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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas," by Jennifer Raff.

 

The initial reaction from the communities was mixed. Some were reluctant to disturb the human bones any further. But other community members wanted to learn what information the ancient man could reveal about the history of the people in the region. “As I remember those initial talks,” Terry Fifield told me in an email, “council members wondered who this person might be, whether he was related to them, how he might have lived. It was that curiosity about the man that inspired the partnership at the beginning.” 

After much discussion and debate, community members eventually agreed that the scientists could continue their dig and study the ancient remains. They stipulated that excavations would immediately cease if the cave turned out to be a sacred burial site. They also mandated that the scientists were to share their findings with them before they were published and consult with community leaders on all steps taken during the research—and the community members would rebury their ancestor following the work.

So while this book is about how scientific understandings of the origins of Native Americans have changed, we cannot tell that story without also scrutinizing how scientists have arrived at these understandings. This is not a pleasant history to recount. The Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas have been treated with disrespect, condescension, and outright brutality by a number of scientists who have benefitted at the expense of the people they were so curious about. This is the legacy that contemporary anthropologists, archaeologists, and geneticists need to confront head-on; there can be no honest progress in the scientific study of the past without acknowledging those threads of human history we have dismissed, neglected, or erased in the past. The journey to knowledge has to involve self-scrutiny; scientific progress cannot be divorced from the social context in which it takes place.

It had become evident to physical anthropologists of the early 20th century that the scenario that José de Acosta had originally proposed on the basis of biblically inspired logic in the 16th century was, in fact, supported by multiple lines of biological evidence.

But evidence kept appearing that didn’t quite work with the model. Even as better dating methods pinpointed the earliest appearance at Clovis to 13,200 years ago, the Clovis First model still couldn’t quite satisfy everyone. From time to time, a maverick archaeologist would come forward to present a site that didn’t fit the model; evidence that showed people were present in the Americas before Clovis. These supposed pre-Clovis sites irritated most senior archaeologists, who, like my professor, already knew how the Americas were peopled. Like annoying pebbles working their way into the shoes of a runner, the archaeologists had to keep stopping to clear away these distractions before they could make progress on their research. My generation of students was inculcated with the belief that every single site proposed to predate Clovis had one or more fatal flaws. The attitude at the time, one of my colleagues told me, was basically “We know the answer. Don’t bother us with data.”

In return for your respect, caves offer you the unique experience of seeing unparalleled treasures of nature: speleothems of the most astonishing beauty created over thousands of years by what began as a tiny accretion of minerals in water droplets. You have to move with utmost care to avoid touching them as you scramble over rocks or crawl through tunnels. Since your light source is usually a focused beam from a headlamp or flashlight, you learn to maintain a constant state of alertness in the underground world. As a child (and later as a teenager) I loved feeling this single-minded focus for hours, listening to the small sounds of water, our own footfalls, and the occasional flutter of bat wings, and glimpsing something ancient and beautiful in the beam of my flashlight every time I turned a corner. 

Entering a sacred burial space like Actun Tunichil Muknaliii requires an additional level of respect: for the place itself, for its history, for the ancestors interred there, and for the living people who still consider it sacred. It’s an important consideration when visiting such places as tourists; one must be mindful of how the vocabulary of “discovery” and “adventure” and the opportunity to gawk at the remains of ancient peoples may be demeaning to them and harmful to their descendants.

One possible refuge for humans during the bitterly cold Ice Age was the southern portion of central Beringia—a region that is presently under about 164 feet of ocean but would have been lowland coastline 50,000 to 11,000 years ago. Unlike the steppe-tundra regions, the southern coast of the land bridge would have been much warmer and wetter because of its proximity to the ocean. 

Paleoenvironmental evidence shows that it actually contained wetlands, with peat bogs and trees like spruce, birch, and adler that people could have burned for fuel. Waterfowl would have visited this place, and they and other animals would have provided a reliable supply of food for the Beringians. This model for Native American origins explains the genetic evidence of isolation. To some archaeologists, it also meshes well with the archaeological evidence. Beringians living on the south coast of the land bridge had access to Pacific marine resources, including kelp, shellfish, fish, and marine mammals. A prolonged stay in a coastal region would have required the population to develop adaptations for these new resources. If true, this period of isolation meant that the First Peoples already had the culture and knowledge needed for thriving in coastal environments by the time routes into the Americas became accessible a few thousand years later. It means that Beringia should more properly be viewed as a lost continent than as a land bridge. The term land bridge gives the impression that people raced across a narrow isthmus to reach Alaska. The oceanographic data clearly show that during the LGM, the land bridge was twice the size of Texas. If the Out of Beringia model is correct, Beringia wasn’t a crossing point, but a homeland, a place where people lived for many generations, sheltering from an inhospitable climate and slowly evolving the genetic variation unique to their Native American descendants.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Poetry of Strangers: What I Learned Traveling America with a Typewriter," by Brian Sonia-Wallace.

Everyone thinks Americans don’t want to talk to each other. 

In reality, we’re all just dying to be heard.

My role, I quickly realized, was just to grant people permission to express the emotions they kept under wraps in order to get along in public space. The people who come to the mall seem to have this terrible longing to speak and be listened to, to be witnessed. A base, human need to break from the constant impersonal bombardment of consumer culture that lives in that space and to sit, in silence, with a stranger who was there explicitly to care about their stories. 

From my perch at the typewriter, I gathered intel on the human condition from the belly of the beast, and the heart of American consumerism turned into a confessional. Lots of people would ask how much my poems cost—in a citadel of commerce, unless the free thing is a sample to lure us into buying, nothing is free. But I wasn’t selling a product, I was selling the humanity of the mall itself.

I was filled with wonder and awe by an upperclassman, eighteen to my fourteen, who had just gotten back from traveling on his own for the first time and seemed so confident and independent to my opening adolescent eyes. “Did you ever give people a fake name or pretend to be someone else?” I asked him. 

“No,” he told me. “On the road, I felt like I was the most honest I’ve ever been. There was a feeling of not ever having to worry if people would like you or what you said. You’d be gone the next day, so it didn’t matter. At home, I’m performing all the time. Traveling, I didn’t have to worry about anyone else. I was just me.”

They always say reading to your kid is a positive, but in my case, it backfired because I was so scared my mom would stop reading to me that I refused to learn to do it myself. How else was I going to know that she still cared?

I’ve been writing poems on the spot since 2012. I’ve written in three countries and across thirteen states. People are more or less the same, everywhere you go. No matter what the event is, they tell me about their hopes, their sorrows, their spouses, and their dogs. Somehow, before I even start writing, sitting at the typewriter creates permission. Permission for my patrons to sit in their feelings, in their uncertainties. Permission to embrace wherever they may be emotionally and so be able to move forward without fear. I guess sometimes we all just need another person to tell us what we’re doing is okay and what we want is allowed. Across age and gender and class and race, across all the lines that divide us from each other, people are shy and sweet when it comes to having a poem written just for them. 

Years later, when I run into people I’ve written for, they recognize me and tell me where in their house they have their poem framed, a daily reminder to themselves of themselves.

In 2019, I run an initiative with the City of West Hollywood called Pride Poets, to train queer poets to do typewriter poetry. One of the poets, Natalie Nicole Dressel, tells me afterward how she knew she had enough information from talking to someone to start working on their poem. “I talk to the person until I see myself in them. Then I write that,” she says, like it’s obvious. 

A psychologist I wrote for at a party told me that when we tell each other stories, what we’re doing is patterning our brains to be in synch. Neuroimaging suggests that people hearing stories have the same synapses firing as the person telling the story. Sharing memories, sharing stories, is a physical process. Two bodies moving in unison, two brains acting as one brain. Really, the woman at the party says, what’s happening in the exchange of a story for a poem is that the person I’m writing for and I are synching brains. Two people with different identities and pasts, finding themselves in each other. 

It seems to me that most people just need their stories to be heard. And that need is the right word. That we lose something when our stories are not heard. That something not only in us, but in the world, dies. 

With every poem I write, I remember that the value of a story doesn’t always depend on how many likes or retweets it gets, or how many people it reaches. 

Sometimes, just one person hearing a story—is enough.

The Sacraments of Baptism and Communion

 

 

"Sacrament," the word and the act, can seem so quaint in a time when our culture has gotten so secular and even our churches are feeling the need to seem modern in look and vocab and cadence. Perhaps I am old-fashioned (although I did not grow up in the church), but I find ceremonies like baptism and communion quite powerful.

The thing I like about baptisms, besides the tableau of wriggly burrito-sized babies or smart-looking dressed-up kids, is the call to the congregation to help in the godly raising of the baptized child. It is a reminder that we all, ant not just the parents, bear some communal responsibility for seeing the child down the straight and narrow path that leads to life.

As for communion, "this is my body" takes on vivid imagery when the person serving communion takes that thick loaf of bread and tears it in two. When we have largely been inoculated from the shock value of Jesus on the cross, that act is a powerful reminder that the payment for our sins was profoundly costly.

Maybe baptism and communion are stuffy rites for you. For me they can evoke a deep sense of responsibility and a deep sense of gratitude. I am thankful for these sacraments.

Disagreeable

 

I have strong opinions. I believe in absolute truths. My day job involves being on a side, helping my clients get something done.

 

However. Keeping an open mind is paramount. When presented with inconvenient evidence, I may want to argue it away but what I should do is deal with it, confess that I might’ve been wrong, and learn to change.

 

That’s how science works, how econ works, how civic life should work.

 

And yet. I see too much selective adherence to facts. When we’re proven right we lambaste those who disagree with us. When we’re proven wrong we deny or obfuscate or just yell louder.

 

“Objectivity” has ceased to mean we accede to experts, and now just means I have my experts who are right and you have your experts who are stupid.

 

“Fair” has ceased to mean anything more than life goes the way I think it should go; crying “unfair” means something didn’t go the way I think it should.

 

The truth, whether it’s science or politics or society, is usually more complex and random than we’re comfortable with. Life is more unfair and capricious than we’d like.

 

Pick a hot topic. COVID? Affordable housing? Police? Extremely complicated, extremely charged, extremely important. That’s how most critical issues are. We’ve got to get these right. Yet we spend so much time absolutely crushing those who think differently from us. Not only is there no possibility of even a kernel of truth to their positions that we might gain from in moving things forward, but a vehement need to silence and smear any opposing school of thought.

 

Modern American discourse has metastasized into factions, dehumanization, and winning. We imagine the worst of those who disagree with us, so much so that we must not only not give room for opposing points of view but actively extinguish them because we believe they in turn are out to extinguish our very existence.

 

Perhaps I am speaking from a haughty place of privilege and cluelessness, but the vast majority of people who I disagree with are people who I personally like and whose contrary opinions I benefit from. I think we want the same things even if we have polar differences in how to get them. I earnestly want folks to have full voice for their concerns, and I greatly desire to hear and learn from them.

Yes, in some cases those on the other side threaten eternal damnation or actively seek to extinguish our very existence. Dialing up to 11 is an appropriate response. And it should be reserved for such situations, not kept at that level for any and all disagreements.

 

I’m lucky to have a diverse group of people in my social circle. Ardent maskers and anti-vaxxers, NIMBYs and YIMBYs, pro-police and abolish the police. I’m lucky to have leaned into their positions and learned something from each angle. I’m personally better for it, and society could be closer to progress if we only gave berth to all the different perspectives that together make up our pluralistic society.

I must acknowledge that what people call micro-aggressions ought to be taken seriously. In our ignorance we can say or do things that are quite triggering for and hurtful to others. Some humility is in order, as well as on most occasions some outright repentance of our own sins, confession of complicity in structural sins, and acknowledgement of past sins. 

I must also argue that pushing back against someone who is trying to advance a certain agenda is not necessarily condoning the opposite opinion. Done in the right spirit and with the right intentions, pushing back can also mean wanting to understand better and seeking a deeper awareness of what is really going on. Alas, "questioning" has become a reason for people to drop the hammer on you - "I can't believe you're not supporting me on this thing I feel strongly about" - rather than being received in a spirit of someone knowing less than you do and wanting you to tell them more.

Similarly, some of us have made determinations about certain issues - most prominently and recently things like COVID and climate change - that cause us to be extremely unwelcoming of contrary positions even if the nature of science is to make room for testing and retesting of hypotheses. 

As noted above, whether we're talking about science or econ or civic discourse, things are more complicated than the binary simplicity we try to bend the world towards. You are free to feel very strongly about your position, to fight with vehemence for your perspective to be heard and respected. I certainly do. I just don't think it's fair for that vehemence to cause you to shout down or vilify opposing viewpoints without actually giving space for those viewpoints to be fully articulated.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "All Success is a Lagging Indicator," by Ryan Holiday.

Your retirement accounts are a lagging indicator of whether or not you have your financial act together — earning enough, saving enough. Pulling an all-nighter is not a sign of dedication but a lagging indicator of the exact opposite. It means you plan poorly, you procrastinate, you aren’t proactive enough, you don’t know how to effectively manage your work and your time. Not being able to fully disconnect from your devices on vacation is a lagging indicator that you don’t have good systems in place. Hitting a personal record on the bench press is a lagging indicator of a lot of discipline and hard work. Receiving a promotion is a lagging indicator of a lot of quality work. Delivering a keynote with confidence is a lagging indicator of a lot of preparation.

All my books are lagging indicators. They are a culmination of years of work. That’s actually Robert Greene’s definition of creativity. He says, “creativity is a function of the previous work you put in.” Creativity is not mysterious or romantic. It’s tedious, Robert says. “If you put a lot of hours into thinking and researching and reading, hour after hour — a very tedious process — creativity will come to you.”

Nothing comes from nowhere. Not success. Not inspiration. Not the muses. Not writer’s block. Everything is a lagging indicator. Of whether or not you did the work.

Man in Motion

Something I'm trying to be more self-aware about is an innate and often unhealthy need to be in a rush. Yes, my life is busy. Yes, it's good to be productive. Yes, I'm glad I have good time management skills. But one needn't always be on the go. Heck, my pace at times is downright frantic.

To be sure, there are times when this is appropriate. Things can conspire such that you have to whiz from thing to thing just to get everything done. But I've noticed lately I act this way way more often than is required. I am so focused on the future that I've neglected to be present in the present. I catch myself and start to have an internal conversation: "Why are you in a rush?" "Slow down." "Be present."

It was golf, of all things, that made me realize this most clearly. Golf, my new hobby, my first ever adult hobby. The sliver of free time I've given myself permission to enjoy. And yet all too often I whiz through this unnecessarily. I'm rushing through a chilly day to get back inside. I'm worried about getting back to the office or back home in time. I'm nervous about being in the way of the group behind me. This is during the very thing I've gladly put in my life to have a little bit of leisure!

I will psycho-analyze what's going on at a later date. For now, I am naming this trait of mine, and acknowledging it is often a bad thing. 

I will say this. It now makes sense to me why some of my most self-reflective times come when I am on the move, say on a plane or train or bus. I've had incredible insights about my life, journaled deeply and richly, or just sank into a good book, while cuddled up in a seat racing down the street or in the air. It's like the fact that I am in motion gives me permission to be in the present, because I am simultaneously going somewhere, like I'm allowed to be still because I am also making progress towards some destination. It's not a coincidence that on my days off not only do I go to a city to bike around, but I usually take the bus or train to that city because part of the respite is the opportunity to be still while on the go.

I would like to get better at being present absent this cue. I should give myself room to just be, without having to rush everywhere. But I am thankful for moments on the go when I am truly able to rest and be still.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death," by Caitlin Doughty.

 

Cremations for very heavy people can take longer, sometimes over two hours longer. That gives the fat enough time to burn away. But at the end of the process, you can’t tell who went in the machine a 450-pound person and who went in a 110-pound person. The flames are the great equalizer.

A typical mortician fear is that a dead person will defecate, purge, or leak a bit when the family comes to visit the body. Who wants the final “memory picture” of Grandpa to be a vague eau de poop? Morticians have a host of tricks to prevent this from happening. Entry-level trick: a diaper. This is my preferred method because it’s non-invasive. You’ll see what I mean in a second. Mid-level trick: an A/V plug. (A/V doesn’t stand for audio/visual. It’s, um, more graphic than that. I’ll let you take that journey of discovery on your own.) The plug is a clear plastic contraption that looks part wine corkscrew, part plastic stopper for a sink or tub drain. Master-level trick: packing the anal canal with cotton and sewing the anus closed. My personal opinion is that this method is a little much, and we should let our corpses poo in peace. I’m happy to share more fecal opinions, so it’s a shame no one seems to be asking.

We all know the scene: a child running through the house with their eyes crossed, tongue stuck out, and nose pushed up like pig snout. Their long-suffering mother screams after them, “If you keep making that face, it will get stuck like that forever!” Good threat, Mom, but not true. Wacky faces, even the wackiest faces, always pop back into position. (Furthermore, Mom, there is medical evidence all those scrunched, pinched faces are good for circulation.) But what happens if you die making a face? Say, you have a heart attack right in the middle of taunting your mom with an obscene scowl. Will that be your face for eternity? 

The answer is mostly no. Intrigued? Read on.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays," by Esme Weijun Wang.

A diagnosis is comforting because it provides a framework—a community, a lineage—and, if luck is afoot, a treatment or cure. A diagnosis says that I am crazy, but in a particular way: one that has been experienced and recorded not just in modern times, but also by the ancient Egyptians, who described a condition similar to schizophrenia in the Book of Hearts, and attributed psychosis to the dangerous influence of poison in the heart and uterus. The ancient Egyptians understood the importance of sighting patterns of behavior. Uterus, hysteria; heart, a looseness of association. They saw the utility of giving those patterns names.

Medicine is an inexact science, but psychiatry is particularly so. There is no blood test, no genetic marker to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone is schizophrenic, and schizophrenia itself is nothing more or less than a constellation of symptoms that have frequently been observed as occurring in tandem. Observing patterns and giving them names is helpful mostly if those patterns can speak to a common cause or, better yet, a common treatment or cure.

Some have suggested that schizophrenia persists because it promotes creativity, much like the argument emphasized in MacArthur Genius Grant winner Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. As tempting as this perspective is, I worry that seeing schizophrenia as a gateway to artistic brilliance glamorizes the disorder in unhealthy ways, therefore preventing suffering schizophrenics from seeking help. If creativity is more important than being able to maintain a sense of reality, I could make a plausible argument for remaining psychotic, but the price of doing so is one that neither I nor my loved ones are likely to choose to pay.

 

 

The story of schizophrenia is one with a protagonist, “the schizophrenic,” who is first a fine and good vessel with fine and good things inside of it, and then becomes misshapen through the ravages of psychosis; the vessel becomes prone to being filled with nasty things. Finally, the wicked thoughts and behavior that may ensue become inseparable from the person, who is now unrecognizable from what they once were.

Depression is often compared to diabetes—in other words, it’s not your fault if you get it, and you’ll be fine if you just take care of it. Schizophrenia, on the other hand, is compared to Alzheimer’s—it’s still not your fault if you get it, but there’s no fixing it, and though you may not intend to be a burden, you’ll still be one until you die.

I’m still trying to figure out what “okay” is, particularly whether there exists a normal version of myself beneath the disorder, in the way a person with cancer is a healthy person first and foremost. In the language of cancer, people describe a thing that “invades” them so that they can then “battle” the cancer. No one ever says that a person is cancer, or that they have become cancer, but they do say that a person is manic-depressive or schizophrenic, once those illnesses have taken hold. In my peer education courses I was taught to say that I am a person with schizoaffective disorder. “Person-first language” suggests that there is a person in there somewhere without the delusions and the rambling and the catatonia. 

But what if there isn’t? What happens if I see my disordered mind as a fundamental part of who I am? It has, in fact, shaped the way I experience life. Should the question be a matter of percentages of my lifetime, I’ve spent enough of this lifetime with schizoaffective disorder to see it as a dominant force. And if it’s true that I think, therefore I am, perhaps the fact that my thoughts have been so heavily mottled with confusion means that those confused thoughts make up the gestalt of my self; this is why I use the word “schizophrenic,” although many mental health advocates don’t. 

My friends with anxiety disorders, for example, tend to speak of anxiety as a component of their personalities. Laura Turner writes, in her essay “How Do You Inherit Anxiety?,” “It is from Verna Lee Boatright Berg that I inherited my long face, my quick hands, my fear that someday soon I will do something wrong and the world will come to a sharp end.” In their minds, there is no tabula rasa overlaid by a transparency of hypochondria, generalized anxiety disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder; such thoughts are hardwired into their minds, with no self that can be untangled from the pathology they experience. Another friend’s obsessive-compulsive disorder has calmed significantly since she began taking Prozac, but she continues to be most comfortable when things are tidy, even though her tidiness is no longer disruptive. She still washes her hands more thoroughly than anyone I know. 

There might be something comforting about the notion that there is, deep down, an impeccable self without disorder, and that if I try hard enough, I can reach that unblemished self. 

But there may be no impeccable self to reach, and if I continue to struggle toward one, I might go mad in the pursuit.

Life Lessons from the Game of Golf

 

 

I've been playing golf for less than 6 months and am still terrible at it though getting better. Most important is that I enjoy the sport, which I assumed I would but have been surprised at how joyful an activity it is for me. Also unknown when I first started is whether it would be a solitary or social activity, and I've been delighted to find that I enjoy all kinds of times on the course, whether solo or with friends or paired with strangers. How delightful!

More than the pursuit of a lower score and basking in some rare free time, the game itself offers so many great life lessons. So many aspects of the game are a metaphor for a happy and successful life. Here are just a few I've mined, mostly from the people I play with, all of whom are better than me and whose general demeanor and friendliness to me have taught me much:

1. Good shot or bad shot, you move on. I'm still the yippy dog who squeals with delight when I hit it square and curses under my breath when I shank one. But in life as on the course, having a short memory is paramount. Your mistake can't shake your next shot, nor can your success lull you into thinking you've got it made.

2. There's no progress without failure. Anyone who tries to be successful while avoiding the possibility of failing will simply not be successful. In golf and in life, the only way to get better is to try hard enough to fall hard on your face, usually multiple times and in spectacular fashion. Related to the previous point, you try, you learn, and you persevere.

3. Every place has its etiquette. I've played mostly one course in my life but people tell me every course has slightly different norms. It's important to acknowledge the existence of those norms and respect them, just like when you are a newcomer to a place or group you don't trample over it and act like you're allowed to do whatever you want.

4. It's not "practice makes perfect," it's "good practice makes perfect." Repetition is helpful to make the movements of golf feel more natural. But after a while, you have to be careful not to repeat bad habits even if you get reasonable results at first, because if you want to get good you have to be consistent, and the only way to be consistent is to do things the right way.

5. Technique > muscle. I wish I could crush it like Tiger or Rory, but hitting it square means hitting it further than hitting it hard. Related to the previous point, sheer exertion may seem like the path to length, but it's not, which may seem surprising at first until that first time you use proper technique and let equipment and physics do the rest.

6. Stay in bounds. It feels good to "grip it and rip it," but while that endorphin rush might get you a birdie now and then, it also leads to being all over the course, which runs up your score. Slow and steady often wins the race, to mix metaphors; short but straight beats long and crooked every day.

What other insights have you gleaned for life from golf?

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Beneath the Tamarind Tree  A Story of Courage, Family, and the Lost Schoolgirls of Boko Haram," by Isha Sesay.

If not for fate, twinned with my mother’s childhood determination, I could just as easily have started off in a place not much different from Chibok and been one of the millions of girls facing countless obstacles to gain an education. Instead, my parents saw educating me as a priority, and I considered the freedom to dream up countless different paths to my future a birthright—all of which cemented the foundation for the life I have today. I am a living testament to the transformative power of education, and that truth never leaves me.

All the girls were crammed into the midsize hotel room, arrayed in brightly colored blouses, ankle-length skirts, and head wraps. The jam-packed room was a canvas of bold reds, blues, and yellows. My arrival didn’t interrupt their singing, though a few gave me small half smiles. Others looked as if they were far away, lost in reverie. I quickly realized they were singing Christian praise songs and many of them were holding Bibles: this was their daily evening worship—a time for exultation and prayer. Many of the girls sat on the bed, while others perched on the writing desk, and the remaining handful shared the few uncomfortable-looking chairs in the room. I spotted an unoccupied nightstand to the right of the bed and quickly made a beeline for it. From my corner, I found myself clapping along with the group while they sang. Though I quickly became swept up in the emotion of the room, I was struck by the serenity on the girls’ faces. There was no sign of pain, anger, fear, or dark emotion in their expressions. How were these girls able to manifest such peace and joyfulness after being held captive for more than two years, after witnessing the worst of humanity? I struggled to make sense of it. Yet here they were, twenty-one girls with their spirits seemingly untainted, creating a sound so beautiful my own heart was buoyed beside theirs. 

Tim soon arrived with his camera and positioned himself in a corner by the door to unobtrusively capture the singing and clapping. At first I worried that the girls would find his presence upsetting, but they were so focused on their singing that they remained oblivious to him. The girls took turns leading the songs. One would sing a few lines unaccompanied before the rest swooped in to carry the remaining verses higher and louder. It seemed to me that they’d developed a way of supporting and encouraging each other that was palpable in their singing. I felt cocooned by their voices and could have stayed there for as long as they had the breath to sing. 

But after half an hour, their voices trailed off and the girls reached for their Bibles, ready to begin studying. I motioned to Tim for us to leave. My departure, like my arrival, was barely acknowledged. With heads bowed, the girls were immersed.

I tried to tamp down my anxieties, reminding myself that there were no other journalists traveling back to Chibok with the girls. My journey would be a world exclusive, the kind of assignment that journalists live for. Turning back to look at the contents of my bag strewn across the bed, I noted that the question reverberating at the back of my mind was far simpler: But is it actually worth dying for?

As you read this, there may well be a part of you wondering why you should care about this story, about these twenty-one girls, after all this time. The world has moved on, you say. You’re probably thinking I should do the same. 

But pause and listen to me, just for a moment: I’m not asking you to care about the girls simply out of tenderhearted humanitarianism. I am also asking you to care about these girls out of pure self-interest. If you view what happened to these girls through the lens of national security, you’ll see inherent in this tale the potential threat to you, your loved ones, and the global strategic interests of the United States.

We can ill afford to ignore the actions of any terror group simply because its concerns appear to be entirely local, or its murderous activities are taking place far away. Terrorism in the twenty-first century has no borders. So with that in mind, I’m urging you to remove the boundaries on your thinking. What happened that harrowing night in Chibok wasn’t just Boko Haram triggering a slow-moving nightmare for the people of that quiet community. It was also a flare illuminating the path of a transnational terror group with mutating ambitions. 

One last thing: what happened in northeastern Nigeria in 2014 also offers a microcosm of the clash between opposing forces fighting to reshape our world. The mass abduction brought into focus a larger global narrative unfolding at this very moment. We are in the midst of an epic power struggle between militant Islam and the West, between progressivism and conservatism, between globalists and nativists, between a hoped-for open future benefitting many versus a set-in-stone, closed-off past rewarding the few. Boko Haram’s actions in Chibok spotlight the efforts of regressive forces to deny an education and autonomy to huge swathes of people in an attempt to keep them underfoot and make them easier to control. The education advocate and Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, herself a survivor of the Pakistani Taliban’s violent efforts to thwart her education, has repeatedly spoken of the fear felt by extremists, saying, “They are afraid of books and pens, the power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women, the power of the voice of women frightens them.” 

As individuals and as a country, to know the intention of groups like Boko Haram and to still look away from the Chibok girls is to betray our shared humanity. The horrors that these girls have endured do not belong in a Nigerian vacuum. The place for every single one of them is right at the heart of the conversation about the global threats America is facing, and the development of a more holistic counterterrorism response that might just make all of us a little safer.

For Chibok’s Christians, devotion to the land is matched only by their passion for Jesus Christ; these are the twin tenets of life in this community. From birth to death, the focus is on God above and what comes from the earth beneath their feet. For these Christians, most of whom belong to the Church of the Brethren in Nigeria (Ekklesiyar Yan uwa a Nigeria, or EYN), faith isn’t a hidden-away, occasional pursuit; it is a fervent, communal, all-consuming affair, the center of which is daily worship. Every morning in almost every single Christian home in Chibok, the same ritual has played out for decades, adults and children rising from beds and mattresses, wiping sleep from their eyes, readying themselves to worship and praise the Lord.

The girls struggled with their choices. Should they flee into the night, uncertain of what may be lying in wait beyond the school walls? Or simply stay put, right where they were, with the risk of being trapped if Boko Haram burst into their school? 

“Let’s pray, before we do anything,” Priscilla said. At her instruction, the dozens of girls, Christian and Muslim, sat together on the ground and drew close to form one group. They bowed their heads in desperate prayer. The chaos from the town was spreading. The praying girls could hear doors opening and closing all around them, followed by quickened footsteps.

As the entire family crowded around and cradled her in their arms, Saa felt as though she’d died and come back to life. The horrors of the night quickly receded, and soon there were no more thoughts. All that mattered were the surging feelings of love, joy, and gratitude that remained.

It seemed as if the entire population of Chibok town was there, packed into that schoolyard. As the minutes ticked by, the sense of mourning deepened. Soon the collective sorrow was so great, it was nearly impossible to distinguish the anguish of parents whose daughters had been taken from the misery of the rest of the supportive community. Distraught parents, distressed family members, concerned locals, all of them stood together weeping and shouting in mounting confusion and anger.

Meanwhile, the lack of visibility for the missing girls’ parents also factored into how everything played out. The president’s supporters routinely argued that the absence of TV and newspaper images featuring distraught Chibok parents was yet more proof that no girls had been taken. The truth was that the majority of the missing girls were from families so poor, they simply couldn’t afford to travel to places like Lagos and Abuja, where, at least for a time, hordes of journalists were eagerly waiting to hear their stories of what had happened on that hot night in April. These heartbroken parents were held back by not only their inability to afford the hefty transportation costs, but perhaps just as much by their limited education. Chibok isn’t some media-savvy community whose locals would grasp the critical importance of getting the stories of their missing daughters out to Nigeria and the wider world. As a result, there was a gap created by their lack of visibility and silence. Unfortunately, many inside and outside the government would step up to fill it with spin.

Mary was among the nearly one hundred girls who formed a convoy following on foot. She shuffled along while wearing just one blue-black flip-flop, urged forward by a phalanx of grim-faced men with their fingers resting on the triggers of long-barreled guns, which they seemed ready to use at a moment’s notice. 

Sweat ran freely down her back as she tried to stay alert and avoid potholes that might send her tumbling. Mary walked with her mind wrapped up in thoughts of her parents, picturing them totally distraught at the news that their only child had been taken. She feared the loss would destroy them. Mixed in with that fear was a sense of foreboding that Mary couldn’t shake off, a distinct feeling that her life still hung in the balance. Every time this idea rose to the surface of her consciousness, it came with the question, What will I tell God if I am killed? She felt unprepared for death, uncertain she’d done enough in her short lifetime to give a successful accounting.

The next day, the captors arrived with a message: “We will kill you if we ever catch you performing Christians prayers again.” Priscilla believed every word of the threat. Petrified, they could no longer find it within themselves to gather in the dark in large groups, but they refused to abandon the practice altogether. They continued to look for opportunities to replenish their faith. When the moments presented themselves, Priscilla found they were almost always unannounced and involved no more than two to three girls. They weren’t regular occurrences, but these impromptu worship moments provided not only peace and succor to distressed souls, they also brought the spark that kept the spirit of defiance burning within the group.

After weeks of deprivation and suffering, the girls suddenly wanted to see what they looked like. With the sun high in the sky and a sense of curiosity burning within, Priscilla and Bernice among handfuls of other girls sidled over to an area not far from their rooms where Boko Haram had abandoned its broken-down motorbikes. The girls knew their captors were watching as they crowded around the bikes’ small rearview mirrors. They stared, wide eyed, at their own reflections, almost as if they didn’t recognize the faces staring back at them. When Priscilla finally looked in the mirror, she was shocked by how much she had changed. The girl in the mirror looked nothing like the girl who’d been at school in Chibok. From time to time a schoolmate would actually turn up with a broken-off rearview mirror hidden away in her hijab. In those squalid spaces where they lacked everything, the mirror became a prized possession, passed among the girls excitedly. Jida was all too aware of what was happening, but rather than confiscate the mirror, he would gently chide them. “Put it away,” he said whenever he spotted them gathered together and engrossed in their reflections. “It will only make you think more about what you have left behind,” the old man always added. But for the girls, staring at the round disk was more than a frivolous pastime—it was also a means of reconnecting with the girls they used to be, another lifetime ago.

Boko Haram’s unbending opposition to girls’ education is, in essence, an expression of its desire to silence them. To deny females a voice is to take away their ability to challenge the very practices and norms that subjugate and harm them. Successive Nigerian governments shaped a response to this tragedy that included minimizing and ignoring the voices of those fighting for the girls’ return. And with the international media attaching so little importance to the voices of Africans, news bosses easily moved on and global audiences tuned out. 

All of this has driven me to use my own voice to keep this story on people’s minds. I also understand that the only reason I’m able to take this stance and speak up is because I’ve been empowered by education, and that I was born to an educated mother. 

I don’t need data to make the case that education is one of life’s greatest differentiators. I have to look no further than my own mother’s life to see how it alters life’s outcomes. One educated girl can change everything.

Like the other girls, Priscilla would have to wait until Sunday—two full days—before she could embrace her mother and father. When the moment finally came, it was at a specially arranged Thanksgiving service. At last, all the parents and daughters gazed on faces they’d long feared were lost to them forever. Under the cream-colored canopies erected to protect the families and specially invited VIPs from the unfriendly skies, mothers and fathers clung to their painfully thin daughters for the first time in years. They cradled their children like they were fragile newborns, as if the opening up of any space between them might allow something terrible to happen once more.

For Esther Yakubu, there has been no progress; she doesn’t have stories of her daughter’s healing to share. More than four years have passed since Dorcas disappeared, and Esther continues to count the days until her beloved returns. During these long years of separation, this mother of five has slowly morphed into a ghost of her former self. All joy has ebbed away, leaving her lifeless. She laments that God keeps her in a world without her firstborn by her side. She does her best to wade through the unending anguish, to be present for her remaining four children, all of whom miss their big sister terribly. They also mourn the mother they lost the day that Dorcas disappeared.