July 5, 2016 in 4,134 words

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THE FORGOTTEN HERO: LARRY DOBY

On April 15, 1947 in Brooklyn, New York, the great Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier and became the first African-American in 67 years to play in the Major Leagues. (Yes, Robinson was not the first, as is often stated.) Less than three months later, on July 5, 1947 in Cleveland, Ohio, Larry Doby became the second African-American ball player break the color barrier, and the first on an American League team. Although history tends to forget Doby’s much-less hyped debut and subsequent stellar performance, his life, career, and path to the majors were just as interesting and courageous as Robinson’s. As Dave Anderson wrote in a 1987 New York Times article, “In glorifying those who are first, the second is often forgotten … Larry Doby integrated all those American League ball parks where Jackie Robinson never appeared. And he did it with class and clout.”

Records point to Larry Doby being the grandson of Burrell Doby, a South Carolina native who was born into slavery in 1852. There are few other records (if any at all) of Burrell Doby until the US Census of 1880, where he appears as a freeman and a sharecropper in a town near Camden. It was around this time when he and his wife gave birth to David Doby, Larry’s father. Through David’s childhood, the Dobys were one of the more successful black families in the region. As a teen, David worked as a stable hand and later joined the Army to fight in World War I, serving for five months before being honorably discharged. …

Donald Trump Isn’t Sorry

^{The Republican candidate refuses to apologize for his mistakes—and that may be key to his success.}

Being Donald Trump means never having to say you’re sorry.

That, he explained to Jimmy Fallon last September, is among the advantages of never being wrong. “I fully think apologizing is a great thing, but you have to be wrong … I will absolutely apologize sometime in the distant future if I’m ever wrong.”

Instead of apologizing swiftly, assuming responsibility, and putting controversies behind him, Trump prefers to deny potential problems, disclaim responsibility, and move on to some fresh controversy. It flies in the face of decades of accrued wisdom about how to handle political crises. And it appears to be working for him. …

Donald Trump blames media in furor over ‘antisemitic’ Clinton tweet

^{• Presumptive GOP nominee rejects criticism of ‘star of David’ tweet3
• ADL chief condemns ‘sixth or seventh’ invoking of ‘bigotry or racism’
• Trump comments ‘clearly racist’, says Libertarian candidate Johnson}

Donald Trump responded on Monday to a swirling controversy over an apparently antisemitic tweet featuring Hillary Clinton which he subsequently deleted.

Using Twitter again, Trump said: “Dishonest media is trying their absolute best to depict a star in a tweet as the Star of David rather than a Sheriff’s Star, or plain star!”

Later, he put out a statement on his website blaming Clinton for “false attacks” and said that linking the star with antisemitism was “ridiculous”.

“Clinton, through her surrogates, is just trying to divert attention from the dishonest behavior of herself and her husband,” the statement said.

The argument that the star in the original tweet, which had six points and was superimposed over an image of $100 bills, was not a star of David was first used by Trump’s fired campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, in an appearance as a CNN pundit on Sunday. …

Top 10 Heroic Wartime Pigeons

We’ve all heard of messenger pigeons, or more technically, homing pigeons—birds that can carry messages to specific destinations across exceptionally long distances. Using the magnetic fields of the Earth as navigation, these birds can find their way back home from distances up to 1,800 kilometers (1,100 mi).

Because of this unique skill, homing pigeons were used for many years as a means of communication among humans. This list looks at homing pigeons during World War I and World War II and how they played an integral role in saving hundreds of lives. If you know of any other famous pigeons from any time period, please be sure to mention in the comments!

10. Cher Ami

Our list begins with Cher Ami, a heralded messenger pigeon that single-handedly saved a battalion of 200 men from certain death. On October 2, 1918, in the thick of World War I, Major Charles Whittlesey and his division were valiantly fighting through German defenses in what would be called the Meuse-Argonne Offensive of October 1918.

However, they were the only US forces that managed to cross German lines. By the next morning, they were under heavy enemy artillery fire and were being decimated by mortar, machine gun, and sniper fire. Headquarters was unable to provide any assistance, so they took the only action they could—an artillery barrage of their own.

The US soldiers were horrified as friendly missiles unexpectedly began to crash all around them. Whittlesey quickly wrote a plea for cease-fire and strapped it to his last carrier pigeon, Cher Ami. As soon as he took off, though, the Germans directed fire on him and shot him out of the air. …

The horrifying ‘gay cure’ experiments that were purged from scientific history

Robert Heath claimed to have cured homosexuality by implanting electrodes into the pleasure centre of the brain. Robert Colvile reports on one of the great forgotten stories of neuroscience.

For the first hour, they just talked. He was nervous; he’d never done this before. She was understanding, reassuring: let’s just lie down on the bed together, she said, and see what happens. Soon, events took their course: they were enjoying themselves so much they could almost forget about the wires leading out of his skull.

The year was 1970, and the man was a 24-year-old psychiatric patient. The woman, 21, was a prostitute from the French Quarter of New Orleans, hired by special permission of the attorney general of Louisiana. And they had just become part of one of the strangest experiments in scientific history: an attempt to use pleasure conditioning to turn a gay man straight. …

No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

^{Pupils choose their own subjects and motivate themselves, an approach some say should be rolled out across Germany}

Anton Oberländer is a persuasive speaker. Last year, when he and a group of friends were short of cash for a camping trip to Cornwall, he managed to talk Germany’s national rail operator into handing them some free tickets. So impressed was the management with his chutzpah that they invited him back to give a motivational speech to 200 of their employees.

Anton, it should be pointed out, is 14 years old.

The Berlin teenager’s self-confidence is largely the product of a unique educational institution that has turned the conventions of traditional teaching radically upside down. At Oberländer’s school, there are no grades until students turn 15, no timetables and no lecture-style instructions. The pupils decide which subjects they want to study for each lesson and when they want to take an exam.

The school’s syllabus reads like any helicopter parent’s nightmare. Set subjects are limited to maths, German, English and social studies, supplemented by more abstract courses such as “responsibility” and “challenge”. For challenge, students aged 12 to 14 are given €150 (£115) and sent on an adventure that they have to plan entirely by themselves. Some go kayaking; others work on a farm. Anton went trekking along England’s south coast. …

10 Incredible Facts About Jupiter

In Roman mythology, Jupiter is the equivalent to Greece’s Zeus and is called “dies pater,” or “shining father.” Jupiter is the son of Saturn, brother of Neptune, and brother of Juno, who just happens to also be his wife. Jupiter the celestial body, meanwhile, is the largest planet in the solar system. It also may be the most important to us after Earth itself, since it changed the way we viewed Earth, the solar system, ourselves, and the universe we call home.

10. Jupiter Could Have Been A Star, If Only…

In 1610, Galileo discovered Jupiter and its four primary moons Europa, Io, Callisto, and Ganymede, which today are known collectively as the Galilean moons. This was the first time a celestial body was observed circling anything other than the Moon orbiting Earth. This provided excellent support for Polish astronomer Nicolai Copernicus and his theory that Earth was not the center of the universe.

As the largest planet in the solar system, Jupiter has more than twice the mass of rest of the solar system combined, not counting the Sun. Jupiter has an atmosphere very much like a star, consisting mainly of hydrogen and helium, and planetary scientists think that had it gotten about 80 times larger, it would have turned into a star. As it is, with its four massive moons and many other smaller ones, Jupiter is a miniature solar system in and of itself. Jupiter is so massive that over 1,300 Earth-sized planets would be required to match the volume of the gas giant. …

Will guns be a wedge issue in November?

Although guns are likely to be a hot topic of discussion among Democratic campaigns and even voters in the months ahead, there is no reason to believe that gun control, in any form, will be a decisive election issue in November.

The Democratic House sit-in certainly was dramatic and attracted a suffocating amount of media coverage. And the Orlando massacre was both shocking and merely the latest in an increasingly long list of mass shootings.

But those two facts don’t guarantee that the issue will play any differently this year than in the past, even though Democrats, some columnists and gun-control advocates insist the Orlando shooting changed things.

After all, previous promises that voters would turn against opponents of “reasonable” gun-control legislation turned out to be nothing more than wishful thinking by those who favor additional restrictions on gun purchasers. …

The House Prepares for a Tense Week Over Gun-Control Measures

^{The chamber will pick up where it left off after Democrats staged a sit-in on the matter late last month.}

^{House Democrats sing “We Shall Overcome” on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 23.}

A little over a week and a half after House Democrats staged a sit-in on the chamber floor calling for the chamber to vote on gun-control legislation, members are back in full swing and set to tackle gun proposals—again.

This week, the House is set to vote on an antiterrorism package put forward by Republicans. The proposal includes gun-control restrictions to bar people suspected of terrorist ties from purchasing firearms. Republican Senator John Cornyn introduced a similar bill last month, but Senate Democrats rejected it, arguing it was unworkable. House Democrats are expected to do the same.

Democrats are pushing for “no-fly, no-buy” gun legislation, which also calls for expanding background checks. Representatives John Lewis and John Larson are expected to meet with Speaker Paul Ryan. “Democrats asked Speaker Ryan to address the full Democrat caucus,” said AshLee Strong, Ryan’s spokeswoman. “He looks forward to meeting with Congressmen Lewis and Larson to discuss the important action the House will take to prevent terrorist attacks.” …

THE BARKLEY MARATHONS, A 60 HOUR RACE SO INTENSE ONLY 14 OF OVER 1,000 ULTRAMARATHONERS HAVE EVER COMPLETED IT

The Brushy Mountain Penitentiary, where they used to house some of the worst of the worst criminals, is located on the eastern side of Frozen Head State Park in the Tennessee mountains. Although escape attempts were rare, the prison’s ideal location reduced the chances of prisoners safely making it back to civilization. Beyond being a maximum security prison, if an inmate did happen to evade the guards and get over the two exterior walls of the penitentiary, the Tennessee mountains might as well have been a gigantic third wall.

That’s not to say escape attempts didn’t happen. In 1977, James Earl Ray escaped from the Brushy Mountain Penitentiary where he was serving time for the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The escape plan was simple- while fellow inmates staged a fight to distract the guards, Ray and six other convicts used a makeshift ladder to scale the walls. While one convict was shot before making it over the wall, Ray and five others managed to escape into the snake-infested Frozen Head State Park. …

This State May Ditch Obamacare for Single-Payer Healthcare This November

^{Residents of this state have a $25 billion question to answer on Nov. 8.}

President Obama’s signature health reform law, the Affordable Care Act — which you probably know as “Obamacare” — has been controversial and generally disliked by about half of Americans since it was signed into law in March 2010.

The Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll has been closely monitoring the public’s sentiment toward Obamacare on a near-monthly basis since it was signed into law. You can essentially count on two hands how many months over the past six years the general public had a “favorable” view on the law.

Although Obamacare enrolled about 12.7 million people through its marketplace exchanges in 2016, and a nearly equal number of lower-income individuals and families have gained medical coverage through the expansion of Medicaid in 31 states, the program’s long-term survival is still in question, with premium prices looking as if they could soar by a double-digit percentage in 2017. Another analysis conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a weighted average increase of 11% could be in store, based on the price of the lowest-cost silver plan in 2016 compared to 2017. …

DEGREE OF OPPORTUNITY: Colorado could ditch Obamacare for a single-payer system.

How Anti-Growth Sentiment, Reflected in Zoning Laws, Thwarts Equality

^{A construction site in Boulder marks a new Google campus that will allow the company to more than triple its local work force.}

The small city of Boulder, home to the University of Colorado’s flagship campus, has a booming local economy and a pleasantly compact downtown with mountain views. Not surprisingly, a lot of people want to move here.

Something else is also not surprising: Many of the people who already live in Boulder would prefer that the newcomers settle somewhere else.

“The quality of the experience of being in Boulder, part of it has to do with being able to go to this meadow and it isn’t just littered with human beings,” said Steve Pomerance, a former city councilman who moved here from Connecticut in the 1960s.

All of Boulder’s charms are under threat, Mr. Pomerance said as he concluded an hourlong tour. Rush-hour traffic has become horrendous. Quaint, two-story storefronts are being dwarfed by glass and steel. Cars park along the road to the meadow.

These days, you can find a Steve Pomerance in cities across the country — people who moved somewhere before it exploded and now worry that growth is killing the place they love. …

Elizabeth Warren wants the government to crack down on technology giants

In an electric June 29 speech delivered at the New America Foundation, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts threw her rising political weight and prestige behind an idea that’s been bubbling beneath the surface of the Obama-era Democratic Party for several years: The United States needs a revived and reinvigorated antitrust policy.

The Obama administration itself shares — and to some extent has driven, via a Council of Economic Advisers report and some executive actions — the analysis that the American economy suffers from a shortfall of competition.

But Obama has focused his energies in two particular areas, aspects of competition policy that don’t involve antitrust enforcement like occupational licensing and aspects of antitrust policy that apply specifically to stodgy telecom utilities. His administration stopped T-Mobile from merging with either AT&T or Sprint, blocked Comcast from swallowing Time Warner Cable, imposed tough network neutrality rules in broadband providers, and has generally taken the view that the high barriers to entry in these sectors justify a heavy-handed regulatory approach. …

7 Safety PSAs (That Were Clearly Made By Serial Killers)

Safety — it’s not just a stupid dance from the ’80s. It’s also the thing that constantly keeps us from not dying. But since humanity is chock-full of dum-dums, the concept of safety is something that has to be sold to people. Sometimes, though, keeping the public from killing themselves gets communicated in batshit crazy ways that are as scarring as death itself.

#7. “Never Rest” — The British Farm Safety Video Full Of Murder And Ghosts

Farm safety isn’t something you typically hear a lot about, but it’s apparently a big fucking deal in the UK (where everyone is living inside of a Beatrix Potter story). So much so that they produced a farm safety video for kids titled “Never Rest: A Drama About Farm Safety For Children.” The whole thing sounds sensible, but it plays out like it was written by R.L. Stine’s meth head cousin.

After moving into their family’s new farmhouse, two children immediately discover a grave with the word “Never” awkwardly scrawled above “Rest in Peace” — because even rotting corpses aren’t immune to sick burns. Luckily, the farmhand’s kids are there to explain that the farm is haunted by the ghost of the old man who accidentally murdered his four kids via farm equipment almost a century ago. Which is probably what the realtor meant by “colorful.”

^{“More people have died here than on Hershel’s farm from Walking Dead.”}

…

How to Turn Anxiety Into Excitement

Trying to calm down during a bout of anxiety is likely futile. Instead, try saying: “I am excited.” Because anxiety and excitement are both arousal emotions and have similar symptoms, it’s easier to get from one to the other than to completely shift gears into calmness. In this short video, staff writer Olga Khazan explores this theory with Alison Wood Brooks, a professor at Harvard Business School who has researched this phenomenon, and tests it out for herself at karaoke. …

It’s “political sleight-of-hand”: For their next trick, Republican magicians will make your federal land disappear

^{When federal land becomes state land, it can be bought and sold to the profit of small-government billionaires}

Earlier this year, a group of right-wing extremists, led by the infamous Bundy family of Nevada, took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for 41 days before the FBI and state police were finally able to apprehend them. The occupiers have slowly been revealed to the nation for what they are: a cluster of conspiracy theorists who can barely articulate a coherent opinion, much less an intelligible ideology.

But looking past this group of yahoos, with their guns and their handles of Wild Turkey, one finds a much more sinister and powerful effort to sell off huge swaths of public land to private interests looking to exploit the land’s resources for profit.

“A couple of years ago, we started seeing legislation popping up in state legislatures,” John Sterling of the Conservation Alliance explained, “asking federal governments to transfer federal lands to the state.”

These bills, invariably introduced and supported by Republicans, are wrapped up in a “small government” ideology, the same kind that the Bundys were spouting when they commandeered the wildlife refuge. The rhetoric appeals to “a vocal group of people who don’t want the federal government doing anything,” Sterling explained, and so are easily lured into the idea that the federal government’s control of these lands is somehow a violation of “states rights.” …

10 Crazy Misconceptions About Historic Leaders

For better or worse, the many have always been ruled by the few. It’s perhaps not entirely surprising that we’ve developed some misconceptions about the lives and the work of the wealthy and powerful people who’ve led us throughout history. Sometimes, the pieces we managed to put together to form these misconceptions are just as strange as the beliefs themselves.

10. ‘Margaret Thatcher Invented Soft-Serve Ice Cream’

When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, the bishop of London reignited the debate over whether or not one of Britain’s coldest leaders was involved in the unlikely invention of one of the world’s coldest treats—soft-serve ice cream. The story went massively mainstream, with news networks across the globe repeating the tale that Thatcher, who had a degree in chemistry from Oxford University, had briefly worked at J. Lyons & Company as a chemist. There, she reportedly helped to develop the method for adding extra air into ice cream to create a bizarre legacy.

However, the story isn’t true at all. Soft-serve ice cream first came from the US, not Britain, and it seems to have been the brainchild of either Tom Carvel or J.F. McCullough. They stumbled on the idea independently and in different ways, but at around the same time—in the 1930s, well before Thatcher’s 1947 college graduation. Soft-serve as we know it today really took its shape in the 1960s, though, with the development of air pumps and other equipment. …

7 Ways to Find Meaning at Work

^{David Brooks and Arthur Brooks offer advice on how to turn a job into a vocation.}

Several years ago, Gallup asked people in 142 countries to respond to a series of statements designed to measure employee engagement—involving matters like their job satisfaction, whether they felt their work was important, and whether they had opportunities in the workplace to learn and grow. What the polling firm found was that engagement is the exception, not the rule: Worldwide, 13 percent of employees were engaged at work, while 63 percent were not engaged and 24 percent were “actively disengaged,” meaning they were unhappy and unproductive. Engagement rates were highest in the United States and Canada, and lowest in East Asia.

“About one in eight workers … are psychologically committed to their jobs and likely to be making positive contributions to their organizations,” Gallup noted. “The bulk of employees worldwide … lack motivation and are less likely to invest discretionary effort in organizational goals or outcomes.” …

The Wolves of Silicon Valley: how megalomaniacs in hoodies became tech’s answer to Wall Street

Free food, sleep pods and graffiti walls. Few places are so enshrined in urban myth as Facebook, Google and other companies of their ilk. Silicon Valley has long been considered the Neverland of corporate life – a place where office slides and oversized Lego figures are as ubiquitous as water coolers. But what’s it really like to work at one of these tech behemoths?

‘Everyone freaked out when they found out I’d written this’

One person should know – Antonio Garcia Martínez. His CV includes Facebook product manager, Twitter advisor and start-up CEO. Today, however, the 40-year old is casting himself as lowly writer, soon-to-be “unemployable in tech”, thanks to Chaos Monkeys, his newly released exposé of life inside Silicon Valley. Martinez joined Facebook’s nascent advertising team in 2011, but as a vocal critic of the company’s strategy, he was pushed out after just two years. …

REAL FERAL CHILDREN OF THE MODERN WORLD

Stories of children who end up on their own in the wild and survive by their wits—or with the help of wild animals—have been around for as long as recorded history. Most of the stories are hard to believe, and a lot harder to confirm, but there are a few that have occurred in relatively modern times that are actually true.

JOHN SSEBUNYA OF UGANDA

In 1991 Millie Sseba was gathering firewood in the jungle near her village, when she came across a group of monkeys. One, in a tree, looked particularly odd. She looked closer…and saw that it was a human boy. She ran back to her village and returned with a group of men who, after battling the monkeys, were able to capture the boy. They took him to their village and cared for him. He was badly malnourished, covered with sores, and had tapeworms. A few weeks later, he was taken to Paul and Molly Wasswa, a Ugandan couple who run an orphanage for destitute children. The boy was soon identified as John Ssebunya, the son of a man and woman who used to live in a nearby village.

The story of what had happened to him began to be pieced together. John himself was able to add to it when he eventually learned to speak. About a year before he was found with the monkeys, at the age of three or four (nobody knows his exact age), John saw his father shoot and kill his mother. He fled, fearing he would be killed, too, and ended up in the jungle. A few days into the ordeal, a group of vervet monkeys approached the boy and, according to John, gave him food. Monkey experts say this part of the story is doubtful, and that it’s more likely the boy was simply allowed to take the monkeys’ extras. In any case, what is accepted as fact is that after some time the monkeys took the boy in. He learned to eat roots, fruits, and other monkey food, and spent most of his time in trees—and his monkey friends are credited with his survival in the jungle. John’s story became an international sensation and was the subject of a 1999 BBC documentary called Living Proof. …

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