Her Voice

Among my possessions are two things from my grandmother on my father’s side — her wedding ring and a 12-page typed manuscript about growing up in a hard-scrabble frontier family in Canada’s Huron County.

It was a difficult life. Born in the 1870s, she was the second youngest of eight kids. Her father mainly seems to have made money by selling things that he cleared from the land — logs and limestone — or that his wife and kids gathered like wild blueberries and raspberries. They did grow a few crops, and had an apple orchard, plus a few pear trees that didn’t produce. 

They also had a handful of farm animals.

She says that it was a two-mile walk to school and that many times her hands and feet “froze” in winter, but that they were fine once she was able to thaw them out. Her father sounds like a pretty uneven character who was abusive to the point that one by one all of the family members ran away, only to return for a while before disappearing once again.

When they left, they weren’t reachable even if they wanted to talk. There were no telephones yet. For my grandmother, after her own mother finally ran off, life became simply unbearable. She was expected to cook and clean the house for her father and older brothers and to stop going to school, which was her one true love.

Besides being able to see friends at school, she loved to read and write and make up stories.

When she was around 16 she finally ran away from home, taking her younger sister with her. They found another farm family where the situation was friendlier, and for the most part she finished her growing up and schooling there.

Eventually, as an older teen, she found happiness singing and dancing with other farm kids on Saturday nights until three or four in the morning, then grabbing an hour of sleep before rising to do another day’s hard work.

I had read about all of this in her manuscript before but that was soon after she died in the late 1960s, when I didn’t really appreciate it at the time. But recently as I reread it for the first time in many years, a new detail jumped out at me. When she was only 14 or so, my grandmother apparently wrote a book!

It must have been short and definitely was fiction, even though at the time she says she had not yet read a work of fiction by anyone else. She says her siblings loved her book and asked her to read it to them over and over. There is no indication what the story was about.

My grandmother was hardly what you’d call an intellectual. She didn’t come from a long line of literary greats, but she created stories of her own almost by instinct.

This novel of hers from 130 years ago apparently was not preserved. It would have been written with a pencil in some sort of school notebook, which was no doubt lost somewhere along the way.

All I have now is the knowledge that it once existed. Plus the additional fact that her youngest son, my father, also wrote an unpublished novel on his own, which I discovered among his possessions after he died.

At the very least, I know I’m nowhere near the first story-teller in my family. No doubt there were many others in the distant past. And I also won’t be anywhere near the last.

BTW, I also have my grandmother’s wedding ring, a simple metallic thing distinguished by a heart, given to her by David Weir, my grandfather who died two decades before I came onto the scene.

(I first published this two years ago in February.)

(Read also: Finding Dad’s Novel.)

(NOTE: Today we have a special addition of links below from my friend Leslie.)

HEADLINES:

• Driver rams New Year’s revelers in New Orleans, killing 10. FBI investigating as ‘act of terrorism’ (AP)

• New Orleans mayor says New Year's Day incident was a 'terrorist attack' (NPR)

• Tensions Escalate After Pakistan Pounds Afghanistan With Airstrikes (NYT)

• Ukraine stops transport of Russian gas to Europe (The Hill)

• U.S. Strikes Militant Group in Yemen That Has Kept Up Attacks on Ships (NYT)

• Steve Bannon Ramps Up MAGA Civil War With Graphic Threat to Elon Musk (Daily Beast)

• Years of inaction on ‘crisis’ at Secret Service set stage for Trump shooting in Butler (WP)

• Advertisers Keep Avoiding News Sites, and Publishers Have Had Enough of It (WSJ)

• How India's food shortage filled American libraries (BBC)

• They wrote obituaries about Carter — but died before him (WP)

• AI Robots Are Entering the Public World—With Mixed Results (WSJ)

LESLIE’s LINKS:

• These Renaissance masterpieces cost multiples of Michelangelo’s paintings (WP)

• Trump Wants Greenland and the Panama Canal. It’s About Climate. (NYT)

• Ukraine Says It Downed Russian Helicopter With Sea Drone For First Time (RFE)

• Why the world needs lazier robots (WP)

• Trump Is Dismantling the Systems That Keep Us Safe. All Americans Will Suffer. (NYT)

• Ukraine Live Briefing: Russia Halts Gas Flows To Europe Via Ukraine (RFE)

• Ozempic economics: How GLP-1s will disrupt the economy in 2025 (WP)

• The Atlantic Beefs Up Politics Coverage Under Trump (NYT)

• Will The War In Ukraine End In 2025? (RFE)

A President Who Rocked

 One of the major pieces I published in Rolling Stone near the end of my time there was also one of my first in-depth efforts to document the global trade in banned drugs and chemicals.

Not exactly what you’d expect from a Rock ‘n Roll magazine, eh?

It was called “For Export Only” and it was summarized like this: “What do the multimillion-dollar U.S. pesticide and drug industries do when government agencies ban the use of their products? They find new markets in underdeveloped countries.”

The article appeared in the magazine’s February 10, 1977 issue, which had Peter Frampton featured on the cover as “The Rock Star of the Year” in a profile written by 19-year-old Cameron Crowe.

In those years, long before email, laptops or cellphones, the way we got feedback on our articles was through the mail. And usually there was a lot — we got hundreds of letters, for example, in response to our Patty Hearst stories.

By contrast, I only got one letter in response to “For Export Only.’ Yet it had an intriguing return address — 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C.

It was from a staff member to President Jimmy Carter indicating that my article had been included in his weekly briefing on new policy issues.

I didn’t think too much of it at the time (maybe it was just standard PR stuff?), until I learned that Carter had also decided to form an interagency task force to study the banned exports problem that I had exposed. Eventually he issued an executive order that for the first time in U.s. history restricted the trade in banned and restricted goods overseas.

This was a major policy victory on what until then had been an obscure issue few kew or cared about. Soon after the article appeared, I left Rolling Stone and co-founded the Center for Investigative Reporting, where one of our big early projects was the book I co-authored with Mark Schapiro on the same topic, “Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World.”

That book helped launch a global movement to stem the tide of restricted hazards flowing around the globe — a movement that continues in many forms and many places to this day.

But Jimmy Carter was the only political leader who early on recognized the importance of this issue, which involves the immorality of rich countries dumping dangerous goods in poor countries where regulatory structures are weak, causing heavy damage to human health and the environment.

I never got to thank Carter for his role in taking what at the time was a bold new regulatory attempt to try and rein in what was basically unadorned corporate greed, but I did meet him briefly years later at an event honoring environmental leaders hosted by Ted Turner.

Jimmy Carter was many things — a peanut farmer, ambitious politician, humanitarian, policy wonk, avid reader, big-time rock fan, but I’ll always remember him as the only person who reached out to me and recognized the ground-breaking potential of that seminal piece I published in Rolling Stone.

******

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HEADLINES:

• Trump endorses Johnson in speaker’s race ahead of critical vote (CNN)

• Jimmy Carter's state funeral to be held Jan. 9 at Washington National Cathedral (ABC)

• America Needs More Jimmy Carters (NYT)

• Work after White House made Carter a standout (WP)

• Remembering a Visit to Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia (New Yorker)

• Jimmy Carter spent decades working to eliminate an ancient parasite plaguing the world’s poorest people (AP)

• Why Jimmy Carter lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan in 1980 (WP)

• Appeals court upholds $5 million E. Jean Carroll verdict against Trump (NBC)

• Bleak outlook for US farmers – and Trump tariffs could make it worse (Guardian)

• Taking back Panama Canal would require war: Former ambassador (The Hill)

• Sobbing and prayers echo through South Korean airport as families mourn air crash victims (CNN)

• Now Syria’s long-ruling Baath party is collapsing, too (AP)

• Negative time, discovered for the first time in history: It goes from the future to the past (Ecoticious)

• AI does not mean the robots are coming (Financial Times)

• Robots learned how to perform surgical tasks by watching videos. For decades, robots have helped doctors perform surgeries. Now, some can be trained to imitate actions on videos, according to a new study. (WP)

• Gym Installs Confusing New Equipment To Mess With Anyone Joining In January (The Onion)

***

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Next Comes the Song

One occupational hazard of a career in journalism is the illusion that what you do has any lasting impact in the larger scheme of things. That rarely happens, but on certain occasions you do get the chance to make a difference in one person’s life.

Thirty years ago, I was in my office at Mother Jones early one morning when the front desk buzzed me to say there was someone who would like to talk to an editor. It was the week following the Rodney King beating by police in L.A. and there had been destructive riots with looting in San Francisco’s downtown areas.

My visitor was a soft-spoken young man carrying a large package. He asked me if we could speak privately.

Back in my office, he explained the purpose of his visit. He’d been caught up in the anger of the moment, he said, and had been angry and frustrated by yet another act of police violence against his community — he’d grown up in South Central L.A. -- when he had joined the rioters and broken into a Radio Shack and stolen a computer monitor.

“I knew it was wrong almost the minute I did it, and now I feel bad,” he told me. “I’d like to ask if you’d return it for me.”

I looked closely at my young visitor. He was black, perhaps 21 years old or so, with the kind of honest face you can’t fake. I really wanted to know more of his story.

“Tell you what,” I said. “I will return it for you if you’ll tell me why you stole it in the first place and what you wanted it for.”

He accepted these terms and we further agreed that I would protect his identity in any article that I published based on our conversation. 

His story proved to be exceptionally timely. He described growing up in poverty, surrounded by violence and family tragedy but told me how he had avoided getting into major trouble himself, partly due to his love of music. His dream was to to make music of his own and he had grabbed the monitor in the mistaken belief it was a computer that could help him do that.

Later on I arranged for the monitor to be returned to Radio Shack, which eventually led to a call from the D.A.’s office asking me to identify my young informant so he could be charged for a crime.

I flatly refused and asked, “How many of the hundreds of rioters that looted have turned the stuff they stole back in?”

“He’s the only one.”

I then suggested it might send a mixed message at a time of heightened racial tensions to prosecute the one guy out of hundreds willing to try and make amends. Besides, I doubted any jury would convict him of anything anyway.

That was the last I heard from the D.A., but a friendly editor over at the San Francisco Examiner spotted my piece in Mother Jones and asked to reprint it.

That set off a completely unanticipated seres of events, including a flood of donations from the public to help my young friend buy a real computer, which in turn helped him make his dreams of becoming a musician come true.

So that’s the ending to this particular story. But you know that where one ends, often another begins.

That’s what happened in this case, but that story is not mine to tell.

******

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HEADLINES:

• Jimmy Carter, 39th president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, dies at 100 (WP)

• As Birth Rates Plummet, Women's Autonomy Will Be Even More at Risk (Wired)

• ‘A Complete Unknown’ Director James Mangold on Consulting With Bob Dylan, Adoring Pete Seeger and Why Newport ’65 Was Like ‘Thanksgiving Dinner Gone Amuck’ (Variety)

• To evade Assad’s secret police, Syrians developed a code language (WP)

• Musk causes uproar for backing Germany’s far-right party ahead of key elections (AP)

• Think DEI Is Dead? Enter The H-1B Visa And Elon Musk’s ‘War’ (Forbes)

• Trump says H-1B visa program is 'great' amid MAGA feud over tech workers (NBC)

• Elon Musk Is a National Security Risk (NYT)

• China Has Limited Firepower to Counter U.S. Tariffs (WSJ)

• Peyote sacred to Native Americans threatened by psychedelic renaissance and development (AP)

• Our Reporter Returned to Afghanistan, Seeking Lessons and Secrets (NYT)

• Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza. (WP)

• Travis Kelce Excitedly Hands Taylor Swift Wrapped Football-Shaped Gift (The Onion)

  ***

  If you would like to send the ten-part series, “Who Killed Betty Van Patter?” to a friend, just copy the ten links below and paste into an email or text message:

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Part Six

  Part Seven

  Part Eight

  Part Nine

  Part Ten

Today’s Lyrics

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you
You were trying to break into another world
A world I never knew
I always kind of wondered
If you ever made it through
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me
If I was still the same
If I ever became what you wanted me to be
Did I miss the mark or over-step the line
That only you could see?
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me

Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell
Goes rolling by, all good people are praying
It's the last temptation
The last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing

Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away
Tomorrow will be another day
Guess it's too late to say the things to you
That you needed to hear me say
Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away —Bob Dylan

Warnings From Abroad

Donald Trump makes a lot of threats, so many that it can be difficult to figure out which ones to take seriously, but among those we must are his repeated threats against journalists.

Whether or not he ever follows through on his vows to jail reporters, punish media companies he perceives as hostile, and sue press outlets he doesn’t like, the damage he’s already done by inciting his followers against the media is substantial.

And it’s worth remembering that he’s not even in office yet.

Trump’s oft-voiced dream of establishing himself as an autocratic will depend on somehow curtailing the free press, including prominent alternative voices who have the courage to stand up to him.

His apologists in the right-wing media often say he is only joking about instituting some form of state censorship but I’m not laughing.

Of course, the U.S. is not the only country going through a populist revolt that erodes democratic norms, including attacks on the media. In that context, I pulled up Ann Marie Lipinski’s recent piece in Nieman Reports on what advice foreign journalists have for those of us concerned about this issue in the U.S.

Here is an excerpt:

• International journalists are hearing echoes. From countries around the world that have witnessed the rise of autocratic and populist leaders, they are watching the U.S. and warning of a characteristic of wounded democracies everywhere: an endangered free press.

• When Donald Trump sued CBS News for $10 billion over its editing of a Kamala Harris interview, some viewed it as just another tantrum. When he threatened to revoke broadcast licenses for critical coverage, we were told it was beyond a president’s power. And when the president-elect’s insults escalated from cries of “fake news” to violent provocations, his defenders said not to take him literally.

• But each of these developments and others are warning signs to those journalists who saw the improbable become reality in their countries as democratic norms were trampled.

• “American colleagues, prepare for the worst,” writes Glenda Gloria, editor of Rappler, a news site in the Philippines whose staff endured years of personal attack and legal torment from the Rodrigo Duterte administration. “If it doesn’t happen, you’ll be happy to be proven wrong. If it happens, it could happen fast.”

• “Dear American colleagues, do not have any illusions,” writes Bartosz Wieliński, deputy editor of Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza. “If an autocrat or dictator announces something, sooner or later they will act on it.”

Think about that — “If it happens, it could happen fast,” and “sooner or later they will act on it.” Our major media institutions are at weak point after decades of newspaper closings, corporate takeovers, and the disruptive impacts of technology.

The journalism profession has reached a low point in public esteem, established reporters at mainstream outlets fear for their jobs, and the CEOs of Facebook (Meta), Amazon, et.al. seem ready to bow at the feet of the would-be despot.

So at this juncture things look bad. But maybe this is just paranoia on my part. Maybe it will never come to pass. Maybe.

***

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HEADLINES:

• 179 dead in South Korea’s worst plane crash in years (CNN)

• The End of News — Legacy media has a trust problem, but it’s not too late to solve it. (Atlantic)

• At CNN, lower TV ratings and heightened anxieties about what’s ahead (WP)

• Dear America — Advice from areas of the world where press freedom is under attack (Nieman Reports)

• How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking? (New Yorker)

• Trump team says Canada, Greenland, Panama comments are part of a broader plan (WP)

• Elon Musk pledges "war" over H-1B visa program, calls opponents racists (Axios)

• US may hit new debt limit as early as Jan 14, Yellen says (Reuters)

• Yellen Warns ‘Extraordinary Measures’ Will Be Needed to Avoid Default (NYT)

• US government will not buy Bitcoin in 2025 — Galaxy Research (Cointelegraph)

• Elderly student loan borrowers owe $121 billion. They ask Biden for relief. (WP)

• How to fight ageism in the world around you — and in yourself (NPR)

• Migrants and End of Covid Restrictions Fuel Jump in Homelessness (NYT)

• Free-speech advocates tell Supreme Court US TikTok law reminiscent of dictatorships (Reuters)

• It's a full-on leak war between the SF Giants and Scott Boras now (SFGate)

• Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was Google’s first female engineer—only because she tried to delete a recruiter email and accidentally opened it instead (Fortune)

• Good news! 2025 will be full of AI! (WP)

• Grandma Who Survived Great Depression Casually Drops That She Once Killed Man For Mayonnaise (The Onion)

***

If you would like to send the ten-part series, “Who Killed Betty Van Patter?” to a friend, just copy the ten links below and paste into an email or text message:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

Part Nine

Part Ten