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Little Führers Everywhere

Matthew Heimbach in front of court in Charlottesville, VA. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

Vegas TenoldEverything You Love Will Burn | Nation Books | February 2018 | 20 minutes (5,442 words)

The first time I met Matthew Heimbach was in 2011, shortly after my trip to New Jersey with the National Socialist Moment. Our meeting was completely coincidental, and we would both forget about it for several years until we met again. That summer I found myself in the woods of northern North Carolina at the invitation of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. My experience with the NSM had resulted in more questions than answers, and I figured that if I wanted to understand the white supremacist movement in America, I might as well start with the “Original Boys in the Hood,” as one of their more popular t-shirts stated.

It took some driving around to find the location of the Loyal White Knights rally. This was another thing that had changed over the years. There was a time, only a few decades ago, when Klan rallies were, if not announced and attended by the public, certainly tolerated enough to be held in the open. In 2011, even in North Carolina, they had been relegated to the backwoods, as far from people as they were from relevance. At the turn-off to a narrow dirt road stood a decrepit old tractor that someone had taken the time to drape in a Confederate flag. It seemed like a clue, so I took a chance and turned left into the woods. Read more…

The Hotel of Multiple Realities

Emily Carter Roiphe | Longreads | February 2018 | 14 minutes (3,466 words)

The Waiting Room

I was leaning on my husband’s shoulder one day as we were walking through a lobby that seemed a bit crowded for the part of New Mexico where we lived. On the soundtrack there was some desultory chatter and the hum of fluorescent lights.

“Where are we NOW?” I asked in exasperation.

“You had a brain aneurysm, sweetheart, you had brain surgery.”

“Is the surgery over?” I asked.

“Yes, for a whole day,” he said.

“So, we can go now?”

We’d been planning to go camping in Monument Valley, and I didn’t want to complicate our schedule. I’d had something wrong, but they fixed it, I felt fine, could we please get on with it? Then I saw his face. Usually, my husband is pretty cocky in public, thinking that he has me, and I am so wonderful, that he wants to make sure people notice, so he keeps up a performative patter of flirtatious banter about how brilliant, sexy, infuriating, and baffling I am. It’s his routine. There was something about his tone of voice now, that made me turn to look at his face; it was ashen. He looked terrified.

“What?” I said. “I feel fine. There’s nothing wrong with me anymore. I want to go camping like you promised.”

His eyes filled and he said, “Let’s go back to your room.”

First I thought, I have to do whatever, say whatever, be whatever it takes to get that look off his face, it’s making a bouquet of broken glass bloom in the dark place behind my ribs.

Then I thought, Room? What room? Are we in a hotel?

Then I realized I wasn’t walking, but perhaps, sitting and floating along. How was this possible, I wondered analytically. Am I walking or riding, standing up or sitting, falling down or getting to my feet? I wasn’t alarmed by these questions but I knew one thing instinctively: keep those questions to yourself, tell no one you have questions, or you can forget about that camping trip. I was very focused on the idea of going camping, a tent, all the stars in the wide open sky out there.
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An Education in Doubt

Cover art for Roald Dahl's novel 'Matilda' / Illustration by Quentin Blake

Catherine Cusick | Longreads | February 2018 | 12 minutes (2,900 words)

We need to scream and argue about this school thing until it is fixed or broken beyond repair, one or the other. If we can fix it, fine; if we cannot, then the success of homeschooling shows a different road that has great promise. Pouring the money we now pour into schooling back into family education might cure two ailments with one medicine, repairing families as it repairs children.

— John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down

I stood and, still shaking, tried to pry loose the small length of copper tubing. I almost had it when Dad flung a catalytic converter. I leapt aside, cutting my hand on the serrated edge of a punctured tank. I wiped the blood on my jeans and shouted, “Don’t throw them here! I’m here!”

Dad looked up, surprised. He’d forgotten I was there.

— Tara Westover, Educated

When I was 9, my dad brought home a copy of Matilda on VHS. Every time I watched Matilda best her unfit parents and take down the unforgivably violent Trunchbull, something would swell in my heart.

“Daddy,” Mara Wilson pleads up to Danny DeVito, one of the only actors ever to plead at him in that direction. “You’re a crook.”

“What?” DeVito says, turning away from training Matilda’s brother in the junk tricks of his trade at the auto shop. He’s teaching his son how to fudge the mileage on used cars by rewinding an odometer with a hand drill.

“This is illegal,” Wilson says, stomping an indignant little foot.

“You make money?” DeVito asks a 9-year-old. “Do you have a job?”

“No,” Wilson replies. (Of course, Wilson does have a job. We are watching her do it. She’s hard at work headlining a major motion picture that ends up grossing $33 million at the box office.)

I, too, am 9 years old, watching Wilson back in 1996, crossing my gangly legs one over the other on the beige carpet in my family’s den.

“But don’t people need good cars?” Wilson-as-Matilda asks. “Can’t you sell good cars, Dad?”

“Listen, you little wiseacre,” DeVito begins, launching into one of those custom-made lines for movie trailers. “I’m smart, you’re dumb; I’m big, you’re little; I’m right, you’re wrong. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Wilson takes one decisive look around. She sees her father’s signature hat next to some superglue.
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The Great Online School Scam

Photo: Getty Images.

Noliwe Rooks | Excerpt from Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education | The New Press | September 2017 | 18 minutes (5,064 words)

* * *

DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

In a 2013 interview with Philanthropy Magazine, DeVos said her ultimate goals in education reform encompassed not just charter schools and voucher programs, but also virtual education. She said these forms were important because they would allow “all parents, regardless of their zip code, to have the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children.” Also in 2013, one of the organizations that she founded, the American Federation for Children, put out a sharply critical statement after New Jersey’s school chief, Chris Cerf, declined to authorize two virtual charter schools. The group said the decision “depriv[es] students of vital educational options.” Yet another group DeVos founded and funded, the Michigan-based Great Lakes Education Project, has also advocated for expansion of online schools, and in a 2015 speech available on YouTube DeVos praised “virtual schools [and] online learning” as part of an “open system of choices.” She then said, “We must open up the education industry—and let’s not kid ourselves that it isn’t an industry. We must open it up to entrepreneurs and innovators.” DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

At the time of her nomination, charter schools were likely familiar to most listeners given their rapid growth and ubiquity. However, the press surrounding the DeVos nomination may have been one of the first times most became aware of a particular offshoot of the charter school movement—virtual or cyber schools. Despite flying somewhat under the mainstream radar, online charter schools have faced a wave of both negative press and poor results in research studies. One large-scale study from 2015 found that the “academic benefits from online charter schools are currently the exception rather than the rule.” By June of 2016, even a group that supports, runs, and owns charter schools published a report calling for more stringent oversight and regulation of online charter schools, saying, “The well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools should serve as a call to action for state leaders and authorizers across the country.” The jointly authored research was sponsored by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50Can, all groups that lobby state and federal agencies to loosen regulations to allow more robust charter-school growth. As one of the report’s backers said, “I’m not concerned that Betsy DeVos supports virtual schools, because we support them too—we just want them to be a lot better.” Such an upswing in quality seems highly unlikely to happen anytime soon. They are yet another trickle in the stream of apartheid forms of public education flowing down from the wealthy and politically well connected to communities that are poor, of color, or both.

In Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Carolina, Ohio, and Florida, poor students from rural areas as well as those in underfunded urban schools that primarily educate students who are Black and Latino today face a new response to the question of how to solve the riddle of race, poverty, and educational underachievement. Increasingly, despite little supporting evidence, a growing number of states and local school districts no longer believe that the solution is merely about infrastructure, class size, funding, or hiring more teachers. In states with high levels of poverty and “hard to educate” Black and Latino students, virtual schools are on the rise. Such schools are not growing nearly as fast in school districts that are white and relatively wealthy, nor are they the educational strategy of choice in most private schools. As much a business strategy as one promoting learning, virtual education allows businesses to profit from racial inequality and poverty. Sadly, this particular cure to what ails our education system more often than not exacerbates the problems. Read more…

A Tale of Two Vegases

View of the strip in Las Vegas. (Kobby Dagan/VWPics via AP Images)

Gayle Brandeis | Longreads | February 2018 | 12 minutes (3,027 words)

 

The Best of Times — March, 2007

The night before I was slated to fly to Atlanta to attend the biggest writing conference of the year, I was sideswiped by one of my vomiting episodes. These hit every few months — hours of intense abdominal pain that came and went like labor, followed by hours of vomiting that often led to a trip to the emergency room; this had been going on for the past 12 years, with no diagnosis. I didn’t want to miss the trip, but I was writhing around on the floor, and heaving into a large mixing bowl, and attempting to keep the anti-nausea suppositories up my ass long enough for them to kick in. I was chanting, “Help me, help me, help me” — words that always burbled from my mouth during these episodes. I wasn’t sure who this chant was aimed at — not my husband, who tended to shy away whenever the vomiting began — but my mom seemed to hear me in Oceanside, 100 miles from my home in Riverside, California. She called and was alarmed when I told her I still hoped to get on the plane the next morning.

“I’m coming with you,” she announced. Before I had the sense to stop her, she purchased a last-minute ticket for my flight. She picked me up in her red Intrepid shortly after sunrise, and I wondered what in the world I had gotten myself into. I pretended to sleep most of the flight.

My mom and I ended up having a surprisingly good time in Atlanta — we danced together, attended illuminating panels, had a blast with her cousin who lived in the area, ate copious amounts of boiled peanuts; she even made meaningful eye contact with Walter Mosley, who she was certain would one day become my stepfather. When our flight was delayed, she was miraculously relaxed and chatty, and I didn’t feel the need to pretend to sleep on the plane to avoid her. I was plenty sleepy by the time we arrived at the Las Vegas airport, though — it was 1 a.m., and we had missed our connecting flight. The airline gave us the option of staying in the airport and flying home in a few hours, or taking a hotel room and flying home late the next day.

I was so tired, I needed to rest my head on the ticket counter, but I looked up at her and said “Why don’t we stay? Maybe we could see a show or something.” It was the first time I could remember voluntarily extending a visit with her. Our relationship had always been complicated, but when she started to show signs of a delusional disorder 14 years earlier, our connection became all the more fraught.

“Let’s do it,” she said, and soon we were giggling in a free cab on our way to a free hotel room just off the strip. Our luggage was still on the plane, so we slipped into the plush white robes hanging in the closet and crashed for a few hours. We put our rumpled travel clothes back on after our showers, then ordered egg white and asparagus omelets with our free breakfast vouchers and set out to see how much Vegas we could pack into a day.

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The Internet Isn’t Forever

Illustration by Shannon Freshwater

Maria Bustillos | Columbia Journalism Review | February 2018 |2900 words (12 minutes)

This story is published in collaboration with the Columbia Journalism Review, whose Winter 2018 issue covers threats to journalism.

The Honolulu Advertiser doesn’t exist anymore, but it used to publish a regular “Health Bureau Statistics” column in its back pages supplied with information from the Hawaii Department of Health detailing births, deaths, and other events. The paper, which began in 1856 as the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, since the end of World War II was merged, bought, sold, and then merged again with its local rival, The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, to become in 2010 The Honolulu Star-Advertiser. But the Advertiser archive is still preserved on microfilm in the Honolulu State Library. Who could have guessed, when those reels were made, that the record of a tiny birth announcement would one day become a matter of national consequence? But there, on page B-6 of the August 13, 1961 edition of The Sunday Advertiser, set next to classified listings for carpenters and floor waxers, are two lines of agate type announcing that on August 4, a son had been born to Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama of 6085 Kalanianaole Highway.

In the absence of this impossible-to-fudge bit of plastic film, it would have been far easier for the so-called birther movement to persuade more Americans that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. But that little roll of microfilm was and is still there, ready to be threaded on a reel and examined in the basement of the Honolulu State Library: An unfalsifiable record of “Births, Marriages, Deaths,” which immeasurably fortified the Hawaii government’s assertions regarding Obama’s original birth certificate. “We don’t destroy vital records,” Hawaii Health Department spokeswoman Janice Okubo says. “That’s our whole job, to maintain and retain vital records.” Read more…

The Making of a Black Fortune

Portrait of a young, well-to-do African American woman, c. 1890. (Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images)

Shomari Wills | Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires | Amistad | January 2018 | 6 minutes (1,450 words)

At the turn of the century, Robert Reed Church was 60 years old. He now walked with a cane. His eyes were still fiery and bloodshot, and he remained fear­less and quick-tempered. A decade earlier, in 1889, he had begun to draw up plans for a park and arena for black citizens in Memphis. As their construction neared completion, he wondered how white Memphis would react to his project. His life had been filled with attacks by Confederates, racist police officers, and segregationists for daring to strive as a black person. Many winters earlier, he had been pelted with rocks by racists for having had the audacity as a black man to be the only man in Memphis with a sled. What would they do when he opened a $100,000 arena?

As a young man, he had dealt with white men with his fist and gun. Now, gray and wrinkled, Church decided to exert a skill he had acquired with age: diplomacy. In 1900, a group of ex-Confederate soldiers decided to throw a reunion for Confederate veterans in Memphis. As they struggled to raise $80,000 to build a temporary auditorium in which to hold the affair, they received an unexpected donation of $1,000 from Church, a former slave. “I never gave a cent in my life, so cheerfully or gladly as I gave that check to the veterans’ entertainment fund,” he said afterward. He had learned that goodwill could be bought when he had helped bail out Memphis from bankruptcy. He hoped that $1,000 would be enough to protect his arena from the same resistance as his pool hall, which a white mob had burned down when he was a young entrepreneur.

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Blockchain Just Isn’t As Radical As You Want It To Be

Block chain concept. 3D illustration

Rachel O’Dwyer | An essay originally anthologized in Ours To Hack and To Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet | OR Books | August 2017| 6 minutes (1,600 words)

* * *

The current rhetoric around the blockchain hints at problems with the techno-utopian ideologies that surround digital activism.

A blockchain is essentially a distributed database. The technology first appeared in 2009 as the basis of the Bitcoin digital currency system, but it has potential for doing much, much more—including aiding in the development of platform cooperatives.

Traditionally, institutions use centralized databases. For example, when you transfer money using a bank account your bank updates its ledger to credit and debit accounts accordingly. In this example, there is one central database and the bank is a trusted intermediary who manages it. With a blockchain, this record is shared among all participants in the network. To send bitcoin, for example, an owner publicly broadcasts a transaction to all participants in the network. Participants collectively verify that the transaction indeed took place and update the database accordingly. This record is public, shared by all, and it cannot be amended.

This distributed database can be used for applications other than monetary transactions. With the rise of what some are calling “blockchain 2.0,” the accounting technology underpinning Bitcoin is now taking on non-monetary applications as diverse as electronic voting, file tracking, property title management, and the organization of worker cooperatives. Very quickly, it seems, distributed ledger technologies have made their way into any project broadly related to social or political transformation for the left—“put a blockchain on it!”— until its mention, sooner or later, looks like the basis for a dangerous drinking game. On the other side of things, poking fun at blockchain evangelism is now a nerdy pastime, more enjoyable even than ridiculing handlebar moustaches and fixie bicycles. Read more…

The Great Stink

CSA Images/Mod Art Collection

Laurie Penny | Longreads | February 2018 | 17 minutes (4270 words)

My heart goes out to men right now. Actually, my heart goes out to all sorts of unsavory places these days, no matter how much I warn it. My heart goes out to men most nights, wearing precarious outfits, no doubt getting exactly what it deserves. It brings back stories.

In the past weeks and months I’ve spent a lot of time sitting across tables from men who have been accused of sexual assault and rape — men who are angry, and afraid, and have no idea what to do now. Men for whom the fast-changing code of sexual and romantic conduct is not the most immediate problem: theirs is that they have been called out, condemned, and are wondering what the next months and years of their lives are going to look like. And in their bitterness I can hear a backlash coming down the tracks.

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Hierarchy of Needs

(Severin Matusek / EyeEm)

Angela Palm | Creative Nonfiction | Winter 2017 | 10 minutes (2,732 words)

“You never laugh anymore,” my seven-year-old said from the backseat of the car while I was driving. It was early November.

“What did you say?” I asked, though I had heard him clearly.

* * *

I had been thinking about what it meant that Donald Trump had not yet stopped running for president. About the errands we still had to do that night. About the balance of my credit card, and about our new mortgage and all the furniture I couldn’t afford to fill the new house. About the cost of my kids’ college. About the most recent school shooting and the new statistic I’d read that said Americans in 21 states are more likely to die a gun-related death than as a result of a car accident. About heroin overdoses and prescription pill addictions that were hitting closer and closer to home. Food insecurity. Black lives and deaths in America. Overpopulation. Prison overcrowding. The Syrian refugee crisis. Global warming. Dying oceans. My aging parents, and my own mortality. E-mail that had gone unanswered for months because I was simply tired of typing. The state of my marriage. The quality of my teaching. The exercise I wasn’t getting.

If my brain were a computer, its internal fan would make that loud, warm, whirring sound that means it’s working too hard. It probably isn’t a coincidence that adult coloring books topped Amazon’s bestseller lists last year.

* * *

I wash my body each day with liquid soap I squeeze from a bottle that reads “happiness.” I buy this product again and again to no noticeable effect and keep quiet faith in the power of the subliminal.

If that power exists, then it follows that I am also subconsciously affected by the sponsored ads on Facebook. Should I buy that period underwear? I find myself wondering several times in a single day. No, no.

* * *

The most basic needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are physiological ones: air, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, and excretion of waste. Eating, fucking, snoozing, shitting. Happiness is not listed among any of the hierarchy’s tiered descriptions, but I imagine it floats somewhere above the uppermost point of the two-dimensional pyramid or surrounds the diagram’s boundaries like a cloud. Perhaps it appears intermittently as each level of the hierarchy clicks into place, and flickers out of focus again when the pyramid fluctuates. Or maybe it is measured differently altogether.

As a culture, we’re obsessed with the search for happiness, desperate for a definition of its formula.

Our independence, says the Declaration of Independence, guarantees a right to pursue happiness and bypasses the needs in Maslow’s hierarchy entirely. Though the document assures life and liberty in imprecise, yet enthusiastic terms, it cites no explicit guarantee of basic needs such as drinkable water or fresh air. Those are assumed here. For now.

I have everything in Maslow’s ground-floor level of needs, some things in the upper levels of needs, and many things that aren’t needs at all. But this assumes happiness relies on having as opposed to being.

* * *

Echoing Tolstoy’s assertion about happy families in Anna Karenina, a therapist wrote that unhappy people have vastly different reasons for being unhappy, but happy people all have one thing in common: They are grateful for what they have rather than being obsessed with what they want.

Through product messaging, I’ve come to believe soap might have the power to make me happy. A pill might make me happy. Stylish clothes might make me happy. Make-up. Skiing. Validation from the strangers of the Internet. Alcohol. Weight loss. Botox. Period underwear.

As a culture, we’re obsessed with the search for happiness, desperate for a definition of its formula. An Amazon search turns up over 92,000 books that focus on the subject. In 2008, a woman named Robyn Okrant embarked on a mission to live for a year according to Oprah Winfrey’s advice on happiness. Okrant changed her sex, her food, her clothing, her makeup, her philanthropic methods, and more. In a Forbes Magazine interview she says of the experience: “It was incredibly draining, and it made me really sad. It made me sad to think of how many hours I’ve lost — even when I wasn’t doing the project — to blindly following advice and listening to what other people tell me I should be doing to create my own happiness.”

* * *

Do you know how easy it is to mask unhappiness? Add exclamation points. That is how I text my mother: I’m great! Can’t wait for the holidays!

* * *

This past fall, Thanksgiving came and went quickly. Before my brother and his girlfriend flew back home, we spent a small fortune on lunch together at a trendy brick oven pizzeria and brewery. While we waited for our food to arrive, I heard a man at the table to my right tell another man about a gay bathhouse he recently visited. “The floor is covered in semen,” he said as he ate his salad. The other man nodded, his expression neutral and joyless. I imagined a place where men empty themselves into and around each other, and I mentally classified it as a combination of a fulfilled basic need and the freedom to pursue happiness.

To my left, beyond my brother, a large flat screen television broadcasted a continuous live video feed of a Ugandan village’s water pump, which the pizzeria had funded. I was the only person in the restaurant who watched it for longer than a few seconds. Between bites of thin crust pizza topped with speck and Brussels sprouts, I saw a young boy in red t-shirt carry a plastic jug to the pump and fill it. I saw a barefoot girl toddle across the screen, then bend over to rake her hands across the ground, her face placid and oblivious to the camera. A man crossed the screen somberly and approached the pump, filling his two jugs. Then a woman filled her jugs.

Beyond the pump was a row of homes. A telephone pole rose above them, presumably delivering electricity to the village from an unseen source beyond the camera’s lens. The area in view was free from debris, free from conflict, and nothing I could see in this tiny slice of rural Uganda echoed the violence of a twenty-year civil war. I was unsure whether to take this a sign of recovery, as I only saw what I saw, and nothing more. But whatever the context, this village remained. It moved me, though I could not articulate exactly why.

For a moment, I coveted the simplicity the live feed seemed to depict. I don’t really want to live in a world where lunch for four costs $100 and restaurant staff refills my glass more often than I need, where emotions are advertised as bath soap and adult coloring books are offered as tools for unburdening our saturated minds, but here I am.

During the 43 minutes or so that I witnessed their lives from the comparable extravagance of my own, none of the Ugandans that passed before the camera laughed, but none cried either. They drew their water from the well, and then they returned to their homes, aligned on either side of a narrow road, to clean and cook and live. I wondered whether they knew they were being watched by relatively well off and overwhelmingly white people in Vermont, day after day, and whether the cost of that water was their exploitation and subjection to an American pizzeria’s marketing plan during the restaurant’s business hours. Altruism doesn’t need a camera. Neither do the thirsty.

Carl Sagan said that there are no dumb questions, but I read an article that went one step farther. It said that happy people all ask dumb questions. Here’s one: who is the camera for, then?

* * *

Over Thanksgiving break, I graded my creative writing class’ personal essays and memoirs. Their nonfiction writing revealed wide-ranging pursuits of happiness and setbacks along the way. I never said, “Write about how you struggle,” but they did. Three women battled eating disorders. One of those three was also a cutter whose words about blood sloshing from her wrists read like intimate correspondence with a lover.

(Recently, I read a suicide prevention handbill that said the term committed suicide was offensive. Died by suicide is the preferred term. I made a mental note to remember that. But what is the appropriate term for a person who enjoys hurting themselves? Who obsesses over the color of blood and loves the pain associated with extracting it from her own veins? Who, for reasons I will never comprehend, cuts herself in pursuit of happiness?)

There were two other women whose mothers had died too young. Another student’s chronic illness forced her to withdraw from school. One young woman wrote mainly about other people’s heroin use, others’ sexual abuse, as though she was recasting a truth she couldn’t quite admit as her own. All semester, I cheered silently for her.

A young man with autism recently came out of the closet and didn’t want to be called brave for that. Another young man with ADHD was allowed, by the grace of a formal accommodation, to leave the room and use his phone whenever he felt like it. He employed this choice only when he became frustrated with the less talented writers in the class. At times, I wanted to walk out with him.

A young woman wrote a chronicle of her meaningless tattoos, detailing how being able to get inked up for no reason makes her happy. She ended her essay with the line, “This skull, if you have to believe it stands for something, means I’m dead inside.”

Though some basic needs are assumed in the United States, safety is not necessarily one of them.

One young man couldn’t be bothered to do the classwork I assigned. He assumed I’d let it slide without consequence. “I’m just really into dance right now,” he said when I asked why he wasn’t doing the work — not any of it. “Are you sure my grade is right?” he asked after grades were posted.

I need an extension, they said. I need you to repeat the assignment requirements, they said. I need an electronic reminder for homework or it won’t get done, they said. I’m overwhelmed, they said. They cried when printers jammed and when they were late to class. They cried when they were given an earned poor grade. They would write me to tell me their weekend was “just too much” and they wouldn’t be able to haul themselves into the classroom.

They would stare at me like guppies, open-mouthed, waiting to be fed, and I would often have the wrong kind of nourishment. I’d read articles about trigger warnings and about millennial attitudes and about millennial parents and millennial fear of failure and low tolerance for stress, and I still couldn’t completely formulate a way to educate them effectively.

They were happiest when I brought food to class.

* * *

Though some basic needs are assumed in the United States, safety is not necessarily one of them. During the prior semester alone, there had been seven shootings on American college campuses. Just after the Thanksgiving break, the following headlines populated my Facebook feed:

“Your Opinion on Gun Control Doesn’t Matter” (Daily Kos)

“‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” (The Onion)

“On Guns, We’re Not Even Trying” (The New York Times)

Toward the end of the semester, I had been stumbling about my house, talking nonsensically to myself instead of writing or grading. “Refrigerator. Frigerator. Fridge,” I said while walking through the kitchen. Then, as I entered my office, fragments from Horace’s Ars poetica: in medias res. Ab ovo. Which mean, respectively, “into the middle of things” and “from the beginning.” The poet never implied that endings exist. Only that poetry is somehow perpetually on its way from one understanding to another, altered understanding. It is in pursuit.

* * *

Recently, I tried for the hundredth time to explain the concept of infinity to my five-year-old. “No. It has to end,” he sobbed angrily, and then stomped away.

How do we begin receding from too much? As individuals, as a generation, as a nation?

The first sign taught in baby sign language is “more.” There is no sign for “less.”

Once, the average person only had words for a handful of colors. In 1903, Crayola crayons were red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and black. By 1949, there were 48 colors available; 64 by 1958; 72 by 1972; 120 by 1998. We learned more names for colors than we ever dreamed: magenta, fuchsia, copper, periwinkle, cornflower, ochre, onyx, royal blue, sienna, peach, beige. A box of eight crayons becomes 16 becomes 24 becomes 48 becomes 64 becomes 72 becomes 120. A child who has had a box of 48 crayons is never again satisfied with only 8. Or maybe they don’t know how to ask for less in a society of more.

Not having more was a relief, a reprieve I hadn’t experienced for years.

In 2003, Crayola officially added the colors inch worm, jazzberry jam, mango tango, and wild blue yonder and they retired the colors blizzard blue, magic mint, mulberry, and teal blue.

By that same year, it is estimated up to 20,000 children had been abducted and forced to enroll as soldiers in the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army.

* * *

I admit I have an adult coloring book. I limit myself to five colors for each picture to keep the process simple, but it takes forever to choose five from my kids’ 64 pack. I’m stressed before I even begin the supposedly meditative activity.

In the phenomenon referred to as Russian blues, we discriminate between colors faster when linguistic organization presorts them.

There must be more colors to discover than we have named. There must be a Crayola 286-pack in our future, containing the shades between fuchsia and magenta, cornflower and periwinkle. Or the purple that bees see in the space between yellow and ultraviolet light.

Can we want things that we do not know about?

* * *

After the semester ended, I attended a grant-funded writing residency in Massachusetts. The Cape in winter is nearly deserted. Many of the good restaurants close for the season, and a majority of the homes sit empty. I welcomed the stillness, the solitude. For a week, there was less of everything: less motion around me, fewer people with whom to interact, less to accomplish, less to buy. There was less noise, less mess without two children. Fewer distractions without Facebook and Amazon and political headlines. I had most of what I needed — food, water, shelter — and not much more. Not having more was a relief, a reprieve I hadn’t experienced for years.

I took daily, silent walks to the vacant shore, meditatively listing to myself the places and things around me named for shells. Shellpoint Apartments, Shellhouse, Shell Inn, Shell Street. Repeat. I knelt in the cold sand and looked out across the bay. I examined the lifeless things that had washed ashore, raking my hands across the ground like that Ugandan child and gathering what the sea had discarded. A peace swept over me whenever I was near to the ground. I caught myself smiling for no reason.

At the Cape, I passed hours sitting quietly, needing nothing, wanting nothing. Pursing nothing but a few more words on a page. On the final night, four friends stopped by, including a couple with their new baby. The baby laughed and I laughed and soon we were all laughing together. All the fine dining restaurants were closed, so we ate at a Ninety Nine chain restaurant and did not make polite apologies to one another for it. We squeezed into a booth for four that was too small to accommodate our group of six. A hockey game played on the television in the bar, but we didn’t watch it. We had wine, but not water. We talked of punk music, but not war. Of banned books, but not guns. A comment about the unusually warm winter, but no mention of global warming.

I returned home the next morning, restored by fractions and of somewhat sounder body and mind. I threw away the happiness body wash. I deleted Facebook from my phone, deleted task managing apps, deleted emails, deleted unnecessary streams of information from wherever they made contact with me. I made a point to laugh in front of and with my children, and hoped it was not too late to unlearn all that I didn’t need to know.

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This essay first appeared in the “Joy” issue of Creative Nonfiction, the print quarterly founded by nonfiction writer Lee Gutkind in 1993. Our thanks to Angela Palm and the staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.