This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Candidate’s mom keeps emailing to follow up on her behalf
I’m in a position to hire older teens (usually just graduated high school) for a summer job. I have a question about how to handle an applicant’s mom. The child applied, but their mom keeps emailing to follow-up. At the beginning of my career, I worked in higher education (freshman orientation) for several years. In all of our parent programming, we were very clear that contacting your child’s professor wouldn’t help and no one can give you information anyway due to FERPA laws.
Everything in me wants me to respond to the mom and say that it’s not appropriate to email potential employers on behalf of your adult or soon-to-be adult child. To date, I have ignored the mom and only reached out to the applicant. Honestly, the thought of dealing with or making our manager deal with a helicopter parent as an employer makes me not want to hire this applicant. Is it my place to give this parent (or child) feedback?
At a minimum, you could email the mom back and say, “We do not discuss applicants’ candidacy with anyone other than the applicant themselves. We’ll respond to her directly.”
Should you say more? You’re not obligated to but you can if you want to, and you’d probably be doing both of them a favor if you spelled it out more explicitly. For example: “If I can give some advice that will help Jane, I recommend that you not contact employers on her behalf. We want to see that she can manage work-related communications independently, without a parent’s involvement, since she would be expected to do that if we hire her. You risk hurting her chances if you contact employers on her behalf.”
2. How do you evaluate “flourishing”?
I work as an administrator in an academic department in a public university. It’s basically the same old story of being overworked and underpaid. We are guaranteed a 3% raise at the end of the fiscal year and normally up to 5% with merit. Merit is based on the annual performance review, which is two parts: a self-evaluation and your supervisor’s evaluation. Even if you receive “Exceeds Expectation” on all parts of the evaluation, you don’t really see a raise beyond 3.9% (and that’s if you’re lucky).
This year, HR is shaking things up and wants us to answer five open-ended questions. Four of the questions I don’t really have a problem with, it’s the first one that I do: “How did you demonstrate [University’s] core values?” One of those core values is “flourishing.” The university website talks about “flourishing” as being able to make choices for a healthy and fulfilling life.
First, how do you prove or demonstrate that you’re flourishing? I’ve sardonically told others that I’ve taken fewer sick days due to burnout. I don’t think that is what HR or the dean’s office wants to hear.
Second, how do I evaluate if someone is flourishing? I am a supervisor, and I want to make sure that my supervisees get the best evaluation that they can get.
Can you just … ignore that value and focus on others that seem more relevant? Unless there’s something that specifically states you must address every value individually, it’s not uncommon for evaluations to pull out specific values that the manager (or evaluee) wants to talk about, rather than doing a full inventory of all of them.
But it could also be interesting to ask HR if they can give some examples of what employee alignment or misalignment with that value would look like in a work context. I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t have good examples.
3. My employer wants us to list our dietary restrictions publicly
I have a situation at my job where there is a mandatory all-hands meeting that lasts all day and we will be fed. Thankfully, my workplace is willing to accommodate dietary restrictions (I have Celiac and cannot eat anything with gluten), but the way they are collecting this information gives me pause. Instead of a private form that only goes to the person ordering the catering, we were all sent a shared Google spreadsheet where we are expected to put in our name and dietary restrictions in order to RSVP. I don’t like the idea of anyone and everyone RSVPing for the meeting being able to see my restriction, but I’m not sure if this counts as private medical information that shouldn’t be shared. Is there a way I can push back against this public form and still be able to get my gluten-free lunch?
There’s no legal issue here (except maybe in some very narrowly defined circumstances) but it’s still not information that needs to be public. Try sending the organizer (or their boss, if you don’t trust the organizer to be responsive) a message that says, “Could you arrange for us to submit dietary restrictions privately instead? I’d rather not broadcast my medical restrictions to the whole company, and I imagine there are others who feel the same.”
4. Pimple patches vs visible pimples
I am a middle career professional office worker, who occasionally gets large facial pimples. (Like, about once a month, one pimple on my chin or mouth. Hormones, I assume, though regular mask wearing probably doesn’t help.) I don’t usually wear makeup, and don’t really have the skills to cover up such a large spot without it looking really weird. (And I worry about further inflaming it by piling on makeup, plus getting makeup all over the inside of my mask.)
When I’m working from home, I usually use a hydrocolloid pimple patch, which is not visible on video calls. But what’s the best thing to do for in-person days? I feel like pimple patches have gotten more mainstream, but I’m not sure if it ends up calling more attention to it, since even if I use the “clear” ones, they’re still visible. What do you think?
If you’re wearing a mask, can you just let the mask cover it?
I tend to think pimple patches draw more attention to it in person, especially for people who are unfamiliar with them, which is still a lot of people. (You also wouldn’t want to use one at work at the stage where it’s drawing out gross stuff from the pimple and trapping it under a clear patch.) But it’s a perfectly valid option to just let the pimple run free! You’re a human who occasionally get blemishes. It’s fine.
5. Leaving a job to care for an aging parent
I took a new job late last year to be closer to my aging parent. At the time, my parent was showing signs of worsening health but was still functioning well. Unfortunately my parent’s condition has been deteriorating rapidly over the last few weeks. My job requires a rigid work schedule and offers minimal flexibility, though my boss has done their best to support me within this structure.
I’m wondering if I can try to advocate for a part-time schedule in the interim or if I should rip the bandaid off and quit, knowing this is where I am likely headed as my parent requires more care? My position was unfilled for over a year before I arrived and there is a shortage of people with my skills. I’m also open to other advice from readers who have navigated similar situations.
If you’re going to quit otherwise, you might as well ask if what you want is possible first! If it’s not, it’s not — but there’s nothing wrong with inquiring. I’d say that in other circumstances too, but it’s especially true when there’s a shortage of people who can fill your job.
MUSKEGON, MI—Letting out an emphatic sigh as the boy began crying, local dad Harry Moran reportedly lost his patience Wednesday after providing his child with several continuous seconds of emotional support. “Oh, come on, are we still talking about this? I just said I was proud of you, for God’s sake!” the 44-year-old…
Countries such as Canada, the UK, and Australia often struggle to build transit projects cost effectively, and a big part of this is a lack of in-house expertise at transit agencies. If a transit agency doesn’t have someone on hand who can draw up a plan or advise on a technical issue, they will typically hire an outside consultant, this is not only expensive, but it also probably doesn’t help build internal capability, so reliance on outsiders is maintained.
Construction of the Ontario Line.
Now, sometimes consultants might make sense — there are some things that any organization might only have to do very infrequently and for which it doesn’t make sense to have someone on staff, but transit systems (at least in big cities) shouldn’t be doing any of the following infrequently.
Building and maintaining electrification
Upgrading signalling
Rebuilding stations
Expanding capacity on busy lines / services
Unfortunately though, even when a big city manages to figure things out, there is no guarantee that smaller cities will, or even other big cities.
In the Canadian case, a great example of this is GO Transit in Toronto — who has managed to buy up a ton of the network it operates across, and get most lines running an all-day hourly service or better (this is huge in the context of North America where most suburban rail runs a number of trips per day that can be counted on my hands). By comparison, the once fairly similar “EXO” commuter train network in Montreal has not been able to similarly buy up track space and expand service, which is obviously bad for Montreal and the country as a whole. The ideal situation would be EXO and GO pulling from the same team of experts who can apply solutions they find in one city to the other quite easily given the stakeholders, technical standards and the like are broadly similar. And of course, something similar could be said for VIA rail, which likely has some specialized expertise in things like maintaining aging rolling stock, but does not run nearly the same level of service as GO or manage building the same type of capital projects at similar frequency — such as new stations, as well as grade separations. And this is all on top of Ottawa, which has built a modern mainline railway with its O-Train Line 2!
EXO commuter trains in Montreal.
The reality is that a number of different organizations in Canada (and other countries) are often trying to do the same things in parallel, and while they can share knowledge and communicate amongst themselves, having a more unified organization would likely be useful. I think this is a big part of the benefit of having an infrastructure owner-operator model as in the EU, because no matter where you are in France, or Germany, or Sweden, you will more or less build railways the same way. If other countries were to have the type of transportation systems seen in these European countries, we need to stop reinventing the wheel… several times over. There should probably be a national entity in a country like Canada or the US that can come up with solutions to transit problems or opportunities presented by cities, states, and provinces, drawing from experience on projects nationwide.
It’s been fairly well reported that in for, example, France, the RATP act as consultants for cities across the country when they are looking to build new transit. This not only makes building transit projects more efficient and cost effective, but it helps get projects that might not otherwise be financially viable over the line.
And you can see how this would make sense in cities across places like North America. A smaller city like Victoria or even Calgary probably doesn’t have the fiscal resources to go through the motions that Toronto has with GO Transit to figure out how to turn it into a modern railway (we have spent an enormous amount with… less impressive results than I’d like), but once Toronto figures it out, they could certainly emulate and build to the same standards.
So, I think the direction we need to move in is one where technical expertise and resources are shared at the widest applicable level, especially when good railways and transit should be a federal priority; regulating railways is a federal responsibility, and the federal government always contributes a large portion of the funds for new transit projects. It simply doesn’t make sense for those building and operating rail in Canada — namely Metrolinx — to be so far removed from those outlining the regulations and technical standards.
And the idea of setting national technical standards makes a lot of sense, and not just in Canada. From the Ontario Line, to the REM, to Sydney Metro and Melbourne’s suburban rail loop, similar projects with similar technical needs within a single country should adopt similar standards to increase the potential economies of scale that can be delivered in future maintenance and equipment orders. That would truly be a national approach to transit.
"In the plausible future, there is going to be a whole generation of humans living their lives in zero-gravity," Chang writes. "This kind of environmental shift will totally reshape our understanding of space and body function."
"When our hands and feet are no longer suitable for the task of controlling our movement in zero gravity, we need a new form of body extension."
"This limb has the ability to automatically anchor to your surroundings, and stabilize your position while floating inside a space station."
"Wave - Hit - Wrap / Automatic Anchoring"
"Just like a snake hunting, uses its whole body to wrap and squeeze."
From the original concept to the final functional prototype, the limb has been upgraded 12 times to ensure every structure on it can cooperate perfectly under its context.
[Editor's note: In the descriptions below, I think Cheng may be confusing the role of flesh versus tendons—it's possible there's a translation issue.]
"Control String – The control string is like our muscles, driving the limb to move."
"The Rubber Band Structure – The rubber band is like our flesh, it doesn't have the ability to move the limb, but functions as a mechanism to prevent the limb from curving too much."
"The Limb Bone – Inspired by the dinosaur tail, connecting with each other by joint ball, which let the limb have the power to conduct heavy load tasks."
"As We Move Towards Evolution"
"This Augmented Limb prototype [seeks to answer] how should we respond to living environment changes driven by fast-developing technologies? When the evolution conducted by nature can't catch up with the speed of how we implement technology to send us into an environment full of uncertainty, what should we do?"
Honestly just the idea of royalty is wild to me. You’re just keeping human pets at this point. It’s weird. It’s a weird thing to do. You’re collective pet owners of a bunch of purebreds that are spoiled rotten and think they’re the boss of you.
“We can’t go in the big palace. Yes we own it but that’s Charles’ palace. He’s very nervous and he gets upset if anyone gets into his palace, and honestly it’s not worth dealing with him afterwards.”
“We’re throwing a party for Charles, it’s really expensive but wait until you see how cute they look in their little outfits! (No, we can’t eat any of the food, it’s not for us.)”
Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week.
"Time to delete your Glassdoor account and data," Monica, a Midwest-based software professional, warned other Glassdoor users in a blog. (Ars will only refer to Monica by her first name so that she can speak freely about her experience using Glassdoor to review employers.)
Monica joined Glassdoor about 10 years ago, she said, leaving a few reviews for her employers, taking advantage of other employees' reviews when considering new opportunities, and hoping to help others survey their job options. This month, though, she abruptly deleted her account after she contacted Glassdoor support to request help removing information from her account. She never expected that instead of removing information, Glassdoor's support team would take the real name that she provided in her support email and add it to her Glassdoor profile—despite Monica repeatedly and explicitly not consenting to Glassdoor storing her real name.
Chrysotile asbestos, aka "white asbestos," is still imported, processed, and used in the US for diaphragms (including those used to make sodium hydroxide and chlorine), sheet gaskets, brake blocks, aftermarket automotive brakes/linings, other vehicle friction products, and other gaskets, the EPA notes.
Exposure to asbestos is known to cause lung cancer, mesothelioma, ovarian cancer, and laryngeal cancer. And asbestos is linked to more than 40,000 deaths annually just in the US.
Enlarge / "Trimming the Herbs," mapped above, is all that stands between "Team 0%" and its ultimate goal of clearing every Super Mario Maker level. (credit: Is SMM Beaten Yet?)
As of late 2017, there were almost 85,000 "uncleared" levels in the original Wii U Super Mario Maker (SMM)—levels that had never been beaten by anyone except for their original uploaders. As of this writing, a group of persistent players gathered under the banner of "Team 0%" has spent years narrowing the list of uncleared levels to a single entry—a devious, Super Mario World-styled Bob-omb bounce-and-throw gauntlet named "Trimming the Herbs" (the second-to-last uncleared level went down on Thursday, March 14, as noted on the excellent "Is SMM Beaten Yet?" tracker).
Given enough time, Team 0% would undoubtedly be able to bring down SMM's "final boss," as it were. But the collective effort to finally and completely "beat" SMM has an external deadline: April 8, the day Nintendo has announced that it plans to finally shut down the aging Wii U's gameplay servers.
The next three weeks will determine whether Team 0% can live up to its moniker or if this one final level will leave the team just short of its ultimate achievement. "I’d never think we would be this close to actually achieving this goal," Team 0% founder Jeffie told Ars Technica recently. "How often does a community of gamers do something like this?"
DORADO, PUERTO RICO—In response to a training video that the six-time former heavyweight champion posted in anticipation of their match, Jake Paul announced Monday that he was bringing a gun with him to fight Mike Tyson. “This July, when I fight Mike Tyson, I will come to the arena with a loaded firearm,” the…
LAS VEGAS—Now in the eighth year of his long-term residency at the resort, pop star Bruno Mars reportedly owes the Park MGM $50 million after having assumed since 2016 that the casino cocktails were complimentary. “They’re supposed to be free, right—at least while you’re gambling?” asked the “Uptown Funk” singer,…
VANDALIA, OH—Drawing criticism for what many called his dehumanizing and hurtful rhetoric, former President Donald Trump gave a campaign speech in Ohio over the weekend in which he referred to migrants as “Dons and Erics,” according to sources in attendance. “There are millions of these Dons and Erics pouring over the…
HOUSTON—Laughing and smiling the whole night as they bonded over Emily Barkan’s flaws, local couple Jay and Brenda Barkan were reportedly really hitting it off with their daughter’s emotionally abusive boyfriend this week. “Andrew is such a gentleman—I was about to suggest Emily stick to salad tonight, but then he…
WASHINGTON—Concluding that it had found no clear reason to doubt the veracity of such emails, texts, and direct messages, the Federal Communications Commission announced Tuesday that all messages it had seen offering free iPads seemed pretty legit. “Usually there are only a few typos, and it all seems above board;…
BATON ROUGE, LA—Admitting it was the only way she could accomplish anything lately, local woman Kelley Lawrence reported Friday that she tended to do her best creative thinking when backed into a corner with her livelihood at stake. “The only time inspiration strikes these days is when I’m faced with losing my home…
They burned his coat before they killed him. This was in Fort Worth, in 1921, during a strike at a packinghouse: A Black worker, excluded from the whites-only union, crossed the picket line. After his shift, he was confronted by white strikers. What I know of the story comes from century-old newspaper accounts that I suspect may have favored drama over accuracy; they say the man talked back to the picketers, was stabbed by one of them, and pulled a gun from the pocket of his overcoat and shot two people. Then he was badly beaten and left for dead. Once the police had hauled him off, the man’s attackers, in the words of the next day’s edition of the Fort Worth Record, “made a bonfire of the Negro’s coat on Exchange Avenue.”
It takes some effort to burn a coat. Hence the bonfire. Although this is another detail I can’t verify, the coat burning has the strangeness of truth—of an omen, even. It’s as though the killers wanted to destroy evidence ahead of time.
To go looking for traces of a person who was lynched is to encounter one erasure after another, beginning with a bonfire lit one winter afternoon. I’m tempted to fill in details: the stink of burning wool, mingled with the packinghouse odors of cowshit and blood. The flames gobbling up the fabric. A handful of white people lingering with fists in their pockets, mesmerized by the fire.
But see how quickly I’ve lost track of the man I’m trying to locate, who disappears along with his coat.
On a mild fall morning, I make my way to East Exchange Avenue and find myself on a bluff overlooking the Stockyards. The Swift and Armour meatpacking plants that once bolstered the city’s status as a center of the livestock trade are long gone, while the stockyards have become a tourist attraction. I can hear a guide’s amplified voice, and I turn to see a group of enormous, old-looking longhorns, white and rust and brown-colored, being paraded down the brick street, a living tableau of the men-with-bovines version of Texas history.
I’ve come for a different tour. A bright red Dodge truck pulls up, and the driver, Fred Rouse, apologizes for “the mess,” which amounts to one loose water bottle. He’s neatly dressed and speaks in a soft, calm voice, belying the upheavals he’s weathered since 2020. His mother died from COVID that year, in August. A month later, he’d just settled in to watch Game 1 of the NBA finals when a friend he hadn’t spoken to in many years called and asked whether he could pass on Rouse’s number to some people he knew. Once connected, members of a community group called the Tarrant County Coalition for Peace and Justice (TCCPJ) started telling Rouse about a man they said was his grandfather, also named Fred Rouse. Your grandfather was lynched, they said.
The Fred Rouse who’d been sitting on his couch rooting for the Lakers figured they’d made a mistake. He was 46 years old, a network engineer, a father of three. He’d moved to the Dallas area after college and more recently to a suburb of Fort Worth. His dad had died when he was 12, and he’d never known anything about his dad’s dad—not even his first name—but this story about a lynching didn’t line up. As far as he knew, he didn’t have any family in town. Then the callers identified his mother and father and siblings. They verified other things he knew to be true of his family, and he was convinced: On December 11, 1921, his grandfather had been dragged from a hospital room where he was recovering from a beating and hanged from a hackberry tree on Samuels Avenue.
“It was like, ‘All right, that’s not really something I wanted to hear four weeks after my mom died,’” says Rouse. Yet soon, he was in touch with a cousin in Fort Worth he’d never known, and he joined the TCCPJ. He became Fred Rouse III. Now he is helping to create a memorial to his grandfather and contributing to another project, one that will turn what was once a Ku Klux Klan headquarters into the Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing.
In a city that has traditionally identified itself with nostalgic legends of cowboys and pioneers and oilmen, these efforts to commemorate the first Fred Rouse, Tarrant County’s sole documented Black lynching victim, aim to make visible some of what those legends obscured. Even more ambitiously, they intend to seek solace through art and architecture and landscaping and community, to reckon with horror and death in beautiful new spaces.
As we look down at the Stockyards, Rouse points to the spot where his grandfather was first beaten up, then to the old streetcar tracks embedded in the brick. His grandfather had a chance to escape by boarding a car, Rouse says. He was denied entrance by the conductor, though, and fell into the hands of the mob. The Record would report that “his face has been beaten almost into a jelly, and his body is bruised and filled with holes.”
Nostalgia, according to one theory, helped fuel the wave of lynchings in Texas during the 1910s and early 1920s. Violence had long been seen as necessary for white people’s survival and prosperity here, whether through fights with Native Americans, the stringing up of suspected cattle thieves, wars against Mexico and the Northern United States, or assaulting abolitionists and, later, carpetbaggers. Killing was established as a ritual of manhood, historian William Carrigan has argued, and in the modern era, lynching became a callback to the violent frontier past.
“We have no idea about the ghosts that are walking the streets of Tarrant County.”
In the immediate wake of the Civil War, many whites were lynched, but by the close of the nineteenth century, lynching victims were overwhelmingly Black and their murders were turned into entertainment. The most notorious such spectacle was the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, which drew more than 10,000 people to witness a “feeble-minded” 17-year-old be dragged, beaten, stabbed, doused in oil, amputated and castrated, then slowly lowered onto a fire. Here the language typically used to characterize lynchings—as racial terror, as a form of social control—doesn’t really seem adequate. Terrorism has a twisted logic to it; this was much more deranged, a collective sociopathic turn. Sadism as a pastime.
There will never be an accurate tally of Texas lynchings, says Jeffrey Littlejohn, a history professor at Sam Houston State University who maintains a website, Lynching in Texas, with a map-based interface of known killings. “People will call me and say ‘I have this story, I can’t really confirm it,’ and then you look into it and you can’t really confirm it, either,” he says. To date, he and his students have documented more than 600 Texas lynchings, and in 75 percent of those, the victims were Black men.
“I want people to understand that these events happened in their communities, cities, counties,” Littlejohn says. “People were reading about them in the newspapers. Lynching is mixed right in there with what the federal government was doing, what bills had passed, what wars were being fought abroad, what the corn and cotton prices were, and here’s a big story about someone who was burned at the stake on a square in Conroe.”
From the Stockyards, Rouse drives us to our next stop. He’s leading me through the TCCPJ’s Fred Rouse Memorial Tour (originally developed by DNAWORKS, an arts group, as the Fort Worth Lynching Tour: Honoring the Memory of Mr. Fred Rouse) which guides visitors through the events of his grandfather’s final days. We park behind an office building downtown, which a century ago was the hospital where the police brought Rouse once they realized he was still alive. The Negro ward was located in the basement. I picture a sort of subterranean field hospital, people languishing on cots in a continual twilight, while one of them, a man with a ruined face who wasn’t supposed to survive, is somehow clawing his way back to life.
The building is now part of the Bass Performance Hall complex, but high above the entrance, the words “City & County Hospital” are engraved in stone. Earlier I spoke by phone with Timeka Gordon, who grew up on the east side of Fort Worth and is now the director of the Intercultural Center at Texas Christian University, as well as a member of TCCPJ. She helped develop the tour, and when she first came to the hospital site and saw the inscription, she told me, “I lost it. Here we are in downtown Fort Worth, a place I had visited so many times as an adult and as a child. I’ve learned about everything else, and never did I learn about this man and what happened here. We have no idea about the ghosts that are walking the streets of Tarrant County.”
Thanks to the TCCPJ, a local marker program, and cooperative property owners, there’s now a sign outside the building that tells of how Rouse was abducted from the hospital: Late at night on the fifth day of his convalescence, a group of men barged into the Negro ward and demanded he be turned over to them.
Fred Rouse III stands over the sign and reads a line out loud: “When the nurse called their attention to the fact that he had no clothes, they jokingly replied that ‘he would not need any.’” The men dragged him away and ferried him north, headed for a tree where a white man had been hanged the year before.
In 2019, Gordon took a group of TCU students to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, established by the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). There, more than 800 hanging steel pillars represent counties where lynchings occurred, the victims’ names etched in the metal. On the way, Gordon was contacted by a TCU colleague, who asked her to look for a particular name, Fred Rouse. It was the first Gordon had heard of him. “I was dead set on looking for the pillar. I became all-consumed, and my students did as well,” she says. They found the marker with Rouse’s name on it. “We were determined when we got back to TCU to research this man.”
The professor who’d contacted her, Adam McKinney, had already begun that research, prompted by a column in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about the Tarrant County pillar. With others they formed the TCCPJ, its mission to memorialize Rouse and to spark broader conversations about race. The group raised enough money to purchase a plot of land at Samuels Avenue and NE 12th Street, where Rouse was hanged from a hackberry limb.
It would’ve been close to midnight by the time the men brought Rouse there to what was known as the death tree. Word spread quickly, and a mob of dozens, maybe as many as a hundred white people, left their beds to watch the hanging. Afterward some in the mob fired shots at his dead body; others threw rocks.
The tree was chopped down three days later. Two policemen and a railroad employee would be charged with murder, but the cases were eventually dropped.
The corner of Samuels Avenue and NE 12th Street is now part of an industrial zone bordered by railroad tracks and a thoroughfare. Rouse and I head there and walk onto a spit of grass that sits next to a window-cleaning business and across from a huge lot where semi-trailers are docked at a warehouse. Back-up alarms pierce the air over the rumbling and whining of motors. In addition to purchasing the land, the TCCPJ worked with EJI to install a commemorative marker, and hired a design firm to plan a memorial at the site.
There are no trees on the land now, which makes it all the harder to picture what occurred a century ago. The dreary environment around it, with its expanses of concrete, its corrugated flex-space buildings and relentless engines, is so familiar—we’ve all passed through a zillion ugly, paved-over places like this, wrecked for the sake of shipping and logistics and whatever else—and I remember that it’s not just the cows-and-oil version of history that hides the past from us.
For Fred Rouse III, the twists of fate that brought him to this spot seem so improbable as to suggest some larger force at work. On the hundredth anniversary of the lynching, the TCCPJ and others held a ceremony for the marker’s unveiling, and Rouse addressed the gathered crowd. Now he recalls some of the speech for me: “One hundred years ago today, my grandfather’s blood was shed on this land, but 100 years later, his blood came back, his flesh came back, and his name came back.” Rouse is still amazed by this.
“When I was standing there giving that speech, it was like I was on a mountaintop,” he says. “All the things that had to happen, to put me there a hundred years later, to the day. I can’t even describe the feeling.”
Both the Fred Rouse memorial and the planned arts space are meant to be sites of community healing. Wondering what that could look like, I talk to Diane Jones Allen, principal landscape architect at DesignJones, which designed the memorial. Previously she and a team designed the Tamir Rice Memorial in Cleveland, and in both projects, questions about how to balance trauma with beauty and tranquility have played out in practical, material decisions. For the Rouse memorial, moreover, “It’s an industrial zone, that was our challenge,” she told me.
In the final design, three steel panels with tree-shaped openings serve as thresholds for visitors to pass through before arriving at a wall of remembrance. Plants will surround the path and fill the space between the memorial and the window cleaning company. In the renderings, the cutouts in the panels seem to make the absence of the hackberry tree visible, a jagged hole, and I can see how these nontrees might serve as a kind of portal. Walk through them and discover what happened.
Rouse’s story had been largely forgotten in Fort Worth before the EJI lynching memorial revived it, yet there are some people who knew about Rouse all along. One is Sandy Joyce, editor of La Vida News: The Black Voice, a weekly paper founded in 1957. Joyce grew up in Fort Worth, occasionally accompanying her mother to her job as a maid for a wealthy white family, and attended I.M. Terrell High School, which was the Black high school when the school district was segregated. She then left for Columbia University and lived in New York for 27 years before returning to Fort Worth in the mid-1990s.
Joyce went to a meeting that DesignJones held for community members, she says, and came away with mixed feelings. “I told them, ‘This is really not as successful as it could be, because these people [at the meeting] don’t know [the location] where you’re talking about’”—and not just because the site is in a warehouse zone. Fort Worth has always been the kind of place where people on the south side often didn’t know much about the north side, and vice versa, Joyce told me, and that makes it harder to define the community of interest for the memorial.
After Rouse’s tour I meet up with her, and she guides me around the Southside, a historic middle-class Black neighborhood of frame houses and wide avenues. She gestures toward old clubs that have closed and old churches that are still going and a popular Jamaican restaurant. Then we stop at a public library branch, one that Joyce and other activists had fought to have built. She shows me the community room, lined with old photos of schoolchildren in all-Black classrooms, and names some of the teachers. While she never says it outright, I believe she’s trying to help me at least glimpse the larger arc of Black history in the city, to make sure I see more than the lynching.
Just up the street from the library is Evans Avenue Plaza, built in the early 2000s, where stone rectangles embedded in the brick commemorate notable events in local African-American history. One of the plaques, for instance, notes that in 1919, a Black branch of the YMCA was established in Tarrant County, and in 1920, African American voters helped implement a city mayor form of government, and in 1921, Fred Rouse was lynched for crossing a picket line. Here, it seems, Rouse was remembered quietly, locally, as part of a broader history. Worthy as it is to commemorate what happened to him in a larger way, to tell his story to people across Fort Worth and beyond, I can see how, for someone who’s lived with this knowledge for a long time—and who’s seen her share of well-meaning groups try to do things that die on the vine—the memorial project might elicit a more cautious kind of support.
Another project, the arts center named for Fred Rouse, is much bigger in scale than the memorial, a collaboration among multiple groups who’ve banded together under the name Transform 1012 N. Main Street. The design for the space is still in progress, but the idea is to renovate and repurpose a huge abandoned building at 1012 N. Main Street that was originally a KKK auditorium seating 4,000 people. Its size speaks to the Klan’s power in Fort Worth in 1924, when construction started. Two years earlier, the same year that a grand jury failed to indict the suspects in Rouse’s murder, candidates affiliated with the Klan won every state and local race on the Fort Worth ballot, as well as one of Texas’ Senate seats.
This, however, was a high-water mark for the Klan in north Texas and elsewhere. The local chapter only held on to the building for a few years. It was then briefly a department store, then a boxing arena, and for a long time, a pecan factory—a sign reading Ellis Pecan Co. is still attached to the facade. (Occasionally a young Sandy Joyce would go there with her grandmother, who would sell the nuts from her pecan trees when she needed cash for a project.) It had been sitting vacant and was slated for demolition when the Transform 1012 coalition acquired it.
Bizarrely, the magician Harry Houdini performed there in 1926, while it was a KKK auditorium. Born in Hungary and the son of a rabbi, Houdini must’ve been pretty hard up to hire himself out to a group that was, among other things, antiimmigrant and anti-Jewish. In rooting around online, I don’t find anything about the show itself, but I do come across an account of another visit by Houdini to Fort Worth, a few years earlier, in which he was tied up and dragged behind a motorcycle, hung upside down, and made to escape from shackles. All of it sounds eerily familiar, as though Houdini fashioned a kind of performance art out of the materials of racist crimes. (This, some further searching reveals, is not a new idea in the world of Houdini specialists, but it was new to me.)
By the time of his second show, Houdini was on a mission to debunk charlatans posing as Spiritualist mediums, who claimed they could receive messages from deceased loved ones. His tour slogan, in 1926, was “Can the Dead Speak to the Living?” His answer was an unequivocal “no.”
In a book the TCCPJ produced for the 2021 centenary, the authors repurposed Houdini’s question. Can the dead speak to the living? Can Fred Rouse speak to us? In large part, that’s what these projects, a memorial and the reinvention of a building, are asking.
The power of the lynching tour, which may eventually be true of a visit to the memorial garden and the arts center, lies in their physicality, in how you progress through space as you learn what happened. The tour asks you to sit with—or walk with—the story in a slower, deeper way than if you were to just read it on a historical marker. It’s not that the journey puts you in Rouse’s place, rather it places Rouse.
In the beginning, it frustrated me that Rouse will always remain faceless—that we don’t know more about him, that even the particulars of the lynching story are elusive, drawn from old newspaper accounts. Yet this staging of his last days gives him a kind of shape, like the cutout of a tree that no longer grows. He becomes an absence we might walk through, toward a truth that will never quite let us catch up to it, partial, terrible, halfway paved-over but still at hand, still with us.
Tom Stafford commanded the first Apollo mission to dock with a Soviet craft in space. He also served as commander of Apollo 10 - the dress rehearsal before NASA's first landing on the moon in 1969.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
I was recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis after a long period of treatment for increasing pain, joint deformation, and immobility.
After the diagnosis, I told my boss, HR, and the team of four that I manage. Since I don’t want this to be seen as weird or embarrassing or something to tiptoe around, I made clear that the diagnosis is not a secret — and when it was evident that I couldn’t move around very well and my cognitive functioning is deteriorating, it couldn’t really be hidden anyway.
HR has been supportive and proactive in searching out coping techniques for me, including my not traveling to gatherings (I work remotely) and looking for processes that will help ameliorate my memory and understanding glitches.
I’m also trying to help manage this through diet, physical therapy, working with my doctor, changing my home layout, etc. The prognosis is scary and I do my best to not let my fear and grief creep into my work interactions. I’m upbeat and matter-of-fact about it as much as possible.
Meanwhile, I have the kindest, most caring friend and co-worker imaginable. She’s on the other side of the country and not part of my team or even my work entity (we are under the umbrella of a much larger organization). She has added me to her prayer chain, which makes me cringe but I know is coming from a place of love so I just ignore it. But now she’s pushing an online naturopath who she says will absolutely heal me, and says that even though he’s really expensive, all my problems will be solved. She even names what she (and he) think the real problem is, and it’s not MS. The guardian angel emails, prayers, etc. are bad enough but don’t cost me anything and makes her feel helpful and heard. This is now in uncomfortable territory.
I am not interested in her suggestions, even though I have an open mind toward naturopaths in general. But I’m broke, don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to work or even be mobile, have no family to support me, and basically have to be super judicious about where I spend any money I have on treatments.
I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to hurt her or make her think I don’t appreciate her concern. A flat “no” would feel so hurtful and dismissive, and my biggest worry is that I might insult the genuine love and compassion that’s behind this. Any advice you can give would be most appreciated!
I’m going to take your word for it that she’s kind and caring because you know her and I don’t … but this behavior is not kind!
It’s hard to believe there are people who still haven’t gotten the memo that it’s rude to push unsolicited medical advice — particularly when it’s contrary to an active treatment plan that person has formed with their doctor. And telling you that what you haven’t isn’t really MS?!? You are a better person than I am for worrying about sounding dismissive after that.
Your coworker can be a generally good person while still having a huge blind spot that’s leading her to behave wildly inappropriately here. You’re being extremely generous about it … but one day she’s going to do this to someone who isn’t going to give her as much grace and it is not going to go well.
In any case, please remember: if she genuinely wants to show you love and compassion, then you will be doing her a favor by letting her know the best way she can show it for you.
The scripts I’d normally suggest for a situation like this are more blunt than it sounds like you want to use. So here are some softer ones:
• “I am handling this with my doctor and feel confident about our plan. The best thing you can do for me is to just be my colleague so work can be a place I don’t need to discuss this.”
• “You’re kind to be concerned, but the best way to support me is to let me manage it privately. I’ve got it covered with my doctor, and it adds to my stress when people outside my treatment team offer advice.”
• “I know you’re worried and I thank you for that, but what I most want is for my work relationships to be a place where I’m not thinking or talking about it. Thank you in advance for understanding.”
If she is coming from a place of genuine caring, as you believe her to be, then she should respect this. If she doesn’t respect it — if she blows by your clear request and pushes her own agenda anyway — then this isn’t about love and compassion, and you should feel freer to set a firm boundary.
If you have a dog or cat, chances are you’ve given your pet a flavored chewable tablet for tick prevention at some point. What if you could take a similar pill to protect yourself from getting Lyme disease?
Tarsus Pharmaceuticals is developing such a pill for humans—minus the tasty flavoring—that could provide protection against the tick-borne disease for several weeks at a time. In February, the Irvine, California–based biotech company announced results from a small, early-stage trial showing that 24 hours after taking the drug, it can kill ticks on people, with the effects lasting for up to 30 days.
“What we envision is something that would protect you before the tick would even bite you,” says Bobby Azamian, CEO of Tarsus.
CLEVELAND—Remarking that his family history was apparently far more complicated than he originally thought, Cleveland resident Nathan Yang received an unsettling Ancestry.com report Monday that said Genghis Khan descended from him. “Huh, that’s weird—this says that I’m closely related to the first khagan of the Mongol…
We’re like the early seasons of Great British Bake Off, where everyone helped each other and drank tea while they waited for things to finish baking and occasionally got berated by an older white man who is creepy toward some of the women.
We’re like a group of high school friends who went out one night and accidentally killed someone and then hid the body because they were scared of the consequences, and now we’re forever connected by the shared guilt, fear, and shame.
We’re like a group of people constantly eating at Olive Garden.
We’re all bound together by our fervent belief that our god-like CEO will rescue us from the apocalyptic visions of a dying Earth by taking us to a terraformed paradise in space. Also, we’re not a cult.
We’re like a fictional soccer team with a folksy yet wise coach who is determined that we all should grow into the best versions of ourselves. He also somehow never feels the need to replace anyone because of poor performance or financial realities. (Please note: we do have at-will employment.)
We’re like a group of people who moved to a new city and then, by happenstance, fell in with each other. Due to our alienation from everything that we knew, we now spend every waking moment with each other, trying in vain to recreate a feeling of home that, deep down, we know we have irrevocably lost.
We’re trauma-bonded.
We’re a pride of lions, a pack of wolves, a parade of elephants, a murder of crows, a conspiracy of lemurs, a bloat of hippopotamuses—really any sort of group of animals where their occasional collective efforts to secure food or shelter or whatever mask the fact that it’s still survival of the fittest and if you challenge leadership, we will leave your lifeless corpse in the dirt.
From the original concept to the final functional prototype, the limb has been upgraded 12 times to ensure every structure on it can cooperate perfectly under its context. 
