLED

BY SOME 653,000 USPS EMPLOYEES.

incoming and outgoing mail on a computer (it gets busier the first week of each month when the senior population mails out bills). Between 9:30 and 10:30 a.m., a carrier delivers incoming mail. Letters and periodicals end up in some of the office’s 103 P.O. boxes — because Gabbs is so rural, the USPS doesn’t deliver to individual addresses — and packages land in parcel lockers. The carrier takes outgoing mail to Hawthorne, about 55 miles away, where a big mail truck ferries it to the regional processing and distribution center in Reno, a two-hour drive northwest. From this point on, the mail of Gabbs’ 75 residents becomes a drop in an ocean of 425 million pieces handled by some 653,000 USPS employees.

But this machinery has become fickle. Lee Green, the genial owner of R&D’s Bar and Grill, inherited the business when his mother died earlier this year. After her passing, Green had to send legal documents to the recorder’s office in Tonopah, the Nye County seat. He didn’t bother to ask for a tracking number for 32

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A PR I L STE WA R T, PA R T-T I M E POSTM ASTE R I N GABBS, GREW UP I N T H E TOW N S H E N OW S E RV E S .

TOP : L E E GR E E N OWN S THE R &D B A R I N G A B B S. THE E ATE RY I S THE LAST P R IVATE B USIN E SS IN TOWN .

B OTTO M : DUR IN G I TS HE YDAY, GA B B S WAS HO M E TO S E VE R A L B USIN E SSES, C H UR C HE S A N D 1 , 500 R E S IDE N TS.

the first-class envelope — Tonopah, after all, is only 111 miles away. That was in mid-March; the letter still hasn’t arrived. Green ended up having to drive there to hand over the documents in person.

Last April, Georgene Chiaratti, 57, a kitchen manager at the local school, received a letter from the IRS. It referenced the amount of stimulus-check money she’d received during the pandemic — she would need this information when filing her taxes. But the letter came too late; Chiaratti had already sent her tax returns. Because she failed to declare the correct amount, she incurred a $1,000 penalty, she says. “I was counting on the money to pay ahead on some of our bills.”

Identifying the weak link in the Postal Service’s long chain can be something of a guessing game. Last year, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada pointed the finger at DeJoy’s “misguided proposals” to slow mail delivery, among other cost-saving measures. Stewart pins the blame on the local distribution network.

“Outgoing things will kind of miraculously disappear for a week or two then show up in Reno magically,” she says. It’s now become standard practice for Stewart to put a tracking number on mail her customers say is important, even

when these aren’t certified letters. The postmaster has become something of a custodian. do life disappear, a community — especially in the age of prolific globalized online services — adapts. The absence of a movie theater is now easily remedied by a Netflix subscription. The shuttering of a shopping center is followed by online orders of clothes and cat litter and nearly anything else you might need. Growing up in rural Nevada, Green didn’t watch his first baseball game until he was in eighth grade — they only got two channels back then, and neither one carried games. Now, the folk music blasting through R&D’s Bar and Grill comes from an internet radio station. But for many rural residents of the American West, there’s no substitute for the post office, even when it fails them at times.

But when the mail comes and goes without error these days in Gabbs, it’s a reminder of what the USPS can provide. A reminder that strangers and loved ones alike are within reach. After Ernie Klucas, 62, received surgery as part of his cancer treatment, his son wrote him a letter. It landed in Klutas’ hands on a sunny day in June — a mere two days after it was sent, postmarked St. Louis, Missouri.

WH E N S OME WAYS

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LETTERS FROM THE FIELD

THE DISTANT FAMINE HOW COVID-19 AND WAR IN UKRAINE ARE LEAVING SUDAN ON THE BRINK

BY JA M E S L . WA L K E R

A

s bombs continue to fall in eastern Ukraine, their impact is felt 2,500 miles away in northeast Africa, where a breastfeeding mother teeters on the edge of starvation. Residing near Nyala, the capital of Sudan’s war-torn South Darfur province, she makes a living cultivating groundnuts on a meager half-acre plot. Whatever sales she makes used to go toward a basic food basket for herself and her three young children. But she can no longer afford to feed both herself and her kids. Most days, she goes without food. And it’s about to get worse.

She was one of about 15 million people already suffering from acute or severe hunger in Sudan this summer, according to Eddie Rowe, country director for the United Nations’ World Food Programme, who met her on his most recent visit to Darfur. Hunger isn’t new to this arid strip between the Sahara Desert and the African tropics. Political turmoil and civil conflict, erratic rains made worse by climate change and the worst drought in 40 years are familiar culprits here, and the coronavirus pandemic, which dramatically decreased food production worldwide, aggravated matters.

But now those conditions are converging with the impact of a war between two of the world’s biggest breadbaskets. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February is fueling an “unprecedented global hunger crisis,” according to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, due to a rise in the price of food, fuel and other key commodities. The WFP estimates that as many as 50 million people in 45 countries are at risk of famine. Sudan is likely to be among 34

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the hardest hit, with another 3 million projected to join this young mother in her predicament this fall.

BEFOR E T H E WAR began in February, Russia and Ukraine accounted for nearly a third of global wheat production. For months, fighting along Ukraine’s eastern coast and a Russian blockade on the Black Sea prevented grain ships from safely leaving ports, causing a global shortage and sending prices skyrocketing.

The Black Sea is still infested with hundreds of mines dropped by both sides, and reports

POLITICAL TURMOIL, DROUGHT AND THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC ARE CONVERGING WITH THE IMPACT OF A WAR BETWEEN TWO OF THE WORLD’S BIGGEST BREADBASKETS.

have emerged of Russian soldiers deliberately bombing and torching wheatfields. Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s top foreign policy official, has accused Russia of using food as a “weapon of war.”

Limited shipments returned in August under a deal brokered by the U.N. and cosigned by Turkey, but about 20 million tons of grain meant for export are still trapped in the

country. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said this number could rise to 75 million tons after this year’s harvest. And it’s not only wheat. Ukraine is the world’s largest exporter of sunflower oil; Russia is the largest when it comes to fertilizer, and a significant provider of crude oil. By disrupting these supplies and heaping pressure on agricultural production worldwide, the war has led to soaring costs for fuel, transportation and food production.

People worldwide are feeling the pinch. In the United States, rising food and energy costs have helped push inflation to its highest level in 40 years. Food prices in Britain were expected to rise by up to 15 percent this summer.

But it is the world’s poorest that are taking the punch. Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world, is especially reliant on wheat imports from Ukraine and Russia, which supply between 70 percent and 80 percent of its market needs, according to a 2021 U.N. report.

“Sudan’s climate is usually unsuitable for growing wheat,” explains area expert Gillian Lusk, although thousands of farmers still cultivate the grain under a government irrigation scheme. However, drought and the outbreak of pests and disease means wheat production has decreased by 13 percent over the past year to about 600,000 metric tons, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization. For sorghum and millet, popular local alternatives, that decrease could be as much as 37 percent.

Together, these factors have left a third of Sudan’s nearly 47 million population on the

ILLU STR ATION BY K I M BE R LY M O R R I S

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brink. Three million children under five years of age are suffering from acute malnutrition in the country, leading to stunted growth, severe wasting — where children are too thin for their height — and a much higher risk of death.

FUNDING SHORTFALLS IN JULY FORCED THE WORLD FOOD PROGRAMME TO CUT RATIONS FOR REFUGEES ACROSS SUDAN TO JUST HALF OF A STANDARD FOOD BASKET.

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TO KEE P H E R expenses low, the young mother in Darfur used to travel to a large market nearby, where prices were cheaper. But the cost of transport has tripled because of the rise in the cost of fuel. Now she has to walk, roughly six miles each way, two-and-a-half hours in the scorching heat. Her difficult choices highlight the complex nature of this particular famine, with causes far beyond the food itself.

“The main cause of hunger now is the collapse of the economy, greatly heightened since October’s coup,” Lusk says. Sudan has suffered through long-standing economic troubles, worsened by last year’s military overthrow of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, who had been appointed as part of Sudan’s democratic transition after 26 years of dictatorship.

Today, the Sudanese government is too cash-strapped to help its people. It had previously committed to buying the little domestic production of wheat that remains, promising incentivizing prices for local farms, but it ended up reneging on the promise due to a lack of funds. Almost a third of Sudan’s domestic production — roughly 150-200 metric tons, according to the WFP — is now rotting in farmhouses. It’s as if Sudan is trying to put out multiple house fires with a single bucket of water.

Some worry the crisis could launch instability across the region, in the same way that record food prices preceded the Arab Spring a decade ago. In Sudan, bread isn’t only a staple of the diet, it’s also political. Baladi, a traditional flatbread, accounts for 530 calories per person per day according to the International Food Policy Research Institute. Soaring baladi prices in 2019 were a significant factor that led to the toppling of longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir.

Now, skyrocketing inflation — averaging 354 percent in 2021, according to Sudan’s Central Bureau of Statistics — has triggered protests and civil unrest in a country still grappling with the long-standing Darfur conflict in the East. “Despair and desperation are synonymous with the emotions of the (Sudanese) communities,” Rowe explains, “a spike in the bread price could lead to mass protests.”

ANY S OLU T ION WOU L D be far from simple.

Sudan — like many other countries in Africa — relies heavily on U.N. agencies and nongovernmental organizations to bolster its state institutions. But international organizations are also impacted by rising food and fuel prices. Funding shortfalls in July already forced the WFP in Sudan to cut rations for refugees across the country to just half of a standard food basket due. And now, amid costs that have increased a quarter since last year, there is evidence of acute food insecurity in all 18 of Sudan’s states.

“We now have to make heart-wrenching decisions in targeting locations where we can provide nutrition assistance due to lack of funding,” Rowe explains. He estimates the organization will face a shortfall of over $370 million in just the second half of 2022. A corresponding influx of cash would help in the short term, but that’s certainly not a given.

What worries Ian Mitchell, a food security specialist from Chatham House, an international policy institute based in London, is that aid budgets from wealthier countries are currently being refocused on Ukraine. For example, this May, the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved nearly $40 billion in new aid for Ukraine — about a fifth of the usual global aid budget. In contrast, a U.N. appeal for aid to Yemen in March raised only $1.3 billion, less than a third of the organization’s target to deal with one of the world’s largest and most complex humanitarian emergencies.

“There is no answer to the food crisis without an answer to the finance crisis,” the U.N.’s Guterres said in a statement in May. He went on to highlight the need to support farmers by investing in resilient food systems — for example, the provision of pesticides or hybrid seeds — to increase yield and protect crops against pests and the worsening effects of climate change in years to come.

For the young mother in southern Darfur, future solutions are too distant to think about.

She only managed to plant on half her tiny plot this year due to a previous poor harvest.

She is just as afraid of long dry spells as she is of a surprisingly aggressive rainy season flooding her crops. She is currently doing odd jobs — like selling charcoal — to buy the food necessary for her family’s survival. Her situation, and that of millions of others, is only set to get worse without urgent aid in a country where, according to UNICEF Sudan, 78,000 children under five years of age are already dying every year from preventable causes.

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LOST BOYS THE INTERNET IS FERTILE GROUND FOR DEADLY RACIST IDEOLOGY. CAN PARENTS PROTECT THEIR KIDS?

BY B E N JA MI N B O MB A R D

O

n a saturday afternoon in midMay, Payton Gendron, an 18-yearold college dropout, drove to a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood near downtown Buffalo. He was heavily armed and determined to kill people of color in order to defend the white race. Before that moment though, and for most of his young life, Gendron was pretty unexceptional. In many ways, he was a typical American kid.

As a child, Gendron would go to his babysitter’s house and they’d watch Disney movies and eat ravioli. There was a poster at her house that entranced him: a young boy and girl praying together.

Growing up, he loved science videos and dreamed of becoming an engineer, like his mom and dad. He had friends: Nick and Wes and Alexis, Tommy and Li’l Parker, and most of all Matt, his best friend since third grade.

The Boy Scouts stirred Gendron’s love of the outdoors, and at times he wished he could devote his life to nature. On campouts, he would listen intently to crickets in the dark and birds chirping at dawn. He was never happier than when he was in the deep woods.

Gendron also played video games. Most days, when he got out of school, he would return to his family’s suburban home in Conklin, New York, and play video games. By his recollection, he spent whole years of his life online and playing games, and of that time, only a few moments stood out. “Everything else is just blank,” he wrote in an online journal. The 38

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problem with video games was that they provided a false sense of progress and influence.

You could spend hours in a game, feeling like you had made an impact, but when you left the game behind, he wrote, “in reality you haven’t changed anything in the real world.”

Then, in March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic struck and the world suddenly shut down.

GENDRON MAY HAVE ACTED AS A LONE WOLF, BUT HE WASN’T THE FIRST YOUNG MAN TO BE INSPIRED BY BIGOTRY AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES.

Gendron, then 16 years old, went down with it. Stuck at home in front of the computer for weeks and months on end, he grew bored out of his mind. He spent hours browsing bulletin boards on the website 4chan, where he eventually encountered the “great replacement theory,” a white nationalist conspiracy theory that claims that white people are being systematically replaced by immigrants, Muslims and refugees.

At first, Gendron didn’t make much of it. But he was lonely. And because he felt increasingly isolated and powerless, he went further down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. Jews and the elite, he came to believe, were behind the systematic replacement of white people. Blacks were inferior, and the white race must be protected at all costs. These ideas gave him something to believe in and something to act on.

And when he saw on 4chan a video of a young man gunning down dozens of worshipers at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, Gendron felt with the fiery blaze of life-changing epiphany, a sense of purpose unlike anything he had ever possessed. He saw a way to change things in the real world, and he would do so in a most horrific way.

On that pleasant Saturday afternoon in Buffalo, Gendron parked his car in front of the Tops grocery store, jumped out with a Bushmaster XM-15 assault rifle and immediately started shooting. He streamed the beginning of the attack on Twitch, an online video platform (Twitch stopped the stream after two minutes).

Ten Black people were killed that day and three other people were injured.

I’ve watched the gut-churning video myself.

It gave me nightmares. I’ve read the manifesto Gendron posted in the lead-up to the shooting, as well as excerpts from the private journal he kept on the messaging platform Discord.

I wanted to try to get inside his head, to see where his dark thoughts led him, and to understand what parents, educators, friends and his

community could have possibly done to derail or prevent his extreme radicalization.

Gendron may have acted as a lone wolf, but he wasn’t the first young man to be inspired by bigotry and conspiracy theories to commit such a monstrous act. And with acts of racist hate on the rise in America, unless we learn from his experience and others, he won’t be the last.

There’s no hard data about how many young people are radicalized every year by the white ILLU STR ATION BY N I C K O G O N OS KY

power movement. Researchers and experts I spoke with confirmed that it’s a growing problem, and anecdotal evidence suggests that white supremacists have ramped up their efforts to recruit young people, especially teenage boys.

“It’s absolutely an increasing problem,” said Nora Flanagan, an educator who has been working to fight racism and bigotry for more than 20 years. She equates white supremacists and white nationalist groups with political

evangelicals. “They have always sought to expand. They’re always actively recruiting.”

Flanagan and others say the lack of media attention given to the problem of white supremacist recruitment is due in part to what felt like the normalization of violent and racist rhetoric that took place during the Donald Trump presidency. That normalization in turn created fertile ground for the white power movement to organize in the open and grow their ranks.

Much of the recruitment now happens online, targeting kids as young as 11.

“White nationalists and bigoted groups have access to all the online spaces that kids do,” said Lindsay Schubiner, a program director for the Western States Center, a left-of-center nonprofit. They court young recruits on every available social media app, from Facebook to TikTok and Instagram, on discussion platforms like Discord and Reddit, in online gaming spaces such as Steam and Roblox, and on entertainment sites such as YouTube and iFunny. They seed these spaces with racist, antisemitic and white supremacist propaganda slicked up as memes, videos, bulletin board discussions and infographics — the edgier, more amusing, more provocative and more ironic, the better.

White supremacists hope that by exploiting a toxic stew of negative social forces, and preying on the awkwardness, confusion, desperation, and need for acceptance and belonging felt by many adolescents, they can potentially increase their numbers. “In the ’80s they were trying to build an army for a race war. Now they’re trying to build a political base,” said Flanagan.

Joanna Schroeder, a writer and the co-author of a toolkit addressing bigotry and conspiracies with young people, says white supremacists are finding easy targets for recruitment in a growing population of disaffected mainstream white boys who increasingly feel left behind. “Whether or not their impressions are objectively true,” she said, “it is the way they’re feeling. And because nobody is addressing this with them or asking them to have a reality-check type of conversation, they get that information online.

And online, there are certain groups of people who take that sense of disenfranchisement and exploit it. They say, ‘You are superior, and look how you’re being held back.’”

Of course, not all children exposed to white supremacist beliefs and propaganda become extremists. And only a small percentage of those who do go on to perpetrate mass violence.

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But even a single mass shooting is one too many.

“There are a lot of blocks in the pyramid that builds toward incidents like Buffalo,” said Melissa Mott, who works on holocaust and genocide education with the Anti-Defamation League. “Buffalo just evidences what’s happening below the surface.”

ONCE, WHEN HE was six, Gendron was playing in his cousin’s pond and he went in deeper than he should have. He couldn’t swim and didn’t have a life jacket, and in the water he was a fury of thrashing arms and wild desperation. He swallowed a lot of water, and a lot of it went into his lungs. He might have drowned had his uncle not jumped into the pond and pulled him out.

Safely onshore, Gendron coughed up a lot of the water he had inhaled.

Unfortunately, when Gendron fell deep into the cesspool of white supremacy, he got in over his head and nobody was there to pull him out. He gulped down hate-filled memes and infographics — much of it pulled from the /pol/ board (which stands for politically incorrect) on 4chan — until he was basically breathing the stuff.

He wrote, “Yeah I’m equivalent to the average 4chan degenerate.

What else do you expect from a person who barely interacts with regular people?” he wrote on his Discord journal.

Last year, as a senior at Susquehanna Valley High School, having already made up his mind that he would follow in the footsteps of the Christchurch shooter, Brenton Tarrant — himself a fervid racist and evangelist of the “great replacement theory” — Gendron wrote in an online economics assignment that he wanted to commit a murder/suicide act at his school graduation or sometime afterward.

School authorities reported his comments to the police and Gendron was taken into custody. “Perhaps it was a cry of help from me, I’m not actually sure,” he wrote. He often

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wondered if he was irrational, schizophrenic, autistic or mentally ill, and that was why he was planning to kill people. The authorities who evaluated him apparently didn’t find any reason for further concern, nor legal justification to extend his detainment. After a day and a half in custody, he was released and fell off the radar.

By March of this year, Gendron had dropped out of college, a fact he hid from his parents. He hid everything from them. They didn’t know he owned a semiautomatic assault rifle and a shotgun, or that their son was a white supremacist. When they tried to confront him about a speeding ticket he received far from home — he had driven to public lands two hours northwest of Conklin to shoot his Bushmaster XM-15 on state lands — he “lied nearly the entire time.”

He had lost all but one of his friends. There was, however, that one Friday night when he went to a high school play and ran into Logan, a friend from coding class. They saw each other and instantly hugged. “We talk about you every day in class,” Logan said, which struck Gendron as a pleasant shock. “I haven’t felt that way in a long time,” he wrote later that evening. “Someone actually being excited to see me. Logan’s a great guy. I miss him a lot, plus the rest of coding class. (They’re) all great people.”

Matt was Gendron’s last remaining friend. They hung out once in a while, but they didn’t talk like they used to. Gendron didn’t share his racist beliefs or talk about the “great replacement theory” with Matt, who is Hispanic, or Skylar, Matt’s girlfriend, who is Black. He didn’t tell them about his plans to kill people, which, he wrote again and again, he didn’t actually want to do. In his more lucid moments, what he wanted most of all was for “something to pass or someone to do something” so he didn’t have to kill anybody. But imprisoned in the echo chamber of his own mind, without anyone to interrupt his diseased thoughts, he returned

continually to the need for violence and murder as the only solution to the threat facing the white race. “I have to commit this attack,” he wrote. “(If) I don’t who will? We have to fight The Great Replacement or it will end us all.”

One night, less than a week before his attack, Gendron went for a walk and returned to his computer in a particularly sentimental mood. “There’s bats flying around in the sky.

I can’t tell if they’re squeaking or it’s just the sounds of their wings,” he wrote. He thought about girls at school he found attractive. He reflected on how much he enjoyed being a leader in Boy Scouts, and he lamented his course in life. “To be honest,” he wrote, “I made lots of mistakes and I wish things turned out differently.”

Then his thoughts turned to a guy he knew in high school. He and Dan weren’t friends.

They never really talked, even though they sat across from each other in calculus class. Junior year, Dan committed suicide. Gendron often thought about taking his own life. “I wonder what (Dan) was thinking right before he did it,” he wrote.

Instead, Gendron decided his commitment to his race took precedence over taking his own life. How incredibly selfish it would be to end his pain, because then, he wrote, “I would be ignoring the cries of help from my people.

(We) are being genocided … I hope that all the people I kill will live in forever peace and that they will never feel pain again. I hope you enjoy the beauty of Heaven.” have been interrupted at any number of points by any number of people, if only they’d noticed the warning signs and taken them seriously.

Groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Western States Center have produced toolkits and online resources to help parents, educators, families and youth identify and confront radicalization. Some of these resources note several behaviors a young person may exhibit if they are exposed to white power recruiting material online. They may start parroting the rhetoric of the “great replacement theory” or talk about “white genocide.”

They may rationalize stereotypes or racial hierarchies, or claim to be involuntary celibates or “incels.” They may blame immigrants and people of color for societal struggles.

The warning signs of violent radicalization aren’t always as glaring as a teenage boy writing in a class assignment that he wants to shoot up his school, or buying nearly a thousand

GENDRON’S RADICALIZATION COULD

dollars in military gear and illegal gun magazines, or decapitating a cat, like Gendron did.

(His mother, he claimed, gave him a box in which to bury the animal.) Often, the signs are much subtler.

Author Joanna Schroeder nearly lost control of her vehicle one day when she heard her 11- and 14-year-old sons and their friends say the word “triggered” in response to a meme they were looking at in the back seat of the car.

She recognized the term as “a calling card of the alt-right,” she wrote in a column for The New York Times. “People associated with this group are known for trolling those who disagree with them, and calling critics ‘triggered’ is a favorite tactic.”

Her red flag flew again when she later watched her son reflexively “like” a disturbing image on Instagram. It was an irony-heavy meme of Hitler, and it evidenced the viral nature of much white supremacist propaganda, slipping in under a young person’s defenses and stealthily infecting their thinking. Schroeder reported that her son was “shocked and embarrassed” when she “pointed out the meme’s actual message: that it would have been better if the Holocaust had continued.”

Schroeder and others I spoke with stressed the need to balance the reality that children will use smartphones, social media and online platforms with the stressful uncertainty of how they’re spending time there. They advise parents to wait as long as possible before giving children access to smartphones and social media. When you do, they said, institute strict controls over your children’s smartphone and social media use. “I absolutely have periodically checked each of my sons’ texts shortly after they were each given their first phones,” said Flanagan. “I let them know I’ll be doing this, and I explain why — all revolving around their safety and development as the good humans I know them to be.” As kids validate that trust and demonstrate the ability to use digital tools safely and kindly, said Schroeder, that’s when you give them increasing autonomy with their devices and apps.

“You’re not going to be able to keep up with everything your teenager is on,” said Schroeder. “You have to accept that you slowly let them have more internet access. Observe how they use social media. And then acknowledge to them: I am not always going to know what’s happening in your video games. I am not always going to know what’s happening in your Discord chats. I know you’re going to find social media platforms that I do not understand.

What I want you to know is that people trying to trick other people into believing things that hurt people is as old as time. And it can happen anywhere. So let’s talk about how they do it, what they want you to believe, why it’s not true and what you should do when you see it.”

All of the experts and researchers I spoke with, as well as all of the toolkits, emphasize this point. The most important thing a parent, caregiver or educator can do to circumvent white supremacist radicalization, they said, is to spend concerted time and effort establishing open, judgment-free communication with young people. It’s solid footing for both parent and child when a red flag flies. When Flanagan sees messages or content on her children’s devices that raise concerns, she said, “We have a conversation. I don’t get mad; I ask questions,

“THERE IS NO SINGLE EXPERIENCE, SITE, OR REASON THAT LEADS AN 18-YEAROLD TO COMMIT THE MOST HORRIBLE ACTS OF RACIST VIOLENCE.”

and we listen to each other. The goal is always to keep communication open.”

If a child tells you about how they read online that the Holocaust never happened, Mott says, don’t sweep it under the rug: Talk about it. Go straight at it. When Schroeder’s son “liked“ the meme of Hitler, she sat him down and discussed with him the pain and trauma experienced by Jewish people all around the world, and she told him about her “late friend Edith, whose delicate arm,” Schroeder wrote, “displayed a number tattoo that stopped my heart every time I saw it.”

Flanagan said parents and teachers need to ask questions. And listen. Don’t overreact or underreact. She said, “If I slam right down on one of my kids or one of my students for a Discord channel I see them belonging to, if I come down like a ton of bricks, as my father says, they’re gonna shut down and it’s going to push them further into that. It’s also going to validate the ironic victim mentality of these hate groups.”

“Remain open and curious so that you can maintain that relationship without making

them defensive,” said Schubiner. “Don’t agree with them, but state your values of respect and inclusion and equity. And in situations where a young person may be all-in, that’s really sad, and it’s really dangerous. So, it’s important to proceed with caution.”

Walsh, both experts in adolescent development, have written that “there is no single experience, site, or reason that leads an 18-year-old to commit the most horrible acts of racist violence.” The same can be said of the interventions and efforts necessary to counteract the radicalization that leads to violence. It’s an ongoing, multi-pronged effort, made all the more challenging by the Covid pandemic and the shutdowns that followed.

The resulting atmosphere of isolation, stress and anxiety created the perfect storm for a wave of radicalization, the proliferation of conspiracy theories and the normalization of white supremacist ideas and rhetoric.

That means that Gendron may just be the tip of the iceberg. In all likelihood, there are other young men out there who followed the same well-worn path to bigotry. They were already lonely, confused, hurt and in need of answers before intense societal disruption drove them into digital isolation, where they were eventually lured into the dark and hateful recesses of the internet. Down there, they found a sense of purpose and belonging in the dangerously false promises of white supremacism, because, like trolls lurking under the bridge, white supremacists were there waiting for them.

The work of leading these disaffected young people out of the shadows, Schroeder said, “must be done by parents, but it will only really work if it’s supported by systems. Schools.

Sports. Religious groups. Anywhere kids spend their time.” All the warning signs were there.

And if somebody had worked to intervene in a way that didn’t further alienate him, maybe Gendron would have become an engineer like his parents and devoted his life to nature.

More importantly, maybe 13 people — Roberta Drury, Margus Morrison, Andre Mackniel, Aaron Salter, Geraldine Talley, Celestine Chaney, Heyward Patterson, Katherine Massey, Pearl Young, Ruth Whitfield, Zaire Goodman, Jennifer Warrington and Christopher Braden — shopping at the Tops Friendly Market near downtown Buffalo on a pleasant Friday afternoon in mid-May would have finished buying their groceries, gone about their days and continued living their lives.

ERIN AND DAVID

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THE BATTLE OVER THE BIG LIE THIS NOVEMBER, VOTERS WILL DECIDE THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN ELECTIONS. ARIZONA IS GROUND ZERO

BY E TH A N B AU E R

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usty Bowers is a worried man.

Retreating to a dark room within his suite at Arizona’s sun-baked capitol complex, he sinks into a couch, tall and slender in a purple dress shirt. With a prominent mole above his left brow, the speaker of the state’s house looks you in the eye as he talks — until the conversation turns to the subject of his fears. Then his gaze drifts and he stares into the distance, speaking of the “world of hurt” he believes his political rivals will unleash should they prevail in the midterm elections this November.

Remarkably, those rivals are from his own party.

Bowers is a lifelong Republican and a staunch conservative who regularly votes along party lines on issues like taxes and abortion. He holds a 92 percent rating from the NRA, a 20 percent rating from Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona and abysmal reviews from environmental organizations like the Sierra Club. Unlike some prominent members of the GOP, he supported former President Donald Trump throughout his term in office, though it ended on a sour note. “He did some good for this country, for which I’m grateful,” Bowers says, “but he’s unfit to serve as our president.”

Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Arizona — one of several swing states that sealed his loss — forced Bowers to choose between loyalty to his party and 42

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fundamental principles like honesty and respect for the rule of law. Appearing before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol in June, Bowers testified that Trump’s legal team, led by Rudy Giuliani, pressured him to allow a committee to hear unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud with the goal of persuading legislators to replace Biden’s electors with Trump loyalists. When they offered no

“WE HAVEN’T HAD TO WORRY THAT ADMINISTRATORS MIGHT TRY TO SUBVERT THE RESULTS TO BENEFIT ONE SIDE OR ANOTHER. BUT THAT’S NOW A REAL THREAT.”

evidence to support the maneuver, Bowers refused, even after Giuliani cajoled him, asking, “Aren’t we all Republicans here?”

Bowers stood on principle and paid for it, becoming a target for Trump backers on every level. Protesters harassed him for two years, gathering outside his home, making vile and unfounded accusations. Trump campaigned against him in the race for state senate, calling him a “Republican in Name Only.” About a month after his testimony, Bowers lost the

primary to David Farnsworth. Both men are members of the same party and religion. But one publicly supported Trump's election claims and the other did not. Bowers wasn’t alone. Most of the state’s mainstream GOP fell to a slate of like-minded individuals — including a former TV news anchor who became the party’s gubernatorial candidate in her first-ever run for office — in a stunning rebuke to those who chose country over party, which could well end Bowers’ political career.

Still, his worries aren’t personal. Bowers’ defeat was part of a nationwide battle for the soul of the Republican Party, widely seen as a proxy contest between Trump and his former Vice President Mike Pence. The Trump wing leveraged the unfounded claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen to argue that democracy can only be saved if their faction takes over the machinery of elections themselves — especially in swing states. The mainstream continues to trust the nation’s electoral infrastructure and wants to get back to winning elections the old-fashioned way. Now, the general ballot in November could reshape the future of American elections.

S OME C AL L IT “the steal,” others “the big lie.”

Facing unfavorable polls in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, Trump started to claim the voting was already rigged. He kept it up on Election Day and throughout the aftermath as votes were being counted, revealing

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the will of voters. “Your vote hasn’t counted for decades,” Jim Marchant told supporters earlier this year. “The people that are in office have been selected. You haven’t had a choice.”

It can be difficult to discern whether candidates are sincere in their belief that elections have become corrupt or are cynically leveraging a position that can help them to win office — as some still hope. Either way, the idea of taking over the process itself is not entirely original.

Political machines of the past have dominated elections in certain American cities for periods of time, doling out patronage and making local deals to hold onto the levers of power; think Tammany Hall in 19th century New York or the Chicago Democratic machine for most of the 1900s. But today’s movement to seize control of national elections is unprecedented in scope, and perhaps more reminiscent of the maneuvers used by democratically elected strongmen in countries like Hungary, whose authoritarian president, Viktor Orban, headlined the recent CPAC conference.

“We haven’t had to worry before, at least in modern American history, that election administrators might not run elections fairly, and might try to subvert the results to benefit one side or another,” says Rick Hasen, director of UCLA’s Safeguarding Democracy Project and one of the country’s foremost experts on election law. “But that’s now a real threat that’s on the table. And we’re gonna have to figure out how to address it.”

KE VI N DIETS CH/GE TTY

AT THE VERY LEAST, THIS FACTION IS PROMOTING A NEW VISION FOR AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, ONE THAT RESTS ON CONTROLLING ELECTIONS THEMSELVES TO ENSURE PREFERRED OUTCOMES.

that he had lost. But the willingness to back or even expand on his increasingly wild claims — that dead people and noncitizens voted against him; that poll workers stashed crates full of ballots; that hardware manufactured in China was hacked to turn voting machines against him — soon became a loyalty test for Republicans to stay on his side and hold onto his potent endorsement.

Arizona was one of several swing states that tilted the election in favor of Joe Biden, who took the state by just over 10,000 votes. It subsequently became one of the states where Trump and his legal team took their allegations of fraud to court — where they consistently lost — and leaned on different levers of power within the state trying to manufacture a more favorable outcome. That effort failed in the short term but spawned a new strategy to put allies in charge of those levers. This November, Arizona is one of five states with

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election deniers running for all three statewide posts that oversee or influence elections.

In Michigan, for example, the Republican nominee for secretary of state is a former community college professor who was launched to prominence by going on Fox News after working as a poll watcher in Detroit during the 2020 elections, alleging a litany of hijinks that no one has been able to verify. In Pennsylvania, the Republican gubernatorial nominee is campaigning on overturning election results and trying to ban ballot drop boxes.

And in Nevada, the Republican secretary of state nominee wants to throw out electronic balloting machines, claiming they don’t record

THE STRATEGY IS reshaping state and local campaigns in curious ways. Beyond prominent offices like governors and legislators — whose influence is a little more obvious — certain down-ballot races are drawing a higher profile than ever, precisely because they play a role in election integrity. And because the emphasis is on loyalty to the former president, some candidates have resumes that might seem surprising.

A campaign ad for the Republican candidate for Arizona secretary of state offers an interesting case study. On screen, he slides on a white cowboy hat — posturing as a man of action — over wire-framed glasses and a bushy mustache. Ads are rare this far down the ballot, but this man is lucky enough to let a former president speak for him. “He is tough as hell,” Trump says. “Mark Finchem had the courage to hold the hearings that led to the Arizona audit,” a voiceover artist adds. “Mark Finchem is the election integrity fighter we need, now.”

A member of the Arizona House since 2015, Finchem is also a member of Oath Keepers, a nationwide militia. As of this writing, that group’s leader and seven other members were awaiting trial in federal court on seditious conspiracy charges, among others, for their alleged role in the insurrection of January 6, 2021. At least three more had already pleaded guilty. Prosecutors say the group kept a “death list” of officials who oversaw the Georgia elections in 2020, which Trump lost, and brought explosives to Washington, D.C., for potential use during the uprising. Finchem was there, too, photographed among the mob at the Capitol steps and tweeting a photo of his own.

That same month, he posted a “treason watch list” on his Pinterest account featuring Barack Obama, Janet Napolitano and other prominent Democrats. On his website, a banner declares: “Sign the petition to decertify and set aside AZ electors.”

In the past, that history might have locked Finchem into an obscure corner, with perhaps enough votes to win a seat but lacking the support to make an impact. That was the case in January, when he co-sponsored a bill that would have allowed Arizona state legislators to reject election results; the bill stalled within days. But his stance on elections and unwavering support for Trump have earned him the party’s backing in what has become a key campaign.

In most states, the secretary of state administers and oversees elections. Finchem is a founding member of the America First Secretary of State Coalition, which seeks to install Trump loyalists as election administrators across the country. The group’s website offers a detailed, six-point plan for coalition candidates who take office: Voter ID; paper ballots; eliminate mail-in ballots while keeping traditional absentee ballots; single-day voting; unfettered poll watch reforms; and aggressive voter roll cleanup. In theory, none of these measures seem particularly outlandish, but the coalition makes it clear these efforts come with partisan intent.

“Many others may talk the talk, but we are actually walking the walk by declaring ourselves to stand and fight in the public arena for conservative principles and solutions to the corrupt election process nationwide,” the website reads. “Please join with us on this exciting, determined, Never-Give-Up journey to Take Our Country Back!”

Attorney general is another key position, charged with defending a state’s election

results in court — or declining to do so. Arizona candidate Abraham Hamadeh says that his goal is to “prioritize the Election Integrity Unit and increase the number of prosecutors and investigators in order to be prepared and protect the 2024 election.” From whom, exactly, is not clear.

THE H AL LWAY TO Bowers’ office passes a display case full of small statues, each representing a figure from Arizona history, from lawmen to Apache leaders. Bowers, who studied art at Brigham Young University, carved them himself. His aesthetic is reflected in many busts and paintings along the outer walls and inside the legislative chamber, where he lobbied to surround the floor with giant pan-

BEYOND PROMINENT STATE OFFICES LIKE GOVERNORS AND LEGISLATORS, CERTAIN DOWNBALLOT RACES ARE DRAWING A HIGHER PROFILE THAN EVER, PRECISELY BECAUSE THEY PLAY A ROLE IN ELECTION INTEGRITY.

els depicting the Grand Canyon. Inside, his desk is bare, save for a book about procedure, a cactus-print mouse pad and a small, fake crow — a gift from Albert Hale, a former President of the Navajo Nation and a Democratic state representative from 2011 to 2017. Hale nicknamed Bowers the “Gáagii nez” — “the tall crow,” in Diné — and gave him that little crow to keep watch.

Perhaps Bowers could have saved some pride by ceding the primary, but he refused to quit, even as attacks mounted, as demonstrators outside his home chanted over loudspeakers and handed out fliers calling him a pedophile. “The whole mentality of this constant barrage of anger and malice and name calling — I wasn’t gonna be bullied to leave,” the former BYU art major says, sitting among some of his own sculptures and paintings. “So he might beat me, but he’s not gonna bully me.”

That defiance served him well in the aftermath of the 2020 election. One thing that the tense weeks and months between that November and the inauguration of President Joe Biden made clear is how much American democracy relies on the character of the

individuals like him who serve in public office, whether large or small in scope. When history thrusts them into a difficult position, our system depends on them to stand up and do the right thing. Across the country, we’ve seen examples of Republicans who refused to bend the law to give their party a win. Arizona is no different.

On the other side of the aisle, Arizona Democrats will leverage a slate of Trump-backed candidates to argue that without people like Bowers, on the right or the left, there will be little firewall. “The messages that they’re going to put forward in the general election are that this is all about preserving democracy,” says Julie Erfle, an Arizona-based consultant with knowledge of Democratic campaign plans. “This is about not letting legislators choose the next president, or who our electors are.” That starts at the top with Katie Hobbs, the gubernatorial candidate who is now finishing her four-year term as secretary of state. “I don’t think this is even a choice about Democrats or Republicans; it’s a choice between sanity and chaos,” she says. “It is not hyperbolic to say that democracy is on the ballot in 2022, and that the outcome of these elections will determine the future of free and fair elections in our country.”

GOP strategist Chuck Coughlin approves.

“If I’m the Democrats, I’m running on that,” he says. “I’m gonna say, ‘You can’t elect a fascist.’

I’m having (Democratic secretary of state nominee) Adrian Fontes warm up every one of my crowds. I’d have him on a ticket with me, talking about the integrity of the election, and talking about protecting people’s right to vote.”

Bowers didn’t stand alone. On the same day as the capitol insurrection, another group of protestors gathered in Arizona. Outside the state capitol, they set up a guillotine intended for Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates, another lifelong Republican, and his colleagues. He, too, fears for the future after enduring nearly two years of harassment and watching extremists take the primary.

“There’s a reason that Donald Trump has selected these people and gotten behind them,” he says. “This isn’t about some broader goal for democracy. This is about putting key people in place in the swing states where he thinks they will put the finger on the scales. I can’t say it any clearer than that.”

Looking ahead to November, the outcome is still where it belongs — in the hands of voters.

At least for now.

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WE, THE WOMEN WOMEN HAVE ALWAYS BEEN TRAILBLAZERS IN THE WEST. WHY ARE SOME STATES FALLING BEHIND?

BY N I CO L E M C N U LTY

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he usually returned library books on time. But Emily Bell McCormick wanted to keep this one. As her mother read aloud the story of Joan of Arc, the image of an ironclad teenager leading an army clung to her memory.

“It’s truly against all odds, but she had a mission and nothing was going to deter her, even if it cost her her life,” McCormick recalls.

“I think it was maybe my first time hearing a powerful woman’s story.”

Joan kept springing to McCormick’s mind when she was thinking about college. She wanted to study politics, to become a leader herself, but she didn’t think it was practical.

Her parents never spoke to her about politics or told her that she, a Latter-day Saint girl from Holladay, Utah, growing up in the 1980s, could be a politician herself. McCormick didn’t see herself reflected in local leadership.

And she didn’t see a path.

According to Susan Madsen, the compass points to a larger problem. Madsen has studied women’s leadership for more than two decades, as both a professor and the founding director of the Utah Women and Leadership Project at Utah State University. So, last summer when WalletHub released a list — “2021’s Best and Worst States for Women’s Equality” — a local businessman asked Madsen to come up with ways to improve Utah’s ranking. Because for the fourth year in a row, Utah was dead last.

The rankings are based on metrics including the wage gap, higher education attainment 46

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and political representation. Madsen and her team went straight to WalletHub’s original sources, including census data and Department of Labor statistics, and found the same result. The team published a solution: get more Utah women elected to office.

Women holding public offices makes a significant impact on policy — and the lives of Americans — across the country. Research from nonpartisan nonprofit The National Democratic Institute shows that as more

THE CLOSER WE GET TO POLITICAL PARITY, THE MORE WOMEN’S QUALITY OF LIFE INCREASES, BOTH THROUGH PUBLIC POLICY, AND WOMEN BEING INSPIRED BY THOSE IN OFFICE.

women are elected to office, there is an increase in policymaking that emphasizes quality of life that undergirds positive and democratic impacts on communities.

Those policies are often beneficial across party lines as well. Research shows that women’s leadership and conflict resolution styles exemplify democratic models and that women tend to work in a less hierarchical and more cooperative way than male colleagues. This

results in 25 percent of women lawmakers in the U.S. citing women from the opposition party as key supporters of their top legislation, while only 17 percent of male lawmakers name similar support.

According to the Center for the American Woman and Politics, congresswomen in the U.S. sponsor three more bills per congressional term than congressmen and co-sponsor 26 more bills per term than male colleagues.

They bring in 9 percent more money for their districts than male congressmen. Break it down, and that amounts to roughly $49 million extra for a district represented by women.

Having women in office makes a difference for all of us. But the issue runs deeper than just getting women elected, Madsen says. It’s getting women interested to begin with.

In states like Utah, a strong conservative and religious culture impacts the metrics, Madsen says. Data from Harvard researchers show that girls who grow up in lower-income households in Salt Lake City have greater household incomes and opportunities as adult women compared to other states, a reflection of the emphasis on married, two-parent families. But Madsen thinks the state’s messaging needs to also reflect the reality that women can be both mothers and professionals — including political office.

The problem is bigger than one landlocked state in the West, a region where women account for 36 percent of state legislators, slightly more than the national average. But that’s

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still far less than the proportion of women who exist in the country. And evidence shows that the closer we get to political parity, the more women’s quality of life increases, both through public policy, and women being inspired by those in office. at Joan woven into a vibrant tapestry on her parents’ wall — her only political role model. She married after college at Brigham Young University, but waited to have children until finishing graduate school in 2004. And then went on to start a fashion business. She kept thinking about Joan, but she didn’t feel any closer to her than she did while reading about her in a book written by someone else.

“I didn’t feel like an imposter,” McCormick says, “I was an imposter.”

That’s one of the two main reasons behind the national underrepresentation of women, says Jennifer Lawless. The Leone Reaves and George W. Spicer Professor of Politics and professor of public policy at the University of Virginia, Lawless has been studying the gender gap in political ambition since 2001. Though there are now twice as many women in Congress as there were then, the ambition gap, the number of women who said they had an interest in running for office compared to men, is still the same: 16 percentage points.

Women tend to think they need a list of qualifications no one person could have, whereas men “think what qualifies them is passion and vision,” she says. “We’ve seen this in hundreds of interviews with potential candidates and at the end of the day, it’s a lot easier to have passion and vision than two different graduate degrees.” Another reason fewer women run is because they’re a third less likely than men to think about it in the first place, partly because parents are less likely to talk to their daughters about politics.

Lawless says it comes down to perception: Women use different yardsticks to measure their qualifications because they think the political arena is biased. “And until we can change that perception, it’s really difficult to figure out how to close this gender gap in political ambition.”

When women do run, research has found, they win at the same rates as comparable men in comparable races. But half of Americans don’t believe this is true, and many female candidates see barriers that studies show might not exist.

This plays out in another challenge women

JEFFREY P. ALLRED

M C COR MIC K U S E D TO STARE

E M I LY B E L L MCCO R MICK, F O U ND E R O F THE P O LI CY P R OJ E C T, B E LIE VE S T HAT P O LICY R E F O R M C AN BE AS P OW E R F UL AS R EP R E SE N TATIO N IN O F F I C E W HE N IT CO M ES TO I MP R OVIN G WO M E N’S E QUA L ITY. UTA H IS R A N K E D AS THE WO R ST STAT E F O R WO ME N ’ S E QUA L ITY, ACCO R D IN G TO S OM E R E P O R TS.

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face, or, at least think they face: fundraising.

Ally Isom, who challenged U.S. Sen. Mike Lee in this year’s Republican primary race in Utah, felt like potential donors saw her as a “compromised investment” because of her gender.

The last factor in women being less likely to want to run is competition aversion, according to Jessica Preece, a political science professor at Brigham Young University. Women are less likely to be competitive, and most want to enter politics because of a specific issue, whereas men are more likely to see politics as a personal career move. Many of these barriers are more magnified on the Republican side, in part because there are fewer candidate training organizations, but there’s also a cultural difference.

In a recent study, Preece found conservative voters’ idea of politics is closely tied with visions of masculinity. “So when a candidate has a more typical masculine background, they’re a businessman and they care about taxes, that’s going to resonate with the Republican voter more than a candidate who is a teacher who cares a lot about education, even if what she wants for education is a very conservative vision, right?” she poses.

In 2016, McCormick decided to teach herself about politics.

She started Googling one civics topic every day, unaware of training organizations like Emerge Nevada, or those in her home state like nonpartisan Utah Women Run — both of which teach women the nuts and bolts skills to run for office: making campaign plans, creating websites, crafting fundraising emails, and more nebulous things like connecting with people.

Many of the 24 women who go through Emerge Nevada’s annual training are already working in a volunteer capacity, according to Danna Lovell, executive director of the organization. But more women in Utah volunteer than the national average, in part because of religious values, but also because of a history of women’s activism, specifically around suffrage. Women fought for and won the right to vote when Utah was still a territory in 1870. It was the first time in U.S. history that women voted, setting an example for the rest of the emerging U.S. “They were exceptionally good at building coalitions, by making themselves politically necessary, by reaching out to other people to broaden the appeal of their movement,” says Katherine Kitterman, a historian and executive director of Better Days 2020. The federal government outlawed women from voting in the Utah Territory a few years later. And

KRISTIN M URPH Y

U TA H STATE UN IVE R SI TY P R O F E SSO R SUSA N MADSEN, A S P E A K E R , AUTHO R AND A G LO B A L THO UG HT L EADER O N WO ME N A N D LE ADERSHI P, R E CE N TLY P UB LISHED RES E AR C H E X P LO R IN G THE LI NK B E TWE E N WO ME N ’ S QUALI TY O F L IF E A N D P O LITICS.

although the legacy of women’s activism stuck around, it didn’t translate to more women entering public office.

Utah Women Run trains roughly 400 women annually, says Morgan Lyon Cotti, a board member of the organization and associate director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics.

But there are only 27 women in the Utah Legislature, and women only hold 35 percent of municipal positions. The lack of women in office influences the types of laws that are — or aren’t — passed. It also impacts the price of doctor visits, one of Utah’s lowest scores on WalletHub’s ranking. According to Madsen, more women in office could help pass laws covering health care costs for women and children.

But even though these trends around women’s representation are magnified in states like Utah, women face obstacles across the political spectrum.

The top-ranking state on 2021’s “Best and Worst States for Women’s Equality” list is Nevada — in part because it’s the only state with a female-majority Legislature. A whopping

58.7 percent of state legislators are women, compared to Utah’s 26 percent.

So, what happened in Nevada, and how much power do women really have?

That’s a question that Jean Sinzdak, the

MORE WOMEN IN UTAH VOLUNTEER THAN THE NATIONAL AVERAGE, IN PART BECAUSE OF RELIGIOUS VALUES, BUT ALSO BECAUSE OF A HISTORY OF WOMEN’S ACTIVISM.

associate director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, has been trying to figure out.

When Western territories were looking to become states, they needed bodies to reach the threshold, and the Homestead Act helped.

In 1863, anyone was allowed to acquire 160 acres of federal land, single women included.

As women migrated to Nevada, Sondra Cosgrove, a historian at the College of Southern Nevada, says many of them opened boarding houses, laundries and restaurants, and eventually started running schools and social welfare programs — for money.

“Once it gets into the psyche that women can have businesses, women can hold public offices,” Cosgrove says, “it’s not that big of a thing when these pioneer women want to cross over from what’s considered the female realm into something like a county assessor or a judge.”

But just because the culture and seats were changing doesn’t mean everyone’s attitude was, too.

Maggie Carlton first became a Nevada state senator in 1998. She says women used to have to literally force their way into rooms when they weren’t invited to legislative meetings. In 2001, when legislators on the Commerce and Labor Committee were discussing a bill that could allow a woman’s OB-GYN to be their primary care provider, and another about mammograms for breast cancer testing, a male colleague leaned over and asked, “If I promise to vote for this stuff, can I leave now?” Carlton recalls.

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— that is, until she became more involved with her union. In January 2022, she decided that despite the challenges, she wants to run for the Nevada Legislature. That’s where she thinks she could do the most effective work. But now, she’s considering a run for the commission because the Legislature’s low pay and part-time structure make her nervous.

After hundreds of interviews with politicians, stakeholders and lobbyists, the Center for American Women in Politics is finding a new result: that women’s equality in Nevada might not be as great as lists like WalletHub’s makes it seem.

“It’s not to say that the Legislature doesn’t have any power at all,” Sinzdak says, “but it’s sort of understanding how it fits into the big picture.” in her selftaught lessons and memorizing political processes, McCormick started attending political caucuses, widening her network. When she began calling people, they got on board with the potential legislation: free period products in all K-12 schools in the state, which came to be known as the Utah Period Project, under the umbrella of a nonpartisan group McCormick founded, The Policy Project.

But in lieu of running, McCormick decided that lobbying elected officials seemed like a good choice. Success didn’t happen overnight, though — it took hundreds of phone calls over four years. One of the people who eventually got a call was Kate Bradshaw — both a lobbyist and a member of the female-majority Bountiful City Council.

Bradshaw admits that she’s a bit of an anomaly doing both simultaneously and that it’s more common for people to lobby after they’ve served in public office. Even though she estimates that male lobbyists in Utah outnumber women four to one, she still sees how women are affecting change.

A few weeks later, Bradshaw received another call. She saw herself at the center of a Venn diagram of independent networks of women, reaching out to key leaders and changemakers to gather support for the legislation.

“I think it’s probably our social training from the time we’re young that we build these types of networks,” Bradshaw says. “When women are serving in Relief Society or in civic settings like the PTA, you end up having these groups, and then you have overlapping generations. And so you’ll retain these networks that you, for the right issue, can activate.”

And it worked: In March 2022, the Utah Legislature unanimously passed the Period Project

M AG G I E C A R LTO N , N E VA DA’ S LO N G E STS E RV I N G STATE LE G I S LATO R , H AS S E E N A S H I FT I N WO M E N ’ S R E PR E S E N TATI O N A N D PO LI CY I N H E R CAREER. BUT SHE ST R E SS E S H OW FA R PO LI T I C S A R E FR O M PA R I TY.

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that affect working families.

But things might not be as equal — or as rosy — as a ranking makes it seem. The year that Carlton, Nevada’s longest-serving state legislator, entered the Senate, 12-year term limits came into effect. “There was an incentive for men to be in our Legislature if they could go in and set up camp for a long time because the gaming industry and the mining industry are going to want to work with you,” Cosgrove says, “and then you get lucrative contracts or consulting when you’re not in session.”

Many of the former male legislators went to municipal positions — like the Clark County Commission — and women took their places. Term limits have been a “double-edged sword,” says Lovell, with Emerge Nevada.

The turnover means there’s no time to get stale, but it’s also harder to build institutional knowledge and people are looking for their next gig from the start.

Nevada also has one of the country’s few part-time legislatures, meeting for 120 days every two years. Legislators only get a paycheck for the first 60 days. But as the state has grown, Carlton has found that it’s a Sisyphean task to make legislative progress with parttime hours.

“When you’ve got two million people in one county, there’s no way you’re going to get everything done in 60 days,” she says. “It’s a fulltime job if you do it right.” A full-time job with part-time pay. Carlton is retiring in November but remembers the shock she felt during her first session. As a coffee shop waitress working Monday through Friday she made more than her state legislator salary, which comes in under $10,000 per session year.

Add that to the uphill battle of passing legislation, and the job gets even less attractive. The Legislature is a powerful body on paper. “But if you’re only in session 120 days every other year, there’s going to be a natural encroachment on that power,” Cosgrove says. Since decisions still have to be made during the 18 months of downtime, the governorship and Clark County Commission have amassed influence.

Only one woman sits on the seven-seat commission that’s “arguably the most powerful body in the state,” Lovell says. Since Las Vegas sits in Clark County, the commission handles most of the money from the gaming industry.

And commissioners on average earn $90,000 per year, according to Transparent Nevada.

Sara Evans, 39, works in social services and trained with Emerge Nevada. Her interest in politics started when she was a kid, but it felt too far removed from her immediate reality

bill, and Gov. Spencer Cox subsequently signed it into law. McCormick was floored — it was one thing for a “women’s issue” bill to pass, but another for it to pass unanimously.

But McCormick is still interested in running for state or federal office, which is important to people like Lyon Cotti, who says lobbying and holding offices aren’t mutually exclusive — women still need to be in the room and have a vote.

“So will I run for office? Oh yeah, without a question. And I’ll probably lose,” McCormick says.

But she’s not worried about losing an election. She has her sights on something different. Something she thinks can ultimately have a bigger impact.

“I can build something that’s going to have the same effect, and maybe even a better effect than me being in office one time. This is a generational effort. It’s all of us coming together. And there’s so many of us you can’t push us to the side.

Fifty years ago you could. Now, you can’t.”

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HOW TO STOP THE NEXT MASS SHOOTING A SYMPOSIUM FROM ACROSS THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM

BY ETHAN BAU ER, MYA JARADAT, AL EXANDRA RAIN AND GENEV IEV E VAHL IL LU STRATIO N BY JO N K RAU S E

OCTOBER 2022

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WE’RE

NOT

GETTING IT

RIGHT After thousands of senseless deaths. After all the pained pleas from surviving family members. After witnessing those pleas blotted out by the grandstanding of our elected officials. After it all, we haven’t come close to addressing mass shootings, the scourge of our era, in a way that comes even close to a solution.

You know the sequence of events like you know your morning breakfast routine. The news pops up on your social media feed, or it spasms across the TV screen, or a websurfing co-worker intones coolly from the adjoining cubicle: another one. School shooting in Texas. Mall massacre in Indiana. A quickening of the pulse. A tightening of the chest. Again? Again.

Flip through cable channels, back and forth, between your preferred partisan news source and the preferred partisan news source of those other Americans, and the gang’s all there, again — the bulbous heads with the klieglight shine, the expertly coifed hair, all reciting the familiar talking points, each side speaking past each other, resulting in precisely nothing, because no one is drawing from the same facts to begin with.

But what if we were? What if we could agree on a shared set of facts, however small that shared set was? What if we really tried to hear each other? Could a real dialogue finally begin? These were the questions we asked as we began putting together the following pages. Focusing on nine topics that arise in the wake of every mass shooting, we scoured the nation for voices — experts and concerned Americans from both flanks of the debate — willing to speak honestly, without judgment, about subjects many of us tune out unless we agree with the source.

Think of this as a colloquium, a symposium where disparate voices from around the country — and all over the gun violence dilemma — have improbably gathered. Think of this as the beginning of a conversation long overdue.

— T HE ED I TO R S

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WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT GUNS progressive belief, the A and R in AR-15 does not stand for “assault rifle.” While some find this linguistic gaffe laughable, it points to something deeper: When it comes to guns, the two sides seem to be speaking entirely different languages, impairing our ability, as a country, to make progress in the quest to curb mass shootings. (AR, by the way, stands for ArmaLite, after the company that developed the AR-15.)

The left’s lack of both technical know-how and a broader understanding of gun culture manifests in many ways, including legislation proposals, says Amy Swearer, a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “The way they talk about firearms it’s like they don’t understand what they’re banning,” says Swearer. “What they’re banning isn’t the caliber or anything related to fire. They’re banning pistol grips” — an additional handle mounted toward the back of the weapon that allows users greater control, better aim and more efficient firing. “Even if you take them away, that bullet will cause the same amount of damage.”

Ditto for bills that suggest getting rid of concealed carrying permits, adds Swearer, maintaining that anyone who jumps through the hoops of getting such a license — and there are many hoops — is more law-abiding than the general population, not less so. Mass shootings aren’t committed by people with concealed carry licenses, she says.

Beyond misunderstanding the technical aspects of firearms, gun control advocates also often misunderstand the motivations of gun owners, says Cam Edwards, former host of the NRA radio show “Cam & Co.” “They get gun owners wrong,” he says, “and they get gun ownership wrong.”

But as ownership broadens and more and more progressives arm themselves — and anecdotal evidence from gun dealers and experts suggests they are — that could change.

For sociologist Andrew Whitehead, author of “Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States,” the gulf between gun control advocates and gun rights groups snapped into focus in 2018 when, the week following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, National Rifle Association head Wayne LaPierre spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference and argued that the answer to gun violence is more guns. As he listened closely to LaPierre’s language, Whitehead noticed a link between Christian nationalism and opposition to gun control.

Since then, Whitehead has noticed that the NRA and other gun rights groups increasingly frame the Second Amendment as being divinely inspired, powerful language for Americans who might identify as Christian. “It becomes not just a public policy issue, says Whitehead, “but an identity issue: ‘Who am I? Who are we and what does this say about us?’”

But the demographics of gun ownership are changing — skewing slightly more left, more minority and more female. And, according to Swearer, it could be that as firearms cross race, ethnic and “political divides the more you’ll see people understand” one another’s language.

CONT RARY TO P OP U L AR

— BY MYA JARADAT

Association, proposes taking that a step further: turning students themselves into conscientious gun owners and skilled marksmen. “We are currently working on getting firearm education back into school physical education programs,” Lankford says, “supporting safe youth shooting programs, firearm competitions and lawful firearm ownership.”

These ideas have their detractors and potential pitfalls. Militarizing teachers and turning schools into harder targets, for instance, doesn’t acknowledge that more weapons often escalate, rather than deescalate, potentially violent scenarios. “The solution to gun violence is not more guns, but less,” American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director Louise Melling has said. And advocating for increased mental health care doesn’t mean much without passable legislation — and the politicians naysaying gun control are rarely the same politicians caucusing in favor of increased access to health care. Not to mention the stigmatizing effects of always equating gun violence with mental health: “The notion that mental illness causes gun violence stereotypes a vast and diverse population of persons diagnosed with psychiatric conditions and oversimplifies links between violence and mental illness,” Jonathan M. Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish wrote in American Journal of Public Health.

Mass shootings are not a partisan issue. Lives lost to gun violence is not political. The solutions won’t be simple. On that, both sides seem to agree, including those who propose we stop focusing on the gun part of the gun violence epidemic. “There is not one easy thing you can do,” says Wallace, “to fix the situation.”

HOW GUN RIGHTS ADVOCATES PROPOSE TO STOP MASS SHOOTINGS G UN VIO LE N C E IS not about guns. As much as that sentence would seem to crumple under its own logic, that’s exactly what the most ardent gun rights activists maintain. Ask a strong Second Amendment advocate how to curtail one of the greatest scourges of the modern era, and answers range from arming teachers to mental health.

For Jim Wallace, executive director of Gun Owners Action League in Massachusetts, it’s the latter. “We cannot address mass shootings without addressing mental health. If you look at the bulk of (mass shootings), they are committed by people with severe mental illness that go untreated.” Likewise for Zachary Fort, president of the New Mexico Shooting Sports Association. “We need to get people help,” Fort says, “before they spiral into acting out in such a psychotic way.”

Others advocate balkanizing so-called soft targets, such as schools.

Kevin Jamison, president of both the Western Missouri Shooters Alliance and Missouri’s Sport Shooting Association, proposes arming teachers or putting gun safes bolted to their desk or closet, to deter potential school shooters.

Kenny Lankford, president of the Wyoming State Shooting

— BY GENEVIEVE VAHL

It’s a foundation of gun culture. The text firearm enthusiasts turn to like scripture. The thing they say that progressives will just never understand. The Second Amendment, or lately, simply, 2A, is never far from the minds of conservatives defending the freedom to carry.

“It comes down to the inalienable right of self-defense,” says Amy Swearer, of the Heritage Foundation. Conservatives don’t consider Swearer an expert on Second Amendment issues but the expert. “The best way, the most practical way, of carrying out the right to self-defense,” she says, “is to be armed.”

Likening the Second Amendment to “break in case of emergency glass,” Cam Edwards, editor of bearingarms.com and the former host of a NRA News Radio show, says many conservatives consider the right to bear arms as the last line in the system of checks and balances — not to overthrow the government, but to protect it.

The Second Amendment wasn’t always central to conservative ideology. It’s only within the past 40 years that it’s become increasingly important, in large part due to a concerted effort by the NRA, says Robert Spitzer, author of six books about American gun policy. “Anything that is in the Constitution has special meaning to Americans,” says Spitzer, but “the political right has succeeded in making the Second Amendment something it wasn’t designed to be.”

Historically, the understanding of the Second Amendment was that it was intended to allow state militias to arm themselves. This interpretation held sway from the 1800s to the 1960s, “and then you started to see one or two (articles in law journals) saying it’s about personal rights,” says Spitzer.

Now, saying that one supports the Second Amendment is a way of

ZACH GIBS ON/GE T TY IM AGES

WHY THE SECOND AMENDMENT IS SO IMPORTANT TO CONSERVATIVES

GU N RIGH TS ADVOC AT E S AT T E ND A RALLY I N R I C H M O N D, V I R G I N I A .

invoking that one is supportive of a slew of conservative ideas. “Gun rights articulate so nicely that whole package of conservative, new right political beliefs and policy proposals,” says David Yamane, a sociologist at Wake Forest University who is both a gun owner and gun culture expert.

Mass shootings bolster conservatives’ support for an individualistic interpretation of the 231-year-old addendum to the constitution, says Spitzer, reinforcing the notion that they need to be individually armed and ready should a shooting take place, as Swearer’s interpretation suggests.

“The Second Amendment is about … individual self-defense against criminals,” she says, “and about collective self-defense as communities or a nation against tyrants and invading armies. It’s not divinely inspired.

It’s about a natural inalienable right … that transcends religion. It’s innately human.” — BY MJ OCTOBER 2022

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WHAT WOULD AN ASSAULT RIFLE BAN REALLY LOOK LIKE? A F T E R E VE RY MASS shooting, a similar refrain issues from gun control advocates. Stop the guns and you stop the massacres. But is this call to nix arms practical? How, exactly, would it work? Sure, it’s been done in other countries. After a 1996 shooting in Australia claimed 35 lives, more than one million guns were bought back and smelted. The same year, the U.K. successfully implemented a handgun ban. In 2019, New Zealand banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines after a gunman killed 51 people in two mosques. But those are countries with different histories and cultures. Countries where firearms aren’t de facto totems of individual liberty. Countries that, let’s face it, don’t have so many guns that they’ve lost count.

In the U.S. no one knows exactly how many weapons are out there circulating, says Josh Horowitz, of the Center for Gun Violence Solutions. The best estimates place the number at nearly 400 million. In other words, there are more guns in America than people.

And between the massive black market and poor regulations on the transfer of guns, authorities don’t even know who owns that unknown quantity, says Yamane. There’s no federal gun registry, just a few state registries, including in California, which, notes Yamane, “doesn’t allow private sales of firearms.” That “doesn’t mean California knows everyone who owns a firearm down to the last gun,” he says, and there would be no process for authorities to collect the guns of convicted felons — a group that isn’t supposed to have firearms in the first place.

Tim Moore, a 35-year-old gun owner who lives in the town of Lake Placid, Florida, says at any given point in the day, he is not more than six feet away from a firearm. He scoffs at the idea of a ban, not based on the morality of it — Moore, like most gun owners, does believe there should be some restrictions on firearms — but because of the logistics.

“Let’s say 20 percent do a buy back. How are you going to get the rest?” Moore says, pointing to the vastness of the country and the fact that we don’t know which homes hold guns and which don’t. And even if the government cuts off the flow by stopping sales of new weapons, Moore asks, are the nearly 400 million weapons that are already circulating simply “going to wither away?” — BY MJ

DO GOOD GUYS WITH GUNS REALLY STOP BAD GUYS WITH GUNS?

WH E N A 2 2 -Y E AR- OL D used a handgun to kill an Indiana mall shooter in July 2022, pro-gun outlets touted his heroism as yet another example of a “good guy with a gun” — a frequently proposed solution to mass shootings. As Coby Garcia noted shortly afterward in the Harvard Political Review, “There are numerous examples in which armed civilians have engaged with active shooters and neutralized the situation.” But how much do we really know? Is carrying a weapon more likely to protect? Or more likely to escalate the situation and increase casualties?

An oft-cited survey by criminology researcher Gary Kleck found that Americans use guns defensively about 2.5 million times per year — some five times more than guns are used in crimes annually. (Though, estimates vary — often considerably — from 2,000 to 100,000 or more.) “There are a lot of Americans who own guns for self-protection, but … a surprisingly large number of them have actually used guns for self-protection,” Kleck says.

Harvard’s David Hemenway, a longtime Kleck adversary, has criticized Kleck’s methodology, saying it’s impossible to answer the “good guy with a gun” question by extrapolating survey results. Hemenway instead points to 2020 Stanford study that found men who owned handguns were eight times more likely to die of self-inflicted gunshots; or a landmark 1993 study that found owning a gun nearly tripled the odds of homicide by a close contact. Hemenway’s point: the presence of a firearm, no matter its intended purpose, statistically raises the likelihood of violence.

But “human beings often don’t make these kinds of decisions based on rational-choice economics,” explains Joseph Pierre, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral science at UCLA. “Gun ownership has a lot to do with how guns make us feel.” So even if owning a gun increases the risk of an accidental shooting or suicide, our brains often dismiss that elevated risk based on the possibility of preventing harm — even if that possibility is unlikely. “For gun owners,” Pierre says, “the actual odds of (defensive gun use) aren’t all that meaningful when they’re juxtaposed with the (faulty) perception that the odds” are in the gun owner’s favor.

— BY ETHAN BAUER

IN THE U.S. NO ONE KNOWS EXACTLY HOW MANY WEAPONS ARE OUT THERE. THE BEST ESTIMATES PLACE THE NUMBER AT NEARLY 400 MILLION. IN OTHER WORDS, THERE ARE MORE GUNS IN AMERICA THAN PEOPLE. 56

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44 MIND ON THIS IS THE AMERICAN

GUNS

Percent of adults who live in U.S. households with guns PER A 2020 GALLUP SURVEY

71 393M 6 7 8 9 10 9 8 7 6

Percent of mass shooters with a previous history of domestic violence PER AN ANALYSIS BY EVERYTOWN

Guns in possession by Americans

PER A 2018 ESTIMATION BY THE SMALL ARMS SURVEY

COMPILED BY

19.8M 56

Percent of mass shooters who demonstrated at least one warning sign prior to the shooting

ALEXANDRA RAIN

PER A 2020 NATIONAL SHOOTING SPORTS FOUNDATION ESTIMATION

92

Percent of Americans in favor of background checks for all gun sales

3% 42%

55%

Percent of Utahns who support universal background checks ACCORDING TO A JULY DESERET NEWS/HINCKLEY INSTITUTE OF POLITICS POLL

66

Percent of Americans who believe laws regarding firearms sales should be stricter PER A GALLUP 2022 SURVEY

42 55 03

IAN SULLIVAN

Assault rifles circulating in the U.S.

PER AN ANALYSIS BY EVERYTOWN

90

ART BY

Percent of Americans who want to enforce current gun laws more strictly Percent of Americans who want to pass new gun laws in addition

73 PER A 2021 GALLUP SURVEY

Percent of Americans who believe there should be no ban of the possession of handguns PER A GALLUP 2022 SURVEY

73%

Percent of American who have no opinion PER A GALLUP 2022 SURVEY

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THE PRESENCE OF A FIREARM, NO MATTER ITS INTENDED PURPOSE, STATISTICALLY RAISES THE LIKELIHOOD OF VIOLENCE.

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO SURVIVE A MASS SHOOTING the storm of bullets first. They pinged off metal gates near the stage during the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas. “Nobody really knew where to run,” she remembers of that October 1, 2017, evening. Bodies dropped. People were trampled.

Lisa Fine-Cavalli, another festival attendee, remembers the initial denial. “It’s just fireworks,” people had said. Fine-Cavalli came from Sacramento. Williams from Southern California. Both were especially excited to see their favorite country artist, Jason Aldean — who happened to be on stage when the barrage began.

Fine-Cavalli knew those bursts weren’t fireworks. She took cover under bleachers as the worst shooting in U.S. history began, unfolding like a sadistic game of red-light green-light: People waited for the pop-pop-pop to cease so they could run, only to drop again when the shooting resumed. The air vibrated as bullets whizzed past her head. “I just kept thinking,” Fine-Cavalli says, “that we were probably all going to die.”

Williams and Fine-Cavalli escaped the bullets but not the burden of survival. The effects have lingered since that fateful night when a mysterious gunman slaughtered 58 and injured more than 500, unleashing a tsunami of consequences for survivors and for America.

Psychotherapist Harper West has seen it before. A school shooting gripped her suburban Detroit community the same year as the Las Vegas shooting. The first therapy appointments were with the survivors, carrying guilt. “Why didn’t I get shot?” they wondered. Next came the trauma-adjacent; people who didn’t experience the rampage themselves, but who were still feeling its shockwave.

University of California, Irvine’s Roxane Cohen Silver studies “collective trauma” — events that can impact a broader group than those directly affected, like the Las Vegas shooting. “Traditional media, as well as social media, can broadcast the tragedy instantaneously beyond the directly impacted communities,” she explains. “It can shape our threat perceptions,” adds University of California, Santa Barbara’s Erika Felix, “which can increase our anxiety.” The American Psychological Association confirmed as much in a 2019 survey, which found almost 80 percent of Americans fear mass shootings, with children particularly stressed.

Williams still can’t fully process what she witnessed in Las Vegas; she also can’t escape it. “You find yourself looking at pictures, or at documentaries,” she says, “just trying to believe that you were actually there.”

Fine-Cavalli couldn’t sleep for three months. She still has recurring

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nightmares. “It just alters your existence completely,” she says. “I don’t trust people like I used to. I’m more edgy. I’m more quick to anger — or to be emotional.” She’s also still stricken with disbelief.

Even now, after five trying years, she often recalls escaping the hail of bullets only to come across a truck piled with bloody, mangled bodies. “This can’t be real,” she told herself then. She walked, then ran, then walked toward her hotel, passing people along the Strip, waving yardlong margaritas, taking selfies with gambling winnings, still unaware of the carnage. “How,” Fine-Cavalli asked herself, “can these people not know?”

— BY EB

WHAT AR-15s DO TO CHILDREN’S BODIES M ASS SHO OTE R S HAVE made AR-15-style semi-automatic rifles their weapons of choice, at least in high-profile events like Sandy Hook, Parkland and Uvalde. They do so for the same reasons that some champion AR-15s as the best self-defense weapons on the market: They’re easy to shoot, they’re versatile and they inflict serious damage quickly. “I personally,” explained one such advocate in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, “stand in support of the AR-15.”

Traditionally, in the aftermath of these massacres, AR-15-style rifles have received a lot, maybe even most, of the attention — the seemingly monthly debate over how and why they should be banned. Recently, thanks to the release of crime-scene photos, trauma surgeons willing to go on record and revelations that authorities had to use DNA testing to identify mangled kids in Uvalde, what those weapons actually do, physically, to the human body is coming into focus. “Highlighting what actually happens to our children,” says Las Vegas trauma surgeon Deborah Kuhls, “really sucks people in enough to look at the whole problem.”

Though the overwhelming majority of gun injuries are not caused by AR-15-style weapons, the injuries they inflict are especially gruesome

and deadly compared to those from a handgun. The first time Kuhls saw the effects, the high-velocity bullet had not only penetrated chest muscles and fat, but sent shockwaves that bruised relatively distant organs, including the victim’s lungs and heart. “I just thought of this bullet,” she recalls, “just destroying his soft tissue.”

“It’s about energy,” says Utah trauma surgeon Dr. Toby Enniss. All bullets move fast to the naked eye, but AR-15 bullets leave the muzzle two to three times faster than typical handguns. Surgeons call the results “cavitating lesions” — shredded tissue surrounding the bullet’s trajectory. The energy is “physically pushing tissue out of its way,” Enniss says. And it’s especially potent in children, where the effects of high-velocity weapons are multiplied. “If I walked up to you and shot you with an AR-15 in your kneecap, it would just pulverize your bones,” says Johns Hopkins trauma surgeon Dr. Joseph Sakran. “(With children), the cavities are smaller, the organs are compressed in a smaller space. … It’s not a surprise that some of the parents (in Uvalde) couldn’t identify their kids.”

— BY EB

WHY CAN’T CONGRESS PASS MEANINGFUL GUN LEGISLATION? T HE M ASSAC R E IN Uvalde, Texas, this summer spurred the passing of the Safer Communities Act, the first piece of bipartisan gun legislation in almost 30 years. The bill was introduced in 2021, not by a Democrat, but by the Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio — a reminder that issues surrounding guns don’t fall neatly along party lines. Nor does the criticism of the recent legislation — with opposition to coming from both sides, albeit for different reasons. Some on the left call it toothless and say that while the law is a significant step forward, it doesn’t go far enough; on the right, Republican leaders called on legislators to vote against the bill and tarred those who supported it as RINOs. Nonetheless it passed, becoming the latest chapter in the zig-zagging tale of bipartisan legislation that seems unable to fix the scourge of gun violence. Take the firearms control bill passed in 1968, in the wake of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy assassinations; it was rolled back in 1986 by a law signed by then-President Ronald Reagan. In subsequent years, however, Reagan, a 1981 presidential assassination attempt target, made a public about face, culminating with his 1991 New York Times op-ed titled “Why I’m for the Brady Bill.” (The name referred to his aide, James Brady, shot during the attempt on Reagan’s life.) Imposing a five-day waiting period, the Brady Bill took effect the same year Congress passed the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, a law criticized,

in large part, because it included a 10-year sunset clause. Following the law’s 2004 lapse, notes Robert Spitzer, author of six books on American gun policy and a City University of New York Cortland political science professor, mass shootings “began an annual increase.”

This summer’s Safer Communities Act passed at a time of extreme party polarization, Spitzer says. “The two parties have become ever wider apart on the gun issue.” This shows up on the state level with “more liberal states strengthening their laws and more conservative states loosening their laws.” This red-blue state divide is “symptomatic of the polarization and balkanization of American politics despite the fact that there was this (most recent) agreement.”

Though some gun control advocates are pleased with much of the new law, experts say that while it narrowed a few holes in previous legislation, it didn’t close them entirely. For instance, Josh Horwitz, co-director of Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Violence Solutions, believes the bill’s emphasis on mental health is misplaced.

Nonetheless, Horwitz was encouraged by the legislation. “This is what a compromise looks like,” he says, in “a very divided country on firearms.” w — BY MJ

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THE MAN WHO SAW TOO MUCH

BY Ethan Bauer 60

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY Laura Seitz

DON DUFF’S discovery in October 1962 helped push the world to the BRINK OF NUCLEAR WAR. Sixty years later, with the specter of nuclear conflict back in the headlines, THE EFFECTS LINGER.

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the ground, in a bunker equipped with a thick metal door like a bank vault, a young, blue-eyed Airman 1st Class reported for his usual midnight shift.

He knew this night, October 15, 1962, could be consequential, though plenty of others had been, too. As a photo interpreter with the Strategic Air Command stationed at Offutt Air Force Base outside of Omaha, Nebraska, Don Duff had helped discover previously unknown missile sites in Siberia and Mongolia using images from the satellites that 62

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constituted America’s surveillance response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik I — the first successful, Earth-orbiting satellite, which marked the beginning of the space race and a new era of the Cold War. Now, five years later, the U.S. remained deeply distrustful of the Soviets. Including the nation’s intelligence apparatus, which for several years

had taken a particular interest in Cuba. The 1959 Cuban revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power had revealed its Communist character, and the spectacular failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 had entrenched not only Castro’s government but its alliance with Moscow. And Moscow, it had become clear, was prepared to exploit that partnership.

L EF T: P R E SIDE N T JOHN F. K E N N E DY A MID TH E C U B A N MISSILE C R IS ES, I N THE FA LL O F 1 9 6 2.

A since-declassified CIA report dated August 22, 1962, detailed a military buildup on the island starting in at least late July. Informants reported that Soviet ships were hauling in huge amounts of military equipment very quickly — a first outside the Soviet bloc.

“Clearly,” the report concluded, “something new and different is taking place.” What exactly that something was, though, the U.S. government wasn’t sure.

To find out, it began deploying U-2 spy planes to conduct surveillance of Cuba. On the night of October 13, at 11:30 p.m., Pacific Time, U-2 pilot Richard Heyser took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California in a newly modified aircraft and flew over Arizona, New Mexico and Texas en route to western Cuba. With crystal-clear skies, he turned on his cameras as he darted in and out of Cuban airspace, hoping to avoid the deadly consequences of Soviet anti-aircraft missiles. Six minutes and 928 photos later, Heyser turned toward Florida and landed at McCoy Air Force Base. Representatives from the CIA, as well as Strategic Air Command’s director of intelligence, Lt. Gen. Robert Smith, awaited him.

Duff admits this is where the history gets murky. Most textbooks and government reports skip over how what happened next unfolded. But 60 years after those fateful days brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction, Duff, now 83, with a few wispy strands of white hair jutting from his pink scalp and a slight shake in his hands, maintains his place in history.

That history has renewed relevance this year, with the war in Ukraine — and Russia not-so-subtly implying its potential use of nukes — arguably bringing the world the closest it’s been to nuclear conflict since 1962.

Duff sighs at the prospect. He knows better than just about any living American how close we’ve come in the past, and remains very proud of what he did to prevent such a catastrophe back in ’62. With a navy-blue

veteran cap commemorating his service in the Cuban missile crisis perched atop his head — a cap he custom-made himself — the longtime Utah resident repeats what he’s been repeating for decades. He repeats what’s been playing on loop in his mind all that time, something that the authors of history books on the crisis never acknowledge: Don Duff found the missiles. He identified them first.

The CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS has renewed relevance this year, with the WAR IN UKRAINE arguably bringing the world the closest it’s been to nuclear conflict since 1962.

DON DUFF GREW UP IN THE SHADOW of World War II — the era of that unique species of hero, the American G.I. Duff was fixated on such heroism from the time he was five or six.

“I used to be able to sing all the songs,” he says with pride. Perhaps it started with his older brother, who’d served in the Navy. Perhaps it started by reading American history texts. Or maybe he was inspired by his own family’s history, which he says goes back to the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War. “I had a strong sense of patriotism,” he says, “so I figured it was my duty to enlist and serve my country.”

He did so at 20 years old, opting for basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, outside of San Antonio. On the ride down, as far as he could tell, he was the only person in his batch of recruits who’d volunteered; everyone else had been drafted or forced into it by some other means. Perhaps that’s why his drill instructor made him the barracks chief, in charge of 40 soon-to-be soldiers. He didn’t love the idea; he was shy, he admits. But he agreed, and he can’t argue with the results. “The military made me speak out,” he says, “and stand by my values.”

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instead. That meant three months at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Once, in the middle of a hot Texas summer, he was standing at the front of a line of stationary soldiers and felt something hit him in the back. The guy behind him had passed out from the heat. Duff tried to help him, but his instructor told him to get back into position.

“No sir, I can’t do that,” he remembers saying.

“I take care of my men.” Such moments made him confident that should the time arise to say something important — something his commanders, his country or even the world needed to know — he’d be prepared.

“That stuck with me. I didn’t think I could speak out like that,” he says. “But you learn.”

“That was actually a major motivator for guys like me.

‘IF YOU WORK HARD, YOU COULD BE A HERO LIKE DON DUFF.’”

— Robert King retired air force lieutenant colonel

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DUFF TURNED 24 YEARS OLD on the day Heyser’s U-2 flight snapped the first photos of western Cuba. His birthday party was at a friend’s trailer house, off base, where he enjoyed a home-cooked dinner and a cake. “I guess I’ll head back to the base and get ready for my midnight shift,” he told his friends.

The facility where his unit processed photos was among the most secure in the country.

To reach it, he needed to walk into the headquarters of Strategic Air Command and show identification to a watchful guard. That granted him access to an elevator, which he took three floors down into the earth. Another guard waited to perform another inspection, which granted him access to a hallway. Down that hallway, he took a left turn toward the Command Center. The photo interpretation lab was right beside it. To gain entrance, a person needed not only top-secret clearance, but access to a rotating code word. Duff knew this procedure well. One time, while on guard duty inside the bank vault-like door, he heard someone buzzing in from the outside. “Who’s there?”

Duff called through a keyhole latch. “This is General Smith,” came the answer — Strategic Air Command’s director of intelligence.

“Oh, good morning general,” Duff called back. “What’s the password?”

“This is General Smith, I don’t need a password,” he answered, followed by a thunderstorm of expletives. “Who the hell do you think I am,” Duff remembers him saying, “Mickey Mouse?”

Duff didn’t budge, and Smith left fuming, promising punishment to come. Duff reported

the incident to his commanding officer. “You probably would’ve caught some hell if you’d have let him in,” the colonel told him. “I’ll take care of it.” Duff never heard about it again.

Luckily, no one would bother them as October 14 wore on into the next day. Using machines called “Iteks” — imagine a big-screen TV with a large hand-crank to roll the film through and various knobs and joysticks to zoom in and adjust — two crews pored over Heyser’s snapshots in a cramped darkroom.

Prior to Duff ’s shift some lower-resolution film had been sent to Offutt, and one of Duff ’s colleagues, a former roommate, had taken a look at the image during the day shift and identified missile trailers. Now Duff instructed the technicians to focus on that particular installation. At around 2 a.m., he noticed something. “Let’s zoom in on this picture,” he told a fellow interpreter. “You see this missile trailer? It looks like part of this missile is sticking out of the trailer. Maybe they’re unloading it.” The missile in question appeared to be covered with canvas, but his eyes were well trained; he could make out the exposed edge.

And using knowledge of Soviet weaponry, he identified it as an SS-4 medium-range ballistic missile, capable of delivering a nuclear warhead from Washington, D.C., to San Antonio, and anywhere in between.

IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH, Duff had no way of knowing what was happening behind the scenes, at the highest levels of American government. He had no way of knowing that, at 8:45 in the morning on October 16 — at least according to the official history — national security adviser McGeorge Bundy informed President John F. Kennedy of the missiles, leading Kennedy to call an emergency meeting of his top advisers in the White House Cabinet Room at 11:45 that same morning. At that first “ExCom” meeting, featuring the secretaries of defense, treasury and state; the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff; and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, among others, President Kennedy decided that the missiles had to be removed, without question.

Before long, the rest of the world would know that imperative, too.

On October 22, at 7 p.m. Eastern Time, Kennedy addressed the nation from the Oval

DON DU F F IN SALT L AK E C IT Y, JU LY 2 02 2, NE ARLY 6 0 Y E ARS AF T E R H E IDE NT IF IE D A S OV IE T MISS IL E IN AN IMAGE TAK E N H IGH AB OV E C U B A.

Office. “Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island,” he told the country. “Upon receiving the first preliminary hard information of this nature last Tuesday morning at 9 a.m., I directed that our surveillance be stepped up.”

Duff, watching from a TV in a barracks breakroom at Offutt, seized on “unmistakable evidence” and “preliminary hard information.”

He’d spent the past week poring over more photographs from Cuba, identifying more potential missile sites. “We knew it was pretty tense, and we knew that what he (Kennedy) was saying — ‘We have discovered missile sites

in Cuba’ — that was our work,” Duff says. In his head, he thought, “We’re the ones who gave him that.”

Over the next seven days, Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev exchanged nine official letters while also sparring through various backchannels. At Offutt and at military bases around the country, the U.S. prepared for war. Offutt had gone to DEFCON 3 on October 20 and to DEFCON 2 on October 24, meaning that nuclear war was near.

Planes were in the air at all times, heading toward Soviet territory, turning back near the border until the order was given to proceed with an attack. Offutt was home to a refueling squadron, and one morning, after Duff had finished his shift at 8 a.m. and was walking the quarter mile to the chow hall, he noticed one of those planes — a massive Boeing KC-135 — rumbling down the 10,000-foot runway. “It was really going,” he remembers. “You could hear the motors.” And it just barely made it off the ground, he recalls, given how heavily loaded it was with fuel. Nuclear war loomed as heavily as it ever had. The Strategic Air Command headquarters, he’d been assured, was very well-built; strong enough, in fact, to withstand a direct hit if you’re underground.

“Yeah,” Duff thought, “but how do you get out from underground?”

On October 27, Russian forces shot down Rudolf Anderson Jr.’s U-2 during another reconnaissance flight over Cuba, killin g the pilot. To make matters worse, another U-2 flying a mission in Alaska got off course and ended up in Soviet territory, prompting the Soviets to scramble their fighters, and prompting the Americans to do the same. What followed became known as “Black Saturday” — in the words of Kennedy aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “the most dangerous moment in human history.” Kennedy understood exactly what was happening; his experience as a veteran of World War II had taught him that regardless OCTOBER 2022

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of a commander’s intentions, randomness — mistakes, misfires, disobeyed orders — were endemic to warfare. In this situation, though, the burden of that entropy could mean literal human extinction.

Duff, who believed an invasion of Cuba was imminent, made an unusual request of his commanding officer the following day. With the crisis spiraling out of control, he’d heard rumors that the invasion would take place around 9 a.m. “I know we’re supposed to get off at 8 o’clock,” he said, “but with the tenseness outside, can I stay in and clean the rooms for a couple hours?”

KEYSTON E- FRAN CE /GA MMA-KE YSTON E V IA G ETT Y I MAG ES

THE DEATH OF ANDERSON, the U-2 pilot, proved a turning point. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev realized the situation was evolving into something they couldn’t guide.

On October 28, they struck a deal: Kennedy pledged that the U.S. would not invade Cuba; in exchange, the Soviets would dismantle and remove the missiles. (The U.S. also agreed to remove its own missiles from Turkey at a later date, though that detail wasn’t revealed until

decades later.) Duff personally breathed a sigh of relief in early November, as he continued reviewing surveillance footage from Cuba.

“We could see,” he recalls, “that they were being dismantled.”

Kennedy visited Offutt that December to thank the Air Force for its contributions during the Cuban missile crisis. “The amount of flights made during that period of time, the amount of men that were involved, was a record unparalleled by any country in the history of air power,” Kennedy said during his public remarks. “There is no doubt that it contributed greatly to the maintenance of the peace and the security of the United States and those countries associated with us. … We are very much indebted to you all.” Duff couldn’t attend himself, but he did earn a special ribbon that he still keeps pinned to his Air Force Blues. And he also heard secondhand that in off-the-record remarks, Kennedy thanked the Air Force for discovering the missiles.

If Kennedy did believe the Air Force first spotted the missiles, that’s not what most history books recount. Most history books on the crisis say that the CIA, not Duff or his beloved Air Force unit, discovered the missiles.

Phil Carradice’s book, “The Cuban Missile Crisis,” sums up the question of missile identification in one sentence: “The images were

studied by experts at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Centre.” A book of declassified documents related to the crisis, “The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962,” adds: “By the following afternoon photographic interpreters would notify top CIA officials that the mission had obtained definitive photographic evidence of Soviet medium-range ballistic missile bases.”

It frustrates Duff to no end that his role never became common knowledge. He’s spent decades combing through scholarship and research to find the evidence he needs to prove his place in history, but so far, he hasn’t found it. “(The CIA) claims credit for everything,” he says. “The Air Force was never given credit for this stuff, and neither was our unit.”

Even the Air Force’s own account of the situation, “Strategic Air Command Operations in the Cuban Crisis of 1962,” notes that once Heyser landed in Florida, the film from his flight was “immediately unloaded and personally flown to Washington.” Duff doesn’t dispute that; he just insists that there’s more to the story. He insists that Heyser’s film also made its way to Offutt later that day, and that he quickly identified the missile. He insists that Kennedy must have known about them shortly thereafter, given that the CIA didn’t identify the weapons until some 14 hours later.

F IDE L C AST RO ADDRE SS E S H IS NAT ION IN 1 9 6 2 , WARNING C U B AN C IT IZ E NS OF T H E ME AS U RE S TAK E N

BY T H E U.S . AT T H E H E IGH T OF T H E MISS IL E C RIS IS .

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KEYSTO NE-FRANCE/GAM M A-KEYSTONE VIA GE TTY IMAGE S

In his own written recollections of the crisis, Duff said that the official timeline “doesn’t jibe with my recollection of (Strategic Air Command) communications to D.C., on October 14 and 15.” It’s possible that the U.S. intelligence apparatus waited to inform Kennedy until Duff ’s finding was confirmed; the spirit of rivalry between the CIA and Air Force intelligence was well known in those days. Regardless, “The CIA and other people deny that it ever happened,” he explains.

“All I can tell you is that this sticks in your mind like anything in life that you remember.

At 2 o’clock in the morning on October 15, I saw this missile,” he says. “I was there.”

Since-declassified Air Force photos do show, without question, Strategic Air Command personnel examining reconnaissance photos during the Cuban missile crisis. And Duff ’s discovery was at least well known by word of mouth. Robert King, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who served as a photo interpreter at Offutt in 1971 and ’72 and eventually moved to Salt Lake City, explains the potential discrepancy in the official narrative this way: “I can’t tell you who was first or not, because one of the things we did — that was very wise — was to create a competition between the CIA and Strategic Air Command,” he says. “That competition drove guys to want to be the first.” And even if he never got official credit, the airmen who followed Duff at Offutt knew his name and knew what he did. “That was actually a major motivator for guys like me,” says King. “‘If you work hard, you could be a hero like Don Duff.’”

AFTER RETIRING FROM THE MILITARY, Duff enrolled at Utah State University and began a notable career in forestry and fisheries. Using his skills and Air Force connections, he managed to get U-2 pilots to conduct test flights over mountain ranges in Utah’s desert country; they had to do test flights anyway, he figured, so why not make them synergistic?

Using images from those flights, he found isolated streams that he then tested for the presence of certain strains of fish that were thought to be extinct; he found two — Bonneville and Lahontan cutthroat trout. Eventually, his efforts were recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency, and he won numerous

awards, including from the American Fisheries Society and Trout Unlimited. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service touted his achievements on its Facebook page just last year. But despite the notoriety gained via his career’s success, he’s never forgotten his role in the Cuban missile crisis.

Richard Heyser, the pilot whose U-2 photos of Cuba sparked the crisis, feared he would be blamed for it. “I kind of felt like I was going to be looked at as the one who started the whole thing,” he told The Associated Press in 2005.

“I wasn’t anxious to have that reputation.”

Perhaps it’s because his name has largely been lost to history, but Duff never felt that way. He was — and still is — happy to have played a role. He did exactly what he was supposed to do, and in so doing helped keep the United States secure.

Sixty years since his discovery, he’s seated in a small room at a library in Salt Lake City.

He splits his time between a home nearby and a cabin in Nevada. He still thinks about the missile crisis often. Still wears the baseball cap he had custom-made, commemorating his service. Still talks about his involvement in the affair. He was once invited to a panel on Kennedy at the University of Utah, where he gave a presentation about the Cold War. He was disappointed by how little the students knew of what happened, even though he could hardly blame them given their dates of birth. But he wants them to know. Especially now, with tensions so high in Ukraine and Russia.

“The younger generation … ought to realize what went on, and that it could happen again,” Duff says, pressing his brown hiking boot up against the foot of a Formica table. “We were this close to World War III.” He holds his trembling fingertips about an inch apart. Duff is not a man who startles easily, but now his blue eyes glance up at the fluorescent-lit ceiling, then back down to offer a warning: “It was scary,” he says. “It was scary.”

Duff doesn’t know how many more anniversaries he’ll be able to mark, but this year, he’ll be traveling to California in October for a 60-year reunion. Surrounded by U-2 pilots at the program’s Beale Air Force Base headquarters, he’s pretty sure he’ll be the only photo interpreter left. He’ll spend the weekend attending keynote breakfasts, presentations, speeches from pilots. Among his own unique species, you can bet he’ll have plenty of stories to share.

And you can bet, too, that he’ll be wearing his custom hat.

F IDE L C AST RO, L E F T, WIT H T H E U SS R’S GE NE RAL S E C RE TARY, NIK ITA K H RU S H C H E V.

It FRUSTRATES DUFF TO NO END that his role never became common knowledge. “(The CIA) claims credit for everything.

THE AIR FORCE WAS NEVER GIVEN CREDIT for this stuff, and neither was our unit.”

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SECULARISM AS SCAPEGOAT IN THE 21ST CENTURY, HAS FAITH BECOME TOO EASY AND BRITTLE?

BY T ER RY L G I V E N S A N D N ATH A N I E L G I V E N S

I

n 1857, decades before Thomas Edison’s work on the phonograph, a Frenchman by the name of Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville conceived the idea of permanently etching soundwaves on a durable medium. He succeeded in producing a “phonautograph,” which recorded human voice in the way that a polygraph traces the varying lines registering heart rate and respiration. The machine duly registered in lampblack the undulating forms of audible sound as human subjects spoke into the device. But the resulting squiggles were no more decipherable than binary code is to the human eye. It seemed the project had failed.

A century and a half later, French researchers discovered several of Scott’s lampblack recordings in the Academy of Sciences in Paris.

One of them dated to April 1860, three years before Abraham Lincoln delivered his address at Gettysburg. The researchers conceived the idea of converting the waveforms into digital code then played it back through computer speakers. At first they thought they were hearing a woman’s voice, singing the French folk song “Au Clair de la Lune,” but later they realized they had been playing back the audio at double its recorded speed. When they dropped it down to the right tempo, a man’s voice appeared out of the crackle and hiss: Edouard-Leon de Martinville serenading us from the grave.

A voice sang its way into the oblivion of a century and a half. And then, like snatching a firefly from the evening sky, other humans in another century reached back into time, bridged the stretch of years and heard the melody. What we may be lacking in today’s world is a more strenuous listening.

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challenges to faith, and are they particular to this modern moment? It has been commonplace in the age of growing religious disaffiliation and the rise of the “nones” to equate unbelief with the rise of secularism.

As Charles Taylor points out, ours is the first era in which belief is one option among many: disbelief, indifference, agnosticism or atheism.

If you had lived centuries ago in the West, everyone around you would have been, in Robinson Jeffers’ words, “taking the stars and the gods for granted.”

WHAT ARE T H E

CHRISTIANITY SET ITSELF IN OPPOSITION TO SELF-INTEREST AND THE DOMINANT SOCIAL PARADIGMS OF THE DAY, INSISTING ON SELFDENIAL, SACRIFICE AND A TOTAL DISREGARD FOR SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL HIERARCHIES.

The simplest expression of the secularization hypothesis is the idea that societies outgrow religion as they modernize. This happens when science and technology develop sufficiently to supplant religion. Why hope for some better world if this world can be rendered sufficiently comfortable? Why search for miraculous healing when modern medicine offers reliable cures? At first glance, the secularization hypothesis is borne out in the data.

Numerous polls show that religiosity is on the decline by a variety of measures including religious preference, importance attributed to religion, church attendance, church membership or belief in God. Youngest Americans are, according to these measures, the least religious, with Gallup finding that just 45 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds “report that religion is very important in their daily lives.”

The secularization hypothesis entails the belief that moderns are more sophisticated, less naïve and credulous than post-Enlightenment folks. That’s a bit simplistic, actually. Premoderns may not have had a lot of the knowledge we have, but they weren’t any less intelligent.

Most of our vaunted achievements are the product of a combined cultural inheritance, not individual superiority. And one thing that premoderns had ample experience with — more so than we moderns — was death.

So the fundamental Christian claim — that Christ rose from the dead — was met with entrenched skepticism even among early disciples. The seeds of belief in the Resurrection only took initial root in the women of the movement, and who was going to take them seriously? The apostles did not. “He appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went out and told those who had been with him, while they were mourning and weeping. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it” (Mark 16:9–11).

We should not be surprised, therefore, that some of the earliest critics of Christianity pointed out its raw implausibility; apparently familiar with the Resurrection narrative, Celsus asked, “And who beheld this? A half-frantic woman,

ILLU STR ATION BY M A RY H A AS DY K

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THE TASK OF CHRISTIANITY, AS WITH ALL MORAL SYSTEMS, IS TO PROVOKE US TO BRIDGE THE ENORMOUS DISTANCE BETWEEN WHAT WE ARE NOW AND WHAT WE SENSE WE CAN — AND SHOULD — BE.

as you state, and some other one, perhaps, of those who were engaged in the same system of delusion.” No wonder that one of the oldest of all depictions of Jesus Christ is the Alexamenos graffito, a mocking depiction of Christians worshiping Jesus Christ on the cross, who is depicted with the head of a donkey.

“Christ crucified (was) foolishness to Gentiles,” observed Paul (1 Corinthians 1:23).

According to the secularization hypothesis, religion flourished before science because conditions were so deplorable. For those living lives of unremitting hardship, religion offered an appealing form of consolation: suffering was given meaning, and a distant future promised better days and heavenly rewards. Religion was a collection of stories that people adopted to make life tolerable. In this light, religion seems superfluous when technology has eased so much of the pain from which religion was merely anesthetizing us. But such a focus on religion as a palliative neglects the tremendous costs that Christianity imposed on its disciples.

We need to revisit these careless assumptions that faith was easier, more natural and less “against the grain” in a more naïve, premodern age. Consider the rise of Christianity under the Roman Empire. The defining and most conspicuous attributes of early Christianity — as judged by its non-Christian contemporaries — were strict regulation of sexual behavior for both sexes and a total disregard for class distinctions. In contrast, most of the religions of that time ignored or even condoned and endorsed sexual promiscuity (at least for men) and rigid social hierarchy. One could hardly think of an outlook worse suited to make life tolerable than one which forbade partaking in many basic pleasures and offended the ruling elite.

It was extremely difficult for early Christian converts to accept claims that contradicted their everyday experience (such as people rising from the dead), and it was also difficult for them to embrace a system of belief that was extraordinarily demanding. Christianity set itself in opposition to self-interest and the dominant social paradigms of the day, insisting on self-denial, sacrifice and a total disregard for social, economic and political hierarchies. After all, Christianity requires us to love our enemies, to seek perfection, to live by strict moral codes and to give up everything — including our time, our resources and even our lives.

THE TAS K OF Christianity, as with all moral systems, is to provoke us to bridge the

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enormous distance between what we are now and what we sense we can — and should — be. That is not an easy or pleasant journey to make. Christianity promises a lot, but it also asks a lot in return. Until the late fourth century, being a Christian required conspicuous courage — social, moral and often physical. It was more than marginally demanding and cost more than mere social marginalization. Christians who accepted these claims often paid for it with their lives.

In fact, we suggest one crucial circumstance behind the rise of the “nones” is not that belief is too hard in a secular age; perhaps it has become too easy. After the fourth century, the costs of being a Christian were turned inside out. Christian affiliation was now an asset, not a liability. From the late Roman era to the 21st century American political arena, being Christian has been a virtual prerequisite for office and advancement within the regions of the world where Christianity flourished.

While the core message of sacrifice and loving one’s enemies never changed, the practical requirements for becoming a Christian shifted dramatically when it became the official state religion of the empire. Christianity as a doctrine remained as austere as ever, but persons bearing its name went from holding tickets to the lion’s den to brandishing passes to high government positions. The political and social advantages, rather than costs, continue to this day — most prominently in American political life. An overwhelming majority of voters — 80 percent to 95 percent — would support a Catholic or evangelical candidate for president. Advertise your atheism, and the number drops to 60 percent. Clearly, in many places and seasons, Christian affiliation has been easy — even desirable. If anything, such comfortable contexts make casual belief a perennial temptation. The consequence, we are arguing, has been a more fragile Christianity, a more vulnerable discipleship: one that asks much but requires little. This is the sense in which genuine, costly, investment-laden faith — even in the “Age of Faith” — has always been difficult. Only when Christianity is not the default religion, when the cost of membership is high, do those costs make discipleship the product of a highly deliberate, willful choice.

Revisiting the current religious environment, one other data point invites us to reevaluate the nature of the current trends. Complicating the popular picture of religious decline is the fact that the cohort of young Americans, while highest in religious disaffiliation, is also the

highest in terms of belief in most superstitions (like knocking on wood or throwing salt over your shoulder.) An Insider poll also found that 44 percent of 20-something Americans believe in astrology “a lot” or “somewhat.” We should not be hasty to chalk up declining religiosity to the secularization hypothesis if the people fleeing the pews are holding onto or even increasing their belief in good luck charms and star charts. What is happening? One erstwhile believer may give us a clue.

Elna Baker, a onetime Latter-day Saint, shared, on an episode of “This American Life,” a conventional conversion story from her youth in Snowflake, Arizona. She was on a church youth trip, was encouraged to pray for a personal witness, and did so. “Then,” she recalled, “the sun came through the clouds and warm light hit my face. I felt like someone was wrapping their arms around me and hugging me.

My body rocked back and forth, and I knew it wasn’t me who was doing it.”

Later in the episode, she described her last spiritual experience before abandoning her childhood faith: “Three years ago, maybe four years ago, ...

I felt like it was getting so hard to believe for me. And I just was like, ‘You know, I want a sign again like the one I had when I was young. And I just want you to tell me that you’re there, God.’ “And I knelt down and I prayed and I asked this. And then I looked up at the sky and I was like, ‘The sky? That’s the sign?’ Like, anyone can see this. This isn’t a sign. You just see a few stars. It’s New York — you see, like, maybe five stars. And just as I was saying, ‘This isn’t anything, this is just what’s always there,’ one of the stars shot across the sky. And it was the biggest shooting star I’d ever seen.”

Almost immediately thereafter, however, she reflects on the nature of that evidence.

“As soon as it happened, I did the thing I do now — I started questioning. Was that meant for me? Or did I just happen to look up at the exact moment when a star shot across the sky? ... And that’s when I realized I don’t just want a sign, I want to be myself at 14 again — the kind of person who believes in signs.”

This story perfectly illustrates that what seems plausible to a given individual is not just a consequence of the evidence and reasoning available to us, but of our assumptions about what evidence and reasoning we’re willing to consider. This may be our most important claim about faith. Faith is not an escape from or even a bracketing of rationality or evidentiary claims. Faith involves an

expansion of the domain of rationality. believe a Divine Maker would ask us to diminish or discredit the reason that God embodies. We do believe a healthier way to envision faith, and its moral value, is as a suite of dispositions toward openness; a willingness and even passionate embrace of eternity as a multilayered adventure, accessible to us through a more expansive epistemology than our narrowly conceived methodologies. Faith is a response to the “intuition,” in Marilynne Robinson’s words, “that reality is rooted in a profounder matrix of Being than sense and experience make known to us in the ordinary course of things.” It is a stance of humility, an unflagging willingness to take correction, an imaginative resistance to our own prejudices.

All of which takes us back to that French inventor, de Martinville, and that voice from the void. Mere church affiliation is not necessarily a faith-filled stance toward the divine.

At the same time, the manifold ways in which persons of good intent strive to make sense of the universe, from crystals to nature immersion to meditative practices, even while abandoning the traditional institutional forms, is a good sign that faith — as a suite of dispositions toward openness — may be alive and well. Strenuous listening seems to be the key.

Some of the most daunting challenges to faith that have recently appeared on the social sciences horizon can cloud our confidence that we can make meaningful sense of the voices within and without. Many of these challenges relate to a reshaped understanding of free will, of how emotions are constructed, and of the subtle ways in which intellect is shaped and conditioned.

Some of these developments throw into question the reliability of our beliefs and the grounds on which we construct a durable faith. Our response to this predicament has been to argue that certainty of any sort is a more complicated affair than we may have assumed. That the most fruitful engagement with these developments is to realize the indispensability of faith, of intuition and of epistemological openness — to any quest for understanding. Belief is hard — but there is no way around the headwinds.

WE DO NOT

ONLY WHEN CHRISTIANITY IS NOT THE DEFAULT RELIGION, WHEN THE COST OF MEMBERSHIP IS HIGH, DO THOSE COSTS MAKE DISCIPLESHIP THE PRODUCT OF A HIGHLY DELIBERATE, WILLFUL CHOICE.

T E R RY L G I V E N S I S A S E N I O R R E S E A R C H F E L L OW AT THE NEAL A. MAXWELL INSTITUTE OF RELIGIOUS S C H O L A R S H I P AT B R I G H A M YO U N G U N I V E R S I T Y. NAT H A N I E L G I V E N S I S A W R I T E R L I V I N G I N AS H L A N D, V I R G I N I A , A N D A F R E Q U E N T C O N T R I B U T O R TO P U B L I C S Q UA R E M AG A Z I N E .

T H I S E XC E R P T I S F R O M A S O O N-T O - B E R E L E AS E D B O O K , “ I N T O T H E H E A DW I N D S : W H Y B E L I E F H AS A L WAYS B E E N H A R D — A N D S T I L L I S.” ( E E R D M A N S, O C TO B E R 2 0 2 2 )

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IDEAS

FREEDOM AND ABUNDANCE HOW GLOBAL POPULATION GROWTH SPURS INCREASES IN RESOURCES AND IDEAS

BY M A R I A N L . TU PY

W

ith a few exceptions, most scholars from antiquity onward were either hostile to population growth or deeply ambivalent about its potential effects on human welfare. Of course, more people meant larger armies and more taxpayers, which is what mattered to the feudal lords of yesteryear, but population growth also meant greater pressure on available resources and other calamities.

That was not an irrational prism through which to view population growth. For thousands of years, the world was, in fact, stuck in what came to be known as a Malthusian trap.

The world’s population fluctuated, growing during the times of good harvests and collapsing when food got scarce. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the world’s population at the time of Jesus was somewhere between 170 million and 400 million. Fourteen centuries later, it was somewhere between 350 million and 374 million.

In the 18th century, the speed of scientific and technological progress enabled some scholars to look at population growth with growing optimism. They began to see human life as intrinsically valuable and problems concomitant with population growth as eminently solvable. The French economist Nicolas Baudeau, for example, argued that the “productiveness of nature and the industriousness of man are without known

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limits” because production “can increase indefinitely.” As such, “population numbers and well-being can go on advancing together.”

Other leading intellectuals of the day went as far as to argue that good government is one that leads to the maximization of the human population and its well-being. The Scottish philosopher David Hume, for example, noted that “wherever there are most happiness and

POPULATION NUMBERS AND WELL-BEING CAN GO ON ADVANCING TOGETHER.

virtue and the wisest institutions, there will also be most people.” The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau held that “the Government under which ... the citizens increase and multiply the most is infallibly the best.”

These were, to put it mildly, revolutionary ideas, and the almost inevitable backlash against them soon arrived. The Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus was born in Westcott, England. He studied English, classics and mathematics at Cambridge University. Over time,

Malthus became fascinated with geometric and arithmetic growth rates. A geometrically growing value increases in proportion to its current value, such as always doubling (for instance, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024). An arithmetic growth rate, in contrast, increases at a constant rate (1, 2, 3, 4 or 1, 3, 5, 7).

In 1798, Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” He argued that “population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence (by contrast) increases only in an arithmetical ratio.” He then warned that if “the proportion of births to deaths for a few years indicate an increase of numbers much beyond the proportional increased or acquired produce (i.e., food) of the country, we may be perfectly certain that unless an emigration takes place, the deaths will shortly exceed the births. … Were there no other depopulating causes, every country would, without doubt, be subject to periodical pestilences or famine.”

Malthus believed that history validated his theory, which it did. He also insisted that what was true in the past would also be true for all eternity, and that was not to be. Malthus in fact lost his main argument even before his first book went to print.

Between 1700 and 1798, the population of England increased 62.3 percent. Relative to income, however, the price of bread fell

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by 26.6 percent. In other words, it became more abundant. While Malthus was proven spectacularly wrong, his theory remained influential among many scholars, including the Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich.

In 1968, Ehrlich published a book called “The Population Bomb.” It sold 3 million copies, was translated into many languages, and brought Malthusian concerns into the mainstream. It started with a prediction: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.

In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” In 1970, Ehrlich appeared on “The Tonight Show.” The show, wrote John Tierney in The New York Times, “got more than 5,000 letters about Ehrlich’s appearance, the first of many on the program.

Ehrlich has been deluged ever since with requests for lectures, interviews, and opinions.”

Ehrlich’s message scared and scarred generations of Americans, inspiring such movies as the 1973 ecological dystopian thriller “Soylent Green.” (The more recent “Avengers: Infinity War” is based on the same premise.) On the other side of the country, the University of Maryland economist Julian Simon remained unconvinced. He looked at the numbers and noticed that prices of resources were falling, rather than rising. That implied that resources were becoming more abundant — even while the population grew.

In 1980, Simon bet Ehrlich $1,000 on $200 quantities of five metals: chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten. The futures contract stipulated that Simon would sell these same quantities of metal to Ehrlich for the same price in 10 years’ time. Since price reflects scarcity, Simon would pay if population increases made these metals scarcer, but if they became more abundant and therefore cheaper, Ehrlich would pay. Over the next 10 years, all five metals became cheaper, and Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07, representing a 36 percent decrease in inflation-adjusted prices.

Since 1990, some scholars have argued that Simon got lucky. To test that hypothesis, we have analyzed the prices of hundreds of commodities, goods and services spanning two centuries. In our book, “Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet,” Gale L. Pouley and I found that resources became more abundant as the population grew. That was especially true when they looked at “time prices.”

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Most people are familiar with the socalled “current” prices, which the shopper sees on the supermarket shelf, and “real” prices, which take into account inflation.

What’s missing from both prices is the amount of dollars in your wallet. How often have you heard your grandparents complain that a gallon of gas cost 50 cents and a loaf of bread 5 cents “back in the good old days”?

“True, Grandma and Grandad,” ought to be your response, “but what happened to your incomes over your working lives?”

Typically, though not always, individual incomes increase at a higher rate than inflation.

That’s because people tend to grow more productive (i.e., they use new knowledge or inventions to generate more value per input, such as an hour of work, an acre of land and amount of capital available) over their lifetimes and across time. Just think of the economic output or productivity of a worker with a shovel versus that of a driver of a giant excavator.

Whereas nominal and real prices are measured in dollars and cents, time prices are measured in hours and minutes. To calculate a time price, all you need to do is to divide the nominal price of a good or service by your nominal hourly income. That tells you how long you must work to afford something. So long as your nominal hourly income increases at a faster pace than nominal prices do, goods and services get more abundant.

Take, for example, an unskilled worker — say, a janitor — in the United States. Between 1850 and 2018, the time price of rice fell by 98.1 percent. So, the same amount of work that bought him one pound of rice in 1850, bought him 52.92 pounds in 2018. Instead of one pound of pork, he was able to buy 35.56. His personal “abundance” of cotton rose from one to 32.74; of wheat from one to 30.79; of corn from one to 26.04; of wool from one to 24.99; of lamb from one to 3.78; of beef from one to 3.23, etc. All the while, the population of the United States rose from 23 million to 327 million.

What happened to global time prices of resources? They fell by 84 percent between 1960 and 2018. The personal resource abundance of the average inhabitant of the globe rose from one to 6.27 or 527 percent. Put differently, for the same amount of work that he or she could buy one item in the basket of resources we looked at, he or she can now get more than six. Over that 58-year period, the world’s population increased from 3 billion to

7.6 billion. It will reach 8 billion around the time you read this article.

More importantly, we also found that personal resource abundance increased at a faster pace than the population grew — a relationship we call “superabundance.” On average, every additional human being created more value than he or she consumed. This relationship between population growth and abundance is deeply counterintuitive, yet it is true.

But, how does all that progress happen?

Committees don’t have ideas. Algorithms don’t have ideas. Machines don’t have ideas — at least not yet. So far, ideas have always been a product of human intelligence. Those ideas lead to inventions, and in turn, inventions tested by the market lead to innovations that drive economic growth and rises in the standards of living. But large populations are not enough to sustain superabundance — just think of the poverty in China and India before their respective economic reforms. To innovate, people must be allowed to think, speak, publish, associate and disagree. They must be allowed to save, invest, trade and profit. In a word, they must be free.

Society provides the incentives that either encourage or discourage individuals to manifest their ideas in reality. Individuals, who lack equal legal rights and face onerous regulatory burdens, confiscatory taxation or insecure property rights, will be disincentivized from turning their ideas into inventions and innovations. Conversely, people who function under conditions of legal equality, sensible regulation, moderate taxation and secure property rights will apply their talents to their benefit and, ultimately, to that of society.

The possibilities for creating new value are thus immense. The world is a closed system in the way that a piano is a closed system. The instrument has only 88 keys, but those keys can be played in a nearly infinite variety of ways. The same applies to our planet. The Earth’s atoms may be fixed, but the possible combinations of those atoms are infinite.

What matters, then, is not the physical limits of our planet, but human freedom to experiment and reimagine the use of resources that we have.

M A R I A N L . T U PY I S E D I TO R O F H U M A N P R O G R E S S. O R G A N D A S E N I O R F E L LOW AT T H E C ATO I NST I T U T E’S C E N T E R FO R G LO B A L L I B E RT Y A N D P R O S P E RI T Y. H E C O -AU T H O R E D T H E R E C E N T LY P U B L I S H E D B O O K “S U P E RA B U N DA N C E : T H E STO RY O F P O P U L AT I O N G R OW T H , I N N OVAT I O N A N D H U M A N F LO U RI S H I N G O N A N I N F I N I T E LY B O U N T I F U L P L A N ET.”

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OCTOBER 2022

75 YEARS EST 2001

CULTURE

BREAKING BREAD A PORTLAND FOOD CART SHOWS HOW CUISINE BRIDGES DIVIDES AND UNITES GENERATIONS

BY E TH A N B AU E R

T

hese days, Collin Mohr is a long way from home. But a taste of home is never too far away. In fact, it’s the first item on the menu at Ruthie’s, a Portland, Oregon, food cart named in honor of Mohr’s grandmother, which he co-owns and operates. She taught him to cook and to appreciate good food, so it’s only fitting that Grandma Ruth’s rolls would lead the way. They’re fluffy and sweet, with a buttery-brown crust and top-andbottom halves that resemble a thick, tightly closed book with glistening shells. Mohr, who is also the chef, follows his grandmother’s recipe to the letter, even importing flour and honey from Utah to keep it authentic.

Those rolls may sound familiar to readers from the Intermountain West or those who have ties to the region, and even to tourists who’ve dined at the Lion House in downtown Salt Lake City. Under different names, with subtle variations, rolls like these are a staple for many families with a Latter-day Saint heritage, and a key ingredient for family gatherings, from weddings and funerals to Thanksgiving dinners. And now, they’re a year-round bestseller at Ruthie’s, often alongside other options with an intermountain flavor, from a refined version of “funeral potatoes” to a modern take on Grandma Ruth’s broccoli-cheddar casserole, all prepared with a farm-to-table ethos.

All this is served from a single window in a blocky trailer with ragged brown shingles for siding. Ruthie’s rests in the back corner of a 76

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courtyard in the trendy Richmond neighborhood, where strings of light shine over a series of brown picnic tables. Mohr and his childhood friend, Aaron Kiss, both moved to Portland from South Ogden, Utah, in the early 2010s — at least in part to put some distance between Mohr and the small town that shaped his childhood. There, he was the kid who never went to church, though his grandmother did. That became his identity. He carries it with him here, but fits in quite well, with his scraggly beard and colorful tattoos peeking

“SITTING AROUND THE FIRE IS WHERE YOU TALK. IT IS WHERE YOU EXCHANGE THOUGHTS, FEELINGS, VIEWS. AND IT IS THE BEST WAY TO COME TOGETHER.”

out from under a baseball jersey. But there are certain elements you can’t leave behind. When he and Kiss decided to start a food business, drawing on their cultural background was a no-brainer.

In two short years, this approach has earned national acclaim for what Willamette Week calls “Mormon cooking,” with endorsements from Portland Monthly and the Los Angeles Times. When the Netflix travel show

“Somebody Feed Phil” visited in May, host Phil Rosenthal introduced the subject as “a cuisine that I didn’t know was a cuisine.”

That raises an interesting question. What even is a cuisine? We often talk about cuisine in terms of nationalities, ethnicities or regions; large groups of people whose traditions and geographic circumstances have shaped their cultural values, specifically how they source, prepare and eat their food. But what if a food culture comes from a people who don’t quite fit any of these categories? Who, like Mohr, don’t always neatly fit the categories they place upon themselves? Can that cuisine help us to understand who they are and what values they share? Or does the food itself somehow help to shape their identity and hold them together? a group of somehow interrelated foods that have sprung up in concert with a particular culture,” says David Page, author of the recent book “Food Americana,” which explores the country’s unique culinary traditions. For example, Page is Jewish; brisket, while cooked in many ways in many places, has unique roots in certain Jewish communities.

Roots tend to grow regionally. Consider Italy.

While Americans have a clear understanding of what qualifies as “Italian food,” Sicilian cuisine, Tuscan cuisine and Venetian cuisine are all very different. “Over time, the creation of an Italian country in some degree brought those cuisines

“A C U IS INE IS

COL L IN MOH R AND AARON K ISS GRE W U P AS B E ST F RIE NDS IN S OU T H OGDE N, U TAH . T H E Y MOV E D TO P ORT L AND, ORE GON, IN S E ARC H OF S OME T H ING NE W, B U T T H E IR H OME STAT E E NDE D U P INS P IRING T H E IR F IRST RE STAU RANT.

T HE R O C K F ISH S L I DE R IS A S I G N ATUR E ITE M AT R UTHIE ’ S. IT’ S A L SO O N E D ISH THAT’ S M OR E IN SP IR E D

BY F R E SH, LO C A L I N G R E DIE N TS T HA N BY GR A N D M A R UTH’ S WA R D CO O K B O O K , T HO UG H IT’ S S E RVE D O N HE R S I G N ATUR E R O L LS.

PHOTOGR AP H Y BY M O R I A H R AT N E R

OCTOBER 2022

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“WE WANT TO TAKE SOMETHING TO THE POTLUCK. WE WANT STREET TREATS WHERE EVERYONE COMES OUT ON A SUNDAY NIGHT AND SHARES. SHAREABLE MEALS ARE SIGNATURES.”

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together,” he adds. “But there are still marked differences between areas.” So, too, in America.

Barbecue is another beloved example for Page, who also created the “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” television series hosted by Guy Fieri. Originally imported from the Caribbean, barbecue became the distinctive cuisine of the southern United States. But there are many regional variations — from Texas to Memphis, St. Louis to the Carolinas — with their own distinctive flavors and methods, varying spice or smoke or sauce. In each version, the differences are what form the foundation of a budding cuisine, reflecting the circumstances or values of the people it feeds.

Food is similar across much of the Midwest — Utah is not the only state that loves cheesy potatoes and yeast rolls — because its communities had something in common. “The center of events was a religious establishment,” Page says. “So much of what’s served communally at, say, a church breakfast or a synagogue brotherhood meeting is not the expensive end of the stick. It’s the stuff that you can put together, whatever your economics, for a large group of people.” Within those environs, whether Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic, cheap ingredients that were readily available took on new mutations as each community slowly but surely made each dish their own. “Cuisines can be self-defined,” Page says.

“If a cuisine is representative of your particular group or interests, I’ll give it to you.”

In that sense, Ruthie’s reminds Page of a New York restaurant called Bubby’s — a kosher staple named after the Yiddish word for grandmother — that serves up traditional Jewish favorites. But Ruthie’s also shows how cuisines tend to change over time — especially in the era of globalization. “The Reuben sandwich, which is seen as a deli special, is not kosher,” he observes. “It mixes meat and milk.

So at what point is authenticity authentic?”

Perhaps the answer is utilitarian. How does food bring communities together? “It’s the original uniter,” Page says. “Once we figured out fire, we sat around the fire carrying mastodon parts, or whatever. It is where you talk. It is where you exchange thoughts, feelings, views. And it is the best way to come together.” Riffing on the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, Page argues that eating together is even central to what it means to be human: “You should decide who you are going to dine with before you decide what to eat,” he explains. “Because eating alone is like being a wolf.”

afternoon at Ruthie’s, a sharp knife chop-chop-chops against a dull board just out of sight, resonating across the courtyard. The stream from a high-pressure hose hisses against dishes. Plumes of smoke puff from the wood oven, splashing the patio with oaken perfume. Soon, Mohr will serve up more heaping plates of rolls alongside pools of jam and piles of fresh butter. When he does, he shares more than food, because these rolls always transport Mohr back to his youth. It simply wasn’t a family gathering without them; his uncle John was even known to protest if they were absent.

Mohr always felt out of place in South Ogden, an outsider among neighbors and even relatives who belonged to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Eager to find his own way in the world, he moved to Portland to attend the Le Cordon Bleu culinary school when he was 18. Kiss followed him three years later. For several years, they worked at various eateries, before Covid-19 presented them with a dilemma. In 2020, as the economy tanked, Mohr lost his job. Kiss wasn’t very happy with his. When an acquaintance offered to sell them an empty food cart, they took him up on it before they even had a plan.

The name came to them first, in a long-running brainstorm session. They liked how it felt, mostly, as a tender homage that was fittingly intimate for the space. It was only later that they realized the name brought with it an entire concept that was both personal and much bigger. Grandma Ruth had a book that was special to her, almost sacred within the confines of the kitchen. The ward cookbook gathered the culinary knowledge of members of her congregation, before it was passed down between generations and perfected with pencil marks over time. It formed the foundation of every family gathering, every afternoon spent in her kitchen, where Mohr learned to appreciate how food can bring folks together.

Now, it would do the same for Ruthie’s.

ON A S U MME R

the book “Raised in the Kitchen” about modern family cooking. A Latter-day Saint from Farmington, Utah, she describes the characteristics of her people’s cuisine in terms of houses: You have modern houses, you have traditional houses and then you have various combinations that take elements from each. “What’s something that their great-grandma made that they’ve slightly adapted to fit the culture right now,” she asks, “but couldn’t lose

C ARRIAN C H E NE Y WROT E

the recipe because it’s grandma’s?”

The very idea of a ward cookbook implies a unique identity. More than a how-to manual, it’s an effort to preserve the collective memory, to immortalize the group’s cultural staples and share them with future generations as a sort of oral history written in lists of ingredients and step-by-step directions. Indirectly, it catalogs and categorizes what makes them who they are. Perhaps even more importantly, it reveals something unique about Latter-day Saint culture that expresses itself through food.

If you asked Cheney’s kids about their favorite kitchen memories, they would probably point to the process of making her own patented potato rolls. “There’s something about getting your hands in dough, and feeling that breath that comes from it,” she says. “When you’re standing side by side in the kitchen, doing something where your focus is completely on your hands and on food, all the walls drop, and you just suddenly start talking and sharing.”

The phenomenon reminds her of her mother’s Dutch oven peach cobbler, typically simmered atop a campfire. After a long day of hiking and exploring, she’d return to their temporary dwelling to find it waiting for her, under a starry night, served up with an orange-tinted twilight chat with her mom.

“There was magic when that happened,” she remembers.

Beyond the apparent thrift and simplicity, it’s that sense of connection, of family and community, that lies at the heart of Latter-day Saint cuisine. “We want to create things that can be shared with others,” Cheney says. “We want to take something to the potluck. We want to have street treats where everyone comes out on a Sunday night and shares something. Shareable meals are signatures.”

She’s seen it many times, most of all among her family. “There is something about when you sit down with someone and share something that hits all the senses — I’m convinced there is something there,” she insists, “when you’re smelling, tasting, touching and you’re enjoying a conversation together. Somehow it seems to become a moment and a memory, and you have a real connection.” episode about Ruthie’s aired on Netflix, the spot was overrun with Latter-day Saints and Utahns far from home. They descended on Portland from the outskirts, from small towns like McMinnville and Wilsonville, braving a neighborhood that is at least visibly

A F TE R THE

notable for the proliferation of open-toed Birkenstock sandals, just to get a taste of home.

The dramatic irony that a sort of prodigal son would become the chef who could deliver that is not lost on him. “They’ve shown up in full force,” Mohr says. “And they’re referencing Ogden High or Bonneville or something like that. It’s just surreal.”

and three different varieties of a Jell-O salad, and a couple of different casseroles that are all familiar,” Mohr explains. “That’s what I grew up going to. It was amazing food, and you always knew it was gonna be a good time.”

Even so, such dishes elicit not only the flavorof home, but its memory. Sharing them isn’t just about passing on a family tradition — it’s

GRANDMA RU T H ’S ROL L S ARE MADE WIT H INGRE DIE NTS IM PO R T E D F ROM U TAH AND COME WIT H DOL LOP S OF B U T T E R AND H OM E M A D E JA M .

Ruthie’s menu changes often, with whimsical choices like shokupan — a soft Japanese bread — or dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, served with ranch powder and caviar. But the shack is lined with colorful jars of canned and preserved salad accessories, and the ward cookbook’s influence shows through in hearty winter dishes when fresh local produce isn’t as available. Sometimes, Mohr and Kiss deconstruct the classics, like the broccoli-cheddar casserole — keeping the core of hash browns, broccoli, cheddar and curry powder, but fire-roasting the broccoli in their wood oven, using locally sourced potatoes and cheese, and importing their spice mix from India. “Food is competitive. You have to change,” Mohr says.

“Take something simple and make it fun.”

That’s not unlike the childhood Mohr remembers. “You’ll go to a normal get-together, and there’ll be four different varieties of potatoes,

about passing on the surrounding experience.

“The fact that we can get people to sit down at a table, share a moment with each other, put their phones away and enjoy a meal together,” Mohr says, “you know, that’s what it’s all about for us.”

Ruthie’s also has the most important endorsement of all, from Grandma Ruth. She’s never traveled here, but her grandson sends her pictures regularly. That tie is essential to the project, Mohr says. “It’s a creative outlet and a memory.” One he tries to re-create every evening. Tonight, as he brings out an order of rolls for a mother and her son, he sets the mood: “My grandmother’s rolls there for ya,” he says, reading their expressions as he does. “To see people have the same reaction I had when I was a kid — it’s just the most humbling moment.

Those rolls, to me, are my childhood. It doesn’t get any cooler than that.”

OCTOBER 2022

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CULTURE

FINDING OUR BEARINGS CAN THE INVENTION BEHIND STONEHENGE AND BICYCLES HELP SOLVE A FRACTURED SOCIETY?

BY S COTT C A R R I E R

I

remember when I learned to ride a bicycle — five years old, three-and-a-half-feet tall. At first the bike was heavy and awkward and I crashed into the asphalt more than once.

But then I got it — how to balance and pedal and steer — and I was flying. I realized I had spent my life pretty much as a stationary object, but now I had wheels and my own velocity. I could turn in circles or go fast in a straight line. It felt like freedom. It felt like magic.

At that time I did not question how it could be that a five-year-old could zip around like a bird with very little effort or restraint. I took it for granted. Bicycles existed, therefore I would ride them. For fun. Because I could. When my bike broke down, anything other than a flat tire, I didn’t know how to fix it. Eventually I’d get a new one. I was ignorant of the machine, the way the magic actually worked.

When I was 19, I moved away from home to go to college. I didn’t have a car, so I needed a bike, and there was a bike shop across from campus. I went in and told the long-haired mechanic I wanted a bike that turns well at high speeds and doesn’t break down. He brought out a Motobécane, red and black, made in France. I rode it and fell in love.

The mechanic, however, warned me about 80

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the bike breaking down. He said, “This is a good bike, with good components, but even the best bikes need to be maintained.”

Bicycles, he told me, are the most efficient form of transportation, by far, because they are lightweight and they roll on ball bearings.

ALL BEARINGS, WITH OR WITHOUT BALLS OR ROLLER ELEMENTS, REDUCE FRICTION. THIS IS WHAT WE NEED TODAY — LESS FRICTION, IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE.

All the moving parts — the wheels, the pedals and crank, the steering column — they all spin on ball bearings.

“You can’t see them,” he said. “They’re hidden inside — rings of steel balls spinning inside doughnut-shaped shells, or it’s more like they’re

sandwiched between two sides of a bagel.”

He held his hands like he was holding a bagel together. “Too tight and the balls don’t spin. Too loose and the balls wobble.

But in between there’s a magic spot where there’s no friction.”

He picked up a front wheel lying on the bench, told me to hold it by the axle — one hand on each side — and he gave it a spin.

He said, “A guy brought in this wheel because it was wobbling, because it had loose bearings.”

The wheel in my hands felt like it was spinning on butter — silently, no vibrations — like it was never going to stop.

“I adjusted the bearings,” he said. “Now it’s good.”

He told me the bearings in my bike were also good, for now, but eventually they’d all go out of alignment and need to be adjusted.

“It’s just the way it is,” he said, “So it’s time you learn how to maintain your bearings.”

I bought the bike and a bunch of tools, the ones he said I needed.

I don’t remember how long it was after that, or why specifically I started taking the bike apart, but there came a moment when the bike was in pieces and I had a hundred small steel balls rolling around on my kitchen floor. I’d

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WE NEED A NEW KIND OF BEARING THAT’S PURELY CONCEPTUAL, ONE THAT CAN HOLD TOGETHER OPPOSING THOUGHTS OR BELIEFS AND LET THEM MOVE WITHOUT FRICTION.

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rendered a perfectly functioning machine into chaos, and I thought, “This may not end well.”

It turns out ball bearings are all around us, inside all our wheels and motors. We don’t see them in action because they’re hidden, enclosed by design. But they are here, inside our fans and vacuum cleaners and jet engines, as well as our bicycles, cars and trucks. They are literally how we roll. Without ball bearings, civilization as we know it would come to a loud, grinding halt.

And yet we give them very little recognition or respect. We don’t think about where they came from or how they got here. We don’t know we’re dependent upon them.

There are many kinds of bearings. Some have balls or roller elements and some do not.

The thing they all have in common is their function, which is to reduce friction. Today, this is what we need and want — less friction, in more ways than one — but for most of human history friction was not a problem, not something that needed to be reduced or overcome. Friction used to be a good thing. It’s how we kept from slipping while walking. It’s how we built our fires.

But then, about 10,000 years ago, people started moving large rocks across the ground to build sacred, megalithic monuments. We’re talking about rocks the size of elephants and whales, often transported many miles, to build structures that connected the earth to the sky, structures that had magical powers. This is when friction first became a problem, and it’s how our dependence on bearings began.

They were Stone Age people, meaning they had only stone tools to work with. Horses were not yet domesticated. The huge boulders they moved and placed are still standing across Africa, Europe, Asia and islands in the Pacific Ocean. Nobody knows for sure why they did it because they didn’t write things down.

There was no written language back then. So we don’t know for sure how they did it, either, but there seems to be only one possibility.

Think of Stonehenge, built 4,600 years ago on what is now the Salisbury Plain of England.

The tall standing stones in the outer ring are 13 feet high and seven feet wide, four feet thick, each weighing up to 30 tons, and they come from a quarry 15 miles away.

Imagine we’re standing there in the quarry, 4,600 years ago, looking at one of the stones lying on the ground — 13 feet long, 30 tons

— wondering how we’re going to move it even one foot, let alone 15 miles.

We have one basic problem — too much friction. Friction comes from surfaces sliding or rolling over each other — the more surface area coming into contact, the more friction is created. If our stone were shaped like a ball, it wouldn’t have much surface area touching the ground and we could roll it, but instead of a ball, we have long slab. To slide it across the ground seems impossible.

Our only hope is to lower the amount of surface area coming into contact between the rock and the ground. You may have already come up with the answer — we use smooth logs as roller pins under the rock. We chop down some trees with our stone axes and smooth out the trunks and we put them under the rock, one after another. The rock doesn’t touch the ground, it rides on the rolling logs — a huge reduction in friction.

This is how we think they did it. We don’t know for sure, but the only other answers are by magic or aliens.

These were the first bearings, the first step in overcoming the forces of friction. We now call them roller bearings and we still use them for conveyor belts.

The second big innovation in reducing friction was the invention of the wheel — or I should say the invention of the wheel and axle because they always go together. This place, where the wheel spins around the axle, that was the new bearing. We now call it a plain bearing.

For thousands of years, the methods and practice of building wheels remained essentially the same. All this changed in 1869 when a French bicycle mechanic named Jules Suriray designed and built ball bearings for a bicycle wheel. The bicycle was a great leap forward in the evolution of bearings and the reduction of friction.

It started with the running machine, invented in 1817. It was like a bicycle, but it had no pedals. The frame was wood, the wheels were wood with plain bearings. To make it go forward or backward you had to walk or run your feet along the ground. The French called it the velocipede. By 1860 velocipedes in Paris had rather beautiful lightweight steel alloy frames.

Pedals were added over the next few years, and the bicycle was born. The early bikes had big front wheels because that way they’d go farther and faster for every turn of the pedals.

By 1869, there were young men racing bicycles all around Paris. People called the bikes bone-shakers for all the banging and bouncing over cobblestone roads. These banging and bouncing forces went first to the plain bearing in the front wheel and then through the steel frame to the bones of the rider.

Bearings wear out, just like lower vertebrae.

The moving parts need to function as a unit — everything staying the right shape and size, in alignment — while moving across the ground and being subjected to the forces of gravity and lateral accelerations. You can start off with everything working together really well, but eventually friction is going to create heat which causes swelling which causes more friction … and the unit is going to fall apart, especially if there’s banging and bouncing involved.

We know Suriray was a blacksmith/bicycle mechanic in Paris. We know he had a shop near the Place de la République. But, unfortunately, very little is known about his personal history or how he came up with his ball bearing design.

I assume, or I imagine, that young men around Paris brought Suriray their broken bicycles and asked him to fix them so they would go even faster. They wanted a competitive edge.

Suriray looked at the bicycles and realized their front wheel bearings were wearing out from friction and abuse. If he could reduce the friction, the bike would go faster and last longer.

We know there was a big race coming up — November 7, 1869 — the first long-distance bicycle race across the countryside, Paris to Rouen, 80 miles. Suriray did not invent the ball bearing, he was just the first person to build a ball bearing that actually worked for a wheel and axle. He hand-filed the steel balls and then used a lathe to make two round half shells, and then he figured out how to hold them in place — not too tight, not too loose — so the balls spun freely between the axle and the wheel.

His design was simple, and it worked very well.

It’s basically the same design we use today. It must have felt really good when he gave the wheel a spin. It may have felt like magic.

One hundred and twenty riders showed up at the Arc de Triomphe for the start of the race. The course followed bumpy country roads with uphill sections where the bikes had to be pushed. James Moore, a 20-yearold Englishman riding Suriray’s bicycle,

finished first, 15 minutes ahead of the second and third riders. Moore became famous and Suriray went into business making bicycle wheels with ball bearings.

Then, in 1870, the Franco-Prussian war began and Paris became a war zone. Nobody there was interested in bicycles anymore.

Bicycle manufacturing moved to Germany, England and the United States. Ball bearings became standard parts but making them was difficult, especially the steel balls, as they were shaped and filed by hand, one at a time. Then, in 1883, Friedrich Fischer, a German bicycle manufacturer, invented the ball grinding machine that could produce large numbers of steel balls with fine precision, varying no more than two one-hundredths of a millimeter.

By 1890, bicycles looked and handled pretty much like they do today. The front and back wheels were the same size and they had inflatable rubber tires. The pedals were in the middle of the frame with a chain to the back wheel, and all moving parts (except the brakes) turned on ball bearings. They called it the safety bicycle because it was a lot safer and easier to ride than the bone-shaker.

By the mid-1890s a bicycle craze was sweeping across Europe and the United States. There were hundreds of bicycle manufacturers and millions of people riding. Bicycles gave people a new sense of freedom, especially women.

Women who rode bicycles started demanding equal rights, like the right to vote. You might say ball bearings went to their heads — they wanted to be free, without friction, in all parts of their lives, not just when they were on a bicycle.

All this changed, however, at the turn of the century when mass production of affordable automobiles put men back in the driver’s seat.

Ball bearings were used in automobiles, and then in airplanes, as well as in electric generators and electric motors. Without ball bearings to reduce friction, the spinning parts of these new machines would have heated up and seized together.

In this way ball bearings became essential in our culture — like water is essential in our bodies. An illustration of this would be the bombing of Schweinfurt during the Second World War. At that time, 1943, the city of Schweinfurt produced approximately 50 percent of the ball bearings spinning inside

the Third Reich’s war machine. The strategy, therefore, was to cripple the war machine by bombing the ball bearing factories.

On the morning of August 17, 1943, 230 American B-17 bombers took off from England, headed across the Channel toward Schweinfurt, Germany. The bombers flew in a formation that stretched for 20 miles, blanketing the sky. Once over the continent, they were intercepted by German Messerschmitt fighter planes that began shooting them down. All the planes had ball bearings surrounding their propeller shafts. It was a battle of, by and for ball bearings.

The factories were hit but suffered only temporary damage, while the Americans lost about 20 percent of their planes and their crewmen — either killed or taken prisoner.

Clearly, the bombing mission had not been a success. So the allied forces did it again, and again — 22 times in all. And yet the German war machine never suffered for ball bearings.

Today we have most excellent bearings that ride on roller pins and roller cones as well as balls. We even have bearings that ride on fluids and air. For instance, the disc in my laptop computer spins on an air bearing where no solid surfaces come into contact, reducing friction to almost nothing. Today, friction is no longer a problem to be solved.

Our problem now is we have too many wheels and motors spinning all around us.

We have grown dependent upon them and the fossil fuels that keep them spinning — we need and want more and more and more and more, while glaciers recede and species go extinct.

What we really need now is a new kind of bearing, one that’s purely conceptual, a bearing that could hold together two opposing thoughts or beliefs — like science and religion, or us and them — in a way they could move together without friction. Jesus and Buddha thought compassion could work like this, as a conceptual bearing, but compassion always seems to be in short supply, or not around when you need it.

It’s been 46 years since I was in college staring at the steel balls scattered on my kitchen floor, and I must confess that I have yet to master the art of maintaining my bearings, of finding the perfect spot — not too tight, not too loose — but I’m working on it.

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the last word

C H RIST INE E MB A

DATING GONE BAD WHAT AMERICA GETS WRONG ABOUT SEX

BY LO I S M. CO L L I N S

T

he #MeToo movement made it clear that consent is crucial when it comes to sex or even kissing. But what should be a starting point has too often become the ceiling for such encounters, the only requisite for men and women to engage with each other, writes Christine Emba in “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.” The Washington Post columnist argues that while today’s young people feel freer than ever to experiment with sex, that freedom, along with weakened social taboos, has created unprecedented dissatisfaction and the sense that something vital is missing.

A single woman in her early 30s who is active in the dating culture, Emba has a bone to pick with “uncritical sex positivity,” the notion that casual sex can be healthy for everyone involved. The practice has left many feeling dissatisfied precisely because sex is not a casual act, she contends, but one that engages both body and spirit. Ignoring that reality leaves many feeling liberated and miserable, especially women, she notes, and treating sex as a no-strings transaction creates “too much of the kind of sex that saps the spirit and makes us feel less human, not more — sex that leaves us detached, disillusioned or just dissatisfied.”

Emba’s faith has certainly shaped her views on sex. She was raised as an evangelical Christian in Richmond, Virginia, before converting to Catholicism during her senior year at Princeton. She studied public policy 84

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and international affairs, planning a career in public service and dreaming of working for the United Nations. Instead, she has been drawn to writing for media outlets that let her explore her interest in culture and ethics.

At the Post, she writes a society and ideas column she calls “a delightful and humorous beat I kind of gave myself.”

Dating has never been more confusing. A

CONSENT TELLS US WHAT WE CAN’T DO. WE SPEND A LOT OF TIME ASKING WHAT IS ALLOWED, AND NOT ENOUGH TIME ASKING: WHAT IS ACTUALLY GOOD?

2020 study by Pew Research Center found that most single adults in the United States say dating is hard. Many simply don’t want to do it. That outcome seems at odds with the movements that are changing how people relate. Deseret asked Emba how what we think and teach about sex and relationships has gone wrong.

WHAT LED YOU TO EXPLORE SEX AND CONSENT?

I’ve always been interested in questions of culture and society and ethics. How we treat each other. How do we figure out what the good is? How should we be in the world as the world changes so rapidly? I come at it from an unusual point of view, growing up with a pretty conservative mindset when it came to sex and relationships, before spending most of my adulthood in a far more secular world.

And, of course, I am a young woman living in the world. I’m not married, so I have an in-thethick-of-it view on the culture of dating and relationships, but I also think about questions of being female and feminism.

HOW DID COVERING #METOO IMPACT YOU?

That was an eye-opening moment that drew together those questions about culture, gender, morality, and questions about whether various movements that we are almost expected to support had delivered on what they promised. I’m thinking specifically of feminism and the sexual revolution, and their attendant beliefs and mores. #MeToo shows that the problems that many people thought we’d move past just hadn’t gone away.

Beyond the high-profile cases — the Harvey Weinsteins, the Charlie Roses, where it was clear that this was a bad thing — “Don’t

do bad things!” — I was more interested in cases that didn’t have clear answers, that hit closer to home and, consequently, went the most viral. They surface tricky issues that were causing young women a lot of pain and sadness and seemed at odds with what we would have hoped would have been resolved by now.

I was also surprised by how common certain experiences were: “It’s not rape, but this sexual encounter made me feel trapped, disappointed, even traumatized.” Haven’t we all been pressured into doing something we don’t want to do and it’s terrible? And I was left thinking, is this what dating is like now? If this is normal, normal seems really bad.

WHAT ASSUMPTIONS DO PEOPLE MAKE ABOUT SEX THAT ARE WRONG?

That depends on the people. In writing this book and dealing with how it’s been received, I’ve found that some of the assumptions that I think are wrong feel almost taboo to say in a progressive, liberal milieu. Then to conservatives, or to people with a religious upbringing, they are just obvious.

Like the belief that men and women are basically the same and experience sex in the same way, that both just want to get out there and fulfill their desires, and that both can treat sex with equal casualness.

Or the idea that sex doesn’t really mean anything, that it’s like any other physical activity that people do together. And as long as you’re careful and use protection and get consent, it’s fine. That there’s nothing to think about, there are no consequences.

Or the assumption that at least while you’re young, the best way to be is liberated and unencumbered, untied down; that feelings are the enemy.

Or the notion that people want what they want, and we shouldn’t judge anyone for what they want. That all judgment when it comes to sex is inherently bad.

But what assumptions is our broader culture holding about sex that aren’t serving us? Where do we think the sexual revolution should have taken us? And where did we end up? We’ve talked about consent so much, from college onwards, but clearly that hasn’t solved these issues. So what ethics do we need if consent isn’t enough?

WHAT, THEN, SHOULD WE CRITICIZE? AND HOW?

It’s important to be able to speak in the public square about what our goals are, what we think good looks like, what our ethics are.

It’s important to be able to say that some things are better than others, to at least try ILLU STR ATION BY KY LE H I LTO N

and hash out some moral judgments. In fact, some acts are harmful. Some things make us better or worse people. And we want to be creating a good society, which means that we do have responsibilities to each other and a duty to try and do the good — not just whatever we want, or whatever pleases us in the moment.

YOU WRITE ABOUT WILLING THE GOOD FOR EACH OTHER. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN AND HOW DO YOU DO IT?

Consent tells us what we can’t do. You get consent to make sure that what you’re doing is not strictly against the rules or illegal. But I worry that in our current moment, we spend a lot of time asking what is allowed, and not enough time asking: What is actually good?

What should I be doing? There’s a negative vision, but not a positive vision. There’s been so much conversation about how the sexual culture is bad. These are the terrible experiences

SLOWING THINGS DOWN WOULD BE HUGE. CARING FOR ANOTHER PERSON, RESPECTING THEM AND THEIR HUMAN DIGNITY. YOU NEED TO GET TO KNOW SOMEONE.

that are so common to women — “You too?

Me too. Yeah, we all hate this.” But where do we go from there? What is the good, and how do we change our society to get there? That was one factor that pushed me to try and hash out these questions in the book. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard.

I suggest that past consent, willing the good of the other could be a good ethic, a good norm that we should strive for in our relationships. The formulation is from Aristotle by way of Thomas Aquinas. It’s this definition of love as willing to give to the other — not just romantic love, but a deep love for another human person. Willing it to the other implies that you have some understanding of what good is. It’s your responsibility to try and figure that out. And then it also implies that you’re valuing the other person as highly as you value yourself, which is difficult, I think, for humans; it’s not necessarily a natural posture. Even the attempt will bring us to a better place than where we are now.

HOW DO THINGS CHANGE?

We’ve arrived at a place where we know not

to be like Harvey Weinstein, which is great.

But we didn’t make much progress on how to actually change this situation. So I wanted to jump-start that discussion, because one of the benefits of our cultures is that we talk. Sex is everywhere, sex is so prevalent in our advertising and our discussion. But it’s a particular vision of sex, almost an ad- and media-created fantasy. It’s not necessarily real. And I do think that if women and men are able to talk honestly about what they want from each other, even where that clashes with what’s expected in the current culture, or what they’ve been told they should want, forward movement can happen. That sort of honesty and realism about what sex is, who we are, what is good, what is not so good, that is how we set the stage for actually creating something new.

WHAT YOU DESCRIBE SEEMS TO REQUIRE GETTING TO KNOW EACH OTHER. DOES THAT IMPLY TAKING OUR TIME?

Slowing things down would be huge. Caring for another person, respecting them and their human dignity. You need to get to know someone to care for them well. You need to sort out what you want, not just in this encounter, but also what sex means to you, what relationships mean to you, what you want in the long term. And yeah, doing all of that takes time and consideration and forethought in many cases. Talking to a friend about “Rethinking Sex,” he made a point that this book has sex as the focus, but the questions in it are broader. They’re about freedom and individualism versus community and our responsibilities to others.

Part of what shapes any encounter with another person, sexual or not, is the frame that you’re looking through. Are you seeing yourself as an untethered individual whose responsibility to another person is nil, apart from not actively hurting them? Or do you feel that you have some tie to another person or should have some responsibility to them that’s higher than that? And then what implications does that have for what you do? Or what you ask of someone or how you treat them?

ANY LAST WORD?

I want people to know that they are not alone. And they are not crazy for feeling out of step with the current culture if they aren’t enjoying it. They aren’t bad women — or bad feminists — or bad men for not having a good time right now. The thing that you sense is wrong is wrong and it’s not in fact crazy to want more, to ask for more, to wonder how to change your culture to be better. And also, I think it’s possible.

OCTOBER 2022

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PARTING SHOT

“We have an end in sight, and it’s not like this is forever.”

so hot that railroad tracks in London began to expand and buckle. California’s heat wave was its longest and hottest on record.

Sacramento reached 116 degrees the first week of September; San Jose 109 degrees, both all-time records. The September heat wave was the “greatest ever west of the Rockies hands down,” tweeted weather historian Maximiliano Herrera. Here in Salt Lake City, high temperatures broke records for seven consecutive days in September, following the city’s hottest summer on record.

Scientists who study climate say heat waves around the world are becoming longer and more frequent, which they tie to the burning of fossil fuels. “This means every heat wave is now made worse,” the New York Times reported in August, “to some extent, by changes in planetary chemistry caused by greenhouse-gas emissions.”

T H IS S U MME R WAS

CADEN ALLEGER, PLAYS AT THE DRAPER, UTAH SPLASH PAD DURING A HEAT WAVE IN JULY. PHOTOGRAPHY BY KRISTIN MURPHY

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OCTOBER 2022 ISSUE 18

18

M AGAZ I NE

WHY EQUALITY BEGINS AT THE BALLOT BOX

THE MIDTERMS AND THE PRECARIOUS FUTURE OF ELECTIONS

EFERENCE

R

PLUS:

ROBERT MAY P. GEORGE ON FREE THINKING

OCTOBER 2022 VOL 02 | NO 18

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M AG A Z I N E

HOW TO STOP THE NEXT MASS SHOOTING ANSWERS FROM ACROSS THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM

WHAT IF SECULARISM ISN’T THE PROBLEM?

BY TERYL GIVENS

WHY ELECTIONS ARE ON THE BALLOT IN ARIZONA

FERENCE MAY

OCTOBER 2022 VOL 02 | NO 18

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FADING WHISPERS

IS IT TOO LATE TO SAVE NATIVE LANGUAGES?

BY ETHAN BAUER

M AG A Z I N E

HOW TO STOP THE NEXT MASS SHOOTING ANSWERS FROM ACROSS THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM

WHAT IF SECULARISM ISN’T THE PROBLEM?

BY TERYL GIVENS

WHY ELECTIONS ARE ON THE BALLOT IN ARIZONA

FADING WHISPERS

IS IT TOO LATE TO SAVE NATIVE FERENCELANGUAGES? MAY

OCTOBER 2022 VOL 02 | NO 18

OCTOBER deseret.com $4.95

M AG A Z I N E

HOW TO STOP THE NEXT MASS SHOOTING ANSWERS FROM ACROSS THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM

FERENCE MAY

OCTOBER 2022 VOL 02 | NO 18

OCTOBER

deseret.com $4.95 deseret.com $4.95

WHAT IF SECULARISM ISN’T THE PROBLEM?

BY TERYL GIVENS

WHY ELECTIONS ARE ON THE BALLOT IN ARIZONA

FADING WHISPERS IS IT TOO LATE TO SAVE NATIVE LANGUAGES?

OCTOBER 2022 VOL 02 | NO 18

F LOR E N C E PE ST R I KO FF, ONE O F T H E LAST 20 0 NAT I V E S PE A K E R S OF A LU TI I Q , AS P H OTO G R A PH E D O N LOC ATI O N I N A K H I O K , AL AS KA .

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OCTOBER 2022

99

ERNEST SIVA PREFERRED TO LISTEN. HE WAS YOUNG THEN. HE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND YET. GROWING UP ON THE MORONGO INDIAN RESERVATION IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, HE SPOKE ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY ENGLISH. BUT EVERY EVENING AFTER DINNER, HIS GRANDFATHER, PETE RAMON, WOULD SIT AT THE TABLE AND SPEAK IN SERRANO — THE NATIVE LANGUAGE OF THE SERRANO PEOPLE, WHO HAVE LIVED IN CALIFORNIA FOR SOME 2,500 YEARS. “IT WAS JUST A MATTER OF PRACTICE, A MATTER OF FACT. HE JUST EXPECTED THAT TO HAPPEN. THAT’S HOW WE KEPT THE SERRANO LANGUAGE GOING,” SIVA SAYS. “BUT IT WAS JUST THE TIME THAT THINGS WERE CHANGING.”

By that, he means his native tongue seemed to be losing its utility. His great-grandfather used to warn him to keep the language flame burning, because without it, he and the rest of his generational cohort would lose a vital link to understanding who they are and where they’ve been. “But you have to learn and change,” he added. “Learn the new way to be successful in this world, because everything is changing.”

Globalization, infrastructure and (later) the internet — not to mention centuries of culture-squashing colonialism — had made English ubiquitous. Many of Siva’s elders still spoke Serrano, but the youth were losing interest. It just didn’t seem like they needed it, and for the early part of his life, count Siva among them. “I always understood,” he says. “I just didn’t try to speak.”

He’d sometimes fall asleep still listening to his grandfather. Oftentimes he didn’t know exactly what was being said, whether it was a parable or a story. “But for sure,” he says, “it was history.” Sometimes his grandfather would sing “bird songs,” which contained the origin stories of their people. Again, he didn’t yet understand. But over time, he learned to heed his great-grandfather’s advice; to adapt and preserve at once. “That’s what we were following more or less to the present,” he says.

“Our family has done that.” But he recognizes 100

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that many others — mostly for reasons outside their control — have not. “We’re the last of the Mohicans,” he says with a coarse chuckle, “so to speak.”

Many across western North America are scrambling to preserve Native languages before they disappear forever. And not just in a way where they rest on old recordings in museums, but in a way where people actually speak them casually; in a way where they can evolve and grow. “The loss of traditional language,” says Jon Reyhner, a professor of education at Northern Arizona University who has written extensively on native language revitalization, “is a good proxy for cultural loss.” And many Native Americans are tired of suffering such losses.

“Our languages connect us to our ancestors and to our homelands and help us share Indigenous knowledge from generation to generation,” says Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary.

“But because of the federal government’s forced assimilation policies that were meant to strip us of our culture, many of our languages are at risk of being lost or have been lost forever. It is a sad reality for many Indigenous people. Many of us have lost that connection.

Many of us have lost our language.”

That fact has been documented by

publications from National Geographic to The New Republic. It also spawned a capstone project by Jordan Layton, a BYU photography student who graduated in 2017. After reading about how one language disappears every 14 days, he teamed up with BYU professor and head of photography Paul Adams to capture some of the last speakers of certain languages before they go extinct. The project uses 20-by-24-inch tintype metal plates coated with collodion and liquid silver — a process from the 1800s that produces archaic-looking, yet enduring portraits. “Tintypes are one of the most permanent and archival kind of prints,” Layton told Y Magazine in 2020.

“That, in juxtaposition with how quickly these languages and cultures are dying out, just felt really symbolic and important.”

The project, titled “Vanishing Voices,” has been featured in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian and accompanies this text.

So far, Layton and Adams have photographed 18 people across North America. The work remains ongoing, because the languages continue to fade. Yet some — like Siva — still hold onto hope that the dialect of their people won’t be consigned to old-timey photographs. That rejuvenation is possible. But, like “Vanishing Voices” poignantly illustrates, time is running out.

Siva’s journey to reclaiming his mother

Our languages connect us to our ancestors

OUR LANGUAGES CONNECT US TO OUR ANCESTORS AND TO OUR HOMELANDS AND HELP US SHARE INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION. LUTHE R G IR A D O, OF TEHACHAPI , CALI FORNI A, BEFORE H IS DE AT H I N 2021 . HIS SISTE R I S NOW THE ONLY REMAI NI NG NU WÄ S P E AK E R.

— DE B H AAL AND, U.S . S E C RE TARY OF T H E INT E R I O R

P R ISC ILLA E SWONI A, MOJAVE, ONE OF 75 NATI VE S P E AK E RS OF THE SE VE R E LY ENDANGERED LANGUAGE, I N PARKE R ARIZONA.

JOS E P H G. NORRIS , H U L’Q’U MI’NU M , O N E O F 93 RE MAINING S P E AK E RS , IN DU NC AN, B R I TI S H CO LU M B I A .

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N O R B E R T SYLV E STE R , HU L’ Q ’ U M I ’ N U M , O N E O F 93 R E M A I N I N G N ATI V E S PE A K E R S IN D U N C A N , B R I TI S H CO LU M B I A .

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tongue didn’t have a single starting point, but it was heavily influenced by his passion for music. At an event in the late 1950s, folk legend Pete Seeger once asked him if he “knew any Indian songs.” Siva told the truth: He did not. “That happened more than once,” he says. “And I realized that if I was going to be a music teacher, I should really be sharing our culture at some point.”

So he did. He learned some bird songs, and he taught them for over a decade at UCLA in his American Indian music class. While there, he was once chosen as a bass soloist in a faculty production of Handel’s “Messiah.”

His mother happened to be in town, so she came to watch him perform. After the show, he asked her what she thought. “Oh, it was nice,” she said. “But don’t forget your own songs.”

“So that was kind of another turning point,” he says.

Indeed, to undo centuries of stifling, he realized he could no longer listen alone. are about passing down wisdom. In very oversimplified terms, they teach tribal members lessons about how to live a good life. Or, at least, they taught such things. Centuries of colonialism resulted in policies designed to “civilize the savage” through boarding schools beginning in the mid-19th century, and other forms of forced acculturation. “Teachers were told that there was nothing of value in Indian cultures,” says Reyhner, “and their role was to assimilate American Indian students into American culture. Learn English, often become Christian,

native american stories and songs

and forget all that savagery.”

The legacy of these programs might feel like a bygone relic of a more cruel time, but they weren’t officially reversed until 1972’s Indian Education Act allowed educational instruction in Native languages. The Native American Languages Act of 1990 additionally declared that, from then on, “it is U.S. policy to … promote the rights and freedom of Native Americans to use, practice, and develop Native American languages.” This was just over 30 years ago; the scars are fresher than many realize. “Like many Native people in our country, I do not speak Keres, my Indigenous language,” says Haaland, who is an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe.

“My mother was beaten in school by educators when she spoke Keres and because of that trauma, she could not bear to teach me or my siblings.”

Historical atrocities aren’t the only reasons for Native language declines, though the trail often leads back to them. Reyhner also cites the influence of popular culture.

Native Americans consume the same music and movies and TV shows as any other Americans, and naturally, what’s most popular is almost always in English. That is, some languages have succumbed to noncoerced assimilation over time. Haaland, for one, did not want that to happen to her kids. Luckily, with much of the stigma around Native languages now (legally) removed, she says her mother is finally comfortable enough to teach Haaland’s children. “We are lucky,” she says. “Many communities have lost their elders and cannot pass on the language.”

The Indigenous Language Institute told The New York Times in 2010 that while some 300 Native languages were once spoken in the United States, only 175 remained. That number has shrunk since then, and the overwhelming majority of the ones still around are critically endangered. The Endangered Languages Project provides a color-coded map of endangered languages across the world, and in the U.S., the majority are either “severely endangered” or “dormant.”

One outlier is Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language, which is the only one in the U.S. listed as “at risk” rather than “endangered.” That’s the language Reyhner is most familiar with, having taught Navajo children math when he first graduated from college, and he warns that even those seemingly encouraging numbers are deceiving. When he started teaching around 1970, he estimates that 95 percent of his students were fluent in Diné Bizaad. But today, as paved roads and communications infrastructure have largely broken communities out of isolation, only the elders are still speaking it regularly. If he visited his old school today, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 5 percent (speaking it)," he says.

That is, at least for now. nonprofit named for his aunt: The Dorothy Ramon Learning Center. It started in the early 2000s with his wife and neighbor reading “Nonprofit Kit for Dummies.” Their goal was to further his aunt’s legacy; for over a decade, she’d worked with a linguist to publish a nearly 900-page bilingual book of her stories and memories

siva, now 85, runs a

THE LEGACY OF THESE PROGRAMS MIGHT FEEL LIKE A BYGONE RELIC OF A MORE CRUEL TIME, BUT THEY WEREN’T OFFICIALLY REVERSED UNTIL 1972’S INDIAN EDUCATION ACT ALLOWED EDUCATIONAL INSTRUCTION IN NATIVE LANGUAGES.

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MY MOTHER WAS BEATEN IN SCHOOL

BY EDUCATORS WHEN SHE SPOKE KERES AND BECAUSE OF THAT TRAUMA, SHE COULD NOT BEAR TO TEACH ME OR MY SIBLINGS. called “Wayta’ Yawa’ (Always Believe).” The nonprofit works to promote workshops, exhibitions and exchanges about Southern California’s Native American culture — including language classes. But even in his retirement years, Siva’s commitment has grown beyond the nonprofit.

He meets with linguists from the San Manuel Reservation every Thursday; they work with a program called the Serrano Language Revitalization Project, whose goal is “promote and sustain San Manuel’s unique linguistic heritage.” He also, until the pandemic interfered, regularly visited the K-8 school on the Morongo reservation to share stories about Coyote and Hummingbird and other characters of Native folklore. He might teach brief lessons in Serrano or Cahuilla, which he knows from his father’s side of the family. And, of course, he’d sing.

Siva heeded his mother’s advice about learning the songs of his people — at least as much as he could. Songs in their culture had different purposes tied to everyday life.

Hunting songs for nights before a hunt, for example, or basket-making songs. Funeral songs. Siva recalls attending one such funeral as a boy, where elders chanted in the background of a fire. When those elders died, they took thousands of years worth of wisdom to the grave. Regrettably, many of the oral traditions of the Maara’yam, as the Serrano called themselves before the Spanish arrived, have been lost to history. “It was like written books. They were the books of our people,” Siva says. “They were that important. So once the books are burned, you’re going to lose your songs, your knowledge. Because ours was in memories.”

He estimates that “just a handful” of Serrano speakers remain, though he’s hopeful that perhaps it’s being passed down, at least to a few people, outside of institutional knowledge. He doesn’t even consider himself a fluent speaker 104

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because it isn’t his first language. “I think every day about the language and, of course, use it, but there’s really no one to talk to, and that’s what it takes,” he says. “We give it a good college try every once in a while. But we should do more. Because it could be done.”

Siva is sure of this: That with enough interest and effort, Native languages still have a chance to grow in the 21st century. Many have already taken steps down that road. First lady Jill Biden recently visited a Cherokee language immersion school in Oklahoma — one of several across the country. The Navajo Nation Museum in Arizona has dubbed three films — “Star Wars,” “Finding Nemo” and, most recently, the Clint Eastwood classic “A Fistful of Dollars” — in Diné Bizaad. “That’s one way to show the youth that our language is versatile and our language can be adapted in any setting,” Jennifer Wheeler, a professor who helped translate the most recent film, told the Navajo Times. “We hope that it gives them hope and shows them that it is possible to learn our language.” And the United Nations General Assembly declared this year the beginning of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, scheduled to conclude in 2032.

The challenges such initiatives face are fierce. Generations of Native Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that their traditional languages are unnecessary at best. But that attitude has evolved, even in the U.S. federal government. Haaland praised the Biden administration’s commitment to reversing the historical trend, including a multiagency initiative announced last November between the departments of the Interior, Education, and Health and Human Services. “These investments are a testament to our administration’s commitment to support Indigenous communities and the respect we have for Indigenous knowledge,” Haaland said.

Funding and government interest are undoubtedly important, Reyhner adds, but

“political support comes and goes for this.” And with or without it, there’s only one statistic that matters moving forward. “Adding new, young speakers to Indigenous language communities is the ultimate — and only — critical measure of success of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages,” Richard Grounds, executive director of the Yuchi Language Project, wrote in the December 2021 issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly.

That entire issue was dedicated to “securing the future of our languages,” with Adriana Hernández Chos laying out three hopeful strategies: full immersion programs, the master-apprentice model, and the deployment of “multilingual media and digital strategies” to meet prospective speakers where they are, on TVs and smartphones. “There’s no panacea,” Reyhner adds. “There’s no one thing you can do.” But, as Chos, Siva and others have illustrated, there are some things that can be done, both big and small, to preserve Native languages — and everything that comes with them.

“Languages go to the heart of a tribe’s unique cultural identities, traditions, spiritual beliefs and self-governance,” Haaland says. “Investing in these preservation programs can help sustain Indigenous knowledge that can only be transmitted through tribal languages.”

Siva hopes above all that future generations won’t make the same mistake he did, waiting until later in life to take the languages of his heritage more seriously. Doing so can result in a difficult burden, though one worth bearing — and one that no one else can bear. “We realized that if we didn’t carry it on,” he says, “it was on our shoulders.”

RIGH T: P H OTOGRAP H E D S H O R TLY B E FO R E H E R DE AT H IN 2 02 1 IN WO O D LA K E , C A , MARIE WILCOX , WAS T H E LAST N ATI V E WU KC H U U MNI S P E AK E R.

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