Patricia Acensi-Ferr learned that she had breast cancer on Valentines Day.

It was 2013, and she was a 35-year old new mom caring for a baby at the tail end of her maternity leave. Her situation was serious. But she decided to fight it with humor: She named her tumor Roberto and, when her hair started falling out, she named one of her wigs Ginger. She survived a 15-month-long treatment that grew to involve surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. Today, she is cancer-free.

With the date of her return set for March 2014, though, Acensi-Ferr received another blow: While she was away, her job had been eliminated. Before her cancer, she had worked for about 15 years in the French government. In accordance with French law, Acensi-Ferr was offered another projectbut it was unrelated to her interests and experience.

Even before her maternity leave, Acensi-Ferr had felt like her employer wanted her to quit. The French have a name for it: placardis, meaning relegated to a closet. Now, she had had enough; she negotiated an exit package with her employer, and then quit.

Even without the cancer, the moral limit had been surpassed from my point of view, she says. I think it could not have happened any other way. But still, she wondered how her situation could have played out differently.

Acensi-Ferrs double-whammy of personal transitions may be uncommon, but her experience taking time away from work isnt. Exact figures are tough to come by, but off-ramping, or voluntarily taking leave, has become more common in many rich countries. Every month, 273,000 women and 13,000 men take maternity or paternity leave in the United States. And there are plenty of other reasons why someone might leave their work for an extended amount of time: a serious illness, the death of a close family member, or even burnout, which affects up to two thirds of US workers.

As some workplaces become more flexible about their policies, the number of workers off-ramping is growing.

Not everyone can afford to, or wants to, take time off work. But as some workplaces become more flexible about their policies for everything from parental leave to mental health breaks and sabbaticals, the number of workers off-rampingand the challenge of managing their returnis growing. People who have gone through these kinds of experiences may come back to feel and act differently. They may feel stressed, isolated, and depressed, all of which can impact peoples ability to function at work.

Acensi-Ferrs employer could have welcomed her back and offered her a new position better suited to her background. That wasnt meant to be. But what happened next turned out, in a sense, even better: She started laying the foundation to become a leading advocate for professional resilience in Francepoised to help a population of off-rampers just like her.

For Acensi-Ferr, professional resilience is how we transform a trauma into an opportunity for performance. And in 2015, she did just that, launching SynchroniCits, a consulting and coaching group that trains employees and employers on how to foster resilience in professional situations.

Acensi-Ferr was able to bounce back from adversity on her own, and one goal of her organization is to give other individuals the tools to do the same. But increasingly, companies are seeing the value in supporting their employees transitions after a difficult or traumatic experience requires time away from work. As they struggle to retain or retrain returning employeesand bear the associated costsbusinesses have turned to resilience consulting and coaching firms like Acensi-Ferrs, which have proliferated in the past two decades.

Resilience can absolutely be learned, and experience is the best teacher, says Jessica Chivers, a psychologist and CEO of The Talent Keeper Specialists, a UK-based consulting and coaching firm that helps people returning to work after extended leave.

Resilience can absolutely be learned, and experience is the best teacher.

Along with Chivers company, Acensi-Ferr is joined by Wisdom Labs, a company that focuses on the mental, emotional, and social well-being of workers, and Shes Back, a UK-based coaching group that focuses on women reentering the workplace. Acensi-Ferr has also launched Envie2Rsilience, a group that advocates for professional resilience with employers and public officials. Every year, the groups give out a Professional Resilience Prize (link in French).

These groups believe that coaching makes a difference, says Chivers. Individuals having access to somebody outside of their organization that they can strategize, plan, talk openly with, and use as a sounding board, can make all the difference between that person staying and working to reintegrate and thinking I just cant do this, I need to leave.

And that, the coaches say, is good for business. The faster you can get someone up to speed and working at full capacity, the more money youre going to make out of them, says Lisa Unwin, founder of Shes Back. They also argue that helping returning employees boosts companies bottom line, by keeping turnover and recruiting costs down.

Arlette Pujar saw the value of resilience training for the officials she trains at the National Center for Territorial Public Service in Martinique (CNFPT), a French overseas territory. The center trains hundreds of public officials in all industries across the Caribbean island. Absenteeism, burnout, and turnover is very high, says Pujar.

Despite our idyllic environmentthe sun, the sea, the coconut treesmany territorial officials are suffering, she explains. Income inequality is high and many officials earn less than minimum wage. The island is plagued by air pollution and contaminated waters, and there are deep-seated issues tied to its history of racism and oppression. We are descendants of slaves, says Pujar. Today, we suffer the consequences and sequelae.

Acensi-Ferr spoke to agents of the CNFPT about resilience in June. She gathered small groups of officials who had recently returned to work or been away for a long time for personal or medical reasons, and encouraged them to share their stories with their colleagues. One woman spoke about how her burnout kept her indoors for the better part of two years, too traumatized to go to the office to hand in her medical leave papers. A former public hospital employee talked about losing his leg in a car accident and the difficulties he experienced returning to work. There was a lot of crying, because every situation felt like a mirror to the officials present, says Pujar.

With Acensi-Ferrs help, CNFPT was able to encourage employees to support one another. For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Pujar marshaled a group of officials, some of whom had had cancer themselves and others who simply wanted to show their support, to take part in the yole ronde, a special maritime race that is traditional in Martinique, where each person in the boat has a very particular job that keeps it afloat. The goal is to use a tradition employees are familiar with as a tool to increase their confidence, says Pujar.

Since then, things have changed for the better. The CNFPT set up programs to improve reentry for officials after a long absence, and it plans to redo the resilience seminar with Acensi-Ferr.

It has been a great achievement for us, Pujar says of the resilience training. Beyond the number of participants, I believe fundamentally that it has been a game-changer, and even HR directors who were present have realized the importance of taking into consideration the reentry of employees.

Whether or not training affects the bottom line, workers and employers have plenty of reason to want to foster resilience. A lot of people are suffering right now, in the workplace especially, says Cory Smith, the co-founder and CEO of Wisdom Labs. He founded the company with the explicit goal of protecting employees from depression, isolation, stress, and burnout.

Smith knows a thing or two about those issues. In 1997, while working for the UNESCO World Heritage Center, he survived a suicide bombing in Ben-Yehuda Square in Jerusalem. He returned to the US and immediately founded a company, not realizing that he was suffering from symptoms of PTSD. He eventually burned out, which forced him to reexamine his career and life choices. How do we provide something that allows people to not have to go through this alone and suffer so much? he asks.

Smiths answer was to co-found a company that uses the science of what we know about the brain to help workers develop the skills of resilience: setting goals and acting on them, taking risks, and practicing mindfulness and an attitude of gratefulness. Practices like guided breathing, meditation, and exercise can help.

Strengths-focused conversations reconnect individuals with a sense of capability, credibility, and can-do.'

Companies that turn to Wisdom Labs hope to equip their employees with these skills for self-awareness and self-regulation. Similarly, for Chivers clients, the first step in the process is often a strengths diagnostic tool, she says, which helps individuals find out how their skills can help them navigate their transition. Strengths-focused conversations reconnect individuals with a sense of capability, credibility, and can-do, she writes in an email.

But theres only so much an employee can do for themselves. Professional resilience has to be built into an organization itself. So another important element is to highlight the resources an individual has in their workplace, says Smith, including social connections and support. Studies show that people with close and supportive relationships are often more resilient to external stressors. But people can feel quite isolated when they return to work, says Unwin. You dont have to be out long to feel as though youve lost some of your social networks.

For employers, then, resilience can be fostered by encouraging connections and community in the workplace. That can mean group activities, trainings, or mentorship programsanything that makes it comfortable for colleagues to share with each other and ask for help.

Its also important for employers to help off-ramped employees maintain ties while theyre gone. Theres a lot of things you can do during your time off to keep in touch with people, says Unwin. In the UK, employees can work up to 10 days, called Keep In Touch Days, while on leave and still keep their benefits. Companies can support their employees attempts to ease back into the workplace by organizing Keep In Touch Days and making sure their HR departments are on hand to support employees on those days.

Employers should also make sure, as Chivers says, that return employees are sufficiently stretched but not stressed. Being busy is good, but not being overwhelmed. The very worst thing that could happen is for an employee to show up on her first day, and for no one to be expecting her, or for her computer not to be set up, or for her to have nothing to do. Its really soul-destroying, says Unwin. And that happens a lot.

Acensi-Ferr did what she hopes her clients wont do after an extended period of leaveshe left. But she believes time away can be an opportunity for people to ask themselves important questions about their career goals, the big one being, do I really want to come back after this is all over?

What I advocate for in my work, Acensi-Ferr says, is either a reunion, when possible and desirable for the parties involved, or a divorce by mutual consent.

Sometimes our coaching work is about helping people to leave well with reputation and relationships intact, once theyve decided that staying isnt an attractive option, writes Chivers in an email. That isnt a failure of resilience, its the very opposite: Its realizing there are options and choices and they dont have to stay in an unhappy situation.

When employees choose not to return to work, or return for a little while and then quit, Smith views it as an opportunity for their former employer to examine which resources (time, money, technology, support etc.) were missing or which demands were out of balance. Would coaching or training have helped them cope? Or does there need to be a systems change of some kind that optimizes workflows and demands that are in line with employee wellbeing?

The field of professional resilience is just a few decades old, but according to Acensi-Ferr, most companies still dont invest time or resources into thinking about ways in which they can ease an employees reentry into the workplace. Her company has only brought in about 50,000 this year in individual and company coaching fees. There are brave people and brave companies who dare to take an interest in these issues. Unfortunately, for the majority of them at the moment, there is instead a tendency to wait for the situation to resolve itself.

Still, applying the lessons she has learned in her work, she is sticking behind her project of building the practice of resilience in Frances professional settings. My utopia, Acensi-Ferr said in a speech earlier this year (French), is convincing companies that resilience is a virtue that will determine their performance.

Read more:

Resilience in the workplace can help retain employees - Quartz

After months of teasing, misdirection, and red herrings, the finale of DC Comics Event Leviathan finally told us who the heck Leviathan is.

As the head of the spy organization of the same name that, Leviathan destroyed all the covert super-spy organizations and evil secret societies in the DC Universe in one fell swoop. The six-issue miniseries, from Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev, followed a group of the DC Universes greatest detectives, as they tried to figure out who Leviathan was in a single night, before the rest of their plan could be put into effect.

Bendis maintained that Leviathan wasnt a new character, but someone who existed in DC Comics canon. And as revealed by Event Leviathan #6, that someone was a relatively unknown superhero with a long origin in DC Comics history: Manhunter.

Like 1940s comics characters who never reached the popularity of a Justice League member, Manhunter has been through waves of reinvention. He began as a non-costumed crime fighter, but was revived several times as a red-clad and masked vigilante detective and as an army of robots called the Manhunters who preceded the Green Lantern Corps. as a failed attempt to police the galaxy.

Now, hes one of Supermans canniest foes. Well just have to wait and see how long this incarnation sticks!

What else is happening in the pages of our favorite comics? Ill tell you. Welcome to Polygons weekly list of the books that our comics editor, me, enjoyed over the past seven days. Its part society pages of superhero lives, part reading recommendations, part look at this cool art. Lets get started!

Mark Shaw, the 1980s incarnation Manhunter, turned out to be Leviathan. He was a human man empowered for costumed crime-fighting by the remnants of the ancient robot Manhunter army. Now hes gone all mastermind-y trying to remake the world in a better image, etc. etc.. You know how this villain stuff goes.

N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbells Far Sector finally kicked off this week and its got a great hook, great worldbuilding, and absolutely gorgeous art. If you like science-fiction mysteries, you should get in on the ground floor with this one.

Im still waiting for the real plot of The Batmans Grave to show itself, but also loving how Ellis writes Bruce and Alfred.

Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy is a comic about women defending their girlfriends (and I dont mean friends who are girls), and Im really into this Ivy-makes-armor-out-of-bark look.

Id fall for those big blue puppy dog eyes, too, Lois.

Hey! Its the Wonder-Woman of China! Im so glad someone out there is remembering that the Justice League of China exists and is great.

If you read one comic this week, make it the finale of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, if only for the scene with Galactus. Its a beautiful metaphor about dealing with loss and necessary change, for how to navigate the ever shifting status quo of Marvel and DC comics characters, and also is the books creators speaking directly to its many kid-aged fans who have to say goodbye. It almost made me cry.

Meanwhile, in X-Men #2, two sentient islands did some very personal business and now the mutants utopia is, uh, bigger.

Im a simple woman: A comic makes me laugh out loud, I put it in the roundup.

Runaways gets a runner-up prize for Best Scene This Week, in a bit where all the characters try on new costumes from a giant closet. Kris Anka nails these faces, especially Nicos girlfriend, Karolina (top right).

I thought that some of you might like to know that ElfQuest is back with a new story and its about Skywise being very gay.

Reaver #5 has my favorite kind of reveal: The powerful old sorcerer jerk with a mute female slave turned out to actually be a corpse being puppeted by a mute female sorcerer. If I had a dime for every time that happened to me...

More here:

Supermans apocalyptic villain finally revealed by DC Comics - Polygon

LaMelo Ball tries to catch his breath, placing his hands on his hips as if holding on to them is all that is preventing him from falling down. His hamstrings burn. His knees creak. His white ankle socks have turned a dirty shade of gray from his beach sprints this October afternoon. As he stares out at the Pacific Ocean, his feet sink into sand so dense it might as well be tar.

The glittering, blue-green waves have no beginning, no end. Some might find it idyllic, relaxing, here on the beach in the sleepy, saltwater-scented beach town of Wollongong, Australia.

Not LaMelo. He doesn't like to think about what's out there.

It's not just that he's far from home, from all he knows. LaMelo is afraid of the ocean. Or more so, of everything in it. Tiger sharks, great white sharks, bull sharks. He is sure that if he dips his feet in, lets the water swirl around his toes, he'll be swallowed up. This is the other side of the Pacific, but it's the same ocean.

And there's something else familiar, something else after him. He can sense it, see it out of the corner of his eye. He realizes he's being watched. Two girls, one blond, one brunette, come closer. Close enough to see the imprint of his footsteps. The blonde pulls out her iPhone and starts recording LaMelo with one hand, holding an H&M bag in the other. The girls point and stare at him like he is an art exhibit. An animal. Like one of the sulphur-crested cockatoo birds hovering in the distance. The brunette asks LaMelo for a selfie. "Best day of my life," she says a few minutes later before walking away.

A world away from where the Ball family is known for seeking such attention, I'm struck by the awkwardness of the scene, of the strangeness that is constant in this teenager's life. But LaMelo doesn't seem bothered. Smile, selfie, smile is the rhythm of his life.

"It's always been like this," he says. He can't remember a time when cameras weren't rolling, when he wasn't being watched.

Maybe it began at age five, when kids lined up for his autograph as he played with his older brothers, Lonzo, now a guard for the New Orleans Pelicans, and Gelo, who played briefly at UCLA. Or age 10, when he was expected to outperform 15- and 16-year-olds. Or age 14, when he was playing for Chino Hills High School and recalls a random man coming from behind him in line at Yogurtland to pay for his order, knowing how highly he was ranked. Fans would stalk his family after his games that year, chasing them to whatever restaurant they chose. His father, LaVar, would remind him as the youngest, the one shouldering the heaviest of expectations: Don't chase the money. Let the money chase you.

But LaMelo never chose this chase. Never had a say. "All my life, I felt like I was just supposed to go to the NBA, you know?" he says. "Ever since I was born, damn near, He's going to be an NBA player." He says he wants to be the greatest basketball player to ever play. Most boys who grip the peach-dotted leather, launching free throws into the air from their beds, share that dream. But no other American prospect has lived LaMelo's life: prepping for the pros with a middle school body, dropping out of high school at 16 and moving to Lithuania to play pro in 2018. His every move was scrutinized, his every facial expression dissected: Is he happy? Is he sad?

I traveled to Lithuania for three weeks back then, to profile LaMeloto look at how someone that young performed in front of that many eyes for that many years. And now, a year and a half later, I'm here in Australia, on a two-week trip to watch him play for the Australian National Basketball League's Illawarra Hawkshere to see how he's changed.

Ever since LaMelo landed in Australia, he's been dazzling scouts with behind-the-back passes and uncanny court vision. The hype has increased. One scout has even likened him to Luka Doncic. For good reason: LaMelo has an extremely tight handle and is a gifted passer. He is creative, flashy, an instinctive playmaker. "The stuff I see is NBA stuff. His IQ is amazing," says Aaron Brooks, the 10-year NBA veteran who played alongside LaMelo on Illawarra until he tore his Achilles in late October. "There's no doubt about it: He's ready for the NBA. His ceiling is so high."

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LaMelo plans to play with the Hawks through the end of the 2019-20 season, in February, before jumping to the NBA in June, when he's sure to be one of the first names called in the draft. Wollongong, about an hour and 15 minutes south of Sydney by car, has never landed a prospect of that caliber. "This is definitely unprecedented," Hawks general manager Mat Campbell says. The Hawks are the NBL's smallest team and don't have a history of success (their only title came in 2001). They're 2-8 this season. It seemed strange that LaMelo didn't choose a bigger, more competitive squad such as the Sydney Kings, where he could have played alongside former NBA No. 1 overall pick Andrew Bogut, or the Perth Wildcats, the nine-time NBL champions. "I just didn't want any distractions," LaMelo says.

But distractions still swarm him. LaMelo lives with Jermaine Jackson, his mentor and manager and former coach at SPIRE Institute, but LaVar and the rest of the family (minus Lonzo) are here filming this week for their Ball in the Family Facebook reality show. Even without them, LaMelo is followed like a Kardashian. Against Melbourne United, one man dodged security, reached the door leading to the locker room and banged again and again, screaming for LaMelo. Recently, LaMelo wore sparkling diamond earrings to Steelers Seafood & Grill. "It was massive talk of the town," says Molly Wharfe, a barista at Utopia Coffee House. "We can't believe he's here. This is crazy."

The NBL has profited from LaMelo's talent, securing ESPN and Facebook deals to broadcast the games. Brittany Gray, the Hawks' marketing and media manager, says that the announcement of LaMelo's signing generated 1.6 billion impressions across the NBL's web and social channels. Over a million viewers in the U.S. streamed LaMelo's debut against the Brisbane Bullets on Facebook, an NBL record.

For LaMelo, this is the same script, different continent. "People done made money off this kid for years," says Jackson, who played in the NBA from 1999 to 2006. "I don't really want to use the word, but it's damn near like he's a prostitute."

People here seem to always mention LaMelo's social media following, his global presenceso much so that he has almost become the tweet, become the Instagram story. "He's a little bit like our spotlight to the world," says Larry Kestelman, the NBL's owner and executive chairman. "Because until people have a look, because of LaMelo, to see what we have, you don't necessarily know we exist."

But as much attention as he attracts, he doesn't want any of it. He drags when asked to film scenes for Ball in the Family. He just wants to play basketball. He is bubbly but soft-spoken, friendly but guarded, trusting few. When he smiles, you can see a faint glimmer, a rhinestone of a cross he lasered on a tooth near the corner of his mouth. It's a testament to his faith, as are the tattoos "Fear" on his left wrist and "God" on his right. "I look at this every time I wake up," he says, referring to the angel wings he has tattooed on his chest. "It makes me feel like I have angels with me. For all the stuff I've been through.

"People don't know me, know me as a person. They don't know what I've been through."

The more he speaks, the words begin to tumble out as if they've been held in for a long time. He is acutely aware of howpeople view him, treat him."People don't look at you as a human," he says. "People look at you as a dollar sign."

Today, LaMelo is brighter than anything in the Snakepit, the Hawks' practice court, where the first NBL game was played in 1979. It's not just his colorful tights underneath his shorts: red-and-green plaid (tomorrow, black-and-white checkered; the day after, green camouflage). It's the way he rushes to the worn, copper-colored court while his teammates, many a decade older, head in slowly, softly.

"Caaaaaaaaaashhhh!" LaMelo screams, popping a three a few seconds after throwing his forest green backpack on the sideline. He doesn't start close to the rim, like most do. His first shot is always a three. Then a longer three. "I might not miss a shot today!" he says to his teammates, still lacing up their sneakers on the sideline.

This is his joy, his peace. His enthusiasm changes the gym's mood from dormant to vibrant.

"He keeps me upbeat and energetic," says David Andersen, a 39-year-old Hawks forward and four-time Olympian. "That's a good trait to have as you go through the grind of a professional season."

LaMelo greets Todd Blanchfield, a guard who is teaching him to play the sport of cricket. "G'day, maaaaaate!" LaMelo jokes. Then he spots Brooks. "Oooh! Oooh!" LaMelo squeals, trying to cross Brooks over. "You dancing now!"

The first time they met, Brooks told LaMelo, "Your brother's really good," referring to Lonzo. LaMelo stared at him and said, deadpan, "I'm better than him." He also believes he can play in the NFL right now: "Swear to God, I can be an NFL quarterback!" Any such dreams were squashed, though, when LaVar said the fashion-conscious, sneakerhead teenager would have to closet his sneakers and wear cleats all day every day of ninth grade if he wanted to play football.

LaMelo's confidence can easily be mistaken for arrogance, his playfulness for lack of focus. I spent enough time around him in my two weeks to see that that's not the case. He listens intently, and he yearns to be coached. But he is 18. Not yet mature but not immature. He's just a boy. Problem is, he can't speed up time. He can't jump to the NBA yet. He can't be a man yet, either, let alone his own man.

He's trying to be, though. "People think he's just Lonzo's brother or just LaVar's son," says RJ Hampton, a close friend and fellow top draft prospect who plays for the New Zealand Breakers. "Melo's his own person."

He can snake his way into the paint and handle physicality despite his lanky, still-growing 6'7" frame because he's crafty. It is easy to get pickpocketed at his size, but LaMelo rarely loses the ball. He has struggled in Australia in terms of shooting percentage, but his "tremendous upside" is clear, says Hawks head coach Matt Flinn. "Can you imagine him in four years?"

He is still a work in progress, most glaringly on defense. His teammates have not babied him either. Once, a teammate took off for a fast break but missed the layup. He yelled at LaMelo, trailing at half court: "F--king run with me! You should have f--king been there to put it back!"

Earlier this season, Flinn gathered the team to talk about accepting roles. He told them there are two wolves living inside them: the bad wolf, responsible for whining, self-loathing, self-pity; and the good wolf, responsible for playing hard, loving teammates, having confidence. "The two wolves are inside you, fighting constantly," Flinn said. "The one that leads your life, determines what you do, is the one you feed the most. Do you know which wolf wins in the end?"

Players fell silent, some looking down at their sneakers. LaMelo waited a second or two before poking his head through the huddle, saying softly, "The good wolf!"

It's around 10 p.m., and LaMelo is hungry. We walk to the McDonald's he frequents. If he isn't here, he's at Chicko's, a chicken spot up the street; or at the cafe Coffee Club, eating a Caesar salad (he hates most vegetableswon't chew them, has to swallow them wholebut lettuce is OK).

Once inside McDonald'sor "Macca's," as the Aussies call itLaMelo heads toward six large machines. "You gotta order on these things," he says. He breaks into a smile once he has his large Oreo McFlurry. "They use more Oreos than in America," he says, a couple of cookies crumbling down his white tee. "In America they be stingy with the Oreos!" It's true; the Australian McFlurry seems to have cookies inside and not just on top. Still, this dessert feels like home.

His nearby apartment, however, does not. It's small, modestfar from his family's spacious estate in Chino Hills. In the living room, there are two giant cardboard boxes draped in front of the curtains to keep the sun's glare off the TV so LaMelo can play Fortnite. There is a wooden hand flipping the middle finger. There's LaMelo's bed, which he makes every morning. He brought a couple dozen shoes, including the fuchsia Gucci shoes he's wearing tonight, but not much else. He can't take much. "I've been on the road so long," he says.

For LaMelo, home is wherever he happens to be. He is 18 hours ahead of his friends back in California, but at least people here speak English. At least Wollongong is much warmer, much more cosmopolitan, than the freezing, rural town of Prienai, Lithuania. But days here are just as monotonous: weights, practice, working out, video games, napping, eating. "Then wait for time to die," he says. "People think playing overseas is easy. It's not." He doesn't complain, though. He learned not to as a child.

When LaMelo was six, he jumped from a high wall to the pool in the family's backyard. "Y'all, this is funnnnnnnnnnn!" he squealed to his brothers. The next time, he slipped and fell hard. He couldn't walk, so Gelo gave him piggy-back rides the rest of the week. LaMelo remembers LaVar yelling at Gelo: "Why the f--k you giving this dude a piggy ride? Put his ass down!" But when LaMelo tried to walk, his ankle throbbed. Didn't matter. He had to walk through pain.

As the years wore on, as Lonzo's fame increased, as LaVar's proclamations became more brazen, LaMelo realized that he could not slip. He had to perform. But performing, always performing, has left little time for processing. "Melo can't really relax," Jackson says.

It's morning, but the sun has disappeared. It's windy, overcast. Few are outside walking their dogs along the Blue Mile, a path adjacent to the beach. The waves crash gently, a quiet hum for a smaller audience.

I meet LaMelo and Jackson at Jackson's white Kia Cerato to head to a team weightlifting session. I tell LaMelo I returned my own rental car because it was terrifying driving on the left side of the road with the steering wheel on the right side of the car. He tells me he drove here once. "Wasn't hard, though. I'm just cold at driving, period," he says, laughing. "Coldest driver ever!"

Jackson is less chipper. Forbes published an article a few hours earlier examining NBA teams' interest in LaMelo, but instead of assessing his on-court skills, it focused more on his commercial, global appeal. The academy director at SPIRE Institute was quoted saying, "The viewership and social media metrics back up the value of taking LaMelo Ball and the financial return on investment it brings prior to him even stepping on the court." Like LaMelo is a piece of stock.

A car.

A thing.

LaMelo hasn't seen the article, so Jackson tells him about it. LaMelo stares blankly at Jackson, nods three times. His head drops, and he looks out the window. Something in him quiets, shuts down. Then he blasts G Herbo's "Summer Is Cancelled": "They tellin' me I'm the man, I ain't even settle in yet // Gotta get youngin' together, they starve on the regular // I came from sparkin' competitors // My life was never no regular degular"

LaMelo cranks the dial up, switching to Meek Mill's "Cold Hearted II": "Scream, 'Ride or die,' I thought you would ride with me // Found out you was jealous, you wouldn't even grind with me." LaMelo is moving his entire body now, rapping along: "Goin' city to city, can't take my son to school when I want to // Can't see my mama, my family when I want to."

He almost always has his cherry-red headphones on. They teleport him to a place beyond Australia. A place where he is understood as he is: a kid who doesn't seek awards, acclaim. He hasn't kept a single trophy except his Chino Hills state championship ring freshman year. Back when he was 14. Back before everything changed.

Most days in middle school, LaMelo would run hill after hill in Chino. As the sun beat down his back, sometimes he wished he could hang out with his friends. Play NBA2K.

Relax.

But he couldn't. He was supposed to go to the NBA. And his brothers were, too. "You weak as hell! You think you good, but you ain't!" Lonzo would scream, battling one-on-one, in challenges laced with love. Exhausted, playing against people older than him, LaMelo wanted to quit at times. "Moments like, Man, I'm done, bruh. I'm not trying to do this," he says. "But at the end of the day, my dad was like, 'What else you gon' do, to be honest?'"

LaMelo never had time to contemplate. LaVar pulled him out of Chino Hills High his junior year, and he had to leave his friends behind and head to Lithuaniaand now, Australia. "People don't know how much he sacrificed," Jackson says. "If you go back to the most times in your life you really had fun, when was that? The years he missed." LaMelo never thought he'd grow up across the globe. "Definitely not," he says. "I thought I was gonna do four years at Chino Hills. I thought I was going to go to USC and from there go one-and-done."

"I just saw life different," he says. "Not being a normal kid, not going to dance parties, not going to school." He doesn't know whether that's good or bad because, he adds, "I don't know any other way."

I remember watching practice every day in Lithuania, struck by how no matter how freezing it was outside, no matter how miserable he was inside, LaMelo kept a stiff upper lip. He played hard. He didn't complain. "It was like a scary movie," LaMelo says. "It just made me want to go home."

LaMelo wouldn't call Lithuania tough, though. Tough was seeing his mother, Tina, in a wheelchair, shivering in her BBB puffer jacket, in the cold Lithuanian gym, forcing a smile for Ball in the Family cameras despite recovering from a stroke. "My mom could have possibly died," LaMelo says.

Seeing her continue to suffer guts him. So when he is with her in offseasons, he pours her water, tears open the straw. He hops in the pool, holding her hands as she completes rehabilitation exercises. He becomes the parent, she the child.

People don't see those moments. Many think LaMelo is egotistical, disrespectful. Spoiled, immature. Too loud.

"I'm just misunderstood," LaMelo says. "About everything." That's, of course, partially because of his father. Assumptions that people have are fed by whatever his father says or does. "It gets attached to us," LaMelo says. "I mean, at the end of the day, that's my dad. I know him. He knows me. That's always going to be a bond."

"I just play basketball," LaMelo adds. "Whatever he say, he say. I don't" He cuts off. It's hard to explain. He can't control much but the backspin on his jumper, the precision of his passes. He can't control what his dad says about him. About anyone. But when stripped of the labels both have been assignedoutspoken father, prodigious sonthey are, at their core, still a father and a son. A father and a son who will have years where they understand each other, years where they don't. Moments they feel tethered, moments they feel distant.

"You not gonna turn on your dad. You only get one dad in the world," LaMelo says. "People say to me, 'He's ruining your career.' I mean, no he's not, because he made me who I am."

For most anyone, approaching adulthood means beginning to look, really look, at your parents as separate from you. People who have their own lives, problems, emotions, ambitions. People who are flawed, human. You inherit the best of them, the worst of them. And you try to figure out who you are because of them or in spite of them.

That's part of what LaMelo is going through now...but going through it while living a half-world away from his home, while living with someone hired by his father to groom him in the father's image of what he should be. (LaVar and the rest of the family declined, through Jackson, to be interviewed for this article.)

LaMelo remembers one afternoon in a gym in a rough neighborhood in Los Angeles when he was four. He remembers shooting off to the side with LaVar while Lonzo and Gelo were playing pickup with grown men. Someone fouled hard, and a verbal altercation broke out. "All right! All right! I'mma be back!" one man threatened.

He did come back. He slid through the back door with a black hoodie on, carrying a gun. "Shot the whole gym up," LaMelo says. "Pop pop pop pop." He remembers how in a split second, his feet dangled in the air, his tiny body sheltered by his father's stomach. LaVar had scooped him, Lonzo and Gelo up in his arms, somehow carrying all three while running, running so hard, out of the gym.

Hearing this story, having seen the way this family operates for so long now, I think of how LaVar would operate with a similar protective instinct in the coming years, shielding his sons before harm touched them. Maybe that's why he pulled LaMelo out of high school and kept him from playing college basketball. From being exploited by powerful systems that other boys cannot escape.

The sad part is, the vultures still got to LaMelo. He is still prey. Still treated like a dollar sign.

"It's LaMelooooo Balllllllllll!" says guard Angus Glover as LaMelo enters WIN Entertainment Centre for shootaround, hours before the Hawks' season opener against the Brisbane Bullets. LaMelo starts popping threes. "Damn, my s--t butter," he says. "Smack!"

Critics have questioned his shot selection and his unconventional form. LaMelo has been tinkering with it for the last year and a half or so. Nowadays he launches 260 in the morning and 340 at night without leaving the ground, working on a balanced, fluid motion: up, rather than out.

He used to chuck 35-footers without settling into the offense, but these days he is more thoughtful. Selfless. "He tells us, if you run, I'll find you," says guard Sunday Dech. LaMelo is aware of his weaknesses. He isn't a lockdown defender. He is still growing into his body. "He's 18," center Josh Boone says. "Everything is new to him."

But competition in the NBL doesn't compare to that of the NBA. Guards here are solid, but the bigs are two steps slower. In this practice, Hawks players are moving through shell drill with little go. It is usually like this: low intensity, little defense. LaMelo makes a turnover, but no one calls him out.

Sitting next to Jackson on the sideline, I ask why LaMelo's family sent him here when there are much more competitive destinations, like Sydney, or teams in the EuroLeague. Perhaps Spain. "Connections," Jackson says. He won't reveal which ones, instead saying: "If you know someone at a hair salon, you're gonna go to that salon. It's never about what's best for the kid. It's about what's best for the rest."

LaMelo stays on the court to shoot after practice. "I'm finna make 20," he tells Jackson. "This s--t easy, dawg." He makes five, misses the sixth. "This rim ass." He finally hits 20. "Wraps!" He puts on red pajama pants but is compelled back to the court.

He stands on one end and rolls the ball perfectly to the other end. Then he stands on one sideline and bounces the ball so it lands immaculately inside the ball rack. He dances, pleased with himself. Then he gets more excited: It's time for his Caesar salad.

We arrive at Coffee Club, and LaMelo spots one of the cooks in the kitchen he has befriended: "My boyyyyyy!" A waitress brings a vase of water, and he giggles, filling everyone's cup to the brim so the water teeters on spilling over. He orders his Caesar salad with a side of pancakes, drowning them with two cups of syrup.

I ask about practice: "Do you wish you were more challenged here?"

"Ummmmm," he says, pausing. "I just gotta get through the year."

"How do you do that, though? Get through it? It seems hard to do every day."

"That's like me asking how you do your job," he says. "How hard is your job?"

"I mean, I think your job is harder than mine."

"Nah, your job is way harder," he says. "You gotta listen to me, write notes down, think about your next question, then ask more questions and then you gotta write the story. That's hard."

I try to imagine how many reporters have stuck a mic in his face since he was a child. How many fans, handlers, family members have asked for his photo, his time, his smile. All watching him but never really seeing him.

Security is tight a few hours later, two hours before the Bullets game. "We've got twice as much," says Jonathan Malishev, a security guard. The Hawks' content creator, Matthew Adekponya, and I walk to the back entrance, but another security guard doesn't let us pass. "We've got a player here," the guard says into his walkie-talkie, staring at Adekponya.

"Really?" Adekponya says, flashing his media badge. Adekponya is Australian but a dual citizen (Australian-Ghanaian). The guard apologizes and lets us in. "Racial profiling," Adekponya says, sighing as we head into the arena. He says last year hardly any security existed: "It's the LaMelo effect."

More here:

The Life of LaMelo - Bleacher Report

Good morning, BroadwayWorld!

A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY opens at The Public Theater tonight! This scorching new version of Kushner's first play stars Linda Emond (Annabella Gotchling), Michael Esper (Vealtninc Husz), Grace Gummer (Paulinka Erdnuss), Jonathan Hadary (Xillah), Nikki M. James (Agnes Eggling), Crystal Lucas-Perry (Zillah), Nadine Malouf (Rosa Malek), Mark Margolis (Gottfried Swetts), Estelle Parsons (Die lte), Michael Urie (Gregor Bazwald), and Max Woertendyke (Emil Traum).

Lucas Steele joins Off-Broadway musical Emojiland alongside Lesli Margherita, Josh Lamon, George Abud, Emojiland Co-Writer Laura Schein, Felicia Boswell, Natalie Weiss, and Ann Harada. The production will have a limited Off-Broadway run Thursday, January 9, 2020 through Sunday, March 8, 2020 at The Duke on 42nd Street in New 42nd Street Studios.

Read more about these and other top stories below!

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1) Voting Now Open For The 2019 BroadwayWorld Cabaret Awards, Presented by TodayTix!

Voting is NOW OPEN for the 2019 BroadwayWorld Cabaret Awards, brought to you by TodayTix! The BWW Cabaret Awards honor exemplary performers and productions in New York from October 1st, 2018 to September 30th, 2019. Nominees in all categories excluding Special Event - Solo and Special Event - Multiple needed to have performed all or the majority of their shows (at least two of three shows) during this eligibility period.. (more...)

2) Kerry Butler, Will Swenson & More Will Star in BROADWAY VACATION Reading

They've been to Wally World, Europe, and Vegas . . . and now The Griswolds are coming to Broadway!. (more...)

3) Photo: Lin-Manuel Miranda Receives the Portrait of a Nation Prize

Lin-Manuel Miranda received the Portrait of a Nation Prize from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery this weekend. The prize was presented to Miranda by former First Lady, Michelle Obama.. (more...)

4) Review Roundup: The National Tour of FROZEN - What Did the Critics Think?by Review Roundups

From the producers of The Lion King and Aladdin, Frozen launches a North American tour, commencing in Schenectady, NY prior to an official opening at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles. Heralded by The New Yorker as 'thrilling' and 'genuinely moving,' Frozen has emerged as the biggest hit musical of the last two Broadway seasons, breaking four house records at its New York home, the legendary St. James Theatre. For more information, including a list of currently announced cities, visit FrozenTheMusical.com/Tour.. (more...)

Today's Call Sheet:

A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY opens at The Public Theater tonight!

This scorching new version of Kushner's first play, originally scheduled to close on December 8, has been extended through Sunday, December 15, with an official press opening on Tuesday, November 19.

The complete cast for A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY features Linda Emond (Annabella Gotchling), Michael Esper (Vealtninc Husz), Grace Gummer (Paulinka Erdnuss), Jonathan Hadary (Xillah), Nikki M. James (Agnes Eggling), Crystal Lucas-Perry (Zillah), Nadine Malouf (Rosa Malek), Mark Margolis (Gottfried Swetts), Estelle Parsons (Die lte), Michael Urie (Gregor Bazwald), and Max Woertendyke (Emil Traum).

BWW Exclusive: Ben Rimalower's Broken Records with Special Guest, Michael Musto

BroadwayWorld is excited to bring you the newest episode of our first self-produced podcast - Ben Rimalower's Broken Records, The Albums You Wouldn't Shut Up About. On each weekly episode Rimalower and co-host Daniel Nolen chat with guests about one album that they were obsessed with, how they discovered it, what it led them to, where they were in life when it impacted them and how it's stayed with them since.

In this episode, Ben and Daniel talk to legendary writer and New York nightlife fixture Michael Musto about the 1968 album "Diana Ross and The Supremes Sing and Perform Funny Girl." They also discuss "The Wiz," Motown, Barbra Streisand, "Mahogany," Liza Minnelli, Madonna, "Evita," Nancy Walker, Mary Wilson, "Follies," and Marilyn Maye. Michael talks about the first time he saw the movie "Funny Girl," as well as his attempt to see Diana Ross live in Central Park. Michael can be seen performing live at venues around New York City, and his weekly column can be found on NewNowNext.

Listen here!

Set Your DVR...

The cast of David Byrne's American Utopia will appear on THE TONIGHT SHOW STARRING Jimmy Fallon

Josh Gad will appear on THE LATE LATE SHOW WITH James Corden

Lin-Manuel Miranda will appear on THE DAILY SHOW WITH Trevor Noah

Kristin Chenoweth will appear on WATCH WHAT HAPPENS LIVE, THE Wendy Williams SHOW

What we're geeking out over: Lucas Steele Will Join The Cast Of EMOJILAND The Musical

Lucas Steele (Tony Nominee for The Great Comet) makes the jump from Broadway to the inside of a smartphone this winter, in the new Off-Broadway musical Emojiland. Arborhouse Productions & Visceral Entertainment (Michael Chase Gosselin and Tim Sulka) today announced that the actor will be taking on the role of Skull alongside the previously announced citizens of Emojiland: Lesli Margherita (Matilda, Dames at Sea) as Princess, Josh Lamon (The Prom, Groundhog Day) as Prince, George Abud (The Band's Visit) as Nerd Face, Emojiland Co-Writer Laura Schein as Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes (aka "Smize"), Emmy Winner & Grammy Nominee Felicia Boswell (NBC's Jesus Christ Superstar LIVE, Shuffle Along, Motown) as Police Officer, Natalie Weiss (Everyday Rapture, YouTube's "Breaking Down the Riffs") as Construction Worker, and Ann Harada (Avenue Q, Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella) as Pile of Poo.

The production will have a limited Off-Broadway run Thursday, January 9, 2020 through Sunday, March 8, 2020 at The Duke on 42nd Street in New 42nd Street Studios (229 West 42nd Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues). Emojiland The Musical garnered 12 nominations and 5 wins at the 2018 NYMF Awards and was a 2018 Richard Rodgers Award Finalist.

What we're watching: Watch Marisa Tomei & More in New Highlights from THE ROSE TATTOO on Broadway

Roundabout Theatre Company's new Broadway production of Tennessee Williams' Tony Award-winning play The Rose Tattoo, directed by Trip Cullman, is entering its final weeks of performances. The play will conclude its limited engagement on Sunday, December 8, 2019 at the American Airlines Theatre (227 W 42nd St.).

The Rose Tattoo stars Cassie Beck, Alexander Bello, Tina Benko, Andra Burns, Susan Cella, Emun Elliott, Paige Gilbert, Greg Hildreth, Isabella Iannelli, Jacob Michael Laval, Ellyn Marie Marsh, Carolyn Mignini, Portia, Ella Rubin, Jennifer Snchez, Constance Shulman, Burke Swanson and Marisa Tomei.

Social Butterfly: THE SOUND OF MUSIC's Tally Sessions Takes Over Instagram!

The hills were alive this weekend as Tally Sessions took over BroadwayWorld's Instagram Story at Asolo Repertory Theatre's The Sound of Music, exactly 60 years after the iconic musical's original Broadway production opened! So in case you missed it (or just want to relive all of the fun and excitement), we compiled clips for you to enjoy.

And a Happy Birthday shout-out to Allison Janney, who turns 60 today!

Janney starred as Prudy Pingleton in the big screen adaptation of HAIRSPRAY. She most recently starred on Broadway SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION for which she received a Tony Award nomination. Her other Broadway credits include 9TO 5, A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE and PRESENT LAUGHTER.

Allison Janney currently stars alongside Anna Faris in the CBS/Chuck Lorre hit comedy Mom. The actress also received rave reviews for her turn as Margaret Scully on Showtime's Masters of Sex. She won Emmys for both roles in the same year and won a second Emmy for Mom the following year.

She recently won an Oscar for her role in I, Tonya. Her recently released movies include Tallulah, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, The Girl on the Train, Minions and Spy. Other film credits include The Way, Way Back, The Help, Juno, Finding Nemo, The Hours, American Beauty, Nurse Betty, Drop Dead Gorgeous, 10 THINGS I Hate About You, Primary Colors, The Ice Storm, The Object of My Affection and Big Night.

See you bright and early tomorrow, BroadwayWorld!

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Wake Up With BWW 11/19: A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY Opens at the Public, and More! - Broadway World

Hey, everyone! the worlds eighth-richest man said, with a bit too much brio, as he waved to the crowd at Gaston Hall in Washington. Its really great to be at Georgetown with all of you today. But then the smile fell away from Mark Zuckerbergs face, and there was an awkward pause as he licked his lips and looked at the crowd.

With his next lines an acknowledgment of the death, earlier that day, of the longtime House of Representatives member Elijah Cummings he settled into a more sober mood, which he sustained for the remainder of his speech. It was clear that Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, knew the message he had come to deliver, bearing the awkward title Standing for Voice and Free Expression, would not be an especially popular one on a college campus in deep-blue Washington, and that indeed he himself might not be an especially popular man.

Over the course of just five or so years, and accelerating significantly in November 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, there had been a sea change in how Americans, especially liberal Americans, regarded Facebook. If, during the Obama era, there was a nagging suspicion among critics of Silicon Valley that Zuckerbergs company and its fellow internet giants had become too large their market power too great, their sway over the political and cultural discourse too absolute the election left millions of people convinced that those suspicions were absolutely correct. Now there were calls among prominent Democratic politicians for tough regulation, even for breaking up the company. One of the most vocal among them, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, had recently surged to a near-lead in the presidential primary race; in leaked audio from a Facebook town hall, Zuckerberg lamented her ascent and vowed, in the event she were elected president, to go to the mat and fight.

All of it the fierce criticism in the media, the political maneuvering among Democrats, the leak from his own staff had fostered a sense of a company under siege, and it was easy to hear this Georgetown speech in October as a simple and defiant response, a middle finger raised to the haters. To those eager to regulate speech on his platform or hold Facebook legally accountable for misinformation, Zuckerberg offered reminders of the First Amendment and the American tradition of free expression more broadly. He pointed out how that tradition benefited movements the audience seemed likely to support (#BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo) and contrasted Facebooks approach with that of Chinese-owned services like TikTok, the new sensation among teenagers in the United States and elsewhere, which has been accused of censoring mentions of anti-China protests in Hong Kong.

Afterward, observers analyzing the speech were unimpressed, seeing it as at best a reiteration of Facebooks perennial self-serving arguments and at worst a vacuous word salad. (Zuckerberg doubles down on free speech, as Wired put it, while Recode sniffed that he offered a lot of nothing.) By the following week, the appearance at Gaston Hall had been filed away as just one more maneuver in Zuckerbergs continuing charm offensive toward the political class, his sole goal being to maintain the status quo.

But whether Zuckerberg intended it or not, his speech showed glimmers of something else. There were hints of a more profound sense of threat and dislocation perhaps, even, a signal of Zuckerbergs understanding, conscious or not, that the status quo might no longer be sustainable.

Despite all his efforts at optimism, Zuckerberg acknowledged some basic problems with Facebook that had become impossible to ignore. Having built a machine to connect the world and let everyone have a say thereby giving rise to a new social reality in which, as he put it at Georgetown, people no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard Facebook now had to concede that there was no foolproof way to stop those voices from saying things that were unfactual or malevolent, or to stop their friends and followers from believing them. In part, this was because of a genuine Catch-22 involving scale: Phenomenal size had allowed Facebook and its fellow American tech giants to become the center of online life, but now they could not correct the most toxic problems of online spaces without wielding even more unsettling levels of power. While I certainly worry about an erosion of truth, Zuckerberg said, I dont think most people want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100 percent true.

Also revealing was his take on his Chinese competitors, which went well beyond just criticizing them on free-expression grounds. China is building its own internet focused on very different values, and its now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries, he said, informing his American audience that its sense of an internet dominated utterly by Facebook was by now a parochial notion. A decade ago, almost all of the major internet platforms were American, he said. Today, six of the top 10 are Chinese. This remark was directed at his antitrust-minded critics, but it was also a reminder that however bad Facebook might be for democracy, the alternatives might be worse.

For a decade, the story of Facebooks growth seemed like a positive (for Facebook) feedback loop: More users meant more conversation, which meant more relevance, which meant more users. The service became a kind of social power grid, a platform that you simply couldnt not be on. It became fashionable among tech writers to claim that Facebook was subsuming the entire internet, if it hadnt done so already.

Optimism about Facebooks impact on the world was an important part of the cycle. Everything about its sunny rhetoric, its design (clean and spare), its policies (real names, no pseudonyms), was finely calibrated to make people embrace it as the safe and upbeat alternative to the seedy world of the open web. When Facebook became a publicly held company in 2012, its I.P.O. prospectus included a long letter from Zuckerberg about Facebooks values, in which he declared that the company was built to accomplish a social mission and that connecting the world would ultimately bring about better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

It wasnt hard to glimpse, lurking behind the strained smiles and flag-draping of the Georgetown speech, the death throes of that Facebook dream. The chief executive was forced to admit that his platform, far from solving social problems, had given rise to some thorny ones of its own. In his bracing rhetoric about the rise of the Chinese internet, you could even see the contours of Zuckerbergs nightmare of the virtuous cycle becoming a vicious one, with the gravitational pull of Facebook reversing, spinning its billions of users and their monetizable conversations out of his platform and inexorably toward China, toward despotism, toward dystopia: a TikTok of a boot stamping on a human face, forever.

In this special Tech & Design Issue of The New York Times Magazine, we ponder the internets future at a time when that future has never felt more unsettled. It isnt just about Facebook and the other American tech giants, which no longer enjoy the rapid growth that characterized their early days. The rise of the Chinese internet has threatened a geopolitical power shift, as a different government and national economy looks poised to become the center of the online world. Even governments that dont censor the internet have begun to talk about regulating it in unprecedented ways as with the European Unions G.D.P.R. law, which already has given a huge swath of the developed world a subtly different set of online rules.

But perhaps the deepest shift has been a shift in attitudes: the breaking of a spell that seemed to protect Silicon Valley from distrust. After years in which questions about online privacy hardly penetrated the consumer consciousness, Americans have awakened to a feeling of deep suspicion about how companies are harvesting and using their data. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll earlier this year found that American adults, by double-digit margins, believed that social media does more to spread falsehoods than truths and more to divide the country than to unite it. Even the tech giants own employees have now become uneasy about the implications of their work, leading to some unusual labor movements among their highly compensated white-collar ranks.

If all this disappointment seems so acute, its only in contrast to the unrealistic hopes that the internet grew up on, long before Mark Zuckerberg showed up. From the earliest days of Arpanet, the internet has been seen as embodying an ambitious, even utopian set of values. Its supposed to be open and global (such that anyone can plug in, anywhere) and also equal (in that every node should be able to get the same things). Even as the internet quickly morphed from a (mostly) public-funded (mostly) academic project into a (mostly) corporate-funded profit center, the power of those core values persisted. It persisted because those values have proved to be extremely profitable, at least for those who understand how to profit from them. People like Marc Andreessen, who took what he learned developing a web browser at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and helped found a company, Netscape, that went public and eventually was sold to America Online for $4.2 billion; and Mark Zuckerberg, whose company allows all those voices to get attention free but makes a mint by selling them, and their personal data, to advertisers.

In retrospect, Zuckerbergs letter in that 2012 Facebook prospectus was the high-water mark of internet boosterism, and it in fact encompassed most of the dreams that had attached themselves to the internet over the previous decades. References to Gutenbergs printing press? Check. Denouncing of monolithic, top-down mind-sets, coming from the chief executive of a huge corporation? Check. A sense that effecting broad-based social change and becoming fabulously rich are goals that go hand in hand? For sure: Ive developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems. Intimations that tech will topple authoritarian rulers around the world? Its in there: Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

As the technology critic Evgeny Morozov noted in his trenchant 2013 book, To Save Everything, Click Here, the distance between the quotidian reality of the internet and the utopian set of notions we projected onto it had become so vast that quotation marks ought to separate the idealized version from the real thing. The internet was going to empower the masses, overthrow hierarchies, build a virtual world that was far superior to the terrestrial one that bound us. But the actual internet was never capable of any of that, and once it fell into the hands of plutocrats and dictators, all the gauzy rhetoric around it only served their interests.

By the same token, though, we might make the same observation about the internet that many people fear theyre bound up in today: Our dark new fantasies about it with the puppet strings that stretch from the Kremlin to Palo Alto, making Grandpa dance to QAnons fiddle are often just as ridiculous as the sunny visions they replaced. In this issue, weve tried to see the internet and its likely future as best we can, from as many angles as we can, in the hope that after decades of imagining it as a utopia, and then years of seeing it as a dystopia we might finally begin to see it for what it is, which is a set of powerful technologies in the midst of some serious flux.

So the internet didnt turn out the way we hoped. Now what?

Arguably the most bracing reality about the internet today is that, after years of pretending that the internet means the same thing to all people everywhere, that fiction has finally become impossible to sustain. For the upper end of the income spectrum, a new suite of pay services promises to clean up the worst aspects of online life, even as the basic infrastructure of broadband and mobile remains highly unequal depending on where you live, both in America and around the world. And while Facebook and its fellow tech giants continue to loom over the American economy, through a business model that involves exploiting user data, their individual dreams of imperial expansion have brought them, collectively, to an awkward stalemate.

At the same time, its crucial for Americans to realize, as Zuckerberg now seems to, that the internet is no longer as American as it once was. Government censorship and other interventions are only entrenching an online reality in which different nations are seeing very different internets, even different sets of facts. In China, a parallel and growing mobile-based internet doesnt just portend a more censored online future; its offering up whole new ways to structure and order online life, with possible consequences that are scary in some ways and egalitarian in others.

Perhaps the most profound force at work upon the internet right now is the simple passage of time. Everyone raised in a pre-internet era continues to age and disappear, while new generations grow up not merely as digital natives but as lifelong witnesses to the internets best and worst effects. In the nave dreams of earlier days, many people joined Zuckerberg in imagining that connecting the world could bring about new social virtues at no social cost. But its now clear that interconnection by its very nature also brings about confounding new social situations, whether its the problem of disinformation seeded and spread by organized propagandists or the mind-bendingly obsessive culture of online fandom. For teenagers today, the internet is both a stage onto which to step boldly and a minefield through which to step gingerly a double bind that has given rise to whole new habits of living online, in which self-expression and self-protection are inextricably linked.

The passage of time, its clear, has been weighing even on Zuckerberg a fact evident in what was, without a doubt, the most eye-opening moment in his Georgetown speech. Building this institution is important to me personally, he said, late in his oration, because Im not always going to be here, and I want to ensure that these values of voice and free expression are enshrined deeply into how this company is governed. Not always going to be here? This 35-year-old, multibillionaire chief executive, with an ownership vice-grip that essentially guarantees he can remain atop Facebook for as long as he chooses, was raising the specter of his retirement, or perhaps even his death.

Those concerns are surely premature, but neither would it be surprising if the impermanence of human existence were on Zuckerbergs mind right now. Facebook and its chief executive might both hold on for decades, but the vision of the internet they represented sunny, American, all-devouring is already dead and gone. What, exactly, is arising to take its place? Its complicated. Read on.

Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist whose work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Pierpaolo Ferrari is an Italian photographer and, along with Cattelan, is a founder of the magazine Toiletpaper, known for its surreal and humorous imagery.

Additional design and development by Jacky Myint.

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The Internet Dream Became a Nightmare. What Will Become of It Now? - The New York Times

In a world in which finding facts and making sense of things seems increasingly akin to trying to assemble a jet engine made of sand in a hurricane, it is a great comfort to be presented, every now and then, with the intangible rendered tangible. We often labour unsuccessfully to resolve a visual representation of issues and systems into words. Metaphors made flesh make life easier to understand.

Broadgate is a metaphor made flesh, bricks and mortar. The subject of Channel 4s Boom, Bust and Bankers documentary, this is the 13-hectare (32-acre) office and retail estate near Liverpool Street station that is dominated by the fifth tallest building in London, the 164m (538ft) Broadgate Tower.

The site came into being in 1985, complete with what were effectively defensive walls it was known as the Ring of Steel to keep the people of the deprived parts of the city immediately to the north and east out while the men (and, yknow, it really was just men) inside got on with mastering the new universe Thatcher created with the free-market revolution. They warmed themselves at the bonfire of regulations she ignited, while outside it got colder and colder.

The show neatly mapped out a short history of finance from then to now. I dont know if you have heard, but it did not work out well. A lot of people got rich and then even richer when, as Geraint Anderson, a former member of their ranks, put it, they realised there was no downside to being reckless. At least until 2008, when the entire banking system teetered on the brink of collapse with Lehman Brothers tumbling into the abyss, Morgan Stanley losing 80% of its market value and many other stories causing the share price of tiny violin manufacturers to rocket. Fortunately, a full reckoning was averted by the injection of billions upon billions of pounds of taxpayer cash. Everything went back to more or less normal. Footage from the time, showing Peter Mandelson slithering tight-lipped into his car as a reporter asked why he, as business secretary, couldnt stop bankers having bonuses, summed up the whole event quite well.

Alongside this succinct summary of how things work at the top ran an equally concise encapsulation of how they work at the bottom. Literally, as the programme went down into the basement of Broadgate to interview some of its cleaners, security personnel and other unseen workers who make sure the lives of those higher up run smoothly. Jos Tandazo, originally from Ecuador, gets up at 4am to start cleaning and is back home at 11.30pm. This is the best place he has been, he says, but I do miss being outside. Luis Valencia earns the London living wage of 10.50 an hour but it turns out that 355 a week after tax is not all that liveable on, and he and his father (who has two jobs, the first of which is an 11-hour shift at Victoria station) live together to make ends meet. In their spare time (I dont know, I dont know) they join protests outside places that do not even meet the living wage; here, Thomas Cook, which says it outsources to Accelerate. Accelerate declined to comment.

And there was Barry Smith, a former trade union rep who was made redundant from the railway job he loved by privatisation and is now a security guard another forcibly broken link in the chain that once connected the powerless to the powerful.

Interspersed with these stories was the tale of Broadgates regeneration and the millions of pounds being spent on its transformation from financiers fortress to what its overseer, David Lockyer, is keen we envisage as a modern capitalist community utopia. To this end, he is having the ring of steel dismantled and replaced by buzzwords and an enlivenment programme to encourage a mix of tenants and dilute the suits that once formed its rental mainstay.

I imagine Lockyer also envisaged a useful bit of promotion in return for granting Channel 4 its access-all-areas pass. But the makers outmanoeuvred him with their delicate blending of stories, with all their wordless contrasts (the absolute guff talked by PRs about the mindfulness of their new project versus the human language coming out of everyone else), invisible connections (the geopolitical crises that created profits for the people upstairs who bet the right way, but destroyed the lives of many who were forced to emigrate as a result and now work beneath them), and silent testimony to the growing inequities between the haves and have nots. Class, capitalism, power and privilege all playing out in the microcosm of one small patch of London, as they do the world over. Oh, for a reckoning.

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Boom, Bust and Bankers review a harrowing tale of two Cities - The Guardian

Hand-colored engraving of Puritans about to embark for America. (Alamy)

When the word Puritan entered the English language almost 500 years ago, it came as an insulta soul-killing Nick-name, as one of the insulted called it. One of the name-callers, a conforming clergyman exasperated by demands to purify the Anglican Church of all vestiges of Roman Catholicism, replied to his implacable critics, We call you Puritans not because you are purer than other menbut because you think yourselves to be purer.Ad Policy Books in Review

In one variation or another, the charge has been repeated ever since. In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne portrayed his Puritan ancestors as stern and black-browed members of the most intolerant brood that ever lived. The narrator of George Santayanas 1935 novel The Last Puritan accused them of sharing with the Bolshies a scorn of all compromises, practical or theoretical. Just a few months ago, Maureen Dowd devoted a New York Times column to denouncing the left flank of the Democratic Party for keeping the spirit of the Massachusetts Bay Colonyalive and well on the Potomac and Twitter, thereby raising the risk of a second term for Donald Trump. These modern Puritans, she wrote, eviscerate their natural allies for not being pure enough.

No nation or culture has had a monopoly on this phenomenon: the hyperorthodox who recoil not only from the profane world but also from anyone who fails to share their revulsion. Nevertheless, serious historians have detected something peculiarly American in the typebeginning with the breakaway faction of Puritans who gave up on England in the fourth decade of the 17th century and emigrated to America, where, it is alleged, they aimed to prove their incorruptibility by serving as a light unto the nations (Isaiah 42:6). And so began, some have argued, the insidious presumption that America stands alone, like ancient Israel, in covenant with God.

Today, college students are often introduced to this ideasometimes called American exceptionalismthrough A Model of Christian Charity, a speech by John Winthrop, a devout Christian of Puritan temperament who became the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Borrowing an image from the King James version of Matthew 5:14 (Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid) that was itself an echo of Isaiah 42:6, the speech contained the famous claim that we shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us, and it has become the prime exhibit for prosecuting the case against those first New Englanders. In the words of Daniel T. Rodgers, a distinguished professor emeritus of history at Princeton University who in his new book, As a City on a Hill, recounts the history of this argument in order to dispute it, the Puritans have been blamed for injecting a sense of Gods chosenness into the distinctive cultural DNA of imperially expansive America.

Rodgerss book is not only a close reading of the reception and history of Winthrops speech but also a rescue operation for Puritanism itself. Rather than instigating the pernicious idea of the United States as Gods most favored nation, the Puritans, he argues, were unsure of their worthiness and subjected themselves to the moral scrutiny of the world.

To begin with, Rodgers shows that almost everything we thought we knew about Winthrops speech is wrong. Ever since a copyist (its unclear when) scrawled Written on board the Arrabella on the Atlantick Ocean on a cover sheet attached to the surviving manuscript, Winthrop has been imagined as raising his voice into the roaring wind on the roiling sea. But in fact, he was more likely to have delivered the speechoften called a lay sermon because he was not an ordained ministerin Southampton before embarking. Or he may never have delivered it at all.

For more than 200 years the work lay in manuscript, until the Massachusetts Historical Society published it in 1838, in a collection of documents in which it was preceded by a few poems just a cut above doggerel and followed by a short history of the US Postal Service. Throughout the 19th century, the speech remained little more than an antiquarian curiosity. Even in the early 20thcentury, when scholars began to take note of it, no one attributed to it any claim of divine special favor. Writing in 1916, the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who traced his New England ancestry to the 1660s, heard in it an emphasis on collectivism rather than individualismas if Winthrop had been a secret socialist.Current Issue

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The modern career of Winthrops speech got underway in the 1930s, when a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Perry Miller, went east to Harvard, in part to study with Morison. Miller, who also had New England roots (he was related to Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy) but cultivated the personal style of a Midwestern tough guy in the Dreiser-Hemingway mode, had dropped out of college for a while and joined the merchant marine, which took him, among other places, to the west coast of Africa. It was there, he later recalled in brash emulation of Edward Gibbonwho had been seized by the ambition to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire while contemplating the ruins of the Forumthat Miller discovered his destiny while unloading drums of American oil. Suddenly, he grasped his lifes mission: to expound to the world what I took to be the innermost propulsion of the United States. This propulsion, Miller insisted, had been ignited in colonial New England.

In two magisterial volumes composed in the 1930s and 40sThe New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century and The New England Mind: From Colony to ProvinceMiller ranged over a vast number of tracts and sermons from both old and New England and assembled them into a brilliant portrait of the Puritans, as Rodgers puts it, in an existentialist key. For Miller, dreadlay at the heart of the Puritan experiment, by which he meant not primarily dread of the wilderness or Americas native heathen inhabitants but dread of themselves. At the core of the Puritan church, in his view, were not the sacraments of baptism or Communion (though he chronicled the furious disputes that arose over qualifications for these rites) but the copious sermons whose central subject was the ubiquitous sin of pride.

The essential task of the Puritan minister was to destroy the presumption that any human being had the slightest merit in the eyes of God. But Puritanism also offered consolation. It taught that the more unworthy one feels before God, the more ground there is for hope. This was the preachers paradoxical work: to castigate his flock without mercy (the minister, as one thundering preacher put it, will discover the lusts, and deceits, and corruptions, that you could not find out) until, stripped of the belief in their essential worth, penitent listeners would throw themselves upon Gods mercy. According to one English minister who did not emigrate to America but mentored several leaders of the emigration, None are fitter for comfort than those that think themselves furthest off.

These were among the themes of Millers demanding two-volume study of the New England mind. But the work for which he remains best known was a kind of codaa short essay published in 1953 whose title, Errand Into the Wilderness, he borrowed from an Election Day sermon delivered in 1670 by the Puritan minister Samuel Danforth. In that essay, Miller focused on A Model of Christian Charity, arguing that Winthrops little flotilla, which sailed from Southampton to Salem, Massachusetts, in April 1630, was a task force launched for the purpose of working out that complete reformation which was not yet accomplished in England and Europe, but which would quickly be accomplished if only the saints back there had a working model to guide them.

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Winthrop and his comrades, Miller contended, departed the Old World not to abandon it but to save it. They wanted to build in New England a model of what old England should be. They fled the Anglican crackdown on religious dissent (several ministers who joined the exodus had been threatened with defrocking or worse) and sought safety in America in order to erect a true church. What they had in mind was not an ecclesiastical establishment like the Church of England, with authority exerted downward from king and bishops. Instead they envisioned independent communities of gathered believers, each with authority vested in itself and served by a pastoral and preaching ministrywhat became known as Congregationalism.

Miller was a prodigious scholar, but he could be carried away by his metaphorical imagination. He told a dramaticeven melodramatictale of self-exiles bewildered as the world they left behind changed beyond recognition. In the 1630s and 40s, while New Englanders built their godly commonwealth, their Puritan comrades in old England were fomenting not only church reform but also a political and social revolution, including what Michael Walzer, in The Revolution of the Saints (1965), called the whole apparatus of radical politics: the illegal press, organized book smuggling, a rough underground network. They defied the bishops and worked to restore power to Parliament after its dissolution by CharlesI, to depose and ultimately execute the king, and under Oliver Cromwell to establish a regime with a degree of religious pluralism that shocked their brethren abroad.

Watching from afar, Millers Puritans were forced to confront their obsolescence. The guiding example of their city on a hill was no longer needed. Miller, who served in Britain during World War II with the Office of Strategic Services, compared them to a platoon of soldiers sent on a reconnaissance mission who, by the time they get back, find that the situation at headquarters [is] entirely changed and their mission has been forgotten. To amplify his point, Miller added a theatrical trope to his military metaphor. The emigrant Puritans were like an actor who, having prepared for the leading role in the greatest dramatic spectacle of the century, stepped onto the stage only to find the theatre empty, no spotlight working, and himself entirely alone. Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the hill, Miller concluded, they were left alone with America.

Millers prose was heartfelt and arresting, so much so that many students and readers who went on to teach or write about early America had their impression of Puritanism shaped by him. But Rodgers also notes the oversights and exaggerations in his rendition of the Puritan errand. For one thing, Winthrop said nothing in A Model of Christian Charity about transforming England but spoke only of succeeding plantationsthat is, future coloniesabout which he hoped that men shall saythe Lord make it like that of Massachusetts. Rodgers also makes the telling point that Miller used the word model in the modern sense of a small precedent to be replicated on a larger scale, but in the 17th century it could also mean something closer to what we would call an analysis or anatomy, a condensation, Rodgers writes, the marrow and principle of the thing being outlined.

Moreover, Miller missed the force of the crucial words that Winthrop wrote immediately after we shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us: So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world. These wordswhich express the existential anxiety that Miller did so much to illuminate in his earlier workattest to Winthrops craving fame less than he feared notoriety.

Nonetheless, when the time came for resistance and revision, as always happens when a new generation of scholars succeeds the last, Millers version of the Puritans was not tamped down but ratcheted up. Another gifted scholar, Sacvan Bercovitch, born in Canada to (in his words) Yiddishist left-wing immigrant parents, was astonished upon his emigration to the United States to discover the persistence of the myth of America as Gods darling nation. Beginning in 1975 with The Puritan Origins of the American Selfwhich took as its proof text Cotton Mathers Nehemias Americanus, the Life of John Winthrop (1702)Bercovitch, who eventually succeeded to Millers professorial chair, argued that his predecessor had not gone far enough. Puritans did not merely see themselves as taking incremental steps toward reforming international Protestantism; they saw themselves appointed by God to prepare the scene of Christs triumphant descent to His New Jerusalem. They imagined New England as no less than the site of the Second Coming, from which truth would radiate throughout the world, as prophesied in the Book of Revelation. These were not Millers Puritans beset by self-doubt. Bercovitchs Puritans were convinced, with terrifying certainty, of their divine charge to lead what he called the last stage of the worldwide work of redemption. Their hallmark was not dread but an overweening confidence in the sanctity of their mission. They saw themselves as legatees of the divine mandate granted to ancient Israel.

Writing in the shadow of another warthe United States monstrous misadventure in VietnamBercovitch went so far as to claim that the Puritans had used the biblical myth of exodus and conquest to justify imperialism before the fact. In this reading, Winthrops speech becomes the ur-text for a kind of collective narcissism that runs through American life: the brazen conviction that the American way is the only way. By implication, the Puritans were retroactively responsible for the predations committed in the name of manifest destiny, for the folly of trying to remake Europe in Americas image after World War I, for the fanatic hatred of godless communism, and for the catastrophic intervention in Vietnam.

By the turn of the 21st century, after the tragic sequence of 9/11 and the Iraq War, this way of telling American history had become so habitual among some scholars that when a Harvard undergraduate, Pete Buttigieg (who studied with Bercovitch), wrote in his 2004 senior thesis that the very founding of America was an act of international interventionwhich would recur in later years with Americas exportation of its democratic creed, he was repeating an academic dogma.

Rodgers insists that neither Millers version of the Puritans attempting to save the Old World by example nor Bercovitchs version as the self-appointed vanguard in the cosmic drama of salvation gets Winthrop and his contemporaries right. In this judgment, Rodgers is not alone. In a sweeping new history of what he calls the city-state of Boston, Yale historian Mark Peterson laments that these interpretations badly distort the meaning and influence of the governors words, and Michael P. Winship, in a valuable new history of Puritanism, Hot Protestants, observes that the idea that the puritans envisioned New England as the site of the millenniums New Jerusalem has been thoroughly discredited. And so the pendulum swings. The Puritans seem to be coming back into view not as progenitors of some future America but as they appeared to themselves in their own time, what the mid-20th-century historian Carl Bridenbaugh called vexed and troubled Englishmen.

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In taking the turn to a more historicist approach, it makes sense, as Rodgers does, to stick with Winthrop as the Puritans representative man. Before emigrating to America, Winthrop struggled to negotiate the accelerating transformation of England from a relatively static feudal order to a dynamic and disruptivemorally as well as sociallymarket economy. A member of the landed gentry, he feared that England was becoming a place where no mans estate almost will suffice to keep sail with his equals, and he who fails herein must live in scorn and contempt; hence it comes that all arts and trades are carried in that deceitful and unrighteous course, as it is almost impossible for a good and upright man to maintain his charge and live comfortably in any of them. In short, it was becoming harder for men of Winthrops rank to be both virtuous and prosperous.

The aim of the great landowner, as R.H. Tawney wrote in his still valuable Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), was no longer to hold at his call an army of retainers, but to exploit his estates as a judicious investment. Winthrop was not quite a great landowner, though he owned enough to have commissioned a portrait of himself in ruffled collar and white gloves. But when Suffolk, his home county in England, was struck in the 1620s by an economic downturn and revenue from his land holdings declined, he felt compelled to accept an appointment as an attorney to the Court of Wards in London in order to supplement his income. This work was rife with opportunities for corruption. Bribery and favor trading were rampant, and it was common practice for the court to sell wardships on behalf of the king to bidders intent on extracting value by carrying off timber and crops, allowing buildings to rot, and thus leaving the ward, when he came of age, with a depleted inheritance.

Meanwhile, Winthrops real estate holdings in Suffolk forced upon him vexing questions. Should he raise rents on subsistence farmers who had long resided on his property at nominal fees? Should he prohibit scavenging? Should he enclose his lands with hedges for the purpose of raising sheep, thus driving his tenants into the swelling ranks of vagabonds or what we would call the homeless? As the great historian Christopher Hill wrote, this was a time when large landowners had no inhibitionsabout evicting whole villages to make room for sheep in order to profit from the growing wool export trade.

Winthrop never shed his inhibitions. He may have fled England in part because he feared becoming one of the losers in the new economy, but he also feared becoming one of the morally compromised winners. As Rodgers aptly puts it, Winthrops flight from old to New England is best understood not only as an ocean passage but a passage from self to others. His Model of Christian Charity was filled with yearning for a lostno doubt largely imaginaryworld where poor and rich treated each other with reciprocal loyalty.

Winthrop was certainly no radical egalitarian of the sort found in Hills revelatory book The World Turned Upside Down, about the Levellers and Ranters who dreamed during the English Civil War of expanded suffrage, the redistribution of wealth, and limits on the size of property that any landowner could possess. But neither was he insouciant about the plight of the poor, however much he believed, as he wrote in the opening lines of Model, that God hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor. These words have often been read as an ominous overture to the long history of Americans justifying the extremes of poverty and wealth as consistent with natural law. But as Rodgers shows, this is a bad caricature. Rather, Winthrop hoped that in the New World, God would touch the hearts of those empowered like himself so that the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor. One of the most significant passages in A Model of Christian Charity is his discussion concerning the repayment of loans. If the debtor have nothing to pay, he said, citing Deuteronomy 15:2, then thee must forgive him.

Rodgers gives a subtle account of how the memories of destitute people in old Englandwandering ghosts in the shape of men, as Winthrop called themhaunted not only Winthrop but also other magistrates and ministers in New England, where harsh measures such as whipping vagrants were implemented alongside the abatement of taxes for poorer town residents and grants of grain or firewood to families in distress. Grudging as it often was, Rodgers writes, public, tax-supported responsibility for the poor was a fixture of New England town life. By 1700, he points out, Boston was spending perhaps a quarter of its budget on poor relief. At the center of As a City on a Hill is the insight that Winthrop and his fellow Puritans believed that market price and ordinary market relations would not suffice for a moral community.

In later chapters, Rodgers tells the story of how A Model of Christian Charity was plucked out of Winthrops context by politicians, pundits, and even some historians and reimagined as something quite differentas a founding document for the nation itself. In the process, the moral question Winthrop had placed at the core of his text would no longer be the part of the Model that mattered. Winthrop and his fellow Puritans were turned into prophets of nationalism and unfettered capitalism, and the aching tension, as Rodgers calls it, between the social fact of inequality and Winthrops yearnings for a community rooted in love was all but lost.

Disputes concerning the meaning of the past are, of course, indices to conflicts over the present and divergent hopes for the future. Such a dispute took place some 40 years agothough it is not usually thought of as a debate about Puritanism and its legacybetween two American presidents. In July 1979, in what became known as the malaise speech (although he never used that word), Jimmy Carter spoke of a spiritual crisis in the United States and called for a renewal of Americans faith in each other. In preparing his speech, he was counseled by, among others, Christopher Lasch, who was steeped in the history of the Puritans and especially valued their vision of a society in which, Winthrop wrote, we mustmake others conditions our own and must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others necessities. Winthrop asked his fellow emigrants to keep their eyes [on] our commission and community, and using the language of 1Corinthians, he beseeched them to conceive of themselves as members of the same body. Although Carter made no direct reference to A Model of Christian Charity, his admonishing speech, now notorious for its political miscalculation, was filled with echoes of Winthrops call for charity and self-restraint.

Carters recapitulation of Puritan social and ethical ideals proved unpersuasive. Sixteen months later, Ronald Reagan defeated him for the presidency and set out to dismantle a half century of public policy from the New Deal to the Great Society designedhowever meager those efforts may seem nowto mitigate the inequities of American society. Reagan, too, appropriated the Puritans. For him, they were laissez-faire capitalists in the making, prophets of a free market utopia. Over the next eight years, on at least 30 occasions, he echoed Winthrops speech (to which he liked to add the word shining as a flourish before the scriptural phrase city on a hill). Reagans shining city bore little resemblance to Carters anxious nation. It was a triumphant image of American power, prosperity, and eminence, a movie-set city, as Rodgers describes it, with nothing in it of Winthrops clarion warning that God is affronted when putative believers shutteth our ears from hearing the cry of the poor (Proverbs 21:13) or worship other Gods, our pleasures, and profits.

Every generation imagines its own version of the Puritans errand. The one Rodgers invokesa social experiment conducted with an acute sense of the conditionality of Gods promises and more open to self-criticism, even to a certain humility, than most in historys annalsis a salutary one for our dark time.

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How Should We Remember the Puritans? - The Nation

Just about anyone who runs regularly encounters injury or at the very least aches and pains. Nike envisions a world where such hangups are not the norm, and its newest running shoe, the Nike React Infinity Run, is the brands latest effort toward such a utopia. And this one has some science to back it up.

The shoe features a blend of technologies developed for earlier shoes. The ultralight, performance-oriented Nike Zoom Vaporfly 4% is celebrated for its geometry, with the rockered bottom fueling more fluid and efficient strides. Meanwhile, the Nike React boasts a proprietary foam that delivers a high level of cushioning and energy return.

Weaving the best of these two shoes together results in a shoe that is simultaneously speedy, supportive and, it turns out, safe. According to a study of 226 runners by the British Columbia Sports Medicine Research Foundation, the Nike React Infinity Run resulted in a 52 percent lower injury rate versus the Nike Structure 22, a classic motion-control shoe. Wearers also reported less pain in the knees and feet.

Because it basically compared a new Nike with an older Nike, this study is best digested with a healthy grain of salt. Still, the prospect of a super comfortable running sneaker that also delivers high performance and makes running more pleasurable and (possibly) reduces injury is a pretty tempting one. We are currently testing the shoe and will be sharing first-hand impressions very soon.

At a price of $160, the Nike React Infinity Run will be available January 3for Nike Members and January 16 for everyone else.

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Nike's New Running Shoe Aims to Cut the Running Injury Rate in Half - Gear Patrol