A very intense book, which I found easy to read. I couldn’t put it down. It moves fast and covers so many important topics from her life in the present day to the horrors of her past.

The book was written by Amy Wallace and publish after Virginia killed herself. The introduction covers why, which was helpful to me. Otherwise, it would have been a lingering question while reading the book.

Sexual abuse is horrid. I know people who have been abused. All of them struggle with it. One might think Virginia’s case is unusual, but I don’t think so. I think human trafficking and sexual abuse are all too common today. AI generated porn will probably only make it worse. Abusers can never get enough as was the case with Jeffrey Epstein who abused hundreds (thousands?) of women.

This book is a must-read. It may help people who have been abused to heal. And, it will keep present what Virginia went through.

[k93] I want to say explicitly why Virginia opted not to stay silent, which certainly would have been easier for her. From the beginning, she told me she believed that her story would help other people–not just survivors of Epstein’s cruelty, but any person, male or female, who’d ever been coerced into sex against his or her will.

[k162] Because despite the unspeakable cruelties she’d endured throughout her life, Virginia opted to keep her heart open and, whenever possible, to lead with love.

[k175] “Life is not a private affair. A story and its lessons are only made useful if shared.” Dan Millman, Way of the Peaceful Warrior FIXME

[k209] My breath catches, and the familiar thrum of a panic attack rolls over me. Even as a child, I never liked to cause a scene. I would rather envelop my pain, holding the turmoil in my chest, instead of risking more danger by screaming and letting it out. So I stay quiet, trying to soothe myself.

[k212] I look down at my pretty fingernails–freshly manicured and painted a glossy ivory. I read the bracelet on my left wrist, a gift from a dear friend, that spells out “B-A-D-A-S-S” in lettered beads. I take one careful step and then another. My stomach churns, but I keep going. “Please,” I beg without speaking. “Please don’t let me faint in this exquisite place.” I find a bench and sit, looking around for exit signs. “I can make it,” I tell myself–a mantra I’ve relied on so many times before. I know from experience that I should not yet try to run.

[k362] When you grow up female, danger is everywhere. I’ve known that for as long as I can remember.

[k784] Every night, as I lay in my bed, dreading the now-familiar creak of the door, I tried to remember a time when I’d been more than nothing. I longed to be worth something again.

[k950] I know this is a lot to take in. The violence. The neglect. The bad decisions. The self-harm. Imagine if a trauma reel like this played in your head all the time, as it does in mine, and not just on the pages of a book you can put down if you need to, just for a moment, to steady your nerves. But please don’t stop reading. I know exactly how to help you get through these tough parts, just as I help myself: by focusing on the present.

[k1279] From the start, they manipulated me into participating in behaviors that ate away at me, eroding my ability to comprehend reality and preventing me from defending myself. From the start, I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation. Of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive.

[k1306] How can you complain about being abused, some have asked, when you could so easily have stayed away? If you didn’t like feeling dirty, you could simply have never gone back. But that stance wrongly discounts what many of us had been through before we encountered Epstein, as well as how good he was at spotting girls whose wounds made them vulnerable to him.

[k1311] A master manipulator who excelled at divining the desires of others, he threw what looked like a lifeline to girls who were drowning, girls who had nothing, girls who wished to be and do better.

[k3999] Please don’t hear this as a plea for sympathy. No one ever promised me that challenging my abusers would be easy.

[k4402] For example, CHILD USA, a nonprofit focused on child-abuse prevention, conducted a study of thousands of abuse victims who had been Boy Scouts; only half of those came forward before they were fifty. More and more, the public was coming to understand that being sexually abused as a child could take decades to process. And it could take even longer than that for a victim to imagine speaking publicly about that experience and naming his or her abuser.

[k4696] In the email, renowned computer scientist Richard Stallman suggested that I had been a willing participant in my encounter with Minsky. Stallman questioned whether Minsky “applied force or violence” and seemed to be arguing that if he did not, I must have opted in. “The most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing,” Stallman wrote of me.

[k4704] Just as Stallman defended Minsky, many friends and colleagues of MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito defended him after it was revealed that he had cultivated a close (and lucrative) relationship with Epstein.

[k4715] “I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no. I made that clear to him,” Melinda would tell King, adding that she herself met with Epstein “exactly one time” because she “wanted to see who this man was.” Her reaction: “I regretted it the second I walked in the door. He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. My heart breaks for these women.”

[k5224] “And that’s true of every woman who ever complained about any kind of harassment,” Maitlis, played by the actress Ruth Wilson, continues. “Always uphill. Always against the tide. Always a battle against the unspoken. You know, the look in their eyes that says, ‘Really? Did he really?’…When I sat down with Prince Andrew, I was only ever hoping to ask the right questions. I didn’t know how he’d be or what he’d say. But it was the arrogance. The entitlement. He just couldn’t help himself. You know, the way that certain men, whatever their sickness, assume certain rights without ever giving it a second thought. Their want. Their need. Their impulse.”

[k5260] you’ve read this far, I hope my story has moved you–to seek ways to free yourself from a bad situation, say, to stand up for someone else in need, or to simply reframe how you judge victims of sexual abuse. Each one of us can make positive change.

I finished this book at 4 a.m. That’s the endorsement. Read this book if you think we live in a divisive and violent time. The KKK knew how to sow real division. In the 1920’s, the KKK saw huge growth by dividing people and constant violence.

At times the book reads like a historical novel. That’s why I couldn’t put it down at the end. I had to find out how it happened. I knew the conclusion from the subtitle, but I wanted to see how the trial played out.

The heroes: Madge Oberholtzer, Patrick O’Donnell, George Dale, Rabbi Feuerlicht, William REmy, and many others. I was going to name the villain, but that just gives fame to the villain.

To me this quote from the book summarizes the real villain:

A vein of hatred was always there for the tapping. It’s there still, and explains much of the madness threatening American life a hundred years [later]. The Grand Dragon was a symptom, not a cause, of an age that has been mischaracterized as one of Gatsby frivolity and the mayhem of modernism.

It’s a painful read. The subjugation of large parts of our society through Jim Crow laws, mob violence, and daily shunning is hard to read for me. I realize that’s trite, because people had to live it but I live in different times. I can’t imagine what it was like to live then even after having read very clearly what it was like.

[k111] Hoosiers were joiners. And in 1925, if you were not a knight of the KKK, you did not belong.

[k112] The Klan owned the state, and Stephenson owned the Klan. Cops, judges, prosecutors, ministers, mayors, newspaper editors–they all answered to the Grand Dragon.

[k119] In the golden age of fraternal organizations, the Klan was the largest and most powerful of the secret societies among American men–bigger by far than the Odd Fellows, the Elks, or the Freemasons, and vastly greater in number than the original Klan born in violence just after the Civil War.

[k193] A handful of Hoosiers were heroic–two rabbis, an African American publisher born enslaved, a fearless Catholic lawyer, a small-town editor repeatedly beaten and thrown in jail, a lone prosecutor. They were aided by a gifted man of letters, a Black poet and Broadway composer who forced an epic national political realignment with his eloquent defiance.

[k292] Johnson, sworn in six weeks after Lincoln began his second term, would have none of his predecessor’s vision. He ignored pleas from civil authorities to go after the Klan, and he urged Southern politicians to balk at expanding the Constitution.

[k293] “Everyone would and must admit that the white race was superior to the Black,” he said. He vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, a legislative attempt to extend real power to the formerly enslaved, but was overridden by a strong majority in Congress.

[k297] Violence escalated: lynching, arson, beatings, a reign of orchestrated bloodshed for the last three years of Johnson’s chaotic term.

[k301] We are the law itself–the same boast would be heard in Indiana, fifty years later, taking flight through the revelations of Madge Oberholtzer.

[k307] Grant promised to smash the Klan. There was nothing gallant or noble about these midnight marauders. The president saw them for what they were: killers in bedsheets who were “trying to reduce the colored people to a condition closely akin to that of slavery,” he said.

[k316] The enemy was “the most atrocious organization that the civilized part of the world has ever known,” Grant’s Justice Department declared. After Congress handed him the tools he needed, the president used the Ku Klux Klan Acts to hammer the hooded order.

[k321] Acknowledging defeat, the Klan formally disbanded under an order from Forrest. He burned all records.

[k380] Evansville was ripe for the Klan, the perfect place to plant the flag in the North for the second coming of the Invisible Empire. And D. C. Stephenson was the ideal missionary.

[k402] One month after the attack on the bellhop, the Klan held a large parade in downtown Dallas, marching with banners that read “Pure Womanhood, Our Little Girls Must Be Protected” and “One Hundred Percent American.”

[k405] And the abduction and near killing of Alex Johnson? “As I understand the case, the Negro was guilty of doing something which he had no right to do,” said Sheriff Dan Harston. “There will be no investigation by my department. He no doubt deserved it.”

[k414] The Democrat, Samuel J. Tilden, won the popular vote but fell short in the Electoral College because three states were in dispute. The courts handed the mess off to Congress, which appointed a commission to decide the outcome. As a bargaining chip to get him over the line, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes promised to withdraw federal troops from obstructionist Southern states. In return, he won the highest office in the land by a single electoral vote. His presidency marked the close of Reconstruction and ushered in nearly ninety years of disenfranchisement and segregation for millions of American citizens. Shortly thereafter, Tennessee passed the nation’s first Jim Crow law, separating passengers on rail cars by skin color.

[k423] With the abolition of slavery, Black people were no longer counted as three-fifths but as a full person in the census. Ultimately, that gave twenty-five additional congressional seats to a one-party South that violently suppressed the vote of those newly recognized people.

[k425] In 1880, 50 percent of Black men in the former Confederacy voted. By 1920, less than 1 percent exercised this fundamental right.

[k489] But what really drove the pair of promoters into the arms of the twentieth-century Klan founder was money. In 1920, Clarke and Tyler cut a deal with Simmons, granting them a significant share of every new membership. The best way to make their fortune, they realized, was to incentivize local recruiters on the ground by giving them a cut as well.

[k492] In barely a year’s time, the number of Klansmen went from 3,000 to 100,000.

[k492] In barely a year’s time, the number of Klansmen went from 3,000 to 100,000.

[k517] All it took was a small bribe and a bit of Bible talk. The constituency was vast. Evansville alone had seventy-two Protestant churches. In short order, he paid off a dozen or so ministers to evangelize on behalf of the Klan, spreading the word of hate along with the word of God.

[k526] In the America of 1922, fear of others generated a lot of anxious energy. This collective unease had only to be corralled, sanctified, and monetized.

[k535] Violet had tried to make the union work, though her husband was constantly cheating on her and made no secret of it. He said he could get any woman he wanted with the snap of his fingers.

[k584] Suddenly, members of the Horse Thief Detective Association were breaking up parties and smashing liquor joints. They blocked roads, searching vehicles for bottles, rousting those in passionate embrace. They invaded private homes, looking for alcohol or card-playing. They harassed businesses that opened on Sunday. They served as armed marshals at Klan parades, taking over public streets, directing traffic, menacing the occasional malcontent who booed at the men in white robes.

[k604] At the close of three days of testimony, following a long and impassioned soliloquy, Simmons stood and pointed his finger at his congressional interrogators–they were the ones who should be shamed for going after the family men of his organization. “I call upon the Father to forgive those who have persecuted the Klan!” he shouted. And with that, he fainted and fell to the ground. The politicians folded. Simmons believed the hearing was the best thing that ever happened to the hooded order. “It wasn’t until the newspapers began to attack the Klan that it really grew,” he said. “And then Congress gave us the best advertising we ever got.” Over the next year, the Klan expanded by 1.1 million members.

[k638] That $10 initiation fee was more than the average factory worker made in a day. Plus, there were quarterly dues and uniform requirements. Stephenson got his cut of everything.

[k644] The Birth of a Nation had done well in the North, just as D. W. Griffith envisioned it would.

[k650] At the end of the movie, the words of a title card filled the screen: The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.

[k679] By year’s end, Stephenson had accomplished something that the initial Klan had not: his vigilantes were part of the system. They operated freely and openly, and their crimes were not punished, just as in Texas.

[k687] The talented D. C. Stephenson had proved to be quite the prodigy, as he said so himself.

[k689] He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it.

[k697] expectations. Now he promised to work the same magic in Michigan, Kansas,

[k712] For a majority of Dallas officers were now oath-bound members of the hooded order–proof of Malcolm X’s later observation that the Klan had “changed its bed sheets for a policeman’s uniform.”

[k835] “The strongest argument in favor of prohibition is the imperative necessity of keeping whiskey out of the reckless colored element,” said the state’s leading dry newspaper, the Patriot Phalanx. “The Negro, fairly docile and industrious, becomes, when filled with liquor, turbulent and dangerous and a menace to life, property and the repose of the community,” another paper wrote.

[k857] Turning to other enemies, Barr said it was well known that the Roman Catholic Church was training “,000 Negroes” to be priests.

[k1033] What was not in dispute was the role of one town, in a state that tried to censure human pleasure, in bringing big-time recorded jazz to the world. Known as Harmony Hollow, Richmond was the only place between New York and San Francisco with a decent recording studio. The Gennett brothers, from Italian immigrant stock, ran the large Starr Piano Company.

[k1039] They also signed and promoted artists who were shunned by other studios. Jazz came to them in 1923 and would be sold on the Gennett label. So-called race records, though marketed to Black consumers, were showing a large crossover appeal.

[k1044] In late afternoon, about 6,000 hooded men assembled in a park a mile away.

[k1060] Armstrong was still new to lovers of music beyond a few precincts of New Orleans and Chicago, and new to the North by only a year. But when the disc he recorded in Richmond was released, he belonged to the ages.

[k1077] The best-known enterprise was Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, one of the most successful Black business empires in the world.

[k1079] At the peak of her success, she employed 3,000 people, mostly women, making and selling cosmetics for a population that other companies ignored. She was the first Black woman to become a millionaire, one of the first great female entrepreneurs in the United States.

[k1082] For all of Madam Walker’s accomplishments, when she went to the Isis Theater and gave the clerk her nickel to see the film, she was told the price for Black moviegoers was five times the amount, and she would have to sit in an isolated area to the side.

[k1090] With Stephenson’s move into Indianapolis, the Klan vowed to keep Black residents in a tight geographic box. The city had fifteen African American physicians in 1923, but they were not allowed to attend to patients at the main hospital.

[k1112] Douglass died well before the horror of the Tulsa Race Massacre, when a white mob destroyed thirty-five city blocks in a part of Oklahoma known for its fine homes and businesses–the Black Wall Street.

[k1116] Tulsa was a hotbed of Klansmen.

[k1117] The marauders burned more than 1,200 homes, five hotels, a dozen churches, thirty-one restaurants, four drugstores, a public library, a hospital, and four doctors’ offices. A police detective urged white fellow Tulsans to “get a gun and get busy and try to get a N—-.”

[k1124] As in Dallas, there were no convictions of any of the killers, thieves, and firebombers, no prison terms, no retribution. The Klan of the 1920s had enough control of the legal system to ensure that those who gutted the wealthiest Black community in the United States, a mass murder of American citizens, would not face justice.

[k1130] On Saint Patrick’s Day, a crowd filled basketball-rattled Tomlinson Hall in Indianapolis to hear a fiery Irish American lawyer, Patrick H. O’Donnell.

[k1133] O’Donnell had grown up on stories of the British stripping his people of their culture, their religion, their language, and their civil rights in their native land. Now he saw the Klan trying to do the same thing in the country his family had fled to from Ireland.

[k1143] Klan secrecy, and the oaths never to reveal the names of fellow members, gave O’Donnell an opening.

[k1146] O’Donnell cultivated insiders, who got him membership rolls. “We feel that the publication of the names of those who belong to the Klan will be a blow that the masked organization cannot survive,” he wrote in the inaugural issue of Tolerance, dated September 10, 1922.

[k1152] Hundreds of families withdrew their money from the bank run by the Klansman.

[k1171] “We are going to drive the Klan out of Indiana!” he thundered. “We are going to redeem Indiana and re-annex it to the American Union!” In South Bend, on the same day that O’Donnell spoke, the Klan had a Saint Patrick’s Day message of its own: flames for Notre Dame, Roman Catholicism’s center of higher learning in America. Unlike most communities in Indiana,

[k1225] O’Donnell was now Stephenson’s main target in the press. He fulminated against “Mad Pat” in the Fiery Cross, calling him “an Enemy of America.” He ordered Klansmen to burn a cross in the township outside Logansport, where O’Donnell grew up and some members of his family still lived.

[k1230] Fear of Catholics was brought to the American shores by British Protestants steeped in dark conspiracies about the power of Papists. Though many of the colonists were fleeing religious persecution, it wasn’t long before some were practicing what had been preached against them back in Europe.

[k1235] Thomas Nast, the most influential newspaper cartoonist at the time, stoked loathing of the faith of new immigrants with sketches depicting bishops as crocodiles coming ashore.

[k1470] Stephenson quoted extensively from the work of Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, the chief eugenicist guiding the anti-immigration forces in Congress.

[k1473] He created a model human sterilization law, building on the pioneering work from Indiana, that was drafted by more than thirty states. Ultimately, about 70,000 people across the United States would be forcibly sterilized. A special category of “degenerates” was added in many of these states in order to sterilize homosexuals. Laughlin’s law also drew strong interest from a circle of proto-Nazi scientists in Germany. Laughlin himself would later praise Hitler for understanding that “the central mission of all politics is race hygiene.”

[k1478] If the United States were to become “darker in pigmentation,” as the influential eugenicist Charles Davenport explained, the typical American would eventually be “smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art, more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality.”

[k1524] As Stephenson neared the end of that night’s speech, he summarized what was at stake when “members of inferior races” were let into the United States. “This is a struggle to save America,” he said. “It’s a struggle perhaps even more serious than that between the states in the Civil War.” The hundred percenters from the Heartland were at the forefront of a war to prevent “the inevitable destruction of what may be called the American race.”

[k1650] Why, Coughlan wondered later as a writer trying to come to grips with what had happened to his neighbors, “did the town take so whole-heartedly to the Klan?” His answer was rooted in “the deadly tedium of small-town life,” a militant religious fundamentalism “hot with bigotry,” and “American moralistic blood lust that is half historical determinism, and half Freud.”

[k2188] In cities big and small, North and South, the blazing cross had become as much a part of life as the soda fountain and the barbershop pole. More than 10,000 turned out for a Klan picnic in Colorado. The Klan terrorized Jewish, Italian, Black, and Latino neighborhoods in Denver, and could count on brothers under the sheets in law enforcement to avoid arrest. “They paid ten dollars to hate someone,” said a Denver judge, “and they were determined to get their money’s worth.”

[k2210] The National Origins Act of 1924, a Klan-blessed master design for the future of America, passed in the House by an overwhelming margin and sailed through the Senate with only six dissenting votes.

[k2302] He noted that the 18th Amendment, outlawing alcohol, was fully enforced with regular raids, while the 15th Amendment, upholding the right to vote regardless of race, was given no protection. “The federal government will use a navy to prevent a man from taking a drink, but will not empower a deputy marshal to protect the Negro’s ballot,” said Johnson.

[k2325] Elsewhere, the Empire elected not just a governor in Colorado, Clarence Morley, but a United States senator, Rice Means. In Denver, an oath-bound Klansman, Ben Stapleton, survived a recall election in a city where one in seven voters had taken the same vows. “I will work with the Klan and for the Klan,” he pledged afterward. “I shall give the Klan the kind of administration it wants.”

[k2333] Forty years of Jim Crow in the South and voter restrictions aimed at immigrants in the North were able to shrink the American electorate as never before: just 48.9 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in the 1924 presidential election–an all-time low.

[k2413] Under Prohibition, people with a doctor’s note could buy a pint for all that ailed them every ten days at a drugstore. This business made a wealthy man out of Charles Walgreen, whose Chicago-based chain of drugstores grew from nine in 1920 to 525 by the end of the decade.

[k2492] At bus stops near Indiana Avenue, Black passengers were left stranded. When they tried to board at other locations, the doors were slammed in their faces. Drivers were specifically instructed not to pick up Black bus riders.

[k3184] “We’ve passed this immigration bill and built a stone wall around the nation so tall, so deep, so strong, that the scum and riff-raff of the old world cannot get into our gates,” he said.

[k4043] Across the country, another prominent Klansman was embroiled in a sordid tale that defied the hooded order’s professed values. Dr. Ellis O. Willson, a dentist who’d been a leader of the large Klan chapter in La Grande, Oregon, was charged with raping his clerical assistant, and then killing her accidentally during a botched abortion.

[k4049] In Colorado, three Klansmen were charged in separate cases of child molestation and statutory rape. The Grand Dragon, Dr. John Galen Locke, was implicated in the kidnapping of a nineteen-year-old who had refused to marry his pregnant girlfriend–a violation of the Klan’s professed values of sexual purity and the sanctity of marriage.

[k4096] Democracy was a fragile thing, stable and steady until it was broken and trampled. A man who didn’t care about shattering every convention, and then found new ways to vandalize the contract that allowed free people to govern themselves, could do unthinkable damage.

[k4101] The Republican Party was outraged–not at the disclosures of Stephenson’s web of graft, but at the press for reporting it. This journalism was the work of Jews, party officials implied. Clyde A. Walb, the Republican Party state chairman, said a syndicate of international bankers was trying to bring down the GOP in Indiana. The party’s Central Committee disowned Adams, a lifelong Republican.

[k4173] In the end, Stephenson gave several exhaustive accounts of the bribery scheme and how he pulled the levers of power in the state. This evidence, along with testimony of other witnesses and canceled checks, proved beyond a doubt that the Klan’s governor had been guilty, as the judge said so himself in a directed verdict. But Jackson got off on a technicality: the statute of limitations had expired. He finished out his term and retired from politics.

[k4188] At the conclusion of the Pennsylvania trial in 1928, Judge W. H. S. Thompson issued a scathing indictment. He found that the Invisible Empire of the Roaring Twenties, one that would later cast itself as a Mayberry Klan of good fellowship and high Christian values, was “an instrument of terror, oppression, violence and a menace to public peace.” He called it an “unlawful organization, so destructive of the rights and liberties of the people.” After noting that Imperial Wizard Evans and his lawyers came to the court seeking relief “with filthy hands,” he awarded them nothing.

[k4203] Those days were gone–a shameful aberration in the American story, the Chicago Tribune wrote in the wake of the crumbling Klan. The paper sketched an outline that sounded like a bad fairy tale. “It came about that American citizens in Indiana were judged by their religion, condemned because of their race, illegally punished because of their opinions, hounded because of their personal conduct, and a state of terror was substituted for a state of law.” But was it really an aberration?

[k4250] But take away the courage of Madge Oberholtzer as she lay dying from poison and the sadism of Stephenson, and there is no extinguisher of the flames that enveloped the nation during the 1920s.

[k4255] Without her, Stephenson might have been named to that vacant United States Senate seat, and gone ahead with a run at the White House while the Klan was still ascendant. There is always some peril in seeing things in the past from a starting point of the present, as if every molecule of chance was put in place by human design.

[k4258] We should also think about another cause and effect, or lack thereof. Stephenson was a charismatic con man–“the most talented psychopath ever to tread the banks of the Wabash,” as one chronicler of the age put it.

[k4263] A vein of hatred was always there for the tapping. It’s there still, and explains much of the madness threatening American life a hundred years after Stephenson made a mockery of the moral principles of the Heartland. The Grand Dragon was a symptom, not a cause, of an age that has been mischaracterized as one of Gatsby frivolity and the mayhem of modernism.

[k4270] The Klan-sponsored Immigration Act of 1924, which sharply restricted the number of Jews, Catholics, southern and eastern Europeans, Asians, and Africans who could come to the United States, stayed on the books for forty-one years.

[k4278] Indiana had pioneered the world’s first compulsory sterilization law. And a new measure that Governor Jackson signed in 1927 was enforced until 1974, allowing the state to deny thousands of Hoosiers the ability to bring children into the world. The same year that the new law went into effect, the United States Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell, upheld the right to sterilize a “feeble-minded” woman in a mental institution. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the majority opinion. In the years that followed, about 70,000 Americans who were deemed a threat to the national gene pool–the deaf, the blind, ethnic minorities, people with epilepsy, homosexuals, poor people, and “promiscuous” women–were sterilized against their will. Nazi Germany defended its own 1936 eugenics law by pointing to the United States as a role model. In 1981, Oregon performed the nation’s last legal forced sterilization.

[k4360] In 2022, Congress finally passed, and President Joe Biden signed, a bill making lynching a federal crime–122 years after the first such legislation was introduced. According to the NAACP, nearly 5,000 lynchings took place between 1882 and 1968.

The Python Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) is the source of much confusion. You will see code like this:

# The following sleep is here only to allow other threads the
# opportunity to grab the Python GIL. (see pyepics/pyepics#171)
time.sleep(0)

Calling time.sleep releases the CPU the thread is running on at the kernel level, but it does not release the GIL, per se.

That time.sleep(0) hands control back to the OS scheduler, but the GIL remains held by the interpreter. The confusion stems from mixing up parallelism and concurrency: the GIL prevents parallel execution of Python bytecode, yet allows threads to interleave execution cooperatively. A simple example illustrates this.

CPU Intense Example

import threading, time

def _cpu_intense_function():
    def _is_prime(n):
        for i in range(2, int(n**0.5) + 1):
            if n % i == 0:
                return False
            return True

    for n in range(3, 10000):
        _is_prime(n)

def _thread(inc):
    global shared_value

    for _ in range(500):
        _cpu_intense_function()
        shared_value += inc

shared_value = 0
ones = threading.Thread(target=_thread, args=(1,))
ones.start()
millions = threading.Thread(target=_thread, args=(1000000,))
millions.start()
while shared_value < 500000000:
    time.sleep(1)
    print(shared_value)

The following output demonstrates that shared_value increases by ones and millions simultaneously:

$ python cpu_intense.py
117000121
237000241
355000358
475000475
500000500

The GIL allows the two threads to interleave so shared_value changes (almost) simultaneously in the ones and millions places. Neither thread “releases” the CPU explicitly. The GIL allows the two threads to run concurrently without corrupting the Python interpreter. However, the GIL does not guarantee atomicity of operations like shared_value += inc or any other single Python statement.

Therefore, the program is not guaranteed to stop. There is a race condition from the time shared_value is loaded to when it is stored after being incremented (three Python opcodes). Since the window is about 200 nanoseconds on modern processors, the program terminates almost all of the time, especially since the majority of the time is spent in _cpu_intense_function.

You would need to use a synchronization primitive like threading.Lock to update shared_value atomically and to guarantee the program will always stop. Again, the GIL does not ensure atomic execution of Python statements.

Parallel vs Concurrent

The GIL does guarantee that only one Python thread is executing Python statements at any one time. To demonstrate this, we’ll time the code as written:

$ time python cpu_intense.py
<snip>
real    0m4.418s

Then, with the ones.start() commented out:

$ time python cpu_intense.py | grep real
<snip>
real    0m2.366s

The program runs in half the time, which means the two threads do not run in parallel, even though they are running concurrently. On my multicore laptop, a similar C program would run in about the same amount of time in both cases. In other words, the C program scales linearly and the Python program does not scale at all. This is why the GIL is bandied about in the scientific programming community, and why I’m writing this article: HPC is just one part of the story in experimental physics software.

Interpreter is Shared State

In order to understand the GIL, we need to understand what the Python interpreter is and isn’t. Firstly, the interpreter is not a thread; it’s just code and data. The code is the CPython program and all its libraries, and at first, the Python program it reads in is its only data. The interpreter compiles the Python program and its libraries into opcodes to be executed in the Python virtual machine.

When you execute python cpu_intense.py, the kernel starts a process, which is the code, data, and a thread, known as the main thread in Python. In the example above, the main thread executes the Python code which starts the other two threads (ones and millions). In Linux, the code is read-only and the data is, of course, writable. The GIL is what keeps this data (the program, stacks, heap, etc.) from getting corrupted.

In other words, the GIL is an instance of a synchronization primitive, which is rather complex for efficiency reasons, that is used to protect the shared state (Python program and data) of the Python interpreter.

Preemption vs Cooperation

I have tried to use coroutines, and decided that threading is the way to go in Python. That’s why I’m writing this. I’m working on device control code right now, which uses EPICS, and the first example code I showed is from PyEpics, the Python wrapper for the EPICS library written in C.

By and large, device control code is not CPU intense. Rather, it’s asynchronous so it needs to be concurrent. In Python, there are three types of concurrency: multiprocessing, threading, and asyncio. Confusingly, the title of the threading library is “Thread-based parallelism”, which is incorrect. The GIL as noted above, prevents parallelism in Python. Two Python threads cannot execute in parallel. More confusingly, asyncio does not support I/O in any sense – concurrently or otherwise. asyncio would have been better called coroutines, because that’s all it supports. multiprocessing is correctly described as “Process-based parallelism”, which is one way to execute Python in parallel.

asyncio supports cooperative multitasking using coroutines. When a coroutine calls await, asyncio can switch to another coroutine, if one is ready. Without await, the currently running coroutine would hog the CPU, especially when it makes calls to C libraries. To demonstrate to yourself, create two coroutines, start them running, and have one call time.sleep(5). The other coroutine will not run for 5 seconds. However, change that to await asyncio.sleep(5), and the other coroutine will run.

threading supports kernel-level threads which are preemptable multitasking. The kernel controls when threads run, not the Python interpreter. That’s what the cpu_intense.py example demonstrates. The two threads run whenever the kernel decides. However, the GIL prevents two threads from accessing their (shared) Python interpreter at the same time. The GIL is designed to release itself very frequently, not on every opcode, but close enough for our purposes. Even the simplest Python statement is made up of several opcodes.

Python opcodes are to threading as CPU level instructions are to Python’s multiprocessing module, that is, parallel execution of forked instances of the Python interpreter. Just like the GIL, the kernel switches processes (threads) at the CPU instruction level. On single core computers (rare nowadays), this was just fine. Today, of course, we want to take advantage of all the cores on a processor when we need them. A Python opcode takes many CPU instructions to execute, which is why multiprocessing is used to achieve CPU-level parallelism. Python multiprocessing programs scale while threading programs to not.

Asynchrony vs Polling

Our example program would run in parallel if we used multiprocessing instead of threading. As noted above, I’m writing this article, because I’m writing device control code, which needs to be asynchronous, not necessarily parallel. For the most part, device control code ends up waiting for device events or control requests, that is, unless the program is implemented using polling.

Much Python EPICS control code uses polling, even though EPICS is designed to be fully asynchronous. PyEpics Advanced Topic with Python Channel Access suggests code be written like this:

pvnamelist = read_list_pvs()
for i in range(10):
    values = epics.caget_many(pvlist)
    time.sleep(0.01)

While this does work, it’s inefficient from a CPU utilization perspective, and it creates unnecessary latency. In this case, the code blocks for 100 milliseconds even when all the devices respond immediately to their “channel access” requests (caget). Moreover, it’s likely that this code will make too many caget requests, because the actual values have not changed from the last caget.

The EPICS protocol is fully asynchronous, just like the vast majority of device drivers in operating system kernels. Another term for asynchronous programming is event-driven programming. In the kernel, events are device interrupts. In EPICS, events are asynchronous messages from the programs managing one or more devices. At the Python level, PyEpics allows Python code to register for callbacks to receive these messages so no polling is necessary. When the callback occurs, new data is available from the device. This is why polling shoudl be considered an anti-pattern in EPICS.

GIL Aware

While polling can reduce latency in certain situations, in Python code, it is an anti-pattern due to the GIL, and, as noted, each Python opcode requiring many CPU instructions to execute. When Python is waiting on events from the operating system, it is like any other program, compiled or interpreted. This is why writing device control code in Python can be as efficient as programming C. (Note: I’m not speaking about kernel device drivers, where C is a better choice.) Polling in Python is self-inflicted contention, which is why event-driven Python device programming is even more important than in C.

EPICS uses the ctypes library to call the (multi-threaded) EPICS C library. Unlike other types of Python extensions, which must release the GIL manually, ctypes does this implicitly: The Python global interpreter lock is released before calling any function exported by these libraries, and reacquired afterwards. Note that properly written C extensions also release the GIL, e.g. numpy and scipy. Finally, disabling the GIL is an expiremental option in Python 3.13. This will shorten the life of this article, but the points made are still relevant, since the Python interpreter still needs to be locked.

Scientists use Python extensively, and they know the GIL prevents Python code from executing in parallel. EPICS is the acronym for Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System so the folks who use it are (predominantly) scientists. I think this may be one source of the confusion about the GIL. Often, the reason to use EPICS is to perform intense computation with the results from EPICS requests. If the computations need to be parallel, Python threading is the wrong tool. For HPC applications, it’s important to use packages like multiprocessing, dask, and MPI in Python to avoid issues with the GIL.

The Device control code itself can be written in Python with threading. For asynchronous Python, you can generally ignore the GIL.

After the set I bumped into local players Larry Vernec (bass) and Adam Wolf (piano). They have forty‑plus years together. We traded small talk until close. Late night for me, but those hours are often when loose thoughts connect.

AI in the Lounge

During the break the woman next to me, a retired high‑school music teacher, asked about AI. She’d just finished Klara and the Sun and couldn’t shake the human‑robot friendship theme.

I told her AI can generate useful things—text, images, even music—but I’ve never heard three computers improvise like Cyrus’s trio. The real magic was how they listened to one another, not the notes themselves.

A Billy Strings Detour

Earlier that day my childhood friend Ed texted a Billy Strings livestream. I replied with a link to BT ALC Big Band Radio on Spotify—lots of current releases. Ed loved the funk and said he wished he could sit in with a horn section. Same.

We used to play together as kids. Watching the late‑night duo at Dazzle—two friends still grooving decades later—I pictured us doing the same. Regret is a quiet instrument.

When the Band Isn’t a Band

Saturday morning I dug into the artists behind the songs I had saved. One track, by Take Your Time, had a tight groove but no artist bio. A search pulled up a Reddit thread: Take Your Time on Spotify — AI generated?. The creator confirmed:

“I prompt the style I want, pick the best parts, then clean everything in Ableton and iZotope. A few hours later the playlist is done.”

So the “band” is software. The song Straight to the Point, had 6K listens. The account pulls 105K monthly listeners. I’d favorited the track before knowing any of this.

Sampling, Lip‑Syncs, and Memex

Music has blurred lines for decades. Mocean Worker builds tracks from samples. Milli Vanilli lip‑synced. The Monkees didn’t play on their early records. Technology keeps moving the line.

In 1945 Vannevar Bush sketched the Memex, a desk that could summon any piece of media. That future arrived faster than he or the Memorex marketers expected.

Is It Real?

Last night a flesh‑and‑blood trio proved chemistry still matters. This morning an algorithm fooled me into toe‑tapping. Both moments were real because I experienced them.

If the groove connects, does the source matter? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Better to ask, does it resonate? If yes, live enough.

Bozos on the Bus

Engineer Robert Lucky captured this feeling back in 1996 in his IEEE Spectrum column Bozos on the Bus. Technology, he wrote, is a Greyhound hurtling into the fog. None of us—not even the people who built the engine—knows exactly where we’re headed. We just hang on, wide‑eyed, until the ride smooths out.

AI‑generated playlists are the latest swerve. One night I’m sure I can tell a living rhythm section from latent‑space funk; the next morning an algorithm slips into my Favorites without a red flag. Lucky’s point holds: every breakthrough turns us into bozos for a minute, gawking until the novelty fades and the bus lurches again.

So when someone asks whether the music is “real,” I think of Lucky’s shrug. Stay on the bus, keep listening, and try not to spill your coffee.

Acknowledgements

This article was generated by ChatGPT o3. I removed some of the bold text in favor of links as is my style. ChatGPT got almost all the links wrong except for the ones I provide. It rewrote some of the quotes, changed context (I didn’t bump into Adam and Larry, just listened), and generally fluffed it up, but kind of in my style. An interesting tidbit is that I never told ChatGPT Ed and I played horns as kids.

The above paragraph was written entirely by yours truly. The entire process took about 1.5 hours.

Around 2018 Sirepo had outgrown Celery as a job management system. We decided to implement a tailored solution to our problem, which involves jobs running from a few seconds to a few days. We also had a requirement to integrate with job managers on 3rd party supercomputers with independent authentication.

To manage the events in a job manager, we would need to manage asynchrony. Python supports several mechanisms for asynchrony: coroutines, threads, and multiprocessing. We had used Flask, which relies on threads (and multiple processes) for asynchrony. Our experience with Flask was not great.

We also reasoned that multi-threading is hard to implement correctly. With Python, the global interpreter lock always looms large in threading discussions, anyway. We thought fully separate memory spaces (processes) or cooperative multi-tasking (coroutines) would be more reliable.

We had good experience in BOP relying on PostgreSQL for locking and inter-process communication for jobs. However, Sirepo is different. It’s all about the jobs whereas BOP applications are mostly about the database.

We considered a publish-subscribe database like Redis to solve the queuing/locking problem with multiple processes. Even with pub-sub, we realized we would need a process manager so that jobs could be started, awaited on, cancelled, and timed out. An important part of this change was being able to charge for different levels of CPU resources.

Cancellation and timeouts led me to Nathaniel J Smith’s Timeouts and cancellation for humans. It’s well-written and worth a read. Nathaniel and I struck up a conversation about coroutines. This further convinced me that coroutines were the way to go, especially because they were cancellable. I did not have experience with modern day coroutines so we hired Nathaniel who helped us get started on the project. This was a good call. I am very grateful for Nathaniel for helping me (in particular) understand the ins and outs of Python’s asyncio.

Fast forward six years, the Sirepo job system has been in production for several years. Suffice it to say, we have learned a thing or two about job management, coroutines, cancellations, timeouts, locking, etc. This article collects our experience.

Job Supervisor and Coroutines

Sirepo jobs run on our cluster and at NERSC, which uses Slurm for job management. On our cluster, we control CPU and memory utlization with containers. We have paying customers with few complaints about the job system. The “one-click” 3rd party supercomputer integration is a godsend to many of our users. It is very nice to have happy customers.

And, we have had many issues with the job supervisor. Many are the natural outcome of emergent design, and others are intrinsic to coroutines in combination with Python’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission approach to cancellation, timeouts, errors, and other exceptional conditions.

We have expanded our use of coroutines to other projects. All new projects, which require asynchrony, use Tornado. We replaced Flask with Tornado for the API server so now all services rely on Tornado. Coroutines work well. We have not encountered many bugs with Tornado or asyncio. We think at this point we also know a bit better how to write reliable services based on coroutines.

Cooperative vs Preemptive Multitasking

In order to understand coroutines, we need to separate concurrency from parallelism, and cooperative multitasking from preemptive multitasking.

For most programmers, concurrency implies preemptive multitasking. Threads and multiprocessing are the most common form of concurrent programming we encounter. Coroutines while being an old invention in programming, only recently started to become popular. They weren’t added (formally) to Python until 2015. Programming language courses do not emphasize them. This is why they are tricksy, and why we can easily confuse concurrency with parallelism.

I think the confusion starts with the word concurrent, which Merriam-Webster defines as “operating or occurring at the same time.” Python coroutines execute concurrently, but they do not execute “at the same time”.

A better definition is found on the Wikipedia Concurrency page:

In computer science, concurrency is the ability of different parts or units of a program, algorithm, or problem to be executed out-of-order or in partial order, without affecting the outcome. This allows for parallel execution of the concurrent units.

The word allows is key. Concurrency allows for out of order execution. Coroutines can execute out of order, but their execution does not happen simultaneously as with (preemptible) threads.

Parallelism is overlapping execution. Coroutines do not run in parallel. They execute in a single Python thread.

Coroutine execution order is controlled by the asyncio event loop Coroutines are cooperative, not preemptive multitasking. That’s their main attraction: there can be no race conditions.

Rob Pike’s talk Concurrency is not parallelism is worth a watch. The caveat here is that Goroutines are not coroutines, because they are allowed to execute in parallel, which Python coroutines cannot. Still, the talk explains concurrency and parallelism clearly and with some good examples.

Concurrency Requires Logging

Let’s move on to something practical: Debugging concurrent code is hard, precisely because execution is out of order. Good logging is essential in order to make it easy to debug, especially in production.

We have had numerous failures due to concurrency, most of which are easily explainable in hindsight. Debugging consists of staring at logs for hours on end, because the difficult to find defects only occur in production, in real-time. They are difficult to reproduce.

Over the years, we have had to improve logging in the job system. Here are some guidelines we use:

• Always catch and log exceptions in coroutines with sufficient context. Sufficient will become apparent over time.
• Use something like __repr__ or the more robust pkdebug_str to create consistent context for objects in log message.
• Include detailed logs with timestamps in issues (bug reports). In public repos, like Sirepo, use a log trimmer to avoid exposing personally identifiable information (PII).

Here’s how job_supervisor._Op logs its context:

def pkdebug_str(self):
    def _internal_error():
        if not self.get("internal_error"):
            return ""
        return ", internal_error={self.internal_error}"

    return pkdformat(
        "_Op({}{}, {:.4}{})",
        "DESTROYED, " if self.get("is_destroyed") else "",
        self.get("op_name"),
        self.get("op_id"),
        _internal_error(),
    )

Track Object Life Cycle

Note the is_destroyed flag in the previous code snippet. In shared-memory, asynchronous code, an object can be destroyed by one coroutine while it still is being used by another. This is the cause of numerous failures: using state when it is no longer valid.

For example, in the supervisor, a job might be canceled asynchronously by an API call triggered by a user pressing a cancel button. The coroutine handling the request that cancels the job is not the coroutine which is monitoring the job. The coroutine monitoring the job holds a copy of the job object, which is destroyed by the coroutine canceling the job.

That’s why in Sirepo asynchronous code, objects that are referenced concurrently by two coroutines are destroyed explicitly. Coroutines are obligated to check object’s is_destroyed flag to determine the object’s validity after an await. This means state management can get complicated.

In _send, is_destroyed is checked:

async def _send(op):
    if not await op.prepare_send() or op.is_destroyed:
        return None, False
    if not op.send():
        return None, False
    if (r := await op.reply_get()) is None:
        return None, False

This check ensures that op has not been canceled. Once checked, we know that op can’t be destroyed until after the await op.reply_get.

asyncio.Task.cancel

That’s a lot of code and logic just to send and get a reply. Why not just Task.cancel the _send coroutine? After all, as the documentation says, “Tasks can easily and safely be cancelled.” We did not find Task.cancel to be easy to manage. It is very hard to write correct cancellation code. We found one defect related to cancel in Tornado itself. Admittedly, Tornado was written well before asyncio, and before tasks could be canceled.

Cancelling is hard. For example, you can only cancel a concurrent.futures.Future when it is pending. Already executing futures cannot be canceled, even when they are waiting on another coroutine.

Another example is threading.Timer.cancel, which “will only work if the timer is still in its waiting stage.”

You cannot cancel a threading.Thread: “threads cannot be destroyed, stopped, suspended, resumed, or interrupted.”

And, you guessed it, you can’t kill a Goroutine, a Rust thread, a Java thread, etc. Indeed, Java had Thread.stop, and it was removed for good reasons.

That’s why canceling a Python coroutine is problematic, too. Cancelling coroutines is hard. In Python 3.11, Task.uncancel and Task.cancelling were added, which to me is yet another clue that it is hard to implement cancelling. Piling on more methods, doesn’t fix the fundamental issue.

Use asyncio.Queue

We have settled on asyncio.Queue as the sole means of communication and synchronization in coroutines. The advantage of Queues over Locks and Events is that a Queue allows you to pass values. As you saw in the example above, reply_get returns None when there is no reply, and that only happens when the send was canceled. This is a clean way to communicate out-of-band state. With Events and Locks, there’s no value – just one state change. This means you have to have some other value to release a Lock or Event in a way that clearly communicates this alternative state.

Python 3.13 added Queue.shutdown, which makes this communication even clearer. Here’s the code in pykern.api.client, to destroy and API call:

if x := getattr(self._reply_q, "shutdown", None):
    x.shutdown(immediate=True)
else:
    # Inferior to shutdown, but necessary pre-Python 3.13
   self._reply_q.put_nowait(None)

And, the corresponding code in: result_get:

try:
    rv = await self._reply_q.get()
except Exception as e:
    if (x := getattr(asyncio, "QueueShutDown", None)) and isinstance(e, x):
        raise util.APIDisconnected()
    raise

This code allows for clean communication that the APIDisconnected, and the API call did not complete.

Coroutines Block on I/O

Calls to open, read, etc. are blocking, that is, they block all coroutines until the operating system fulfills the I/O operation(s). You need parallelism in order to implement asynchronous I/O in Python. (I have no idea why they call the coroutine module asyncio, since it does not support I/O.)

A Tornado specific problem is that reply functions block and are not thread safe. This means a single response blocks the entire server. Sirepo has an outstanding issue with sending data without blocking. With websockets, we will eventually chunk messages to avoid this issue.

We use aiohttp and aiofiles to avoid blocking on other types of I/O. The implementation uses ThreadPoolExecutor to parallelize the I/O operations.

To achieve true parallelism in production, we run Tornado in multiple processes behind a proxy. This is true for any asyncio-based web server.

Backfitting is Hard

When an existing function is converted into a coroutine, all callers have to be modified. This makes updating exiting code very difficult. This is by design. It also is annoying, let’s face it.

One way to fix this problem is to create a new function that calls the async function with asyncio.run, which allows non-async functions to call coroutines. This allows you to deprecate the usage and migrate your code slowly. Here’s a simple example from Sirepo:

def call_api_sync(self, *args, **kwargs):
    import asyncio

    return asyncio.run(self.call_api(*args, **kwargs))

This allows non-async code to use call_api, which is async.

Programmers Infer Parallelism

The way coroutines work is more than semantics. It directly affects what is going on in programs that use them. I think programmers infer parallelism from the asyncio objects, e.g. Lock and Semaphore. These are words we learn in operating system courses. Coroutines execute in a single thread.

When you write some asyncio code that reads from a file in an asyncio-based web server such as Tornado, no other coroutine can preempt the read loop unless there is a call to await.

This may seem obvious in the context of this article, but the language of preemption is implied in the asyncio documentation:

asyncio synchronization primitives are designed to be similar to those of the threading module with two important caveats:

• asyncio primitives are not thread-safe, therefore they should not be used for OS thread synchronization (use threading for that);
• methods of these synchronization primitives do not accept the timeout argument; use the asyncio.wait_for() function to perform operations with timeouts.

To me, the most important caveat is that coroutines are not parallel. The language implies an equivalence to threads, which are totally unrelated. All asyncio operations are not thread safe except call_soon_threadsafe.

Yield to the Event Loop

You have to pay attention when coding coroutines. Cooperative multitasking requires yielding to the event loop whenever real work is being done. By real work, this could be blocking I/O or computation. Blocking I/O is solved by aiofiles (discussed above).

If a coroutine has a loop, it needs yield to the event loop in its loop unless the loop is “fast” or calls await in the loop. The meaning of “fast” is obviously in the eye of the beholder.

In the job_supervisor we yield to the event loop when garbage collecting old jobs:

for u, jids in (await _uids_to_jids(too_old, qcall)).items():
    with qcall.auth.logged_in_user_set(u):
        for j in jids:
            _purge_job(jid=j, too_old=too_old, qcall=qcall)
    await sirepo.util.yield_to_event_loop()

sirepo.util.yield_to_event_loop is wrapper, which allows us to document this magic:

async def yield_to_event_loop():
    await asyncio.sleep(0)

asyncio.sleep(0) has special semantics:

Setting the delay to 0 provides an optimized path to allow other tasks to run. This can be used by long-running functions to avoid blocking the event loop for the full duration of the function call.

(Nit: I hate tricks like this. They should just have provided asyncio.yield_to_event_loop.)

await does not Always Yield

The use of await does mean “yield to the event loop”. In the following code await some_func() executes completely synchronously:

async def some_func():
    for i in range(1000):
        await sync_func()

async def sync_func():
    pass

This code would execute the same in the event loop if we removed async and await keywords. This may seem obvious in this simple example, it’s not obvious in any non-trivial coroutine.

This is important, because unless you know exactly what the coroutine being awaited on does, there’s no guarantee that a loop which contains an await actually releases the processor. This means you have to break the abstraction of any coroutines you call, or you have to always call yield_to_event_loop. This would be annoying, and it’s a real problem in asyncio-based code. This is a Python specific issue, and is a design flaw in my opinion.

Tornado.on_message

When we first wrote the supervisor, we assumed that WebSocketHandler.on_message is a coroutine, because it can be defined that way. This is another example of inferring something the behavior of coroutines, which I believe would true for thread-based web server. There’s an open issue about this in Tornado so we aren’t the only ones who made this assumption.

The fix is to simply create a task in on_message as is done in pykern.api.server:

async def on_message(self, msg):
    try:
        # WebSocketHandler only allows one on_message at a time
        pykern.pkasyncio.create_task(
            self.pykern_api_connection.handle_on_message(msg)
        )
    except Exception as e:
        pkdlog("exception={} stack={}", e, pkdexc())

I want to emphasize again the importance of logging at this level. If there is an exception in handle_on_message, a stack trace will be logged. The exception is not raised, because there’s no value in having Tornado process the exception. WebSocket messages are simple. There are no replies so there’s nothing for Tornado to do, and it has no useful context for this problem (in our code).

Debugging

In our experience, debugging coroutines is just as hard as threads, and possibly harder. A coroutine is not visible to the operating system. If a thread is an infinite loop, for example, you can easily see that with a operating system thread monitoring tool like top. Coroutines can’t be monitored externally. All you see is the whole process is busy computing.

Coroutines do not have race conditions, which eliminates one very difficult class of defect. However, they can deadlock. When two or more coroutines are deadlocked, there’s no insight with normal operating system tools. There are tools to see threads which are blocked, which greatly helps debugging.

The way we debug is to have very good logging. Every new hard to debug defect usually results in improved log messages either to include more context or messages in places that were missing.

Sirepo uses pykern.pkdebug which allows (real-time) control of logging on a per line, function, or module basis. A regular expression controls the output. If the controlling regular expression is not set (normal case), the log function does nothing, which is efficient. This type of logging can be useful in particularly difficult defects, where you don’t want to flood the production logs when the system is running normally.

asyncio has a static environment variable PYTHONASYNCIODEBUG, which logs interesting information about coroutines, e.g. long running coroutines, not awaited coroutines (common problem), and exceptions raised when calling asyncio APIs from the wrong thread.

Summary

asyncio is part of Python now, and more and more code will use it. Hopefully this article helps you write more effective coroutines. It’s not as easy as it looks, but as you develop your own coroutine coding patterns, it becomes manageable.

Other people have written extensively about coroutines. Here are some useful references in alphabetical order:

• Asyncio, twisted, tornado, gevent walk into a bar…
• Serving large files with Tornado safely without blocking
• Stack Overflow: Does await in Python yield to the event loop?
• Unity Forum: Why do people hate Coroutines?
• Why I stopped using Coroutines in Kotlin

Goblin’s BandBox

I have been expanding my home gym. I wanted to do trap bar deadlifts, but I didn’t want a big trap bar and weights just for deadlifts. One way to do this is with resistance bands.

My friend Devon, whom I recently visited, likes to travel light and uses resistance bands exclusively for working out. He’s in great shape so I thought I’d try them, too. I tried deadlifting with them under my feet. Then I tried with a board under my feet to hold down the resistance bands, but it was awkward.

Then I discovered Goblin’s BandBox. You can watch Pascal in an instructional video to see how it works. Very cool. He even provides an instruction manual.

Here’s what mine looks like from the top:

And, the bottom:

You might see some flaws, e.g. the notches on the top are a mistake. There are many others. It makes me sad to look at it, because I worked very hard to get here. The important thing I have to remember is that it works well, and I don’t have to have a trap bar and plates.

BandBox Fixation

One alternative to the BandBox is to use a board with feet so the bands can slide underneath. You can buy one for $300. Some people built the same thing using a plastic cutting board with hockey pucks for the feet. However, Goblin’s BandBox is better and allows for other activies like side pulls.

My BandBox fixation became acute. I sought out what Pascal calls “idle rollers”, which are called “gravity rollers” in the US. I should mention that Pascal is Swiss, and you might notice the quality of the rollers. I wanted to find those, and I couldn’t. I honed in on 15 inch rollers after a bit, and ordered those. Pascal said it is hard to find those, but that wasn’t the hard part for me.

The most difficult piece to get was the anti-slip phenolic resin plywood, which I could only find in 4x8 sheets and nothing local. (While finding links for this article, I ran into this on Etsy, which would have been a good option. Buffalo board is not a name I had seen before, and that’s a good term to search for in the US.) I have a plyo box which is made out of the same anti-slip plywood. I figured this was going to be my cheapest and easiest option so I ordered one to use for this part.

All of this researching took quite a bit of time. I was quite fixated on making the best possible BandBox, of course. I’m glad the research phase was over.

First Sketch

The rollers arrived. They are solid and worked well. I started my first sketch:

The initial depth (height in the sketch) was going to be 19 inches which was large. The rollers are very long, and this meant the whole box was going to be quite large. I wasn’t happy with the net weight of the end product either. I felt like there had to be a better solution.

That’s when I did even more research to figure out a better solution. I get kind of lost in these research activities so I spent way more time than I needed to. A Reddit post mentioned PVC and dowels instead of rollers. This is what I ended up using. I’m happy with the solution, because it’s not as deep or as heavy.

Wood Fixation

The box hardware stores have crappy 2x4s. They are quite uneven or damaged on one side. I spent too long going through stacks of 2x4s trying to find the “right one”. I ended up buying a stair tread, something I’ve used before for nice pine. They have to be straight and clean or people are going to trip going up the stairs. They are typically 1 inch thick, which was almost perfect. I had to compromise.

This meant cutting a 1 inch piece of wood straight. These are the side pieces of the BandBox and they have to be level so the box sits flat and so the cross piece (where you place your feet) is level. I figured a cutting experiment was in order. You can see the left over piece of stair tread in the first picture. My cuts (without a table saw or guide rail) were too uneven to work well. And anyway, 1 inch was a little narrow for the dowel/PVC holes.

There are many lumber places near where I live. I was out driving near one and stopped by. It was pretty quiet outside. Of course, it turned out to be just the warehouse even though Google Maps said it was a retail store. An employee said the store was actually 5 miles farther away. There were others nearby, but I decided to call them first. Nobody had clean 2x4 pine in stock. Everybody in Denver recommends Austin Hardwoods, which I decided was too far out of the way.

To cut my wood fixation short, I was in Boulder and went to Sterling Lumber (locals know this as Boulder Lumber). They had very nice maple 1x4s so I bought 9 feet, had them cut it in half to fit in my car, and went home.

Crooked Wood

The maple cost $50 ($5.50 per linear foot) so I figured it had to be straight. My motto: cut twice, measure once. I should have checked. The piece was warped, and my idea of screwing two pieces of wood together to form a 2x4 was going to take some work.

Aside. When you buy dimensional lumber in the US, e.g. 2x4s and 1x4s, you get something less than advertised. A 1x4 is really .75 by 3.5 inches. A 2x4 is really 1.5 by 3.5 inches. You can’t be annoyed by this, but you need to take this into account.

Interestingly, the single 1x4 was actually not 3.5 inches wide. Rather, it was slightly tapered. This might not matter if you are building something, but it was off enough that I was also going to have a sanding job to even out the pieces for solid support.

I figured that it wouldn’t be too bad to screw and glue the wood together so end wood fixation. Time to cut, I mean, measure.

Second Sketch

I ended up with 1.25 inch oak dowels. The PVC tubing is labeled as 1 1/4, which is actually 1.375 inch so a 1.25 inch dowel fits perfectly for smooth rolling. It was time for a second sketch:

I was feeling quite good about the wood and dimensions. Things were coming together. Take note of the quick three sets of parallel lines where the three extra holes would go. I was following Pascal’s diagram (included without permission):

I’m referring here to holes 4A through 4F.

Cut the Cake

This project was taking quite a bit of time, and I was starting to get annoyed with my perfectionism. That’s always a bad sign for me. I needed to take some breaths. Thankfully Janis helped me see that the product wasn’t as important as the process. I actually like building things, but I still get upset at myself for taking so long doing it. This is a common loop I get into. By writing this article, I hope to help myself process this process.

The dowels were first. They had to be even, because they would form part of the support of the box. I used a backsaw and cheap mitre box that I’ve had for years. Oak is pretty tough to cut, and it took longer than expected.

For the PVC, I broke out the reciprocating saw. The PVC was harder to clamp so the backsaw wasn’t going to work. Naturally in my carefulness about the PVC I got my thumb between the back of the shoe and the chassis. Ouch!

The maple boards were next, and they went smoothly. I was careful to clamp them together so that the two pieces would be the same length. A little crooked on the end, since I was using a circular saw, free hand.

Puzzling over the Plyobox

The anti-slip plywood was next. I needed to figure out how to get the right pieces out of the plyo box, which comes in six pieces with lots of logos and holes in the wrong places. Here’s a picture of the assembled plyo box (included without permission):

What I had failed to think about was the length of each piece was not 20 inches or 18 inches. I needed two pieces that were 8 x 16 inches. That meant the 16 inch piece was right out, and the 18x16 piece was the best choice.

I screwed the two faces together, checking carefully that I would get minimal writing on the foot plate. After screwing together the resin coated faces to avoid messing up the resin, I ended up with this:

This made me happy despite a few imperfections in the resin. I was annoyed, but I wasn’t going to fuss over it.

Sanding and Hands

The crooked maple pieces needed to be sanded to make them even. This turned out to be quite a job. Maple is dense, and it takes a long time to sand it down. I was using a vibrating sander which makes a mess, and well, vibrates.

I had done all this in one day, because I wanted to be done with the messy cutting and sanding. It was getting on 4 or 5 hours, which, back in the day, would have been no problem for me. Given my age and lack of recent woodworking, I should have not been surprised when my hands cramped, like big time.

In the end, I had to accept the limits of my aging body, and stop for the day. This was very frustrating, because there was plenty of light and I wasn’t ready to stop.

This fluke in my process really hit me hard. I don’t like feeling my age. I am generally fine with it, and I accept many limits. My hands are the one thing that I worry about.

Dowelry

With all pieces finally sanded, the next step was assembly. While I was happy with the wood dowels, what I failed to think about was that the 1.25 inch dowels were quite wide. Remember holes 4A through 4F in Pascal’s sketch? Well, it was going to be really hard to achieve that.

In hindsight, I should have used two different sized dowels. A BandBox’s rollers need to be wide so the bands aren’t pinched when looping over the roller. However, the in-between dowels are fixed, and the bands aren’t intended to move over them. I probably could have gotten away with 1 inch dowels all around, or even 0.75 inch dowels for the removable pins which help when doing one sided exercises.

Third Sketch

The best plan was to have two holes underneat the foot plates instead of three. Here’s the quick sketch I did:

More compromises due to the randomness of the process. While it seemed like I was planning thoroughly, I simply didn’t have the experience to know to plan this part out fully. I didn’t want to sit in sketchup for hours, and as it turns out, I’m glad I didn’t. I was in for more chaos.

Hard Wood Drilling

Luckily my son has a drill press so I was able to cut precise holes in the maple support pieces. I just needed to mark things out when I realized that I had a 1 inch forstner drill bit and one that was 1.375 inches. The latter was what I was going to use for the holes for the removable pins. That’s why I bought 1.25 inch dowels in the first place.

Off to the hardware store to buy a 1.25 inch forstner drill bit. That was an ouch of about $20 that I hadn’t planned for.

The drilling itself went quite well. I got the shopvac out. Drilling large holes creates a lot of wood shavings. Drilling into maple even more. The drill bit got hot. I would stop to vacuum up the shavings. It was only after the third hole that I realized I could hold the vacuum hose right next to the drill bit. I had done this in the past, but being out of practice, I forgot. That made the mess cleaner, but then I had to allow time for the bit to cool down.

It took about 5 minutes to drill one large hole. I had picked maple, because I wanted it to look nice. It would have been much better to use pine. Strong enough, and it would have looked good enough. Drilling would have been faster and better.

The small holes for the screws were the worst. I should have regeared the drill press, but I was too lazy. It went too fast and the wood smoked. Going slowly didn’t seem to help. The smaller bit got much hotter, faster than the forstner bits, which have much more mass and better contact with the drill chuck which also dissipates the heat.

I should mention that I clamped the two inner support pieces of wood face to face to make the first set of holes. Once the two end holes were cut, I could put in some leftover dowel pieces to ensure all the dowel holes would align. Here’s what the drilling looks like:

Assembly!

With all the pieces cut, sanded, drilled, and sanded (again), it was time to assemble everything. This was an evening activity, because assembly is always simple after the hard work above. Here are all the parts beautifully arranged:

Be sure to go back and look at the finished BandBox and compare the parts to see if you can see a key difference between these parts and what finally got assembled.

Cluttered Work Area, Cluttered Mind

Again, I was getting annoyed with how long this project was taking. Part of my frustration was that I don’t have a dedicated work bench any more, because we needed space in the garage for both cars. My work area was a mess:

I started assembling.

I screwed the side pieces together, and I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to flatten the bent side pieces with screws. A couple of screws broke so I was going to have to glue the pieces together. No tragedy, and the end product would be stronger.

Screw You Glue

Since the screws broke in the first attempts at assembly, I went to the hardware store one more time to get better screws. Unlike the selection of the wood, I rushed the process. I also didn’t think clearly. I bought some brass screws which looked better, but were actually weaker than the steel screws I was using. They were also longer, which was good, but that made them even more likely to break off.

When I was screwing the wood together after gluing and clamping, I broke off a head in the side piece. This got me pretty flustered. I should have known brass screws were weaker. I started beating myself up pretty badly.

If you have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you will know that I was in a gumption trap, and more mistakes were going to be made.

Finally, the first side piece was glued, and I was ready to call it a night.

Devastation

As I mentioned, my garage was a mess. I needed a good place to put my perfectly cut, drilled, and sanded pieces of wood that had yet to be assembled while I was putting the one side piece together. What better place than on top of the car? Not.

Yes, I forgot to move that off the car when I stopped for the night. And, yes, someone drove off with the parts on top of the car the next day.

I just happened to go into the garage midday (the glue was still curing), and I just happened to see a piece of wood on the car after the car was back. Unbelievably, one of the two side pieces were on top of the car after having been driven over five miles with two stops.

If I hadn’t seen that piece of wood at that time, I probably would have completely chucked it in. As it was, I was completely devastated by having to start over again. The one piece that was lost had 9 very difficult to drill holes in it. I couldn’t imagine matching it up to the other side piece that was being glued.

Car Chase

After much encouragement by Janis, I went outside to look for the wood piece thinking it had to have fallen off right next to the house.

I came back in the house, and I told Janis I couldn’t find it. Janis said, maybe it fell off nearby? I was distraught and angry with myself. A great time to get into a car, I always say. Maybe I should have grabbed a beer for the road.

No accidents, and yes, I found the other piece. It wasn’t too beat up either. Just some minor dings on the corners:

I still cannot fathom how it stayed on the car for over 3 miles. It fell off in a very safe place (for a piece of wood) on an overpass crossing I-70 where there was a bit of shoulder, which no cars would likely drive on.

The only word for this is a fluke, which also happens to be the name of a book I recommend. This is simply the law or large numbers at work.

The Missing Piece

After gluing the other piece together, I was ready to put it all together. I just had to drill some holes in the edges to match up the predrilled holes in the foot plates that were – yes, you guessed it – were lost a few days before.

For some reason, it didn’t occur to me that there were four pieces of wood on top of the car: the two side pieces and the two foot plates. The foot plates were gone, gone, gone. I was going out anyway, and half-heartedly looked for them. Maybe they’ll show up on my front door (fluke!) some day.

However, I had to accept them as missing. This meant I had to use the 20x18 sides of the plyo box that I was holding in reserve. These are the ones with the big Yes4All written across them.

The Last Flaw, Not!

I matched up the pieces of wood carefully. Then I did the math, and I said 20 minus 4 is 16, which is the length of the foot plate I needed. I cut 4 inches off one side. When I went to cut the other side, I realized that I had cut too much. Here’s what it ended up looking like in the finished product:

I thought about buying a new plyo box, but that would have been $90. I also thought I could replace the piece if someday I happened upon some anti-slip phenolic resin plywood. However, there would be one more flaw.

Screwing Around

A big storm was coming in, and I wanted to be done with the messy cutting parts that I wanted to do outside. Definitely should have taken a breather, but I didn’t. Instead, I broke off several screw heads before I realized I was trying to go too deep into the maple. It was not necessary. More mistakes:

Once I switched to shorter screws and drilled out the wood a couple of times (till the smoke stopped pouring out) that I was able to use shorter (1.625 inch) deck screws without breaking heads.

Good thing that the BandBox works as intended. Time to quit working wood and start working out!

New Dimensions

I hope this story was entertaining and/or informative. I rushed through it mostly to get all the text written. I hope to get some edits from you, dear reader. Unlike woodwooking, writing and software are much more editable.

For those of you who want to attempt this, here are some dimensions on the side pieces:

The outside side pieces only have holes for the removable pins:

Parts List (measurements in inches):

• (4) 1x4 board 25W (supports)
• (2) 5/8 anti-slip phenolic resin plywood 16L x 8W (foot plates)
• (4) 1 1/4 PVC 12.75L
• (4) 1 1/4 dowel 14.5L (support PVC)
• (2) 1 1/4 dowel 18L (removable pins)
• (8) 1 5/8 deck screws
• (10) 1 1/4 flathead wood screws

P.S. there were even more incorrect cuts, but I’ve already bored you enough.

I wrote in 2020:

I wonder what I’ll be saying about this article in 10 years.

“Ouch!” is what I say after three years.

However, if I had stayed in Amazon until today (August 2023), the AIRR would be -4.4% in comparison 16% for the S&P 500. Total cummulative loss would have been 46.1%. Yay!

Jump In!

For those of you who know me, I jump in to pretty much anything I do with all four paws. It sometimes hurts a lot, and other times, it feels great.

I don’t think of myself as impulsive. I think things through as best as I can, and then I decide. If I had decided to keep half in the S&P 500 and half in Amazon, I would have fared better, of course. That’s just not me.

Hire Warren Buffett

In 2014, I wrote:

You can be as lazy as me and hire Warren, too.

I was all in on Berkshire Hathaway from about 2003 to about March 2020 when I panicked, and got out of the market due to the COVID-19 scare. Panicking is never good, and hiring Warren Buffet is pretty much always a reasonable choice.

If I had stayed in Berkshire from August 2003 till today, my AIRR would have been 10.2%, and the S&P 500 would have been 9.7%. Betting on Buffet wasn’t bad advice, and I regret that I didn’t.

Be Sensible

I often say that you can’t take “half the advice” when someone is giving it. This is part of my “all in” philosophy.

Long ago, Warren Buffett said, “Consistently buy an S&P 500 low-cost index fund. I think it’s the thing that makes the most sense practically all of the time.”

I have many decades of investing experience. I started out “right” in the early 1980’s after reading the Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need by Andy Tobias, and thinking index funds were the best investment. I have tried to follow some of Tobias’s advice but not the index investing part. That was probably the most import to follow.

Play It Safe

In 2022, I wrote:

Diversification is thought to be safe, but it leads to owning a lot of Day 2 companies.

I think I am finally done trying to beat the advice of the Oracle of Omaha and many other sages.

So that’s it. I’m all in on the S&P 500, forever.

One more important point: It’s ok to make mistakes. Failure is an option. You will recover from the vast majority of mistakes. Just take the time to learn from them. If you are particularly wise, take the time to learn from the mistakes of others, like mine.

Alex Haley spent two years meeting with Malcolm X to produce The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a brilliant work about a brilliant man. If you don’t know anything about Malcom X other than he was a “radical”, you should read this book. He was not a radical.

He had a horrible history (like the vast majority of blacks at the time) which taught him many things: hate Whites and be strong. For him, it was “enough is enough”. He overcame years of debauchery and prison to become a leading light in the civil rights movement.

His flaws are evident, e.g. views of women. He was an anti-integrationist, which on the one hand, makes sense, but it was counter-productive and unrealistic. He complains about the vainglorious white man, but he sounds vainglorious at times in the book. Yet, he let us see his flaws in his autobiography. That’s awesome.

I’m mixed on his views of Jews. I could argue he was angry that Jews controlled the businesses frequented by Blacks (wouldn’t be the first). I could also argue that he was singling out the Jews, just because of what he saw. They didn’t own all (or even most) of the businesses patronized by Blacks. He said he was antiexploitation, which is fine, but he could have just pointed out (his conclusion) that Blacks should have owned businesses. Fundamentally, Jews and Blacks have a lot in common, down to the early history of Jews being an enslaved people, which Malcom X knew well with his deep religious studies.

All that aside, I enjoyed the book immensely. It’s critical to read to get a good understanding of the civil rights movement in the 1960s as well as another difficult personal story of an African American.

[k153] When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night. Surrounding the house, brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out.

[k159] My father, the Reverend Earl Little, was a Baptist minister, a dedicated organizer for Marcus Aurelius Garvey’s U.N.I.A. (Universal Negro Improvement Association).

[k169] Among the reasons my father had decided to risk and dedicate his life to help disseminate this philosophy among his people was that he had seen four of his six brothers die by violence, three of them killed by white men, including one by lynching. What my father could not know then was that of the remaining three, including himself, only one, my Uncle Jim, would die in bed, of natural causes.

[k178] Louise Little, my mother, who was born in Grenada, in the British West Indies, looked like a white woman. Her father was white.

[k179] Of this white father of hers, I know nothing except her shame about it.

[k185] The teaching of Marcus Garvey stressed becoming independent of the white man.

[k190] Soon, nearly everywhere my father went, Black Legionnaires were reviling him as an “uppity nigger” for wanting to own a store, for living outside the Lansing Negro district, for spreading unrest and dissention among “the good niggers.”

[k192] Shortly after Yvonne was born came the nightmare night in 1929, my earliest vivid memory. I remember being suddenly snatched awake into a frightening confusion of pistol shots and shouting and smoke and flames.

[k197] The white police and firemen came and stood around watching as the house burned down to the ground.

[k203] After the fire, I remember that my father was called in and questioned about a permit for the pistol with which he had shot at the white men who set the fire.

[k211] My father was also belligerent toward all of the children, except me. The older ones he would beat almost savagely if they broke any of his rules–and he had so many rules it was hard to know them all. Nearly all my whippings came from my mother.

[k233] The only Negroes who really had any money were the ones in the numbers racket, or who ran the gambling houses, or who in some other way lived parasitically off the poorest ones, who were the masses. No Negroes were hired then by Lansing’s big Oldsmobile plant, or the Reo plant.

[k277] I remember well how my mother asked me why I couldn’t be a nice boy like Wilfred; but I would think to myself that Wilfred, for being so nice and quiet, often stayed hungry. So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise. Not only did we have our big garden, but we raised chickens.

[k327] As the visitors tapered off, she became very concerned about collecting the two insurance policies that my father had always been proud he carried. He had always said that families should be protected in case of death. One policy apparently paid off without any problem–the smaller one.

[k331] The company that had issued the bigger policy was balking at paying off. They were claiming that my father had committed suicide. Visitors came again, and there was bitter talk about white people: how could my father bash himself in the head, then get down across the streetcar tracks to be run over?

[k343] She would go into Lansing and find different jobs–in housework, or sewing–for white people. They didn’t realize, usually, that she was a Negro. A lot of white people around there didn’t want Negroes in their houses.

She would do fine until in some way or other it got to people who she was, whose widow she was. And then she would be let go.

[k372] But there were times when there wasn’t even a nickel and we would be so hungry we were dizzy. My mother would boil a big pot of dandelion greens, and we would eat that.

[k420] This was my first lesson about gambling: if you see somebody winning all the time, he isn’t gambling, he’s cheating. Later on in life, if I were continuously losing in any gambling situation, I would watch very closely. It’s like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time. He’s a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.

[k494] All I had done was to improve on their strategy, and it was the beginning of a very important lesson in life–that anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you’re both engaged in the same business–you know they’re doing something that you aren’t.

[k500] Eventually my mother suffered a complete breakdown, and the court orders were finally signed. They took her to the State Mental Hospital at Kalamazoo.

[k502] We were “state children,” court wards; he had the full say-so over us. A white man in charge of a black man’s children! Nothing but legal, modern slavery–however kindly intentioned.

[k516] I truly believe that if ever a state social agency destroyed a family, it destroyed ours. We wanted and tried to stay together. Our home didn’t have to be destroyed. But the Welfare, the courts, and their doctor, gave us the one-two-three punch. And ours was not the only case of this kind.

[k523] I have rarely talked to anyone about my mother, for I believe that I am capable of killing a person, without hesitation, who happened to make the wrong kind of remark about my mother.

[k592] They all liked my attitude, and it was out of their liking for me that I soon became accepted by them–as a mascot, I know now. They would talk about anything and everything with me standing right there hearing them, the same way people would talk freely in front of a pet canary. They would even talk about me, or about “niggers,” as though I wasn’t there, as if I wouldn’t understand what the word meant. A hundred times a day, they used the word “nigger.” I suppose that in their own minds, they meant no harm; in fact they probably meant well.

[k603] What I am trying to say is that it just never dawned upon them that I could understand, that I wasn’t a pet, but a human being. They didn’t give me credit for having the same sensitivity, intellect, and understanding that they would have been ready and willing to recognize in a white boy in my position. But it has historically been the case with white people, in their regard for black people, that even though we might be with them, we weren’t considered of them. Even though they appeared to have opened the door, it was still closed. Thus they never did really see me.

This is the sort of kindly condescension which I try to clarify today, to these integration-hungry Negroes, about their “liberal” white friends, these so-called “good white people”–most of them anyway.

[k612] But I was no more than vaguely aware of anything like that in my detention-home years. I did my little chores around the house, and everything was fine.

[k640] The one thing I didn’t like about history class was that the teacher, Mr. Williams, was a great one for “nigger” jokes.

[k643] Later, I remember, we came to the textbook section on Negro history. It was exactly one paragraph long. Mr. Williams laughed through it practically in a single breath, reading aloud how the Negroes had been slaves and then were freed, and how they were usually lazy and dumb and shiftless.

[k649] Basketball was a big thing in my life, though. I was on the team; we traveled to neighboring towns such as Howell and Charlotte, and wherever I showed my face, the audiences in the gymnasiums “niggered” and “cooned” me to death. Or called me “Rastus.”

[k772] Mr. Ostrowski looked surprised, I remember, and leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. He kind of half-smiled and said, “Malcolm, one of life’s first needs is for us to be realistic. Don’t misunderstand me, now. We all here like you, you know that. But you’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer–that’s no realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can be. You’re good with your hands–making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don’t you plan on carpentry? People like you as a person–you’d get all kinds of work.” The more I thought afterwards about what he said, the more uneasy it made me. It just kept treading around in my mind.

[k781] They all reported that Mr. Ostrowski had encouraged what they had wanted. Yet nearly none of them had earned marks equal to mine.

It was a surprising thing that I had never thought of it that way before, but I realized that whatever I wasn’t, I was smarter than nearly all of those white kids. But apparently I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes, to become whatever I wanted to be.

It was then that I began to change–inside.

[k800] I went every Saturday to see my brothers and sisters in Lansing, and almost every other day I wrote to Ella in Boston. Not saying why, I told Ella that I wanted to come there and live.

I don’t know how she did it, but she arranged for official custody of me to be transferred from Michigan to Massachusetts, and the very week I finished the eighth grade, I again boarded the Greyhound bus for Boston.

[k803] No physical move in my life has been more pivotal or profound in its repercussions.

[k807] Whatever I have done since then, I have driven myself to become a success at it. I’ve often thought that if Mr. Ostrowski had encouraged me to become a lawyer, I would today probably be among some city’s professional black bourgeoisie, sipping cocktails and palming myself off as a community spokesman for and leader of the suffering black masses, while my primary concern would be to grab a few more crumbs from the groaning board of the two-faced whites with whom they’re begging to “integrate.”

All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did. If I hadn’t, I’d probably still be a brainwashed black Christian.

[k822] Ella still seemed to be as big, black, outspoken and impressive a woman as she had been in Mason and Lansing.

[k1088] This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are “inferior”–and white people “superior”–that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look “pretty” by white standards.

[k1131] White customers on the shine stand, especially, would laugh to see my feet suddenly break loose on their own and cut a few steps. Whites are correct in thinking that black people are natural dancers. Even little kids are–except for those Negroes today who are so “integrated,” as I had been, that their instincts are inhibited. You know those “dancing jibagoo” toys that you wind up? Well, I was like a live one–music just wound me up.

[k1171] People like the sleep-in maid for Beacon Hill white folks who used to come in with her “ooh, my deah” manners and order corn plasters in the Jew’s drugstore for black folks.

[k1426] Hundreds of Negro soldiers and sailors, gawking and young like me, passed by. Harlem by now was officially off limits to white servicemen. There had already been some muggings and robberies, and several white servicemen had been found murdered. The police were also trying to discourage white civilians from coming uptown, but those who wanted to still did.

[k1440] It didn’t take me a week to learn that all you had to do was give white people a show and they’d buy anything you offered them. It was like popping your shoeshine rag.

[k1480] I never would forget that–that I couldn’t have whipped that white man as badly with a club as I had with my mind.

[k1599] Harlem’s numbers industry hummed every morning and into the early afternoon, with the runners jotting down people’s bets on slips of paper in apartment house hallways, bars, barbershops, stores, on the sidewalks. The cops looked on; no runner lasted long who didn’t, out of his pocket, put in a free “figger” for his working area’s foot cops, and it was generally known that the numbers bankers paid off at higher levels of the police department.

[k1705] This shouldn’t reflect too badly on that particular building, because almost everyone in Harlem needed some kind of hustle to survive, and needed to stay high in some way to forget what they had to do to survive.

[k1713] I got my first schooling about the cesspool morals of the white man from the best possible source, from his own women.

[k1723] Domineering, complaining, demanding wives who had just about psychologically castrated their husbands were responsible for the early rush. These wives were so disagreeable and had made their men so tense that they were robbed of the satisfaction of being men. To escape this tension and the chance of being ridiculed by his own wife, each of these men had gotten up early and come to a prostitute.

[k1729] More wives could keep their husbands if they realized their greatest urge is to be men

[k1737] All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak: they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.

From time to time, Sophia would come over to see me from Boston. Even among Harlem Negroes, her looks gave me status.

[k1787] The white woman wanted to be comfortable, she wanted to be looked upon with favor by her own kind, but also she wanted to have her pleasure. So some of them just married a white man for convenience and security, and kept right on going with a Negro.

[k2455] He had never been able to keep a white woman any length of time, though, because he was too good to them, and, as I have said, any woman, white or black, seems to get bored with that.

[k2498] Looking back, I think I really was at least slightly out of my mind. I viewed narcotics as most people regard food. I wore my guns as today I wear my neckties. Deep down, I actually believed that after living as fully as humanly possible, one should then die violently. I expected then, as I still expect today, to die at any time. But then, I think I deliberately invited death in many, sometimes insane, ways.

[k2704] The girls got low bail. They were still white–burglars or not. Their worst crime was their involvement with Negroes. But Shorty and I had bail set at $10,000 each, which they knew we were nowhere near able to raise.

[k2711] Before the judge entered, I said to one lawyer, “We seem to be getting sentenced because of those girls.” He got red from the neck up and shuffled his papers: “You had no business with white girls!”

Later, when I had learned the full truth about the white man, I reflected many times that the average burglary sentence for a first offender, as we all were, was about two years. But we weren’t going to get the average–not for our crime.

[k2717] But people are always speculating–why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.

[k2735] I got ten years.

The girls got one to five years, in the Women’s Reformatory at Framingham, Massachusetts.

This was in February, 1946. I wasn’t quite twenty-one. I had not even started shaving.

They took Shorty and me, handcuffed together, to the Charlestown State Prison.

[k2758] With some money sent by Ella, I was finally able to buy stuff for better highs from guards in the prison. I got reefers, Nembutal, and Benzedrine. Smuggling to prisoners was the guards’ sideline; every prison’s inmates know that’s how guards make most of their living.

[k2817] In prison, where so little breaks the monotonous routine, the smallest thing causes a commotion of talk. It was being mentioned all over the cell block by night that Satan didn’t eat pork.

[k2822] My brothers and sisters in Detroit and Chicago had all become converted to what they were being taught was the “natural religion for the black man” of which Philbert had written to me. They all prayed for me to become converted while I was in prison.

[k2865] “The devil is also a man,” Reginald said.

“What do you mean?”

[k2867] “Them,” he said. “The white man is the devil.”

[k2871] I said, “Without any exception?”

“Without any exception.”

[k2874] The white people I had known marched before my mind’s eye.

[k2898] When Reginald left, he left me rocking with some of the first serious thoughts I had ever had in my life: that the white man was fast losing his power to oppress and exploit the dark world; that the dark world was starting to rise to rule the world again, as it had before; that the white man’s world was on the way down, it was on the way out.

[k2908] They were all Muslims, followers of a man they described to me as “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad,” a small, gentle man, whom they sometimes referred to as “The Messenger of Allah.” He was, they said, “a black man, like us.” He had been born in America on a farm in Georgia. He had moved with his family to Detroit, and there had met a Mr. Wallace D. Fard who he claimed was “God in person.”

[k3020] I was to learn later that Elijah Muhammad’s tales, like this one of “Yacub,” infuriated the Muslims of the East. While at Mecca, I reminded them that it was their fault, since they themselves hadn’t done enough to make real Islam known in the West. Their silence left a vacuum into which any religious faker could step and mislead our people.

[k3034] The hardest test I ever faced in my life was praying.

[k3038] I had to force myself to bend my knees. And waves of shame and embarrassment would force me back up.

For evil to bend its knees, admitting its guilt, to implore the forgiveness of God, is the hardest thing in the world.

[k3047] I’ve never been one for inaction. Everything I’ve ever felt strongly about, I’ve done something about.

[k3097] Available on the prison library’s shelves were books on just about every general subject. Much of the big private collection that Parkhurst had willed to the prison was still in crates and boxes in the back of the library–thousands of old books.

[k3105] No university would ask any student to devour literature as I did when this new world opened to me, of being able to read and understand.

[k3116] The teachings of Mr. Muhammad stressed how history had been “whitened”–when white men had written history books, the black man simply had been left out. Mr. Muhammad couldn’t have said anything that would have struck me much harder. I had never forgotten how when my class, me and all of those whites, had studied seventh-grade United States history back in Mason, the history of the Negro had been covered in one paragraph, and the teacher had gotten a big laugh with his joke, “Negroes’ feet are so big that when they walk, they leave a hole in the ground.”

[k3193] America’s U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson complained not long ago that in the United Nations “a skin game” was being played. He was right. He was facing reality. A “skin game” is being played. But Ambassador Stevenson sounded like Jesse James accusing the marshal of carrying a gun. Because who in the world’s history ever has played a worse “skin game” than the white man?

[k3701] The black people, God’s children, were Gods themselves, Master Fard taught. And he taught that among them was one, also a human being like the others, who was the God of Gods: The Most, Most High, The Supreme Being, supreme in wisdom and power–and His proper name was Allah.

[k3839] (People don’t want to believe the sums that even the minor underworld handles. Why, listen: in March 1964, a Chicago nickel-and-dime bets Wheel of Fortune man, Lawrence Wakefield, died, and over $760,000 in cash was in his apartment, in sacks and bags…all taken from poor Negroes…and we wonder why we stay so poor.)

[k3890] And then we discovered the best “fishing” audience of all, by far the best-conditioned audience for Mr. Muhammad’s teachings: the Christian churches.

[k4155] Two white policemen, breaking up a street scuffle between some Negroes, ordered other Negro passers-by to “Move on!” Of these bystanders, two happened to be Muslim brother Johnson Hinton and another brother of Temple Seven. They didn’t scatter and run the way the white cops wanted. Brother Hinton was attacked with nightsticks. His scalp was split open, and a police car came and he was taken to a nearby precinct.

The second brother telephoned our restaurant. And with some telephone calls, in less than half an hour about fifty of Temple Seven’s men of the Fruit of Islam were standing in ranks-formation outside the police precinct house.

[k4169] Harlem’s black people were long since sick and tired of police brutality.

[k4175] We wouldn’t learn until later that a steel plate would have to be put into Brother Hinton’s skull. (After that operation, the Nation of Islam helped him to sue; a jury awarded him over $70,000, the largest police brutality judgment that New York City has ever paid.)

[k4222] In late 1959, the television program was aired. “The Hate That Hate Produced”–the title–was edited tightly into a kaleidoscope of “shocker” images…Mr. Muhammad, me, and others speaking…strong-looking, set-faced black men, our Fruit of Islam…white-scarved, white-gowned Muslim sisters of all ages…Muslims in our restaurants, and other businesses…Muslims and other black people entering and leaving our mosques….

Every phrase was edited to increase the shock mood.

[k4231] Here was one of the white man’s most characteristic behavior patterns–where black men are concerned. He loves himself so much that he is startled if he discovers that his victims don’t share his vainglorious self-opinion.

[k4271] “The guilty, two-faced white man can’t decide what he wants. Our slave foreparents would have been put to death for advocating so-called ‘integration’ with the white man. Now when Mr. Muhammad speaks of ‘separation,’ the white man calls us ‘hate-teachers’ and ‘fascists’![”]

[k4280] “Mr. Malcolm X,” those devils would ask, “why is your Fruit of Islam being trained in judo and karate?”

[k4308] The reporters would try their utmost to raise some “good” white man whom I couldn’t refute as such. I’ll never forget how one practically lost his voice. He asked me did I feel any white men had ever done anything for the black man in America. I told him, “Yes, I can think of two. Hitler, and Stalin. The black man in America couldn’t get a decent factory job until Hitler put so much pressure on the white man. And then Stalin kept up the pressure–”

[k4317] But instead of abating, the black puppets continued ripping and tearing at Mr. Muhammad and the Nation of Islam–until it began to appear as though we were afraid to speak out against these “important” Negroes. That’s when Mr. Muhammad’s patience wore thin. And with his nod, I began returning their fire.

[k4901] The American black man should be focusing his every effort toward building his own businesses, and decent homes for himself. As other ethnic groups have done, let the black people, wherever possible, however possible, patronize their own kind, hire their own kind, and start in those ways to build up the black race’s ability to do for itself. That’s the only way the American black man is ever going to get respect.

[k5001] These “angry revolutionists” even followed their final instructions: to leave early. With all of those thousands upon thousands of “angry revolutionists,” so few stayed over that the next morning the Washington hotel association reported a costly loss in empty rooms.

Hollywood couldn’t have topped it.

In a subsequent press poll, not one Congressman or Senator with a previous record of opposition to civil rights said he had changed his views. What did anyone expect? How was a one-day “integrated” picnic going to counter-influence these representatives of prejudice rooted deep in the psyche of the American white man for four hundred years?

[k5025] I never experienced one college session that didn’t show me ways to improve upon my presentation and defense of Mr. Muhammad’s teachings.

[k5028] At the outset, always I’d confront such panels with something such as: “Gentlemen, I finished the eighth grade in Mason, Michigan. My high school was the black ghetto of Roxbury, Massachusetts. My college was in the streets of Harlem, and my master’s was taken in prison. Mr. Muhammad has taught me that I never need fear any man’s intellect who tries to defend or to justify the white man’s criminal record against the non-white man–especially the white man and the black man here in North America.”

[k5038] Question-and-answer periods are another area where, by now, again blindfolded, I can often tell you the ethnic source of a question. The most easily recognizable of these to me are a Jew in any audience situation, and a bourgeois Negro in “integrated” audiences.

My clue to the Jew’s question and challenges is that among all other ethnic groups, his expressed thinking, his expressed concerns, are the most subjective. And the Jew is usually hypersensitive. I mean, you can’t even say “Jew” without him accusing you of anti-Semitism. I don’t care what a Jew is professionally, doctor, merchant, housewife, student, or whatever–first he, or she, thinks Jew.

[k5045] But I know that America’s five and a half million Jews (two million of them are concentrated in New York) look at it very practically, whether they know it or not: that all of the bigotry and hatred focused upon the black man keeps off the Jew a lot of heat that would be on him otherwise.

For an example of what I am talking about–in every black ghetto, Jews own the major businesses. Every night the owners of those businesses go home with that black community’s money, which helps the ghetto to stay poor. But I doubt that I have ever uttered this absolute truth before an audience without being hotly challenged, and accused by a Jew of anti-Semitism. Why? I will bet that I have told five hundred such challengers that Jews as a group would never watch some other minority systematically siphoning out their community’s resources without doing something about it. I have told them that if I tell the simple truth, it doesn’t mean that I am anti-Semitic; it means merely that I am antiexploitation.

[k5927] That morning was when I first began to reappraise the “white man.” It was when I first began to perceive that “white man,” as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. In America, “white man” meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been.

[k6047] Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.

[k6281] I remember that in the press conference, I used the word “Negro,” and I was firmly corrected. “The word is not favored here, Mr. Malcolm X. The term Afro-American has greater meaning, and dignity.” I sincerely apologized. I don’t think that I said “Negro” again as long as I was in Africa.

[k6675] The first thing I tell them is that at least where my own particular Black Nationalist organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, is concerned, they can’t join us. I have these very deep feelings that white people who want to join black organizations are really just taking the escapist way to salve their consciences. By visibly hovering near us, they are “proving” that they are “with us.”

[k6682] Aside from that, I mean nothing against any sincere whites when I say that as members of black organizations, generally whites’ very presence subtly renders the black organization automatically less effective. Even the best white members will slow down the Negroes’ discovery of what they need to do, and particularly of what they can do–for themselves, working by themselves, among their own kind, in their own communities.

[k6715] My father and most of his brothers died by violence–my father because of what he believed in. To come right down to it, if I take the kind of things in which I believe, then add to that the kind of temperament that I have, plus the one hundred percent dedication I have to whatever I believe in–these are ingredients which make it just about impossible for me to die of old age.

[k6768] When I am dead–I say it that way because from the things I know, I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form–I want you to just watch and see if I’m not right in what I say: that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with “hate.”

[k6773] I will be labeled as, at best, an “irresponsible” black man. I have always felt about this accusation that the black “leader” whom white men consider to be “responsible” is invariably the black “leader” who never gets any results.

[k6780] And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help to destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America–then, all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine.

ALEX HALEY

EPILOGUE

[k6784] During nineteen fifty-nine, when the public was becoming aware of the Muslims after the New York telecast “The Hate That Hate Produced,” I was in San Francisco, about to retire after twenty years in the U.S. Coast Guard.

[k6793] “You’re another one of the white man’s tools sent to spy!” he accused me sharply. I said I had a legitimate writing assignment and showed him my letter from the magazine stating that an objective article was wanted, one that would balance what the Muslims said of themselves and what their attackers said about them.

[k6798] Around the Muslim’s restaurant, I met some of the converts, all of them neatly dressed and almost embarrassingly polite. Their manners and miens reflected the Spartan personal discipline the organization demanded, and none of them would utter anything but Nation of Islam clichs.

[k6802] He said that I should talk about an article with Mr. Muhammad personally.

[k6803] The slightly built, shy-acting, soft-voiced Mr. Muhammad invited me to dinner with his immediate family in his mansion.

[k6809] My article entitled “Mr. Muhammad Speaks” appeared in early 1960, and it was the first featured magazine notice of the phenomenon.

[k6878] For perhaps a month I was afraid we weren’t going to get any book. Malcolm X was still stiffly addressing me as “Sir!” and my notebook contained almost nothing but Black Muslim philosophy, praise of Mr. Muhammad, and the “evils” of “the white devil.” He would bristle when I tried to urge him that the proposed book was his life.

[k6971] I’ve just become aware how closed my mind was now that I’ve opened it up again. That’s one of the characteristics I don’t like about myself. If I meet a problem I feel I can’t solve, I shut it out. I make believe that it doesn’t exist. But it exists.”

[k7030] There was something about this man when he was in a room with people. He commanded the room, whoever else was present.

[k7279] A few days later, however, he wrote in one of his memo books this, which he let me read, “Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so ‘safe,’ and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.”

[k8065] I tried to be a dispassionate chronicler. But he was the most electric personality I have ever met, and I still can’t quite conceive him dead. It still feels to me as if he has just gone into some next chapter, to be written by historians.

New York, 1965

The Sixth Extinction is the period in which we live. Humans are killing off species in geologic time, just like the other five mass exinctions. Elizabeth Kolbert documents that this is happening and has been happening for millenia and why. This isn’t an industrial age problem: we are the problem. (Machines don’t cause extinction, people do.)

We’ve only recently begun to understand the meaning on extinction. It’s a relatively new concept, and our understanding of what happened when evolved rather rapidly with the discovery of the iridium layer in 1980. We have only just begun to confirm the anthropocene extinction, which is the primary subject of Kolbert’s book.

This is an excellent summary of the science. I plowed through it in five days, which is unusual for me. It was recommended by Dylan who was assigned it for a geology class at Colorado College. I highly recommend it.

[k252] Such wholesale losses have led paleontologists to surmise that during mass extinction events–in addition to the so-called Big Five, there have been many lesser such events–the usual rules of survival are suspended. Conditions change so drastically or so suddenly (or so drastically and so suddenly) that evolutionary history counts for little. Indeed, the very traits that have been most useful for dealing with ordinary threats may turn out, under such extraordinary circumstances, to be fatal.

[k975] But human-caused extinction is of course troubling for many reasons, some of which have to do with Darwin’s own theory, and it’s puzzling that a writer as shrewd and self-critical as Darwin shouldn’t have noticed this.

[k1207] The bolide arrived from the southeast, traveling at a low angle relative to the earth, so that it came in not so much from above as from the side, like a plane losing altitude. When it slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula, it was moving at something like forty-five thousand miles per hour, and, due to its trajectory, North America was particularly hard-hit. A vast cloud of searing vapor and debris raced over the continent, expanding as it moved and incinerating anything in its path. “Basically, if you were a triceratops in Alberta, you had about two minutes before you got vaporized” is how one geologist put it to me.

In the process of excavating the enormous crater, the asteroid blasted into the air more than fifty times its own mass in pulverized rock. As the ejecta fell back through the atmosphere, the particles incandesced, lighting the sky everywhere at once from directly overhead and generating enough heat to, in effect, broil the surface of the planet. Owing to the composition of the Yucatan Peninsula, the dust thrown up was rich in sulfur. Sulfate aerosols are particularly effective at blocking sunlight, which is the reason a single volcanic eruption, like Krakatoa, can depress global temperatures for years.

[k1268] In times of extreme stress, the whole concept of fitness, at least in a Darwinian sense, loses its meaning: how could a creature be adapted, either well or ill, for conditions it has never before encountered in its entire evolutionary history? At such moments, what Paul Taylor, a paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum, calls “the rules of the survival game” abruptly change.

[k1297] “In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty,” Kuhn wrote.

[k1298] Crisis led to insight, and the old framework gave way to a new one. This is how great scientific discoveries or, to use the term Kuhn made so popular, “paradigm shifts” took place.

The history of the science of extinction can be told as a series of paradigm shifts. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the very category of extinction didn’t exist.

[k1306] “Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world” is how Kuhn put it.

[k1308] Within a few decades, so many extinct creatures had been identified that Cuvier’s framework began to crack. To keep pace with the growing fossil record, the number of disasters had to keep multiplying. “God knows how many catastrophes” would be needed, Lyell scoffed, poking fun at the whole endeavor. Lyell’s solution was to reject catastrophe altogether.

[k1312] The uniformitarian account of extinction held up for more than a century. Then, with the discovery of the iridium layer, science faced another crisis. (According to one historian, the Alvarezes’ work was “as explosive for science as an impact would have been for earth.”)

[k1478] (A recent study of pollen and animal remains on Easter Island concluded that it wasn’t humans who deforested the landscape; rather, it was the rats that came along for the ride and then bred unchecked. The native palms couldn’t produce seeds fast enough to keep up with their appetites.)

[k1510] Crutzen wrote up his idea in a short essay, “Geology of Mankind,” that ran in Nature. “It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch,” he observed.

[k1521] Crutzen published “Geology of Mankind” in 2002. Soon, the “Anthropocene” began migrating out into other scientific journals.

[k1938] Some of the scientists, who had dived all over–in the Philippines, in Indonesia, in the Caribbean, and in the South Pacific–told me that the snorkeling at One Tree was about as good as it gets. I found this easy to believe. The first time I jumped off the boat and looked down at the swirl of life beneath me, it felt unreal, as if I’d swum into the undersea world of Jacques Cousteau. Schools of small fish were followed by schools of larger fish, which were followed by sharks. Huge rays glided by, trailed by turtles the size of bathtubs. I tried to keep a mental list of what I’d seen, but it was like trying to catalog a dream.

[k2127] As a general rule, the variety of life is most impoverished at the poles and richest at low latitudes. This pattern is referred to in the scientific literature as the “latitudinal diversity gradient,” or LDG, and it was noted already by the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who was amazed by the biological splendors of the tropics, which offer “a spectacle as varied as the azure vault of the heavens.”

“The verdant carpet which a luxuriant Flora spreads over the surface of the earth is not woven equally in all parts,” Humboldt wrote after returning from South America in 1804. “Organic development and abundance of vitality gradually increase from the poles towards the equator.” More than two centuries later, why this should be the case is still not known, though more than thirty theories have been advanced to explain the phenomenon.

[k2178] Coca, Silman told me, made a heavy pack feel lighter. It also staved off hunger, alleviated aches and pains, and helped counter altitude sickness. I had been given little to carry besides my own gear; still, anything that would lighten my pack seemed worth trying. I took a handful of leaves and a pinch of baking soda. (Baking soda, or some other alkaline substance, is necessary for coca to have its pharmaceutical effect.) The leaves were leathery and tasted like old books. Soon my lips grew numb, and my aches and pains began to fade. An hour or two later, I was back for more. (Many times since have I wished for that shopping bag.)

[k2407] For most of the Pleistocene temperatures were significantly lower than they are now–such is the rhythm of the orbital cycle that glacial periods tend to last much longer than interglacials–and so an evolutionary premium was placed on being able to deal with wintry conditions.

[k2456] The project has now been running continuously for more than thirty years. So many graduate students have been trained at the reserves that a new word was coined to describe them: “fragmentologist.” For its part, the BDFFP has been called “the most important ecological experiment ever done.”

[k2632] Yet another possible explanation for why observations don’t match predictions is that humans aren’t very observant. Since the majority of species in the tropics are insects and other invertebrates, so, too, are the majority of anticipated extinctions. But as we don’t know, even to the nearest million, how many tropical insect species there are, we’re not likely to notice if one or two or even ten thousand of them have vanished.

[k2704] The body temperature of a hibernating bat drops by fifty or sixty degrees, often to right around freezing. Its heartbeat slows, its immune system shuts down, and the bat, dangling by its feet, falls into a state close to suspended animation.

[k2974] Before humans arrived on the scene, many whole categories of organisms were missing from Hawaii; these included not only rodents but also amphibians, terrestrial reptiles, and ungulates. The islands had no ants, aphids, or mosquitoes.

[k3293] The Anthropocene is usually said to have begun with the industrial revolution, or perhaps even later, with the explosive growth in population that followed World War II. By this account, it’s with the introduction of modern technologies–turbines, railroads, chainsaws–that humans became a world-altering force. But the megafauna extinction suggests otherwise. Before humans emerged on the scene, being large and slow to reproduce was a highly successful strategy, and outsized creatures dominated the planet. Then, in what amounts to a geologic instant, this strategy became a loser’s game. And so it remains today, which is why elephants and bears and big cats are in so much trouble and why Suci is one of the world’s last remaining Sumatran rhinos. Meanwhile, eliminating the megafauna didn’t just eliminate the megafauna; in Australia at least it set off an ecological cascade that transformed the landscape. Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear that he ever really did.

Everyday White People Confront Racial and Social Injustice is about the right length for me. I started feeling the repetition towards the end.

The stories made me think about my White Privilege. I could write an essay about the number of times I would get away with something that a Black person would not. I made mistakes that would have landed a Black man in jail. I’ve never been in jail, and I’m grateful for that. I have never been hit by a police officer. There was one time where I could have been, and I wasn’t. There have been many times when I’ve been approached by police for various violations and non-violations, and I’ve always walked away.

And, I’ve done many things right that would have not been possible without my White Privilege. I got into good schools. I got good (enough) grades. I worked in various environments where there were no black people. I still do, sadly.

I am “cultural Jew” (see below), but it has not been a hindrance in any sense. I would argue, it was a great benefit. That’s one thing I don’t like about this book. It should have been titled Everyday Jewish People, because many of the stories (at least five) are by Jewish people. Their Jewishness was central, in many ways, to their story. I’m not sure what it says about the book, but the fact there were so many Jews is just not “Everyday”, statistically at least.

The authors talked about their oppressed identities, which I found interesting. Most of the authors are women (another statisical anomaly), and they talked about their feminism. The vast majority are old, which is part of the book, I guess, in that these are mini-memoirs.

I guess the title bothers me in other ways, too. The people are not “everyday” in my sense of the word. I think of Studs Terkel interviewees when I think of “everyday”. These are all highly privileged people who are recognizing some of their privileges. Interestingly, none talked about their Intellect Privilege. That’s something I think about.

Despite all my complaining, I recommend the book, especially if you no nothing about Social Justice work.

[k887] Knapsacks and Baggage [by] Abby L. Ferber

[k905] My family was not very religious, but we were “cultural Jews.” Like many nonreligious Jews, we felt an obligation to carry on our Jewish cultural and religious traditions because they have always been threatened.

[k912] The message I internalized was that Jews were the universal scapegoat, and even when fully assimilated and successful, as they were in Germany prior to the rise of the Nazis, their safety was never secure.

[k914] My Jewish identity is not simply a religious designation I can choose or discard (Ferber, 1999).

[k916] My great-grandmother Anna, for whom I am named, fled a small Russian village at the age of 16 to avoid an arranged marriage. She came to the United States to seek out a cousin who had immigrated earlier. Her parents disowned her, and she never spoke to them again; she later learned that her entire family perished in Nazi concentration camps. I realize how precarious my own existence is; were it not for random actions such as those by each of my great-grandparents, I would not be here today.

[k935] I had trouble understanding how members of my own family could exhibit racist behaviors, given their own connections to oppression.

[k939] I also grew up with a Black Jamaican maid.

[k942] She had two children of her own who were close in age to my siblings and me. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I wondered if anyone was at home for them. I felt more and more uncomfortable as I recognized that my mother’s own independence was predicated on the subordination of a Black woman.

[k1137] The Political is Personal [by] Kevin Jennings

[k1253] And I remember what my momma always told me as a child: “Kevin, the truth will set you free.” The truth is that every person has worth and value and deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. I must continue to speak that truth as long as I live, and I truly believe it will help set us all free.

[k1983] What’s a nice white girle to do in an unjust world like this? [by] Dianne J. Goodman

[k2029] I also keep learning about my sense of entitlement and how my white privilege allows me to take things for granted and be oblivious to the challenges faced by people of color. I remember when I was facilitating a workshop and I first told the story about how I would open up a bag of snacks in a store to taste them so I could decide if my kids would like them and how many I should buy. (I would always pay for whatever I opened.) Seeing the look of shock on the faces of the people of color, it dawned on me that my unconscious assumption that I could just sample food with impunity, because no one ever suspects me of any wrongdoing, was an expression of my white (and class and gender) privilege and sense of entitlement–of being a “nice white girl.”

[k2040] It takes courage to be a leader, to speak up, challenge the status quo, try new initiatives, put oneself out there. I struggle with this frequently, doubting the importance of what I have to say, worrying I will get it wrong, fearing judgment and ridicule. But if I expect others to take risks, I can expect no less of myself. “We can’t teach what we don’t know, and we can’t lead where we won’t go.”

Everything is about relationships. I increasingly believe that everything comes down to relationships. What I care about, how I learn, my motivation to stay engaged, my ability to engage others, the support I get on my journey, opportunities for work, and the effectiveness of my change efforts are all connected to relationships with others. The more I do my own work (see previous guidepost), the stronger and more authentic those relationships can be.

[k2059] I often think about and refer to the words of Pat Parker (1990) from her poem “For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend”: “The first thing you do is forget that I’m black. / Second, you must never forget that I’m black” (p. 297).

[k2194] White Water [by] Gary R. Howard

[k2393] Lesson: Speaking clear-eyed truth to power is a dangerous occupation in this country that claims to uphold human rights and social justice.

[k3418] Resisting Whiteness/Bearing Witness [by] Michelle Fine

[k3461] We were first-(and a half) generation American Jews: hard work, assimilation, love, laughter, and accumulating privilege without noticing.

[k3479] Later in the interview, still not fully aware of how drenched in White my biography and consciousness have been, I asked, “So, when you were in school were you the kind of student who participated a lot in class?”

“No, not me. I was a good kid.”

[k3492] We won the case. The principal was removed. Within a few years, the same man who was found guilty of racism was elected by the general population to be the district’s superintendent of schools.

[k3534] And now I know that a single White antiracist woman just turns into white noise in court. But for 30 years I have engaged in feminist, antiwar, racial justice, and education justice movements, and in struggles against the prison industrial complex, high-stakes testing, gentrification, and exclusion from higher education, and in these delicious, sweaty settings I have learned there is strength when antiracist White allies link arms in coalitions for justice.