Deseret Magazine - May 2024

40 A PLACE OF REFLECTION

THE PERSONAL SIDE OF PRESERVING THE GREAT SALT LAKE.

by

chris carlson

DETOUR FROM DEMOCRACY

THE CONSTITUTIONAL FLAW THAT COULD TRIGGER A CRISIS IN NOVEMBER. by ethan

bauer

“Will ‘the most dangerous blot in our Constitution’ prove to be as fatal as Jefferson feared?”

“I get defensive when people refer to parts of the West as flyover states.”

joshua dubois

DuBois, CEO of Values Partnerships, led the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships under President Barack Obama. A frequent media commentator, he authored “The President’s Devotional: The Daily Readings that Inspired President Obama.” His commentary on speaking out with grace is on page 17.

Williams is a writer and climate scientist who has pursued stories and work in Chilean Patagonia, Copenhagen, Bhutan and the Alaskan tundra. Her work has been featured in Backcountry Magazine, Powder Magazine and The Dirtbag Diaries. Her story about why young people are drinking less is on page 26.

Hughes is a Franco-British journalist living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she covers politics and social and environmental issues for The Associated Press and Le Figaro. Before moving to Brazil, she lived in Paris, where she worked for Agence France-Presse. Her story about the failed utopian community of Fordlândia, Brazil, is on page 36.

MacNicol is a writer and podcaster whose work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Cut and New York magazine, among others. Her latest book, “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself,” will be published this summer. MacNicol’s essay on how AI can dictate our worldview is on page 70.

A former Utah poet laureate, Rekdal teaches at the University of Utah, where she directs the American West Center. Her most recent book of poetry is “West: A Translation,” which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A poem from that book is on page 79.

Cranney is a data scientist and social science researcher based in Washington, D.C., where he also teaches at the Catholic University of America. A nonresident fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for the Studies of Religion, his work has been published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and other peer-reviewed publications. His essay on the relationship between religion and happiness is on page 66.

JOSHUA DUBOIS

ELÉONORE HUGHES

PAISLEY REKDAL

ANNEKA WILLIAMS

GLYNNIS MACNICOL

STEPHEN CRANNEY

THIS IS THE PLACE FOR BUSINESS

Located 10 minutes from downtown Salt Lake City is a Utah State Park with the perfect venues to set your team up for success all year round! With eleven inspiring, tech enabled spaces, we have the ideal venue to fit your corporate needs. Rooms for breakout gatherings, spaces for over 500, free WiFi, trail rides for team building, a variety of catering options, and free and easily accessible parking. This Is The Place for your business!

JEFFERSON’S WARNING

When the founders gathered in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution, they debated for months to decide how a president should be elected. At first, they liked the idea of Congress picking the president — as the British Parliament chooses the prime minister — but discarded that proposal over concerns it would lead to corruption between the executive and legislative branches.

Eventually, they settled on a little-known compromise called the “contingent election,” which has been mostly ignored by our history books. If no candidate emerges from the Electoral College with an electoral majority, the outcome is decided by the House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets one vote. Thomas Jefferson believed this was “the most dangerous blot in our Constitution, and one which some unlucky chance will some day hit.”

Fortunately, we haven’t come close to a contingent election since 1824, when John Quincy Adams won the presidency over populist Andrew Jackson. But as distant as it may seem, a contingent election is a real possibility this fall, at a time when confidence in American democracy is already fraying. As Ethan Bauer details on page 52, this could be a dangerous mix. “With just 16 percent saying they trusted the government in 2023, a contingent election could be the poison pill embedded in the U.S. Constitution that causes the rest of the electoral system to fail.”

With so much at stake this election season, we’re making a special effort at the magazine to focus on what truly makes America great. In that vein, this month’s cover story highlights the Great Salt Lake in a gorgeous photo essay by Chris Carlson. When I met with him to see his photos for the first time, I was inspired by the spiritual connection he feels with this endangered natural wonder. He told me how his ancestors were among the first white settlers to build homes on Antelope Island. Now, he hopes his work, which begins on page 40, will spur others to take action while the vanishing lake can still be saved. “Walk the shores,” Carlson implores. “Listen to the stories. See the beauty. Witness the plight.”

We love this land and believe in the institutions dedicated to preserving our democracy, but every good fight starts with good people. As I’ve noted in this space before, one important way to help is by listening respectfully to those who hold opposing views. But as Joshua DuBois points out in this month’s Commentary on page 17, that doesn’t mean compromising our deeply held beliefs. In fact, sometimes it requires the courage to call out what we see as wrong. “We need an active, lived civility that is not quiet,” DuBois writes, “that doesn’t take a backseat, but leans into the healing of this country.” I like to think our forebears — from Mason to Jefferson and Carlson’s pioneer ancestors — would agree.

—JESSE HYDE

EXECUTIVE EDITOR HAL BOYD

EDITOR

JESSE HYDE

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

ERIC GILLETT

MANAGING EDITOR

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CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

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POLITICS EDITOR

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EDITOR-AT-LARGE

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STAFF WRITERS

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WRITER-AT-LARGE

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ART DIRECTORS

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OUR READERS RESPOND

Our MARCH cover story examining what’s behind the exodus of people and businesses from the Golden State (“What’s the Matter with California?”), by Natalia Galicza, ignited a passionate debate that revealed the love-hate relationship people have with the state. But many readers, like Mark Holley, came to California’s defense. “I moved to Southern California from Utah 12 years ago. I won’t ever leave. I’ve found that people who have never lived here have the most negative things to say about it, which is interesting because they actually know the least about California. There are tons of issues here that need fixing — but the same can be said for Utah or anywhere else.” Ethan Bauer’s analysis of how sports betting is changing the stakes of the game (“Big Risks and Bad Bets”) proved timely as other national media outlets like The Associated Press and The New Yorker focused on the issue the same month that a betting scandal broke in Major League Baseball. Les Bernal, national director of Stop Predatory Gambling, recommends Bauer’s piece. “I’ve read almost every story on sports gambling in the U.S. over the last five years and yours was one of the very best. Excellent insight and analysis.” And it sparked this thought from reader Ron Stamm on the influence betting could have on those directly involved in the outcome of an athletic contest. “The high stakes involved may put players, coaches and officials in jeopardy — either through threats or the temptation of under-the-table cash — to influence the outcome.” In that same month, the Academy Awards honored films that interpreted the past, prompting Bauer to explore whether having Hollywood telling us how to think about our own history is a good thing (“Rewritten”). Reader Todd Richardson is OK with it as long as filmmakers who call their work educational and inspiring don’t hide behind the excuse of mere entertainment when they misfire or mislead. “It’s both or it’s neither,” Richardson argues. “Can’t have it both ways.” A film that took home multiple awards (“Oppenheimer”) told the story of the first atomic bomb blast — the Trinity test in New Mexico. The ongoing fallout from that explosion framed Matthew Brown’s story about how the U.S. military has shaped the economies of the West, for better or for worse (“Shell-shocked”). While readers debated whether the government should compensate those living downwind from radioactive fallout of nuclear testing, Taylor Barnes, field reporter for the military watchdog website Inkstick, had this to say: “Really superb piece on the costs/benefits of nuclear weapons spending in local economies in the American West.” An excerpt of Ruy Teixeira and John Judis’ new book on how the Democratic Party lost its core bloc of working-class voters (“The Elites”) elicited this response from reader Ron Richey: “I believe that there is room for a new political movement that tracks with the traditional conservative values of religious expression and freedom, prosperity through manufacturing and innovation, and the value to our society of solid working-class prosperity.”

“I’ve found that people who have never lived here have the most negative things to say about it, which is interesting because they actually know the least about California.”

SADDLE MAKER

CARY SCHWARZ IN SALMON, IDAHO

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GLENN OAKLEY

Marseli has never been more relieved, with his eyesight restored he can once again provide for his young family of six

R E S T O R I N G L I V E S

T H O U G H S I G H T

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t o g i v e s i g h t t o t h e b l i n d w h i l e a t t h e s a m e

t i m e i n c r e a s i n g t h e c a p a c i t y o f t h e l o c a l

m e d i c a l c o m m u n i t y . F I G H T B L I N D N E S S I N Y O U R C O M M U N I T Y T O D A Y w w w . C h a r i t y V i s i o n . o r g

SPEAKING OUT WITH GRACE

FINDING THE COURAGE TO TAKE A STAND

BY JOSHUA DUBOIS

When the president of the United States gave a speech, really as a sermon, in front of the casket of the late Rev. Clementa Pickney — who was murdered by man in a South Carolina church in 2015 — it was almost as if the most complicated and tragic parts of our common collective national story, and in some ways the most beautiful, came together in that moment. And the most radical thing I think President Barack Obama could have said in that moment is what he did say: that we all need to give and receive grace.

When I think about the state of America today, and the anger over politics, I think of people who are hurting and who are broken and who are seeking meaning in their lives. Perhaps that’s a radical thing to say about the people who descended upon the Capitol building on January 6. They were angry. And yes, they did things that require consequences. But they were also trying to fill a hole in their souls with some level of meaning. The same meaning that people on the left sought when they canceled people in the public square and maybe railed on Twitter or elsewhere. They’re all trying to scoop meaning into this hole, this abyss, and they’re doing so by demonizing someone else, by othering other people. Sometimes it becomes more acute and even becomes violent and literally kills people.

So what can faith leaders do? They can preach, share and teach the fact that the places where too many of us are building meaning are sinking sand. And they can talk about where true meaning is found. And that doesn’t have to be some bland message, some

generic message. They can call out and name the idols that people are replacing true meaning with, and then call people into something that’s more lasting and eternal.

This is going to be a deeply uncivil year, and that does not require people to be quiet. We’ve got to find that sweet spot where you can still speak lovingly, but prophetically, when you see something that you just know in your gut is wrong.

This is what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. did. He wasn’t quiet. In fact, one of his biggest criticisms was reserved not for the most virulent racists. But, as he said in his letter from the Birmingham Jail, it was reserved for the white moderates who were so concerned with decorum and civility that they refused to speak out when they knew something was wrong.

And so I think what all of us have to do, especially this year, on both sides of the aisle, is when you know that something is just wrong, you have to say it. You’ve got to put it out there. And in my tradition you express yourself, seasoned with salt and full of the Holy Spirit, with as much love as possible, but still speaking to it. We need an active, lived civility that is not quiet, that doesn’t take a backseat, but leans into the healing of this country.

JOSHUA DUBOIS, AN ORDAINED PENTECOSTAL MINISTER, LED THE WHITE HOUSE OFFICE OF FAITH-BASED AND NEIGHBORHOOD PARTNERSHIPS UNDER PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA.

OUT OF OFFICE

WOULD A FOUR-DAY WORKWEEK HELP OR HURT US?

MOST AMERICAN EMPLOYEES still work eight-hour days, five days a week, even in the age of remote work. But many companies and governments are exploring a change, replacing that standard with the four-day workweek. The idea has gained traction from Belgium to the United Arab Emirates, from California to Missouri. Bankrate reported last year that more than 80 percent of America’s full-time workforce supports the concept. Could this be the answer to work-life balance and burnout? Or does it just create new problems?

NATALIA GALICZA

BETTER BALANCE TO EACH THEIR OWN

THE FOUR-DAY WORKWEEK could be the cure for employee burnout, or mental exhaustion due to overwork. This global epidemic has made headlines since the pandemic and the rise of remote work, under terms like “quiet quitting” and “the great resignation.” According to McKinsey & Co., 1 in 4 employees around the world experience some level of burnout. Not only does this affect their mental health, it also impacts the bottom line, because they are six times more likely to quit in a matter of months, and may also have higher rates of sick days and absenteeism.

The four-day alternative offers employees more flexibility and free time, reducing the likelihood of stress and fatigue. The largest trial to date, which took place in the United Kingdom in 2022, showed that an extra day off can keep employees more engaged and healthy. Of the 2,900 workers who participated, 60 percent said the shorter week made it easier to balance their professional obligations with familial and social responsibilities. By the end of the six-month experiment, the likelihood of an employee quitting fell by 57 percent. The number of sick days used dropped 65 percent. But it also yielded a surprising outcome: Revenues rose across the 24 participating companies that provided this data.

“But it’s not just about productivity. It’s also about well-being,” said Andrew Barnes, co-founder of the nonprofit 4 Day Week Global, speaking at the MIT Sloan Management Review’s Work/23 symposium last May. The nonprofit helped conduct the U.K. study and oversees similar research around the world, including experiments in the United States. “And what we’re seeing is on broadly every single account — whether it’s workload satisfaction, stress, burnout, the time people can spend getting fit and exercising — it increased ability to have strong mental health, which is critical.”

Utah was the first U.S. state to experiment with this change for state employees, adopting a four-day, 40-hour schedule from 2008 to 2011. Mandated by former Gov. Jon Huntsman, this temporary change reduced energy consumption and carbon emissions while also saving the state close to $1 million per year.

SOMETIMES AN IDEALISTIC change can have unexpected outcomes and undesired consequences. There’s a reason Utah dropped the four-day workweek for government employees: It didn’t live up to the hype. An audit by the state Legislature found that it was saving far less than the $3 million annual number the governor’s office hoped for. Meanwhile, citizens grew dissatisfied when they couldn’t access government services on Fridays. Similarly, 55 percent of employees in a 2022 Qualtrics survey feared that a four-day workweek would frustrate their customers.

It’s not all roses for employees, either. Everybody works differently, as do different companies in different industries. Some are moving to four days using a compressed schedule — totaling 40 hours, with longer shifts to compensate. Others implement a shortened schedule with only 32 hours each week. Either way, employees still have the same responsibilities. Reducing the workweek just cuts down the time they have to complete their duties. “Burnout is a work-related syndrome. If people are forced to cram their work into four days when they prefer five — and if they need longer days to do so — it could cause burnout,” Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist for workplace management and well-being, told CNN in November.

A shortened schedule can also act as a Band-Aid that hides the real issues behind worker dissatisfaction. For example, in 2022, Gallup found that the quality of the workplace and work experience are up to three times more impactful on employee well-being than the amount of time worked. Addressing the root causes of why employees are unhappy with their company in the first place could be a more effective and inclusive solution than changing up the workweek.

There’s just no one-size-fits-all solution. The four-day workweek leaves out entire industries, like manufacturing and customer service and emergency response, because they don’t have the same flexibility. “It becomes challenging in fields where services have to be provided in the here and now, at fixed times, for customers, or people who are being cared for,” Bernd Fitzenberger, director of the Institute for Employment Research in Germany, told DW News.

BOARDING PASS

CAN AMERICAN TRAINS MAKE A HIGH-SPEED COMEBACK?

THE UNITED STATES became a railroad superpower on May 10, 1869, when the ceremonial “golden spike” completed the first transcontinental railroad in Promontory, Utah. Funded with $64 million in federal loans and untold land grants, this new infrastructure linked California to the eastern states and opened up the landlocked interior for travel and trade. Trains became more than a symbol of prosperity and strength — until the automobile took over. Now the promise of high-speed rail could be changing that, starting in the Southwest. On the 155th anniversary of the project that started it all, we break down the state of railroads today and in the future.

ARIANA DONALDS

186 MPH

This top speed will allow Brightline West — the country’s first true high-speed railroad line, projected to connect Los Angeles and Las Vegas in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics — to cover 218 miles in just over two hours. This

all-electric alternative for 3.5 million air travelers and 11 million drivers each year is expected to create 35,000 jobs and ease traffic on adjacent I-15, currently a 4-12 hour drive depending on traffic. For comparison, China’s Shanghai Transrapid magnetic levitation train hits 267 mph.

8 MILES … OR BUST

Before racing a stagecoach in 1830, the Tom Thumb was a prototype steam locomotive built to convince investors.

Funicular railways and horse-drawn railcars had been in use since about 1795, but this

engine’s performance — hitting 15 mph before breaking down midrace — won over the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, which used the technology on the country’s first commercial line, a 13-mile commute for industrial workers at Ellicott’s Mills outside the city.

MORE THAN 1,000 DEAD

In the 1800s, the cost of building could sometimes be measured in casualties, like this estimate of losses among Chinese laborers on the 690-mile Central Pacific line east from Sacramento. They used nitroglycerin to blast their way across the Sierra Nevada through granite, snow and ice. Avalanches and brutal weather — 44 winter storms in 1866 and parched Great Basin summers — made matters worse. They persisted despite discrimination, low wages and poor living conditions, forming 90 percent of work crews.

$100 BILLION

The current cost forecast for the 171-mile Central Valley project linking Bakersfield and Merced, California is triple the original 2008 estimate. This segment, part of a statewide high-speed rail project, will serve 6 million people in a region known for agriculture. It’s expected to launch in 2031, 11 years late. For comparison, the price tag for Brightline West is estimated at $12 billion, half of that in federal funding that has already been announced. It’s backed by finance billionaire Wes Edens, owner of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks.

254,000 MILES

American railroads peaked at this length in 1917, before the impacts of nationalization during World War I and a shift in federal funding from trains to automobiles. From 1929 to 1965, the number of passenger trains in service fell by 85 percent. Today, the national highway system is 164,000 miles long, compared to 137,000 miles of rail. That reflects the relative portions of federal transportation and infrastructure spending in 2023 — 22 percent on rail and mass transit and 44 percent on highway transportation.

28.6 MILLION

That’s how many passengers Amtrak carries each year, including 3 million on its flagship Acela line that runs 457 miles between Boston and Washington, D.C. The country’s fastest train, it only reaches its top speed of 150 mph on a 16-mile stretch in New Jersey; another 33.9 miles of high-speed rail are sprinkled along the route. New train sets with enhanced “active tilt” systems can travel curved sections faster.

8X MORE EFFICIENT

25,000 MILES

National highway system

164,000 miles

Rail system IN 2024:

137,000 miles

High-speed rail far outpaces airplanes in terms of energy use; it’s also four times more efficient than automobiles. All high-speed trains require electrified track — currently amounting to around 1,100 miles nationwide — but Brightline West will be all-electric, and promises to run entirely on renewable energy with zero greenhouse gas emissions back to the source. It’s expected to cut 400,000 tons of carbon emissions each year.

Covering this distance, China’s high-speed rail network is the world leader, with 6,000 more miles under construction. Spain and Japan are a distant second, with 1,800 miles each. The latter is a leader in velocity, expected to debut a 374 mph magnetic levitation train on the Tokyo-Osaka line in 2037. But about a dozen high-speed trains are in planning stages across the U.S., in corridors like Dallas-to-Houston and Portland-to-Vancouver, where the Cascadia is projected to add $355 billion in economic activity over the next 20 years.

DON’T TELL MOM

MY KIDS HAVE A GROUP CHAT WITHOUT ME. THAT’S A RELIEF

BY JENNIFER GRAHAM

Normally, in the course of human events, being left out of a group stings. Even the most popular woman in the world, Taylor Swift, has a story about being excluded from a group of middle school girls she thought were her friends. She asked the girls to go to the mall, and they said they were busy. Only it turned out they were busy having fun at the mall without her. Honestly, I’m not convinced she has recovered from that.

Social scientists tell us that the pain of exclusion harkens back to prehistoric times when, if our forebears were kicked out of their group, they would die of starvation or exposure. We all still have hunter-gatherer DNA stashed away in between the genetic adaptations to hold our breath underwater and digest milk in adulthood (sorry to all the lactose intolerant out there). Amid the very real evolutionary need to feel part of social groups, there is one particular group in which I am decidedly not welcome, but this time, it doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I revel in the fact that I am not a part of my children’s private group text: the sib chat. In my family, the sib chat is an ongoing conversation between my children that takes place via text. Being an only child,

I’ve never had the option of joining one. But my four children did, and boy, did they. Most weeks, the sib chat is as lively and electric as a broken power line snapping in the middle of the street. It crackles with news and jokes and memes. I only know of this by means of hearsay, and the occasional errant text, which is quickly followed up with

keeping them up to date on what each other is viewing on TikTok. A meta-analysis of 26 studies on sibling relationships worldwide found a wealth of positive outcomes associated with strong sibling ties. From living longer to being happier, those who are close to their siblings seem to do everything better.

MOST WEEKS, THE SIB CHAT IS AS LIVELY AND ELECTRIC AS A BROKEN POWER LINE SNAPPING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET. IT CRACKLES WITH NEWS AND JOKES AND MEMES.

“WRONG CHAT!” by any number of my kids, warning me that whatever just pinged on my phone wasn’t meant for me and would likely offend my differing sensibilities. Out of respect for my children — and the sib chat — I promptly delete.

I’m not sure they know it, but the sib chat does so much more for my children than

In December, there was one dissenting study published in the Journal of Family Issues that caused quite a stir with its findings that only children surveyed experienced better mental health than those with siblings. Much of this deduction centers around the idea of resource dilution:

The more kids parents have, the fewer resources and less attention they are able to give each child. But even that study’s conclusion conceded that the data doesn’t consider the countereffect of the attention given to siblings by one another and doesn’t attest to the quality of sibling connections, according to study author and professor of sociology Doug Downey. “It is likely that higher-quality sibling relationships will be more beneficial to children and may have more positive effects on mental health.” This study also noted that while its findings trend toward the negative, other research

WHEN CHILDREN ARE YOUNG AND WHACKING EACH OTHER ON THE HEAD WITH SQUISHMALLOWS, IT’S HARD TO ENVISION A FUTURE IN WHICH THEY INTERACT PLEASANTLY AND VOLUNTARILY WITH EACH OTHER AS ADULTS.

has shown that having more brothers and sisters correlates with developing better social skills and a lower likelihood of divorce later in life.

When children are young and whacking each other on the head with Squishmallows, it’s hard to envision a future in which they interact pleasantly and voluntarily with each other as adults. This is even more difficult to imagine when there’s a sizable age gap between the youngest and oldest (the spread between mine is 10 years). When a sib chat blossoms, it’s as unexpected and miraculous as the first daffodil that breaks through hard, cold soil in late winter. Where, we wonder, did this marvelous thing come from? And how did such a boon come to our family?

My children weren’t always close, and I blame that largely on the gap in ages. Most 16-year-olds aren’t really that into the lives of 8-year-olds. It wasn’t until all four were in their late teens and early 20s that something emerged that looked like a real connection. When the pandemic hit, three of them came home for 18 months, and, for all practical purposes, became each other’s best friends. (The oldest was living on his own by then.)

It turns out that, pandemic or not, brothers and sisters tend to grow warmer toward each other as young adults. A 2018 study that looked at relationships between siblings in “emerging adulthood” found that even with gaps in communication, “sibling relationship quality appeared to improve with participants, indicating they were happier with their sibling and felt more like equals and had a better understanding of one another.”

My youngest daughter knows that one reason she exists is because I wanted her older sister, who had only two brothers at that point, to have a sister. Not having had a sister myself, I imagined it to be a magical relationship, and indeed it has been, at least from my vantage point. They talk daily, and like to go out with each other for walks and meals. They have watched all 327 episodes of the hit TV show “Supernatural” together, some more than once. And while my own relationship with my daughters is strong, I

know that they can relate to each other in ways that are different from the way I relate to them, particularly since I don’t understand half of their jokes.

The sib chat isn’t just there for the prosaic daily messages. It’s also there for when my kids need support from one another. I believe another one of the psychological advantages of people with siblings is knowing they have people who have known them the longest in their corner, which becomes all the more important as our parents, our original defenders, grow older and frail. This sort of built-in protection in a family unit explains why researchers find positive physical and mental health outcomes associated with having siblings. One study conducted in Canada examined the effect of sibling relationships when a family was faced with stressful events. They found that strong bonds between brothers and sisters help them make it through difficult times. “Notably, the protective effect of sibling affection was evident regardless of mother-child relationship quality,” the authors wrote.

The group chat my children have is just that — an expression of sibling affection. A way that siblings can share joys and weather storms together even when they’re no longer living under the same roof, just the way God and Steve Jobs intended it. Yes, the content may be light or utilitarian — When is Grandpa’s birthday again? Who has a Hulu account? This meme! — but don’t be fooled by that. There is deep love lining the riverbed here that often goes unexpressed among siblings who grow up being gruff to each other, which is something that is pretty much required in the teen years. Later, when they moved out of the house and realized that those people they left behind (or who left home before them) comprise a large part of the small society of people who will know them for all of their lives, this bond became a remarkable gift — for them, and for me. Their sib chat is a chattering, dinging, meme-infused, daily reminder of that gift. And a reminder that when I leave this Earth, I can leave confident that they will continue as a tight family unit, together.

SOBER MINDED

WHY YOUNG AMERICANS ARE ABSTAINING FROM ALCOHOL

BY ANNEKA WILLIAMS

Ilived in the French Alps for nearly six months while in graduate school, ending workdays with long hikes in rugged mountains, eating more than my fair share of freshly baked baguettes, and wandering down cafe-lined streets watching locals sip glasses of wine as meals stretched on for hours and warm wishes of camaraderie and abundance were toasted. There, I learned that in French, santé is synonymous with the English “cheers.” It also translates to “health.” I’m not sure if that’s the etymological intention, but it certainly gave me pause for reflection, mostly because it conveyed a very different relationship to alcohol than the one I see unfolding in my own culture. It also is underpinned by the irony of a toast for health being associated with alcohol — something that we’re finding has objectively unhealthful qualities.

Today, young people in the United States — and other countries around the world — are drinking less than ever before. According to Pew Research Center, adults ages 18 to 34 who reported that drink at all dropped

from 72 percent in 2001-03 to 62 percent in 2021-23. A 2023 Gallup survey found that the rate of drinking has declined by 10 percent in that same age group bracket over the last two decades. It seems that temperance is tapping into the roots of modern-day life.

Our relationship with alcohol in the United States has been fraught for about

TODAY, YOUNG AMERICANS ARE DRINKING LESS THAN EVER BEFORE.

as long as we’ve been a country. To drink or not to drink has long been the subject of social judgment, public scrutiny and moral division. While what we consume is a deeply personal decision, alcohol tends to carry more weight than most other food or drink choices. Historical angst around alcohol dates back to the late 19th century with the beginnings of an aggressive temperance

movement and, later, more than a decade of nationwide prohibition in the 1920s. The temperance movement had numerous religious affiliations and opposed alcohol’s impact on moral character. In this era, alcohol was framed as the cause of many social problems such as domestic violence, poverty and crime, so constitutional prohibition was enacted to try to remedy these social ills by banning the assumed cause. Today, opposition to alcohol seems to stem more from education and personal choice around general physical and mental well-being.

In response to emerging research about the impacts of alcohol consumption on our health, young adults are forging a new relationship with alcohol than generations before them.

I am Gen Z, while my partner is millennial. We like to keep a healthy amount of generational rivalry present in our relationship, so we have a crudely made Venn diagram taped lopsidedly to our fridge that features “millennials” on one side, and “Gen Z” on the other. Most of the diagram’s contents

“YOUNG PEOPLE HAVE DEALT WITH FAMILY AND FRIENDS WITH ADDICTION ISSUES, PROBABLY MORE THAN ANY OTHER GENERATION."

are lighthearted nods to generational icons and trends. Gen Z gets “Noah Kahan” and “TikTok,” while my partner has claimed “blink-182” and “avocado toast” for the millennials. I don’t often feel like the line between millennials and Gen Z is all that apparent, even when it comes to drinking alcohol or not drinking it. Both generations drink less than those before us. But a closer look shows that abstaining from drinking is more of an identifier for Gen Z than it currently is for millennials.

Javier Lastra, one of the lead authors of a 2017 Berenberg Report on generational drinking habits, found that Gen Z (individuals born between 1997 and 2012) was drinking 20 percent less per capita than millennials who, in turn, were drinking less than Gen Xers and baby boomers did at the same age. One of the main reasons they found to drive this shift? Health, both mental and physical. “There’s generally a greater awareness by Gen Z (compared to previous generations) about health,” Lastra explains. “They seem to be a much more health-conscious generation than previous ones.”

There is also evidence of increasing health consciousness across all age groups.

A 2023 Gallup survey found that 39 percent of all adults and 52 percent of young adults (age 18-34) view consuming even one or two drinks a day as bad for health, representing a marked increase in this point of view since just 2018. Public interest in mindfulness meditation has exploded over the last several decades, the fitness industry is booming to meet rising consumer demand for workout classes and gym services, and there is an increase in the use of health-tracking technologies such as apps and smartwatches that measure sleep, calories and other physiological metrics of health. Amid all this information about how to be healthier, live longer and look better, decisions around alcohol are just one piece in the broader puzzle.

In recent decades, there has been a proliferation of research suggesting that alcohol is bad for human health. In 2023, the

World Health Organization announced that there is no safe amount of alcohol to drink; any amount of alcohol has adverse health impacts such as increased risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and mental health problems. Research from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health shows that alcohol consumption, no matter the amount, alters how our body functions at a cellular level, “triggering a number of adverse effects.” This includes disrupting neural stem cell growth, interfering with the communication between nerve cells and causing inflammation that inhibits our mitochondria’s energy production. That can manifest in poor sleep, inflammation in the body, high blood pressure and other negative effects. Alcohol is classified as a group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, placing it among other high-risk carcinogens such as asbestos and harmful radiation. With information like this at hand, it would make sense for anyone of any age to be at least a little scared of alcohol.

History is important, too.

“Young people have seen the behavior of their parents and grandparents and have dealt with family, friends ... people that they know (deal) with addiction issues, probably more than any other generation,” says Gary Frankel, a licensed social worker in Vermont who conducts individual and group therapy sessions for young adults. According to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, more than half of all adults have a family history of alcohol abuse or problem drinking. It’s not uncommon for families in America today to be dealing with the repercussions of generations of familial strife driven by these issues. In that context, it’s simply hard to view alcohol as “cool.” It’s hard to view anything that’s wrapped up in negative feelings as “cool.” Red Brick Road, a U.K.-based ad agency, conducted a report focused on Gen Z drinking habits in the United Kingdom and found that 51 percent of Gen Z respondents reported that their “online image”

was a factor when going out “socializing and drinking.” Lastra found the same thing in a separate report: Gen Z is drinking less, in part due to fear that drunk escapades and reckless decisions will be etched into permanence on the internet. “(Respondents) were afraid of being humiliated,” Lastra explains. But more and more, instead of making choices to avoid negative consequences, Americans are incentivized by the positive effects of their health-based choices.

Just a few weeks ago, I drove by a billboard on Utah’s I-215 that read “Self-care is cool.” In a 2022 McKinsey report, around 50 percent of U.S. consumers reported wellness was a top priority in their daily lives, which represented an 8 percent increase from 2020. This newfound dedication to health seems to be pushing Americans, particularly young adults, away from alcohol. By some estimates, more than a third of people under the age of 27 in the United States abstain from alcohol for the sake of their mental health. And many more take a more moderate and flexible approach. “Gen Z is drinking less alcohol and I think that where that might stem from is social things like what mental health and physical health is and what it means to be a well person,” explains Frankel.

But prioritizing health isn’t as simple as just abstaining from alcohol. In a culture that’s drinking less, there’s a need to navigate new ways to socialize that don’t involve drinks at the bar with friends. For

“THERE’S GENERALLY A GREATER AWARENESS BY GEN Z ABOUT HEALTH. THEY SEEM TO BE A MUCH MORE HEALTHCONSCIOUS GENERATION.”

centuries, the social hubs where alcohol has traditionally been served have been proven to bring people together and facilitate social connections that benefit health. Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at Oxford University, found that living near a pub significantly increased an individual’s happiness thanks to the in-person connections and local community fostered through frequent pub visits. So, one issue to be aware of as alcohol becomes less prevalent in the U.S. is creating solutions to mitigate ongoing social division and isolation. And as I flash back to the hum of voices and the rich sound of laughter echoing down the cobblestone streets of that French village, glasses clinking santé, I can’t help but wonder what changes await as the sober-curious movement gains traction.

Historically, churches, offices and clubs have been important hubs of social interaction that facilitate community and benefit mental health, but these institutions are declining. In 2020, a Gallup survey found that only 47 percent of Americans said they belonged to a church, a 23 percent decrease since 1999. The share of individuals who work remotely has skyrocketed over the past two decades. And, thanks to the iPhone and other technological advancements, more socializing is happening digitally. While there is merit to being connected digitally, in-person interactions have been shown to have a greater benefit to overall well-being, and American adults are now spending

30 percent less time face-to-face socializing than 20 years ago. Simply put, we are spending less time with other people and that is taking a toll on our health.

Social disconnection, an increasing phenomenon in our culture, can have devastating impacts on long-term health. Researchers from Brigham Young University suggest that poor social relationships or the lack of social community can have health impacts of a similar magnitude to smoking and alcohol consumption. Drinking alcohol is objectively harmful to health, but, when it comes to curtailing the negative impacts of social isolation, there could be something to be said for the health benefits of finding new ways to go out with friends.

The future of alcohol consumption in the United States is uncertain, but it’s clear that we are all drinking — or not — and hanging out — or not — in markedly different ways than in generations past. Where this will lead in terms of net health and happiness remains to be seen. As Americans grapple with the idea of what it means to be a healthy person, our culture is at an inflection point, and it’s hard to know whether and how alcohol fits into the equation. It is increasingly apparent that being a healthy person is more complicated than simply being sober. By approaching alcohol more mindfully, young adults are providing space for consumption to be an ongoing and deeply personal choice, rather than a categorical decision. Cheers, or santé, to that.

THROUGH THE LENS

ELLIOT ROSS CAPTURES THE WILD WEST BEFORE IT ’ S GONE

BY NATALIA GALICZA

Do you want to see my favorite alligator?” A blond-haired man points out the reptile in question and begins to climb atop it, sitting on the base of its tail. He interlocks his fingers around its throat and leans back, pulling the gator skyward, making it look like a strange version of a rearing steed. At this moment, surrounded by more than a hundred alligators at the Colorado Gators Reptile Park — a long way from home for them — Elliot Ross crouched in the dirt to shoot a portrait of man and beast.

“Why do you like getting on top of your alligator?” he remembers asking.

“I don’t know,” the man answered. “It’s just a way of saying hello.”

“Do you think he likes it?”

“I don’t know, probably not.”

“So why do you do it?”

“I don’t know. It feels good. I feel powerful.”

The man on the alligator glares into the lens, his leather work boots planted in the dark soil, his posture straight, his denim jeans worn. The portrait is part of Ross’ photo survey “Good Grace,’’ a project and upcoming book in collaboration with the art collective M12 Studio. It aims to showcase the current state of Colorado’s San

Luis Valley, where counties rank among the state’s poorest and driest. Ross photographed the valley and its people for months. Now, looking back, this place gives that man’s response some context: In a region so rural and isolated, a sense of power and control can feel requisite.

“I SEE MY JOB AS ILLUSTRATING THE VALUE THAT EXISTS IN THIS MISUNDERSTOOD PLACE WITH ALL OF ITS LAYERED BEAUTY, ITS DIVERSE IDENTITIES, ITS SILENT HISTORIES, ITS CULTURAL WORTH.”

The intersection of the Western landscape and people’s inner worlds defines much of Ross’ work. A couple shielding themselves from the worsening Los Angeles heat under parasols; his family in northeastern Colorado praying out on the plains that an incoming supercell won’t damage their crops; a young woman in a

quinceañera gown posing in front of the wall that divides the United States and Mexico. These moments serve as a remedial view of the Western identity and experience that Ross has seen become romanticized, demonized and, above all, misunderstood. “I get defensive when people refer to parts of the West as flyover states, which denotes there’s nothing of value,” he says. “And I see my job as to illustrate the value that exists in these misunderstood places with all of its layered beauty, its diverse identities, its silent histories, its cultural worth.”

IT STARTED WITH barn cats and storms. Station wagons and tractors. Electrical outlets and Air Force drills. In his early years, Ross photographed anything he could find to make sense of his surroundings. His grandmother had given him his first point-and-shoot camera when he was four years old, the same year his family moved from Taipei, Taiwan, to rural Colorado. Quickly afterward, photography became a way to navigate the culture shock of switching from a dense urban environment in a city of skyscrapers and neon lights to a home on austere plains where the nearest neighbor or grocery store was miles away.

PHOTOGRAPHY

ELLIOT ROSS

A YOUNG MAN ATOP AN ALLIGATOR IS PART OF ELLIOT ROSS’ RECENT WORK DEPICTING COLORADO’S SAN LUIS VALLEY.

JAYMIN MARTINEZ POSING IN FRONT OF THE BORDER WALL IN A QUINCEAÑERA GOWN IN BROWNSVILLE, TEXAS.

His mother’s side of the family is Taiwanese Chinese, but his father comes from a background of American farmers and ranchers. Ross’ childhood chores included bottle-feeding his 4-H calf every morning, clearing tumbleweeds and fixing fences. He had no allowance in the traditional sense, but every month he got a new roll of film. His family made a pit stop at Walmart on the hour-and-a-half drive to church on Sundays to drop off his film when it was ready to get developed. Those photos often depicted his life on the family farm — all the chores, but also summers spent building forts, searching for arrowheads, dawdling through canyons. Over time, the photographs have come to communicate the values with which Ross was raised. “All the expected descriptors certainly come to mind: self-sufficient, resourceful, endlessly hardworking with high esteem for family

and sometimes God,” he says. “I was raised with these attributes, and they certainly have shaped who I am today. I believe in the small things that create a sense of community, like long-winded conversations with your neighbor.”

“I GET DEFENSIVE WHEN PEOPLE REFER TO PARTS OF THE WEST AS FLYOVER STATES, WHICH DENOTES THERE’S NOTHING OF VALUE.”

Those traits, in their absence, stood out more after Ross left. He valued living in New York City and working as a photographic assistant for luminaries Annie Leibovitz and Mark Seliger. But he also found himself longing for family, canyon

country, high plains, the West’s variety and nuance and contradictions. So he came home and kept his camera in his hand. He captured wrinkled hands grasping a Bible so worn its spine is held together with tape; combines gliding through golden fields; farmers taking in a sermon’s message at Cowboy Church; a child spinning around in a makeshift rain dance to fend off an incoming storm.

Ross was named a Critical Mass Top 50 artist the year he released these photographs in a collection titled “The Reckoning Days,” and held his first solo exhibition at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado, the following year. The response reasserted his decision to move back West, encouraging his newfound dedication to documenting the very world — once unfamiliar — that became his own. “It was, in a lot of ways, an

ROSS’ FAMILY IN NORTHEASTERN COLORADO, PHOTOGRAPHED WHILE PRAYING OVER THEIR CROPS ON A SUMMER EVENING.

affirmation that I was on the right path,” he says. “I feel like I can make work here. Because I’m a part of this.”

EVERYWHERE ROSS GOES, he carries a poem. It’s a one-page printout of Max Ehrmann’s “Desiderata.” The paper is deeply creased from all the folding and unfolding, the reading and rereading. And of all the stanzas, the second one stands out the most to him: “Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.”

He had the poem with him when he ventured to Naco, Arizona, in 2017 to meet and photograph those living along the nation’s southern border with Mexico. There, he heard a man yell from a distance while unholstering his gun. “How would you like to get yourself shot today?”

The voice belonged to John Ladd, a fourth-generation Arizona rancher who has frequently appeared on Fox News to speak

in favor of more stringent border control policies. Ross de-escalated the conversation by explaining what he was working on. He told Ladd he just wanted to listen. So for half an hour, he did.

Like the West, Ladd is not one-dimensional. The cattle rancher expressed some skepticism about the border wall at the time out of fear it would grant the federal government too much power. Yet he felt deeply protective of his ranch, which had existed in his family for more than a century, because it was an extension of himself and his history. “I think we both left from that interaction having learned a little bit more and feeling more compassion towards others,” Ross says. “Despite how angry, how out of control some situations and reactions start, I think it goes to show that there’s so much power in just listening.”

After their conversation came to a close, Ross asked to take a photograph.

A common thread among Westerners, in Ross’ view, is open-hearted skepticism — a combination of curiosity, independent thinking and compassion. His time with Ladd sticks out as particularly memorable because it demonstrated what can happen when that skepticism is put into practice. Misunderstanding can become clarity; similarities can overshadow differences.

In Niland, California, Ross met Cuervo, a self-proclaimed vagabond in his 60s who

Ladd’s portrait turned out. In it, he stands in front of his pickup truck, coated in a fine layer of red dust with a license plate that reads “BEEF.” He’s in a denim button-up and jeans, a white cowboy hat in one hand as he squints into the sun. His eyes are nearly closed and a white mustache covers his lips, but somehow it’s still clear that he’s smiling. “In my view, perceptions of politics and religion play heavily into an urbanite projection of flyover identity onto rural people,” Ross says. “The fact is, the rural West is not a homogenous place by any means.”

wandered the mountains and desert spanning Southern California and northern Mexico with a mule and donkey in tow. He wore a red flannel shirt and a gray kilt, and owned few visible possessions. “He along with other vagabonds have shown me that the richest lives can be led with the fewest things, that wealth exists in interactions with others, through spontaneity and intimate knowledge of the land,” Ross says. “Through connection, we can find an understanding with others, no matter how different they are, politically or religiously or economically. It just reminds me of the hope in humanity.”

What does it mean to be a person in the West? Ross’ work is still attempting to dissect that, even to find his own answer for himself. But what he’s gathered so far is that it can mean being overlooked or shrunk down to size to fit a certain mold. It can mean contending with stereotypes and clichés that make it easy to put off putting in the effort to understand the region’s complexity and examine its gray areas.

In the Talking Heads’ 1978 track “The Big Country,” the chorus tells of an airplane passenger’s reaction to looking down on the nation’s sprawling country: “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me, I wouldn’t live like that, no siree, I wouldn’t do the things the way those people do, I wouldn’t live there if you paid me to.”

What if that passenger got to see Ross’ West? Would it change their mind? Would that matter? Ross believes so, and that debunking the myth of “flyover country” is all the more urgent in our times and all the more rewarding for those who attempt it. “I think the accumulation of experiences that I’ve had with strangers, people I’ve met along the road, they’ve taught me to arrive in humility and to walk in grace. That one can never underestimate a person, and that there isn’t a place for my own judgment or preconceived notions,” he says. “They’ve shown me the incredible power and promise listening holds. And through that, essentially, they’ve shown me hope.”

OPPOSITE: FARMERS ATTEND COWBOY CHURCH NEAR NEW RAYMER IN NORTHEAST COLORADO.

LEFT: ELLIOT ROSS BELOW: RANCHER JOHN LADD PHOTOGRAPHED AFTER A LONG AND INSIGHTFUL DISCUSSION WITH ROSS NEAR HIS RANCH IN NACO, ARIZONA. MAX LOWE

DON’T CALL IT A GHOST TOWN

THE UNCERTAIN FUTURE OF A FAILED UTOPIA

BY ELÉONORE HUGHES

Henry Ford had an idea.

At the time, he was one of the richest men in the world, thanks to his automobile empire. But he needed control over a rubber supply. So why not make it himself?

In the 1920s, most rubber was produced in Southeast Asia. Rumors of a rubber cartel that could dictate prices worldwide sparked the decision to create a plantation where he could produce his own supply.

Ford settled on the Amazon and eventually bought $20 million worth of rainforest — almost 4,000 square miles — off Brazilian authorities. He sent American executives to oversee the construction of the town and plantation. Trees were razed, the rubble of the forest was doused in kerosene and a huge fire was lit to clear the earth. Boats loaded with heavy machinery floated up the Amazon River. Workers from across Brazil poured in to make Ford’s vision a reality. In 1928, Fordlândia, Ford’s dreamt-of utopia, broke ground.

A school was built. A hospital went up. There was a cinema constructed, to entertain residents when off the clock.

Swimming pools, a tennis court, streets lined with Fords and a golf course rose from the charred rainforest.

By 1945, the experiment failed, and the Ford Motor Company sold the land back to the Brazilian government for only $244,200. Nearly 100 years later, Fordlândia may look abandoned, but it’s not.

Roughly 2,000 residents live in the town, complete with a church, a health post and a few guesthouses and small eateries. Youngsters play Brazil’s favorite sport, soccer, near the long-overgrown golf course once built for Americans. Outside the school, 17-year-old Kayná Bodsiad strides up to me.

“Are you here to talk about Henry Ford’s fiasco or the ghost town?” he asks. His question is a stark reminder that journalists, historians and curious visitors have flocked to Fordlândia over the years as a geographical curiosity, drawn by its strange past. Residents are used to catching sight of them wandering around, their skin glistening with sunscreen and cameras around their necks.

TODAY, THE SUN dips toward the Tapajós River as a hot and humid afternoon draws to a close. Classes have ended and kids in uniform are hanging out in front of the school, soaking up each other’s company before parting ways and heading home. Behind them rises a decaying warehouse with broken windows — a vestige of Fordlândia’s past.

“Ghost town” is a trope in the eyes of math teacher Eliana Cardoso Costa. “I would strongly ask you not to use the word ‘ghost,’” she says, frowning from behind her desk in a high school classroom. Cardoso Costa, a 61-year-old woman with square glasses, grew up in Fordlândia.

“There needs to be more respect because here there are lives.”

ABOVE: THE FACTORY THAT USED TO GENERATE ELECTRICITY AND STEAM IN HENRY FORD’S DAY HAS BEEN CONVERTED INTO A BOAT AND CAR REPAIR GARAGE.

RIGHT: CHILDREN GO TO AND FROM SCHOOL ON THE BUS, ADULTS COMMUTE TO WORK, AND LIFE GOES ON IN FORDLÂNDIA.

LEFT: TODAY, MANY RESIDENTS IN FORDLÂNDIA, LIKE MARIA LUIZA PEREIRA SILVA, 58, LIVE IN AND MAINTAIN WHAT USED TO BE VILLAS FOR AMERICAN EXECUTIVES.

BELOW: FURNITURE FROM THE FORD ERA STILL SITS IN EACH ROOM OF DA COSTA CASTRO AND DUARTE DE BRITO’S HOME.

The false assumption that this corner of the Amazon needs someone to bring it to life was the heart of Ford’s great experiment from its beginnings. “We are not going to South America to make money but to help develop that wonderful and fertile land,” Ford said in the Magazine of Business in 1928. Fordlândia was conceived as an oasis of civilization amid an untamed jungle. “The Amazon Awakens,” a 1944 film produced by Walt Disney Productions in partnership with the U.S. government’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, took the viewer on a tour of the Amazon. A narrator described Fordlândia as a “model community” located “deep in the wilderness,” preparing “the future conquerors of the Amazon.” In the town’s center stood the Dearborn, Michigan-style factories, looking lost in the jungle.

Disillusioned with American urbanism, Ford envisioned the rubber plantation as a modern pastoral paradise. Under his orders, American executives enforced a ban on gambling, prostitution and alcohol. Hygiene was strictly monitored. Inspectors would visit workers’ houses and instruct them to hang their washing on lines, rather than lay them out to dry as was customary. A factory-like conception of time reigned. Plantation bosses used a siren to

call employees to report to their stations. A strict hierarchy between white executives and local Brazilian workers was etched into the town’s design as well. Three streets of mill town bungalows were built near the sloping riverbank for local workers. At least a mile away stood the “American neighborhood.” “On one side, the Americans, on the other, the rabble,” says Luiz Magno Ribeiro, a teacher and local historian.

Food was a particular source of contention. Workers’ children were served “scientifically balanced meals,” according to the 1944 film. These included oatmeal, whole grain rice, canned peaches and sometimes fish, which was known to be rotted by the time it was served. Ford abhorred cow's milk, which was replaced by a soy equivalent. Anger and frustration came to a head in the newly inaugurated eating hall, when, in December 1930, a visiting executive proposed to have the men line up for their food. “We are not dogs that are going to be ordered by the company to eat in this way,” one worker said, according to author Greg Grandin. Tensions peaked and soon workers were smashing pots, glass, plates, tables and chairs. Rioters destroyed cars, equipment and machinery during a rampage that caused thousands of dollars of damage.

Known as the “Breaking Pans” revolt, the rampage was the culmination of Brazilians’

MOST OF THE BUILDINGS STILL IN USE IN FORDLÂNDIA ARE THOSE CONSTRUCTED BY THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY, MAINTAINED AND REPURPOSED BY RESIDENTS.

dissatisfaction with Ford’s project. The imposition of an idealized way of life dreamt up back in the U.S. and forced upon locals fostered deep-seated grievances that weren’t healed. Because of this, experts conclude that Fordlândia failed at least in part due to an inability to adapt to the local culture and environment.

THE FORD ERA still serves as the backbone of much of the town’s infrastructure. To this day, water is pumped from the river and distributed to houses across the town, much as it was in the 1930s. But problems are common. The pipework has yet to undergo needed maintenance and getting new parts to Fordlândia is a challenge. Some inhabitants of Fordlândia remember the founding of the town with nostalgia, recalling modern health services — the emblem of which was the contemporary, sleek hospital. A 2012 fire destroyed much of the hospital’s furniture. Thieves looted what remained, stealing equipment containing lead and copper to sell. Today’s residents go to a small center for minor needs but are forced to head to Santarém, the nearest big city that lies a minimum six-hour boat ride away, for more complex care.

Edilson de Araujo Branco was born in the hospital built during the Ford era. He

lives in the former workers’ part of town, in one of the once-identical rows of clapboard, wooden houses. “We’re making the most of what they left,” he says from the porch of his home. Across town, where the American expats used to live, a similar sentiment reigns. The once-stately houses are occupied by Brazilians who are technically squatters. “It’s a blessing, living here,” says Altina da Costa Castro, a short woman whose graying hair is tied back in a ponytail. “The house is big … and I can have a vegetable plot and a henhouse,” she adds as she pulls clothes off the line.

Castro makes sure the house is kept spick-and-span. The original floorboards are regularly washed. Plastic Tupperware is piled on top of a varnished dining cabinet that once contained an American family’s silverware. Castro’s partner, 79-year-old Expedito Duarte de Brito, found paintings that he believes once belonged to Americans in the garden wrapped up in a plastic cover. Those hang proudly on the wall. Duarte de Brito considers himself a guardian of history. If he could, he would do more repairs to the house, but the modest retirement stipend he lives off does not allow for projects like rebuilding a roof.

Many of Fordlândia’s other buildings show signs of neglect — if they are still standing. The cinema from the era was recently torn down. Fordlândia started falling into ruin after the Ford Motor Company left less than two decades after it arrived. No one left was able to front the bill for upkeep, but locals refused to give up on their new town. For Magno Ribeiro, the local historian, Ford’s failure was ultimately due to a brazen disregard to understand the natural environment. “Ford had the best engineers, doctors, electricians … but he forgot the best specialist in the Amazon.”

Not hiring a botanist in those early years proved disastrous. Ford engineers planned to plant rows of hevea brasiliensis, commonly known as the rubber tree. When tapped, the tree spills a waterproof sap, which can be processed into latex. But in the rainforest, the rubber tree grows best naturally

dispersed and widely spaced apart. In tight rows, they become vulnerable to fungus and pests that spread from tree to tree. Ford’s trees wilted again and again.

“THE TALE OF Fordlândia is about limits of a certain rationalization of the world. But it is also one of total blindness to everything that surrounds us,” says Margareth da Silva Pereira, an urban architect and historian who teaches at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Fordlândia’s past holds lessons for the struggles both the region and the world are facing. “An idea of development based on the understanding of nature as something separate from human society persists until this day,” says Ana Luiza Silva, an architect and Ph.D. candidate at the Federal University of Bahia. She co-authored

THE TALE OF FORDLÂNDIA IS ABOUT LIMITS OF A CERTAIN RATIONALIZATION OF THE WORLD. BUT IT IS ALSO ONE OF TOTAL BLINDNESS TO EVERYTHING THAT SURROUNDS US.

the article “Fordlândia — Ruin of the Future.” Silva says this type of development relies on the exploitation of nature, which is seen only as a resource.

Deforestation is playing a part in rising global temperatures, which makes extreme weather events — such as wildfires, floods and droughts — more likely. In the Amazon, backers of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro see deforestation as necessary to make way for development, namely cattle ranching and soy plantations. Some small-scale farmers also engage in deforestation, driven by a lack of economic alternatives. Now, the new extremes are being felt in real time. A historic drought in the Amazon had dramatic consequences for millions of people last year. Some communities were left stranded without access to

drinking water, food or means of transportation. In November, smoke hung in the air in Fordlândia, rising from wildfires lit by humans for deforestation.

“The fires are a huge problem,” says Bodsiad, the teenager, who wants to study environmental biology. “We can’t even see the other side of the river because of the smoke.” Like many of his classmates, Bodsiad wants to leave Fordlândia due to a lack of opportunities. “Financial resources don’t reach us here. And few people visit the town, which would give a boost to the local economy,” he says.

In 2021, GDP per capita in Aveiro, the broader municipality of Fordlândia, was one of the lowest in the country (approximately 9,000 reais, compared to 53,000 reais in Rio de Janeiro). Now the question isn’t if Fordlândia is a ghost town, but if it can continue to exist and not become one.

For decades, residents have fought for historical recognition by Brazil’s National Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute (Iphan), a status that would protect buildings from the era. Historical recognition is important, says Magno Ribeiro, who despairs at the lack of maintenance. But many who live in historical houses also want to be granted documents attesting that the house they have resided in for years belongs to them. For the time being, their homes belong to the federal government, and inhabitants live with the threat of eviction.

Historical recognition could boost tourism and provide a much-needed extra source of income for residents. But Pereira says there is a risk of turning Fordlândia into a destination where day-trippers head to the town, hoping to glimpse remnants of Fordlândia’s past. That could clash with residents’ concrete needs — such as documents attesting their ownership — and only further the town’s reputation as a “ghost town” through tourism marketing. Magno Ribeiro reminds me that here, there are no ghosts. “Ghosts only exist in rich people’s castles,” he says. Maybe, then, this town’s only ghost is Henry Ford himself, since he never actually visited the place we still call Fordlândia.

Re ection A OF Place

The Great Salt Lake is a study of how we can preserve places with more than memories

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRIS CARLSON

IN 2023, PHOTOGRAPHER

Chris Carlson

went to the Great Salt Lake to take photographs for the first time. Something clicked. He returned again and again, visiting the faraway, rarely seen reaches of the lake that has been described as more like a desert than the desert that surrounds it.

By year’s end, Carlson had spent time flying over the mineral evaporation ponds, tracing the line of the Lucin Cutoff, walking across now-exposed lakebed, and chasing the shoreline, tallying up visits during 48 out of 52 weeks.

As the descendant of white settlers who built homes on Antelope Island, he has felt a lifelong connection to the lake. And now he feels a calling to document it, come hell or high water, as the fate of the lake remains uncertain and legislation to protect its future arguably remains nonexistent.

“For me, photographing becomes an extension of my faith, embracing the call to ‘mourn with those that mourn,’” he says.

When looking at images of the Great Salt Lake, the supernatural beauty of Deseret Magazine’s backyard is unmistakable. Each frame is confirmation that something this captivating and kaleidoscopic exists on Earth, and that someone was there to experience it. It’s proof.

It’s also an act of preservation.

The ability to preserve something — not only in the tangible sense of pixels on screens or ink on paper, but also with the intent to create enough attention to spur action — motivates Carlson to keep returning. “It is in our presence and attentiveness that we forge a bond that compels us to protect and preserve these places.”

LAUREN STEELE

BLUE VEIN DECEMBER 31, 2023 2 EVAPORATION PONDS OCTOBER 13, 2023 3 BISON MARCH 19, 2023

“This is the first time I have been compelled to create such a large body of work about one specific subject. This constant ‘nudge’ has gotten me out of bed at 4 a.m. for the last year and a half. And I’m not done.”

1 MIRABILITE MOUND

DECEMBER 31, 2023 2 LEE CREEK

JULY 9, 2023

3 BURROWING OWL JUNE 2, 2023

4 SPIRAL JETTY

JUNE 23, 2023

“Every season spent with the Great Salt Lake teaches me the value of life’s varied seasons, each with its own unique beauty and purpose.”

“These scenes evoke profound sorrow. And yet, there’s still a stark beauty.”

1 MORTON SALT MAY 21, 2023

2 YELLOW GROWTH JULY 1, 2023

3 YELLOW-HEADED BLACKBIRD APRIL 16, 2023

4 EVAPORATION PONDS OCTOBER 13, 2023

5 ROCK FORMATION SEPTEMBER 10, 2023

“

Come to the Great Salt Lake Walk the shores. Listen to the stories. See the beauty. Witness the plight.”

HOW A SINGLE QUIRK IN THE U.S. CONSTITUTION COULD TRIGGER AN ELECTORAL DISASTER THIS NOVEMBER GREATER THAN ANY IN MODERN HISTORY

BY ETHAN BAUER

ILLUSTRATION BY JON

KRAUSE

magine we’ve slogged through the next six months of conventions, campaigning and TV debates. Imagine we’ve reached November 5, 2024 — Election Day. Watch as the results tumble in: Joe Biden, as he did in 2020, wins narrowly in Michigan and Pennsylvania. But Donald Trump, channeling the populism that delivered him the White House eight years earlier, wins Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin — all of which went for Biden in 2020. The rest of the states on the red-and-blue map color in the same way they did in both previous elections. All except one.

The eyes of the nation, whether watching on CNN or Fox News, turn toward Utah, where a third-party candidate is on the verge of capturing a plurality. Biden and Trump both stand at exactly 266 electoral votes. They need 270 to win. The fate of the presidency will come down to the Beehive State’s remaining six. When the final count is in, a third-party candidate captures 41 percent of the electorate. Trump finishes just behind that candidate, at 39 percent, with Biden a distant third. The first third-party candidate to seize an electoral vote since segregationist George Wallace in 1968 would effectively prevent either major-party candidate from becoming president. What happens then?

Most Americans, for good reason, have no idea. The last time we had to ask was in

1824, when John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson vied for the presidency. The answer is something called a “contingent election” — a process where the House of Representatives chooses the president. That may sound great to Republicans, since their party currently controls the House, but it isn’t that simple. At a time when American democracy is fraying, with just 16 percent saying they trusted the government in 2023, a contingent election could be the poison pill embedded in the U.S. Constitution that causes the rest of the electoral system to fail.

Perhaps the third-party candidate is independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has consistently polled in double figures nationwide, or unlikely spoilers Jill Stein or Cornel West. It could have been a contender tapped by centrist political organization No Labels, which had floated names like Joe Manchin, Nikki Haley and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. to oppose the deeply unpopular Trump and Biden, before it decided not to field a candidate after all. And perhaps the necessary electoral votes would come from Utah, where voters have shown an appetite for third-party candidates before; Evan McMullin and Ross Perot each garnered more than 20 percent in 2016 and 1992, respectively. But it’s not just Utah. A contingent election can be triggered by any third-party candidate earning a handful of electoral votes in any state.

THOMAS JEFFERSON FEARED A CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS IF NO PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE RECEIVED AN ELECTORAL MAJORITY.

Right now, this doesn’t seem likely. But it’s true that many Americans don’t like either major-party option. Combined with Biden’s age and Trump’s courtship of chaos, you’re left with wild cards that could still open new doors for third-party candidates in the coming months. “The odds,” says Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow studying Congress at the American Enterprise Institute, “are not insignificant.” And just one election removed from a similar loophole leading to bloodshed on January 6, 2021, this forgotten snag in the Constitution could pose a serious problem — one the author of the Declaration of Independence recognized as an existential threat to the system he helped create.

MANY FEATURES OF the U.S. Constitution have endured the centuries for good reason. But the contingent election process has lasted as a matter of convenience and compromise more than inherent virtue.

Delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention struggled for many months to decide how to elect the president. For a long time, they thought the best idea was to have Congress choose. But that arrangement, they decided, would create conditions for corruption between the legislative and executive branches of government. They wanted something that would keep the branches more separate, but they couldn’t decide whether the president should be chosen on the basis of proportional representation, like the House of Representatives, or an equal say between the states, like the Senate. To resolve the question, a committee proposed what we know as the Electoral College, which distributes votes for president in a roughly proportional way. However, that system only found widespread support thanks to another, lesser-known compromise.

This compromise addressed what to do if the Electoral College failed to produce any

candidate with an electoral majority. In that case, the election would go to the House, where every state delegation, rather than each individual member, would receive one vote for president — the contingent election system.

It sounds pretty foreign today — the Electoral College hasn’t failed to produce a winner in 200 years — but at the time, before the two-party system formed, the contingent election system, as an option, was important. Without two main candidates running against each other, there could be too much competition, the thinking went, for any candidate to secure an electoral majority. George Mason, father of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, predicted that 19 of every 20 presidential elections would be

decided by the contingent election process. “Many of the framers thought this would be the normal thing that would happen,” says Alex Keyssar, a Harvard election historian. “They thought that the Electoral College

THOMAS JEFFERSON WROTE THAT THE CONTINGENT ELECTION SYSTEM IS “THE MOST DANGEROUS BLOT IN OUR CONSTITUTION, AND ONE WHICH SOME UNLUCKY CHANCE WILL SOME DAY HIT.”

would be a sort of nominating board.” Sure enough, that’s how it went in the election of 1800.

Thomas Jefferson would eventually prevail over Aaron Burr thanks to the contingent election process. And by the next

election, legislators had ratified the 12th Amendment, paving the way for the formation of the modern two-party system. “That shifted the terrain,” Keyssar says, “making it somewhat less likely — or maybe significantly less likely, over time, that it would go to a contingent election.”

“MANY OF THE FRAMERS THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE THE NORMAL THING THAT WOULD HAPPEN,” SAYS ALEX KEYSSAR, A HARVARD ELECTION HISTORIAN. “THEY THOUGHT THAT THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE WOULD BE A SORT OF NOMINATING BOARD.”

But the contingent election system remained in place, lurking in the constitutional shadows, ripening as an agent of chaos. Jefferson himself, despite becoming president via the method, wrote in 1823 that the contingent election system is “the most dangerous blot in our constitution, and one which some unlucky chance will some day hit.”

A single year later, his concerns rippled across the nation.

THE ELECTION OF 1824 produced the kind of outcome many of the founders foresaw: The Federalist Party had collapsed, leaving members of the Democratic-Republican Party as the only major players in national politics. With substantial disagreement and factioning within the party, and without the strict nominating procedures of today, four Democratic-Republicans competed to become president.

With 131 electoral votes required to win the Electoral College, Gen. Andrew Jackson led the way with 99, while Secretary of State John Quincy Adams trailed just behind with 84. Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford and Speaker of the House Henry Clay finished a distant third and fourth, respectively — but they captured enough electoral votes to trigger a contingent election. Few thought much of it at the beginning. “But there was a lot of electoral maneuvering going on,” Keyssar says. Especially by Clay, who held enormous sway in the House. He strong-armed many fellow legislators into

supporting Adams, who prevailed in the contingent process and became president despite losing the popular vote to Jackson by a considerable margin. Adams, in turn, made Clay his secretary of state.

Jackson was furious. He told swelling crowds that Clay and Adams had made a “corrupt bargain” to keep him out of the White House. He spent the next three years building support across the nation with a populist message that used the flaws of the contingent election to his advantage: The federal government was corrupt, he argued — in the political language of today, one might say “rigged” — and his loss was proof. Clay and Adams’ quid pro quo has never been proven definitively, but Jackson’s commonsense message resonated anyway. He’d won the popular vote; he’d won the most electoral votes; and he’d been denied the presidency. It didn’t make sense, he proclaimed, even if the proper procedure had been followed. Americans seemed to agree. In 1828, he crushed Adams in a rematch.

“Thereafter,” Keyssar says, “you got a more-or-less durable two-party system.” Which means the contingent election hasn’t been needed again, though there have been some close calls. In 1948, “Dixiecrat” Strom Thurmond secured 39 electoral votes across five states, but Democrat Harry Truman’s margin of victory over Republican Thomas Dewey was large enough that it didn’t matter. Twenty years later, Wallace garnered 46 electoral votes, but Richard Nixon crushed Democratic challenger Hubert Humphrey; once more, it didn’t matter. Then, in 1992, early polls showed independent challenger Ross Perot courting somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of the vote in a three-way matchup with Democrat Bill Clinton and incumbent George H.W. Bush. Those numbers revived high-level, bipartisan conversations about the contingent election process. The Republican House minority leader said it would be an “utter disaster,” while Kansas Democrat Dan Glickman called it a “recipe for, at minimum, chaos, and at a maximum, disaster.” The House set up a committee to

study what members would actually have to do if a contingent election occurred, while the Senate met to discuss electoral reform. Once again, Democrats and Republicans agreed that the contingent process made no sense; they just couldn’t agree what to do about it.

Democrats wanted to shift from the Electoral College to a popular vote, while Republicans wanted to keep the Electoral College but replace the contingent process with a runoff election. The latter effort was led by a relatively young senator from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell. “It is nonsense,” he admitted then, “to have the House of Representatives choose the president.”

By then, Perot had dropped out. The official reason he gave was his desire to avoid a contingent election. He called the possibility “disruptive.” Whether that was the real reason or not, he recognized the risk of opening up this constitutional loophole. All

three candidates did. But nothing was ever done. “The end of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy did absolutely nothing to solve the problems inherent in our electoral process,” Arkansas Democratic Sen. David Pryor told the hearing 32 years ago. “It just pushed off the final day of reckoning.”

MOST AMERICANS REMEMBER the violence of January 6, 2021, but fewer remember what caused it. The turmoil of that day began with something called the Electoral Count Act of 1887. The law was supposed to clarify how some parts of the Electoral College should work, but it also left some things ambiguous. Namely, the role of the vice president in presiding over the counting of the votes, and whether the office has the authority to reject certain electors if they’re suspected of fraud or illegitimacy.

That’s the argument Trump made, asserting that he could be triumphant if only

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Vice President Mike Pence had the courage. Pence didn’t see it that way. The vice president’s role has always been a functionally ceremonial one, and that’s how he approached it. For Kosar, the American Enterprise Institute scholar, the fact that the statute left room for such varying interpretations was always cause for concern. “You saw these very clever lawyer folks and partisan politicos reading this statute in such a way that it would produce the result that they wanted,” he says. “That was distressing. … And with the Electoral Count Act, at least we had a statute to work with.”

Indeed, the procedures of a contingent election have not been clarified via statute over the centuries; we’d be relying on the language of the Constitution alone. And to throw in another wrinkle, the legislators making the decisions would be the incoming Congress, not the current Congress. With that in mind, let’s consider another real possibility.

Imagine that, in addition to some third-party candidate securing enough electoral votes to cause a contingent election,

In this scenario, House Democrats could create rules that would effectively block Republican delegations from voting for Trump, or for anyone. Barring some party flip-flopping, this scenario would most likely result in a stalemate.

The Constitution says that in such a situation, the presidential line of succession should be followed, meaning that the vice president would become president. But picking the vice president would fall to the Senate, where a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority would be required. Neither party is expected to have that, which could mean another stalemate. Following the presidential line of succession, the speaker of the House would become president. But the speaker’s term ends when Congress does, so there would be no speaker of the House when these decisions are being made. In that case, the president pro tempore of the Senate would ascend to the presidency. “It started really upsetting me the more I thought about it,” Kosar says. “What if the Senate pro tem decides that she wants to be the president, and therefore tries to gum

IN 1992, DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS AGREED THAT THE CONTINGENT PROCESS MADE NO SENSE; THEY JUST COULDN’T AGREE WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT.

Democrats manage to win back a House majority — a very possible outcome. Even if that happened, Democrats wouldn’t necessarily be able to choose the president. Remember, the vote is by state delegations, not sheer numbers; Democrats could control the House overall, but Republicans could still hold more state delegations. Would that make a second term of Trump imminent?

No, it turns out. The Constitution says nothing about how a contingent election has to proceed, empowering the House majority to make whatever rules it wants.

up the works? … It gets to be a real mess.”

That could be bad, given that few Americans can even name the Senate’s president pro tempore (Democrat Patty Murray of Washington). But consider this: The Senate could also invoke the “nuclear option,” which would drop the vote threshold for vice president to 50. If the Senate were equally divided along party lines as it is now — another real possibility — Vice President Kamala Harris could cast a deciding vote making herself president.

Contemplate, for a moment, how relatively

benign the election fraud conspiracies of 2020 seem compared to a Democratic vice president voting to elect herself president.

That’s just one long-shot scenario, but it illustrates a much bigger problem. The contingent election process would introduce unparalleled levels of uncertainty, with both Republicans and Democrats highly motivated to use every obscure parliamentary trick at their disposal to keep the opposing party out of the White House. “There’s all these really perverse incentives,” says Beau Tremitiere, a lawyer with the nonprofit Protect Democracy who has studied contingent elections extensively. “It’s just a really dangerously open field with very little guidance, being handed to a Congress that has barely been able to keep the lights on, let alone do something this momentous.” And that’s at a time when the legitimacy of elections is already imperiled thanks to Trump’s lies about the 2020 results. “We’re already struggling to ensure the legitimacy of the upcoming election,” says Lee Drutman, a political scholar with the New America think tank who studies democratic representation. “To throw it into a procedure that is unfamiliar and confusing to many voters, probably 99.8 percent of voters, is just incredibly dangerous.”

Moreover, whatever Congress does, a contingent election assures a crisis of legitimacy. A president chosen by partisan horse trading and closed-doors bargaining is not going to have much of a mandate to rule — especially if Congress ends up choosing whichever candidate receives less of the popular or electoral vote. “Even when (the contingent election process) has been used, it has generated a tremendous sense of illegitimacy,” Drutman says. “And when elections are not seen as legitimate, it creates tremendous political problems.”

AS UNLIKELY AS a contingent election might seem in the context of America’s rigid two-party history, Kennedy's campaign is well aware of it. His team views the contingent election process as a viable

path to the presidency, and so did No Labels before it backed out.

IF THE SENATE WERE EQUALLY DIVIDED ALONG PARTISAN LINES, KAMALA HARRIS COULD CAST A DECIDING VOTE MAKING HERSELF PRESIDENT.

In December, No Labels chief strategist Ryan Clancy told a group of reporters that if his group’s nominee managed to secure enough electoral votes to trigger a contingent election, it could have used those votes as a bargaining chip to form some kind of “coalition government,” becoming a power broker to swing the election one way or the other. That wasn't the plan, he said, but they’d thought about it. In an interview with NBC News, a No Labels co-founder added that the group had already “mapped out” which states might side with them in a contingent election. “The point is,” he added, “the Constitution allows for that kind of potential.”

Is that healthy for a democracy that’s already imperiled? No Labels thought so: More choices and more voices represented in the electoral process enhances democracy. That’s one way to think about it. Another came from a bipartisan group of former lawmakers, who in early February sent a letter to No Labels to address its apparent courtship of a contingent election. “Even if No Labels could mount the most successful third-party presidential campaign in U.S. history and shatter all outside expectations, a split Electoral College is, by far, the most likely outcome. Any suggestion to the contrary is fantasy,” the group, composed of five Republicans and six Democrats, including former Colorado Congressmen David Skaggs and Tim Wirth, wrote. “A contingent election,” they added, “would be calamitous.”

Kennedy has telegraphed the same intentions. In December, the founder of his political action committee, Tony Lyons, said in a statement to Politico that he was confident Kennedy could win a contingent election. “Kennedy has two clear pathways to the White House,” he added. A statement

to Deseret Magazine from Kennedy’s campaign manager, Amaryllis Kennedy, emphasized the same philosophy: He wants to win outright — but a contingent election would be welcome, too. “While we have reason to believe a contingent election would go RFK’s way,” she wrote, “we intend to win the White House with 270-plus electoral votes and the unified support of Americans across the political spectrum.”

Campaign bluster aside, such an outcome is very unlikely. Tremitiere offers another historical example: Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 run for president on the “Bull Moose” party ticket. At the time, Roosevelt was a very popular ex-president. He enjoyed far more recognition and credibility than Kennedy or anyone No Labels could have hoped to nominate. But he lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson by 347 electoral votes. “The historical track record here is really stacked against anyone trying to run as a third-party option,” he says. “And it’s hard to see how someone today would fare differently.” At their best and most influential, then, the most Kennedy and future groups like No Labels could reasonably hope to accomplish is trigger a contingent election. For the health of democracy, Tremitiere says, that’s far worse than not running at all.

IN THE ABSTRACT, most Republicans and Democrats can probably agree that a contingent election is a pretty bad way to choose the president. Whether the solution is the McConnell-proposed runoff election, the popular vote alternative floated by his Democratic contemporaries of 30 years ago, or something else, the current system isn’t something anyone today would build from scratch. So why hasn’t anything been done to fix it?

One explanation: “Legislators have way too much to do, and the other things they feel like they need to do are far more pressing,” Kosar says. And even if Congress did, somehow, recognize the disastrous potential of a contingent election and work to address it before it happens, it’s probably too late for such action in 2024. Paranoia, Kosar says,

would pervade negotiations, with both sides worried that their political opponents would be working to game the reform to their benefit. “So yeah,” he adds, “it’s a problem.”

There are some reasons to be hopeful, says Audrey Perry, an adjunct professor of election law at Brigham Young University. “We’ve survived this long,” she says. “I would hope that we could survive this as well. … I would hope that this could proceed, if not in a clean manner, at least in a nonviolent manner.” Nobody really knows how a contingent election would unfold, and maybe a system that has endured for several centuries could endure this “blot,” too. But we also exist at a time when the digital world has placed what New Yorker writer Jay Caspian Kang calls a “filter of unreality” between all of us,

leading to widespread, long-simmering polarization and a cross-partisan feeling among nearly 7 in 10 Americans that the country is on the wrong track. Add a presidential candidate who has made election denialism and provocation a cornerstone of his appeal, and we could be at a culmination point — one where all it takes is one big shock to the system for the whole thing to collapse.

Will “the most dangerous blot in our Constitution” prove to be as fatal as Jefferson feared? Better yet, maybe time can become the ally of American democracy. Maybe the best we can hope for, when it comes to contingent elections, is that the 200-year streak of avoiding them remains unbroken; that the day of reckoning doesn’t come any time soon.

THIRD-PARTY CANDIDATE ROSS PEROT, CENTER, HELPED THWART THE MOST RECENT POTENTIAL CONTINGENT ELECTION, IN 1992, BY DROPPING OUT OF THE RACE.

PHOTO BY J.

GRIEF SHARED

HOW GRIEF CAN BRING US TOGETHER IF WE ALLOW IT

BY SAMUEL BROWN

Iwas 18 when my father died. I’d be exaggerating to say I never knew him. My mom made him leave when I was 12, and I saw him a half-dozen times between his departure and his death six years later. But he’d actually been thriving in my early childhood in Helena, Montana. He had a job then where he felt valued, a house full of kids and lower-middle-class financial stability. I remember driving in a giant Ford station wagon, delivering newspapers in the freezing pre-dawn darkness, watching him cry when particularly beautiful music played on the classical music station. He sang with a loud baritone that I inherited, and reliable pitch, which I did not. I relished his pleasure in throwing Sunday waffle parties for friends and neighbors. I also remember the stories he made up in the telling, in which we children were the main characters. I no longer remember my name in that fantasy world, other than the sibilant alliteration — savvy Sam or super Sam or the like.

With substantial effort, I could uncover other memories, but such are the accessible highlights of our relationship. We were reconciled just before he died through a letter I received from him in mid-November in

my first year of college. By late December, we were with Dad at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, his belly full of protein-rich fluid the color of beer. The hepatitis he got from the kidney transplant that replaced the organs ruined by his poorly managed diabetes had driven his liver to cirrhosis. He joked, thinly, that he was pregnant and

THERE IS NOTHING QUITE LIKE THE DRAMA OF DOING STRENUOUS BATTLE WITH DEATH. THE WEAPONS ARE LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS, OUR WITS, AND OUR HEARTS. THE STAKES COULD NOT BE HIGHER.

expecting twins any day. I remember his sallow, yellowing skin and the horrible thin mustache. It would be a half-dozen years before I would understand, medically, why he looked as he did: the typical appearance of someone dying of liver failure. What I knew at the time was that Grandpa said Dad was dying, so I took my siblings in to

say goodbye during my Christmas break. He died about a week later: cardiac arrest during dialysis. CPR could not restart his heart, so the team stopped their rhythmic compression of his chest.

I was back at college the day my father died, in the middle of a Boston winter. I hugged my closest friend at the time, an atheist Jewish woman named Amy, in the quiet leafiness of Harvard Yard. She wept more than I did. She found herself discomfited by the finality of death, imagining what it would mean for her parents to lapse entirely from existence. I was aglow with faith in God, true, but I also didn’t have much of a connection to my father as a person. He had always been a startling absence in my life. The fact that the cause of absence was death now, rather than madness or my anger, was immaterial. I suppose I did mourn his death, but that mourning started long before he died and faded quickly once he was safely on the other side. What grief I experienced had to do with my vision of what ought to have been. I was experiencing a generic form of baleful deprivation. I was a fatherless boy. It was the figure of a father that was missing rather than anything specific to the man

who just breathed his last on a dialysis machine. Such was my early grief.

Later in adulthood, I encountered a new form of grief in the intensive care unit. That’s where I practice medicine; I’ve been working in ICUs for about 15 years now, drawn to them even before I graduated medical school. They are my home territory, my professional habitat. There is nothing quite like the drama of doing strenuous battle with death. The weapons are life support systems, our wits and our hearts. The stakes could not be higher.

The statistics say that about 1 in 8 ICU patients will die within the month. It’s that severity of illness that justifies the extra attention from nurses, doctors and therapists. That statistic is even a bit optimistic because many of the survivors are people who are in and out of the ICU before we can even blink. It’s probably about a quarter or a third of patients we really get to know who will die. We are immersed in death in that place. Without us, many more would die. But even when we try our hardest, people still die. It’s biology. So I’ve made peace with it. I have to manage the grief both to provide excellent medical care and to be a decent human being. It’s something I’ve taught myself to do. I’m pretty good at it. The point is to give people some guidance, treat them well, honor the dying and grieve in controlled amounts. To grieve every death in the ICU as if it were the death of an intimate is too much. It just is. You’d break. So you mourn a tiny bit with each death, while allowing the families to do the primary work of grieving. With John Donne, you hear the bell tolling and realize that it is calling to each of us at some basic level. But today the bell does not ring for you or your beloved. Grieve too much, and you will lose your mind. Grieve too little, and you will lose your soul. Such is the balance of life and death in the ICU.

By the time I had arrived at middle age, I was well acquainted with grief. I had even written a couple of books about death and the care of patients with life-threatening illness. I was, as they say, a published expert.

But all that counts for little when your wife loses her eye and then her whole body to a rare melanoma over the course of a bittersweet decade of life lived in the shadow of death. I can see why Damocles gave up after a day of living under the dangling sword. The grief that comes from the death of a beloved takes your breath away, clouds your vision, squeezes your heart and a million other terrible things. It is also sacred, expressing the depth of the bond that has been disrupted. It is seeing clearer than we have ever seen before, even as we are blinded by the suffocating mists of anguish. Both things, as my Kate of blessed memory would say, are true of grief.

I’m often called by human decency to try to say something helpful in the face of an untimely death. Maybe a decade ago, I noticed a louder consensus among thoughtful liberals (my tribe all these years) that the best and perhaps only appropriate response to grief is to emphasize the extent of the tragedy. People shouldn’t rush to explain or place the tragedy into meaningful context. They should instead resonate with the pain. Full stop.

The old way of focusing on the positive, these critics explained, left people feeling alone and misunderstood. Buried in platitudes rather than succor, they had to struggle through more than their grief. After hearing a particularly passionate exposition of the idea, I decided to give it a try. I did so for about six months. But I noticed that while a few people clearly resonated with the new approach, most stared at me in perplexity. Why would I refuse to reach for a shared language of meaning or reassurance, they seemed to ask, when I’d been around death before? I wasn’t a novice, so why was I acting like one? Saying that I had read it on the internet, however true, was not the right answer.

I ultimately abandoned that guiding principle, because it wasn’t working. I spend more time now trying to get a sense for people, to hear what kind of language they’re using, what questions they have. I talk less. And, when I get the sense that such words will be most useful to the people I’m talking

to, I say positive and optimistic things. I even use platitudes. Not because I’m denying the grief. But because I am meeting the grief with the power of human community and hope. I’m certain I get it wrong sometimes. But better some earnest missteps, in my view, than being the flag bearer for an ideology that grossly misreads most people. I’m wrong less often now that I’m open to more than emotional resonance, no longer merely echoing back well-intended darkness for darkness.

I get why some good people believe that the only response to grief must be to steadfastly acknowledge the depth of tragedy. Much of modern philosophy teaches that life is a meaningless accident. So instead of offering meaning, our job is to stare together at unmeaning. This philosophy plays more and more in public rhetoric these last decades. We need to know that context. To be clear, this approach isn’t entirely wrongheaded. There is something sacred about holding hands in the face of inscrutable suffering. For some of us, the shared acknowledgment of our inability to make sense of something vast can be a great reassurance. When the situation calls for it, as it sometimes does, we should gather together against a baffling misery with nothing but the fact of our loving presence. But we would do well to remember that we can stand together and see true meaning. The two are not mutually exclusive.

The more I’ve stared at these questions from the various sides, the more I think that this new trope — resonate with tragedy and nothing else — is a mandate to treat everyone who grieves as if they were mentally ill. On average, people struggling with mental illness, particularly in our modern cultural moment, crave emotional mirroring, what some scholars term “resonance.” I’ve seen it in my own life and the life of my children. When our psyches exist under certain forms of stress, we want the world to look the way we see it rather than to be deeply understood or to exist in profoundly loving relation. We want people to suffer as we suffer. Misery craves company. So people of a particular

cast of mind want reassurance that the tragedy, the trauma, is real and irredeemable. I’ve had moments myself that feel just that way, plenty of them. And I’ve heard those words hundreds of times from people I know and love. It’s hard not to remember an emotion expressed so powerfully.

Still, as I’ve been watching closely, I think that’s usually depression talking. I’ve learned that much from all the therapy sessions with my daughter, who sought (unsuccessfully, thanks be to God) to end her life as a pained exit from the anticipated grief of her mother’s advancing cancer. I know how real and strong and important emotional mirroring can feel — can be — for some of us. I’ve felt it myself. There are days when I just want bleak resonance with the extremity of my sadness; those are rough days indeed. But that’s not most days, not even most sad days.

Having partaken of both emotional states at great length, I can see the difference between grief and mental illness. Grief is normal and strong and even a bit beautiful in its pain. It’s not just tragic. Grief is a form of love and a connection to meaningful vastness. Grief is a source of solidarity and affection and tenderness. It is a turning outward as much as inward. It can also, of course, be annihilating. Particularly when it intermingles with or even transforms into depression, anxiety, psychosis or the other plagues flowing from Pandora’s box. Mental illness wears many faces, but it includes despair, self-hatred and rootless pain. It is not a form of love, but a force that threatens love. It is hopeless.

All these years into intimate familiarity with grief, I’m not persuaded that treating us all as if we were mentally ill does anyone much good. Pushing ourselves to believe that tragedy is pure trauma does violence to the world in all its splendor. What I’m proposing is rather harder than the two extremes we hear the most about: reciting Hallmark cards with our fingers in our ears or hopelessly (if companionably) resonating to despair. What I’m proposing is that we share grief.

This sharing of grief has another face, one that for me, has been among the hardest and holiest work of my life. As a cancer husband and then a widowing single father, I realize that I am often asked — whether I want it or not — to be the vessel of a community’s worry and dread. With the best of intentions, no small number of relative strangers have rushed up to me to express the depth of our tragedy when all I wanted was a world where Kate was still physically present. The pain of such awkward encounters has often been acute, and initially, I tended to flee in anger and pain. I can’t remember when I finally figured out that I had another option. Instead of running away, I could admit that I was called sometimes to hold grief for others. It was hard work, and work I didn’t want to do. But, as I started this new work, I came to

GRIEVE TOO MUCH, AND YOU WILL LOSE YOUR MIND. GRIEVE TOO LITTLE, AND YOU WILL LOSE YOUR SOUL.

see that it was holy. The effort to share grief pulled me out of myself. It did not make my grief any easier; it was not a treatment. But it was sacred practice, and in the pursuit of the sacred stands the sublimely troubling dream of heaven-on-earth. And that is a dream worth fighting for.

I would never hold another bereaved person to this standard. If I shirk this duty, I am not a bad man. It is fair for me to ask others to share my grief by giving me space and tolerating my bad manners when they overstep bounds. But there will be times, many of them, when I have the strength. And when I have that strength and I exercise it on behalf of others, I feel an extra measure of power and grace. Among the many strangely beautiful gifts of this bereavement has been the calling and capacity to give from my deep woundedness. That grace is the painful promise of a shared grief.

Sometimes shared grief can feel too much to bear; there are limits to the burdens weary shoulders can carry. Kate told me as we started to watch the different chemotherapy treatments fail, one after another, that she’d rather have people say hopeful or kind things to her than to tell her how tragic her life was. Things were not going the way she wanted medically, to be sure, but she did not think of her life as a tragedy. One well-intended friend told Kate that this phase of her life was excruciating. Kate bristled. She was busy trying to live as well as she could with the time she had left. There was richness and beauty and poignancy. She had little desire to luxuriate in the trauma of cancer. The constant din of excruciating tragedy was not true as Kate saw it. Her life was hard, and it was glorious.

I’ve found this true for myself as I’ve walked with this grief, even admitting that I’m a more melancholy and pessimistic soul than Kate ever was. Occasionally, I want someone to resonate with the grief, to speak the tragedy, but mostly I want buddies in the mountains, gentle company for dinner, visitors who have something good or useful or interesting to say. Sometimes even someone who needs the gravity of my grief to soothe their souls. I don’t want pontifications or expatiations. More than anything, I am grateful for help with parenting and an expression of affection for Kate or me or the girls. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach here; there is the sharing of our hearts.

And I think that’s where shared grief points us: watching and wondering, call and response, testing the waters. And above all, the awareness that we are all bound together in our shared frailty, our common tenderness. We are bound in the promise that every life will end and every mortal hope will fade into the dust. And we are bound in the covenant that, in all our grief and grievousness, we are glorious and holy, the people of heaven.

SAMUEL

IN PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

THE

RELIGIOUS ARE HAPPIER. THE QUESTION IS WHY

BY STEPHEN CRANNEY

Iwas an undergraduate right around the time “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins and other famous polemical anti-religious books came out. Big picture questions about religion and its harms (wars, anti-intellectualism, terrorism) or benefits were in the air, and I read all that I could on the topic. Later in graduate school, I was exposed to and grew interested in the relatively new field of positive psychology. While classical psychological efforts are geared toward resolving psychological problems, positive psychology asks not only what helps prevent problems like depression, but what promotes positive feelings like happiness. It seemed to me that, fundamentally, the most important question to answer was how to be happy (and I’m not alone in this, as one of the most popular classes at Harvard for nearly 20 years is on the science of happiness).

So, of course, I was interested in seeing what this research had to say about the really big questions concerning religion that

occupied my after-school hours as an undergraduate. Given the broadside polemics against religion I had read, rhetoric that took religion’s evils as inherent, I expected to at least see some ambiguity in the literature over something as potentially sensitive

“RELIGION IS THE SIGH OF THE OPPRESSED CREATURE, THE HEART OF A HEARTLESS WORLD, AND THE SOUL OF SOULLESS CONDITIONS.”

as whether religion makes people happy. But that’s not what I found. There is no substantive ambiguity. Religion is almost always associated with being happier. Debates about the impact of religion on

society have been going on for a long time, and they certainly did not start with popular atheism crusader Dawkins. There is one facet of that debate, however, which, scientifically speaking, is largely settled.

FROM THE STANDPOINT of statistics and empirical evidence, how much do we know about whether religious or nonreligious people are happier? A lot, it turns out. Take Oxford University Press’ “Handbook of Religion and Health,” a nearly 1,200-page tome published in 2012 that addresses the topic, among other areas of research. The authors analyzed 326 articles on the relationship between health and measures of “religiosity and subjective well-being, happiness, or life satisfaction,” finding that 79 percent of those studies reported that religious people were happier, while only 1 percent reported that they were less happy (the rest found no or mixed findings).

But just because religion and happiness tend to go together does not mean that

IN

THE SAME WAY THAT ATTENDING A BOWLING LEAGUE OR A CHARITY-BASED CLUB CAN EXPAND ONE’S SOCIAL CONNECTIONS, SO TOO CAN PARTICIPATION IN A LOCAL NEIGHBORHOOD CHURCH, MOSQUE OR SYNAGOGUE.

religion causes happiness. Yet, this same Oxford book found a dozen studies that were randomized control trials — the gold standard of establishing cause and effect — where people were arbitrarily assigned to different religious interventions, and in more than half of the cases, simply assigning people to various interventions encouraging them to be more religious led to measurable increases in happiness.

The relationship between happiness and religiosity is so established that many research papers take it as a given starting point. For example, a recent paper published in the prestigious social science journal Social Forces on whether religiosity makes it easier to deal with unemployment (it does, with some caveats) states that it is a “well-known research finding … that, in general, the religious are happier than the non-religious.”

So, how does anyone measure happiness? It’s actually quite easy. Just asking people how happy they are has been shown to be related to a wide variety of other measures of well-being, so researchers can simply include a single-question measure about happiness in a survey that is valid for research on the concept of happiness. The happiness-faith relationship is strong enough that it shows up almost any way you slice the data or ask the question. Sometimes researchers will say “it’s complicated,” but it’s really not. With the exception of very particular contexts in the 1 percent of studies finding a negative relationship, whenever you run an analysis on this question, the religious are almost always happier.

For instance, almost every year, a large

survey with a wide variety of questions is disseminated among Americans called the General Social Survey. For many years now, this survey has asked the simple question: Taken all together, how would you say things are these days — would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?

When you dig into the past three years of surveys — 2018, 2021 and 2022 — and look at how many people identify as happy by how often they go to church, the pattern is clear:

Specifically, almost 1 in 3 frequent religious service attenders say they are “very happy,” while among non-attenders it is about 1 in 5. Conversely, about 15 percent of frequent religious service attenders say they are “not too happy,” whereas for non-attenders it is 23 percent.

The fact that 15 percent of frequent attenders are still “not too happy,” of course, shows that there is a lot more influencing happiness in our lives than just religion, and that religiosity is not a panacea. Still, the overall pattern is unavoidable.

But why? The Oxford “Handbook of Religion and Health” I cited above quotes famous mathematician Blaise Pascal with an explanation, saying that the individual “tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words, by God himself.”

Relatedly, an article I wrote showed that on average people who believe in God report more meaning in their lives; for some (but not all) the belief in something higher

can provide an added measure of meaning. Well known is Karl Marx’s “religion is the opiate of the masses,” less well known is the sentence that precedes it: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” Religion undoubtedly gives some people broader existential security and purpose, and this may play a significant role in explaining why religious people are happier.

RELIGIOSITY HAS ALSO been found to be associated with other positive emotions that are precursors to happiness such as optimism, hope, gratitude and self-esteem. It is likely that religious perspectives give one rose-colored glasses for moving throughout life. Less scientifically, the Bible says that “the light of the body is the eye; if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” This light-filled perspective bleeds over into multiple domains of life. A rose-colored religious worldview may help people avoid cognitively catastrophizing bad events in their life; it may help them dwell on the positive things they are grateful for instead of the negative things they do not have. Increased happiness may help one’s relationships, which has a feedback effect causing even more happiness. There are many plausible pathways for why the optimism and faith engendered by a religious worldview can lead to a higher quality of life and more happiness.

However, religion’s benefits are not all based on belief and frameworks about life and the universe. Researchers often try to parse out which

AN EVENING AT THE NATIONAL CATHEDRAL

Deseret Magazine , along with BYU 's Wheatley Institute and Wesley Theological Seminary, sponsored a forum at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., in February. The event’s focus was how to “disagree better,” and featured remarks from Govs. Spencer Cox of Utah and Wes Moore of Maryland, and prominent legal scholars and business leaders.

ABOVE: OVER 800 PEOPLE ATTENDED THE EVENT, WHICH WAS TITLED “WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE, WITH CHARITY FOR ALL.”

RIGHT: DONNA BRAZILE, WHO SERVED TWICE AS ACTING CHAIR OF THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE, POINTED OUT MOST AMERICANS DON’T BELONG TO EITHER MAJOR POLITICAL PARTY.

WES MOORE (RIGHT), GOVERNOR OF MARYLAND, A DEMOCRAT, AND UTAH GOV. SPENCER COX, A REPUBLICAN, HAVE STRUCK UP AN UNLIKELY FRIENDSHIP BUILT ON THE IDEA THAT POLITICIANS FROM ACROSS THE AISLE CAN CONSTRUCTIVELY WORK TOGETHER.

PAUL EDWARDS, LEFT, DIRECTOR OF THE WHEATLEY INSTITUTE AT BYU, VISITS WITH RUTH OKEDIJI, A LAW PROFESSOR AT HARVARD, AND COX.

BELOW: THOMAS B. GRIFFITH, CENTER, FORMER JUDGE ON THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT, WAS ONE OF THE KEY ORGANIZERS OF THE EVENT.

THE VOICE MACHINE

AI’S CODE IS BEING WRITTEN WITH STORIES PAST. WHETHER OR NOT THIS IS PROGRESS IS UP FOR DEBATE

BY GLYNNIS MACNICOL

Last fall, The Atlantic magazine revealed that Meta’s large language model AI, LLaMA, had stripped, in secret and without permission, 170,000 books in an attempt to teach itself English. It was an extraordinary number to consider. All those words! Words that represented the thoughts, experiences, imagination and souls of their writers, ingested, without any concern for the well-being of the author(s), financial or otherwise. All so that AI could learn to speak to us in a way that might make us, the spoken to, feel as though we were engaging with a real person. Without actually having to engage with a real person, of course. So much art plundered and redirected so that AI can better provide the user with driving directions, or press releases, or assistance in writing a term paper, or a facsimile of art. Art to create fake art.

The Atlantic story included a search engine, allowing you to plug in an author’s name and see how many of their titles existed in the database of stripped work. Almost immediately, many of the writers I know, or follow on social media, began searching for themselves. Some had had their entire

body of work pulled. Some, one or two titles. Many of them took to social media to express their outrage over the results (the outrage mixed with a subtle, but palpable, dose of pride, it must be said. They were AI worthy! Even if AI was coming for their livelihood). Curious, I went and searched myself. My 2018 memoir about being 40, single and childless had not hit The New

WHO WILL GET TO TELL OUR TRUTHS? WHO WILL BE DEEMED WORTHY OF A STORY?

York Times bestseller list but it had done well and five years on, remained in print with healthy sales. I continue to hear regularly from readers about it and it still pops up on various lists.

I typed in my name. Nothing.

I didn’t bother to post this nonresult. But a few days later, again out of curiosity, I searched for a few other authors I know. Black women who had written New York

Times bestsellers. Books on female friendship. Memoirs. Black history. They weren’t there. Neither was Elliot Page’s memoir, which debuted at number one on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list. Playwright Jeremy O. Harris was missing, too, despite picking up a record-setting 12 Tony Award nominations in 2021.

Hmm.

One of the reasons I wrote my memoir is that I had arrived at a certain age and encountered an absence of stories that seemed to reflect, in any way, the life I was leading. I felt like I’d been dropped into a cultural black hole. The book was less an account of my doings than it was evidence of existence. Prior to selling the book, I had written essays on similar topics that had gone viral, which is to say, my sense that I was isolated was not based on the experience of feeling alone in my life, so much as the frustration of seeing many people leading similar lives to mine (numbers backed up by studies that show there are more unmarried women right now than ever in history) and never seeing these lives accurately reflected in stories. I wanted to provide some language

SOME PROJECTIONS SUGGEST 90 PERCENT OF THE INTERNET COULD BE ARTIFICIALLY GENERATED BY THE END OF THIS DECADE. WE ARE REBUILDING THE FOUNDATION OF HOW THE WORLD WILL LIKELY OPERATE FOR YEARS, IF NOT CENTURIES, TO COME.

to give life to that experience where there had been little before.

Not finding my book in the LLaMA list felt like a re-erasure of sorts. I had put myself forth. Spoken. Been heard. And now had disappeared again. It was a strange Catch-22: On the one hand, I had not been fed, non-consensually and unpaid, into the digital maw. On the other, my absence from that list also represented one more small example of our human fallibilities, one that AI is training to reinforce.

It will reinforce on an extraordinary scale: One often-referenced estimate projects 90 percent of the internet could be artificially generated in the next few years. We are, as I write this, rebuilding the foundation of how the world will likely operate for years, if not centuries, to come. The materials we’re using, algorithms and databases, will determine what will rise up to become the future sources of truth — the guidebooks for the future to understand this past.

Among the more important questions that need to be asked when you consider this is: Who will get to tell our truths? Who will be deemed worthy of a story? Whose words, thoughts and experiences will be guiding us forward, and who will be left out? Who is this world being built for?

THAT CERTAIN VOICES had been left out of LLaMA’s great vacuuming up of culture was not necessarily a surprise. The limits of AI’s training models are well-documented. AI has had difficulty recognizing Black women especially, for instance, frequently categorizing them as men. A recent Bloomberg investigation found AI-generated images for higher paying jobs automatically were “dominated by subjects with lighter skin tones.” These bias issues, now seemingly being repeated in the sources for language models, speak directly to the persistent problem of Silicon Valley itself, one that has long plagued the startup world: It is dominated by white men.

Indeed, after perusing the LLaMA book database, it looked hauntingly similar to the bookcase of a hypothetical college-educated

man who, having invited you back to his apartment after a date, is eager to impress you with his interests. Here is the Shakespeare, here is the Edith Wharton, here is the James Baldwin. It is the bookcase of a Manhattan brownstone with the curtains left open at night, and lights ablaze, so passersby can be impressed. Look! it says. We read! Or at least, we perform reading.

As The Atlantic pointed out, it is a very Western bookcase. “A system trained primarily on the Western canon, for example, will produce poor answers to questions about Eastern literature.” Or many other things.

In his novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” Milan Kundera (also not in the database) wrote, “One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.”

I have thought of that line often in the last decade as it felt like Twitter, now X, could be described as everyone waking up as a writer. While certain elements of Twitter/X did feel deaf and incomprehensible, it was also a cacophony of voices and experiences that shifted how we thought and spoke about the world and our place in it. The age of AI that is barreling down upon us seems to suggest the opposite.

Deafness and incomprehension may not seem likely on a generative AI model whose number one author source is Shakespeare (“There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so!”). But if the people programming it look exactly the same as the people who have largely always programmed how we communicate (be it with a quill and ink or code) then all this change has the potential to fast-track us into a new, albeit even more punishing, version of a past era. Whether that’s progress or not is up for debate.

IT’S NOT SURPRISING then that communities who have been ringing the alarm bell the loudest over AI’s bias are the ones who suffer most from either their exclusion or the distortion of their identity. For instance, computer scientist Timnit Gebru is one of

several high-profile women of color who saw this coming, writing in a widely read 2021 paper that: “White supremacist and misogynistic, ageist, etc., views are overrepresented in the training data, not only exceeding their prevalence in the general population but also setting up models trained on these datasets to further amplify biases and harms.”

If past is prologue, then we have a good sense of where we’re headed if these biases are allowed to prevail. And it’s directly back into a history that only allowed for one voice. That solitary voice has been variously referred to as the voice of the victor, and the voice of the person who buys ink by the barrel. These days it’s the voice of the algorithm. What they all have in common is that they are almost always male and almost always white. The result is centuries of human existence during which most of the stories, and subsequently laws, are being written and made by very few people.

We know what that past looks like. It looks like a lack of information. Like a slice of Swiss cheese, where the holes are missing context. Often, it looks like how our laws are applied. Joan Didion (15 entries) famously wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” But in truth, the stories we tell determine how we live.

In my case, it looks like every story about being a woman ending happily at the altar. The past few years have seen an increasing panic over the declining rates of marriage in America. They are at their lowest ever recorded. In a February interview with The New York Times about his book “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization,” University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox said he believed one of the challenges facing the institution of marriage (2021 clocked the highest number of unmarried Americans ever recorded) is the “soulmate” myth.

“Our culture, our pop culture in some ways especially, will often give us what I call the soulmate myth. And it’s this idea that there’s some perfect person out there waiting for you and that once you find them

and love them and then marry them, you’ll have this perfect connection that engenders intense emotional connection, sense of romance, passion that in turn leads you to be happy and fulfilled most of the time.”

Wilcox goes on to detail that we need more realistic storytelling when it comes to marriage in the hopes it will let people know what they are getting into, and subsequently lead to less disappointment (on the part of women, presumably, since research tells us men are happier and do better when married).

Those stories do exist, as it happens. And not just on numerous women-focused websites or magazines. In 1987, the sex educator and author Shere Hite (five entries) published “Women and Love,” the third part of her bestselling Hite Report, analyzing the emotional relationships between women and men. Hite found that

I FELT LIKE I’D BEEN DROPPED INTO A CULTURAL BLACK HOLE. THE BOOK WAS LESS AN ACCOUNT OF MY DOINGS THAN IT WAS EVIDENCE OF EXISTENCE.

the majority of married American women (to the tune of four-fifths) believed their marriages to be unequal and that there was widespread dissatisfaction. The Hite Report sold an estimated 50 million copies, and yet this result was so at odds with the established marriage plot, or what Wilcox calls the soulmate myth, Hite was chased out of America and driven into exile in Europe. One wonders if these stories had been taken more seriously, if they had been included in the algorithm as it existed at the time, would we live in a time and in a country where people, marriages and families are healthier?

What is happening now feels similar. This is not a moment when only a few people have access to platforms, or where there are few ways in which to make their voices heard. Quite the opposite. We have a cacophony. And yet, what those who are programming

AI are seemingly doing, intentionally or otherwise, is choosing to not utilize these voices and this knowledge, both from our past and present, at the risk of our future.

AI IS DEVELOPING at a furious pace. In less than two years it has upended how we communicate. Yet it’s useful to remember that what’s currently emerging hovers somewhere between absurd and comical. Google’s latest foray into large language models, Gemini, appeared to rewrite history, replacing white historical figures with actors of color à la the “Hamilton” musical. Even when this was corrected, the resulting voice was less like talking to an actual human than being stuck in conversation with what journalist John Herrman described as a “a customer service rep denying a claim at an insurance company.” Which admittedly, as those of us who’ve been stuck in a chatbox trying to get a phone connected, or any other kind of service supplied, knows can be terrifying in another sort of way, but is not quite apocalyptic.

It’s easy to laugh. And it makes for fun coverage, allowing us to ward off the panic, voiced by many experts, that AI will render most human work unnecessary and/or accidentally set off a nuclear apocalypse. But another thing history has taught us is that things that begin as a joke can quickly turn deadly serious.

Right now, AI in all its foibles remains, ironically, very human. It’s a mess. It is an unwieldy technology that has collided with an unwieldy world. There is the potential for this all to be very exciting. For everyone to be able to see themselves in a technology that will likely infiltrate our lives in ways that even amid all this change, can be hard to imagine. But we must imagine it. This moment is demanding from us, not new stories, necessarily — we are not a world lacking for stories — but an insistence that we imagine ways in which they will remain heard.

GLYNISS MACNICOL IS A WRITER AND PODCASTER WHOSE LATEST BOOK, “I’M MOSTLY HERE TO ENJOY MYSELF,” WILL BE PUBLISHED THIS SUMMER.

DISNEY GIRLS

WHY THIS MOTHER AND HER DAUGHTERS LOVE THE MAGIC KINGDOM

BY MEG WALTER

When I was six years old, my parents took me and my brother to Disneyland. My memories of that trip to Southern California have the warm, gauzy quality of the best childhood flashbacks. Watching a travel agent help my mom to make plans. Smelling baked goods from the pastel storefronts on Main Street in Magic Kingdom. Getting an autograph from Winnie the Pooh and watching my white tennis shoes glow in the black light of Space Mountain. We rode rides that scared us, ate nothing but junk food and cried when it was time to leave.

Like a typical Utah mom, I’ve been back many times over the last three decades. Disney is a logical destination for large families who live within a day’s drive. I make it a game to count how many hats and T-shirts I see there repping my alma mater, Brigham Young University. I usually hit double digits. And I often befriend fellow Utah moms standing in line, because we can just tell we come from the same place. I guess we’re all addicted to the wholesome joy we see on our kids’ faces in the Happiest Place on Earth.

Before my latest visit, I was nervous to be the only adult with my two daughters, ages

nine and 12, while my son and husband stayed home. But once we walked through the turnstile and I looked up at Cinderella’s castle, I realized I had never been more prepared for anything. I am raising my children to share my convictions that Disneyland is a competition to be won and that the only way to achieve success — and to justify the obscene price of entry — is to arrive

I MAKE IT A GAME TO COUNT HOW MANY HATS AND T-SHIRTS I SEE THERE REPPING MY ALMA MATER, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY. I USUALLY HIT DOUBLE DIGITS.

when the park opens, stay until it closes and ride as many rides as possible in between. All around us, people were immersed in the experience. Some wore Mickey ears. Some were eating ice cream at 9 a.m. Some were bumping into each other while looking at their phones, just as I nearly had. “Stay close,” I told my daughters once all shoelaces

were properly tied, and we began weaving through the crowd, accidentally photobombing a number of family portraits. For the next 12 hours, we ran back and forth across the park, weaving around slow pokes, stopping only for the occasional churro or bathroom break and hopping on every ride we saw as allowed by our digital scheduling.

Truth is, we know the park like the backs of our collective hands. I know the cleanest bathrooms — with motion-activated ocean breeze-scented air fresheners — are around the corner from the Jungle Cruise. I can find Corn Dog Castle with my eyes closed. In the old days, we had to pore over a folded paper map and save the best rides for early morning or late at night when the lines were shorter. Now I had the whole day planned on my smartphone, to optimize efficiency and feed my type A tendencies.

Disneyland can still be done without relying on technology, but I prefer to use Genie+. For an additional $30 per ticket, this fast-pass reservation system lets you order food without waiting and book “Lightning Lane” spots on busy rides, hours ahead of time. It’s one more way The Walt Disney Co. ensures that I hemorrhage my savings

while on the property, and it felt like I needed a computer science degree to master it. I used it to navigate a perfect day.

My oldest daughter doesn’t love roller coasters, but I talked her into riding Space Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad for the first time. She only mildly hated the first and liked the second enough to run it back. “If you sit next to me,” she said. At one point, as we were sprinting from Magic Kingdom to California Adventure Park to catch our reservation on a ride called Soarin’ Around the World, I looked back to check on my daughters. I saw them

laughing together, thrilled to be keeping pace, fully on board with my unhealthy desire to turn vacations into goals to be crushed. I’m not sure I like the maniac I become at Disneyland, but these moments made it all feel worth it.

By the time the park closed, we had walked over 13 miles. We had eaten two corn dogs, two buckets of popcorn, two Mickey ice cream sticks, three churros and three tacos. We had spent no longer than 20 minutes in any line, including Rise of the Resistance, the elaborate Star Wars ride known for its two-hour wait

times. And we left with armfuls of Mickey Mouse sweatshirts, novelty popcorn containers from Cars Land and Star Wars souvenirs for the boys who didn’t come.

Later, I called my mom. How complicated was that original trip to plan, I asked her, and how expensive did it feel? Very, she said, in response to both. She had to save up for years, but she was proud to pull it off. A lot has changed since then, and prices have certainly gone up. But like that first trip, we got to try new, scary things together and bond with our loved ones. I think that’s something we will all remember.

FOR THE AUTHOR — AND CROWDS LIKE THIS — EVERY TRIP TO DISNEYLAND IS MAGICAL.

WHAT A PIECE OF ENGINEERING!

BY JOE MAROTTA

Iacquired this typewriter in 1972, when the Susquehanna River overflowed its banks and flooded most of the cities that it passes through in Pennsylvania. The Susquehanna runs from upstate New York to Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. In June, Hurricane Agnes hit, and it rained for 28 straight days, as I remember. Some cities were under 20 feet of water. When the waters receded, crews were sent in to clean up the debris and damage. I worked on one of those crews, based in the town of Wilkes-Barre, a city I’d never been to. The only thing I knew about Wilkes-Barre was that Herman Mankiewicz, a screenwriter who won an Academy Award for best screenplay for “Citizen Kane,” grew up there. We worked from 7 in the morning to 7 at night and slept on cots in the high school gym.

One day, as I was going through a pile of debris, I saw this old Smith-Corona typewriter. It was covered in mud, and like everything else, had spent three days under the floodwater. I worked there for a month, and when I returned home, I brought the typewriter with me.

I carefully cleaned it, lubricated the mechanism and installed

a new ribbon. I used it for many years, and still do occasionally, though most of the time I now use a computer.

Do I write differently when I use the typewriter? I thought about this as I loaded a sheet of paper. Recent studies have shown that writing with a pen or pencil activates more areas of the brain and increases memory more than using a computer. I imagine writing on a typewriter would also have different effects. It’s slower, with no distractions like email or social media. On a typewriter, you can’t edit as you write, which is a danger on computers. No electricity is needed, it doesn’t crash and you get to see the words on a page, so there’s no need for a printer.

And the sound! Pressing that first key, watching the thin arm with a letter at its tip as it snaps up and leaves its imprint on the page. Then another, and another, resulting in a chorus of sound. What a piece of engineering! You are physically connected to the machine and therefore the process. And there’s that whole lineage of writers past and present who created essays, novels, poems and screenplays using a typewriter. Rolling another piece of paper into the machine, I wondered if Herman Mankiewicz wrote “Citizen Kane” on a Smith-Corona.

AN ODE TO THE SMITH-CORONA TYPEWRITER

types of religiosity have which benefits, often dividing religion between intrinsic measures — such as God imagery and prayer — and more extrinsic social measures — such as church attendance — and they find that both have effects. In other words, actually going to church and participating in religious rituals with others is typically associated with well-being independent of more intrinsic factors such as belief and prayer.

While it is difficult to parse out the precise “why” for the more social part of religiosity being related to happiness, it is likely that for us, as social creatures, religion provides precious social connections, networks and experiences that are in decline and in short supply in the year 2024. (In 2023, about 12 percent of Americans said they had no close friends — in 1990, it was only 3 percent). In the same way that attending a bowling league or a charity-based club can expand one’s social connections, so too can participation in a local neighborhood church, mosque or synagogue.

Ultimately, the research shows a well-established association between religion and happiness in a myriad of different ways in our lives. So, will sitting in the pews and praying be the sure cure for what ails us? While being more familiar with the literature helped me recognize the benefits religion has provided in my own life, faith is not something I mechanistically take for my own happiness like some sort of pill. Taking off my investigator hat and entering into more speculative territory, I think that being religious for the personal benefits it provides to our psychological well-being is missing the point, and I suspect that such religiosity probably has fewer benefits anyway. The New Testament says that he who finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will find it. In my opinion, at least some of the benefit from religion is because it forces us to look beyond ourselves and to something greater.

STEPHEN CRANNEY IS A NONRESIDENT FELLOW AT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY’S INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDIES OF RELIGION AND LECTURES AT THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA.

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TERRACE

FROM “WEST: A TRANSLATION”

BY PAISLEY REKDAL

Of this town once built from redwoods trekked from the cold Sierras, nothing’s left. Just bits of aqueduct lost by the roundhouse, an outline ridge of knuckled barrows, glass chips violet from a century of sun. Fists of clinker, and on the berm’s west side, the ghostly hollows of Chinese dugouts whose perimeter I trace according to the wreckage. Shattered whiskey bottles. Bone dishes ground into a culvert where I find, thin as a baby’s fingernail, this metal trouser button: its edges crimped, eyes scrubbed clean of earth so that, when I peer through its slits, I catch a whiskered glimpse of jackrabbit, moving so fast not even time can catch him.

“WEST: A TRANSLATION” IS A COLLECTION OF POEMS THAT EXPLORE THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD’S CULTURAL IMPACT ON AMERICA THROUGH THE LENS OF WORKERS’ HISTORIES. THESE POEMS TRANSLATE AND RESPOND TO A CHINESE ELEGY CARVED INTO THE WALLS OF THE ANGEL ISLAND IMMIGRATION STATION IN SAN FRANCISCO, WHERE CHINESE MIGRANTS WERE DETAINED BETWEEN 1910 AND 1940.

THE NEGOTIATOR

LIFE LESSONS FROM THE BARGAINING TABLE

BY LOIS M. COLLINS

The most important decision in resolving a conflict is when to negotiate and when to fight. It says so right in the subtitle of Robert H. Mnookin’s book, “Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight.” Now 82, the author still serves as director of the Harvard Negotiation Research Project and emeritus chair of the Program on Negotiation, a fitting denouement for a lifetime devoted to resolving grand-scale disputes and sharing his wisdom in books and other writings. From mediating an agreement between technology giants IBM and Fujitsu to playing a part in Israel-Palestine discussions, he’s learned a few things.

Studying economics as a Harvard undergrad, the Kansas City, Missouri, native had no inkling of the life he would lead. But an econ class taught by Thomas Schelling, an early game theorist who was interested in U.S.-Soviet Union interaction over nuclear

arms, ignited a spark of interest that would over time burst into flame. “That introduced me to what in economics is known as strategic interaction — where two parties may have somewhat adversarial interests but

I SEE NEGOTIATION EVERYWHERE BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS HAVING TO MAKE DEALS WITH OTHER PEOPLE WHERE THEIR INTERESTS MAY OR MAY NOT BE ALIGNED.

may also have some common interests and have to decide how to deal with each other.”

Still, he came to dispute resolution through a side door. He jokes that the year

he and his wife spent in the Netherlands on a Fulbright scholarship studying econometrics was enough to send him back to Harvard for law school. They’re now 60 years into a marriage that began when he was a college senior. Their journey has spanned two daughters, two law clerkships — a year on the D.C. Circuit Court and another clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan — private law practice and stints teaching law at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford. He’s been on the Harvard Law School faculty since 1993. Unlike Mnookin, most people will never help craft agreements between warring nations, giant corporations or a renowned symphony and its board. But the principles, he says, apply to disagreements in general. He sometimes starts negotiation workshops by asking students if they’ve ever negotiated. Just a third raise their hands. Mnookin believes the rest get it wrong.

ROBERT H. MNOOKIN

WHY ARE THEY WRONG?

I want them all to raise their hands. We’ve all been negotiating all of our lives. Children negotiate with parents, even with other students about various issues. I see negotiation everywhere because people are always having to make deals with other people where their interests may or may not be aligned.

WHAT DIVERTED YOU INTO THIS FIELD?

I co-wrote a much-cited article called “Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: The Case of Divorce.” It showed that the overwhelming majority of divorce cases are resolved through negotiations, between the lawyers or the divorcing spouses. This doesn’t mean there isn’t conflict, but courts decide very few. The law isn’t irrelevant. Often in that bargaining, one or both sides are thinking about what if negotiations fail, what’s going to happen in court? So that party’s behavior is influenced to some degree by their predictions of what might happen if negotiations fail.

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED THAT WE MIGHT USE IN OUR ORDINARY LIVES?

Effective negotiation requires management of tensions that cannot be made to go away. There is a tension between creating value on one hand and distributing value on the other. Through negotiation, it is possible for people to expand the pie to create value. Assume you and I have different skills, but they’re complementary. If you were an expert at marketing, but I was a good mediator, we could have a partnership where you did all the marketing for my mediation practice. I would have a much larger and more profitable business. But no matter how big the pie is, there’s still a question of distribution. How are we going to share? One challenge in negotiation is when people focus too exclusively on the distributive issue, worried about simply maximizing the size of their share. They see it in zero-sum terms: What you get, I lose. The dilemma is you miss opportunities to collaborate and expand the pie.

TALK ME THROUGH THAT IN THE CASE OF DIVORCE.

Parties can have different preferences. Even with respect to money issues, there are often ways of carving things up that make more than zero sum. For example, if one spouse after the divorce provides resources for the other to get retrained, the other may over time substantially increase their earnings and require less payments from the richer spouse. There may be an asset that has sentimental value for one spouse, but not the other. So that spouse may be willing to give up some other assets valued more by the other party. Presumably, both care about the long-term happiness of the children. And they can, I hope, be educated to understand that by keeping the children

IF YOU MAKE A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL, INEVITABLY, THE DEVIL IS GOING TO GET SOME BENEFITS. OTHERWISE THEY WOULDN’T MAKE A DEAL.

out of the conflict and being able to collaborate with child rearing, the child would be better off. Through negotiation, deals can be made that are much better than if the spouses simply fought it out and wasted resources in a judicial proceeding.

HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHEN TO NEGOTIATE AND WHEN TO FIGHT?

That’s a challenge. In the hardest kind of conflict — with an adversary who you do not trust, who has harmed you in the past, who you are persuaded would like to harm you in the future — how do you decide? Sometimes there’s such hostility that families or businesses just want to fight. They don’t want to negotiate. In international affairs, this often happens. The United States claims we won’t negotiate with terrorists. There are periods of time when we haven’t negotiated with Iran. There was a famous quote from Vice President (Dick) Cheney, saying part of my job is to make sure we

never negotiate with evil actors. In my book, “Bargaining with the Devil,” I tried to offer a framework for thinking through both the advantages and disadvantages.

CAN YOU SHARE SOME EXAMPLES?

My two greatest political heroes in the 20th century were Nelson Mandela, who after years in prison chose to negotiate while he was in custody, although it was contrary to the stated policy of the African National Congress. Winston Churchill, on the other hand, chose to fight. In 1940, France had fallen, there was a need to evacuate troops from Dunkirk and the United States was not yet involved in the war. Some thought there was an opportunity for Benito Mussolini to mediate between Great Britain and Nazi Germany to avoid being further involved. In Britain’s darkest hour, although there were members of his own cabinet who wanted to pursue it, Churchill refused to negotiate. In the benefit of hindsight, it was a good thing, too. What I knew from those examples is there was not going to be a single, simple answer.

SO WHAT’S YOUR LAST WORD ON IT?

If you make a deal with the devil, inevitably, the devil is going to get some benefits. Otherwise they wouldn’t make a deal. Presumably you’re going to get benefits as well. There is not only an emotional dimension but a moral dimension. Is it right to do anything that allows Hamas to have any semblance of continuing power? These are hard questions, and hard judgments to make because they always involve uncertainty. There are times when you will appropriately conclude that you shouldn’t negotiate. But go through a careful analysis of the costs and benefits of negotiating, what the risks and opportunities are. Try to be objective. If you know you have strong implicit biases, you may want to consult with others who are less involved. That’s very important. Should you bargain with the devil? Not always, but more often than you feel like it, because all of your inclinations are going to be to refuse.

ASHTRAY SUNSET, ESCALANTE, UTAH | PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUSTIN PEDERSEN

“Engaging

— Jon M. Huntsman Sr.