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Neither his temper nor his love of alcohol prevent George Brown from becoming deputy leader of the Labour Party."

And, such is the unfairness of posterity, they have guaranteed that he is remembered long after his more sober colleagues have been forgotten. Stories illustrating both characteristics are legion. Presented to Princess Margaret at a reception, Brown kneels on the floor to kiss her hand, only to find himself unable to get up again. On another occasion, just as he is sitting down to a formal dinner, he makes what his biographer describes as 'a salacious suggestion' to the wife of an ambassador to the Court of St James's. 'Pas avant la soupe, Monsieur Brown.' she replies.

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An unverifiable story involves Brown's official visit to Brazil in his capacity as Foreign Secretary. He is said to have attended a glittering reception at the Palace of the Dawn. The military officers were in full dress uniform and the ambassadors in court dress. A member of his party takes up the story: 'As we entered, George made a bee-line for this gorgeously crimson-clad figure, and said, "Excuse me, but may I have the pleasure of this dance?" There was a terrible silence for a moment before the guest, who knew who he was, replied, "There are three reasons, Mr Brown, why I will not dance with you. The first, I fear, is that you've had a little too much to drink. The second is that this is not, as you suppose, a waltz that the orchestra is playing but the Peruvian national anthem, for which you should be standing to attention. And the third reason why we may not dance, Mr Brown, is that I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima." The story is occasionally told of other notorious drinkers.

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When the General Secretary of the Labour Party, Len Williams, is appointed Governor-General of Mauritius in 1968, Brown corners his old enemy in the House of Lords bar. 'Tell me, Len, when you're Governor-General, will you have to wear one of those plumed hats?' he asks. 'Yes.' replies Williams.

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'Well, I hope your fucking feathers all fall out.'

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Craig Brown "Hello Goodbye Hello" (2011)

We are not amused

(Queen Victoria)

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When you see Miss Arnot Robertson laughing at Frank Muir's jokes, you would conclude she is by nature a very merry person; or else that Frank is kicking her under that table a little bit too hard.

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But she is a very merry person, but she wasn't always a very merry person. In fact, when she a child she was a very solemn little girl.? She was brought up, as her name Robertson implies, in Scotland. And she was very grave, very earnest, very serious, never smiled, didn't laugh even at the things ordinary little girls DO laugh at like somebody breaking a leg, her father cutting his ear off when shaving.? None of those things raised a flicker.

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She wasn't sort of backward in any way.? Sort of normal. Bright.? Always had her nose in a book.? Of course in Scotland they don't waste money on a bookmarks.

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Nevertheless she just walked about the whole time with this very grave face. And her parents were very worried about it.? And they tried all sorts of things to get her to cheer up a little.?

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Till finally they hit upon an idea.?? They discovered that near by, the local laird, the McHeath of McMuck his name was, was throwing one of these Highland Games, where they sort of toss telegraph poles about.

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And they thought it would it would be a good idea to take Ms. Robertson there and see if anything there might amuse her.

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She wasn't in the least interested until suddenly somebody started this hammer-throwing competition which they whirl round with a hammer, and then let loose.

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This chap got hold of the hammer, he was a very good hammer-thrower but just a little bit erratic in his timing. And he let go a bit too soon and it hit the Laird, the McHeath of McMuir right in the McTum.?

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Everybody was absolutely appalled except Arnot's parents who looked, and there, for the first time, slowly, across the little girl's face was breaking a very tiny smile.

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And her father turned to her mother and said, "Look, wee Arnot amused."

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Denis Norden 571018b

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A British wildlife park has eight birds that have not been on their best behaviour. The African grey parrots love to shout expletives and squawk swearwords. The highly intelligent animals learn through mimicry, so the park put the parrots with a large flock that does not know curse words, hoping they'll learn to squawk something different. I wonder who it was who cursed around them in the first place.

I thought about another story - one my mother had told me.

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One morning in 1979, when she and my father were staying at my grandmother's house near downtown Los Angeles, they were jogging together up Beverly Boulevard when a homeless man approached them.

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"I must be losing my mind," he said. "You look like Muhammad Ali." "You're not losing your mind - it's me!"

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"Will you sign your autograph for me?"

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Dad reached into his pocket for his black marker - he was always ready for occasions like these. Sometimes he stood for hours signing autographs, telling jokes. It was the common everyday people who he enjoyed most. He knew the effect his presence had on them and he seized every opportunity to connect with people. Sometimes in the most unusual places - places you would never dream of bumping into Muhammad Ali, like an abandoned alley or street corner in the slums of Chicago or New York City. He'd walk down the street shaking hands with all who crossed his path.

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"I've made so many mistakes," he once said. "I'm just trying to get to heaven."

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The homeless man handed my father a crumbled piece of paper. "What's your name?" he asked. Knowing Dad, he probably drew a smiley face and heart next to one of his favorite inscriptions: Love is a net where hearts are caught like fish.

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The man watched in awe as he signed. "I can't believe it's really you ... " he said.

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Before Dad could look up, a clenched brown fist hit him in the face, And with that, the homeless man took off running, shouting all the way up the street, "I hit Muhammad Ali! I hit Muhammad Ali!"

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After the initial shock wore off, both my parents laughed.

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"I guess that's a better story than an autograph," said Dad, rubbing his chin. "He never would have got me in my prime."

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"No one will even believe him," said Mom.

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"Probably not," said Dad. "But he'll know - and that's all that matters."

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Hani Ali "At Home with Muhammad Ali: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Forgiveness" (2019)

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The system is also simply irrational at times. Consider Drew Calver, a forty-four-year-old high-school history teacher and swim coach. A fit swimmer who had completed an Ironman triathlon five months earlier, he had just taken out the garbage when he collapsed from a heart attack. A neighbor rushed him to the emergency room of a nearby hospital, St. David's Medical Center in Austin, Texas. Doctors there inserted stents in his clogged coronary artery during a four-day stay. Calver asked the hospital if insurance would cover the procedures and he was told not to worry, that the hospital would take his insurance. The hospital did indeed take an insurance payment of $55,840, but it also charged him an additional $108,951.

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"They're going to give me another heart attack stressing over this bill," Calver told Kaiser Health News. "1 can't pay this bill on my teacher salary, and I don't want this to go to a debt collector."

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St. David's did indeed send the bill to a debt collector, who sent Calver a letter demanding immediate payment. Meanwhile, experts said the billing was hugely inflated. For example, St. David's charged $19,700 for a stent that costs hospitals about $1,150. After Kaiser Health News published a story reporting that, St. David's abruptly suspended debt collection efforts and agreed to reduce its fee from $108,951 to $332.

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Such a farce could not have occurred in other countries. One study published in The American Journal of Medicine found that 42 percent of Americans diagnosed with cancer between 1998 and 2014 drained all their life assets over the next two years. That, too, doesn't happen in other countries. The bottom line is that since 1970 we have seen American exceptionalism in health care in multiple ways: we lack universal care. we spend more on health and we get worse results.

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Nicholas Kristoff "Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope" (2020)

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Getting Kids Turned On to Reading

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One complaint I am hearing from both parents and teachers is that the No Child Left Behind law makes it impossible to spend much time on subjects other than reading and math because school districts put so much emphasis on students passing tests in these subjects. Recently, I had a discussion with a mom about teaching reading. She told me that her daughter, who has reading problems, was not allowed to go outside for recess because she had to do reading drills. The girl was bored stiff and hated it. However, she quickly learned to read when her mom taught her from a Harry Potter book. To motivate kids, especially those with autism spectrum disorders, you need to start with books the kids want to read. The Harry Potter series is one of the best things that has happened to reading instruction. Two hours before the last Harry Potter book went on sale, I visited the local Barnes and Noble. It was jammed full of kids in costume and a line stretched half way around the block. I think it is wonderful that the kids were getting so turned on about a book.

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I could not read when I was in third grade. Mother taught me to read after school from an interesting book about Clara Barton, a famous nurse. The content kept me interested, and motivated me to learn, even though the book was written at the sixth grade level.

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Mother taught me how to sound out the words, and within three months, my reading skills jumped two grade levels on standardized tests. I was a phonics learner, but other kids on the autism spectrum are visual, sight-word learners. When they read the word DOG, they see a picture of a dog in their head. Children are different; parents should identify which way their child learns best and then use that method.

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Sight-word readers usually learn nouns first. To learn the meaning of words like WENT and GOING I had to see them in a sentence I could visualize. For example, "I WENT to the supermarket" or "I am GOING to the supermarket." One is past and the other is future. When I WENT to the supermarket I see myself with the bag of groceries I purchased. When I say I am GOING to the supermarket, I see myself driving there. Use examples the child can visualize and relate to when teaching all the connector words that are not easily visualized themselves.

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If my third grade teacher had continued trying to teach me to read with endless, boring drills, I would have failed the reading competency tests required by school systems that are "teaching to the test" to obtain better school-wide ranking on standardized tests. After mother taught me reading, I was able to do really well on the elementary school reading tests. She got me engaged in reading in a way that was meaningful to me until reading became naturally reinforcing on its own.

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Parents and teachers can use a child's special interests or natural talents in creative ways to teach basic academic skills such as reading and math. Science and history make wonderfully interesting topics to teach both subjects to spectrum children. If the child likes dinosaurs, teach reading using books about dinosaurs. A simple math problem might be rewritten using dinosaurs as the subject or new exercises created by the adult. For example: if a dinosaur walks at five miles per hour, how far can he walk in fifteen minutes?

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Students with ASD can get excellent scores on standardized tests when creative methods are used that appeal to their interests and ways of thinking. Although their creative effort may take a little more time at the onset, the improved learning, interest, and motivation in the child will more than make up for the extra time in the long run.

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Temple Grandin "The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism & Asperger's" (2011)

Frank Lloyd Wright Designs A House For Marilyn Monroe

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The Plaza Hotel,

Fifth Avenue,

New York

Autumn 1957

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One afternoon in the autumn of 1957, the most venerated architect in America, Frank Lloyd Wright, now aged ninety, is working in his suite in the Plaza Hotel, New York, when the doorbell rings. It is Marilyn Monroe, come to ask him to design a house.

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Since their marriage in June 1956, Arthur Miller and his bride Marilyn Monroe have been based at Miller's modest two-story country house near Roxbury, Connecticut. Dating from 1783, it has 325 acres of land planted with fruit trees. A verandah at the back looks out across endless hills. A short walk from the house is a swimming pond, with clear spring water.

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It is just right for Miller, who likes to live in the countryside, away from the flash world of celebrity, and is known to be careful with money. But Marilyn has other plans. She loves to spend, and has firm ideas about what is glamorous and what is not. Her self-esteem is bound up with her ability to splash out; she craves nothing but the best.

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Like so many men, Frank Lloyd Wright is immediately taken with Marilyn." He ushers her into a separate room, away from his wife and his staff, and listens intently as she describes the sort of home she has in mind. It is spectacularly lavish. Once she has left, Wright dips into his archives and digs out an abandoned plan for a building he drew up eight years earlier.' a luxury manor house for a wealthy Texan couple.

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(Later, when cheekily asked on a talk show, 'What do you think of Miss Monroe as architecture?' Wright replies, 'I think Miss Monroe's architecture is extremely good architecture.')

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The parsimonious Miller is taken aback when he hears of Marilyn's grandiose vision for their new home. 'That we could not really afford all of her ideas I did my best not to dramatize, but it was inevitable that some of my concern showed.' When she tells him the name of the architect, Miller's heart sinks. But he bites his lip, hoping good sense will prevail. 'It had to seem like ingratitude to question whether we could ever begin to finance any Wright design, since much like her, he had little interest in costs. I could only give him his day and let her judge whether it was beyond our means or not.'

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One grey autumn morning, the Millers drive Frank Lloyd Wright to Roxbury. Wright is wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. He curls up in the back seat and sleeps throughout the two-hour journey.

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The three of them enter the old house together. Wright looks around the living room, and, in what Miller describes as 'a tone reminiscent of W.C. Fields's nasal drawl.' says disparagingly, 'Ah, yes, the old house. Don't put a nickel in it.' They sit down to a lunch of smoked salmon. Wright refuses any pepper. 'Never eat pepper.' he says. 'The stuff will kill you before your time. Avoid it.'

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After lunch, Marilyn remains in the house while the two men trudge half a mile up the steep hill to the crest on which the new house is to be built. Wright never stops to catch his breath.? Miller is impressed. At the crest, Wright turns towards the magnificent view, unbuttons his fly and urinates, sighing, 'Yes. Yes indeed.' He glances about for a few seconds, then leads the way back down the hill. Before they go back into the house, Miller steals a quick private word with Wright. 'I thought the time had come to tell him something he had never bothered to ask, that we expected to live fairly simply and were not looking for some elaborate house with which to impress the world.'

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The message is plural, but it should have been singular. An elaborate house with which to impress the world is, in a nutshell, just what Marilyn is after, which is why she hired Frank Lloyd Wright in the first place. But Wright affects not to hear. 'I saw that this news had not the slightest interest for him; says Miller.'

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A few days later, Miller visits the Plaza Hotel alone. Wright shows him a watercolor of his extravagant plan; a circular living room with a dropped center surrounded by five-foot-thick ovoid columns made of sandstone with a domed ceiling sixty feet in diameter, rounded off with a seventy-foot-long swimming pool with fieldstone sides jutting out from the incline of the hill. Miller looks at it in horror, mentally totting up the cost. He notes with indignation that Wright has added a final flourish to his painting - a huge limousine in the curved driveway, complete with a uniformed chauffeur.

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Miller asks the cost. Wright mentions $250,000, but Miller doesn't believe him; it might cover the cost of the swimming pool, 'if that.' He also notes that Wright's 'pleasure dream of Marilyn allowed him to include in this monster of a structure only a single bedroom and a small guestroom, but he did provide a large "conference room" complete with a long boardroom-type table flanked by a dozen high-backed chairs, the highest at the head, where he imagined she would sit like the reigning queen of a small country, Denmark, say'. (Wright also incorporates an elaborate nursery suite in his plans, but thirty years later Miller fails to mention this detail in his autobiography.)

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The marriage goes from bad to worse. Miller and Monroe have nothing to say to each other. 'He makes me think I'm stupid. I'm afraid to bring things up, because maybe I am stupid: Marilyn adds that 'I'm in a fucking prison and my jailer is named Arthur Miller ... Every morning he goes into that goddamn study of his, and I don't see him for hours and hours. I mean, what the fuck is he doing in there? And there I am, just sitting around; I haven't a goddamn thing to do.'

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Miller fails to give the go-ahead to Wright, who dies in April 1959.

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Miller and Monroe divorce in 1961; Monroe dies in August 1962.

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Thirty years later, the plans are dusted off and enlarged. Marilyn's dream home finally emerges as a $35-million golf clubhouse in Hawaii, complete with banqueting rooms, a men's locker room and a Japanese furo bath with a soaking pool, not to mention seated showers .

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Craig Brown "Hello Goodbye Hello" (2011)

Messing about in boats

(Wind in the Willows)

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Many years ago I occasioned to visit Java, a timber plantations there.? I was visiting a chap who was doing experiments, dangerous experiments, in timber planting. He was planting these trees in batches of three very close together in order to grow plywood.

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It was a very hot evening, I remember, very hot indeed. There was a reason for it.? It was the heat, you know; it was very oppressive in the tropics

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We had our sundowners; that means our umbrellas. Afterwards we had a sort of drink, to feed the beast. And we were sort of sitting around the dying Embers.?? It was a pity; he was a nice fellow, Embers, Sir Charles Embers. He was a Bart.? He was about fifty-three, not a young man at all.

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And he was definitely groggy; I think he was a goner because, very foolish, he'd gone out in the midday sun; ropey, topey, making him very dopey, just as the sun was beginning to decline.

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And we were trying to cheer the poor chap up, the way one does. And he said, "I think I will die happy, Tom."

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He called me Tom because he was a bit dim.

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He said, "If I could find somebody to quote for me from The Wind in the Willows.? It was a favorite book when I was a lad of four, fifty years ago."

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And just then one of my chaps stepped forward that I used for filling trees, a nice little fellow.? And his name was Duwong.?

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And Duwong said, "I know Wind in Willows.? I give you quotation thereof."

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And I said, "That's terribly decent of you."

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He said, "It's a song. I sing."

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So we propped old Embers up. He was pretty far gone by that time.? His face was ashen. I sort of accidentally tapped my pipe out on his nose.? And we got him sort of semi-conscious, and my chap started to sing to him,? "On the road to Mandalay, where the old flotilla lay."

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And I said, "Look here, old chap, that isn't Wind in the Willows at all."

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And he said, "Oh yes.? Me sing about Tin the boats."

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Frank Muir 571018a

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If you found a piece of expired fruit in the kitchen cabinet, would you, A, throw it away, B, compost it or, C, try to sell it? An auction house in Newport, England, found a 285-year-old lemon in the back of a 19th century cabinet. A special message was inscribed on the lemon, so they tried selling the aged fruit. To their surprise, it sold for nearly $1,800. It was the cabinet that lacked zest. It only sold for about 40 bucks.

Ask Well

I want to dermaplane my face to get rid of peach fuzz. But is it safe to do myself?

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Peach fuzz can crop up anywhere on the body. But when those wispy little hairs appear on the face, they can make some people self-conscious. The good news, experts say, is that dermaplaning is a great way to get rid of them.

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Whether you try it at home or in a medical office or spa, dermaplaning is just "a fancy form of shaving," said Dr. Kathleen Cook Suozzi, an aesthetic dermatologist at Yale Medicine. A sharp blade is used to gently scrape away those little hairs, she said, along with dead skin cells, which can improve the health and look of your skin.

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But is it safe to try it at home?

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Here's what to know. A medical or cosmetic professional will typically use a sterile surgical blade to perform the procedure, whereas the tools used at home are generally duller, Dr. Suozzi said.

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Whichever route you take, dermaplaning should make your skin feel softer and look smoother and brighter, said Dr. Roberta Lucas, a dermatologist at Dartmouth Health.

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The scraping removes built-up dead skin cells, which can give you a dull complexion, Dr. Lucas said. And along with bacteria and dirt, these skin cells can clog your pores and contribute to acne. Dermaplaning also keeps skin healthy by triggering cell turnover, where dead skin cells are shed and replaced with new ones, Dr. Lucas added.

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When dead skin cells layer on top of peach fuzz, it can create an uneven surface for makeup, making it look "caky," said Dr. Desmond Shipp, a cosmetic dermatologist at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Dermaplaning will create a smoother canvas. It also helps skin care products to absorb better, Dr. Lucas said.

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If you're worried that dermaplaning will cause your hair to grow back faster, darker or coarser, don't be. "That's an old tale," Dr. Shipp said, but the hairs might look and feel different.

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While "micro-traumas" like little cuts or nicks can occur at home or in a professional's office, the risk of it happening is a little higher if you do it at home, Dr. Suozzi said.

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This is because over-the-counter blades usually aren't as sharp as the surgical blades used by professionals, she said, so you might have to press more firmly, increasing the risk of cuts or irritation. Most at-home blades are meant for multiple uses, too. So the more you use them, the duller they become.

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While the American Academy of Dermatology does not have a stance on dermaplaning at home, the experts we spoke with said that you should ideally leave it to a professional; preferably a dermatologist or an aesthetician experienced with the procedure, Dr. Shipp said.

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Because manual exfoliation is generally harsh on the skin, Dr. Suozzi said she preferred chemical exfoliation, which involves using products with alpha hydroxy acids to remove dead skin cells. These items will brighten your complexion without the possibility of cuts - but they won't remove the peach fuzz.

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People with sensitive skin should avoid dermaplaning, Dr. Lucas said. The treatment can also worsen conditions like eczema or acne, Dr. Shipp added.

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Your skin should be clean before dermaplaning, Dr. Shipp said. It can be helpful to apply a barrier, like an oil, to the skin before the procedure to help minimize irritation, Dr. Lucas added. And try to avoid other types of manual or chemical exfoliation, for at least a couple of days before the procedure, Dr. Suozzi said.

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When dermaplaning at home, hold the skin taut and gently skim the blade over its surface no more than three times to avoid irritation, Dr. Lucas said.

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Once you're done, Dr. Suozzi suggested using a fragrance-free moisturizer to minimize irritation. And Dr. Shipp recommended wearing sunscreen and going without makeup for 24 hours. He also said to avoid retinol or acid-based products for a few days.

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Don't dermaplane again until your peach fuzz starts regrowing - that could take anywhere from a couple of weeks to about a month, Dr. Suozzi said.

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Erica Sweeney

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Dan Neidle inserted a sentence into the privacy policy on the U.K. think tank's website in February: We will send a bottle of good wine to the first person to read this. He got a response in May.

One of my favorite celebrity stories involving my father was one he liked to tell about the night he spent with Elvis Presley. On February 14, 1973, Elvis Presley presented my father with a white jeweled robe. On the back, rhinestones and jewels spelled out "The People's Choice." It was meant to say "The People's Champion," but Dad didn't mind. He loved the robe and was grateful Elvis had taken the time, that he cared enough to have it made. On March 31, 1973, when he fought Ken Norton, my father entered the ring proudly wearing the robe.

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"A few years ago, Elvis came to my training camp in Pennsylvania," Dad told reporters. "Nobody knew about it. I said, 'Elvis, please do me a favor. I got a guitar. Come with me down to Pottsville, a little town nearby, to this redneck place called Spoonies.' I called the owner, told him to let us come in the back door. It was Saturday night, dancing inside. Elvis went up to the mike with a towel over his face, then I snatched off the towel and he started singing 'Hound Dog.' Then we jumped off the stage and flew out the back door again.

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"Can you imagine being in that little one-horse town and Elvis Presley runs on stage?" he asked the reporters. "Man, people ran all outta the place, looking, getting in cars, trying to find us. Elvis said, 'Champ, I've never done that before in my life.' "

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I think my father was joking. But you could never tell with Dad.

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People were always doing things for him that they wouldn't normally do.

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When he was filming Freedom Road, he asked Kris Kristofferson to play the part of Abner Lait, which he did as a favor to my father. And Dad once had John Travolta dancing in the streets of Mississippi with random people, in hotel lobbies and taverns around town. I don't know about Elvis, but Dad did that sort of thing all the time - and his friends readily indulged his whims. He liked to shock and amaze, turn up in places and on street corners where they'd never expect to see Muhammad Ali. If he had told the reporter that he and Elvis walked off the stage and signed autographs, I would not have questioned it. But there's no way Dad would have run out the back door without talking to the people.

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My father loved his fans so much that when there weren't any people around he went looking for them. "Let's go outside and stand on the corner, see how long it takes for people to recognize me." He said this one day when we were sitting in his hotel room in New York City.

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"Okay." I grabbed a handful of his pre-signed autographs, then we walked out of his hotel through the revolving doors onto Fifth Avenue.

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"What up, Ali!" said one man.

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"Look! It's 'The Greatest'!" said another.

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In less than a minute, people had gathered around him, like moths to a flame. As always, Dad stood patiently handing out his autographs, performing magic tricks, and taking photographs for as long as his health would permit. He could still walk on his own back then and seemed to have bursts of stored energy he probably conserved for moments like those.

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While most celebrities spent their time finding ways to escape their fans, Dad went searching for his.

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"When your father and I were guests of the ruler of Bangladesh, President Rahman," my mother once told me, "he hosted an elaborate dinner in our honor. Halfway through the banquet, your father disappeared. Do you know where we found him? In the kitchen, performing magic tricks for the staff. People tell stories about legends and superheroes all the time," she said. "But your father was real."

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I often wondered about the stories Dad told about Elvis. I asked three of his friends about it once. Tim, who was acquainted with Elvis Presley's best friend, Jerry Schilling, Howard Bingham, and Gene Kilroy. All of them had spent a considerable amount of time with my father at his training camp in Deer Lake, especially Howard and Gene. If Dad took Elvis out for a night on the town, surely one of them would have known of it, I thought.

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"No, that wasn't true," said Howard. "He probably made that up." "No, that never happened," said Gene.

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"I don't think so," said Tim. "But who knows."

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Elvis called my father at the farm in Michigan a couple months before he died, to congratulate him on his recent marriage to my mother. Dad missed the call. He and Mom were on their honeymoon in Hawaii.

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"Tell him he married a real beauty this time," said Elvis.

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"I'll give him the message," said Lana Shabazz, Dad's fight cook.

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"He'll be home in a couple of days."

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Howard Bingham and his camera went almost everywhere with my father. He captured unforgettable images over the years. He even took the only pictures of my father and Elvis together. But no one I asked seemed to think there was any truth to Dad's story, so I wrote it off as an amusing tale and forgot about it.

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Years later, I was up late surfing the internet for old photos of my father when I came across a statement he once made to the press.

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"Elvis was my friend," he said, after hearing of his passing on August 16, 1977. "He came to my camp in Deer Lake about two years before he died. He said he didn't want anybody to bother us. He wanted peace and quiet, so I gave him one of the cabins in my camp. When the cameras started rolling, watching me train, he was up on the hill sleeping in the cabin, and nobody even knew it. I don't admire anyone, but Elvis Presley was the sweetest, most humble, and nicest man you would ever want to know."

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I guess some things will always be a mystery.

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Hani Ali "At Home with Muhammad Ali: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Forgiveness" (2019)

Mild autistic traits can provide the single-mindedness that gets things done. Hans Asperger stresses the value of people with Asperger's syndrome, recognizing that they often achieve success in highly specialized academic professions. Individuals with Asperger's syndrome who are not retarded or afflicted with extreme rigidity of thinking can excel. Asperger concludes that narrow-mindedness can be very valuable and can lead to outstanding achievement.

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There are few Einsteins today. Maybe they all flunk the Graduate Record Exam or get poor grades. I had to get through school by going through the back door, because I failed the math part of the Graduate Record Exam. My grades in high school were poor until I became motivated in my senior year. In college I did well in biology and psychology but had great difficulty with French and math. Most of the great geniuses have had very uneven skills. They are usually terrible in one subject and brilliant in their special area. Richard Feynman had very low scores on the Graduate Record Exam in English and History. His physics score was perfect, but his art score was in the seventh percentile.

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Even Einstein, after graduating from the Zurich Federal Institute of Technology, was not able to obtain an academic appointment. He annoyed big important professors when he told them that their theories were wrong. He had to take a job at the Swiss patent office. While he was a patent clerk, he wrote his famous theory of relativity and got it published in a physics journal. Today it would be extremely difficult for a patent clerk to get a paper published in a physics journal. If Einstein had lived today, his paper probably would have been rejected and he would have stayed in the patent office.

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There are many examples of great scientists, artists, and writers who were poor students. Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory, was not able to master a foreign language. When he left school, he was considered only an ordinary student. Darwin wrote in his autobiography, Life and Letters, which was edited by his son Francis, "I was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard of intellect." He found life at Cambridge University dull and did poorly in mathematics. Darwin's saving grace was his passion for collecting. This provided the motivation to go on his famous voyage on the Beagle, where he first formulated the theory of evolution.

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Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, was unable to pass the exam to get a high school teaching license, according to Guinagh Kevin in his book Inspired Amateurs. Mendel failed the exam several times. He conducted his classic experiments in the corner of a monastery garden with pea plants. When he presented the results at his university thesis defense, he failed to get his degree. Nobody paid any attention to his wild theories, but fortunately 120 copies of his paper survived and were recognized as the works of genius that they are after his death. Today his principles are taught in every high school science class.

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During my career, I have met many brilliant visual thinkers working in the maintenance departments of meat plants. Some of these people are great designers and invent all kinds of innovative equipment, but they were disillusioned and frustrated at school. Our educational system weeds these people out of the system instead of turning them into world-class scientists.

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Autistic savants who can accomplish amazing feats of memory, drawing, calculation, or reproduction of musical compositions usually have almost no social skills. Until recently, many professionals assumed that savants could not be creative. They thought that their brains acted as tape recorders or photocopiers. But close examination of savant drawings and music shows that there can be true creativity, and these skills can be developed. In Extraordinary People, Darold A. Treffert cites two cases in which savants' social skills and musical and artistic talents have both improved. These abilities will grow if the person is encouraged and supported in this work by a good teacher. Stephen Wiltshire, the famous autistic savant from England, draws fabulously detailed pictures of buildings and also has great musical ability In his book An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks describes how Wiltshire's ability to improvise musically has steadily improved and how when he sings all signs of autism disappear, only to reappear when the music stops. Music transforms him and may temporarily open the door to emotion. When he does his detailed beautiful drawings of buildings he acts autistic. Contrary to popular belief, savants do not always have an absolute photographic memory When Dr. Sacks asked him to make several drawings of his house there were mistakes such as an added chimney or a window in the wrong place. This was partly due to not having enough time to fully study the house. When Stephen makes drawings of imaginary cities he takes bits and pieces of building from his memory and puts them together in new ways. This IS the same way I do design work.

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It's clear that the genetic traits that can cause severe disabilities can also provide the giftedness and genius that has produced some of the world's greatest art and scientific discoveries. There is no black-and-white dividing line between normal and abnormal. I believe there is a reason that disabilities such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result. Researchers speculate that schizophrenia may be the evolutionary price that has to be paid for abilities in language and social interactions. Tim Crow, of the Clinical Research Centre in London, points out that the incidence of schizophrenia is the same in most societies and that it is not decreasing, even though schizophrenics are less likely than others to have children.

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The genes that cause schizophrenia may confer advantages in milder form. This may also be true for manic-depression and autism. In my own case, I believe my contributions to humane slaughtering of cattle and improved treatment of animals have been facilitated by my abnormality. But none of my work would have been possible had I not developed a correlative system of belief.

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Temple Grandin "Thinking in Pictures" (1996)

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In some states, at-risk young people and their families can be coached together. One evidence-backed program is Youth Villages, which is a bit like a Nurse-Family Partnership for at-risk teenagers and their families. A nonprofit founded in 1986, it coaches low-income moms and dads - or some other relative - and gives them support so that they can do a better job of parenting. Today Youth Villages works with adolescent boys and girls in eleven states, offering both residential centers and home support-what it calls "building strong families."

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Among those helped by Youth Villages is Fred Burns, one of ten children born to an impoverished couple in Tennessee who struggled with drug addiction and domestic violence. The family moved in and out of homeless shelters and rarely had much food; Fred sometimes had to steal so that he and his siblings had something to eat. Fred grew up with a serious anger and aggression problem, and at age thirteen he was placed in foster care. That led to a roller coaster of eight foster homes in succession, and his behavior problems finally landed him in a Youth Villages residential facility. Mentors began to work with Fred, hearing him out and coaching him on patience in a longterm relationship that deepened into friendship. "You felt like they were really trying to work together and make things better for you," he said. "They supported me and they made sure I kept going."

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As Fred calmed down, Youth Villages looked for a relative stable enough to continue raising him. An aunt, Shirley, agreed a bit reluctantly, because she wasn't sure that she could handle a teenager, but a Youth Villages social worker supported them during this adjustment process. Gradually Fred settled down, and Shirley formally adopted "him when he was sixteen years old. With this new stability in his life, Fred began to excel in sports and academics. He became the first member in his family to graduate from high school, and he did it in style: he was valedictorian, with a 4.25 GPA. Fred accepted an academic scholarship to Mississippi State University, was successful as a walk-on to the football team, and later transferred to Jackson State University to major in computer engineering.

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Now twenty-three and a college senior, Fred tutors and mentors other youths, coaches football, and gives gifts at Christmas to other families. "The time that everyone has put into me is the reason that I am what I am today," he told us. "I'm giving back because people have been believing in me, and somebody believing in me has helped me believe in myself. I'm doing for others what others have done for me."

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The Youth Villages programs, which have been rigorously evaluated, claim a long-term success rate with troubled adolescents of 80 percent, meaning that they are living with families or on their own and have had no trouble with the law. That success rate is twice the national average, even though Youth Villages programs cost only one-third as much as traditional approaches. Youth Villages argues that with the right support and scrutiny, half of the 600,000 kids in America being raised in effect by the state (including foster care) could remain with their families or relatives, saving tens of millions of dollars annually and reducing the trauma and upheaval for those children.

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Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn "A Path Appears" (2014)

It must be a peace without victory

(Woodrow Wilson)

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This was said by a man who hated marzipan.? And he particularly hated green marzipan.? And the other thing for which he was noted was that he was the Hon. Sec of a tennis club.? And this tennis club hadn't won any match for years and years and years.? And suddenly they acquired a new player who could serve over-on and by dint of a lot of work they managed to win the County Championship.

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And everybody was very pleased about it and they all came round to this chap and they congratulated him, "Well done.? Well done."

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And they had a big tennis club dance. Everybody had to come, wearing a flannel.

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And at this dance they brought on a big cake which said, "At last victory."

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And it was beautifully done this cake; it was all in white.?

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The only thing is that this inscription was done in various kinds of marzipan: At in red, Last in pink, and Victory in green.?

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And everybody said, "Now come on, you were responsible for this.? You must have the first slice of this cake."

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And he said, "I can't.? Because it brings me on.? I get the flinders and the nadgers if I eat marzipan."

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And they said, "You must have some of it."

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And he said, "Well, all right. It must be a piece without victory."

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Denis Norden, 570219b

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I have had a Kacey Musgraves song stuck in my head for two weeks, and it's making me crazy. Why is this happening?

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First, some reassurance. You're not alone. Research suggests that catchy songs that get lodged in your head - colloquially known as earworms - are common, and can happen to people weekly or even daily.

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"Some people wander around with music in their head kind of constantly" said Ira Hyman, a psychologist who studies the phenomenon at Western Washington University.

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Scientists don't fully understand why earworms are so hard to shake. But certain songs are more likely than others to set up shop in our heads. And the propensity to catch them can depend on what you've recently listened to and what you're doing.

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It probably comes as no surprise that the songs that insert themselves into our brains are typically songs we've recently listened to.

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But it's also possible to get an earworm after hearing a word or sound - or even experiencing a situation - that reminds you of a particular song, said Callula Tingly, a postdoctoral research fellow who studies earworms at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

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Perhaps someone mentions Madonna, and then you find yourself humming "Material Girl." Or you take a bite of linguine that tastes exactly like the pasta you ate just before a Taylor Swift concert, and suddenly you're singing "Shake It Off." (While writing this piece, I couldn't stop singing Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head.")

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But don't expect to always understand where the earworm originated. Often, it's "hard to know what got it started," Dr. Hyman said.

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Research suggests that songs with faster tempos - or longer, more sustained notes - are more likely to get stuck in our heads.

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Yet songs usually only tend to cause earworms when you're doing certain activities, Dr. Hy-man said. In one small study of 16 undergraduate students, for instance, researchers had them listen to a well-known song. The next day, the researchers asked them under what, if any, circumstances the song had popped back into their heads. The songs were most likely to arise as earworms when the participants were doing tasks that typically cause the mind to wander.

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Sometimes it's a bit too easy to create the right condition for an earworm. Dr. Hyman said. His colleagues have approached him at the end of the day, right before his bike ride home, and have sung "Who Let the Dogs Out" just to get the song stuck in his head and it has worked. "I'm like, 'Stop that, I hate you," he said.

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Research suggests a few ways to rid yourself of earworms. Gum chewing is one potential option. In a study published in 2015, researchers had 18 undergraduates listen to a popular song and then asked them to try not to think about the song for three minutes. Half of the participants were given gum to "vigorously chew" during the three minutes, and half were not. The participants who chewed gum were less likely to report hearing the song in their heads.

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Emery Schubert, a psychologist at the University of New South Wales, Australia, says earworms can proliferate when our minds are unoccupied. So, it may help to put yourself in a different state of mind - for instance, by entering a mildly stressful social situation. "Start talking to someone you don't know very well," he said. "If I had an earworm now and I spoke to you, I'd probably lose it."

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Melinda Moyer

news of the magpie. It's a colorful little bird that weighs just a few ounces and will attack you like a beast if it perceives you as a threat. An 8-year-old in Australia saw a magpie swoop down on somebody and wondered just who they target. She conducted a study. Thirty thousand people participated, and she found magpies attack men with thin or receding hair. Nobody had made this connection before. Now researchers are combing through her data. I

The best tippers ("fish") and the worst ("snakes") were well known to porters, by occupation and name. Grooms were fish, to impress their blushing brides. Musicians were skinflints, actors marginally more philanthropic, journalists sugar daddies. Baseball players - especially Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson - were cheapskates. They let off steam by punching the stuffing out of their pillows or lathering windows with shaving cream - and left the porter not a penny. Ditto for boarding school brats. Valets held on to money their masters intended for tips. Drunks and hookers were almost as generous as mobsters. So were salesmen, moms with kids, Jack Dempsey, and nearly everyone who rode the Twentieth Century Limited. Sammy Davis Jr. would hand over twenty dollars "as soon as he looked at you," agreed porters who waited on him, but pals Peter Lawford and Jack Benny were snakes who snuck out the back door. George M. Cohan, Morton Downey, "Diamond Jim" Brady, and Humphrey Bogart were grand, Jay Gould miserable. Old man Rockefeller would hand over a mere penny; his wife discreetly added a dollar. Japanese were the most generous foreign businessmen, followed by Englishmen, Frenchmen, Italians, and Russians. Adhering to the adage "watch what I do, not what I say," porters themselves tipped big after eating in the dining car.

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No one tipped bigger than Mrs. H. J. Heinz, heiress to the ketchup kingdom. Soon after boarding she laid out her demands: wrap my coat in cloth before hanging it in the closet, apply my silk bedding, find four bottles of Poland Spring water, and bring me twenty towels. That sounded simple enough to Garrard Wilson "Babe" Smock, George's youngest brother. He suspected his ward was special when a fellow porter offered twenty dollars to switch assignments. But he was crushed when, after a weekend of special service, she left him tipless. A month later Smock's wife, Bertha, called with the explanation. "She said there was a man at the house with a truckload of groceries from the Heinz Company," Babe recalled. "There were six cases of Heinz ketchup, along with cases of peas, corn, baby food, and the rest of the 57 varieties Heinz had. I gave food away to neighbors up and down the street."

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That was one in a series of unusual rewards Smock got during twenty-seven years with the Pullman Company. A washer and dryer came courtesy of the vice president of Bell Telephone in Chicago, who was grateful that Babe tried to help his son stop stuttering. A horse was the tip from a TRW executive, while a furniture store owner in Kansas City told him to pick out anything he wanted for his living room. It was a thank you, Babe said, for "having me do certain things for him. He had diarrhea and he poo pooed all over everyplace. I had to clean it up."

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A different sort of cleaning up was required with American presidents who rode Pullman cars, and not all showed their gratitude. Ulysses S. Grant and Calvin Coolidge were renowned tightwads. Rutherford B. Hayes would give a dime or, if the porter persisted, a quarter. Chester Arthur, by contrast, was "one of the freest tippers in the East." As a senator, John F. Kennedy commuted by rail between Washington and Boston and was known as a half-dollar guy, especially if the porter remembered to put a board under his bed to ease his aching back. Ronald Reagan was "the cheapest of them all," even after his shoes were shined to a spit, but his traveling companion, the actor Robert Young, compensated by being doubly generous. In the fashion of Boston politics, U.S. House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill and Mayor James Michael Curley tipped liberally to garner votes of porters, along with their families and friends. Tops in the political set was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who in 1939 was crowned "most generous" by the Dining Car Employees Union.

Larry Tye "Rising from the Rails" (2004)

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For half a century until 1970, America's incarceration rate held steady and was in line with the norm for other advanced countries. Beginning in the early 1970s, our incarceration rate soared fivefold, peaking about a decade ago before dropping somewhat. The United States had fewer than 200,000 people in federal or state prison in 1970; now it has 1.4 million, not even counting those in local jails. Democrats and Republicans alike embraced tougher prison sentences, although Republican politicians often appeared particularly enthusiastic. Among the intellectual authors of this policy was Attorney General William Barr in his previous stint in that office, under the first President George Bush; at that time, Barr issued a report entitled "The Case for More Incarceration." The upshot is that one in seven Americans in prison today is serving a life sentence, nearly half of them people of color. Total spending on them while incarcerated is about $1 million per person.

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The United States now accounts for almost one-quarter of the world's incarcerated people. Its national incarceration rate is six times that of Canada or France, twelve times that of Sweden. In the United States, 70 percent of criminal sanctions involve incarceration; in Germany, it's 6 percent. In Germany, the sanction is more likely to be a fine, community service or obligatory job training. There is an emphasis on supervised work that helps the criminal compensate the victim.

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Policing in America is harsher than in other democracies. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, police officers pointed a gun at and handcuffed a shrieking eleven-year-old girl who wasn't suspected of any offense but happened to be at a home being searched. Video of that encounter left even the police chief shaken. "You listen to the eleven-year-old's response, it makes my stomach turn," said the chief, David Rahinsky. "It makes me physically nauseous." At about the same time in Eustis, Florida, police arrested a ninety-three-year-old woman accused of trespassing because the old age home in which she had been living for six years said she was behind in rent.

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American incarceration often involves private for-profit prisons, an idea other countries find unthinkable because it gives corporations substantial control over individuals. Texas was the first state to introduce for-profit prisons, in 1985, and now about half the states have them.

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At the federal level, a scathing Justice Department report found that private prisons had glaring security lapses, and President Obama began phasing out their use at the federal level. President Trump reversed that and expanded the use of for-profit prisons to house people in immigration custody.

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For-profit prisons save money by cutting costs, even if it means reduced security that endangers both inmates and corrections officers. A Mississippi private prison had an assault rate at least double that of similar public facilities, while in Florida a juvenile detention center was accused of physical and sexual abuse, including forcing youths to fight one another like gladiators. "It's the Lord of the Flies," one investigator said. In Michigan, a private contractor was accused of serving inmates rotten food with rat-bite marks on cakes camouflaged by frosting. Just as alarming, private prisons lobby for harsher sentences to increase their occupancy rates and improve their profitability. The two largest for-profit prison companies have devoted $25 million to lobbying.

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In Pennsylvania, the corruption was explicit: the owner of private juvenile detention centers paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to two judges who then found youths guilty and sentenced them to his centers. This "kids for cash" arrangement led to children being unjustly detained, including one boy, Edward Kenzakoski, who had no previous record but was held for months for supposedly possessing drug paraphernalia. That started Edward on a downward slide, and he later committed suicide.

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"Do you remember my son?" Edward's mom, Sandy Fonzo, screamed at one of the judges, Mark Ciavarella, who had put her son in detention, after the judge was convicted. "He's gone. He shot himself in the heart, you scumbag."

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America should remember Dostoyevsky's observation: "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." The United States needs not just more humane prisons and shorter sentences, but also, as we've made clear, more interventions to help at-risk children before they end up facing judges. If social workers had reached Ian Manuel when he was a young boy, and if there had been some afterschool program for him other than the streets, he might not have found himself pulling a gun on Debbie Baigrie. We know that when children are randomly assigned to home visitation programs like Nurse-Family Partnership or to good preschool initiatives, they are less likely to have trouble with the law years later. Likewise, school programs like Citizen Schools, Becoming a Man or Communities in Schools, and gang outreach initiatives like Cure Violence, seem to reduce crime rates. Yet these programs are starved of funds: home visitation reaches less than 2 percent of the households that would benefit from it.

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Also inspiring are some of the efforts to help prisoners readjust to society, programs like Women in Recovery, which was successful in turning Rebecca Hale's life around. Recidivism rates are high partly because we don't do enough to support people as they emerge from prison. There are already some signs of a shift, though. We see agreement among many on both left and right that mass incarceration has gone too far, and red states such as Texas have been leaders in reducing the number of prisoners. Overall incarceration rates in America have finally started coming down, and politicians and experts alike are talking about reforming the bail system-which has fueled the sharp rise of people in jails around the country and imposed enormous burdens on the poor. After Harvey Weinstein was arrested for sexual assault following accusations by more than eighty women, he was freed on bail. In contrast, a young adult caught smoking marijuana may be unable to afford bail and thus be stuck indefinitely in jail, losing his job and, unable to make payments, perhaps his home and car as well.

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There's belatedly a broader rethinking under way of the harshness of the "justice" system. Leann Bertsch, the head of the North Dakota prison system, visited a prison in Norway and was startled by how humane it was. The mission of prisons in Norway is to prepare inmates for reintegration into society, so facilities are well-kept and inmates are usually housed in prisons near family, for officials discovered that frequent family visits reduce the likelihood of recidivism. The maximum sentence for most crimes is twenty-one years. After the prison visit, Bertsch retreated to her Radisson Hotel room and wept at the misery she oversaw in America's penal system. "We're hurting people," she realized. Bertsch, who is also past president of the Association of State Correctional Administrators, told Mother Jones. "I had always thought that we run a good system. We're decent. We don't abuse people. We run safe facilities with good programs." But after seeing Norway's prisons, she wondered, "How did we think it was okay to put human beings in cagelike settings?"

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Conservative Republicans like Governor Phil Bryant of Mississippi have introduced reforms that shorten sentences, and Bryant told us that the political climate has changed so that voters like this stance and appreciate the money saved. Mark Holden, a senior vice president of Koch Industries, agrees with us on almost nothing but told us that he believes the justice system is such a mess that "it needs to be blown up" - here he smiled - "in a nonviolent way."

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Nicholas Kristoff "Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope" (2020)

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