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Ben Workman of Utah is never going to lose his keys again. He implanted a chip inside his hand that allows him to unlock his Tesla with just a wave. This procedure is still pretty rare. A piercing studio refused to help Workman do the implant - so did a doctor and a veterinarian. Eventually, he enlisted a family member. Someday he hopes to add a credit card chip. And just for fun, he's already implanted a magnet in his left hand for magic tricks.

Particularly troubling was Trump's dawdling on ambassadorships after he created a problem by firing every current ambassador the moment he took his oath. While he had the power to do so, traditionally incoming presidents leave sitting ambassadors, especially career diplomats, in place until the Senate confirms their replacements. That ensures a steady flow of information and assures foreign leaders about continuity between administrations.

After more than seven months in office Trump had nominated only 36 of 188 ambassadors.

This meant that in foreign capitals when multibillion-dollar investment decisions were being discussed, political intrigues were unfolding, and informal changes in policy were under way, the United States often had no one with authority at the dinner tables, cocktail parties, or official government proceedings where they could pick up intelligence. Just knowing who sat where, or who was absent, at functions often provides valuable insights into foreign affairs. Not having ambassador-rank representatives on the scene posed serious economic and national security risks to the United States and was not consistent with Trump's claims that he would always put America first.

The failure to promptly fill these positions, and many others, raised more than the issue of Trump's lackadaisical approach to governing and ignoring basic duties while he spent hours watching television to learn what was being said about him.

His neglect also brought into question whether he was Violating his oath to "faithfully execute" the duties of his office as Article II, Section 2 of the American Constitution clearly states.

The Constitution does not employ the discretionary verb MAY or the merely authorizing word CAN, but a verb that imposes a duty to act. And it uses that mandating verb twice: "he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law."

Another big reason for the slowness in filling important posts is Trump's mercurial nature and how it creates unnecessary problems. Instead of thoughtful, even calculated, official actions, Trump's volatile emotions often drive his decisions. So does whatever he heard from the last person he spoke to. So one of the first things General John Kelly did as White House chief of staff was to control who sees the president and what papers they put in front of him.

David Cay Johnston "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America" 2017

There is an awards ceremony to celebrate people who had done extraordinary things in government. Every year the Sammies - as Max called them, in honor of his original patron - attracted a few more celebrities and a bit more media attention. And every year the list of achievements was mmd-blowing. A guy in the Energy Department (Frazer Lockhart) organized the first successful cleanup of a nuclear weapons factory, in Rocky Flats, Colorado, and had brought it in sixty years early and $30 billion under budget. A woman at the Federal Trade Commission (Eileen Harrington) had built the Do Not Call Registry, which spared the entire country from trillions of irritating sales pitches. A National Institutes of Health researcher (Steven Rosenberg) had pioneered immunotherapy, which had successfully treated previously Incurable cancers. There were hundreds of fantastically important success stories m the United States government. They just never got told.

Michael Lewis "The Fifth Risk" (2018)

Among fly fisherman in the Pacific Northwest, Liam Wood was a wunderkind. He started casting at age nine and was soon tying his own flies. Still in school, he got a part-time job at a sporting-goods store that outfitted fly fishermen. Five days after graduating from Sehome High School in 1999, Wood grabbed his waders and headed for Whatcom Falls Creek, hoping to hook rainbow trout. It was a perfect day for doing what he loved best. Until, that is, he took a deep breath of cool June air. Liam Wood, eighteen, collapsed and drowned.

Just upstream, Stephen Tsiorvas and Wade King were doing what many ten-year-old boys do, playing with fire. They had a blue butane cigarette lighter. It was spent, but when they flicked the flint, a tiny spark ignited 237,000 gallons of gasoline, killing every living thing for a mile and a half along the banks of Whatcom Falls Creek.

"It looked like a napalm drop," one resident said.

The explosion came minutes before the gasoline, gushing from a ruptured pipeline managed by Royal Dutch Shell, would have flowed under Interstate 5. A few minutes later it would have reached downtown Bellingham, where a high-rise apartment tower for the elderly and disabled stands just seventy-five feet from the water's edge. Because their normal boyish play saved hundreds of lives by igniting the gasoline before it reached downtown, Mayor Mark Asmundson called Stephen and Wade, badly burned and in agony, "unwitting heroes."

Outside the state of Washington, the blast was reported as a freak accident, worthy of a single sentence on the ABC World News, which reported a dead teenager and two boys with burns. Stephen and Wade died soon after the broadcast ended. Within days the boys were largely forgotten by the media, which focused on a sudden spike in gasoline prices, a consequence of the ruptured pipeline that was no longer delivering fuel along the I-5 corridor in Washington and Oregon.

A little more than a year later, the New Mexico desert erupted just before dawn. The blast awakened people twenty miles away. When Carlsbad firefighters reached the scene south of town, they found what appeared to be a gigantic blowtorch, as natural gas under high pressure shot from a thirty-inch-wide pipeline. During the fifty-five minutes it took for EI Paso Natural Gas to shut off the flow of natural gas, the roar from the flames was so loud that firefighters could barely hear orders shouted directly into their ears. But the silence that followed was punctuated by the sound of wailing.

Rushing down to the Pecos River, firefighters found six horribly burned members of an extended family of twelve. Those not killed in the blast sought refuge in the waters after flames engulfed their campsite. One begged to be shot.

This second pipeline disaster also made a brief appearance in the national news, covered as the sad story of an unlucky family that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Within days, all twelve campers would be dead; along with the causes of the rupture, their story was lost in the rush to talk about how electricity prices in California soared because there was no fuel for the modified jet engines that generate electricity to meet peak demand on hot August afternoons. The pipeline repairs took nearly a year.

***

A decade later, on September 9, 2010, another thirty-inch natural-gas pipeline exploded, this time on the San Francisco Peninsula. This pipe operated at 1,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. A wall of flames hundreds of feet high shot skyward as evening fell on suburban San Bruno. To reach manual shutoff valves, Pacific Gas & Electric crews had to negotiate rush-hour traffic. One valve was more than thirty miles from the blast, and it took the crew an hour and a half to get there. The explosion - which left a crater forty feet deep - killed eight people, injured sixty more, and severely damaged or destroyed 120 homes.

Among the dead were Jacqueline Greig and her thirteen-year-old daughter Janessa. Ironically, Greig had worked for the Division of Ratepayer Advocates at the California Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco as a natural-gas analyst for more than two decades. Her last assignment: investigating whether PG&E was spending enough money maintaining and inspecting its high-pressure transmission pipelines to make sure they would not explode.

These are just three incidents out of many, but the explosions in Bellingham, Carlsbad and San Bruno should serve as warning signs about an increasingly dangerous future, one in which an immensely profitable industry too often works quietly to thwart safety regulations.

IS ANYBODY WATCHING?

If you live in an urban or suburban area, you probably spend part of your day above or near a pipeline that moves massive amounts of pressurized natural gas, scalding hot diesel, jet fuel or gasoline. Due to the potential impact of a rupture, these areas are officially known as "high consequence areas," a euphemism for what might more accurately be called death zones.

Compared to automobile or even plane crashes, very few people have died from pipeline ruptures in the past two decades. A pipeline blast kills someone about every three weeks on average, while someone is burned every few days. Most of these are the result of preventable accidents, often due to a mistake by a pipeline worker or a backhoe operator hitting a pipeline. Though the numbers are small, as the pipeline industry emphasizes, this reflects luck more than serious safety planning. Open spaces where pipelines were laid decades ago are now being developed, but aging pipelines in the vicinity remain in use. The political push for less government means fewer inspections, increasing the risk of a deadly blast that one day might wipe out a block of homes, offices, stores or even a hospital or an elementary school.

High-pressure natural-gas lines run in to every big city in America. In Manhattan alone, high-pressure gas lines enter Battery Park at the southern tip of the island, at the mouths of the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, near the George Washington Bridge, on the Lower East Side, and near the vast apartment complex on the East Side known as Tudor City. That is a partial list.

Vincent Dunn, deputy chief of the New York City Fire Department from 1973 to 1999, says what no one wants to hear: when it comes to high-pressure pipelines, profits trump safety. "Industry and big business run the city," Dunn told me. "So if a fire department was asked how to control high-pressure gas lines, we would say don't run it through the big population centers, but we would just be overruled. We have to clean up and wipe up whatever the results are when things go wrong."

A gas industry study, adopted by the federal Department of Transportation, defined "high consequence areas" and estimated the damages from an explosion in an open area, like the desert death zone in New Mexico. The study considered a thirty-inch pipeline operating at 1,500 pounds of pressure per square inch of the pipeline wall and concluded that the likely death zone in the event of an explosion would extend 660 feet in every direction. Experience shows that the estimate is woefully inadequate. The EI Paso Natural Gas pipeline that killed the Heady, Smith and Sumler families in August 2000 operated at just 675 pounds of pressure, so the consequences should have been felt in a much smaller area than 660 feet from the blast. The family members were 675 feet from the rupture.

In a city, buildings could help contain the blast zone, but that presents another problem: streets are flush with secondary fuel sources. Gasoline, diesel and compressed natural gas fill the tanks of cars, trucks and buses. Fuel oil tanks lie under buildings. Sidewalks feature canopies made of canvas and people wear clothes that would add more fuel.

Chief Dunn praised Consolidated Edison for its annual training of FDNY crews, but still warned that the rupture of a large natural-gas line in a densely developed city would likely cost many lives and many billions of dollars in damage. "The gas would burn until the gas company could shut it off from two directions," Chief Dunn said. "The heat would radiate up five or six floors and go through the windows, which don't stop the heat." Fires would start inside offices and apartments.

Once the electric power went off, either from the fire or a deliberate shutdown to prevent sparking, those in elevators would be trapped. People fleeing tall buildings would have to navigate emergency stairwells, a difficult-to-impossible task for the elderly and disabled. Even in buildings that did not catch fire, the smoke and heat from the streets could kill many.

Professor Glenn Corbett, a New Jersey fire captain who teaches fire safety management at John Jay College in Manhattan, told of a pipeline explosion in Edison, New Jersey, in 1994. More than six hundred manual turns of a valve were required to shut off the gas, a process that took six long hours. "There is no question you will ignite some surrounding buildings," Professor Corbett said about a natural gas-fueled fire burning for hours in an area of office or apartment towers. "The chance of this happening is very small, but if it does happen, the costs in life, in services being shut off for weeks or months, and in reconstruction would be enormous."

HOW SAFE IS SAFE ENOUGH?

No law required that any pipelines be inspected until 2002. Even now, with an assist from government officials whose job is to ensure safe operation of pipelines, the industry regularly obscures pipeline locations.

Most troubling of all, segments of pipeline are being given waivers from the very limited safety inspections required under the Pipeline Safety Improvement Act of 2002. The exact locations of these segments are treated as secret, although with enough determination and a surveyor's transit and chain, they can be identified. The industry also benefits from rules it promoted, rules that discourage repairing or replacing old, corroded pipelines. The corroded pipe that exploded near Carlsbad hadn't been tested for integrity since it was laid back in 1950, when Harry Truman was president.

Pipeline safety is the responsibility of the federal Department of Transportation and two agencies under its umbrella. "Safety is the number one priority," department spokesperson Maureen Knightly told me. She said the agency conducts eight hundred to nine hundred inspections a year and "reviews all available data to determine inspection frequency and focus."

A very different view comes from Carl Weimer, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust. It is funded with $4 million of the penalties paid in the Bellingham disaster. Weimer considers the Transportation Department's safety-first claims almost laughable.

"The overarching problem with the current pipeline safety regulatory system is the undue influence that the pipeline industry has on every aspect of how those regulations are designed and enforced," Weimer said. "The industry deluges rule-making processes with their public relations people and lawyers, and most regulators have either come from the industry they now regulate or plan to go to work for that industry once they leave government service."

At pipeline safety conferences, Weimer said, he is often the only person present who is not an industry advocate or regulator. As far back as 1978, the investigating arm of Congress, now called the Government Accountability Office, issued scathing reports about incompetence, weak rules and ineffective enforcement by the Transportation Department's Office of Pipeline Safety. Pacific Gas & Electric was repeatedly found to have violated safety rules in its natural-gas pipeline system, yet was not fined once prior to the deadly San Bruno blast.

Even the American Petroleum Institute, which represents big oil companies, criticized the pipeline safety office over the poor quality of its accident records. Yet the industry as a whole has worked hard to make sure that not enough money is spent to properly inspect pipelines. Six months after the Bellingham disaster, the chairman of the agency that investigates pipeline disasters, the National Transportation Safety Board, told the Association of Oil Pipelines that its efforts to keep the pipeline safety office short of funds and unable to effectively regulate for safety would backfire. Safety board chairman Jim Hall said that "no American would want to use any transportation vehicle that would not be properly inspected for 48 years, nor should we have pipelines traveling through any of our communities in this condition." His words drew no applause. Hall said that to get the industry's attention, criminal charges and prison sentences might be necessary.

The pipeline industry lawyer whom the Obama administration made head of the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, Cynthia Quarterman, said after the San Bruno blast that "we inherited a program that suffered from almost a decade of neglect." She is wrong about that. The neglect goes back long before the George W. Bush administration.

The entire federal and industry approach to pipeline safety stands in stark contrast to the way government and industry deal with airline safety issues, where the focus is on preventing crashes through the use of engineering, analysis and data collection. Rick Kessler, a pipeline engineer who worked on pipeline issues as a Capitol Hill staffer, now serves as a volunteer vice president of the Pipeline Safety Trust. How bad is the current system? Kessler told me that if the Federal Aviation Administration operated on the same rules as pipeline safety regulators, "I wouldn't get on a plane."

Inspecting pipelines for corrosion, faulty welds and damage from earth movements, both natural and by excavators, is one of the best ways to reduce the chance of rupture. Yet buried in the fine print are government rules that discourage shutting down pipelines to inspect, maintain or replace them before they fail, in effect shifting the risks of pipeline disasters from pipeline owners on to unwitting Americans.

Instead of replacing corroded pipelines, the owners just de-rate them.

"De-rating" means reducing the maximum pressure allowed from, say, 1,500 pounds per square inch to 1,200 pounds. As corrosion eats through more of a pipeline's steel wall, the pressure maximum may be reduced


David Cay Johnston "Free Lunch" (2007)

One man's meat is another man's poison
(proverb)

Back here in England there was only one occasion in my life when I put myself on a really strict diet for any length of time. And I can tell you from the heart, it was the most miserable afternoon I ever spent.

It was a Sunday actually. Every detail of it is etched on my nervous system. Because I didn't get up that Sunday until about midday due to the fact that I'd been sleeping with Lady Pamela.

Now I should explain, because of the "oh" that aroused that Lady Pamela was a bitch. She was a doberman pinscher bitch actually.

She didn't belong to us. She belonged to the other trendy couple who lives next door. They asked us if we'd look after her for that Saturday night because they wanted to go to big fancy-dress wife-swapping party in aid of the wildlife fund.

I don't know how much you know about doberman pinschers, but I'm sure it couldn't be less than I do. But this one, for all her enormous size, was of such absolutely surpassing cowardice, ineffable cowardice, that she wouldn't sleep by herself.

We tried putting her down in the kitchen. But every time the fridge switched on, she went into such quivering hysteria, we had to feed her Goodboys dripped in brandy.

So she ended up on our bed. On top of it. and even then she got an attack of the moaning trembles when the teamaker went off.

So, when I got up at midday I was really suffering from the redeye special. And when I got in the bathroom what made me even more irritable was I suddenly discovered in myself a strange girlish kind of modesty in front of a strange dog.

But I didn't like to push her out. It's absolutely absurd, isn't it, because somebody three doors away had switched on a vacuum cleaner. And she was carrying on like it was the Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Anyway I let her hang around the bath and I put my bathrobe off. And I got on the bathroom scales. And that's why I absolutely HEART-STOPPING shock.

Since the morning before I'd put on sixteen pounds. Sixteen pounds I'd put on. Overnight. Action stations.

Well, I have a theory about dieting. People will tell you that the worst part about getting weight off is having to watch what you eat. Well it's isn't. The worst part is having to watch what other PEOPLE eat. Right?

So what I explained to my family, what'll happen is, while I'm not eating, NOBODY will eat. And that way I will be neither discouraged nor tempted.

"I'll tell you what, I said to them, "We'll call it supportive therapy."

Well, look, you know all that stuff you hear on Woman's Hour about the bonds of family loyalty being as strong as ever they were. Lot of nonsense.

I didn't get ANY of it. Now I'm not sure whether I EVER would have any faith at all in family life again if it hadn't been for my old, white-haired mother. She was white-haired. She's not now, but she was then.

About half past five she came over to me and she said, "Son. I've been thinking very hard. Would you do something for me?"

And I said, "Anything, mum.

"Will you go upstairs and weigh yourself again?"

I said, "There's no point."

She said, "Please. Would you? For me."

Well, I did. It was uncanny. When I came down I said to her, "Mother. What was it? What suddenly got rid of those sixteen pounds? Was it simply the power of mother-love? Or was it the concentrated energy of the whole family focusing their thoughts together?"

She said, "None of that. It was just that this time the dog didn't put his paw on the scale."

Well, I still blame the weighing machine manufacturers myself. What kind of technology is it that can't distinguish between the body of a man and the paws of a dog.

There is something definitely wrong where, as the old proverb puts it, "One man's meat is a doberman's paw's on."

Denis Norden 547b

My family's story, or at least one chapter of it, began in the port city of Wilmington, North Carolina. My great-great-great-grandfather, Angus Taylor, was white. He owned my great-great-great-grandmother, an enslaved woman whose name I do not know. In 1823 she had a son by him, Henry, who was freed at the end of the Civil War and would go on a live and work as a carpenter in Wilmington.

Henry's son, Robert Robinson Taylor, was born in 1868 in humble beginnings, but because Henry believed that the path to a better life depended on a good education, he encouraged Robert to study hard and look beyond Wilmington for opportunities. Robert did so well that he crashed through a racial barrier and became the first black student to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. The tuition, a fortune at the time, was paid out of the $5,000 his father had saved from his carpenter's wages.

After graduating in 1892, Robert Robinson Taylor went on to become America's first accredited black architect, hired by Booker T. Washington to design many of the buildings on the campus of the famous Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. His first building, Science Hall, built entirely by students under his direction, all the way down to the manufacturing of the bricks.

Several years thereafter, Washington and Taylor began to work with Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck & Co., who had pledged part of his department-store fortune to help finance more than five thousand schools for black children across the South, many of which were designed by my great-grandfather.

Taylor's son, my grandfather, Robert Rochon Taylor, didn't start out in life quite as diligent. Raised in Tuskegee, he was sent to Howard Academy, the renowned boarding school affiliated with Howard University, only to be expelled for what has been described to me only as youthful impropriety." To teach him a lesson, his father made him work for three years at a sawmill he'd designed in Opelika, Alabama. The lesson apparently worked, because from there my grandfather went on to graduate from the University of Illinois with a degree in business administration, By then he shared his father's keen appreciation for the value of a good education .

By 1929 my grandfather had joined the family profession, partnering with Julius Rosenwald in planning, building, and eventually managing a massive apartment complex between Forty-sixth Street and Forty-seventh, along Michigan Avenue, in a black neighborhood known as Bronzeville on the South Side of Chicago. Its official name was the Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments, but everyone called it the Rosenwald Building. With over four hundred beautiful yet affordable units, it soon became a coveted address for black Chicagoans, from Pullman porters and postal workers to doctors and lawyers. It had its share of celebrity residents as well: musicians like Nat "King" Cole and Quincy Jones, the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis.

Valerie Jarrett "Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward" (2019)

It is hard to stay indoors all the time, especially if the weather's nice. But there are still rules. In the Czech Republic, police in one town reportedly found 75 people violating rules by not covering their mouths in public. That included some sunbathers really enjoying their time out in nature. Police told these opportunistic nudists to cover up. They didn't need to get dressed; they just had to wear those face masks. Weird tan lines in the age of coronavirus.

Dealing with unsavory characters was not new to Trump. He bragged that his projects always came in on time and under budget (Trump's public budget pronouncements were inflated so it was easy to meet them), and it was remarkable how Trump always had labor peace, especially with the mob-controlled cement workers union, which took charge at most of his projects, including the concrete colossus known as Trump Tower. What Trump did not boast about or even publicly mention was that he hired mob-owned firms like S & A Concrete, whose secret owners were the two top Mafia figures in New York: Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, head of the Genovese crime family, and Paul Castellano, head of the Gambinos. Trump also made extensive use of attorney Roy Cohn, the notorious fixer, whose clients included Salerno.

David Johnston "Temples of Chance" 1994

And right away we have a problem. An accident with nuclear weapons is at the top of his list, and it is difficult to discuss that topic with someone who doesn't have security clearance. But the Trump people didn't have it either, I point out, so he'll just need to work around my handicap. "I have to be careful here," he says. He wants to make a big point: the DOE has the job of ensuring that nuclear weapons are not lost or stolen, or at the slightest risk of exploding when they should not. "It's a thing Rick Perry should worry about every day," he says.

"Are you telling me that there have been scares?"

He thinks a moment. "They've never had a weapon that has been lost," he says carefully. "Weapons have fallen off planes." He pauses again. "I would encourage you to spend an hour reading about Broken Arrows."

"Broken Arrow" is a military term of art for a nuclear accident that doesn't lead to a nuclear war. MacWilliams has had to learn all about these. Now he tells me about an incident that occurred back in 1961, and was largely declassified in 2013, just as he began his stint at DOE. A pair of 4-megaton hydrogen bombs, each more than 250 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, broke off a damaged B-52 over North Carolina. One of the bombs disintegrated upon impact, but the other floated down beneath its parachute and armed Itself. It was later found in a field outside Goldsboro, North Carolina, with three of its four safety mechanisms tripped or rendered ineffective by the plane's breakup. Had the fourth switch flipped, a vast section of eastern North Carolina would have been destroyed, and nuclear fallout might have descended on Washington, DC, and New York City.

"The reason it's worth thinking about this," says MacWilliams, "is the reason that bomb didn't go off was because of all the safety devices on the bombs, designed by what is now DOE"

The Department of Energy, he continues, spends a lot of time and money trying to make bombs less likely to explode when they are not meant to explode. A lot of the work happens in a drab building with thick concrete walls at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory, In Northern Cahfornia - one of the three nuclear-weapons research sites funded and supervised by the DOE. There a nice mild-mannered man will hand you a softball-size chunk of what seems to be a building matrinal and ask you to guess what it is. About $10 worth of ersatz marble from Home Depot, you might guess. Whereupon he explains that what appears to be Home Depot marble becomes, under certain conditions, an explosive powerful enough to trigger a chain reaction in a pile of plutonium. The secret that the mild-mannered man would get thrown in jail for sharing is exactly what those conditions are.

Michael Lewis "The Fifth Risk" (2018)

Before Leary, there was Pepsi. In 1963, Alan Pottasch, a newly hired advertising executive at the Pepsi Cola Company, was sitting in his office, pencil in hand, desperately brainstorming ideas for a challenge he might mount against Coca-Cola, the establishment soft drink par excellence, known then as "the brand beyond competition."

Decades of experience had shown that competing with Coca-Cola was a Sisyphean undertaking. Like other giants of the 1950s, Coke had invested millions in advertising meant to cultivate a fierce brand loyalty. Along the way it had succeeded, as few firms do, in transcending mere persuasion and instead convincing people that Coke was not only the better choice but also somehow the only choice. As historian Thomas Frank explains, "Coke built an unrivaled dominance of the once-localized soft-drink marketplace: it offered a single product that was supposed to be consumable by people in every walk of life - rich and poor, old and young, men and women - and in every part of the country." Coke managed to create a phenomenally low "brand e1asticiry" - the economist's term for the willingness of consumers to accept a substitute, a matter proven by the fact that Pepsi was similar, cheaper, yet remained unable to build market share,"

Coke had succeeded by identifying itself with everything wholesome and all-American, drawing on the deep American self-regard and desire to belong - and somehow making it feel that to drink something else might be vaguely treasonous. At Christmas, it even associated itself with Santa Claus, and in fact the company helped cement the modern image of Santa Claus in the public consciousness as a rotund bearded man with a broad belt, clad in Coca-Cola's red and white.

Pepsi, meanwhile, was the perennial underdog. First bottled in 1893, when it was called Brad's Drink. Pepsi was originally sold as a minor-league patent medicine: the "healthy" cola. The name was a play on its claim to treat dyspepsia. or indigestion. As the trailing brand. Pepsi was willing. early on. to cry innovative promotional techniques, like catering to me disenfranchised. Coca-Cola advertised itself as the all-American drink, but by this it meant the white American drink, and so Pepsi in the 1940s briefly experimented with niche marketing by creating an a11-black marketing department. known as the "negro-markets" department. Over the 1950s, Pepsi depended entirely on identifying itself not as healthful. or even better tasting, but the cheaper cola. occupying the market niche that generic colas hold today. Its most successful jingle, the one McLuhan borrowed for Leary's psychedelic venture. had gone like this: "Pepsi-Cola hits the spot; 12 full ounces. that's a lot." Truth in advertising: Pepsi was sold in a 12-ounce bottle for 5 cents. the price of 6.5 ounces of Coke. By 1957. when Portasch joined the company. despite all its efforts Pepsi was being outsold by a factor of nearly six to one, giving a classic demonstration of the power of brand to undermine the concept of choice - but without anyone feeling they had sacrificed any freedoms. They were just choosing Coke. that's all.

Ponasch had begun to persuade his management that selling Pepsi as a cheaper alternative was not, in the long run, a winning strategy. But what else could Pepsi be? Like Leary. Marcuse, and others. Portasch noticed that there was something going on with the young people. who were listening to different types of music and dressing differently than their parents, and - while this was still the early 1960s - giving some signs of rebellion against the consumer culture constructed over the 1950s. But if Leary or Marcuse sought to ride the swirling social movements to challenge the established social order. Pottasch thought he could employ it to sell Pepsi Cola.

"We made a decision," he later recalled. "to Stop talking about the product. and start talking about the user." He thus conceived of marketing Pepsi without reference to its inherent qualities. focusing instead on an image of the people who bought it. or who should be buying it. They were the people of the moment: the young. the rebellious. those who (to borrow a later slogan) "think different." They would be known, in Portasch's new formula, as "the Pepsi Generation."

The new ads were the picture of vitality: beautiful young people casually dressed, hanging out, and having fun. "Come alive!" the text read, "You're in the Pepsi generation!" Others read, "For a generation really on the move." Printed in 1964, they look nothing like the more staid advertisements of just a year earlier. Following up on popularity it had won among African Americans, Pepsi also ran similar ads with African American models, also building what would become the brand's counter-cultural bona fides.

"For us to name and claim a whole generation after our product was a rather courageous thing," Pottasch would later remember, "that we weren't sure would take off" But his intuition would prove correct. "What you drank said something about who you were. We painted an image of our consumer as active, vital, and young at heart."

Pepsi, of course, did not create the desire for liberation in various matters from music to sex to manners and dress. Rather, it had cleverly identified with a fashionable individualism. All individualisms, of course, harbor a strain of narcissism, and Pepsi had implicitly understood that, too. For ultimately what the Pepsi Generation were consuming wasn't so much cola as an image of themselves.

Whether Pepsi's approach was truly original is a good question; advertisers are continually claiming to invent things that, on closer inspection, have long existed. But clearly, this campaign had nothing to do with the traditional hard sell, with the product, and what it might do for you, front and center. Pepsi's advertisements and their imitators were in some sense just an even softer version of the soft sell, which pictured an ideal and associated it with the product. Into this category one might put both the "Arrow Man," a dashing figure who wore Arrow shirrs in the 1920s, and the Marlboro Man, solitary smoker of the Great Plains. But no one who smoked Marlboros wanted or expected to become a wrangler. The Pepsi difference was to suggest that consuming the product somehow made you into what you wanted to be.

Pepsi changed its slogan to "The choice of a new generation" and paid Michael Jackson an unprededented $5 million to dance with children to a song set awkwardly to his "Billie Jean" (lyrics: "You're the Pepsi Generation/ guzzle down & taste the thrill of the day/And feel the Pepsi way" (Michael Jackson's agent approached Coca-Cola first, but the market leader was not interested. "They [Coke]saw anything they would do with Michael," recalls the agent, "as a more targeted, ethnic campaign.")

Print advertising has always been less unpopular than television or radio; for it is more under the control of the reader who can avert the eyes. It can also be beautiful. Some of it became much harder to ignore during the 1980s, like a Calvin Klein campaign starring a fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields, or another picturing two men and a woman sleeping in their (Calvin Klein) underwear after a threesome. And on television, viewers (other than parents) might be disposed to zap Shields posting provocatively in her Calvin Klein jeans and intoning. "You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." These were a far cry from the old. extremely irritating Anacin advertisements depicting hammers pounding the skull. Whether, in fact, they prevented zapping, however, is hard to know for sure. Fortunately for the advertising industry, it remained impossible to accurately measure whether people were watching commercials or not, saving the enterprise from a true and full accounting.

It was also during this era that the Super Bowl became a showcase for advertising's greatest talents, seeming to prove the point that there were, indeed, commercials that people truly wanted to see.

Tim Wu "Attention Merchants" (2016)

The prospect of a pandemic might also just be too disturbing to consciously consider. The same disbelief existed in 1918. From fancy dress balls in the Johannesburg City Hall in Spanish costume emblazoned with "Spanish flu" to Londoners holding "sneezing parties" with a bottle of champagne given as prize to the lustiest sneeze, the citizens of the world in early 1918 ridiculed as a joke the threat of "Spanish Influenza". They were not laughing for long.

Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

The process of choosing the medal winners began months before they were ever announced. President Obama would give us a list of people he wanted to consider. We would then check the long list of medal winners selected by prior presidents to avoid duplications. We'd vet his list carefully so there were no unpleasant surprises, and then we'd go back to the president with our proposed additions in an edited 1ist. He often added new names and took some of our recommendations off before approving the final list.

No matter how accomplished the recipients were, the call always came as a shock. Here's how one of them went:

"Michael?" I said.

"Yep."

"Hi, it's Valerie Jarrett."

"Hey, Valerie. What's up?

"President Obama asked me to give you a call to inform you that he is giving you the nation's highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom."

Silence.

"You're kidding, right?"

"I hope you know I would never joke about this."

That was my call to Michael Jordan, my favorite basketball player ever. Back in the nineties the Bulls won six championships, and from the time Laura was six until she was twelve we were at each final game played in Chicago.

Michael Jordan is one of the greatest who ever played the game and even he was left speechless. When I called Meryl Streep from Air Force One, it took a full minute before I could convince the actress this not a prank call. Then she cried. When I tracked down Tom Hanks in the middle of a street in Europe, he let out a scream that no doubt caused stares.

The ceremonies were each special. I never missed one. And on the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the Medal of Freedom by President John F. Kennedy (who had died before the first medals wereawarded), the president and First Lady hosted an event for all living recipients. Simply extraordinary to see so many people who had made positive impacts on our country and the world all in one place!

One day Harrison Ford came by the West Wing to lobby us against a tax on private planes. It wasn't my first time meeting the movie star. In 1995, while shooting The Fugitive in Chicago's city hall, he knocked on the door of my office. It was the weekend, but 1 was there working. He said he was tired and asked if he could lie down on my couch and take a nap for about an hour. An odd request.

"Yup, you sure can," I said, delighted to have him nap in my office. "Take as long as you want."

Ford and I took a photo together, which then ended up in a file somewhere. Well, over twenty years later, the day Ford was scheduled to visit the White House, I showed up to work to find, to my great astonishment, that my assistant, Kathy, had fished the photo out and put it in a frame on my desk. (I told you she was good.) When the actor arrived, he saw the photo and said, "My God, we used to be young."

SPEAK FOR YOURSELF, I thought.

Valerie Jarrett "Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward" (2019)

in Las Vegas, someone is still putting tiny hats on pigeons. Bird lovers are worried. A rescue group has been holding stakeouts. The group said they nabbed a bird in a red hat earlier this week. They called him Cluck Norris. The hat appeared to be glued to his head, so they plan to take him to the vet. Yesterday, they caught another one - Billy the Pidge. Still loose, wearing a pink hat, is Coolamity Jane.

Bare breasts brought Mitzi Briggs to Las Vegas. One of her grown sons wanted to invest in the Folies Bergere at the Tropicana, one of the many topless shows the Vegas casinos use to lure patrons and fire them up for the tables, and she wanted to check out this potential investment. Briggs was rich, thin and four times married, a genteel woman with the pursed lips of a church secretary. She doted on her six children, lavishing money on them, supporting their auto racing and travel. Friends said she gave her children so much that they loved her purse more than her, though Briggs could never see that.

Her fortune began in San Francisco with her maternal grandfather, who founded the Stauffer Chemical Company in 1881. Much of the fortune went to her mother, Marie Stauffer Sigall, who leaped to her death from the fourth floor of a San Francisco hospital in 1951, according to the newspapers. Mitzi always insisted her mother had fallen. Mitzi, then twenty-two, an only child earning As studying philosophy at Stanford University, inherited the $2.8 million estate. Before she graduated she married marine biology student Jack Briggs, then divorced him and married his brother, R. Carlyle Briggs, whom she divorced in 1958. She married and divorced twice more.

While her love life was mercurial, she had a way with money, especially in real estate. By the late 1960s, court records show, her fortune had grown to $44 million. Mitzi Briggs also had become a deeply troubled soul.

She converted to Roman Catholicism in 1967 and came to believe that she had become, in succession, Christ's sister, wife and mother She later told the story of her religious experiences, including the rapture of sex with God, in a rambling vanity book titled Naked Before Thee: A Religious Autobiography, which she wrote under the name Maria Josefa. Copies were available in the Tropicana bookshop during Briggs' years there.

Shortly before Christmas in 1970, one of her daughters committed her to a mental hospital in Belmont, California, prompting a hearing a month later on whether she was sane enough to manage her money The hearing revealed that some of the money she had made in shrewd deals had quickly disappeared in generous gifts. She had donated $5.5 million to the Catholic Church. She had given 184 acres of land in San Jose, California, worth six hundred thousand dollars, to people she believed were militant Native Americans involved in occupying Alcatraz Island. She testified that this gift averted a "Red Power" uprising in which the Indians planned to "blow the faces off Mount Rushmore." John E. Thorne, a Bay Area attorney who represented Briggs during the hearing and who had represented many sixties radicals, would describe her years later as "the kindest, gentlest, sweetest and most generous person you could ever meet." And among the most gullible. Said Thorne of the land she gave away" "The people she was involved with turned out not to be Native Americans at all."

After the hearing a judge freed her from the Belmont hospital and briefly placed her in a conservatorship under her son John David Briggs, then twenty, and the San Mateo County public guardian. The judge put her money under the control of a bank, but not for long.

In 1975, when she came to check out her son's interest in the Folies, the Tropicana was a struggling gambling hall at the far south end of the Strip, a casino built by mob guys who, unlike Briggs, never learned the three rules of real estate: location, location and location. Besides being far from the Strip's center, the Tropicana had too few hotel rooms to keep its Polynesian-theme casino hopping. It was better known for big-name entertainers such as Sammy Davis, Jr. But what fills a casino is hotel rooms, not showrooms. As Briggs saw it, with some fixing up, and some more rooms, the Trop could be a gold mine. She bought in for $6.4 million.

Still, the Tropicana kept losing money, so she poured in an additional $8.6 million. She took little or nothing out. Casino executives routinely charge first-class airfare to their expense accounts, but Briggs always flew coach and often paid her own way

Briggs never understood how to mingle with the customers, how to appeal to their desire to feel lucky and, when they lost, to soothe their egos with gifts and kind words. For a casino owner she held some bizarre views. One evening, soon after she arrived, Briggs hosted a dinner at the Trop for her executives and commission sales people, known as junket reps. Among her guests was another part owner, Deil O. Gustafson, who had bought into the Trop in 1972 and promised to turn it into "the Tiffany of the Strip." Seated near her was the charming Joseph "Caesar" Agosto, the Folies producer, who played a much bigger role in running the Trop than Briggs realized. And among the many wrinkled faces at dinner that night was a lone college student named Rob Goldstein, who was filling in for his father, an old-time gambler who had fallen ill just as a planeload of his players descended on the Trop. The father ordered his son to fly west even though exams started the next week. The room was elegantly prepared, with the best china and stemware and a card, made by a calligrapher, telling each guest where to sit. After the meal the hostess rose to make a speech about her philosophy as a casino owner.

"Mitzi told us about how she didn't understand gambling and how it was evil," Goldstein recalled. ''1 thought she was nuts." Like the others, though, Goldstein kept his thoughts to himself.

The money Briggs poured into an expanding enterprise she regarded as evil was enough to finance a new tower of desperately needed rooms. When it opened in 1978 the Trop's casinos filled with gamblers. But the turnaround came to an abrupt halt in 1979, when the FBI revealed that the Kansas City mob was skimming millions of Tropicana dollars. There was no question about the skim; the feds had wiretapped Nick Civella, the Kansas City mob boss, and Folies producer Agosto was all over the tapes.

Briggs had no idea the mob was robbing her blind or that Agosto was an intimate of Civella. Despite the wiretaps Briggs could not believe that the gracious Agosto had cheated her. She flew to his prison to ask whether it was true.

"Mitzi, I couldn't help it, they had a gun to my head," Agosto told her. She believed.

Later a jury in St. Paul, Minnesota, convicted Gustafson, a Minnesota banker and self-made multimillionaire, of bank and wire fraud, conspiracy and other charges connected with a check kiting scheme that he and Agosto ran to keep the Tropicana afloat. Gustafson was sentenced to ten years in prison.

Briggs was never charged with anything. Even years later law enforcement officials spoke of her sympathetically, as that eccentric woman who was robbed blind by the mob. It was not the last time she would be robbed.

The wiretap evidence was too much even for the laid-back Nevada gaming regulators, who were used to working with people often accused, but seldom convicted, of crimes. The regulators told Briggs and Gustafson to tum in their licenses. But instead of tossing them out, the regulators told them they could sell if they found a buyer fast.

Gustafson worked out a deal to sell the Trop to Ramada, which operated the world's third-largest lodging chain from its headquarters in Phoenix. Ramada was so anxious to get into a business in which it had no expertise, but was certain would produce phenomenal profits, that it agreed to terms that years later would cost it $35 million and would playa major role in making Briggs a pauper. Time would show that the soulless corporations Bill Harrah so disliked could be just as highhanded and heartless as the mobsters who stole the winnings from the Trop.

David Johnston "Temples of Chance" 1994

One thought stuck in Ali's head: "Poverty is not a family value." He worked as a field organizer in Obama's campaign. "The biggest disappointment was that it was a little bit of a cliche: Harvard liberal," said Ali. "Whereas my politics before were not a cliche." Two years later he graduated from Harvard, and then Obama was sworn in as president of the United States. Ali knew he had at least a shot at a very junior position in the new administration. "I had for whatever reason in my mind decided that I should go to the place where it wasn't sexy but the sausage came together." That place, he further decided, was the White House's Office of Management and Budget. His first job in the new administration was to take the budget numbers produced by the senior people and turn them into a narrative: a document ordinary people could read.

One day in his new job he was handed the budget for the Department of Agriculture. "I was like, Oh yeah, the USDA - they give money to farmers to grow stuff." For the first time, he looked closely at what this arm of the United States government actually does. Its very name is seriously misleading - most of what it does has little to do with agriculture. It runs 193 million acres of national forest and grasslands, for instance. It is charged with inspecting almost all the animals Americans eat, including the nine billion birds a year. Buried inside it is a massive science program, a large fleet of aircraft for firefighting, and a bank with $220 billion in assets. It monitors catfish farms. It maintains a shooting range inside its DC headquarters. It keeps an apiary on its roof, to study bee - colony collapse. There's a drinking game played by people who have worked at the Department of Agriculture: Does the USDA do It? Someone names an odd function of government (say, shooting fireworks at Canada geese that flock too near airport runways) and someone else has to guess If the USDA does it. (In this case, it does.)

A small fraction of its massive annual budget ($164 billion in 2016) was actually spent on farmers, but it financed and managed all these programs in rural America - including the free school lunch for kids living near the poverty line. "I'm sitting there looking at this," said Ali. "The USDA had subsidized the apartment my family had lived in. The hospital we used. The fire department. The town's water. The electricity. It had paid for the food I had eaten."

Michael Lewis "The Fifth Risk" (2018)

From 1976 to 1980. People's income more than quadrupled, with the largest paid audience of any American magazine. By 1991. it was the most profitable magazine in the world. And thus the most valuable. So it has remained ever since, (By the 2010s, a full-page advertisement in People was running about $350,000. as compared to a mere $12,000 for an advertisement in Harpers, or about $160.000 for a full-page advertisement in The New York Times newspaper.)

Tim Wu "Attention Merchants" (2016)

Race Against Time

"He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence." - William Blake

For years, scientists have requested detailed operational blueprints - country by country down to neighborhood by neighborhood - on how best to make it through 12 to 24 months of a pandemic. "If the greatest pandemic in history is indeed on the horizon," wrote the editorial board of Lancet, "that threat must be met by the most comprehensive public-health plan ever devised." Indeed, Senate Majority Leader Frist has called for an unprecedented effort rivaling the Manhattan Project in scope and intensity to prepare the nation's defenses.' "We have only one enemy," CDC director Gerberding has said repeatedly, "and that is complacency."

Unfortunately, no country is prepared. In the policy journals like Foreign Affairs, senior officials admit that planning for what they call "the most catastrophic outbreak in human history" is "abysmally inadequate. Despite repeated warnings over the years that a new pandemic is inevitable and repeated prods by the WHO for countries to draw up preparedness plans, only about 50 of more than 200 countries have done so. Some of these "plans" are as stunted as a single page" and most, as described in the science journal Nature, are "very sketchy." The WHO calls for countries to "put life in these plans" by carrying out practice simulations. "One has to be very vigilant, honest and brave," asserts Margaret Chan, now the WHO's chief of pandemic preparedness. "Sometimes you need to make unpopular, difficult recommendations to political leaders which may have a short-term impact on the economy and on certain sectors." As the Los Angeles County Disaster Preparedness Task Force motto reads, "The only thing more difficult than preparing for a disaster is trying to explain why you didn't."

Fewer than 10% of the countries with plans have taken the necessary further step of translating the plans into national law. The chair of the Infectious Disease Society of America's Pandemic Influenza Task Force is concerned about the state of U.S. preparedness. "Although many levels of government are paying increased attention to the problem," he said, "the United States remains woefully unprepared for an influenza pandemic that could kill millions of Amertcans." Osterholm was, as usual, more direct. "If it happens tonight," Osterholm said at a forum sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, "we're screwed."

Osterholm laid it out on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. "We can predict now 12 to 18 months of stress, of watching loved ones die, of potentially not going to work, of wondering if you're going to have food on the table the next day. Those are all things that are going to mean that we're going to have to plan unlike any other kind of crisis that we've had in literally the last 80-some years in this country."

The U.S. pandemic preparedness plan has been long in the making. The planning process started in 1976, only to become one of the longest-standing incompleted processes in Washington. Various drafts emerged in '78 and '83, but were reshelved and forgotten until the latest effort to update and implement such a plan began in 1993. The Government Accountability Office - the watchdog arm of Congress - scolded the Department of Health and Human Services on six separate occasions for failing to develop a national response plan despite many years of "process."

In October 2005, a draft of the plan was obtained by The New York Times. The "preparedness plan" highlighted how poorly prepared the country is for a pandemic. The headline read "U.S. Not Ready for Deadly Flu, Bush Plan shows." In The Boston Globe, Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy noted that other nations like Canada, Britain, and Japan had completed their plan a year or years before. "They're putting their plans into action right now," Kennedy wrote, "while we're waiting to read ours for the first time. America deserves better." Senator Arlen Specter agreed. "Could we have acted sooner to avoid the situation we are in now, in effect running for cover?" he asked. "We need a better way of finding out what the hell is going on."

One of the factors blamed for the 29-year delay in producing a plan was the difficulty of interdepartmental coordination. A pandemic would impact all agencies of government, but they don't all have the same priorities. Senior policy analysts describe the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services, for example, as "not exactly good bedfellows." The USDA's traditional mission to defend the economic interests of the agricultural industry sets up a natural tension with agencies prioritizing broader concerns. Experts predict the economic impact on U.S. agriculture will be nothing compared to the havoc wreaked by the virus more generally.

The official plan was finally released in November 2005. The CDC planners did not mince words: "No other infectious disease threat, whether natural or engineered, poses the same current threat for causing increases in infections, illnesses, and deaths so quickly in the United States and worldwide." In terms of preparedness, though, The New York Times editorialized that it "looks like a prescription for failure should a highly lethal flu virus start rampaging through the population in the next few years." The editorial noted that experts find the plan "disturbingly incomplete," particularly because it "largely passes the buck on practical problems" to state and local authorities, "none of which are provided. with adequate resources to handle the job." Redlener called it "the mother of all unfunded mandates." Laurie Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations has long advocated an integrated public health infrastructure. "If such an interlaced system did not exist at a time of grave need it would constitute an egregious betrayal of trust," she wrote in a book bearing the same name, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health.


Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

Kind hearts are more than coronets
(Tennyson, poem)

The most extraordinary coincidence which helps make this program so leaden is that only a few weeks ago I was recited this proverb in Creole in the island of Mauritius.

And in Creole it goes , "Tous la casa la pie nour la cresse du dilly badou."

In fact it was sung. It was sung to me by a small Creole lad aged fourteen who was trying to flog shells on the beach. His name, inexplicably, was Clarence.

And it goes (singing), " Tous la casa la pie nour la cresse du dilly badou."

And that is that quotation. Most extraordinary.

I didn't want any shells because they're sort of rather ugly. Those shells. But he wouldn't be put off. He's going to go far, this Clarence. No worries with him. He'll survive.

He said, "No shells. You like pawpaw? What you like? Pineapple? I shred it for you. You like to see the trees. The ebony trees. I take you to the Pumpernoose Gardens. Where you like to go? I find."

I said, "No no no no. There's really nothing."

Then I had a thought. There WAS some way of using Clarence.

I should explain at this point what my wife were DOING on Mauritius a few weeks ago. We went there because my wife was born there and hadn't been back for thirty-seven years and we decided that was time she went back just to make sure that she turned the gas off.

It was also the anniversary of our silver wedding so we were having a holiday there.

And it's a magnicent marvelous island, Mauritius. It's tremendously beautiful. And the people there are not only extremely beautiful, but the pleasanted people I've ever met anywhere in the world.

The only trouble is, coming back, is the photographic record. I always like to paw over the photographs afterward. And very little of what was sort of real Mauritius seemed to me to be photographed. And I was dying to get a record. And I said to my wife, "What is really indigenous about Mauritius? What do you remember that we should see."

And she said, "I remember that the little old men, aged about a hundred and four, used to sort of hunker down on the street corners and have little bowls of nuts round them. They were peanuts, and some of them were shelled and they're painted bright pink and bright blue. And you grind them up and you put them beside the curry, the dish of curry. It's one of the side dishes of curry. And that'll make a marvelous picture."

I said, "Fine."

"And the other thing I remember in the plantations, the huts nowadays are sort of corrugated iron and concrete in fact. Concrete villas. But the old plantation worker's huts used to be made of bamboo cane strung together with sort of platted roofs. And so if you'll get a photograph of those."

So I turned to Clarence, my little lad, and said, "Right. Find me. Find me a little old man selling these colored peanuts. How much will you charge? I want two of them."

He said, "One rupee sir."

I said, "Fine. Very reasonable. Right. And find me two huts made of bamboo cane. And here's a five rupee note. Bring me the change."

So he came back and he gave me the addresses of these things and I said, "Where's the change?"

He said, "No change."

I said, "Wait a minute. Clarence. Wait a minute. You said one rupee each for finding these men with the nuts."

"Oh yes sir, but we have a saying in our country. In Creole it goes, 'Tous la casa la pie nour la cresse du dilly badou' "

I said, "What does that mean in English?"

And he said, "Cane huts are more than curry nuts."

Frank Muir
741203

When my dad graduated from medical school in 1947, he joined DC's Freedmen's Hospital for a one-year residency. During that year his mother, only thirty-eight years old, died in Freedmen's from hypertension while he was on duty. In a quiet moment of openness, he once shared with me how helpless and guilty he felt that he could not save her. From Freedmen's he was offered a huge opportunity: a residency at Chicago's prestigious St. Luke's Hospital. He was the hospital's first, and only, black resident. After attending only all-black schools, he was thrilled to break the color barrier, but even then the door opened only partway. He wasn't allowed to live with his white colleagues in the residents' quarters adjacent to the hospital. He had to find room and board on the south side of town where blacks were allowed to live, five miles away from the hospital, and travel by bus or streetcar - a very long and tiring commute after a thirty-six-hour shift. He was also instructed to enter the hospital through the back door. This he refused to do. He showed up on his first day and walked through the front door like all the white doctors. Word of his act of defiance spread quickly through the black staff. The next morning many of them were waiting out front when he arrived, and they all walked in together. Nobody objected.

Chicago was like that. It had a patchy attitude toward segregation. Some freedoms were allowed, some weren't. Marshall Field's, the famous department store, was a classic example. Black people could shop at Marshall Field's, but they couldn't work there. It was a checkered landscape that my mother's family had learned to navigate. Through education that led to financial stability, they became one of the most politically connected black families of the time, carving out a measure of status and access unavailable to most black Chicagoans. They, and others in the black middle class, built their own businesses and social network, but they were second-class citizens nonetheless, and their relative degree of freedom existed in a very narrow lane.

Valerie Jarrett "Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward" (2019)

Hunters in the Czech Republic were following a deer when something went wrong. One of their dogs startled it. The deer ran toward them and one of its antlers caught the strap of a hunter's rifle. It ran off. Someone later saw the deer, still with the gun, more than a mile away. Apparently, the gun isn't loaded, but some future hunter may think twice about opening fire when encountering a deer that also appears to be armed.