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"This is a senior citizen for whom English is not her first language. She doesn't have the resources to fight this,"

Nonetheless, that slight location change allowed the hospital system to bill what's called a "facility fee," laid out on Lee's bill as "operating room services."

comes without warning, as hospitals are not required to inform patients of it ahead of time.

But she's worried her mom will delay getting the shots now, putting up with the pain longer, as she knows they are more expensive.

as more private practices have been bought by hospitals and facility fees are tacked on to their charges.

Ohio, where Lee lives, is considering legislation that would prohibit facility fees for telehealth services.

it's difficult to fight powerful hospital lobbyists in a pandemic political climate, where hospitals are considered heroic.

"Even if it was a lot of money for services properly rendered, then of course she would pay it. But that's not the case here."

"Facility fees are designed by hospitals in particular to grab more revenue from the weakest party in health care: namely, the individual patient,"

Ask outright if there will be a facility fee — and how much — even if there has not been one before.

The corporate gig, as a social media director for a tech platform, was a revelation. “I could just show up to work and do work,” Ms. Tilghman said. After she was done, she could leave. She didn’t have to be a brand. There’s no comments section at an office job.

In 2019, a Morning Consult report found that 54 percent of Gen Z and millennial Americans were interested in becoming influencers. (Eighty-six percent said they would be willing to post sponsored content for money.)

If social media has made audiences anxious, it’s driving creators to the brink. In 2021, the TikTok breakout star Charli D’Amelio said she had “lost the passion” for posting videos. A few months later, Erin Kern announced to her 600,000 Instagram followers that she would be deactivating her account @cottonstem; she had been losing her hair, and her doctors blamed work-induced stress

Other influencers faded without fanfare — teens whose mental health had taken too much of a hit and amateur influencers who stopped posting after an algorithm tweak tanked their metrics. Some had been at this for a decade or more, starting at 12 or 14 or 19.

She posted less, testing out new identities that she hoped wouldn’t touch off the same spiral that wellness had. There were dancing videos, dog photos, interior design. None of it stuck. (“You can change the niche, but you’re still going to be performing your life for content,” she explained over lunch.)

Ms. Tilghman’s problem — as the interest in the workshop, which she decided to cap at 15, demonstrated — is that she has an undeniable knack for this. In 2022, she started a Substack to continue writing, thinking of it as a calling card while she applied to editorial jobs; it soon amassed 20,000 subscribers. It once had a different name, but now it’s called “Offline Time.” The paid tier costs $5 a month.

Casey Lewis, who helms the After School newsletter about Gen Z consumer trends, predicts more pivots and exits. TikTok has elevated creators faster than other platforms and burned them out quicker, she said.

Ms. Lewis expects a swell of former influencers taking jobs with P.R. agencies, marketing firms and product development conglomerates. She pointed out that creators have experience not just in video and photo editing, but in image management, crisis communication and rapid response. “Those skills do transfer,” she said.

The researchers suggested that this difference might all come down to one gene that only men have, called the SRY gene

Though the claims laid out by Lee and Harley are by no means certain,

“The character identification is the driving force,” says Wells, whose own research focusses on perception and the visual appeal of film. “It’s why people tend to identify with that medium always—it allows them to be put in those roles and experiment through that.”

one theme seemed to resonate: everyone could identify with Elsa. She wasn’t your typical princess. She wasn’t your typical Disney character. Born with magical powers that she couldn’t quite control, she meant well but caused harm, both on a personal scale (hurting her sister, repeatedly) and a global one (cursing her kingdom, by mistake). She was flawed—actually flawed, in a way that resulted in real mistakes and real consequences. Everyone could interpret her in a unique way and find that the arc of her story applied directly to them

what does all of this mean for “Frozen”? On the one hand, the movie shares many typical story elements with other Disney films. There are the parents dead within the first ten minutes (a must, it seems, in Disney productions), royalty galore, the quest to meet your one true love, the comic-relief character (Olaf the Snowman) to punctuate the drama. Even the strong female lead isn’t completely new

In 2012, he and Simonton conducted a study of two hundred and twenty family films released between 1996 and 2009, to see whether successful children’s movies had certain identifying characteristics. They found that films that dealt with nuanced and complex themes did better than those that played it safe, as measured both by ratings on metacritic.com, rottentomatoes.com, and IMDb and by over-all financial performance.

the story keeps the audience engaged because it subverts expected tropes and stereotypes, over and over. “It’s the furthest thing from a typical princess movie,”

It also, unlike prior Disney films, aces the Bechdel Test: not only are both leads female, but they certainly talk about things other than men. It is the women, in fact, not the men, who save the day, repeatedly—and a selfless act of sacrifice rather than a “kiss of true love” that ends up winning.

She recalls the sheer diversity of the students who joined the discussion: a mixture, split evenly between genders, of representatives of the L.G.B.T. community, artists, scientists.

“A good story, issues to think about and wrestle with,”

Simonton and Kaufman were able to explain only twenty to twenty-four per cent of variance in critical success and twenty-five in domestic gross earnings.

The other element, of course, is that intangible that Litman calls “buzz” and Simonson calls “information cascades,” the word of mouth that makes people embrace the story,

Part of the credit goes to Disney’s strategy. In their initial marketing campaign, they made an effort to point out the story’s uniqueness.

And their lawyers allowed the music to spread naturally through social media.

part of the credit goes to Jennifer Lee’s team, for the choices they consciously made to make the screenplay as complex as it was. Elsa was once evil; Elsa and Anna weren’t originally sisters; the prince wasn’t a sociopath. Their decisions to forego a true villain—something no Disney film had successfully done—and to make the story one driven by sibling love rather than romantic infatuation have made “Frozen” more than simply nuanced and relatable. They’ve made it more universally acceptable.

In contrast to other recent Disney films, like “Tangled,” “Frozen” isn’t politically fraught or controversial: you can say it’s good without fear of being accused of being a racist or an apologist or an animal-rights opponent

to echo the words of the screenwriting legend William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything.” In the end, it may just be a bit of magic.

then there is the mishandling of time. The physicist Lee Smolin's recent book, Time Reborn, links the crisis in physics with its failure to acknowledge the fundamental reality of time. Physics is predisposed to lose time because its mathematical gaze freezes change. Tensed time, the difference between a remembered or regretted past and an anticipated or feared future, is particularly elusive. This worried Einstein: in a famous conversation, he mourned the fact that the present tense, "now", lay "just outside of the realm of science".

Recent attempts to explain how the universe came out of nothing, which rely on questionable notions such as spontaneous fluctuations in a quantum vacuum, the notion of gravity as negative energy, and the inexplicable free gift of the laws of nature waiting in the wings for the moment of creation, reveal conceptual confusion beneath mathematical sophistication. They demonstrate the urgent need for a radical re-examination of the invisible frameworks within which scientific investigations are conducted.

we should reflect on how a scientific image of the world that relies on up to 10 dimensions of space and rests on ideas, such as fundamental particles, that have neither identity nor location, connects with our everyday experience. This should open up larger questions, such as the extent to which mathematical portraits capture the reality of our world – and what we mean by "reality".

In addition to skewing democracy, social media companies “deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes” and “deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide”. The latter, he said, “can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents”

There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it. This may have far-reaching political consequences.”

Soros warned of an “even more alarming prospect” on the horizon if data-rich internet companies such as Facebook and Google paired their corporate surveillance systems with state-sponsored surveillance – a trend that’s already emerging in places such as the Philippines.

“This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined,”

“The internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions. That turns them into a menace and it falls to the regulatory authorities to protect society against them,

He also echoed the words of world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee when he said the tech giants had become “obstacles to innovation” that need to be regulated as public utilities “aimed at preserving competition, innovation and fair and open universal access”.

Earlier this week, Salesforce’s chief executive, Marc Benioff, said that Facebook should be regulated like a cigarette company because it’s addictive and harmful.

In November, Roger McNamee, who was an early investor in Facebook, described Facebook and Google as threats to public health.

The Human Rights Campaign calls the slew of legislation restricting the access of trans children to sports "unprecedented," grouping it in with other bills introduced recently in states like South Carolina and Texas that would limit certain kinds of medical treatments for trans youth.

Already this year, state legislators have introduced at least 35 bills aimed at restricting trans girls and women from playing on girls' and women's sports teams, according to the LGBTQ advocacy group Freedom for All Americans. That's up from only two in 2019.

"Transgender kids are kids," the organization said. "Excluding and discriminating against them does great harm to them and it weakens the communities in which these children feel excluded and marginalized."

Anti-equality extremists are clearly targeting transgender people again to score political points by demonizing marginalized communities and mischaracterizing movements like Black Lives Matter.

We need to take action now to prove the anti-trans arguments are wrong and unjust, and to draw maximum attention to what Republican leaders in these states are trying to do.

there simply is not a sudden population explosion of trans people, nor any sort of demand for special or new rights. This is about fairness and equal treatment.

which requires businesses with “formal or informal” policies of allowing transgender people to use the appropriate restroom to post offensive and humiliating signage

This includes laws like those in Arkansas, where legislators have banned critical, gender-affirming medical care for transgender children,

Active resistance is needed from administrators within the education system who are tasked with enforcing discriminatory trans sports bans, which isolate and prevent trans students from playing sports on teams consistent with their gender identity.

t has significant health and safety consequences, especially for trans youth.

So far in 2021, we are on track to exceed the number of trans and gender-nonconforming people murdered in 2020

extremist legislators continue advancing measures at a breakneck pace

Sometimes we have to make uncomfortable decisions because we are pushed to the fringes.

As a result, speech that may be protected for adults outside of the school environment – like offensive or vulgar language – can be restricted for students inside of the school environment.

as long as other requirements are met – the speech is lewd, school-sponsored or involves illegal drug use.

Some courts have considered other factors to determine whether there was a sufficient connection between the speech and the school before applying Tinker to off-campus speech.

They’ve considered whether the speech threatens the school’s obligation to provide a safe learning environment – for example, online bullying – or whether the speech is “reasonably likely” to reach the school or affect the school environment - for example by being directed at the school, school officials or other students.

A few courts have ruled that Tinker does not apply to the off-campus speech at issue in their cases because it did not occur in the school environment

That the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case does not provide any indication of how the court may decide the case.

Whatever decision the court makes, it will likely provide some guidance to students, parents and school officials about what students can and cannot say on social media.

I saw an older woman, hair neatly coifed, beat a policeman with her handbag. A young father hoisted his little girl on his shoulder, carefully affixing a surgical mask to her face, an imperfect shield from the gas. A student in Kwangju bit his finger and wrote protest slogans in his own blood.

At the trial, his father lunged at the three policemen, small and scared now, protected by more than 50 guards. Screams broke out and a purse flew through the air at the judges as the light sentence was read. Women whose sons were still in jail stormed the bus carrying the policemen, throwing bottles against the windows. Plainclothes police shoved the four of them onto the concrete, where they lay unconscious.

Laws are still on the books that can be used as tools to stifle dissent. South Korea remains shadowed by legitimate fears of North Korean aggression and espionage, but those were and are exploited by the government.

This is not a tame society, for all the comforts its public has won in the years since. This may be the land of Psy and Gangnam style, a country so wired that some of its children are sent to boot camps to wean them from internet addiction.

Politicians buck the popular will at their peril.

A debate over “partisan perceptual bias” has raged in the political science literature ever since, Princeton’s Larry Bartels noted that it was particularly pronounced during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, with surveys showing that “Democrats were strikingly impervious to the good economic news.” Lee Drutman noted in Slate in 2010 that something similar seemed to apply to Republicans' reporting of their own economic conditions between 2008 and 2010.

The landmark 1960 The American Voter, a study of the elections of 1948 through 1956, found something similar of voter attitudes toward the Korean War, speculating that when a voters’ views conflict with his party allegiance, “allegiance presumably will work to undo the contrary opinions.”

“The economy” simply means different tings to different people.

the Obama campaign has long ago stopped trying to convince Americans that the economy is better than they thought, targeting their message at a “severely conservative” Romney.

And while the Romney campaign made the economy the core of their campaign earlier this year, they’ve recently diversified after struggling — mostly in vain — to persuade voters despite a steady stream of negative data points. Now, the economic argument is part of a broader case the campaign tries to make

John McCain has Aeschylated it to “a Greek tragedy.” And he should know from Greek tragedy. “It’s the negative campaigning and the increasingly personal attacks,” he told The Boston Herald, adding, “the likes of which we have never seen.” When a man who was accused of having an illegitimate black child in the 2000 South Carolina primary thinks this is the worst ever, the G.O.P. is really in trouble. The Arizona senator, who’s supporting Romney, grimly noted: “I know he’s going to be the nominee, but I also worry about how much damage has been done.”

The apogee of apathy for Romney was on Friday, when the man who says he’s an expert manager spoke to a mostly empty football stadium in Detroit.

Asked in Michigan why he couldn’t excite the base, Romney said he is not willing to make “incendiary comments” or “light my hair on fire.”

moderate Republicans feel passé, Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine shockingly announced her retirement, decrying “ ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies” and a vanishing political center.

Once elected, those presidents curbed the id with the ego, common sense and reason. But now the G.O.P.’s id is unbridled. The horse has thrown the rider; the dark forces are bubbling. Moderates, women, gays, Hispanics and blacks — even the president — are being hunted in this most dangerous game.

he cited his wife’s two Caddies and his Nascar team-owner pals, and awkwardly mocked the plastic ponchos of Daytona racing fans: “I like those fancy raincoats you bought. Really sprung for the big bucks.”

Mitt was damaged as a contender against Obama when he was forced to admit that he had a 15-percent tax rate (given, as The Huffington Post points out, that Romney averaged $6,400 an hour at Bain Capital while creating lots of jobs with paltry wages).

Now Santorum should forfeit his chance after making a far dumber remark: Kids should beware of college because they’ll get brainwashed.

Pandering to Tea Partiers, Santorum, who has a B.A., M.B.A. and J.D., and who supported higher education in his 2006 senatorial campaign, absurdly turned the American dream inside-out and into sauerkraut.

He called the president “a snob” for encouraging people to get more educated and asserted that Obama only wants Americans to go to college so they can be remade in his image, while being indoctrinated by liberal college professors.

Does he think that defining ambition down and asking kids to give up hope is a good mantra? Even Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, who was trying to mandate that women seeking abortions be shamed with vaginal ultrasounds that Democrats dubbed “legal rape,” thought Santorum went too far.

In an interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, Santorum offended the Catholics he’s courting by saying that the J.F.K. speech ratifying the separation of church and state made him want “to throw up” because Kennedy had thrown “his faith under the bus.” “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state are absolute,” Sanctorum said.

Is this enough? Or is it rather a capitulation to relativism, a manifesto for political quietism, a worldview that treats injustice as something to be abhorred but not constantly fought against? This might be seen as the core progressive objection to the way of Montaigne. Or is his sensibility in an age of religious terror and violence and fanaticism the only ultimate solution we have?

here’s what we do know. We are fallible beings; we have nothing but provisional knowledge; and we will die. And this is enough. This does not mean we should give up inquiring or seeking to understand. Skepticism is not nihilism. It doesn’t posit that there is no truth; it merely notes that if truth exists, it is inherently beyond our ultimate grasp. And accepting those limits is the first step toward sanity, toward getting on with life. This is what I mean by conservatism.

you can find in philosophy any number of clues about how to live; you can even construct them into an ideology that explains all of human life and society – like Marxism or free market fundamentalism or a Nietzschean will to power. But as each totalist system broke down upon my further inspection, I found myself returning to Montaigne and the tradition of skepticism he represents

If I were to single out one theme of Montaigne’s work that has stuck with me, it would be this staring of death in the face, early and often, and never flinching. It is what our culture refuses to do much of the time, thereby disempowering us in the face of our human challenges.

"As you all know, I went through a really fun time the last 15 months with lots of different people investigating me too, right?"

all of that happened last January was, 'Oh, by the way, ... I have a private email server and all my emails were on this private server and I deleted a bunch of them, but they were only personal, and you're going to have to take my word for it cause the servers gone."

"There is a bias," Christie insisted

not the first time the governor suggested media bias was to blame for the fallout of the George Washington Bridge lane closure controversy.

December 2013, a month before the now infamous "time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" email from a top Christie staffer was revealed, Christie brushed off questions about the lane closures during a Statehouse news conference

"I know you guys are obsessed with this, I'm not. I'm really not. It's not that big a deal," Christie insisted. "Just because press runs around and writes about it, both here and nationally, I know why that is and so do you, let's not pretend it's because of the gravity of the issue. It's because I am a national figure and anything like this will be written a lot about now, so let's not pretend this is some grave thing."

Christie signaled in New Hampshire he's intent on pressing Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential race, on the attacks in Benghazi, Libya that's been a lighting rod for Clinton critics just as the governor declared during a recent trip here that he's done "apologizing" for the Bridgegate scandal

"I don't think there's been nearly enough questions asked about this," Christie said. "We need to ask a lot more questions about Benghazi. We need to get to the bottom of what happened because it does matter, madam secretary."

you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies

It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth

ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.

The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.

I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood

The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body

But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.

here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.

I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed

When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.

Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.

erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped

this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?

now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies

still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party

I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons

“Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.

Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.

I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.

American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.

I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.

It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.

“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.

There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.

I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have

I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.

“I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.

the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.

You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life

I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.

I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

But because the breadth of the new attack was so much greater, the objective seems less clear.

The F.B.I. is “conducting an investigation to identify how and why this occurred,” S. Y. Lee, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement.

An annual “Strategic and Economic Dialogue” with Chinese officials is scheduled to take place this month, and cyberissues will again be in the forefront. But the administration on Thursday did not publicly identify Chinese hackers as the culprit in the latest case, just as it has not publicly identified Russians as responsible for the intrusions on the White House and State Department systems.