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"By the early twentieth century America educated its youth to a far greater extent than did most, if not every, European country," Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz write in The Race Between Education and Technology, their exploration of how investments in human capital made America the world's leading country. "Secondary schools in America were free and generally accessible, whereas they were costly and often inaccessible in most of Europe. Even by the 1930s America was virtually alone in providing universally free and accessible secondary schools." A state university and community college system made tertiary education widespread, and the aforementioned GI Bill of Rights vastly expanded educational attainment and homeownership in America. Three-quarters of men who had served in the military took advantage of the educational opportunities in the GI Bill, and 5 million became homeowners as a result. The GI Bill was a major investment in ordinary Americans, and it paid huge returns by creating the modern middle class.

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There were many other historic initiatives in the early twentieth century that put the United States on a progressive path. In the 1930s, America helped pioneer limits on guns with the National Firearms Act, in which members of Congress seriously considered banning handguns. In that same era, Congress approved social safety net programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance and jobs initiatives like the Civilian Conservation Corps. Other countries later adopted many elements of these programs.

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Then in about 1970, for reasons we'll explore, America went off track, beginning a nearly half-century drift in the wrong direction. High-school graduation rates tumbled from the highest to among the lowest in the industrialized world. Incarceration rose sevenfold. Family structure collapsed. Single-parent households soared. Life expectancy peaked, Working-class incomes grew glacially, if at all. The top one-hundredth of 1 percent of Americans enjoyed a quadrupling of incomes since 1980, after adjusting for inflation, and the rest of the 1 percent saw a bit less than a doubling of real incomes. Those in the 90th through 99th percentiles simply stayed even, with incomes growing at the same rate as per capita GDP, or gross domestic product. And the bottom 90 percent lost relative ground, with their incomes since 1980 growing more slowly than per capita GDP. The result is that the top 1 percent now owns twice as great a share of national wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent. We went from being a world leader in opportunity to being a laggard.

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The decline in education leadership is particularly significant, because good jobs increasingly require a solid educational foundation. Globalization, automation and a relentless focus on cost cutting led to a hollowing out of urban blue-collar and clerical jobs that in the past were often performed by people with limited education. David Autor, an economist at MIT, has found that as a result, urban workers with only a high-school education fill jobs that are actually lower skilled now than back in the 1970s.

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One reason Kevin Green floundered was that he hadn't graduated from high school. That hadn't been an impediment for earlier generations of blue-collar workers, including his dad, for in the early 1970s some 72 percent of American jobs required only a high-school education or less. By 2020, that will have fallen to 36 percent. One consequence is a plunge in earnings for those with limited education. In the 1970s, a male high-school graduate earned on average almost four-fifths as much as a male college graduate, but that has fallen to just over 50 percent. And those like Kevin who didn't graduate from high school do even worse.

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The last half century is also the period in which the American pathway began to diverge significantly from the paths of Canada and Europe. In the 1970s, the top 1 percent earned a similar share of income, 10 percent, whether in the United States or Europe. That rose modestly in Europe to 12 percent today; in the United States it doubled to 20 percent. That's the calculation of the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and their colleagues; others offer different estimates that show a smaller increase in inequality.

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

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Fear is the Main Emotion

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All behavior occurs for a reason. When a nonverbal impaired person has a tantrum, fear may be the main motivator. In my own case, little high-pitched noises that occur at night still set off a little twinge of fear in me. The heart-pounding big fear reactions I used to have during my twenties are now controlled with anti-depressant drugs. Trying to eliminate these big fear reactions through cognitive or behavioral methods didn't work for me. Self-reports from other individuals also indicate that certain sounds or sensations cause panic attacks. A recent brain scan at the University of Utah showed that my amygdala (fear center) is enlarged. This may explain my increased fear responses. If an individual is nonverbal and their receptive learning is impaired, harmless things such as a certain room or a particular person may be associated with a stimulus that hurts, such as a smoke alarm. In some cases, the individual might associate the dreadful sound with something he was looking at when the alarm went off. If he was looking at a teacher's blue jacket, he may develop a blue jacket fear. I know this sounds odd, but these associative fear memories occur all the time in animals. A dog often fears the place where he got hit by a car instead of being afraid of cars. If these associations can be figured out, it may be possible to remove the feared object. I discuss fear memories in more depth in my book, Animals in Translation.

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An individual with severe autism can easily panic if something new is suddenly introduced. A surprise birthday party can trigger a tantrum instead of pleasure. It is best to gradually habituate the child to the things he or she will experience at the party. This is very similar to habituating horses to tolerate the new scary things they will see at a horse show. They need to gradually get used to new things such as flags and balloons at home before they go to a show. Individuals with severe autism can learn to like new things. The best way to introduce them is to let the child or adult gradually approach and explore them at their own pace and inclination. Some nonverbal individuals may explore them by touching, smelling, or tasting. They need to be provided with a specific place where they are allowed to do this kind of exploration, because licking things at the grocery store is not appropriate behavior. Nonverbal impaired people are usually able to learn that certain activities are only allowed in certain places. For instance, if the person does not want to taste a new food, he may need to explore it first by touching it. This activity should be done away from the dining room because touching and smearing food is not appropriate behavior in the dining room.

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Self-Injurious Behavior (SIB)

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Some nonverbal individuals, and even some highly verbal individuals, engage in banging their heads or biting themselves. Reports from people on the spectrum have revealed that many of these problems stem from seevere sensory issues. In this case, the child may be hypo-sensitive - lacking in sensory input - rather than the more typical hypersensitivity (too much input) that is often the case within the autism population. In some of these cases, individuals do not realize they are being self-injurious because they have tactile or body boundary issues. For example, when they are tired or upset they cannot determine where their foot ends and the floor begins. They may not feel themselves sitting on a chair at school, so they squirm or bounce m the chair to induce the sensory input they need to feel stable. Lorna King found that a child who self abuses often feels no pain. Children may dig at their skin to the point of drawing blood because their sensory receptors return them no tactile sensation as they would in a typical person. After King introduced children to activities that provided calming sensory stimulation such as deep pressure or slow swinging, pain sensation returned. She has seen children who used to head bang start to hit their heads and stop before they did so because now they know it will hurt.

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The best approach for controlling SIB is an integrated approach. A combination of behavioral analysis, sensory therapy, conventional medications, and biomedical interventions such as diets and supplements often works best. The big mistake that many people make on treating SIB is to get too single-minded in their approach. Some people try to use just behavioral analysis and never use a drug. Others use drugs and nothing else. Both single-minded approaches are wrong. A drug-only approach leads to a sleepy "drug zombie" and a behavior-only approach without any intervention to reduce nervous system arousal may lead to bad procedures, such as long periods of restraint.

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Does the Nonverbal Person Understand Speech?

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In some cases, a nonverbal person has receptive language and can understand what is being said; in other cases, they do not. Nonverbal people are masters at reading slight differences in a teacher's or parent's actions. I had one parent tell me their child has ESP because he is already waiting at the door BEFORE his mother even gets her car keys or purse. It is likely that the individual is sensing slight differences m behavior before it's time to get the keys or purse. There may be some hustle and bustle activities such as throwing out the newspaper. If the child has severe visual processing problems, he may be responding to the sound of the paper being crushed in the trash can.

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In some situations, the nonverbal individual may be responding to a gesture rather than a word. If you point to the juice or turn your head towards it, the person may perceive your actions. One way to test receptive language is to ask the person to do something odd. An example would be ask the child to put his book on the chair. In some nonverbal individuals, verbal language is impossible, but they learn to read and express themselves through typing. Then speech circuits are scrambled but they can still communicate through the typed word.

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

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One day in late summer a thirty-year-old woman, slightly frail and innocent-looking, was sitting on a hillside near the grain fields of Liaohepo Village in Henan Province, Zuo Dechang, a young hoodlum who had been in and out of the local police station for various crimes, spotted her and cozied up to her. She wasn't much for conversation, for she was mentally retarded, but Zuo didn't mind. He brought her back to his village and tried to find a man who might buy her as a wife.

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"I have no money," an unmarried peasant told Zuo, as the two negotiated a deal. "But I have a small calf. What would you think if I gave you this calf in exchange for this woman you've brought to our village.

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Well, Zuo thought, I could sell the calf for a bit of money. "It's a deal," he told the farmer, and the woman changed hands.

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Her new husband gave her hardly anything to eat and little clothing to protect herself against the cold. A few months later, on a wintry day in 1990, she died.

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A woman for a calf.

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Something, I decided, was wrong with the picture of Communist equality that I had initially absorbed. When I first arrived in China, I was impressed that almost every woman I met had an occupation or a career. I did not notice any discrimination against women, and I met intelligent and capable women in academia, business, and journalism, as well as gutsy female vegetable merchants, engineering consultants, and toy makers. When we got to the Chinese border on Macao during my first trip into China in 1987, a crowd of ambitious, pushy cabdrivers crowded around Nick and me in pursuit of our fare. The most reasonable price was quoted to us by the most levelheaded of them all, a twenty-seven-year-old woman who owned her own taxi, and we chose her.

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I thought, This is equality! I felt better about China itself, for as a Chinese woman, I was troubled greatly by the traditional distaste and discrimination that women faced. It was fine to be proud of the Great Wall but not of a 4,000-year legacy of abandoning female babies, of binding girls' feet, of keeping girls illiterate. Until the turn of the century, many Chinese girls were not even given names: They were called working-age women In the cities hold jobs. These gains gave women some economic independence and self-confidence. Side by side with their husbands, they built huts and tilled the fields. Above all, the party oversaw a revolution in educational practices, mobilizing peasant girls to go to school. For the first time in Chinese history, large numbers of peasant women graduated from the status of donkeys; they became almost human beings and not just walking wombs.

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To be sure, even under Mao there was still a great deal of discrimination. But factories and offices were motivated to improve conditions by enthusiasm for change as well as fear of central leaders. And society was much more prudish then, so It was hardly possible to emphasize sexual differences. Cosmetics were effectively banned, and everyone wore the same blue or gray Mao jackets. Wolf whistles would have been unrevolutionary.

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So when I arrived in China, I was generally impressed by the status of women. And with the new opportunities generated by a market economy, I expected life for women to get even better.

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Then one day, I met Yang Yanru, a middle-aged peasant near Tianjin whose husband had become rich doing business. He asked her to stop working, and she was happy Just to stay at home tidying up the house. That nagged at me. I could understand that now that she was rich she had better things to do with her time than to slave away in a factory for measly pay. But the same thing was happening all over China, and It seemed funny to me that economic progress in China would mean more housewives and fewer career women. What ever happened to Mao's belief in equality?

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As I talked to more women and got better acquainted with their status, it became clear that the problems ran far deeper. The obstacle was not just the strength of traditional beliefs but the invisible hand of the market itself. The market economy raised living standards for women along with men, but it also led to the return of the male-dominated Chinese society - coupled with the sexist features of Western society. Advertisers quickly discovered that the best way to market their products was by airing commercials showing lovely young women, preferably wearing as little as possible. To promote sales of weapons abroad, the army began publishing a calendar with a pinup each month of a buxom young woman clutching a gun. In the 1994 calendar, for example, Miss February wears a bikini top and a red skirt slit to the waist, accompanied by an AK-47 assault rifle.

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Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn "China Wakes" (1994)

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I feel that I am reserved for some end or other

(Clive)

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I had a story, but I think I'll change it and tack it on to Frank's. When they built this tunnel that Frank was talking about through this St. Plain, they didn't know when they were going to through from one end to the other.? So what they did, this cockney foreman got two of his brothers-in-law over from England and he said, "Now you've got a very soft job here. One of you've got to stand at one side and the other's going to stand at the other side, and then when you can both see each other, we're through the mountain."

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But of course during the actual building of the thing, all these two men could do was just hang about until ready and somebody came up to them one day and said, "What the devil do you think you're doing, hanging about?"

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And the reply was, "I don't know, but I feel I'm reserved for some end or 'nother."

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Denis Norden 570129b

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Ask Well

I went through a tough time hair has since become much result of the stress?

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It's natural to assume that stress contributes to gray hair. Just look at the various presidents who left office with many more silvery strands than when they went in.

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But if you dig into the research, you'll find that few studies on the topic exist. And while some have found associations between premature graying and stress, no research has proved the link.

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"There's still a lot we don't know," said Dr. Paradi Mirmirani, a dermatologist at the Kaiser Permanente Vallejo Medical Center in Northern California.

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In past studies, researchers have asked participants to fill out questionnaires about their hair color and stress levels, and then the scientists would see if they could link them.

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In one study published in 2016, for instance, scientists surveyed more than 1,100 young Turkish adults and found that the 315 who reported prematurely graying hair had higher stress levels than those who didn't. (Those with premature graying also had histories of alcohol use and chronic disease, and they had parents who went gray at a young age.)

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But a mouse study published in 2020 took the research a step forward. In it, researchers stressed mice in various ways, including by injecting them with a chili-pepper-like chemical that induced a "fight-or-flight" response. This caused them to release the stress hormone norepinephrine, which, in turn, depleted their hair follicles of the stem cells involved with adding pigment to mouse fur. The hair then grew in gray. The researchers demonstrated similar effects of high levels of norepinephrine on human stem cells in a lab as well, supporting the idea that the stress hormone is linked with graying in humans, said Ya-Chieh Hsu, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University, and one of the authors of this research.

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But studies on this topic are challenging to perform on people. One small human study published in 2021 still advanced the narrative: Researchers plucked various strands of hair from 14 volunteers who had at least some graying. Several of the strands were fully gray, some were partially gray and some hadn't grayed at all. The scientists then created high-resolution digital images of the hairs and calculated when each strand went gray using estimates of how quickly hair grows.

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They also asked the particpants to plot out stressful experiences from the past year on a timeline, and rank them. The researchers found that when a strand turned gray frequently corresponded with the most stressful moments.

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This was the first time a study linked specific stressful events with the moment hair began to gray, said Martin Picard, an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University and an author of the study.

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It offered "our first real evidence that maybe stress does, in fact, play a role for some people," said Dr. Victoria Barbosa, an associate professor of dermatology at the University of Chicago.

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If such preliminary research continues to identify stress-related changes that cause hair graying, it may one day lead to treatments that can repigment hair, Dr. Mirmirani said. But we still need more and larger human studies to confirm the links, Dr. Barbosa said.

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Future research might also help explain why stress is linked with hair graying in some people, but not in others, said Dr. Sind-huja Sominidi Damodaran, a dermatologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

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It's also too soon to know if easing stress could slow down or reverse premature graying.

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For most people, genetics is the main driver of hair graying, Dr. Barbosa said. If you have a parent who went gray at a young age, you're likely to as well.

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Certain medical conditions can cause hair to lose pigment prematurely, Dr. Barbosa said. Those include vitiligo, which causes patches of skin to lose color, and alopecia areata, a type of hair loss. An over- or underactive thyroid and chemotherapy treatments can also contribute to premature graying, Dr. Damodaran said. Deficiencies in iron, calcium and the vitamins B12 and D are correlated with going gray early too, she said, as are obesity and smoking.

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Dr. Barbosa said that she likes to use graying as an opportunity to talk with her patients about accepting graying as a natural part of aging.

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This can be especially liberating for women, she said, since "graying has always been socially more acceptable for men."

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Sarah Klein

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When running for president in 1860, Abraham Lincoln voted for all his party's candidates except himself. He humbly made no choice for president. In Rainier, Wash., city council candidate Damion Green followed this example, and it cost him. He didn't vote for himself, fearing it would seem narcissistic, and he lost by one vote. His opponent tells The Seattle Times he did vote for himself after his wife gave him a nudge.

On the evening of October 18, 1897, George Mortimer Pullman hosted a dinner at the Chicago Club for the heads of the Pennsylvania Railroad, toasting them with fine wines and Pearl de Montana cigars. It was his last hurrah. The next morning he died of a massive heart attack. At the end the sixty-six-year-old tycoon was not merely confused and embittered but paranoid, perhaps rightfully so. Fearing that disgruntled ex-employees might snatch his corpse, he left instructions to be entombed in a wall of steel and stone. The funeral party waited until the safety of darkness to set off from the Pullman mansion on Prairie Avenue. George's mahogany casket had been lined with lead, and he was lowered into a grave wrapped with tar paper and covered with quick-drying asphalt. Another layer of concrete was added, along with heavy rails laid at right angles. The process took two days, leaving him more secure than the pharaohs of ancient Egypt.

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Larry Tye "Rising from the Rails" (2004)

As Eric Sterling drafted tough drug laws, and Daniel McDowell broke them, it was up to officers like Baltimore Police lieutenant Steve Olson to enforce them. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Baltimore and many other cities had a zero-tolerance approach to narcotics, and Olson participated in waves of drug arrests.

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"We made a boatload of arrests, we took a lot of people to jail and the end result is it's not any better," he told us as we drove in a police cruiser through tough neighborhoods. "The vast majority of arrests didn't make a difference."

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Steve, an athletic jokester with a fondness for bicycle policing and marathons, comes from a military family with a precise sense of order and propriety. He despised the chaos and violence of the drug world, and he still carries scars from an incident in 2013 when a criminal ran him down with a motorcycle. But Steve eventually came to view the crackdown as more harmful than helpful. He loved traveling overseas, and he would notice that other countries frequently handled drugs with a lighter touch and seemed to have fewer problems.

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As Steve was having these doubts, something happened in his personal life that also changed how he saw the problem. In 2016, Steve was raising money for Habitat for Humanity, his favorite charity, by offering to do chores for people. His sister volunteered to donate if Steve would clean their dad's truck, so he did so with his usual meticulousness - and was rocked when he found drug paraphernalia. The issue wasn't his dad, he realized, but Steve's brother Mark, age thirty-four, who often used the truck.

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To Steve, all the things he hadn't understood about Mark suddenly made sense: "Why he couldn't pay his rent, why he couldn't hold a job, why he had a dirty appearance, why some of his actions were just completely out of character, why he would explode in rage." It was also clear why Mark hadn't applied for jobs that his brother had recommended: he knew he would fail the drug test. Steve had once found Mark's vehicle in a notorious drug zone, but Mark - who worked on cell phone towers - explained that he was checking on the local tower. "Addicts are great liars," Steve noted resignedly.

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So he phoned his brother. "Mark," he told him. "I'm cleaning Dad's truck." Mark immediately understood and overdosed in an effort to kill himself. He failed, and then he and Steve had a heartfelt conversation. Mark confessed that he had a $300-a-day habit. The family tried to get him into a long-term rehab program and initially couldn't find one that would accept Mark's health insurance. That's all too common. Finally, the family found one, and Mark stayed off drugs for three and a half months. He struggled with his cravings, calling his brother several times a day. Once he explained that the downside of sobriety was the need to face up to a wrenching world. "Sober," he added, was actually an acronym for "son of a bitch, everything's real."

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Then, a few months after Mark went into rehab, Steve was in Malawi volunteering with Habitat for Humanity when he received an urgent text message to call his wife.

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"I knew what that text message meant," he said. "It meant my brother was dead."

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Craving a fix, Mark had been driving ninety miles an hour on the highway to buy a $20 bag of heroin when he lost control of his vehicle. He was killed in the crash. The tragedy made Steve more sensitive to what families were going through. When fellow police officers referred contemptuously to "junkies," Steve would respond, "Oh, you mean like my brother?"

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The tragedy also made him more aware of the barriers to treatment.

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He saw how difficult it was for people to get help, and he became more understanding of the need for public health approaches to addiction in addition to criminal justice approaches.

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"When my brother first started down this road, he did something wrong," Steve told us somberly. "He broke the law. He made a decision, and that was a moral decision. And somewhere down the line during his course of addiction, during the way he lived his life, it stopped being a moral issue, it started being a health issue.

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"When you feel as though you're lost, as my brother felt, you're not going to seek the resources. And it's not made easy. There are so many different loopholes and hurdles and doors to go through."

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The year after Mark's death, Baltimore began a pilot program called LEAD - Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion - that attempts to address these barriers. LEAD responds to drug users not with arrest and imprisonment but with social services, working with users rather than handcuffing them. LEAD started in Seattle, where it led to a 60 percent drop in recidivism, and it has now been copied in many cities around the country. It marks a step away from the traditional American approach toward a Portugal-style decriminalization of narcotics, and it is long overdue. We followed Steve as he made the rounds, looking for people on the streets with addictions, not to arrest them but to guide them toward LEAD counselors.

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"Joe!" he shouted jubilantly to one scruffy, bearded man carrying pipes over his shoulder. Joe greeted Steve warmly, although perhaps a little guiltily: he said he had found the pipes in a dumpster, but that didn't seem terribly credible. In the old days, Steve later explained, the police might have arrested Joe for one thing or another, but now officers were focused on getting Joe into treatment.

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After a bit of chitchat, Steve made his pitch: "Joe, what if! told you that the people I want you to talk to will help you get back to your family?"

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"Give me the name and number and I'll call."

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"I'll take you there."

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"I know you got my back all the time," Joe replied, but then he wavered and said he was too busy.

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"My guys might come to you. Can you stay here for a few minutes?"

Joe shuffled his feet and looked uneasy, then tried to put Steve off. "I'll come down," he said, referring to some vague point in the future.

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"You know how difficult it is to make that first step. You know that, Mr. Olson."

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"Here's my big thing. Can you give me fifteen minutes right now?

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Just fifteen minutes? I'm not going to take you anywhere. I'm not going to ask you to go anywhere. I'm going to bring people to you. Just fifteen minutes. I know you've got to go. I know how much fifteen minutes means to you. But at the same time, fifteen minutes can be the difference. You know that discomfort you're feeling right now? How would you like it to go away?"

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"I want everything to go away."

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While Steve got on his cell phone to track down a social worker who could come over, we asked Joe why he was wary of visiting the LEAD office. "That step is the hardest," Joe said nervously. "You walk into a place where you don't know anybody. You wonder, are they going to welcome you, or treat you like a piece of shit?"

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Soon Steve came back, dejected. The social workers were busy, he explained, taking another young man to get a haircut so he could go to a job interview. But he pleaded with Joe to go to the LEAD office.

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"I'll go," Joe promised. "I really will." He seemed heartened when Steve told him that some of the social workers themselves had previously been addicted and know that world well. Joe added that he would prefer to have Steve escort him, because he feels overwhelmed in strange settings.

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"Joe, you call, I'll come running," Steve promised.

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Joe was sweating, probably a little dope sick and in need of a fix. That may have been why he was impatient to go, and Steve watched him walk away with his pipes over his shoulder.

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"The hardest thing about watching them walk away is this is how it happens all the time," Steve told us when we were back in the cruiser.

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I've been talking to Joe quite a bit for a number of weeks. And it's always closer and closer and closer to it being a success. Today was the closest it's ever come."

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We asked Steve if this kind of policing is enormously rewarding, and he nodded and said he was sure that he was saving lives. Then he sighed. "It's also exhausting," he said. "It's mentally and physically draining to scream without raising your voice eight hours a day. And to know that when I go home at night, the people that were resistant or I couldn't get through the door or don't want to talk to me are still out there." He paused, shook his head and added, "It's not something that I can do for the rest of my career, I can't do this. Physically, mentally, I can't do this."

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Baltimore is pioneering a public health approach to drug addiction in part because of its former health commissioner, Dr. Leana Wen. Like many other experts in the field, Wen argues that we need to treat addiction as a chronic health problem like diabetes or heart disease. Not everyone agrees, and it's true, of course, that addiction depends partly on circumstance and behavior, and that users should be encouraged to say no to drugs-just as diabetics should reject cinnamon buns. Many people do manage to overcome substance abuse without medication, by sheer force of will. But addiction, like diabetes, is about the body's physical wiring, as well as about behaviors. As Wen noted, "We'd never tell someone with diabetes, 'Why can't you get off insulin?' We'd never ask someone with high blood pressure, 'Why do you need medicine, why aren't exercise and diet enough?' "

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There are signs of a bipartisan shift from an approach based solely on criminal justice to a more effective one that also relies on treatment. Portugal's sensible and effective public-health-focused drug policy has been the trend in Canada and Europe. In the United States, such an approach would include three crucial elements.

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First, treatment must be available to all 21 million Americans who need it, and this should include both psychosocial counseling and medication-assisted treatment. An astonishing one in seven young adults, ages eighteen to twenty-five, need treatment, the government estimates. Back in 1971, President Nixon ordered that treatment be made available for all people with drug addictions, without fear of criminal sanction, and obtained substantial funding from Congress to provide that treatment. For a time there was real progress against heroin, but, sadly, in the decades afterward, treatment actually became less available. Only one in five Americans with substance abuse disorders now receive any treatment. That is an astonishing failure of our government and health-care system, and the Trump administration arguably made it worse by chipping away at the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid. "I cannot imagine if we said only one in ten people with cancer can get chemotherapy, or one in ten patients who need dialysis is able to receive it," Wen told us. "But that's what happens for addiction."

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The Affordable Care Act included mental-health care and treatment of drug-use disorders as essential health benefits, but reimbursements for addiction treatment and mental health are very low and many users have no health insurance at all. A much more comprehensive and better-funded national program is needed. We've spoken to people who tried to get into rehab but were told that their addictions weren't yet serious enough to qualify; in effect, they were told to wait, deteriorate and try again. That's obviously shortsighted, particularly because researchers find that increasing access to drug treatment pays for itself by reducing crime. Outpatient substance abuse assistance costs about $4,700 a year; incarceration costs five times as much, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. It says that a dollar invested in addiction treatment programs saves $12 in reduced crime and court costs, plus health-care savings. The Baltimore Station's program that helped Daniel is an example of an effective program that could be replicated.

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A second step is to make drug use less lethal for those who resist treatment. The United States has succeeded in making naloxone, an antidote for opioid overdoses, far more available, so that police officers like Steve Olson now carry it with them to administer in an instant. Naloxone truly is a miracle drug: jab someone comatose from an overdose and, astonishingly, he or she will typically revive and, just minutes later, seem almost as good as new. Wen issued a citywide prescription to all 620,000 Baltimore residents for naloxone, and she worked to distribute naloxone to high-risk communities, such as the red-light district.

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Promoting needle exchanges to reduce transmission of HIV and hepatitis also helps, and this is now widely accepted in the United States. More controversial are safe injection sites, where users can go to use their own heroin or other illicit narcotics, while monitored by a nurse or health aide. The injection site will supply needles, but not the drugs themselves. When users overdose, they can receive immediate treatment, rather than dying on a park bench. There are some ninety safe injection sites in other countries, including Canada, and not a single fatal overdose has been reported despite millions of injections. Dozens of studies have found that they not only save lives from overdoses but also allow health authorities to connect with drug users and gradually reel them in for treatment. At the first safe injection site in North America, in Vancouver, British Columbia, the result was a 35 percent reduction in fatal overdoses in the area. One study estimated that a safe injection site in a U.S. city would not only save lives but also some $3.5 million. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has threatened to prosecute local officials who try to operate safe injection sites.

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The third step is the most complicated - to focus on prevention, education and reducing the stigma that hampers users from getting help. "Society needs to change its attitude to drug users," Wen said, reiterating her point. "They are patients with a disease that needs treatment." One element of prevention is to reduce opioid prescribing by doctors and dentists, and that is belatedly taking place, but the numbers are still far higher than in our peer countries; in 2016, doctors wrote more opioid prescriptions in the state of Michigan than the number of people living in the state.

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When Wen had a baby in 2017, she was prescribed a thirty-day supply of oxycodone.

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"Why do I get this?" she asked.

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"Just in case you need it," the doctor explained. "We don't want you to be in pain."

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Prevention also means criminal prosecutions of major drug smugglers and in particular targeting Chinese businesses that operate fentanyl supply houses. But the broadest challenge in prevention is to recognize that addiction is a symptom of a deeper malaise and that a strategy also has to offer jobs, education and hope. Whether in Baltimore or in Yamhill, drug use is often not just a trip but also an escape from a place that has become unendurable.

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The 2018 First Step Act was an example of bipartisan criminal justice reform and may benefit thousands of federal prisoners by lightening sentences, but it should be just the beginning of greater change in incarceration policies. Eric Sterling, who helped write the harsh drug laws of 1986 and 1988, has completely reversed his perspective and is now working to undo those laws. "That Congress has been unable so many times to change these laws is a real indictment of its unwillingness to fix injustice."

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"It was tragically misguided," he said of the war on drugs. "Everything needs to change."

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

Today I no longer use door symbols because they have been replaced with pictures of other things I have experienced or things I have read. When I read a book with descriptive text, I translate it into photorealistic pictures. As more and more different things are experienced, the more flexible my thinking becomes because the "photo internet" in my head has more pictures and information to surf through.

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Exposure to New Things is Essential.

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Exposing children and adults on the autism/ Asperger's spectrum to new things is really important. Mother was always making me try new things, and some I did not like, but I still did them. When I was about twelve years old, Mother enrolled me in a children's sail boating program, two afternoons a week, all summer. It was a poorly run program and I hated it after the first few sessions because I had no buddy to do it with, yet I completed all the sessions. The lesson I learned was that if you start something, you have to finish it.

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As an adult I motivate myself to keep learning through extensive reading and personal/professional experiences. In the last ten years of my life, from my fifties to my sixties, I have still improved. One revelation I had around age fifty was learning that humans use little eye signals that I did not know existed. I learned about eye signals from the book, Mind Blindness by Simon Baron-Cohen. When I read autism literature I gain great insight from both personal accounts of people on the autism spectrum and neuroscience research. Scientific research has helped me understand how my brain is different. That has helped me comprehend "normal" people better.

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Doing Assignments

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A few years ago I realized the extent to which the training I had in my childhood and teens really helped me later in life. High school was torture with the incessant teasing and I was a goof-off student with little interest in studying. For years I have written about how my science teacher motivated me to study so I could become a scientist. His mentoring was extremely important. Lately I have realized that although I was not studying in school, I had very good work skills that helped me later in the world of employment. I did lots of work that other people appreciated. I cleaned the horse stalls, shingled the barn roof, and painted signs. Even though I got obsessed with these activities, it was useful work that other people wanted done. To be successful, people on the spectrum have to learn how to take their skills and do an assignment. The ability to do an assignment (follow directions, stay on task, complete it in a satisfactory manner) was taught to me from a young age. In grade school, my ability in art was encouraged but I was repeatedly asked to create pictures of many different things (again, producing work for others). I enjoyed the praise I got when I drew a picture of something somebody else had requested.

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Parents and teachers can lay the groundwork for a child's later success in life by exposing the child to many new experiences. But children and adults of all ages can continue to grow and evolve in their behavior and thinking. It is never too late to expand the mind of a person on the autism spectrum.

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

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"Yeah, that's exactly the problem," the woman explained. "If the television news denies something, that usually means it's true. So the government's in a real bind. Actually, I hear that the State Council seismologists think that there will be a quake. You know, you two live in a tall building. You might want to be outside at noon."

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In the end, of course, there was no quake.

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While seismic rumbling and a rise in superstition were sometimes indicators of decline in past dynasties, the latest rumors would have startled the Duke of Zhou. A few of the superstitions underscore the peculiar public mood, which in a few places borders on psychosis. Perhaps the strangest panic occurred m 1993 in Chongqing, a huge riverside metropolis in central China.

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A tale spread that an American-made robotic zombie had gone out of control and escaped from the United States to Chongqing. "The zombie specialized in eating children wearing red clothes, and it was said to have devoured several kids already," reported the Chongqing Legal News, an official newspaper. In the resulting frenzy, many children refused to go to school. Parents protected their "little emperors" by fashioning crosses out of chopsticks and putting cloves of garlic in their book bags. The result was a sudden garlic shortage in Chongqing. The mayor's office was forced to address the issue and order a new round of "ideological work on teachers and students to calm them down and make them at ease about going to school."

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Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn "China Wakes" (1994)

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Tis a Sharp Remedy but a sure one for all ills

(Raleigh)

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Many years ago, when the railways had to go OVER the mountains between France and Italy at a place called St Plain, they decided to build a tunnel. So they got a cockney mining engineer on the job and he invented something which had never been invented before; it was a machine for going through solid rock.

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And the whole machine was a revolving face with industrial diamonds embedded in it.? It was very sharp.?? And they said, " Will this work on ANY sort of large obstruction like a mountain, and he said, "Yes, it's a sharp remedy, but a sure one for all 'ills."

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Frank Muir 570129a

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I keep my nails near-constantly polished, but I worry that it's damaging them. Do nails need breaks or time to "breathe"?

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The idea that your nails need to "breathe" is actually a myth, said Dr. Chris Adigun, a dermatologist in Chapel Hill, N.C., who specializes in nail disorders. "Your nails don't have lungs," she said.

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However, there are some signs that your nail polish, or the way you remove it, may be causing changes that should prompt a break, experts said. And it's important to inspect your nails between polishes so you can spot any potentially worrisome shifts that might be occurring under-neath the color, Dr. Adigun said.

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IS POLISH BAD FOR YOUR NAILS?

In short, no, said Dr. Adam Rubin, a dermatologist and nail specialist at NYU Langone Health.

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There's nothing in traditional nail polish that will directly harm your nails, he said. But, he added, there are some cosmetic issues that may crop up if you keep your nails painted for too long, such as for several weeks at a time.

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Some nail polishes - dark or red colors, in particular - can stain the surface of your nails, Dr. Rubin said. This isn't harmful, but you might not like the way it looks, he added.

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Leaving polish on too long may also dry out nails, causing chalky, white patches to form on the surface, said Dr. Anisha Patel, a dermatologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

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Those patches, called keratin granulations, are benign and more commonly found on toe-nails, which are typically painted for longer than fingernails, Dr. Adigun said. They can sometimes be mistaken for a nail fungus called white superficial onychomycosis.

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If you notice either staining or white patches after removing your nail polish, there's no harm in disguising the discolorations by painting over them, Dr. Rubin said. If you do that, though, know that you risk making the stains or white patches worse.

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To completely banish these issues, let your nails regrow fully, unpainted. This can take about six months for fingernails and 12 to 18 months for toenails, Dr. Adigun said. To prevent staining or white patches from forming in the first place, it can help to apply a clear base coat before you paint your nails. Massaging moisturizer onto your nails and cuticles between polishes might also help keep keratin granulations from forming, Dr. Rubin said.

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If you remove your polish and your nails look dry, moisturize them daily, whether they're polished or not, Dr. Patel said. You can use petroleum jelly, hand cream, nail oil or body lotion, Dr. Rubin suggested.

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WHAT WILL DAMAGE YOUR NAILS?

The way you remove polish can damage your nails, Dr. Rubin said. Scraping or picking at nail polish can strip the top layers of the nail and possibly lead to thinning. And acetone-containing nail polish removers can dehydrate and damage your nails, he said, so it's best to use nail polish removers that are acetone-free.

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This is one reason dermatologists urge caution with gel manicures. The removal process usually involves soaking in acetone, which can lead to dryness and brittleness, Dr. Adigun said. The gel polish itself can also cause allergic reactions (like a rash or, more rarely, hives) and damage the nails. And exposure to ultraviolet light during the application process can increase your risk for skin cancer and premature skin aging, according to the American Academy of Dermatology.

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If you do get gel manicures, give your unpainted nails a break of at least a week or two between manicures to let your nails recover, Dr. Adigun said.

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WHEN SHOULD YOU WORRY?

Every time you remove nail polish, examine your nails for worrisome changes, Dr. Adigun said.

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Dark streaks, splitting, lifting from the nail bed and pain are all potential signs of skin cancer, so if you notice those, visit a dermatologist, Dr. Patel said.

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Thickened, crumbly, yellow or misshapen nails can signal a fungal infection, Dr. Rubin said. And redness or swelling around nails could indicate an injury or bacterial infection, according to the A.A.D. Dents or pits in your nails; crumbling; nails separating from your skin; or white, brown or yellow discoloration could be signs of nail psoriasis.

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Dermatologists recommend annual skin cancer checks, and that includes examining the nails, Dr. Patel said. "We ask our patients to come in without polish on at least once a year so that we can see their nails," she said.

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Erica Sweeney

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A Pittsburgh pooch is finally out of the doghouse. The trouble started when a goldendoodle named Cecil found $4,000 in cash on a kitchen counter. Cecil's owners, Clayton and Carrie Law were planning to use the money for a new fence, but Cecil had another idea. He ate the cash. Fortunately, the dog pooped and the couple got most of the money back, and Cecil is now cashless again.

Marshall, who worked as a dining car waiter on the B&O just after he got married in 1930, earned what he called "the munificent salary of fifty-five dollars a month." Wilkins said his work as a waiter was "grueling," but he added that "it offered me my first sense of the sweep and expanse of the country. For the first time I began to look beyond the comfort and safety of St. Paul to the larger, harder world beyond. Mays, meanwhile, wrote in his autobiography: "Luckily for me, the Pullman Company was coming South each spring to recruit students for summer jobs. If a student was tall enough, strong enough, and had seventeen dollars to buy his cap and uniform, he had work for the summer. The Pullman Company paid the fare to New York and deducted it from the first money the student earned. I jumped at the opportunity to earn my way and to go North for the first time ... I spent the summer of 1915 and several more as a Pullman porter, working out of Grand Central Station in New York and South Station in Boston. I did fairly well. Indeed, I felt that I had done extremely well for I was able to return to school in the fall of 1915 all dressed up. I had two suits. Never before had I owned two good suits - or even one!"

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Most, like Mays, Wilkins, and Marshall, came and went without regret. Why would anyone on the way to becoming a doctor, lawyer, or teacher even consider a porter's life? Certainly no one would return to the rails after earning a diploma, would he? Difficult to fathom, but it happened, often enough to constitute a trend even if no one tracked the numbers.

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The evidence came in snippets. In the April 1946 issue of the company newsletter, for example, there was an item about the porter J. H. Costin of Buffalo who doubled as an attorney. And a union official in the early 1940s reported that in his Chicago railway station seventy-two of ninety red-capped black-skinned porters had college degrees. Then there was the Pullman porter Theodore Seldon, who died in a train crash in 1923, and whose body was identified by tracking his Phi Beta Kappa key from Dartmouth's Class of 1922.

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"I see a lot of young fellows in there got BA degrees, PhDs, BSs, and glad to be shaking them sheets," said the dining car man Turner. John Baptist Ford, a Pullman porter who delivered three lectures at Dartmouth in 1924, said that of the thousands of medical, law, and other students brought on each summer as porters, "most of the boys go back to school in the Fall, but some stick for a year or so, and some never go back. I know a couple of doctors – brothers - who stayed ten years in the service after they'd taken their degrees. They were saving money all the time. When they'd got enough they set up in practice." Ford himself had been studying to be a minister, although "I'm past that now," as he told his Dartmouth audience. "The Pullman Company gets the best men of my race. Thirty percent of colored doctors are ex-porters."

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Rather than moving him away from the ministry, Jimmy Kearse's time on the train convinced him to study at the seminary on the way to receiving his doctor of divinity degree. And after eighteen years as a dining car waiter, the Reverend Kearse was less willing than Ford to pronounce the professionals who worked alongside him the best of the breed. "We were on the train that goes from Washington to Pittsburgh, overnight train," he said. "This man was a lawyer already admitted to the bar but he made more money as a waiter because he couldn't get cases. So he would wait table[s] and he was standing between the two tables with his tray like this [arm held at ninety degrees and to the side with his tray overhead]. He'd do a little dance, a little shuffle. I went to him and I said, 'Len, why do you get out there and do a little shuffle like that?' He said, 'Well, if I do a little shuffle and act like old man Moz, they're going to give me a fifty-cent tip.' I said, 'I could give less than a damn about a fifty-cent tip. Your integrity means more to me than a fifty-cent tip. Be a man.'

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That unlikely career path from barrister to railroad man was mainly a by-product of the size and structure of the community of Negro professionals in the early 1900s. There were half as many doctors, lawyers, and judges combined as there were Pullman porters, and those few were concentrated in Chicago, New York, and a handful of other urban centers. That meant distressingly little support for physicians and attorneys trying to bend the racial bars of their professions. Worse, with whites hesitant to hire them and most Negroes too poor to pay, wages were meager, especially at the beginning. All of which made their old job on the sleeping car look appealing, at least financially and temporarily. The trade-off was starker for those still in school: going back meant scraping by and running up debt, assuming they could get a loan; staying ensured a stream of paychecks and tips, and the rationalization that they were deferring, not deflecting, career dreams.

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To young Negroes looking on, the message was double-edged.

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They might wonder about the point of getting a professional degree, or even a baccalaureate, if the result would be an unskilled job like Pullman porter. Or they might conclude that portering promised full pockets and fast adventures, a life so alluring that it won over even doctors and lawyers.

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Larry Tye "Rising from the Rails" (2004)

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Union featherbedding was real, but it has been replaced by corporate featherbedding with substantial interference in free markets. Noncompete agreements, which prevent an employee from getting a job at a competing company (even low-level jobs at fast-food outlets), constrain some 18 percent of American workers, or 30 million people, and have become a way for large corporations to intimidate employees, limit their mobility and keep labor costs down. Overall, economists have estimated that up to one-third of the increase in earnings inequality is a result of the weakening of unions.

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In Denmark, partly because of strong unions, workers at McDonald's earn $20 an hour, have paid maternity and paternity leave, overtime, work schedules four weeks in advance, pension plans and five weeks of paid vacation each year. (Note also that while taxes are high, the average Dane works one-fifth fewer hours in a year than the average American.)

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We once asked Alan Krueger, the late Princeton University economist who was previously chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, about our perception that the American economy increasingly is structured unfairly to benefit corporations and hurt ordinary citizens. We thought he might push back, but he agreed completely. "The economy is rigged," he said.

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

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Evaluating Treatments

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Every individual with autism is different. A medication or an educational program that works for one may not work for another. For example, one child may make really good progress on a highly structured, discrete trial educational program. Another child may go into sensory overload in a discrete trial program and make little progress. That child will require a gender approach.

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Most autism specialists agree that many hours of early educational intervention are needed, but they disagree on whether it should be the Lovaas ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) or one of the more social-relationship based models, such as the Greenspan (Floortime) method. I have observed that the person actually doing the teaching is often a more important part of the equation than is the method. Good teaching tends to do the same thing, regardless of the theoretical basis of the teaching method. They have a natural instinct about what works and doesn't work for a child, and they adapt whatever method they happen to be using accordingly. If you notice that a particular teacher does not get along with your child, or doesn't seem to have that "feel" for working with him or her, then try another teacher.

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Change One Thing at a Time

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It is impossible to determine if a new diet, medication, or educational program is working if several new things are started at the same time. Start one thing at a time. Many parents are afraid to do this because they want to do the best for their child, and fear that "time is running out." In most cases, a short thirty-day trial period is all that is needed between different treatments to observe the effects. Another good evaluation method is a blind evaluation, where the person offering the evaluation does not know a new educational program or a new medication is being tried. For instance, if the teacher at school mentions your child's behavior has greatly improved, that would be a good indication that a new treatment you're trying at home is working (you didn't tell the teacher beforehand about it). With medication, especially, parents must balance risk versus benefit. A good rule of thumb with medication is that there should be a fairly dramatic, obvious improvement to make it worth the risk or the side effects. For example, if a medication reduced rage attacks from ten per week to one per month, that would be a medication that really works. If a medication makes a child slightly less hyper, that may not be enough benefit to make it worth the risk.

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Many treatments are now available. Some have been verified by rigorous scientific studies and others have not. Discrete trial educational programs and SSRI antidepressant medications, such as Prozac or Zoloft, are backed by scientific studies. Interventions such as Irlen lenses or special diets have less scientific backing. However, there are some individuals who are helped by these treatments. One of the reasons that some scientific studies have failed to show results may be because only a certain subgroup of people on the autism spectrum will respond to some treatments. Further studies, especially those that will illuminate what interventions are most helpful to different subgroups, are needed.

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In conclusion, introduce one new intervention at a time, and keep a diary of its effects. Avoid vague terms such as "my child has really improved." Be specific about the observed changes, either positive or negative, and make entries at least once a day. An example of a well-worded, useful evaluation would be "my child learned ten new words in one week" or "his tantrums went from five a day to one within four days." ?Good information will help you make good decisions that will help your child in the long run.

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The Problem with Short Drug Trials

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Recently there have been increasing problems with the use of very short, unrealistic drug trials for evaluating psychiatric drugs. The severe side effects that can occur with atypical anti-psychotics such as Risperdal (risperidone) or Seroquel (quetiapine) are not going to show up in a six-to-eight-week trial. I am concerned that the FDA approved Risperdal for five-year-olds with autism. Even though it is approved, it would probably be a bad choice for most five-year-olds because the risk of long-term side effects is too high. In very young children, other safer treatments such as special diets or Omega-3 fish oil supplements should be tried first. There are too many powerful drugs being given out to very young children. However, in older children and adults, there are some cases where Risperdal would be a good choice,

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

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In our travels, one of the most wrenching diseases we've seen is trachoma, which is caused by repeated eye infections. Gradually the eyelid turns inward, and the eyelashes begin to scrape the cornea. This is excruciatingly painful and feels like grains of sand constantly abrading the eye.

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"It's like the pain of childbirth, but it goes on for year after year," said Yagare Traore, an elderly woman in Mali who endured this agony for six years. She is a widow who spent the time sitting in her hut, blinded and in pain, unable to farm or to care for her eleven children; perhaps as a result, six of them died. Trachoma used to be common in America as well but now is found only in poor countries and is on its way out - in part because it is simple to prevent and to treat. Training villagers in hygiene, such as face washing, is a big help, and in areas where it is endemic, an annual dose of an antibiotic called azithromycin (Zithromax) given to everyone in the community usually causes trachoma to disappear after three years. The Zithromax is donated by Pfizer, and the cost of distributing it is just 25 cents per person annually. This means that a three-year program to eliminate blindness due to trachoma typically costs just 75 cents per person through an aid group like Helen Keller International.

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Is there a better use for 75 cents?

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For those like Yagare who already have advanced stages of trachoma and turned-in eyelids (a condition called trichiasis), surgery is still needed. But this is a simple procedure performed by a single specialized nurse who can undertake twenty such operations a day. Trichiasis surgery takes about fifteen minutes under local anesthetic and costs less than $40 per person. When Yagare had her surgery and the bandages were removed, a boy stepped forward to guide her home.

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"Get out of my way!" she told him. "I can see! I can walk by myself!"

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Is there a better use for $40?

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

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Dead Dead and Never Called Me Mother

(East Lynn)

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It was actually Frank Muir who said it.? It's his custom after this program to ring up his mother, who heard the program and ask her if it's all right to come home.

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And last week, he went round to the phone box to do this and found it was already occupied by a very stout lady who was phoning her married sister at Cox Fosters to tell her about the girl in her office, Elsie, who'd been carrying on with Sid, from accounts and they'd gone down to Frenten on a sharer and she'd gotten no better than she had any right to expect.?

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And this went on for half an hour.? And when Frank finally went in there. He put his tupence in and And got no dialing tone at all.?

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And I found him there with the phone in his hand, sobbing piteously, and I said, "What's the matter with the phone?"

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And he said, "Dead, dead and never called me mother."

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Denis Norden 570115b

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Ask Well

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I enjoy coffee but dislike how caffeine makes me feel, I drink decaffeinated coffee. Are there any health risk?

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Coffee is a key component of many people's morning routine.

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But having a cup can bring unwelcome effects. An eight-ounce brew can contain between 80 and 100 milligrams of caffeine, which can also cause jitters, anxiety and trouble falling asleep.

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"For some people it's, 'I want to be able to drink coffee in the afternoon because I really like the taste, but I don't want to be up all night." said Eric Brenner, the assistant director of the Center for Coffee Research and Education at Texas A&M University.

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Decaffeinated coffee, generally stripped of at least 97 percent of its caffeine, is an alternative. But some health advocacy organizations have raised concerns about a chemical used in the decaffeination process because it may raise the risk of some cancers.

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There are several ways to make decaffeinated coffee, but two common methods use the chemicals methylene chloride or ethyl acetate to extract and dissolve caffeine from coffee beans.

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One method puts coffee beans in direct contact with the chemicals. It begins with steaming green, unroasted coffee beans to make them swell and open their pores, said Tanya Kuhl, the chair of the chemical engineering department at the University of California, Davis.

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Then, the beans are rinsed in methylene chloride or ethyl acetate to remove their caffeine, Dr. Kuhl said.

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The beans are then steamed again and washed to remove residual chemicals, Mr. Brenner said, and then they're roasted.

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Are the chemicals used to decaffeinate coffee dangerous? Experts say no, at least not in the amount you're exposed to from decaffeinated coffee.

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However, people who are ex-posed to chemicals like methylene chloride at higher levels could have an increased risk of liver and lung cancer and damage to the central nervous system.

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In April, the Environmental Protection Agency prohibited most uses of methylene chloride. The chemical can be used to decaffeinate coffee; foods and beverages are primarily regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, which has determined that decaffeinated coffee should not contain more than 0.001 percent of the chemical.

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That means that it would be practically impossible to drink enough decaffeinated coffee to be exposed to dangerous levels of methylene chloride, Dr. Kuhl said.

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Ethyl acetate, the other chemical used to decaffeinate coffee, also doesn't warrant much concern, Mr. Brenner said. It naturally occurs in kiwi and guava, and is used in products like nail polish and printing ink. But there's no evidence that it can increase the risk of cancer.

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Exposure to ethyl acetate through inhalation, ingestion or skin contact, however, may irritate the eyes, the skin or the throat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nevertheless, the chemical doesn't pose a health threat in coffee, experts said.

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Once coffee beans are decaffeinated, there may be traces of chemicals left over, Dr. Kuhl said. But after the beans are roasted, the chemicals evaporate almost entirely: Coffee beans are typically roasted at temperatures ranging from 356 to 464 degrees Fahrenheit, and methylene chloride and ethyl acetate boil at around 104 and 171 degrees Fahrenheit.

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"There's no health hazard, in my opinion, associated with drinking decaffeinated coffee," Dr. Kuhl said.

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If residual chemicals in your coffee still worry you, there are alternatives, Mr. Brenner said. Some brands decaffeinate coffee using the Swiss Water Process, which uses water to remove caffeine from coffee beans.

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Companies use the process as a selling point because it involves nontoxic ingredients, Mr. Brenner said, adding that decaffeinated coffee is "perfectly safe" regard-less of how it was made.

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To see if coffee beans were decaffeinated this way, look at the bag. It might be stamped with language such as "Water Process," "Swiss Water decaf" or "Swiss Water decaffeinated."

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Or you can check the brand or company website. "It's not a big secret," Mr. Brenner said. "All this information is out there."

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Katie Mogg

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For the past five months, residents of Vastogirardi, a village in southern Italy, had been troubled by a string of tire lashings. Was it a feud between neighbors, even the mafia? After setting up security cameras, police found the culprit, a dog named Billy. Billy had gingivitis, and vets believe he was biting the tires to relieve his pain. All's well that ends well, except for Billy's owner, who will likely have to foot the bill for all the damaged cars and hopefully get Billy some help.