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With coronavirus cases on the rise, at-home testing remains a useful but imperfect way to mitigate risk.

I caught up with Katherine J. Wu, a staff writer who’s been covering this pandemic, to talk about what rapid-test results can—and can’t—tell us. Below you’ll find six takeaways from our conversation.

The conversation that follows has been edited and condensed for clarity.

1. With at-home tests, you trade accuracy for convenience.

“Doctors treating patients very often reach for those really sensitive PCR laboratory tests because they want to know beyond a shadow of a doubt whether the virus is present so the person can get the right treatment. Those tests are so sensitive that people can really trust when they’re negative. With the rapid tests, a negative is a lot less of a certain answer.”

2. At-home tests are most useful when a person has symptoms.

“A lot of the rapid tests we now use at home were initially designed to be taken as diagnostics for people who are feeling sick and want answers quickly. They then got the FDA greenlight to be used as screeners. Generally, right after your symptoms first appear is when they have been shown to be most accurate.”  

3. They’re less accurate when used as screeners by people who feel fine.

“Things get a little tricky when you don’t have symptoms and you don’t have a known exposure—for example, if you’re hoping for a negative so that you can clear yourself to, say, go visit a grandparent.

“Rapid tests are not as good as lab tests when it comes to picking up on the virus when it’s present at really low levels. To get around that, experts say to test repeatedly. That way, if you miss the virus on Monday, maybe you’ll catch it Tuesday.”

4. At-home tests might be your only option.

“Let’s certainly not discount the value of rapid tests. With so many cases here and abroad, laboratory-testing infrastructure is going to be crushed. It may not be practical for people to seek out PCR testing as their No. 1 choice right now. If people are able to access rapid tests, they should test themselves daily at this point because we know results can change so quickly.”

5. All tests are mere snapshots of a moment in time.

“Tests cannot predict the future. The minute that swab goes into your nose—that is what the result is going to be giving you information on. We know this virus can replicate super quickly, especially if we’re talking about something like Omicron or Delta. A person can test negative in the morning and have a blazing positive result by the evening.”

6. Omicron is making things even trickier.

“We are still figuring out how quickly this variant spreads both within individual people and between different people. But based on what we know so far, it seems to be moving super fast, and there seems to be some indication that people can go from not contagious to quite contagious very quickly. And if that’s the case, then that means that negative test results actually expire sooner.”   

For more on that last question specifically, read Katie’s piece from today.

For more on the testing picture overall, read her dispatch from last month on why testing is so complicated.

Have further questions? Send them to us.  

The rest of the news in three sentences:

(1) Coronavirus cases continue their rise in the Northeast. (2) Moderna said preliminary data shows that its booster protects against Omicron. (3) Former President Donald Trump sued the New York attorney general over investigations into the Trump Organization.

Today’s Atlantic-approved activity:

Prepare for launch. The James Webb Space Telescope is set to take off in just a few days. It could help us see the universe like never before.

A break from the news:

America has a drinking problem, Kate Julian warned in one of our must-read stories from 2021.

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Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.

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Variants are a little bit like breakups: There’s never a great time for one to strike, but there absolutely are terrible times. With Omicron, it’s hard to imagine a worse possible moment. The promise of this holiday season has long been that Americans would finally get to make up for all the getaways and family reunions that didn’t happen last winter. That’s exactly what Americans have been banking on: The country is entering its biggest travel moment of the entire pandemic.

Omicron introduced itself to the world only a few weeks ago, but it’s made quite an impression. In the United Kingdom, COVID-19 cases hit an all-time record on Thursday. And Friday. There’s much we still don’t know about the new strain, but as my colleague Sarah Zhang has written, we know enough to see that Omicron is about to tear through the United States. Here, Omicron cases are now doubling every two days, and the variant’s contagiousness—and knack for duping our vaccines—is ratcheting up breakthrough infections. Sports leagues have started rescheduling games, restaurants are closing for a little while, and some schools are going remote.

All of this has left many would-be travelers nervously glancing at their calendar and asking themselves another round of terrible pandemic questions: How bad will things be by Christmas? By New Year’s? And when do things get so bad that I need to cancel my holiday plans?

Whether you should travel over the next couple of weeks is not something Americans are getting an easy answer to at the moment. So far, the CDC is plowing forward with the same old guidelines: If you’re fully vaccinated and not experiencing any COVID symptoms, mask up and off you go. Anthony Fauci and other public-health figures, while urging caution with Omicron, have been reluctant to tell people to stay home. Unlike last year, when virtually no one was vaccinated and the CDC point-blank told Americans not to travel, the fuzzy messaging comes in part from the fact that so much now depends on people’s individual situations—whether they’re vaccinated, what precautions they’re taking, and whom they’re going to see. This year, everyone has to make a choice all on their own.

And yet all the signs make it clear that many Americans have already made up their mind. While some number of people might cancel, no matter what happens between now and the thick of the holidays, Omicron almost definitely will not compel a critical mass of people to change their travel plans. So if you are traveling, you can take several steps to make it as safe for everyone as possible.

[Read: We know enough about Omicron to know that we’re in trouble]

Thanks to Omicron, international jet-setters now have to navigate more travel restrictions, quarantine mandates, and testing rules. But beyond that, almost no evidence shows that Americans are rushing to change any plans. I fired up the TSA’s tracker of how many travelers are passing through its checkpoints each day, and airports are even busier now than pre-Omicron. “If you decide today that you want to travel in the U.S. for Christmas, you’re going to be seeing eye-popping airfares almost everywhere,” Henry Harteveldt, a travel-industry analyst at Atmosphere Research Group, told me. “Depending on where you’re going, the hotel prices or the rental-car rates may be through the roof. All of that is a sign that people really, really want to travel right now.”

United Airlines has said that it ferried 400,000 passengers a day during the Thanksgiving rush, and now it’s planning on even more for the year-end holidays. Meanwhile, the flight-search site Kayak saw a slight Omicron dip in searches within the U.S. when we first learned about the variant, but while the news has gotten only more worrying, searches are already back to where they were in late November.

For anyone who has been persuaded by Omicron to forgo holiday gatherings, airlines have stuck with the more flexible cancellation policies that popped up at the start of the pandemic, Harteveldt said. Most airlines won’t refund your money, but they’ll give you a voucher to use sometime in the future. That at least gives people some wiggle room if Omicron takes a turn for the worse and the CDC makes a last-minute plea for everyone to stay at home. (When I reached out to the CDC for comment on what would need to happen for the agency to come out against holiday travel, a spokesperson sent me back to the travel guidelines on the CDC website.)

Even so, Omicron is making its charge precisely at the moment when many Americans are heading off on their trips—and exactly when they’re least likely to endure the headache of fiddling with their plans. “Very few people are going to cancel the day before the flight,” says Scott Keyes, the founder of the travel website Scott’s Cheap Flights. “At this point, if we haven’t seen a wave of cancellations yet for Christmas—which we haven’t—I would expect that most people are still going to continue to take whatever holiday travel plans they already have on the books.”

The same goes for people who are planning on driving to their gatherings—which is how the overwhelming majority of Americans travel. Of everyone who travels at least 50 miles during the holiday season, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics estimates that just 5 percent fly. Paula Twidale, a senior vice president of AAA travel, told me that AAA is expecting 100 million travelers on the road during the holidays, just a sliver less than in 2019, which she called a “banner year” for travel.

Let’s be clear: That so many Americans seem poised to travel doesn’t mean it’s the right call. “I rather suspect that Omicron will take over from Delta across much if not most of the country during the Christmas period,” Bill Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist, told me in an email. “And in January we will reap whatever whirlwind got seeded along with the eggnog.”

Just like before Omicron, however, the risk of travel has less to do with the act itself and more to do with how people from different households behave before they all meet up. You could take every precaution possible in getting to your grandma’s house halfway across the country, but if you packed into a bar the night before the trip and don’t plan on getting tested before you see her, you’re missing the point. Before you head out for the holidays, says Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at George Mason University, give yourself a cool-down period—a week, if still possible—by pulling back on activities that are especially prone to spreading COVID, such as indoor dining. If you work in person, wear a high-quality, non-cloth mask, and stick to wearing it as best as you can.

A. Marm Kilpatrick, a disease ecologist at UC Santa Cruz, is having his mom and sister over for the holidays, and he just made the unenviable decision of forgoing a sauna party that his friend was throwing. (Kilpatrick has cooler friends than I do.) “We were going to be tightly packed enough that I didn’t want to do that with three or four other households,” he told me. Kilpatrick reiterated the basics of Omicron 101: Get boosted! If you haven’t yet, it’s not too late. Because a booster shot kicks in more quickly than initial doses, you can get a shot today and receive the best Christmas present ever: a tangible immunity bump.

[Read: Fully vaccinated is about to mean something else]

How you travel also is less important than what you do en route. Driving gives you some control over your environment, but be wary of making pit stops to eat indoors and bringing along people from outside your household. Thanks to ventilation in airplanes, flying hasn’t been so risky throughout the pandemic. “But that doesn’t mean we should overcorrect and feel like the risk of being on an airplane is zero,” Popescu told me. “You still want to be mindful of the people right next to you.” That’s especially true now that planes are as full as they were pre-pandemic. If the passenger next to you has their mask off to eat or drink, Popescu said, wait a few minutes until after they’re done to do the same. Turning the overhead AC on full blast and pointing it toward your face can help disperse any bits of the virus that are floating around. And particularly with a more transmissible variant, it’s worth being even more cautious in less ventilated areas, such as when you’re sitting by the gate or lingering on the jet bridge.

Think hard about whom you’ll be seeing once you arrive, especially if your plans include older, immunocompromised, or unvaccinated people. Conversations about pandemic risk can sometimes be awkward, but they can be a good place to start: “A lot of this comes down to: Is the person you’re visiting vulnerable, and how do you feel about that?” Popescu said. “How do they feel about that?” If you’re going to be spending a lot of time indoors with someone who is vulnerable, Kilpatrick said it’s best to bring along at-home rapid tests—the ones you can buy at the pharmacy—for each day of your visit, especially if you have any inklings of COVID symptoms. Because Omicron appears to make people sick even more quickly than previous forms of the coronavirus did, don’t bank on a test result from a few days ago. “If I had a dinner party to go to on Christmas and took a rapid test 15 minutes before the party,” Kilpatrick said, “that’s going to catch a huge fraction of infections.” (Unfortunately, these tests don’t come cheap, and they’re in serious short supply right now.)

Even if Omicron had come at a less terrible time, it wouldn’t have changed the fatigue that Americans are feeling right now. Over time, the link between what’s going on with COVID and how we act about it is weakening, says David Lazer, a political scientist at Northeastern University who’s involved with the COVID States Project. “The problem is that we’ve become habituated,” he told me. When the Delta wave tore through the South, it led to only an incremental bump in protective measures such as mask wearing. Now, Lazer said, Omicron could potentially lead to even tinier changes.

But the pandemic is still here—more than 800,000 Americans are dead—and it is not ending anytime soon. Relish the holiday season, but don’t use it as an excuse to let your guard down going forward as Omicron gears up for its next twist and turn. Americans might be over the pandemic, but the pandemic is certainly not over us.

The day before I got my COVID booster shot, news of the variant we’re now calling Omicron erupted around the world.

Mere hours earlier, I’d been on the fence about boosting, as I had been for months. I’m relatively young and healthy; I’d had two doses of Pfizer in the spring. And although a boost would probably benefit me, I didn’t feel like I necessarily needed it now—a stance that, comfortingly, was shared by several of the pandemic experts I spoke with regularly. Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington, had been “waiting for something to add urgency,” she told me. Müge Çevik, a medical virologist at the University of St. Andrews, in the United Kingdom, has been “looking at the data” before she got another shot. And Mónica Feliú Mójer, of the nonprofit Ciencia Puerto Rico, is now boosted, but delayed the dose over concerns about global vaccine equity. While much of the world waited for their first shots, I felt perfectly comfortable with the protection I’d already built up.

Then there was Omicron—which became the clincher in my decision to boost. This version of the virus looked worrisome, freckled with genetic changes that might enhance its transmissibility or stealth. SARS-CoV-2 seemed poised to deliver another punch. So I raised my guard in return.

Having a new variant around rejiggers the pandemic risk landscape, and that landscape is now looking less favorable to us. Pfizer, for instance, now says that, based on early data, a booster might be necessary to maintain a high level of protection against Omicron. Booster uptake’s been somewhat spotty, though, even among people for whom it’s been recommended since September. About one in four fully vaccinated adults says they will either “probably not” or “definitely not” boost, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll. And more than half of inoculated adults over 65—one of the groups at highest risk of severe COVID-19, and one of the earliest groups to be urged to vaccinate again—have not received an additional injection.

[Read: We know almost nothing about the Omicron variant]

No single concern is keeping millions of eligible Americans on the booster fence, and some of these numbers almost certainly reflect a pre-Omicron mindset. Anecdotally, I’m hearing from experts, colleagues, friends, and family that finding a booster appointment in many parts of the country is now nearly impossible. But a few key questions seem to be percolating on repeat. Here’s a rundown of the thinking that helped some of the now-boosted reckon with the choice—and roll up our sleeves again.

Do I really need a booster?

Understanding the benefits of boosting now means acknowledging two truths. Our vaccines are still doing an extraordinary job of staving off really serious disease. And adding an extra dose will probably keep people even safer.

When COVID vaccines first started rolling out last winter, they were an absolute knockout on just about every metric by which they were measured, not only preventing serious disease and death, but also limiting infections and transmission to a very high degree. Now, several months out, more vaccinated people are briefly contracting the coronavirus, and maybe getting a little sick as antibody levels naturally tick down over time. But the vaccines are still “stellar enough to keep most people from being hospitalized and very sick,” Luciana Borio, a senior global-health fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. That’s thanks to a legion of immune-memory cells that can pump out more when needed, or blow up virus-infected cells. Those hyper-durable defenses take some time to kick in, though, and can’t block all mild cases.

Boosters, then, remind the immune system of an old threat, lifting antibody levels and recruiting new immune cells to the front lines. People who receive boosters are less likely to get infected than those who don’t: The shots are clearly conferring benefits, though the jury’s still out on how long they’ll last. The pluses are especially big for people who are older, and they’re essential for the immunocompromised (who probably needed a three-dose vaccine to begin with).

For everyone else, boosting has looked more like a perk than a must-have: If defenses against the most serious forms of COVID-19 were holding, a touch-up wasn’t urgent.

But a vaccine’s effectiveness can be chipped away from two ends: a drop in the body’s defenses, and a swell in the virus’s offenses. And Omicron has clearly raised the stakes. The variant’s genome is laced with dozens of mutations that weren’t present in its predecessors’. Even if my body retained a perfect memory of my vaccines’ contents, these changes might still bamboozle it.

[Read: Omicron won’t ruin your booster]

“That’s what changed my thinking about booster doses,” Çevik told me. Because of the mismatch between variant and vaccine, she said, there will be a “significant drop” in our antibodies’ ability to protect us from milder outcomes, a trend that appears to be borne out by early data. An extra dose of vaccine—even one that’s an imperfect pantomime of Omicron—would shore up important defenses in advance of a surge. A drop in antibody protection would likely still happen because of Omicron’s genetic quirks, but the fall would be cushioned by sheer quantity—a trend that a press release from Pfizer now appears to confirm.

We’re also still dealing with Delta, a variant that vaccines definitely keep in check, especially as we head into the holidays. “So this could be a double whammy,” Pepper, of the University of Washington, told me. (She, for one, is probably going to boost soon.) While case rates remain high, reinforcing protections against infection and transmission could cocoon the still-vulnerable, and tamp down outbreaks.

Shouldn’t we be holding out for an Omicron booster?

If we could, then, yes, the ideal defense against Omicron would involve inoculating everyone (everyone) with a vaccine that’s a perfect match for the variant. To some, boosting with a vaccine modeled on the now-obsolete OG coronavirus might feel a bit like upgrading to an iPhone SE three months before an iPhone 13 mega-sale.

And yet, every expert I’ve spoken with in the past couple of weeks has delivered an unequivocal verdict: Boosting now is still the right choice—to get ahead of Omicron, to prepare ourselves. A bespoke Omicron recipe isn’t yet available, and won’t be for at least a few months. “The goal is to provide interim protection” before the wave of Omicron crests, Taia Wang, a physician and immunologist at Stanford, told me. And we may never need an Omicron-specific booster, making a wait unwise. Omicron’s genetic tweaks make it a touch unfamiliar, but not completely unrecognizable. Additional doses of vaccine have been shown to enhance the quantity and quality of antibodies that can thwart all known coronavirus variants.

Even if an Omicron-specific vaccine is on the horizon, immunologists told me that people should be able to get both, if they need to—OG now, Omi-vax later. That could be warranted if Omicron’s really, really good at dodging some of our immune defenses. In that case, getting an Omicron-keyed booster would almost be like rolling out an entirely new vaccine. It would coax our body into recruiting fresh crops of immune cells to fight, rather than only marshaling old ones back to the fore.

If we’re boosting so often, won’t side effects get worse?

This is one of the most common concerns I’ve heard. Some people had such rough experiences with their first set of vaccines that they’ve been so far unwilling to sign up for a repeat. Side effects can mean taking time off work, or sleeping through an entire weekend—and on very rare occasions, even worse outcomes.

Second shots, on average, were tougher to take than the first. But that doesn’t mean the third shot will ratchet up the gnarliness. Vaccine makers have found that boosters’ side-effect profile is actually pretty comparable to that of the initial two doses, or somewhere in between them. The body’s had months to calm down since its last exposure. And for those on Team Moderna, the booster’s just a half dose—less likely to rile cells up.

A few other people I spoke with worried that boosting now would mean they’d have to boost again, and again, and again. That won’t necessarily be the case: Some experts hope that a third dose will, for at least the mRNA vaccines, take us up to a new and lasting level of protection. In that optimistic scenario, we might not need another dose of vaccine, or another bout of side effects, for a long time—unless, of course, more problem variants show up.

Several people also raised concerns over the very rare, but very serious, side effects that have been linked to the vaccines—the blood clots that have occasionally followed the Johnson & Johnson shot, and the heart inflammation that can appear after mRNA vaccination. These events are so uncommon that even large trials can’t always identify them, and researchers are still trying to figure out how often they occur after boosts. Still, Taison Bell, a critical-care physician at UVA Health, told me that the chances of a severe side effect popping up after a booster dose remain, in absolute terms, extremely low. And the calculus is clear: Eventually, “all of us will be exposed to the virus,” he said. That’s the framework folks should be using when deciding to boost: The risk of experiencing a truly negative health outcome “is much higher with COVID itself.”

What about vaccine equity?

Boosters, by lifting up antibody levels, make bodies less hospitable to the virus; that cuts the conduits the pathogen needs to travel. On a population scale, that logically translates into trimmer, tamer outbreaks—but boosters alone can’t be pandemic-enders, especially when so many people remain entirely unvaccinated. Omicron might be shifting the conversation on boosters, Feliú Mójer said. “But getting the unvaccinated vaccinated is more important.”

Declining a boost in the U.S. won’t magically inject a vaccine into the arm of someone in Burundi, one of several African countries with immunization rates below 1 percent. But the heavy focus on boosters in wealthy countries risks diverting attention, resources, and human power away from administering first doses, the goal most prioritized by the World Health Organization. It also sends a pretty strong signal about where nations’ priorities lie. At this point, the number of American booster doses that have been doled out exceeds the number of primary injections that have been given in most other countries. Neglecting vaccine equity can also have compounding consequences: The more people who remain unprotected, the more variants will surely arise.

[Read: The coronavirus could get worse]

Of all the concerns on this list, this last one weighs most heavily on my mind. And it’s certainly causing people who otherwise see the benefit of boosters to take pause. Çevik thinks boosters make more sense now than they did before, and she’s probably going to get one herself, but “I’m still standing behind the ethical aspects.” She and Borio also pointed to the continued power of masking, distancing, testing, ventilation—the tools we’ve relied on for almost two years.

Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease physician at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York, previously pushed back against boosters for all and had, prior to the rise of Omicron, put off her own additional dose for months. Now she’s signing up for another shot. Gounder still feels that the topmost goal is to prevent severe disease, which the vaccines continue to do. “I still believe all that I’ve said before,” she told me. “But there’s more than one reason to boost.”

From Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings:

Here’s the album page, if you want to check it out.

Boy howdy, I love Chompers the Chipmunk.

View on my website

Huge Thanksgiving dinners with tons of family and loved ones are awesome, but not everyone has the option to travel or the family to get together with. If for one reason or another you find yourself alone or celebrating Thanksgiving with just one other person, you can still enjoy a classic Thanksgiving dinner on a smaller scale. I’ve crafted this smaller-sized meal that can be prepared in about two hours, so you can enjoy all those delicious thanksgiving recipes without a huge production. :)

What’s Included in This Thanksgiving Dinner for Two

Each recipe makes about 2-4 servings, so you’ll still have a few leftovers, but not as much as if you had cooked regular-sized Thanksgiving dinner (we’re all about reducing food waste here at Budget Bytes).

Three recipes will be prepared in the oven (at the same time and same temperature) and three will be prepared on the stove top while the other recipes are doing their thing in the oven.

In addition to the recipes listed above, here are a couple optional extras you can add, either homemade or store-bought. You can make homemade cranberry sauce or mini pumpkin pies the day before. You might want to prepare a quick Thanksgiving grazing board to snack on earlier in the day, or maybe some cranberry cream cheese dip with crackers. And don’t forget to make a couple of Apple Cider Mimosas!

How Long Does it Take to Prepare?

I was able to make this meal in about two hours. The turkey and stuffing takes approximately 1.5 hours to roast, and I was able to prepare the rest of the sides while they were in the oven. I’m probably a bit faster than the average home cook and very well accustomed to multi-tasking in the kitchen, but I also paused to take all of my photographs in that time, so I think 2-3 hours is reasonable for most people. Beginners may want to allow for extra time.

NOTE: The most important part of being able to prepare this meal in a decent amount of time is to read through the plan thoroughly before beginning. You need to understand how to execute each recipe and in which order before you begin so you don’t get lost. Making a Thanksgiving dinner, any Thanksgiving dinner, takes coordination and multi-tasking skills.

What You Need

How to Make Thanksgiving for Two – Step by Step Instructions

Okay, let’s get into it! I have the process divided into steps below. Each recipe is its own step so you can skip recipes you don’t like or even scale up recipes that you may want more of. You’ll be cooking most of these simultaneously, but they are listed in order of execution. Keep in mind that the cooking times will overlap. Make sure to read through the instructions thoroughly before beginning. Understanding the process for each recipe and the sequence is critical to executing a Thanksgiving dinner!

NOTE: Before beginning, adjust the racks in your oven so the top rack is slightly above the middle position and the lower rack is just below the middle position (not on the lowest position). The bottom rack only needs enough vertical room for a sheet pan, while the top rack needs enough height for the casserole dish and turkey breast.

1. Turkey and Stuffing

This turkey turns out so incredibly juicy and so so much easier than roasting a whole bird. The stuffing absorbs the juices and fat from the turkey as it roasts, making it even more flavorful!

The turkey and stuffing take the longest to cook (about 1.5 hours), so you’ll want to begin this first. The rest of the sides can be prepared while the turkey and stuffing are in the oven.

Turkey and Stuffing Step by Step Photos

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1. Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Place the contents of one 6oz. box of stuffing mix in a bowl and add 1.5 cups of warm water. Stir to combine, then set it aside to soak as you prepare the turkey.
2. Combine 4 Tbsp room temperature butter with 1 tsp dried sage, 1 tsp dried rosemary, 1 tsp dried thyme, and ¾ tsp salt. Pat a 2.5 lb. bone-in, skin-on turkey breast dry, then smear the herb butter over the surface (if the turkey breast is wet, the butter won’t stick, so dry it well).
3. Place the hydrated stuffing mix in the bottom of an 8×8-inch casserole dish and place the turkey breast on top. The turkey should cover most of the stuffing. If there are any large portions of stuffing exposed, you may want to cover the exposed portions with foil to prevent them from browning too much as the dish is in the oven. Do not cover the turkey with foil.
4. Roast the turkey and stuffing in the preheated 350ºF oven for about 1.5 hours, or until the internal temperature of the turkey reaches 165ºF. Let the turkey rest for about 10-15 minutes before slicing and serving.
5. The stuffing under the turkey will have absorbed a lot of moisture from the turkey as it roasts while the stuffing on the outer edges will be quite crunchy. Simply stir the stuffing together and let it sit for about five minutes for the moisture levels to equalize.

Once the turkey and stuffing are in the oven, move on to recipe #2, Candied Sweet Potatoes and Roasted Brussels Sprouts.

2. Candied Sweet Potatoes and Roasted Brussels Sprouts

While the turkey and stuffing are roasting, begin the candied sweet potatoes and roasted Brussels sprouts. These will cook together on one sheet pan in the oven at the same time as the turkey and stuffing. The sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts take about 40 minutes to cook, so you can prepare them on the sheet pan and then wait to put them into the oven until the turkey has about 40 minutes to go.

These candied sweet potatoes were so delicious it was all I could do to keep from eating them ALL myself. :o

Candied Sweet Potatoes and Roasted Brussels Sprouts Step by Step Photos

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1. Peel and slice one ¾ lb. sweet potato into ½-inch thick rounds. Melt 1.5 Tbsp butter, then stir in 1 Tbsp brown sugar, ¼ tsp cinnamon, ⅛ tsp ground cloves, and ⅛ tsp salt. Pour the butter mixture over the sweet potatoes and stir until they’re coated.
2. Cut off the dry stem end of ½ lb. Brussels sprouts, then slice them in half. Add 1 Tbsp olive oil and ⅛ tsp each of salt and pepper, then toss to coat. Place the Brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes on a parchment-lined sweet pan. Make sure to get as much of that butter mixture from the bowl onto the sweet potatoes.
3. The vegetables only take about 40 minutes to roast, so you may want to leave them prepped on the sheet pan until the last 40 minutes or so of the turkey’s baking time so they’re not done too early. Transfer the baking sheet to the oven (lower rack) and roast the vegetables for about 40 minutes, or until browned and tender, flipping them once halfway through.

Once the sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts are on the sheet pan and prepared to go into the oven, you can move on to preparing the next recipe, mashed potatoes. When the sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts are in the oven you can prepare the last two recipes, green bean “casserole” and mushroom herb gravy.

3. Mashed Potatoes

You can prepare the mashed potatoes while you’re waiting to put the sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts in the oven. They’re pretty quick to prepare, then they can sit on the stovetop with a lid on to stay warm while you finish the rest of the side dishes.

This recipe is also pretty flexible, so if there are other ingredients that you like to add to your mashed potatoes, like sour cream, cheese, or herbs, feel free to stir them in at the end!

Small Batch Mashed Potatoes Step by Step Photos

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I am in awe of people who can make a meal plan, repeating many favorite dishes weekly or several times a year, knowing that they love what they love. Because I’m not: I like shiny new recipes. My favorite thing to cook will always be the last new thing I made. All attempts to be a responsible sort of person with a plan are consistently jettisoned by a sparkly whim that landed in my head in the last day or two, like a Big Apple Crumb Cake. Or, in this case, an Ottolenghi recipe from The Guardian I apparently bookmarked over three years ago and forgot about until this stunning image flashed across my screen a few weeks ago and all of my best-laid October plans were kicked to the curb. I haven’t a single regret.

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What feels like eons ago, a friend asked for my advice on an important subject: He was trying to decide whether to start Friday Night Lights or Breaking Bad, both of which had recently become available on Netflix. Specifically, he wanted to know how many episodes he should watch of each to see which would hook him faster. My mind short-circuited. Although both are modern classics, the two series couldn’t be more different: One is a stirring drama about a high-school football coach in a small Texas town. The other is a thriller about a dying man who cooks meth. Both had excellent first episodes that could presumably hold my friend’s attention. But giving him an exact number? I called him and spent an hour explaining why this was an impossible decision for me to make on his behalf.

The question of how long a viewer should stick with a new show before giving up on it—or before it “gets good”—is one I’m asked a lot, given how many TV recaps and binge-watching guides I’ve written over the years. Usually, I resist giving a straightforward answer. After all, taste is subjective, people watch different shows for different reasons, and everyone’s viewing stamina varies. Volume, too, is an issue. “It’s harder than ever to keep up with new TV shows,” Linda Ge, a writer on the CW’s Kung Fu, told me over email. “It is easier to just give up and say you’ll catch up when the entire season is out, but good luck trying to remember you were interested in that show in the first place.”

[Read: The year of ambitious TV watching]

Still, since that conversation with my friend 10 years ago, I’ve dwelled on his question so much that I finally have an answer: Watch four episodes. This is exactly enough to know whether any new TV series is worth your time. (Exceptions include limited and reality series, as well as shows with very short seasons, such as Fleabag.) Of course, you should watch as much or as little of a show as you want. But if you, like my friend, are overwhelmed and just need a number, I have good reasons for my recommendation.

I’ve done the research.

Years’ worth of it, in fact. When I first started my admittedly unscientific pursuit, I assessed my favorite ongoing shows. I quickly noticed that fourth episodes tended to include major character development, shocking narrative swings, or moments that would go on to define the series as a whole. (Apologies for any spoilers.) Lost, for example, revealed a key twist in “Walkabout,” which informed the show’s faith-versus-science mythology. Breaking Bad’s “Cancer Man” ramped up the series’ overarching tension between its criminal protagonist and his DEA-agent brother-in-law. Glee—don’t judge, this was Season 1—had a fourth episode that revealed a teen pregnancy and incorporated a revolutionary-for-its-time coming-out scene.

I kept writing about shows that were all over the map in terms of genre, network, and release strategy (Alias, 24, New Girl, Modern Family, The Crown, House of Cards, Jane the Virgin—I could go on). As I did, a logic emerged: If a pilot has to introduce the show’s world, and the second and third episodes must prove that the series can sustain itself, then by Episode 4 the cast and crew should be comfortable enough that their ease will translate to viewers.

[Read: When a show about kindness gets darker]

Maybe it’s all confirmation bias, and maybe I should look more closely at shows that aired before the 2000s. But binge-watching shows on streaming services only began in earnest in the 2010s, and in that context, I’m convinced. If you need a newer example, the fourth episode of Ted Lasso’s first season resolved two characters’ major conflict and shed light on an antagonist’s personal struggles—putting the Apple TV+ series on track to become TV’s “nicest show.” Brett Goldstein, one of Ted Lasso’s writers and stars, even explained in an interview that he felt the show came together during the making of that episode. Which brings me to my second point ...

The fourth episode is usually when a show “clicks” behind the scenes, according to the experts.

Conversations with producers and writers only strengthened my theory. Rachel Bloom, a co-creator of the CW’s musical comedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend—which includes a big fourth-episode departure via a song-and-dance routine filmed in black-and-white—encouraged the idea when I shared it with her in 2016. She pointed out that, in the writers’ room for her show, she didn’t feel comfortable having another writer take the lead on the script until the fourth episode. With that in mind, she advised me to “look at Episode 4s of all the television shows.”

I haven’t been able to accomplish that, sadly, but other members of the TV industry have landed on Episode 4 unprompted. Joshua Safran, the showrunner of HBO Max’s Gossip Girl reboot, told me earlier this month that broadcast networks and streaming platforms have told him that he’d find his real audience by Episode 3 or 4—guidance he saw come to fruition with Gossip Girl and his previous shows, ABC’s Quantico and Netflix’s Soundtrack. “The pilot is done by too many people, and I don’t mean that in a bad way,” Safran said. “It just goes through so many checks [from the network], and then Episode 2 goes through less … In Episode 3, it’s like, Okay, I got it.”

The producer Robin Schwartz (Starz’s Vida, Facebook Watch’s Sorry for Your Loss) agrees: “There’s so much groundwork that has to be laid in those first couple of episodes: we need to meet our characters, establish a world, set up and kick off a premise. It’s a lot of (necessary) scaffolding,” she wrote over email. “Then somewhere around Episode 4-ish things can start getting a little weird, a little unexpected, venturing off down some garden paths you may find intoxicating in whatever way.”

Even those reluctant to choose an exact number gravitate toward Episode 4. Ken Greller, a writer on Apple TV+’s Dickinson, says that a pilot “can and should grab you,” but concedes that many great shows “don’t actually come together until later on in their first season.” Take BoJack Horseman and Succession; to him, the former fell into place after four or five episodes, while the latter’s standout episode was its fifth. (To me, that’s close enough to the magical Episode 4 to count toward my theory.) The producer Erik Oleson, who worked on Amazon’s Carnival Row and served as the showrunner for the third season of Netflix’s Daredevil, calls the idea of picking a number like “asking me to choose between my kids.” Even so, he mused over Zoom, “I thought that the prison-break episode in Daredevil was just like, Wow, that was so exciting, and that was what, Episode 4?” He chuckled. “Well, there you go.” He meant the fourth episode of the third season, but the show essentially started anew after its second-season finale. Like I said, this is a thoroughly unscientific study.

Watching through the fourth episode considers both the audience’s time and the creators’ efforts.

In the peak-TV era, the number of episodes you should ideally watch (to writers and producers, that’d be the full show) will always be higher than the number you have time to watch. Even the industry folks I polled tended to have a low boredom threshold when it came to their own viewing habits. The writer Chad Hodge (TNT’s Good Behavior) wrote in an email that he’ll give a new show until Episode 2 to see whether “a few whiffs and whispers of things I like” pan out. Sydney Hoffner, a postproduction coordinator for Star Trek: Picard, told me that the longest she’s given a series has been three episodes.

But four episodes is slightly more generous, taking into account both your limited availability and the intentions of those behind the scenes. That’s not so far into a show to reach too important a cliff-hanger that quitting becomes impossible, yet still far enough to get past the setup. So: Four episodes. Just try it. There is indeed too much TV, but four episodes amount to an evening of binge-watching or a month of tuning in weekly at most. By then, you’ll have to have found something appealing about your show—or not. And most important, I hope that you won’t ever have to ask when a series “gets good” again.

Remember huddling in a conference room? It’s almost cartoonish to imagine everybody squeezing into a poorly ventilated space to talk and trade germs for the purpose of … what, exactly?

As many workers begin returning to their office for all or some of the work week, they’re noticing a key change: The pandemic is nearing its conclusion, but meetings are still happening virtually. In many cases, office workers are leaving home, going to their desk, sitting down, putting on their headphones, and connecting to Zoom to chat with people sitting a few feet away from them. The cognitive dissonance that workers may be feeling isn’t because things are different, but because they’re remarkably similar to the way they were at home. While bosses have been braying that we will lose collaboration and mentorship opportunities in a dominantly remote future, workers have been (justifiably) questioning why they have to leave their home at all.

What do you really gain from an in-person meeting that you have been missing the past 19 months?

[Read: End meeting for all]

Zoom and other forms of functional (and free) videoconferencing software aren’t necessarily better than meeting in person, but they’re also not necessarily worse. And although a company may demand that everybody return to the office at some point over the next few months, that doesn’t mean that their outside partners or clients will do so, making Zoom or a conference call an automatic part of every outward meeting.

I will acknowledge that this absolutely happened before the pandemic, and usually led to everyone sitting in a conference room around a speaker. Except we’ve now had a vivid experience of the alternative, and hardly anyone is clamoring to go back to the way things were, germs and all. For the past 19 months, we didn’t need to interrupt our workday to go to a special room so people could talk over one another and waste time. Meetings weren’t an event, but a to-do-list item that required a little more attention than an email. I suspect that those mourning the loss of pre-pandemic meetings are likely executives and managers who enjoyed the attention and the chance to prove themselves valuable through extremely visible performances. Whereas you might be able to “command a room” in person, it’s much harder to feel that everybody knows how great you are when you haven’t gathered them around a long table of which you happen to sit at the head.

Meetings were previously a novelty—a mutually agreed-upon way in which we could all use up one another’s time nonspecifically that was nevertheless accepted as “work.” Videoconferencing’s low barrier to entry has removed meetings from this vaunted status, making them just another means to get things done, along with email, Slack, and other productivity tools. Early in the pandemic, everybody’s first instinct was to frame Zoom as the problem, but I think the world has shifted to understanding that we were simply having too many meetings before, and that videoconferencing enables us to diplomatically end them as quickly as we made them.

To be sure, after all these months of remote work, you may be experiencing Zoom fatigue, or, more accurately, meeting fatigue. The amount of meetings doubled during the pandemic. But as we approach something like a return to “normalcy” in 2022, I believe that the white-collar future will be dominantly remote not because it’s “better,” but because it’s “good enough.” Remote work gets the job done, it allows more people to participate in more activities, and it is significantly easier to get people to join a videoconference than it is to unite them in a conference room.

I believe we’ll also see an eventual reduction in the time spent in meetings. Meetings used to feel special because of the pomp and circumstance of physically gathering, but reducing them to a link has removed the mystique that pressured us to “take up all of the time.” In my own experiment of offering clients the opportunity to end a meeting when we are done talking, I’ve found that they’re elated—if we can get a call done in 10 minutes, that’s 20 to 50 minutes of their time that they’ve just gotten back, because our meeting culture has shifted from performance to pragmatism.

All that being said, fully remote meetings can have downsides. Relying on a dozen or more different internet connections regularly leads to people inadvertently misjudging speaking cues (something you can gauge a little better in person), or missing parts of conversations, or having someone unexpectedly drop out at the worst moment. It can also be hard to tell whether you’ve actually engaged someone with your comments—for better or for worse—because everybody’s staring at separate parts of the screen. And by now most of us have taken to browsing other tabs while someone else is speaking, sort of half-listening with our cameras on (or off). It is indeed challenging to give a virtual speaker your undivided attention for more than a few minutes.

[Ed Zitron: Why managers fear a remote-work future]

However, these digital cons are vastly outweighed by the pros. Post-pandemic meeting culture is a watershed moment for inclusivity, especially for workers with disabilities. Where these employees may have been previously ostracized for not being in the office, the opportunity of a remote post-pandemic meeting culture is one where there is no limit to the seats at the table. Videoconferencing definitely doesn’t make us look our best, but in some ways, that’s rather freeing—it removes a degree of aesthetic judgment, as well as the ritual of feeling physically intimidated in the workplace. Some of the aforementioned “cons” are also, in a way, “pros.” The lack of a strict focal point means that people aren’t arbitrarily judged for their “attention,” and for those like me who have nonverbal communication issues (such as maintaining eye contact), it’s a chance to not get held back for something you can’t control.

The next several months will be incredibly telling for how meeting culture will change in the long term. The disingenuous framing of returning to the office as returning to “work” will only look more silly as millions of people realize at once how silly it is to commute to an office to open a web browser and join a videoconference. As people go back to a shared physical space, they’re going to start asking reasonable questions such as “Why am I here?” and “What am I doing here that I can’t do at home?” as they and several colleagues a few feet apart join a 10-minute-long Zoom meeting. And when they do so, they may make the choice to simply work for a different employer—and do that work from home.

Where are all of my one-pot pasta lovers at? This one is for you! This One Pot Creamy Mushroom Pasta is a super-rich, umami-filled delight that is, as always, easily prepared in one pot. It’s the perfect comfort at the end of a long tiring work day. And don’t forget to make a little garlic bread to serve on the side. ;)

What Kind of Mushrooms to Use

I like baby bella mushrooms for this pasta because they are not too expensive and they have a nice deep color that adds a lot to the plate. You can use white button mushrooms if needed, but they do have a slightly more mild flavor. You could also use full-sized portobello mushrooms, just slice them into smaller pieces before sautéing.

Can I Substitute the Heavy Cream?

I use heavy cream in this recipe which creates a super-rich and luscious sauce for the pasta. Because it’s so thick, it also helps the Parmesan to melt into the sauce without clumping. Milk, which has a much higher water content, will produce a thinner sauce and you may have difficulty getting the Parmesan to melt in instead of clumping. One way I’ve gotten around this in the past is to use a combination of milk and cream cheese. The cream cheese both emulsifies the Parmesan and thickens the sauce (see how the technique is used in Creamy Sun-Dried Tomato Pasta).

What Else Can I Add?

This creamy mushroom pasta is kind of a simple pleasure, but you can add more if you’re craving something more complex. Try adding in a few handfuls of fresh spinach toward the end for a little color. You could also top the pasta with some grilled chicken for a little more oomph.

What Kind of Pot to Use

I used a 3-quart deep skillet for this pasta, but you can use any pot or Dutch oven that has a wide bottom and a lid. Make sure to use a burner on your stovetop that is similar in size to the bottom of your pot or skillet to ensure even heating.

TIPS FOR COOKING ONE POT PASTAS:

Getting one pot pasta just right can take some practice, so if you find you’re having trouble, here are a few tips:

• Stir every few minutes to keep the pasta from sticking to the bottom of the pot. Replace the lid each time to prevent excessive evaporation.
• Make sure the pasta is simmering the whole time. If the liquid is not simmering, the pasta will not cook. The temperature setting needed to maintain a simmer can vary depending on your stove top and cookware.
• Use heavy cookware. Skillets and pots that are thin on the bottom don’t heat evenly and do not yield good results with one pot pastas because some areas of the pot will be simmering, while other areas are not.
• Keep the lid in place at all times when not stirring. This holds in the steam and helps the pasta cook more evenly.
• Watch the pasta. One pot pastas are a little like riding a bike. You have to observe and adjust as you go. If the liquid is almost all absorbed before the pasta is tender, add a little more water. If the pasta is almost tender, but there is still a lot of liquid, allow it to simmer without a lid for the last couple of minutes.

How to Make One Pot Creamy Mushroom Pasta – Step by Step Photos

Mince four cloves of garlic and slice 8 oz. baby bella mushrooms.

Add the garlic and butter to your skillet or pot and sauté over medium heat for about one minute.

Add the mushrooms to the skillet along with a pinch of salt and pepper. Continue to sauté until the mushrooms have released all of their liquid, it has evaporated from the bottom of the skillet, and the mushrooms begin to turn golden brown on the edges.

Add 8 oz. fettuccine to the skillet along with 2.5 cups of vegetable broth. Stir to combine. It’s okay if the pasta is not fully submerged. Place a lid on the pot, turn the heat up to medium-high, and allow the broth to come up to a boil.

When the broth reaches a full boil, give the pasta a quick stir to loosen any noodles that may have stuck to the bottom. Replace the lid, turn the heat down to low, or just above low, so that the broth maintains a simmer. Simmer the noodles, stirring occasionally and replacing the lid each time, until the pasta is tender. There should be a small amount of gravy-like broth on the bottom of the skillet.

Add ⅓ cup heavy cream to the pasta and stir to combine.

Turn the heat under the skillet off. Add ¼ cup grated Parmesan to the pasta and toss to combine. The residual heat from the pasta should begin to melt the Parmesan.

Give the pasta a taste and adjust the salt or pepper to your liking. I usually like to add a little freshly cracked black pepper on top for a little pop!

Try These Other Creamy One Pot Pasta Recipes

• One Pot Creamy Pesto Chicken Pasta
• One Pot Creamy Cajun Chicken Pasta
• One Pot Creamy Sun Dried Tomato Pasta
• One Pot Roasted Red Pepper Pasta
• Pastalaya

The post One Pot Creamy Mushroom Pasta appeared first on Budget Bytes.

Over the years, as I’ve interviewed many sociologists about gender divisions in how couples handle chores and child care, I’ve often wondered what happened after we got off the phone. When these researchers returned to their life, how were they splitting up the tasks in their own home? Because gender scholars—they’re just like us: They too have floors to sweep, kids to feed, toilets to clean.

But, I learned, they are also decidedly not like us. In different-sex couples who have young children and both work a full-time job, mothers are estimated to do an average of roughly five more hours a week of paid and unpaid labor than fathers. Yet most of the sociologists I recently spoke with reported an equitable division of labor at home. These researchers’ deep understanding of family life has helped them come up with tactics for warding off the same inequalities that they study—though they still sometimes struggle to keep gender norms and stereotypes from undermining them.

Sociologists are attuned to the constraints society places on people’s everyday decisions, and those I interviewed stressed to me that their education, income, job stability, job flexibility, and access to child care made it easier for them to realize their egalitarian goals. I also interviewed only different-sex couples; same-sex couples navigate different cultural pressures when managing a home, and tend to split up chores more equally.

Still, we can learn from what these experts have done in their own home. Three of their strategies in particular stuck out to me. The first is fighting against the mistaken belief that moms are better suited to parenting than dads, which can lead women to spend more time, and men to spend less time, on child care. William Scarborough, a sociologist at the University of North Texas, told me that he has made a point of sticking with even the tasks that initially come more easily to his wife. For instance, his son, as a toddler, used to behave better at bath time with her. “But instead of relying on her to do it, I continued bathing him, even if it took twice as long,” he said. “Eventually, I got the hang of it and was able to bathe him without any drama.”

The second strategy is simple: Thank your partner for the work they do around the house. Multiple experts told me this was helpful, and research indicates that people feel less bitterness about housework when their contributions are recognized. “Acknowledging that there’s work going on—that the stuff at home is work—and thanking your partner for doing that, I think, goes a long way,” Richard Petts, a sociologist at Ball State University, told me.

[Read: Masters of love]

A third tactic is to do some chores in tandem. Daniela Negraia, a sociologist at the University of Oxford, told me that she started doing this with her husband out of an awareness that women, on average, do more housework than men. “Our solution was to pick a day, one weekend day for example, and just think of what chores we have, and then work starts at the same time and ends at the same time,” Negraia told me. Scarborough, who also favors doing chores together, said that this “prevents them from becoming alienating.”

The experts’ knowledge of the research helps them actively resist common patterns. The scholars I interviewed talked about trying not to replicate in their own home the findings that fathers spend more time with boys than with girls, that mothers are more likely to involve their daughters in housework than their sons, and that mothers tend to have less leisure time than fathers. Research also drew their attention to how dividing housework and child care fairly isn’t just good in and of itself, but can make their family happier. They were motivated, for instance, by studies indicating that kids benefit from stronger bonds with their dad and that women are more satisfied with their relationship when they feel the distribution of tasks is fair.

But this awareness alone isn’t enough to overcome the larger cultural forces that shape housework and parenting. The women I interviewed tended to disproportionately handle the managerial elements of running a home, as well as their household’s “mental load”—the invisible logistical and emotional work of, among other things, keeping track of when kids need new clothes, planning family outings, and remembering to send birthday cards to loved ones.

Negraia, who bears more of the mental load than her husband, has come up with a creative way to make him aware of the otherwise hidden work she does: When she, say, calls their kids’ doctor or plans out weekend activities, she’ll send her husband a calendar invitation for each task as a way of underlining how much time it eats up without starting a tense conversation. Her husband told me that when he sees those invitations pop up on his calendar, he’ll think, “Maybe I should do a few extra loads of dishes and laundry that day.”

Because these couples’ conversations about housework were grounded in research, they became less personal and fraught—the couples tended to adopt a framework of “us versus society” rather than “me versus you.” “I think that the emotional heat that can so often come with these conversations is really diminished for [my partner] and me because this is so clearly not just about him and me,” Caitlyn Collins, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. “It kind of removes the ego from the conversation.”

That perspective also emphasizes the pervasiveness of gender norms—something no one couple can overcome on their own. Collins told me that when she interviewed working mothers in Sweden, she was struck by how, in what is considered one of the world’s most gender-egalitarian countries, women still had to have frequent and ongoing conversations with their male partner about housework. In her own home, she has come to think of equality not as “a static goal that we will arrive at and [declare] victory” but rather as “a lifelong project that we’re working on together.”

Even those who have dedicated their career to studying gender inequality can only do so much. Whatever they may achieve in their own homes, cultural norms are beyond their control. Petts and his wife notice when another parent texts her and not him to set up a playdate for their kids, and when teachers email her and not him about something at school. “Even if I’m more in charge of school, which I am now, I’m not necessarily privy to all of the information,” he said. “These hidden biases that people have about the roles of mother and father make it challenging to divide these tasks evenly.”

Even though Petts and his wife agree that they share the work of parenting and chores equitably, the world doesn’t always judge them accordingly. Like many involved fathers, he gets applauded for his contributions. “One thing that is hardest for me is that Richard is viewed by others as an awesome dad (and he is) and a wonderful husband (and he is), but I’m viewed as mediocre at best,” Petts’s wife wrote to me in an email, because “the assumption is that when a man does all these things, … the woman has somehow done less than she should. I don’t know how many times people have told me that I am probably the luckiest person around because Richard cooks dinner.”

As the researchers I interviewed understand, one couple can’t change the world. But perhaps by being aware of its shortcomings, you can make some changes in your own home.

When the coronavirus pandemic struck last year, people throughout the developed world raced to buy toilet paper, bottled water, yeast for baking bread, and other basic necessities. Americans also stocked up on guns. They bought more than 23 million firearms in 2020, up 65 percent from 2019. First-time gun purchases were notably high. The surge has not abated in 2021. In January, Americans bought 4.3 million guns, a monthly record.

Last year was also a high-water mark for gun violence—more people were shot dead than at any time since the 1990s—though 2021 is shaping up to be even worse. There was one bright spot in 2020. When Americans self-isolated, mass shooters were denied their usual targets. But as America began to return to normal, so did the mass shootings: 45 in the single month between March 16 and April 15.

The shock and horror of mass shootings focus our attention. But most of the casualties are inflicted one by one by one. Americans use their guns to open fire on one another at backyard barbecues, to stalk and intimidate ex-spouses and lovers, to rob and assault, and to kill themselves. Half of the almost 48,000 suicides committed in 2019 were carried out by gun. All of this slaughter is enabled by the most permissive gun laws in the developed world.

You know this. You’ve heard it before. Maybe you have even gotten sick of hearing it. Yet the problem continues to get worse. The Biden administration is developing strategies to try to decrease gun violence—to crack down on rogue gun dealers, to “keep guns out of the wrong hands.” That’s a worthy project, of course, but it, too, may sound wanly familiar. Over the past decade, many states have relaxed their gun laws, making these weapons even easier to get.

This fall, the Supreme Court will hear a case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Corlett, that could expand gun rights even further. Thirteen years ago, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Court for the first time recognized people’s constitutional right to own firearms as individuals, not just as members of a “well regulated Militia.” Now lawyers for the New York affiliate of the National Rifle Association will argue that the Second Amendment should be interpreted as granting a constitutional right to carry firearms in the streets, parks, playgrounds. If the NRA prevails, the nearly 400 million guns in the United States will show up in even more places than they do now.

The legalistic approach to restricting gun ownership and reducing gun violence is failing. So is the assumption behind it. Drawing a bright line between the supposedly vast majority of “responsible,” “law abiding” gun owners and those shadowy others who cause all the trouble is a prudent approach for politicians, but it obscures the true nature of the problem. We need to stop deceiving ourselves about the importance of this distinction.

Pre-pandemic, about 30 percent of American adults owned a gun, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Another 33 percent rejected the idea of gun ownership. The remainder, about 36 percent, did not happen to own a gun at the time they were asked the question—but had either owned a gun in the past or could imagine owning a gun in the future. In 2020, the future came, and millions of them queued at gun shops, pandemic stimulus dollars in hand.

[Read: Americans don’t really understand gun violence]

They were not buying weapons for hunting. Only about 11.5 million Americans hunt in a given year, according to the latest Department of the Interior survey, fewer than the number who attend a professional ballet or modern-dance performance.

Nor were they buying weapons to play private militia. Fewer than 10 percent of Americans amass arsenals of five weapons or more. And for all the focus on assault rifles, they make up a small portion of the firearms in private hands: approximately 6 percent of all guns owned.

The weapon Americans most often buy is the modern semiautomatic handgun—affordable, light, and easy to use. This is the weapon people stash in their nightstand and the glove compartment of their car. This is the weapon they tuck into their purse and shove into their waistband. Why? Two-thirds of American gun buyers explain that they bought their gun to protect themselves and their families.

And here is both the terrible tragedy of America’s gun habit and the best hope to end it. In virtually every way that can be measured, owning a firearm makes the owner, the owner’s family, and the people around them less safe. The hard-core gun owner will never accept this truth. But the 36 percent in the middle—they may be open to it, if they can be helped to perceive it.

[From the January 1993 issue: Erik Larson on the story of a gun]

The weapons Americans buy to protect their loved ones are the weapons that end up being accidentally discharged into a loved one’s leg or chest or head. The weapons Americans buy to protect their young children are years later used for self-harm by their troubled teenagers. Or they are stolen from their car by criminals and used in robberies and murders. Or they are grabbed in rage and pointed at an ex-partner.

The record shows case after case of guns escalating ordinary disputes into homicides or attempted homicides. In March 2020, a man was fatally shot in the head after an altercation over a parking space at an Atlanta shopping mall. In August 2020, a 75-year-old Nashville homeowner reportedly shot and wounded a landscaper for not properly hauling brush from his property. In November 2020, a gun owner shot and killed a teenager for playing music too loudly in the parking lot of the motel they were both staying at, police said.

These incidents are unusual in only one way: The victims were all men. A frequent use of guns in American life is to dominate and terrorize women. According to a 2017 study, some 4.5 million American women have been threatened by a gun-wielding partner or former partner. Almost 1 million American women have survived after a gun was used by a partner against them.

Put moments of rage or malice aside, and catastrophes still keep happening, due in part to Americans’ collective overconfidence in their gun-handling skills.

Altogether, about 500 Americans a year die from unintended shootings. That’s four times the rate of deaths from unintended shootings in peer nations. Yet this grim statistic still understates the toll of Americans fooling around with weapons. Unintended shootings tend not to be lethal. They account for only about 1 percent of all U.S. gun deaths. But they account for more than one-third of American gun injuries—injuries that can leave people disabled or traumatized for life. A majority of gun owners fail to store their weapons safely, according to research by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That’s why the annals fill with so many heartrending stories of children shooting themselves or others.

[David Frum: It’s the guns]

Above all else, guns are used for suicide. In any given year, twice as many Americans die by suicide as by homicide. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among teenagers and young adults, behind only accidents. The good news is that suicide is highly preventable. Most suicide attempts are impulsive, an act of depression or panic. If a person survives an attempt, he or she will almost certainly survive the suicidal impulse altogether. A gun in the house massively raises the likelihood that a suicide attempt will end in death.

Gun advocates counter this tally of unnecessary bloodshed by generating piles of studies on successful “defensive gun use.” Estimates of defensive gun use vary wildly, from as few as 60,000 incidents a year to as many as 2.5 million. The higher estimates are distorted by a crucial error: They rely heavily on self-reporting by gun owners themselves, with a huge risk of self-flattering bias. If an argument spirals until one person produces a gun and menaces the other into shutting up, the gun owner might regard that use as “defensive.” A third party, however, might perceive a situation that only spiraled in the first place because the gun owner felt empowered to escalate it. Whose perception should prevail?

But there’s a larger absurdity to the project of counting “defensive gun uses.” For decades, the world has witnessed a colossal natural experiment in gun laws. With one exception, virtually all developed countries strictly regulate firearms, especially handguns. If there were any merit to the “defensive gun use” argument, you’d expect that one permissive nation to boast much greater safety. Instead, the one outlier nation—the United States—suffers the deadliest levels of criminal violence. Guns everywhere engender violence everywhere.

In national debates, America’s gun carnage is often blamed on the National Rifle Association. That group is indeed highly blameworthy. But the NRA has been mired in scandal and bankruptcy since 2019, without any notable alteration in the political balance of power on the gun issue. America has a gun problem because so many Americans are deceived by so many illusions about what a gun will do for them, their family, their world. They imagine a gun as the guardian of their home and loved ones, rather than the standing invitation to harm, loss, and grief it so much more often proves to be.

It would be good to reverse the permissive trends in gun law. It would be good to ban the preferred weapons of mass shooters. It would be good to have a stronger system of background checks. It would be good to stop so many Americans from carrying guns in public.

But even if none of those things happens—and there is little sign of them happening anytime soon—progress can be made against gun violence, as progress was once made against other social evils: by persuading Americans to stop, one by one by one.

Drunk driving has been illegal in the United States since automobiles became commonplace. Yet laws against drunk driving went lightly enforced until the 1980s. Police and courts treated drunk drivers leniently. The offenders seemed so remorseful. Had they not suffered enough?

That practice of leniency began to change in 1980, with the founding of Mothers Against Drunk Driving by one determined woman, Candy Lightner, who had lost her daughter to a repeat hit-and-run driver. From Fair Oaks, California, MADD spread across the nation. Before it pressured politicians to amend laws, before it persuaded courts and police to enforce those laws, it enabled those reforms by working directly on public attitudes. MADD convinced American drivers that they were not weak or unmanly if they surrendered the car keys after drinking too much. MADD empowered the families and friends of those drivers to insist that the keys be surrendered.

That kind of cultural change beckons now. The mass gun purchases of 2020 and 2021 have put even more millions of weapons into even more hands untrained to use and store those weapons responsibly.

Today, a new generation of determined women are emulating MADD, this time fighting against gun violence. The day after the Sandy Hook gun massacre, a Colorado mother of five, Shannon Watts, launched a group that now numbers 6 million: Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. After the large Republican gains in the state elections of 2014, Moms Demand Action fought mostly on defense, helping prevent Tennessee from restoring gun rights to violent felons, for instance, and Alaska from compelling state universities to allow guns to be carried on campus. In the 2020s, Moms Demand Action and allies could reshape the national gun debate more fundamentally. It’s the kind of effort that should be much more widely embraced, and not only by mothers.

The gun buyers of 2020–21 are different from those of years past: They are more likely to be people of color and more likely to be women. They are not buying guns to join a race war, or to overthrow the government, or to wait for Armageddon in a bunker stocked with canned beans. They just want to deter a burglar or an assailant, should one come.

Those dangers are real, and it’s understandable that people would fear them and seek to avert them. But like the people who refuse lifesaving vaccines for fear of minutely rare side effects, American gun buyers are falling victim to bad risk analysis.

They need to meet the grandparents who stuffed a gun beneath a pillow while cooking—and returned to their granddaughter’s dead body. They need to see the man in prison because he lost his temper over a parking space. They need to listen to the parents whose teenager found a suicide weapon that had not been locked away. They need to know more about the woman killed in the electronics aisle at an Idaho Walmart when her 2-year-old accidentally discharged the gun she carried in her purse.

They need to hear a new call to conscience, aimed not at the paranoid and the extreme, not at the militiamen and the race warriors, but at the decent, everyday gun owner.

You want to be a protective spouse, a concerned parent, a good citizen, a patriotic American? Save your family and your community from danger by getting rid of your weapons, and especially your handguns. Don’t wait for the law. Do it yourself; do it now. Do it because you just bought your first home, do it because you just got married, do it because you just had the baby you cherish more than anything in this world. The gun you trust against your fears is itself the thing you should fear. The gun is a lie.

As more Americans recognize the lie, they may notice a powerful new possibility. Once emancipated from the false myth of the home-protecting gun, they will find it easier to write laws and adopt policies to stop the criminals and zealots who carry guns into the streets. Win enough elections, and the federal courts will retreat from their sudden gun advocacy—and return to their historic deference to state regulation of firearms.

None of this will be easy, but it is not impossible. Over the past half decade, we’ve seen American society changed for the better through mass movements such as #MeToo. Now we need a new moral reckoning.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Greek writer Thucydides described the progress of civilization. It began, he said, when the Athenians ceased carrying arms inside their city, and left that savage custom to the barbarians. It’s long past time for Americans to absorb this first lesson from the first democracy.

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This article appears in the October 2021 print edition with the headline “Responsible Gun Ownership Is a Lie.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here.

The vaccine timeline for young kids is looking a little more solid. This morning, Pfizer submitted data to the FDA showing that its COVID-19 vaccine is effective and safe for children ages 5 to 11. And this afternoon, the company’s CEO, Albert Bourla, said that trial results for even younger kids, aged 2 to 4, will be available in a couple months’ time. “Before the end of the year,” he confirmed in an interview with Craig Melvin, the Today news anchor and MSNBC anchor, at The Atlantic Festival. Submission to the FDA will follow soon thereafter, Bourla said.

The wait for COVID-19 vaccines comes during an ongoing surge of cases among children. Vaccines are taking this long to reach kids because the trials follow the classic strategy of age de-escalation. Manufacturers first tested their shots in adults, then teens, and most recently kids as young as 2. Pfizer is also running a pediatric trial for the youngest children, aged six months up to 2 years old. Bourla did not specify a timeline for this cohort, but expect results sometime after those from the 2-to-4-year-old group.

Once the results for each age cohort are collected, Pfizer will submit them to the FDA to review for safety and efficacy. The agency doesn’t work on a set timeline, but for context, emergency use of Pfizer’s vaccine took 21 days from filing to authorization for adults and 31 days for teens age 12 to 15. If that precedence holds, then kids 5 to 11 will likely be able to get shots around Halloween and those 2 to 4 will be eligible by early next year. (Don’t be surprised if those timelines stretch, however.)

All eyes are on Pfizer’s vaccine because its pediatric trials are furthest along. Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, the two other companies whose COVID-19 vaccines have been authorized in the United States, haven’t yet released any data from their trials running in children under 12. (Like Pfizer’s trial, these also go down to children as young as six months.) The first shot available to kids will almost certainly come from Pfizer.

The adult and pediatric trials of COVID-19 vaccines do differ in a couple of key ways. First of all, Pfizer is testing a smaller dose in kids. For adults and teens, each shot of Pfizer’s two-dose regimen contained a 30-microgram dose. For kids 11 and under, the dose was reduced to only 10 micrograms a shot, and then reduced even further to 3 micrograms for kids six months up to 2 years of age. Based on Pfizer’s announcements, the data the company has collected so far suggest that the smaller dose is indeed safe and coaxes a strong immune response out of the 5-to-11-year-old cohort; their antibody responses are similar to that of adults who got the higher dose.

Speaking of that immune response, scientists are evaluating the vaccine’s efficacy in kids somewhat indirectly—this is another way these adult and kid trials differ. The COVID-19 vaccine is already known to be effective in adults, so researchers are looking at antibody responses rather than counting the number of vaccinated versus unvaccinated people who get COVID-19, as they did in the original adult trial. Studying efficacy by waiting for enough kids in a trial to get COVID-19 would require a much larger trial—and much more time to complete it. These trials that focus on antibody response are called “immunobridging” studies and are standard in studying vaccines.

Even when young kids are able to be vaccinated, however—and polls right now suggest that many parents are still hesitant—the coronavirus is unlikely to go away. This is why pharmaceutical companies including Merck, Roche, and Pfizer are also racing to develop antivirals to treat patients with COVID-19. This week, Pfizer announced that it is studying an oral pill that could block the replication of the coronavirus. Trials are “ongoing right now” to see whether the pill can mitigate or prevent COVID-19, Bourla told Melvin, and the first results are expected before the end of the year. The world is heading into a third year with the coronavirus, but this time with many more pharmaceutical defenses in the arsenal.

Hey Captain,

I (he/him) have had a rocky relationship with my family for a while now, due to being queer in a family of Trump supporters (among other things), but always made sure to come visit my parents for a week for Christmas. It’s the only time I spend in their house, and I do it with plenty of safeties in place and reasons to escape the house if I need time to myself. For better or worse it’s tradition, all the kids come home for Christmas, and Christmas at my parents’ is lovely enough that I was willing to wade through the bullshit for it.

This changed last year, when I was unwilling to make a mid-pandemic flight (to Florida! Yikes!). That turned out to be the right call, because flights and Florida aside, they just randomly invited people outside their pod over on Christmas Day, and generally flagrantly ignored masking mandates and other safety precautions. They were “understanding” about my reluctance, for their definition of understanding, but it involved a lot of back and fourth and asserting boundaries.

And now I have to rehash the that conversation, because parents and brother are staunch anti-vaxxers, and, concerns about just generally traveling during the delta-variant aside, they are completely unvaccinated for Covid. 

Captain, my mom has talked to me on multiple occasions about how the vaccine is becoming a “lifestyle” and I should think hard and “do my research” before getting it. She talked my 87 year old Nana out of getting vaccinated. I’ve managed to keep my boundaries pretty well up until this point, changing the subject or blatantly shutting down vaccine conversation whenever it comes up. But now I’m going to have to tell her that no, I’m not traveling down to Florida, yes, the virus is still a concern even though my brother got it and he’s fine, and yes, it is because you’re unvaccinated. I’m dreading it.

On the plus side, I have a lovely adoptive family, all vaccinated, who live much closer, who’re having me over for Christmas in a celebration I know is going to be an absolute blast. But, again, that means I have to tell my mom that I am seeing people for Christmas, just not my actual factual parents.

Can you give me some good scripts for this conversation?

Thanks!

Michael K. Williams was known most famously for his portrayal of Omar Little on HBO’s The Wire. Other roles included Chalky White on Boardwalk Empire—also within the HBO family—as well as Professor Marshall Kane on NBC’s Community.

In 2018, The Atlantic's marketing team and HBO joined forces for a series called Question Your Answers, a collection of short films meant to challenge our certainties. Williams starred in one of these films with a deliberation that addressed an ongoing, pivotal question asked by many Black actors in Hollywood: Am I—are we—being typecast?

It’s been a bit of time since I wrote part 1 of this so if you missed the first part of me talking about taking psychedelic ketamine treatments to treat my depression you can click here. So. The first treatment was weird as hell and I basically melted into another dimension. The second treatment theyContinue reading "Adventures in ketamine (part 2)"

Are you someone who enjoys the unsolicited opinions of strangers and acquaintances? If so, I can’t recommend cancer highly enough. You won’t even have the first pathology report in your hands before the advice comes pouring in. Laugh and the world laughs with you; get cancer and the world can’t shut its trap.

Stop eating sugar; keep up your weight with milkshakes. Listen to a recent story on NPR; do not read a recent story in Time magazine. Exercise—but not too vigorously; exercise—hard, like Lance Armstrong. Join a support group, make a collage, make a collage in a support group, collage the shit out of your cancer. Do you live near a freeway or drink tap water or eat food microwaved on plastic plates? That’s what caused it. Do you ever think about suing? Do you ever wonder whether, if you’d just let some time pass, the cancer would have gone away on its own?

Before I got cancer, I thought I understood how the world worked, or at least the parts that I needed to know about. But when I got cancer, my body broke down so catastrophically that I stopped trusting what I thought and believed. I felt that I had to listen when people told me what to do, because clearly I didn’t know anything.

Much of the advice was bewildering, and all of it was anxiety-producing. In the end, because so many people contradicted one another, I was able to ignore most of them. But there was one warning I heard from a huge number of people, almost every day, and sometimes two or three times a day: I had to stay positive. People who beat cancer have a great positive attitude. It’s what distinguishes the survivors from the dead.

There are books about how to develop the positive attitude that beats cancer, and meditation tapes to help you visualize your tumors melting away. Friends and acquaintances would send me these books and tapes—and they would send them to my husband, too. We were both anxious and willing to do anything in our control.

But after a terrible diagnosis, a failed surgery, a successful surgery, and the beginning of chemotherapy, I just wasn’t feeling very … up. At the end of another terrible day, my husband would gently ask me to sit in the living room so that I could meditate and think positive thoughts. I was nauseated from the drugs, tired, and terrified that I would leave my little boys without a mother. All I wanted to do was take my Ativan and sleep. But I couldn’t do that. If I didn’t change my attitude, I was going to die.

People get diagnosed with cancer in different ways. Some have a family history, and their doctors monitor them for years. Others have symptoms for so long that the eventual diagnosis is more of a terrible confirmation than a shock. And then there are people like me, people who are going about their busy lives when they push open the door of a familiar medical building for a routine appointment and step into an empty elevator shaft.

The afternoon in 2003 that I found out I had aggressive breast cancer, my boys were almost 5. The biggest thing on my mind was getting the mammogram over with early enough that I could pick up some groceries before the babysitter had to go home. I put on the short, pink paper gown and thought about dinner. And then everything started happening really fast. Suddenly there was the need for a second set of films, then a sonogram, then the sharp pinch of a needle. In my last fully conscious moment as the person I once was, I remember asking the doctor if I should have a biopsy. The reason I asked was so that he could look away from the screen, realize that he’d scared me, and reassure me. “No, no,” he would say; “it’s completely benign.” But he didn’t say that. He said, “That’s what we’re doing right now.”

Later I would wonder why the doctor hadn’t asked my permission for the needle biopsy. The answer was that I had already passed through the border station that separates the healthy from the ill. The medical community and I were on new terms.

[Read: I thought Stage IV cancer was bad enough]

The doctor could see that I was in shock, and he seemed pretty rattled himself. He kept saying that he should call my husband. “You need to prepare yourself,” he said, twice. And once: “It’s aggressive.” But I didn’t want him to call my husband. I wanted to tear off my paper gown and never see that doctor, his office, or even the street where the building was located ever again. I had a mute, animal need to get the hell out of there. The news was so bad, and it kept getting worse. I couldn’t think straight. My little boys were so small. They were my life, and they needed me.

Three weeks later, I was in the infusion center. Ask Google “What is the worst chemotherapy drug?” and the answer is doxorubicin. That’s what I got, as well as some other noxious pharmaceuticals. That oncologist filled me and my fellow patients up with so much poison that the sign on the bathrooms said we had to flush twice to make sure every trace was gone before a healthy person—a nurse, or a family member—could use the toilet. I was not allowed to hug my children for the first 24 hours after treatment, and in the midst of this absolute hell—in the midst of the poison and the crying and the sorrow and the terror—I was supposed to get a really great positive attitude.

The book we were given several copies of, which was first published in 1986 and has been reissued several times since, is titled Love, Medicine and Miracles and was written by a pediatric surgeon named Bernie Siegel. He seems less interested in exceptional scientific advances than in “exceptional patients.” To be exceptional, you have to tell your body that you want to live; you have to say “No way” to any doctor who says you have a fatal illness. You have to become a channel of perfect self-love, and remember that “the simple truth is, happy people generally don’t get sick.” Old angers or disappointments can congeal into cancer. You need to get rid of those emotions, or they will kill you.

In 1989 a Stanford psychiatrist named David Spiegel published a study of women with metastatic breast cancer. He created a support group for half the women, whom he taught self-hypnosis. The other women got no extra social support. The results were remarkable: Spiegel reported that the women in the group survived twice as long as the other women. This study was hugely influential in modern beliefs about meditation and cancer survival. It showed up in the books my husband read to me, which were filled with other stories of miraculous healings, of patients defying the odds though their own emotional work. But I was so far behind. From the beginning I couldn’t stop crying. I began to think I was hopeless and would never survive.

I needed help, and I remembered a woman my husband and I had talked to in the first week after my diagnosis. Both of us had found in those conversations our only experience of calm, our only reassurance that we were doing the right things. Anne Coscarelli is a clinical psychologist and the founder of the Simms/Mann-UCLA Center for Integrative Oncology, which helps patients and their families cope with the trauma of cancer. We had reached out to her when we were trying to understand my diagnosis. Now I needed her for much more.

For the first half hour in her office, we just talked about how sick I felt and how frightened I was. Then—nervously—I confessed: I wasn’t doing the work of healing myself. I wasn’t being positive.

“Why do you need to be positive?” she asked in a neutral voice.

I thought it should be obvious, but I explained: Because I didn’t want to die!

Coscarelli remained just as neutral and said, “There isn’t a single bit of evidence that having a positive attitude helps heal cancer.”

What? That couldn’t possibly be right. How did she know that?

“They study it all the time,” she said. “It’s not true.”

David Spiegel was never able to replicate his findings about metastatic breast cancer. The American Cancer Society and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health say there’s no evidence that meditation or support groups increase survival rates. They can do all sorts of wonderful things, like reducing stress and allowing you to live in the moment instead of worrying about the next scan. I’ve learned, whenever I start to get scared, to do some yoga-type breathing with my eyes closed until I get bored. If I’m bored, I’m not scared, so then I open my eyes again. But I’m not alive today because of deep breathing.

When I began to understand that attitude doesn’t have anything to do with survival, I felt myself coming up out of deep water. I didn’t cause my cancer by having a bad attitude, and I wasn’t going to cure it by having a good one.

And then Coscarelli told me the whole truth about cancer. If you’re ready, I will tell it to you.

Cancer occurs when a group of cells divide in rapid and abnormal ways. Treatments are successful if they interfere with that process.

That’s it, that’s the whole equation.  

Everyone with cancer has a different experience, and different beliefs about what will help. I feel strongly that these beliefs should be respected—including the feelings of those who decide not to have any treatment at all. It’s sadism to learn that someone is dangerously ill and to impose upon her your own set of unproven assumptions, especially ones that blame the patient for getting sick in the first place.

That meeting with Anne Coscarelli took place 18 years ago, and never once since then have I worried that my attitude was going to kill me. I’ve had several recurrences, all of them significant, but I’m still here, typing and drinking a Coke and not feeling super upbeat.

Before I left that meeting, I asked her one last question: Maybe I couldn’t think my way out of cancer, but wasn’t it still important to be as good a person as I could be? Wouldn’t that karma improve my odds a little bit?

Coscarelli told me that, over the years, many wonderful and generous women had come to her clinic, and some of them had died very quickly. Yikes. I had to come clean: Not only was I un-wonderful. I was also kind of a bitch.

God love her, she came through with exactly what I needed to hear:  “I’ve seen some of the biggest bitches come in, and they’re still alive.”

And that, my friends, was when I had my very first positive thought. I imagined all those bitches getting healthy, and I said to myself, I think I’m going to beat this thing.

One morning in the summer of 1999, Shukriya Barakzai woke up feeling dizzy and feverish. According to the Taliban’s rules, she needed a Maharram, a male guardian, in order to leave home to visit the doctor. Her husband was at work, and she had no sons. So she shaved her 2-year-old daughter’s head, dressed her in boys’ clothing to pass her off as a guardian, and slipped on a burka. Its blue folds hid her fingertips, painted red in violation of the Taliban’s ban on nail polish. She asked her neighbor, another woman, to walk with her to the doctor in central Kabul. Around 4:30 p.m. they left the doctor’s office with a prescription. They were heading toward the pharmacy when a truckload of Taliban militants from the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice pulled up beside them. The men regularly drove around Kabul in pickup trucks, looking for Afghans to publicly shame and punish for violating their moral code.

The men jumped out of the truck and started whipping Barakzai with a rubber cable until she fell over, then continued whipping her. When they finished, she stood up, crying. She was shocked and humiliated. She had never been beaten before.

“Are you familiar with something we call sadism?” Barakzai asked me when we spoke recently. “Like they don’t know why, but they are just trying to beat you, harm you, disrespect you. This is now [what] they enjoy. Even they don’t know the reason.”

She credits this moment for the birth of her life as an activist. Before Afghanistan’s capital descended into civil war in 1992, Barakzai had been studying hydrometeorology and geophysics at Kabul University. When the Taliban, then a relatively new militia, emerged victorious in 1996, Afghan women were forced to leave their studies. As Barakzai recovered from the beating, she made a decision: She would organize underground classes for girls at the sprawling apartment complex where she and her family lived, home to some 45 families. Barakzai would go on to help draft Afghanistan’s constitution and serve two terms in Parliament.

I first traveled to Afghanistan in May 2000, when I was 26 years old. I was living in India at the time, covering women’s issues in South Asia as a photojournalist, and I was curious about the lives of women living under the Taliban. Afghanistan was then emerging from 20 years of brutal conflict—first with the occupying Soviets, and then in a protracted civil war—that had left Kabul pockmarked and with little functioning infrastructure. In the mid-1990s, the Taliban had promised to bring an end to the violence, and many Afghans, exhausted from years of insecurity and relentless destruction, did not resist the Islamic-fundamentalist group. But peace came at the cost of many social, political, and religious freedoms.  

By the time of my first visit, the Taliban had implemented its interpretation of Sharia, Islamic law. Education for women and girls was forbidden under almost all circumstances, and women (except for select, approved female doctors) were not allowed to work outside of the home or even leave the house without a male guardian. Women who did go out were required to wear burkas, a traditional modesty garment that fits tightly over the head and drapes all the way to the ankles, rendering a woman fully covered and unidentifiable in public. All forms of entertainment were banned for everyone: music, television, socializing between sexes outside the family. Most educated Afghans had already fled to neighboring Pakistan and elsewhere; those who stayed had to change their lives to conform to the dictates of the oppressive regime.

As a single American woman, I needed to find a way to move around Afghanistan with a stand-in husband, and to take photographs without being caught (photography of any living thing was forbidden under the Taliban). I made contact with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which was one of the few international organizations still functioning in Afghanistan, and the Comprehensive Disabled Afghans Programme, a UN agency that sought to rehabilitate those injured by the many land mines spread across the country. The groups arranged for men to escort me, along with drivers and translators, through the provinces of Ghazni, Logar, Wardak, Nangarhar, Herat, and Kabul to surreptitiously photograph and interview Afghan women. I quickly learned the virtue of being a female photojournalist, despite the challenges: I had free access to women in spaces where men were culturally or legally prohibited to enter.  

From May 2000 to March 2001, over the course of three separate trips, I traveled around with my cameras and film tucked away in a small bag, visiting private homes, women’s hospitals, secret schools for girls. I went to underground mixed-gender weddings where the Titanic soundtrack bounced off the concrete basement walls as men and heavily made-up women (with nail polish) danced around in a display of pure joy—a simple pleasure that was punishable by execution under the regime controlling the streets outside.  

Perhaps the silence of life under the Taliban sits with me more than anything. There were very few cars, no music, no television, no telephones, and no idle conversation on the sidewalks. The dusty streets were crowded with widows who had lost their husbands in the protracted war; banned from working, their only means of survival was to beg. People were scared, indoors and out. Those who were brave enough to venture out spoke in hushed voices, for fear of provoking a Taliban beating for anything as simple as not having a long-enough beard (for a man) or a long-enough burka (for a woman), or sometimes for nothing at all. Shiny brown cassette tape fluttered from the trees and wires and signs and poles everywhere—a warning to those who dared to play music in private. Matches in Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium had been replaced with public executions on Fridays after prayer. Taliban officials used bulldozers or tanks to topple walls onto men accused of being gay. People who stole had their hand sliced off; accused adulterers were stoned to death.

During these trips, I witnessed the strength and resilience of Afghan women. I often asked myself what would become of Afghanistan if the Taliban fell. I imagined that the men and women who afforded me such great hospitality, humor, and strength would prosper, and that Afghans who had fled their country would finally be able to return home.

M

onths later came the attacks of September 11, 2001, and soon after that the American invasion of Afghanistan. The Taliban fell, and women quickly proved themselves invaluable to the work of rebuilding and running the country. There was a great rush of optimism, determination, and belief in the development and future of Afghanistan. But even as the Taliban disappeared back into the fabric of cities and villages, many of their conservative values, which had deep roots in Afghan society, persisted.   

I photographed the defeat of the Taliban in Kandahar in late 2001, and returned to the country with my camera at least a dozen times in the subsequent two decades. From Kabul to Kandahar to Herat to Badakhshan, I photographed women attending schools, graduating from universities, training as surgeons, delivering babies, working as midwives, running for Parliament and serving in government, driving, training to be police officers, acting in films, working—as journalists, translators, television presenters, for international organizations. Many of them were dealing with the impossible balancing act of working outside the home while raising children; of being a wife, a mother, a sister, or a daughter in a place where women were cracking glass ceilings daily, and often at great peril.

One of the people I met on my trips was Manizha Naderi, a co-founder of Women for Afghan Women. For more than a decade in Afghanistan, her organization helped implement a network of shelters and family mediation, counseling, and legal-aid services for Afghan women who had family issues, were victims of abuse, or were in prison without representation. Naderi now lives with her family in New York. When we spoke recently, I asked her whether she thought things had gotten better for Afghan women over the past two decades.

“Absolutely,” she answered. “Before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, there was nothing, no infrastructure, no legal system, no educational system, nothing there. And in the last 20 years, everything was re-created in the country, from education, to the legal system, to social, to economics … Women have gained everything. Not just women, but the Afghans in general have gained a lot.”

Now, of course, those gains appear to be disappearing. In the past week, the Taliban has taken over nearly every major city in the country; yesterday, forces swept into Kabul, and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. Militants have opened the doors of the prisons and released thousands of prisoners, sent women home from work, and removed girls from schools. In the advance toward the capital, forces have destroyed medical facilities, killed civilians, and left thousands of Afghans displaced. Some claim that the Taliban has demanded that women from the villages it conquers marry its unwed fighters (though the group denies this allegation).

Fawzia Koofi, another woman I got to know in Afghanistan, has poured her life into her country since the Taliban came to power in 1996. She, too, started a network of secret girls’ schools in the 1990s, in her home province of Badakhshan. Koofi was a member of Parliament from 2005 to 2019, and has been one of the people representing the Republic of Afghanistan in peace negotiations with the Taliban in advance of American troops’ departure from the country. When I first met her, in 2009, she was shuttling around Kabul, trailed by a small posse of male advisers and a security detail, returning home following long days in Parliament to a line of constituents at her doorstep pleading to voice their concerns about various issues. She was also raising two young daughters alone; her husband had died from tuberculosis in 2003, which he had contracted while imprisoned by the Taliban. Koofi seemed to never stop, or even tire. The Taliban has twice tried to assassinate her. She always carried around a handwritten letter to her daughters, just in case.  

When I called Koofi a few weeks ago in Kabul, the Taliban was already gaining ground around the country. Koofi was skeptical of the group’s promises that it would continue to allow Afghan women their freedoms to study and work outside the home. She cited a complete disconnect between what the Taliban officials were saying during peace negotiations in Qatar and the human-rights abuses her contacts said their foot soldiers were carrying out on the ground. I asked if she was scared.

“Honestly, I’m not scared of being assassinated,” Koofi told me. “I’m afraid of the country once again falling into chaos.”

As the Taliban overran cities across Afghanistan, Koofi was spending much of her time fielding calls from men and women who were terrified of the implications of a takeover. She was frustrated that she could offer little in the way of consolation. Shortly before I spoke with Koofi, a pregnant woman had called her from Faizabad, the capital of Badakhshan—a place I visited in 2009 to document the high rates of maternal death in the province. Over the course of the past decade, various advances have reduced that number. The woman calling Koofi needed to deliver this baby by Cesarean section, but the Taliban was closing in and she feared that she wouldn’t be able to get to a hospital for the procedure. She had only three weeks left until her delivery date, and no way to leave her home. What could she do? If the woman could not deliver by Cesarean, she might die, but Koofi had no way to help from Kabul. Last week, Faizabad fell to the Taliban.

Recently, the price of burkas has doubled, and in some cases increased by even more. Women are purchasing the best armor to protect themselves from the Taliban: the veil.

Over the weekend, as the Taliban encircled Kabul, I asked Koofi how she was doing and whether she had evacuated. She fled her home on Sunday and is now in hiding in Afghanistan. “No one is helping,” she told me. “Can you talk to the Americans?” I have been receiving WhatsApp messages like this daily from former female translators and subjects, expressing fear and asking me how to get out of Afghanistan.

I don’t know is my answer. I don’t know where you can go. I don’t think America will help anymore. No, I don’t think they will give you or your brother or my former driver from 11 years ago a visa. I don’t know what will happen to women in Afghanistan.

All I know is that the women I’ve met these past 20 years have astonished me with their determination and wit. They have made me crumble in laughter and in tears. I think about the crisp afternoon in Kabul in 2010 when I was driving around with an Afghan actress in the passenger seat of her car. Her beautiful, fully made-up face and hair were in full view as she blasted Iranian music and danced with her hands around the steering wheel. She drove past checkpoints, huddles of burkas, and startled and sneering men. She laughed, and I laughed, and I thought about how far Afghan women had come. The Taliban cannot take away who Afghan women have become in the past 20 years—their education, their drive to work, their taste of freedom.

And there is a new generation of Afghan women today, women who can’t remember what it was like to live under the Taliban. “They are full of energy, hope, and dreams,” Shukriya Barakzai told me. “They are not like me, as I was 20 years back. They’re more alert. They’re communicating with the world. It’s not [the] Afghanistan that was burned in a civil war. It’s a developed, free Afghanistan, with the free media, with women.” The Taliban is taking territory, Barakzai says, “but not the hearts and minds of people.”

Four years ago today, racists, antisemites, white nationalists, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, and other alt-right groups met in Charlottesville, Virginia, to “Unite the Right.” The man who organized the rally, Jason Kessler, claimed he wanted to bring people together to protest the removal of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a local park. But the rioters turned immediately to chants that had been used by the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s: “you will not replace us,” “Jews will not replace us,” and “blood and soil.” They gave Nazi salutes and carried Nazi insignia, and many brought battle gear and went looking for fights. By the end of August 12, they had killed counterprotester Heather Heyer and had injured 19 others. After the governor of Virginia declared a state of emergency, the rioters went home.

The Unite the Right rally drew a clear political line in America. Then-president Donald Trump refused to condemn the rioters, telling a reporter that there were “very fine people, on both sides.”

In contrast, former vice president Joe Biden watched the events at Charlottesville and concluded that the soul of the nation was at stake. He decided to run for president and to defeat the man he believed threatened our democracy. Biden was especially concerned with Trump’s praise for the “very fine people” aligned with the rioters. “With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden said, “and in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”

Four years later, it is much easier to see the larger context of the Charlottesville riot. The political threat of those gangs who tried to unite in Charlottesville in 2017 recalls how fascism came to America in the 1930s: not as an elite ideology, but as a unification of street brawlers to undermine the nation’s democratic government.

In 2018, historian Joseph Fronczak explored the arrival of fascism in the U.S. In an article in the leading journal of the historical profession, the Journal of American History, Fronczak explained how men interested in overturning Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency in 1934 admired and then imitated the violent right-wing gangs that helped overturn European governments and install right-wing dictators.

The United States had always had radical street mobs, from anti-Catholic gangs in the 1830s to Ku Klux Klan chapters in the 1860s to anti-union thugs in the 1880s. In the 1930s, though, those eager to get rid of FDR brought those street fighters together as a political force to overthrow the federal government.

While they failed to do so in an attempted 1934 coup, Fronczak explains, street fighters learned about the contours of fascism once their power as a violent street force was established. He argues that in the U.S., fascism grew out of political violence, not the other way around. Mobs whose members dressed in similar shirts, waved similar flags, and made similar salutes pieced together racist, antisemitic, and nationalistic ideas and became the popular arm of right-wing leaders. In America, the hallmark of budding fascism was populist street violence, rather than an elite philosophy of government.

The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville had the hallmarks of such a populist movement. Leaders brought together different gangs, dressed similarly and carrying the emblem of tiki torches, to organize and attack the government. Rather than rejecting the rioters, then-President Trump encouraged them.

From that point on, Trump seemed eager to ride a wave of violent populism into authoritarianism. He stoked populist anger over state shutdowns during coronavirus, telling supporters to “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” His encouragement fed the attacks on the Michigan state house in 2020. And then, after he repeatedly told his supporters the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, violent gangs attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the government and install him as president for another term.

While that attempted coup was unsuccessful, the empowerment of violent gangs as central political actors is stronger than ever. Since January 6, angry mobs have driven election officials out of office in fear for their safety. In increasingly angry protests, they have threatened school board members over transgender rights and over teaching Critical Race Theory, a legal theory from the 1970s that is not, in fact, in the general K–12 curriculum.

Now, as the coronavirus rages again, they are showing exactly how this process works as they threaten local officials who are following the guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to require masks. Although a Morning Consult poll shows that 69% of Americans want a return to mask mandates, vocal mobs who oppose masking are dominating public spaces and forcing officials to give in to their demands.

In Franklin, Tennessee, yesterday, antimask mobs threatened doctors and nurses asking the local school board to reinstate a mask mandate in the schools. “We will find you,” they shouted at a man leaving the meeting. “We know who you are.”

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Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/us/politics/Joe-Biden-Democratic-nominee.html

https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trumps-very-fine-people-both-sides-remarks/

http://www.processhistory.org/fronczak-fascism/

Joseph Fronczak, “The Fascist Game: Transnational Political Transmission and the Genesis of the U.S. Modern Right,” Journal of American History, 105 (December 2018): 563–588.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/17/liberate-michigan-trump-constitution/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/loudoun-schools-transgender-critical-race-theory/2021/06/23/1691dfc2-d453-11eb-ae54-515e2f63d37d_story.html

https://www.newschannel5.com/news/we-know-who-you-are-group-seen-threatening-medical-professionals-outside-williamson-co-school-board-meeting

https://morningconsult.com/2021/08/04/mask-mandates-behaviors-polling/

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So. A month ago I was in a really dark place mentally and couldn’t get out. I considered TMS because it’s worked before (for about 9 months each time) but I didn’t have the energy to commit another 35 hours in the chair so instead I decided to try psychedelic ketamine therapy for treatment resistantContinue reading "Adventures in ketamine. What it’s like to get way too high to try to cure your depression. (Part 1)"

When you want meatless tacos, try these roasted cauliflower tacos made in the air fryer, topped with Peruvian green sauce and pickled red onions.

Air Fryer Roasted Cauliflower Tacos

I have tons of air fryer recipes but needed a quick vegetarian taco to add to the list. These easy Roasted Cauliflower Tacos are a tasty vegetarian taco option made in the air fryer, my favorite appliance. I topped them with Peruvian green sauce, pickled onions, sour cream, and cilantro. More taco recipes you might like, Tzatziki Fish Tacos, Slow Cooker Chicken Tacos, and Vegetarian Black Bean Tacos.

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The post Air Fryer Roasted Cauliflower Tacos appeared first on Skinnytaste.

Last summer the temperature in London, where I live, climbed above 37 degrees Celsius—or 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It was hotter outside my body than it was inside it. To someone raised under the sodden, used-tissue skies of Britain, that felt like an offense against nature. Everywhere I went, I felt the same constricting, breathless sensation. The heat was like a prison; I had been sentenced to 100 degrees. Stuck at home all day because of COVID-19 shutdowns, I worked with my feet in a bucket of cold water, in front of a fan turned up to what I nicknamed the “Shakira setting.”

Britain’s homes and office spaces weren’t designed with high temperatures in mind; unlike in the Mediterranean and other hot climates, our buildings aren’t typically made with thick walls and shutters to keep out sunlight. Mechanical air-conditioning is unusual in private homes because we already have air-conditioning. We call it rain. Britain might be a rich, developed country, but that doesn’t make it ready for climate change.

Last summer was the first time I can remember thinking, before catching myself, that I couldn’t wait for Britain’s weather to go back to normal. A body-heat-level summer will always be normal. This is the world that fossil fuels made, a world where “freak” weather is not freakish. In the past year alone, wildfires in Australia affected 3 billion animals; cities in Pakistan and India surpassed 120 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature so hot that the roads started to melt; people died of heatstroke in Portland, Oregon; the London Underground turned into a log flume; the air in Montana was so full of smoke that, according to one resident, you chewed it rather than breathed it; and killer “megafloods” swept away riverside homes in Germany.

Some of the strange weather that people around the world have experienced recently is just that: weather. Natural variations in temperature and moisture. But you can live through only so many “once in a lifetime” rainstorms or heat waves before concluding that they are not once in a lifetime after all. Something is very wrong. Climate change no longer feels like an abstract problem for the future, like an asteroid hitting the Earth or a super-earthquake wiping out the Pacific Northwest. I am scared now. I’ve reached my personal tipping point.

[Read: 2050 is closer than 1990]

Understanding a problem intellectually is not the same as feeling its presence in your daily life. Like anyone who reads the news, I’ve been aware of climate change for years, during which the subject bobbed in and out of my field of vision. Like many journalists, I wondered how to make a subject so enormous, and so terrifying, connect with busy people living busy lives. The torrent of disaster footage from around the world has answered that question for me.

“Environmentalism” sounded woolly and tree-hugging when I read it or wrote it. “Climate change” sounded antiseptic and bloodless. “Look at that 50-foot wall of fire” might just do the trick. Every time I listen to blowhard TV presenters waffling about the dire “hockey-stick graph,” or oil executives soliciting praise for their company’s pitiful efforts to address the problem, or politicians falsely telling the public that we can keep consuming as much as we do, I will mentally Photoshop their babbling faces in front of the scenes from Greece, Turkey, or California this past weekend. Let’s see how convincing they sound over B-roll of a literal inferno.

The scientific consensus is clear that climate change is real, and it is equally clear that major action is needed to avoid further catastrophe. A new report from the International Panel on Climate Change warns that rising global temperatures are inevitable, that only a major reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions this decade can prevent climate breakdown, and that some changes may already be “irreversible.” I wince when I read reports like that, because of the danger that such news will prompt apathy rather than action. We’re all doomed, so why bother fighting it?

[Read: A catastrophic new climate report]

What has given me hope, oddly enough, is the coronavirus pandemic. In less than two years, scientists have created multiple vaccines against a previously unknown disease, and governments have begun to distribute them worldwide. Yes, the vaccine rollout suffers from the same problems that climate policy does; the richest countries attend to their own needs first. (Constant high temperatures are especially dangerous in countries where people have to work outside and can’t afford air-conditioning to cool themselves at night. Floods are made worse by cheap, unprotected housing. Wildfires rage more fiercely where the local population lacks enough fire trucks to tackle them.) But the lesson of the coronavirus is that proximity to disaster can change minds, even among those who feel that living in a rich country can insulate them from harm.

Contrast the vaccine take-up in Australia and Britain. In the former, the rollout has been sluggish. The government closed the borders early and infections have stayed low, and many Australians have therefore been reluctant to take the AstraZeneca vaccine, because of early concerns about a rare clotting reaction. Why not wait for supplies from Pfizer or Moderna? Here in Britain, which has counted more than 150,000 deaths from COVID-19, most people couldn’t get the vaccine—any vaccine—into their arms fast enough. For us, COVID-19 wasn’t a 30-second news report about terrible things happening overseas. It was a 50-foot wall of fire in our own backyard. In the United States, vaccination rates have picked up quickly in the communities currently being ravaged by infections from the Delta variant. As the global climate becomes more obviously chaotic, the public’s self-interest should accelerate what my colleague Robinson Meyer calls the “green vortex”—the process by which institutions and initiatives tackle challenges such as decarbonization even without strong national climate policies. For businesses, the economic benefits of free-riding on the depletion of natural resources will soon be weighed against the cost and inconvenience of having your data center washed away in a flash flood.

[Read: The concession to climate change I will not make]

Despair about the climate should also be tempered by the advances we have already seen in the past decade. Here in Britain, stories about “freak” weather now routinely mention climate change, stressing the connection between the two. The BBC documentaries by 95-year-old David Attenborough, a national treasure second only to the Queen, no longer merely show sad, skinny polar bears trying to hunt on melting ice; they explicitly discuss why the bears are so sad and skinny. (Attenborough’s recent Netflix documentary is even more powerful, as he points out that when he was born in 1926, the planet was a full degree cooler.) Even avowedly contrarian publications have less tolerance for climate-change deniers, who were once treated as a spicy provocation to liberal sensibilities. The culture war over climate has burned out as the real world has caught on fire.

I can only hope the United States follows this path too. I no longer feel like the dog in the cartoon, insisting that “this is fine.” This isn’t fine. We have messed up quite badly, for some noble reasons, such as lifting people out of poverty, and some less noble ones, such as enriching the shareholders of fossil-fuel companies. But the same ingenuity that got humanity here, the ingenuity that created the internal-combustion engine and the airplane and the power station and the megafarm, is what can save us.

The impulse to procrastinate is understandable. Anyone who has written a book or cleaned out a garage will know the feeling: Simply by beginning such a project, you have committed yourself to an enormous amount of time and labor, so it’s easier not to start at all. That’s where politicians come in. Individual changes are no substitute for political action. Through subsidies and taxes, governments need to make the greenest option also the easiest one to take. Again, the surprise of the pandemic has been the high levels of compliance with shutdowns and mask mandates, despite isolated instances of rebellion making the news. The coronavirus didn’t cause looting. Society didn’t break down. In the face of existential threats, most of us are cooperative, kind, and resilient. Those qualities are what propelled a bunch of apes through an evolutionary journey that led to humans reaching the moon, splitting the atom, and creating RuPaul’s Drag Race.

The first thing to do is let the fear in, without letting it paralyze us. This isn’t fine.

So what do we do next?

Over the past few months, I have been saving up all the advice I wish someone had given me when I went off to college. I realize that you will probably have to ignore much of this for years, but I am hoping little bits of it will pop into your mind at random moments.

1. Always drink two drinks fewer than you think you want to. You will get more joy out of life if you are alert to it, before that second-to-last drink, when the evening gets slurred. If you drink too much, you lose those lovely, wild moments. You basically miss them. If you master the art of getting just-the-right-amount drunk, you will have more fun.

2. Make sure to talk to your college professors. Maybe because they are intimidated or have more exciting things to do, most undergraduates don’t venture into office hours. Your professors will appreciate your making an effort to connect and discuss things. This will be useful for you later, if you need a recommendation or a job, but it is also the way to get the best possible education. I know this because I am a professor. So many of my most important pedagogical conversations happen in my office or outside of the classroom over coffee.

3. Learn how to read quickly for substance.

4. Don’t ignore boys who are nice. I know narcissistic, damaged, charismatically mean, or ultimately unavailable boys will seem appealing. I know suffering can seem glamorous in love, especially at your age, but this particular fallacy, this romantic view of feeling terrible, will cause you a lot of true pain, and lead you down many bad, distracting paths, so try to at least notice the nice boys when you walk into a room. A subset of this: Men who cook are probably harboring other very good qualities. Another subset: Run in the other direction from an angry man. Anger does not equal passion.

5. Don’t wait too long to learn to drive, like I did. You have to do it before you have a sense of your own mortality, or you will never be a natural driver.

6. Keep a notebook to write down important quotes when you come across them. You will be very happy if you do this,  and can find these quotes when you need them. Otherwise, there will definitely be many times when you think of a quote and can’t quite remember it and can’t find it on the internet and your life will be worse because of this.

7. Write in books.

8. This is for later, but you might as well start thinking about it now: Be independent. Even if you are married, or madly in love, or living with someone, make sure you always have your own income and your own financial independence. This will give you freedom and security if you need to leave (and a healthier, more balanced relationship if you want to stay).

9. Pay more attention to nature and beauty. In this phase of life, you will sometimes think your inner dramas are more compelling than, say, the light in the trees, or the pink-streaked sky you will see when you’re staying up ’til dawn, but you are wrong.

10. This may be one of those things that are so indescribably annoying that you have to tune them out, but I am going to go ahead and say it anyway. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to appreciate what a crazy luxury school is until you are finished with it. Even when you are stressed about an exam, or nauseous from staying up all night writing a paper, or racing to class on a cold day, try to appreciate the onetime splendor of being immersed in friends, eating every single meal with them, discussing blooming dramas in every waking hour, having nothing expected of you from the universe but reading and thinking and arguing and expanding your known world. Later, when many things are expected of you, this time will take on a magical, suspended quality. But even now, in small flashes, you may be able to savor it, apprehend the fleeting pleasure and total, glorious artificiality of college.

11. Find a place in a library where you feel a little bit exalted about your work.

12. Save letters. Print out important emails and save them too.

13. Do not be afraid to ask for more money for a job if you deserve it. I have probably taught you to be too polite and respectful of authority to do this, but ignore me!

14. In all remotely professional emails, write something in the subject line so you can find it later.

15. Do not use parentheses in your writing in a lazy way, when you can’t be bothered to cram all the information into a single graceful sentence. Only use them when they serve some positive stylistic purpose. In other words, use them if you are setting off the information in parentheses for a reason like humor or emphasis.

16. Don’t forget to sleep. When life is so full of people and thoughts and things to read and parties, it is tempting to just not sleep. But one of these days you will wake up feeling an unaccustomed sense of peace and calm, when you are totally un-frantic and un-anxious, and you will think to yourself, Oh this is what it feels like to get eight hours of sleep!

This humanity at play makes my heart happy: In one of the most exciting and competitive high jump finals in Olympic history, Qatar’s Mutaz Essa Barshim and Italy’s Gianmarco Tamberi — who both cleared 2.37m — decided to forgo a jump-off and share the gold.

Click through and watch the video here.

This. Is. Beautiful!

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There’s a special time in everybody’s life, and by “special” we mean “really confusing and also seriously what the heck is going on?” It’s that special time that Greg Van Eekhout covers in his novel Weird Kid, and along the way he gets into why being a weird kid is, kinda, sometimes, awesome.

GREG VAN EEKHOUT:

I was visiting an elementary school and after my author talk a kid came up to my signing table and I said hello and he said, “What is the best pencil sharpness?” You get asked a lot of interesting questions at visits, like “How much money do you make?” and “Are you a Christian?” and “Why do we have to be here?” so I was happy to get lobbed such a softball. “Sharp,” I answered, “because line precision.” But I got it wrong, because sharp leads are prone to breakage, yet dull pencils produce muddy lines, so the correct answer was medium, obviously.  We happily chatted about pencils for a while until I told him about a shop in New York City that sells pencils and only pencils and then he went a little pale and floated off in a state of wonder.

I was so delighted to meet this fine young person with their joyous obsession, and I hoped all their weird interests would be respected and nurtured and celebrated. But I also worried. Because he was only a few short years away from middle school.

In his Life in Hell comic, Matt Groening identifies middle school as the deepest circle of Hell, and he’s not wrong. I still remember my first day of middle school (I’m old, so back then it was junior high). There was a whole new vocabulary and new set of behaviors and ways of being a person that nobody had bothered to tell me about. Even the teachers were weird. They acted like they hadn’t known me for six years (possibly because they hadn’t known me for six years). They acted like they weren’t already aware I was an awesome kid. Nobody wanted to talk about pencils. I was weird in a world where it was no longer okay to be weird.

We meet Jake Wind, the protagonist of Weird Kid, on his first day of middle school, and he faces all the weirdnesses of middle school that I did, only with some additional challenges, because he’s a shape-changing ball of goo from another planet who’s just barely managing to maintain human form.  The metaphor is pretty obvious, I know.

As you might deduce from the description of Jake’s plight, this is a deeply personal, cathartic story to me. I wrote it for the pencil enthusiasts and alien goo kids and everyone who’s beautifully, spectacularly, gloriously a little or a lot weird.  I wrote it for the kids who haven’t yet found a home in a community of likewise weird people. And I wrote it for the kids who haven’t yet learned that the things that make them weird are the very same things that make them interesting, and fun, and invaluable.

Also, Jake’s dad is a proctologist, so there are a lot of butt jokes. The butt jokes earned praise in a starred Publishers Weekly review. I’m pretty proud of that. 

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Weird Kid: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Mysterious Galaxy

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site. Follow him on Twitter.