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Cornflowers are always the first to bloom in the pollinator meadow of Marsha P. Johnson State Park, a welcome sign to bees and people that things are beginning to thaw.

If New York City has a warm spring, the cornflowers may open up by late April, eventually followed by orange frills of butterfly milkweed, purple spindly bee balm and yolk-yellow, black-eyed Susans that also inhabit the meadow — hardy species that can weather the salty spray that confronts life on the waterfront.

Not all of these flowers are native to New York, or even North America, but they have sustained themselves long enough to become naturalized

These species pose little threat to native wildlife, unlike more domineering introduced species such as mugwort, an herb with an intrepid rhizome system.

A wildflower can refer to any flowering plant that was not cultivated, intentionally planted or given human aid, yet it still managed to grow and bloom.

This is one of several definitions offered by the plant ecologist Donald J. Leopold in Andrew Garn’s new photo book “Wildflowers of New York City,” and one that feels particularly suited to the city and its many transplants.

Scarlet bee balm.

Ms. Lopez, who grew up on the Upper West Side near a sooty smokestack, has always longed for more green spaces in the city.

In February of 2020, Gov. Andrew Cuomo renamed the park after the activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the central figures of the Stonewall riots and a co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with the activist Sylvia Rivera. Ms. Johnson, who died in 1992 of undetermined causes, would have turned 75 in August 2020.

Mr. Garn did not intend for “Wildflowers of New York City” to be a traditional field guide for identifying flowers. Rather, his reverent portraits invite us to delight in the beauty of flowers that we more often encounter in a sidewalk crack than in a bouquet.

Marsha P. Johnson, a central figure of the Stonewall riots and a co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries

Ms. Johnson was known for wearing crowns of fresh flowers that she would arrange from leftover blooms and discarded daffodils from the flower district in Manhattan, where she often slept.

In one photo, Ms. Johnson wears a crown of roses, carnations, chrysanthemums, frilly tulips, statice and baby’s breath.

Although cumulous clusters of baby’s breath are now a staple of floral arrangements, the species is a wildflower native to central and Eastern Europe.

Ms. Lopez and STARR have criticized a proposal for a new $70 million beach scheduled to be built on Gansevoort Peninsula, near waterfronts where Ms. Rivera once lived and Ms. Johnson died. In its place, she suggests a memorial garden for Ms. Johnson, Ms. Rivera and other transgender people

“We will never feed enough people, we will never plant enough flowers, never be good enough to honor Sylvia and Marsha,” Ms. Lopez said. “They cared too much, even when no one cared for them.”

“I have candles lit always for Marsha and Sylvia, but I’m praying especially hard now that we get a plan that includes lots of flowers,” said Mariah Lopez, the executive director of Strategic Trans Alliance for Radical Reform, or STARR, an advocacy group.

Her dream of the park includes a range of verdant and functional spaces: a paved area where people can vogue and hold rallies, a flower garden in tribute to Ms. Johnson, a greenhouse and an apiary for bees.

Tansy.

The redesign of the park will add a new fence around the meadow, as well as interpretive signs about the pollinators who depend on its wildflowers. “What would happen if there were no bees in the world?”

“We have to protect them. That’s what the function of this sweet little meadow is.”

But that blessed feeling evaporated in June of 2019, when I lost my daughter, Frankie, to suicide, three weeks before her high school graduation

Ever since that day, I have thought of little else except how I could help the next struggling teenager, the next Frankie.

Several days after her passing, we opened our home up to our community, including Frankie’s very large group of teenage friends

“What strength Frankie had. It must have taken enormous energy for her to do what she did each day.”

That was Frankie. She had the strength to engage in school and in theater, despite her anxiety and depression. She had an ability to connect — emotionally, profoundly — with others, even when she was struggling herself

“empathy personified, with quite the fabulous earring collection.”

Whether that strength came from her home or somewhere else, or both, Frankie just had a way of drawing out warmth wherever she went.

Just as my parents couldn’t predict in the 1980s what seatbelt safety would look like now, I am not sure what suicide prevention should look like in the future.

Suicidal thinking, whether it is the result of mental illness, stress, trauma or loss, is actually far more common and difficult to see than many of us realize

A June 2020 Centers for Disease Control survey found that one in four 18- to 24-year-olds reported that they had seriously thought about taking their lives in the past 30 days; prepandemic estimates found that just under one in five high schoolers had seriously considered suicide, and just under one in 10 had made at least one suicide attempt during the previous year.

Despite 50 years of research, predicting death by suicide is still nearly impossible

Like others who have lost a child to suicide, I have spent countless hours going over relentless “what ifs.”

Maybe what we need are seatbelts for suicide.

“Click it or Ticket” was born in part out of a concern in the 1980s about teenagers dying in car accidents. Just as with suicides today, adults couldn’t predict who would get into a car accident, and one of the best solutions we had — seatbelts — was used routinely, in some estimates, by only 15 percent of the population. Indeed, as children, my siblings and I used to make a game of rolling around in the back of our car, seatbelts ignored.

Three decades later, our world is unlike anything I could have imagined as a child. Putting on a seatbelt is the first lesson of driver’s education; cars get inspected annually for working seatbelts; car companies embed those annoying beeping sounds to remind you to buckle your seatbelt

But like many who struggle with suicidal thinking, she kept her own pain camouflaged for a long time, perhaps for too long.

Most of us (estimates range as high as 91 percent) now wear a seatbelt.

But I imagine a world in which every health worker, school professional, employer and religious leader can recognize the signs of suicidal thinking and know how to ask about it, respond to it and offer resources to someone who is struggling

When I told Frankie’s orthodontist about her suicide, his response surprised me: “We really don’t come across that in our practice.” Even though orthodontists don’t ask about it, they see children during their early teenage years, when suicidal thinking often begins to emerge. Can you imagine a world in which signs for the prevention hotline and text line are posted for kids to see as they get their braces adjusted?

What if the annual teenage pediatric checkup involved a discussion of one-at-a-time pill packaging and boxes to lock up lethal medications, the way there is a discussion of baby-proofing homes when children start to crawl? What if pediatricians handed each adolescent a card with the prevention hotline on it (or better yet, if companies preprogrammed that number into cellphones) and the pediatrician talked through what happens when a teenager calls? What if doctors coached parents on how to ask their teenager, “Are you thinking about suicide?”

What if we required and funded every school to put in place one of the existing programs that train teachers and other school professionals to be a resource for struggling students?

I recognize that despite progress identifying effective programs to combat suicidal thinking, their success rate and simplicity does not compare with what we see with seatbelts. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do more.

Part of doing more also includes making the world more just and caring. To give one example, state-level same-sex-marriage policies that were in place before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationally have been linked to reductions in suicide attempts among adolescents, especially among sexual minorities.

Just as safer highways and car models make seatbelts more effective, asking about and responding to suicidal thinking is only one part of a solution that also includes attention to societal injustices.

I understand, of course, that asking about suicidal thinking is scary. But if it is scary for you to ask about it, it is even scarier for the teenager who is thinking about it.

I will never forget sitting with Frankie in the waiting room in the pediatric psychiatric wing on the night I brought her to the inpatient unit, three months before she took her life

“You know, I am so glad you finally know.” I could hear the relief in her voice. I just nodded, understandingly, but it broke my heart that she held on to such a painful secret for so long.

I find myself inspired by Frankie’s teenage friends, who cared deeply for her and now support one another after her passing.

On good days, she would sit on the worn couch in that office, snuggle in a pile of teenagers and discuss plays, schoolwork and their lives.

And in that corner space, she would text a friend to help her get to class or, after she had opened up about her struggles, encourage others to open up as well.

The fall after Frankie left us, some students decided to remake that hidden corner, dotting the walls with colored Post-it notes. Scrawled on a pink Post-it were the words “you matter”; a yellow one read “it gets better”; an orange one shared a cellphone number to call for help. Tiny Post-it squares had transformed the corner into a space to comfort, heal and support the next struggling teenager.

I don’t know if a seatbelt approach would have saved Frankie. And I understand that all the details of such an approach aren’t fully worked out here. But I don’t want us to lose any more children because we weren’t brave enough to take on something that scares us, something we don’t fully understand, something that is much more prevalent than many of us realize.

If 17- and 18-year-olds who’ve lost a friend have the strength to imagine a world dotted with healing, then the least we can do as adults is design and build the structure to support them

"was advised that she was disturbing what was going on inside and if she did not stop, she would be placed under arrest."

She is seen yelling in one video: "There is no reason for me to be arrested. I am a legislator!"

And her arrest prompted comparisons to civil rights and police brutality protests from this summer as well as those of the 1960s.

Georgia's Constitution says lawmakers "shall be free from arrest during sessions of the General Assembly" except for treason, felony or breach of the peace.

questioned what made Cannon's actions "so dangerous" that warranted her arrest.

Cannon tweeted early Friday thanking her supporters and said: "I am not the first Georgian to be arrested for fighting voter suppression. I'd love to say I'm the last, but we know that isn't true."

In 2016, that state passed a bill restricting which bathrooms transgender people could use.

Because of that law, the NCAA and other sports organizations pulled events from the state. That included seven NCAA championship events, among them two rounds of men's March Madness basketball games.

Proponents believe the laws will keep girls and women's sports free of unfair competition.

In other words, it's a variety of NCAA events — well beyond March Madness — that can affect a city's economy, especially a small city like Sioux Falls. For now, people like Lee will be watching closely to see what the South Dakota legislature does next with the bill.

The NCAA is uniquely situated in this debate in that it is an economic force and a sporting organization - one that already has a policy on transgender athletes. That 2011 policy does allow transgender athletes to participate on their gender's teams.

Idaho passed the country's first transgender sports ban last year. The NCAA came out against that bill, calling it "harmful to transgender student athletes."

More than 500 student athletes have signed onto a letter asking the NCAA not to host events in states with these laws.

Shigir Idol

Dug out of a peat bog by gold miners in 1890, the relic, or what’s left of it, is carved from a great slab of freshly cut larch.

Scattered among the geometric patterns (zigzags, chevrons, herringbones) are eight human faces, each with slashes for eyes that peer not so benignly from the front and back planes.

“Whether it screams or shouts or sings, it projects authority, possibly malevolent authority. It’s not immediately a friend of yours, much less an ancient friend of yours.”

In archaeology, portable prehistoric sculpture is called “mobiliary art.”

The statue’s age was a matter of conjecture until 1997, when it was carbon-dated by Russian scientists to about 9,500 years old, an age that struck most scholars as fanciful.

The statue was more than twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge, as well as, by many millenniums, the first known work of ritual art.

A new study that Dr. Terberger wrote with some of the same colleagues in Quaternary International, further skews our understanding of prehistory by pushing back the original date of the Shigir Idol by another 900 years, placing it in the context of the early art in Eurasia.

“During the period of rapid cooling from about 10,700 B.C. to 9,600 B.C. that we call the Younger Dryas, no beavers should have been around in the Transurals,” he said.)

Written with an eye toward disentangling Western science from colonialism, Dr. Terberger’s latest paper challenges the ethnocentric notion that pretty much everything, including symbolic expression and philosophical perceptions of the world, came to Europe by way of the sedentary farming communities in the Fertile Crescent 8,000 years ago.

“It’s similar to the ‘Neanderthals did not make art’ fable, which was entirely based on absence of evidence,

Likewise, the overwhelming scientific consensus used to hold that modern humans were superior in key ways, including their ability to innovate, communicate and adapt to different environments.

Nonsense, all of it.”

makes it clear that arguments about the wealth of mobiliary art in, say, the Upper Paleolithic of Germany or France by comparison to southern Europe, are largely nonsensical and an artifact of tundra (where there are no trees and you use ivory, which is archaeologically visible) versus open forest environments

The Shigir Idol, named for the bog near Kirovgrad in which it was found, is presumed to have rested on a rock base for perhaps two or three decades before toppling into a long-gone paleo-lake, where the peat’s antimicrobial properties protected it like a time capsule.

“It was not a scientific construction,”

“The rings tell us that trees were growing very slowly, as the temperature was still quite cold,”

Dr. Terberger respectfully disagrees.

“The landscape changed, and the art — figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock — did, too, perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered.”

And what do the engravings mean? Svetlana Savchenko, the artifact’s curator and an author on the study, speculates that the eight faces may well contain encrypted information about ancestor spirits, the boundary between earth and sky, or a creation myth.

The temple’s stones were carved around 11,000 years ago, which makes them 1,500 years younger than the Shigir Idol.

One could wonder how many similar pieces have been lost over time due to poor preservation conditions.”

The similarity of the geometric motifs to others across Europe in that era, he added, “is evidence of long-distance contacts and a shared sign language over vast areas. The sheer size of the idol also seems to indicate it was meant as a marker in the landscape that was supposed to be seen by other hunter-gatherer groups — perhaps marking the border of a territory, a warning or welcoming sign.”

“What do you think is the hardest thing to find in the Stone Age archaeology of the Urals?”A pause: Sites?“No,” he said, sighing softly. “Funding.”

This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks

black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.

we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices

This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.

When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”

Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.

Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.

This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.

The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools

one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.

To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.

It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:

Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”

In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”

The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.

Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California

Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”

A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”

Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.

Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?

Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.

So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease

Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”

We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation

We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.

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."

Thornton said he believes that an attorney should be an advocate, not an adversary, and others agree

One bill Fleming introduced, HB 531, would have curbed Sunday early voting, restricted mail-in voting, even made handing out food and water to voters a misdemeanor crime.

Fleming was county attorney that year when about 20% of Sparta's voters — all Black — had their voter registrations challenged before a mayoral race.

While Republicans have proposed hundreds of restrictive bills across the country, Warren says the particular measures discussed in Georgia are personal for Black people like himself that experienced Jim Crow laws firsthand.

Warren said Facebook posts and meetings with community members helped mobilize action before the county commission, and now says other local jurisdictions that have hired Fleming as attorney are considering dropping him, too.

In the short term at least, it appears that some Republicans are paying attention. The bill signed into law Thursday reversed course on some of the harshest measures, keeping no-excuse absentee voting and actually expanding in-person early voting access.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

But there are limits to this motion. We can’t transcend all our starting points. No matter how far it pulls back the camera is still occupying a position. We can’t actually take the “view from nowhere,” but this doesn’t mean that objectivity is a lie or an illusion. Our ability to step back and the fact that there are limits to it– both are real. And realism demands that we acknowledge both.

Q. So is objectivity a myth… or not? # A. One of the many interesting things Nagel says in that book is that “objectivity is both underrated and overrated, sometimes by the same persons.” It’s underrated by those who scoff at it as a myth. It is overrated by people who think it can replace the view from somewhere or transcend the human subject. It can’t.

When MSNBC suspends Keith Olbermann for donating without company permission to candidates he supports– that’s dumb. When NPR forbids its “news analysts” from expressing a view on matters they are empowered to analyze– that’s dumb. When reporters have to “launder” their views by putting them in the mouths of think tank experts: dumb. When editors at the Washington Post decline even to investigate whether the size of rallies on the Mall can be reliably estimated because they want to avoid charges of “leaning one way or the other,” as one of them recently put it, that is dumb. When CNN thinks that, because it’s not MSNBC and it’s not Fox, it’s the only the “real news network” on cable, CNN is being dumb about itself.

Let some in the press continue on with the mask of impartiality, which has advantages for cultivating sources and soothing advertisers. Let others experiment with transparency as the basis for trust. When you click on their by-line it takes you to a disclosure page where there is a bio, a kind of mission statement, and a creative attempt to say: here’s where I’m coming from (one example) along with campaign contributions, any affiliations or memberships, and–I’m just speculating now–a list of heroes and villains, or major influences, along with an archive of the work, plus anything else that might assist the user in placing this person on the user’s mattering map.

if objectivity means trying to ground truth claims in verifiable facts, I am definitely for that. If it means there’s a “hard” reality out there that exists beyond any of our descriptions of it, sign me up. If objectivity is the requirement to acknowledge what is, regardless of whether we want it to be that way, then I want journalists who can be objective in that sense.

If it means trying to see things in that fuller perspective Thomas Nagel talked about–pulling the camera back, revealing our previous position as only one of many–I second the motion. If it means the struggle to get beyond the limited perspective that our experience and upbringing afford us… yeah, we need more of that, not less. I think there is value in acts of description that do not attempt to say whether the thing described is good or bad

I think we are in the midst of shift in the system by which trust is sustained in professional journalism. David Weinberger tried to capture it with his phrase: transparency is the new objectivity. My version of that: it’s easier to trust in “here’s where I’m coming from” than the View from Nowhere. These are two different ways of bidding for the confidence of the users.

In the newer way, the logic is different. “Look, I’m not going to pretend that I have no view. Instead, I am going to level with you about where I’m coming from on this. So factor that in when you evaluate my report. Because I’ve done the work and this is what I’ve concluded…”

it has unearned authority in the American press. If in doing the serious work of journalism–digging, reporting, verification, mastering a beat–you develop a view, expressing that view does not diminish your authority. It may even add to it. The View from Nowhere doesn’t know from this. It also encourages journalists to develop bad habits. Like: criticism from both sides is a sign that you’re doing something right, when you could be doing everything wrong.

Who gets credit for the phrase, “view from nowhere?” # A. The philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote a very important book with that title.

It says that human beings are, in fact, capable of stepping back from their position to gain an enlarged understanding, which includes the more limited view they had before the step back. Think of the cinema: when the camera pulls back to reveal where a character had been standing and shows us a fuller tableau. To Nagel, objectivity is that kind of motion. We try to “transcend our particular viewpoint and develop an expanded consciousness that takes in the world more fully.”

In states across the country, demand for the vaccine has far outweighed supply

Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines, and none of them have reported any serious health problems.

Other states have decided to remain focused exclusively on vaccinating health care workers and nursing home residents before opening up to a wider swath of the public.

Life will return to normal only when society as a whole gains enough protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they’ll only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens at most in the first couple months.

At least 28 states and Washington, D.C., have begun vaccinating older people, a New York Times survey shows, in many cases marking a shift in earlier plans that had put medical workers and nursing home residents at the front of the line for Covid-19 inoculations.

“I couldn’t hug her,” Ms. Johnson said. “We didn’t share food. We each brought our own sandwich. It was just surreal.”

“Usually by four to six weeks, there’s not much left,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona. But germinal centers stimulated by the mRNA vaccines are “still going, months into it, and not a lot of decline in most people.”

The broader the range and the longer these cells have to practice, the more likely they are to be able to thwart variants of the virus that may emerge.

“Everyone always focuses on the virus evolving — this is showing that the B cells are doing the same thing,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “And it’s going to be protective against ongoing evolution of the virus, which is really encouraging.”

Dr. Ellebedy’s team found that 15 weeks after the first dose of vaccine, the germinal center was still highly active in all 14 of the participants, and that the number of memory cells that recognized the coronavirus had not declined.

“The fact that the reactions continued for almost four months after vaccination — that’s a very, very good sign,” Dr. Ellebedy said. Germinal centers typically peak one to two weeks after immunization, and then wane.

After an infection or a vaccination, a specialized structure called the germinal center forms in lymph nodes. This structure is an elite school of sorts for B cells — a boot camp where they become increasingly sophisticated and learn to recognize a diverse set of viral genetic sequences.

The results suggest that a vast majority of vaccinated people will be protected over the long term — at least, against the existing coronavirus variants

But older adults, people with weak immune systems and those who take drugs that suppress immunity may need boosters; people who survived Covid-19 and were later immunized may never need them at all.

In the absence of variants that sidestep immunity, in theory immunity could last a lifetime, experts said. But the virus is clearly evolving.

“Anything that would actually require a booster would be variant-based, not based on waning of immunity,” Dr. Bhattacharya said. “I just don’t see that happening.”

The good news: A booster vaccine will probably have the same effect as prior infection in immunized people, Dr. Ellebedy said. “If you give them another chance to engage, they will have a massive response,” he said, referring to memory B cells.

Dr. Ellebedy said the results also suggested that these signs of persistent immune reaction might be caused by mRNA vaccines alone, as opposed to those made by more traditional means, like Johnson & Johnson’s

But that is an unfair comparison, because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is given as a single dose, Dr. Iwasaki said: “If the J & J had a booster, maybe it will induce this same kind of response.”

more than half the respondents consider expressing views beyond a certain consensus in an academic setting quite dangerous to their career trajectory.

various people insisted that I was, essentially, lying; they simply do not believe that anyone remotely reasonable has anything to worry about.

in July I tweeted that I (as well as my Bloggingheads sparring partner Glenn Loury) have been receiving missives since May almost daily from professors living in constant fear for their career because their opinions are incompatible with the current woke playbook.

Overall I found it alarming how many of the letters sound as if they were written from Stalinist Russia or Maoist China.

A statistics professor says: I routinely discuss the fallacy of assuming that disparity implies discrimination, which is just a specific way of confusing correlation for causality. Frankly, I'm now somewhat afraid to broach these topics … since according to the new faith, disparity actually is conclusive evidence of discrimination.

The new mood has even reached medieval studies; an assistant professor reports having recently just survived an attack by a cadre of scholars who are “unspeakably mean and disingenuous once they have you in their sights,” regularly “mounting PR campaigns to get academics and grad students fired, removed from programs, expelled from scholarly groups, or simply to cease speaking.”

Being nonwhite leaves one protected in this environment only to the extent that one toes the ideological line. An assistant professor of color who cannot quite get with the program writes, “At the moment, I’m more anxious about this problem than anything else in my career,” noting that “the truth is that over the last few years, this new norm of intolerance and cult of social justice has marginalized me more than all racism I have ever faced in my life.”

The charges levied against many of these professors are rooted in a fanatical worldview, one devoted to spraying for any utterances possibly interpretable as “supremacist,” although the accusers sincerely think they have access to higher wisdom. A white professor read a passage from an interview with a well-known Black public intellectual who mentions the rap group NWA, and because few of the students knew of the group’s work at this late date, the professor parenthetically noted what the initials stand for. None of the Black students batted an eye, according to my correspondent, but a few white students demanded a humiliating public apology.

This episode represents a pattern in the letters, wherein it is white students who are “woker” than their Black classmates, neatly demonstrating the degree to which this new religion is more about virtue signaling than social justice

let’s face it: Half a dozen reports of teachers grading Black students more harshly than white students would be accepted by many as demonstrating a stain on our entire national fabric. These 150 missives stand as an articulate demonstration of something general—and deeply disturbing—as well.

A history professor reports that at his school, the administration is seriously considering setting up an anonymous reporting system for students and professors to report “bias” that they have perceived.

So no one should feign surprise or disbelief that academics write to me with great frequency to share their anxieties. In a three-week period early this summer, I counted some 150 of these messages. And what they reveal is a very rational culture of fear among those who dissent, even slightly, with the tenets of the woke left.

The result is academics living out loud only in whispers

A creative-writing instructor:

The majority of my fellow instructors and staff constantly self-censor themselves in fear of being fired for expressing the “wrong opinions.” It’s gotten to the point where many are too terrified to even like or retweet a tweet, lest it lead to some kind of disciplinary measure … They are supporters of free speech, scientific data, and healthy debate, but they are too fearful today to publicly declare such support. However, they’ll tell it to a sympathetic ear in the back corner booth of a quiet bar after two or three pints. These ideas have been reduced to lurking in the shadows now.

Some will process this as a kind of whining, supposing that all we should really be concerned about is whether people are outright dismissed. However, elsewhere a hostile work environment is considered a breach of civil rights, and as one correspondent wrote

“It isn’t just fear of firing that motivates professors and grad students to be quiet. It is a desire to have friends, to be part of a community. This is a fundamental part of human psychology. Indeed, experiments examining the effects of ostracism highlight what a powerful existential threat it is to be ignored, excluded, or rejected. This has been documented at the neurological level. Ostracism is a form of social death. It is a very potent threat.”

Especially sad is the extent to which this new Maoism can dilute the richness of a curriculum and discourage people from becoming professors at all

Very few of the people who wrote to me are of conservative political orientation. Rather, a main thread in the missives is people left-of-center wondering why, suddenly, to be anything but radical is to be treated as a retrograde heretic

It is now no longer “Why aren’t you on the left?” but “How dare you not be as left as we are.”

One professor committed the sin of “privileging the white male perspective” in giving a lecture on the philosophy of one of the Founding Fathers, even though Frederick Douglass sang that Founder’s praises. The administration tried to make him sit in a “listening circle,” in which his job was to stay silent while students explained how he had hurt them—in other words, a 21st-century-American version of a struggle session straight out of the Cultural Revolution.

The goal, they suggest, is less to eliminate all signs of a person’s existence—which tends to be impractical anyway— than to supplement critique with punishment of some kind.

One professor notes, “Even with tenure and authority, I worry that students could file spurious Title IX complaints … or that students could boycott me or remove me as Chair.”

From the same well is this same professor finding that the gay men in his class had no problem with his assigning a book with a gay slur in its title, a layered, ironic title for a book taking issue with traditional concepts of masculinity—but that a group of straight white women did, and reported him to his superiors.

degree of sheer worry among the people

with most polls indicating that it’s anyone’s guess who will carry Florida

held rallies in nearby Tampa on Thursday that underlined the polar-opposite realities each candidate now inhabits:

a conservative who said he had blocked Fox News on social media for being “too mainstream,”

“felt that it would be a good learning experience, so she could learn about some history and politics firsthand.”

Does he have a locker-room mentality?

“Yeah, sure, but I’m not hiring him to be nice.”

once overshadowed by Clearwater’s beach-retirement hub — has been transformed by recent years that have brought a mix of gentrification and progressive politics.

get-out-the-vote rally in honor of Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and voting rights champion who died over the summer

One in five Black Floridians is thought to have a felony conviction and could be unable to vote because of it.

“I’m not encouraging anyone to break the law, but today is a day for some ‘good trouble,’” she added, using one of Mr. Lewis’s signature phrases from his civil rights struggles

Mr. Overcast sighed. He said that living in the same county as the Church of Scientology’s headquarters had taught him how to tolerate almost any point of view, even that of the neighbor, who he suspected had stolen the Trump sign from his lawn.Mr. Overcast said his home security system had filmed the culprit making off with it. But rather than confront the neighbor, Mr. Overcast just bought another sign.“But with this one I tied 90 pounds of fishing line on it and tied it to a tree in my yard,” he said.

Billy Overcast — “spelled like the weather,” said Mr. Overcast, pointing up, however, to a typically clear day with one hand, a “Trump 2020” flag in the other.

Clearwater

The Confederate flag also bothered him, he told his fellow Jeep enthusiasts, as did the systemic racism

decorated with red, white and blue balloons; an American flag; a Black Lives Matter flag; another flag with an L.G.B.T. rainbow he found on Amazon; and lots of Biden-Harris campaign paraphernalia.

St. Petersburg and conservative Clearwater, the vacation hub and base of the Church of Scientology.

in the swing state that crowned past presidents by small margins, much in this country is riding o

n the all-important question of who flies what flag on which Jeep.

Pinellas County, about three-quarters of which is white, includes a good number of older retirees and suburban women

favor Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee.

256,000 are registered as Democrats

252,000 as Republicans.

a swing county in a swing state

Donald J. Trump narrowly triumphed here by roughly 6,000 votes, out of about half a million cast

But postelection observers said her appeals to middle-class voters in Pinellas County didn’t resonate as well as Mr. Obama’s had.

If you’ve got as little as 30 seconds and a decent internet connection, you can help combat the deforestation of the Amazon. 

to build an artificial intelligence model that can recognize signs of deforestation. That data can be used to alert governments and conservation organizations where intervention is needed and to inform policies that protect vital ecosystems. It may even one day predict where deforestation is likely to happen next.

To monitor deforestation, conservation organizations need an eye in the sky.

WRI’s Global Forest Watch online tracking system receives images of the world’s forests taken every few days by NASA satellites. A simple computer algorithm scans the images, flagging instances where before there were trees and now there are not. But slight disturbances, such as clouds, can trip up the computer, so experts are increasingly interested in using artificial intelligence.

Inman was surprised how willing people have been to spend their time clicking on abstract-looking pictures of the Amazon.

Look at these nine blocks and make a judgment about each one. Does that satellite image look like a situation where human beings have transformed the landscape in some way?” Inman explained.

It’s not always easy; that’s the point. For example, a brown patch in the trees could be the result of burning to clear land for agriculture (earning a check mark for human impact), or it could be the result of a natural forest fire (no check mark). Keen users might be able to spot subtle signs of intervention the computer would miss, like the thin yellow line of a dirt road running through the clearing. 

SAS’s website offers a handful of examples comparing natural forest features and manmade changes. 

users have analyzed almost 41,000 images, covering an area of rainforest nearly the size of the state of Montana. Deforestation caused by human activity is evident in almost 2 in 5 photos.

The researchers hope to use historical images of these new geographies to create a predictive model that could identify areas most at risk of future deforestation. If they can show that their AI model is successful, it could be useful for NGOs, governments and forest monitoring bodies, enabling them to carefully track forest changes and respond by sending park rangers and conservation teams to threatened areas. In the meantime, it’s a great educational tool for the citizen scientists who use the app

Users simply select the squares in which they’ve spotted some indication of human impact: the tell-tale quilt of farm plots, a highway, a suspiciously straight edge of tree line. 

we have still had people from 80 different countries come onto the app and make literally hundreds of judgments that enabled us to resolve 40,000 images,

But if the mess doesn’t bother you, it’s probably no big deal.

Having a messy room doesn't necessarily mean that there's anything else going on in terms of your mental health, but, in some cases, it can indicate something more serious.

Several of the criteria for a depression diagnosis — hopelessness, fatigue, and lack of concentration — can all play a role in why your messy room is in the state it's in.

If you're feeling a little less than hopeful, you might have a hard time understanding why you should even bother to clean up or organize things since, from where you're standing, everything seems to be going wrong anyway.

"Sometimes when life feels out of control or stressful other areas of your life get affected one being your working or living space,"

"So you can intend to put things in order in your room and never find the concentration or the energy to get around to it because you have so many other things going on.

Even if you don't recognize that you fit the criteria for an official diagnosis of depression (or just plain don't fit the criteria) if you're overwhelmed or have a lot going on in your head, cleaning your room can still be a major challenge.

Lack of concentration, too, can make the actual task of cleaning up your room impossible.

"If you're depressed or overwhelmed with life you may feel you don't have time to clean/organize, you may feel you don't deserve a clean space or you may be so preoccupied with other things you don't even notice how messy your room has become."

But just because your room is messy, doesn't mean you have depression, of course.

"If you're constantly hoping to stay more organized and keep the room clean, but find yourself unable to do it for other reasons, that's when you know that it's time for an intervention,"

Greg Sutherland from the University of Sydney agrees. In 2016, he came to similar conclusions as Alvarez-Buylla’s team, using similar methods. “Depending on your inherent biases, two scientists can look at sparse events in the adult brain and come to different conclusions,” he says. “But when faced with the stark difference between infant and adult human brains, we can only conclude that [neurogenesis] is a vestigial process in the latter.”

Alvarez-Buylla agrees that there’s still plenty of work to do. Even if neurogenesis is a fiction in adult humans, it’s real in infants, and in other animals. If we really don’t make any new neurons as adults, how do we learn new things? And is there any way of restoring that lost ability to create new neurons in cases of stroke, Alzheimer’s, or other degenerative diseases? “Neurogenesis is precisely what we want to induce in cases of brain damage,” Alvarez-Buylla says. “If it isn’t there to begin with, how might you induce it?”

In human babies, which learn to gesture at objects before they can speak, the left side of their brain seems to be engaged when they do so. Certain regions on the left side of our brain, such as Broca's area, are especially important when we speak.

Prof. Sandler is exploring the relationship between physical communication and the composition of human language. She believes sign languages can provide some clues to the structure of human language and how language may have emerged in our ancestors.

Prof. Sandler is exploring the relationship between physical communication and the composition of human language. She believes sign languages can provide some clues to the structure of human language and how language may have emerged in our ancestors.

"I could do open heart surgery right now. My hands are steady, my eyes are good," Wareham said. "My blood pressure is 117. I have noticed no deterioration in my mental ability with my age. If you gave me something to memorize, I would memorize it now just as quickly as when I was 20."

Wareham passed away last year, at the age of 104. Like 10% of the Adventist community, Wareham was a vegan. Another 30% are lacto-ovo vegetarians who eat dairy and eggs, while another 8% eat fish but not other meat. Vegetarianism is so prevalent that no meat can be purchased at the cafeterias at the university and medical center.

Other key factors to longevity: Only 1% of the Seventh-day Adventist community in the study smokes. Little to no alcohol is consumed. Daily exercise out in the fresh air of nature is the norm. The church advocates a life of service, so dedication to volunteering, humanitarian and mission work is typical, which contributes to a sense of community.

"The bulk of evidence suggests that changing a few simple lifestyle factors can have a profound difference in the risk of major diseases and the likelihood of living a long life," Orlich said. "The body has an amazing ability to, um, you know, heal itself to some degree.