Mcnally Quotes

Don’t pack up your camera until you’ve left the location.

Accepting the facts is always tough, so we search for forgiveness to this universe everyday to break the shackles, hurt is a prison and I from a very young young age refused to be held prisoner or even conform.

No matter how much crap you gotta plow through to stay alive as a photographer, no matter how many bad assignments, bad days, bad clients, snotty subjects, obnoxious handlers, wigged-out art directors, technical disasters, failures of the mind, body, and will, all the shouldas, couldas, and wouldas that befuddle our brains and creep into our dreams, always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It’s the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.

John Loengard, the picture editor at Life, always used to tell me, ”If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.

A professor I had in college used to tell me that if someone won’t listen to what you have to say because you’re not wearing a tie, then put on a tie, ’cause what you have to say is more important than not wearing a tie. He was right.

You’ve gotta taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it’s like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles.

Unpredictability. Accidents. Not good when you’re engaging in, say, brain surgery, but when lighting...wonderful!

I can’t tell you how many pictures I’ve missed, ignored, trampled, or otherwise lost just ‘cause I’ve been so hell bent on getting the shot I think I want.

Connie, have you been trying to call me?" No Archie. "Well, my phone has not been ringing all day, and I thought it might have been you.

Remember to have a little faith. When you die, I believe, God isn't going to ask you what you published. God's going to ask you what you wrote.

There's a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in doing something, you only do it when it's convenient. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.

Doubt is a storm. We either ride it out, or we change our course. Neither is right or wrong--to stay or go. Twenty years ago, should you have really married X, or Y? This college, or that? A life-changing decision one makes becomes the right decision by the fact of simply having been made.

Every once in a while, it pays to listen to those annoying characters who are just waiting to tell you how to do your job.

When shooting a story about someone, their hands should always be on your list to shoot.

I want to make something that’s fleeting and impermanent but so real and deep and loud.

I slid down in the seat and began to weep. I wept for her, for me, but mostly because the siren call of my first big story with a yellow border around it was more powerful than the call of fatherhood.

Secrets, my mother told me once, are just stories turned inside out.

Sometimes the heaviest things are the ones that don't weigh much at all.

A state is a sovereign political entity like the United Kingdom, Kenya, Panama, or New Zealand, eligible for membership in the United Nations and inclusion on the maps produced by Rand McNally or the National Geographic Society. A nation is a group of people who share—or believe they share—a common culture, ethnic origin, language, historical experience, artifacts, and symbols.

Too much—too tempting—to have my hands on it and not look at it. Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved. A power, a shine, came off it, a freshness like the morning light in my old bedroom in New York which was serene yet exhilarating, a light that rendered everything sharp-edged and yet more tender and lovely than it actually was, and lovelier still because it was part of the past, and irretrievable: wallpaper glowing, the old Rand McNally globe in half-shadow.

When I was in school, I wanted to be W. Eugene Smith. He was a legendary staffer at Life, a consummate photojournalist, and an architect of the photo essay. He was also kinda crazy. That was obvious when he came to lecture at Syracuse University and put a glass of milk and a glass of vodka on the lectern. Both were gone at the end of the talk. He was taking questions and I was in the front row, hanging on every word. Mr. Smith, is the only good light available light?” came the question. He leaned into the microphone. “Yes,” he baritoned, and paused. A shudder ran through all of us. That was it! No more flash! God’s light or nothing! But then he leaned back into the mic, “By that, I mean, any &*%%@$ light that’s available.” Point taken.

[on the Irish] A race of poets and wordsmiths, my ass.

How do you come back to the real world when you've fallen out for a bit?

But secrets aren’t hollow. They have heft and weight. They orbit us like little moons, held close by our gravity, all the while pulling us with their own.

Tioga did you wipe it on my mustache?

. . . install a tracking system--free of judgment or guilt--that you use just to record how you're doing, on a constant basis. In Tibetan this tracking system is known as tundruk, or "six times a day;" we call it a six-time book. If you follow this system, you'll get results.

After all, our patron saint, rock-and-roll princess Stevie Nicks, spent years hoping some guy might save her, and then she figured out that she was absolutely capable of saving herself.

Jay Maisel always says to bring your camera, ‘cause it’s tough to take a picture without it. Pursuant to the above aforementioned piece of the rule book, subset three, clause A, paragraph four would be…use the camera. Put it to your eye. You never know. There are lots of reasons, some of them even good, to just leave it on your shoulder or in your bag. Wrong lens. Wrong light. Aaahhh, it’s not that great, what am I gonna do with it anyway? I’ll have to put my coffee down. I’ll just delete it later, why bother? Lots of reasons not to take the dive into the eyepiece and once again try to sort out the world into an effective rectangle. It’s almost always worth it to take a look.

Her arms groped forward to guide her when her tears blocked her vision in darkness. Then she couldn't run any more. She sank to her knees and began to cry in her terror. She wanted Gary. She suddenly felt strong arms around her. She bent her head to bury it in Gary's shoulder, trembling in the darkness. Whimpering like a small animal in a trap, she pushed herself closer to him and said in a choked voice, "I'm so frightened!" "I know, my love," the voice said. "I'm so sorry you were hurt." She felt herself being pulled up to him, his grip around her tight. It was a strange feeling in this pitch-black hallway, where not even the light of the moon cast any illumination. The lips she touched were cold and yet they responded to her with an unusual warmth. His hands massaged her back. Something, Melanie thought, was wrong with that. The hands were too smooth, not like a plastered wrist would feel. "Gary?" she asked, backing away. She didn't trust what she couldn't see. "My love," the voice whispered, "there is no need to fear now. I shall protect you from those who mean you harm.

Well, I know a guy, he's from far far away He's a songwriter, he got something to say He says, "People in this city are too busy to hang out This town's so spread out, no one would hear you if you shout" Everyone's got a script to sell and someplace else they want to be There's always a lock that would open if you could just find the key" (It Ain't Easy Being Green)

MARIA. So. How is everyone? Can you hear me? I don't believe in microphones. Singing is first of all about projection. So is speech. People are forgetting how to listen. They want everything blasted at them. Listening takes concentration. If you can't hear me, it's your fault. You're not concentrating.

mother. “BONNIE?” Just

What I’m trying to convey is that I love my parents. Of course. But just as important, I enjoy them. How many sons and daughters can say that?

Commitment is the enemy of resistance, for it is the serious promise to press on, to get up, no matter how many times you are knocked down.

For capitalism to develop, customary ties between people and the land must be severed, and communal obligations among people disrupted.

I drove home in a State of Utter: utterly startled, utterly confused, utterly flummoxed.

I won the vote but shunned the soft parade [...] I won every battle and lost the war" (Geronimo)

A small container of Rocky Road lands on the counter next to me. “I figured Rocky Road was appropriate to pave the way to brown town,” she says with a laugh. The man in front of me takes his receipt, and the cashier, a younger woman, reaches for our purchases as soon as Banner starts laughing at her own joke. The cashier’s eyes go wide when she comprehends. “Brown Town? Is that up in the foothills, Logan? I’m not sure I’ve heard of it,” a familiar voice says from behind me. Oh, for Christ’s sake. I turn around to face Mrs. Harris, her hands full with a box of tea and a bottle of melatonin, but when I open my mouth to respond, nothing comes out. Banner smiles sweetly and says, “It’s just south of Pussy Ridge. At least, I’m pretty sure it is.” I choke, and the cashier’s face turns red. “Pussy Ridge. I haven’t heard of that either. I’ll have to ask Mr. Harris to get out the Rand McNally so we can take a drive there this weekend. I do love my weekend drives.” I have no idea how Banner is keeping a straight face, but she replies, “I love a good long ride too. Especially when it gets a little rough.” The older woman smiles. “Me too. Emmy has never been a fan, though. She’s always gotten carsick at the littlest bump.” Banner finally grins. “That explains so much about her.” The cashier’s eyes are tearing up as I shove money at her before I bag the ice cream, Doritos, and lube myself. “See you later, Mrs. Harris. You’ll have to let us know how that drive goes.

We were a poorly drawn triangle that day in the car, the angles between us always shifting, but always adding up to the same thing. In the end, we were always trying to understand one another, even if we only made it halfway most days.

A certain shoemaker one of the chief towns of Silesia, in the year 1591, September 20, on a Friday betimes in the morning, in the further part of his house, where there was adjoining a little garden, cut his own throat with his shoemaker's knife.

Eat, drink, smoke, swim in the ocean, play tennis, golf, and poker, watch polo, read trash, listen to pop singers, occasionally attend the theatre, opera, ballet, charity bashes, and private shindigs, buy clothes and trinkets, write to old friends, party with new friends, and sleep. I think that about covers it.

It was in her abode, in the janitorial quarters assigned her on the ground floor rear, that seemingly inoffensive Mrs. Shapiro set up a clandestine alcohol dispensary—not a speakeasy, but a bootleg joint, where the Irish and other shikkers of the vicinity could come and have their pint bottles filled up, at a price. And several times on weekends, when Ira was there, for he got along best with Jake, felt closest to him, because Jake was artistic, some beefy Irishman would come in, hand over his empty pint bottle for refilling, and after greenbacks were passed, and the transaction completed, receive as a goodwill offering a pony of spirits on the house. And once again those wry (rye? Out vile pun!), wry memories of lost opportunities: Jake’s drab kitchen where the two sat talking about art, about Jake’s favorite painters, interrupted by a knock on the door, opened by Mr. Shapiro, and the customer entered. With the fewest possible words, perhaps no more than salutations, purpose understood, negotiations carried out like a mime show, or a ballet: ecstatic pas de deux with Mr. McNally and Mr. Shapiro—until suspended by Mr. Shapiro’s disappearance with an empty bottle, leaving Mr. McNally to solo in anticipation of a “Druidy drunk,” terminated by Mr. Shapiro’s reappearance with a full pint of booze. Another pas de deux of payment? Got it whole hog—Mr. Shapiro was arrested for bootlegging several times, paid several fines, but somehow, by bribery and cunning, managed to survive in the enterprise, until he had amassed enough wealth to buy a fine place in Bensonhurst by the time “Prohibition” was repealed. A Yiddisher kupf, no doubt.

THE THING THAT ENTRANCED ME about Chicago in the Gilded Age was the city’s willingness to take on the impossible in the name of civic honor, a concept so removed from the modern psyche that two wise readers of early drafts of this book wondered why Chicago was so avid to win the world’s fair in the first place. The juxtaposition of pride and unfathomed evil struck me as offering powerful insights into the nature of men and their ambitions. The more I read about the fair, the more entranced I became. That George Ferris would attempt to build something so big and novel—and that he would succeed on his first try—seems, in this day of liability lawsuits, almost beyond comprehension. A rich seam of information exists about the fair and about Daniel Burnham in the beautifully run archives of the Chicago Historical Society and the Ryerson and Burnham libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago. I acquired a nice base of information from the University of Washington’s Suzallo Library, one of the finest and most efficient libraries I have encountered. I also visited the Library of Congress in Washington, where I spent a good many happy hours immersed in the papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, though my happiness was at times strained by trying to decipher Olmsted’s execrable handwriting. I read—and mined—dozens of books about Burnham, Chicago, the exposition, and the late Victorian era. Several proved consistently valuable: Thomas Hines’s Burnham of Chicago (1974); Laura Wood Roper’s FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (1973); and Witold Rybczynski’s A Clearing in the Distance (1999). One book in particular, City of the Century by Donald L. Miller (1996), became an invaluable companion in my journey through old Chicago. I found four guidebooks to be especially useful: Alice Sinkevitch’s AIA Guide to Chicago (1993); Matt Hucke and Ursula Bielski’s Graveyards of Chicago (1999); John Flinn’s Official Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893); and Rand, McNally & Co.’ s Handbook to the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893). Hucke and Bielski’s guide led me to pay a visit to Graceland Cemetery, an utterly charming haven where, paradoxically, history comes alive.

hungry spirits so that cattle and crops would not be damaged. The nearness of the spirits meant that all sorts of secrets could be divined on Halloween Night. Young couples roasted nuts on a fire, for example,

You’re referring to the guests?

tapioca

The basic building block of Evernote is a “note.”  It can be text, a photo, a snapshot from the web, an e-mail, a chart or graph, anything. 

Everything you see, feel, hear, taste, smell, or even think of is a projection.

We are like that child—looking at the world, believing it is out there, when in actuality we are the ones projecting it.

If you can do something about it, then why get upset? If you can't do anything about it, then why bother getting upset?

The second kind of pain is interesting, for it is what we would normally call pleasure.

It is important that we know that we don’t know when we’re absorbing information. Meta-cognition is, “knowing about knowing”. The common mistake that we make is we still continue to read when we no longer understand the context.

The hoax worked because of the West’s absolute belief in its superiority to people of color; if a savvy Westerner could not explain such a trick, it must be real. The rope trick filled a cultural need—and revealed the gullibility that such delusions of superiority inevitably create.

While there was plenty of free-floating xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-intellectualism around, what would be called McCarthyism was less a product of the American people as it was the collateral damage inflicted by the return to full power of the corporate world and its right-wing political allies.

As Stephen Spender put it, “Music is the most powerful of all the idealist drugs except religion.

Rock ’n’ roll, in fact, would be African American culture’s ultimately most powerful gift to the white children of the ’50s, ’60s,

It quickly became apparent that the team was clicking with its new coach. In an early-season pregame speech, Harbaugh implored his players to bleed for Stanford football, even going so far as to say that he wanted them to bring him their blood during a game. Harbaugh’s wish was Marinelli’s command. “Marinelli gets a cut on his arm,” McNally remembers, “he runs over to Coach Harbaugh. He’s like, ‘Coach, I’m bleeding for Stanford!’ Coach swipes the blood and, like, rubs it across his face in the middle of the game. And it’s the kind of thing where it’s like, ‘Coach, you’re freaking crazy.’ But that’s pretty awesome. That kind of thing, you laugh about it, but deep down you’re like, ‘That’s pretty cool. You’re crazy, you’re freakin’ out of your mind. But you’re passionate about this game, about Stanford football, and I can get on board with that.

What caused the cultural shifts of the ’60s? I accepted the consensus that the civil rights movement, the folk music renaissance, sexual freedom, and the psychedelic world had been the immediate stimuli, but I wanted to dig into older and deeper roots for that most intriguing era. I ended up finding a fundamental origin in the ongoing relationship between white, often young Americans and African American culture, primarily music.

The notion that nature was something made for man to dominate was the first of four major elements of the American creed that the nation’s first great social critic, Henry David Thoreau, would challenge. (The other three shibboleths were that America was the noble exception to all nations in its moral perfection, that Christianity was the only possible American religion, and that the Protestant work ethic and its implied worship of materialism were desirable and essential elements of any life.)

As minstrelsy and spirituals were succeeded by the new musical forms of the turn of the century, increasing numbers of white people began to join Twain and respond to African American life by seeing the intellectual shackles in their own lives and learning the lessons that those at the bottom of the social pyramid had to offer.

Minstrel music was party music, vigorous and sexy in contrast to the prissy bourgeois music of the era. That is why it succeeded.

Bechet even briefly played with Duke, and Ellington would take the counterpoint, romance, and beats of New Orleans music and build a compositional cathedral.

The American cultural scales were teetering, with the stable orthodoxy of WASP assumptions being challenged by the unwashed hordes of immigrants, African Americans, and working-class people along with intellectual and aesthetic developments broadly known as “the modern.” Ragtime would help tip the scales.

In Tibetan Buddhism, taking a root lama creates a sort of indelible connection to a teacher that can’t be erased by any sort of worldly action. The vows of obedience work on the spiritual plane and form a connection that persists in all future rebirths. It entails total submission to the will of another person, and complete trust that they will give you the tools you need to progress spiritually. From the moment she took the vows, McNally gave away control of her own life.

The truth is that Robert Johnson wrestled a superb art out of the blues tradition, an art that has appealed to generations of both black and white listeners, an art that is an essential element of the ongoing progression that is the freedom principle in operation. Forget the context, the mysteries, and the lies; those twenty-nine masters represent artistic truth.

The first year holds trauma unlike any other. The second year is a time of learning hard lessons, facing harsh realities, understanding that you, alone, are responsible for the life change you must accept, the new life you must develop.

He brightened. "Are you Irish then?" "My last name is McNally. I'm as Irish as Paddy's pig.

Richard J. McNally, a Harvard clinical research psychologist, considered the "politics of trauma" in Remembering Trauma (2003).[139] He argued that the definition of PTSD had been too broadly applied, and suggested narrowing it to include "only those stressors associated with serious injury or threat to life" —a suggestion that would drastically alter the public discussion of rape, incest, abuse by clergy, and the traumatic affect of racism and homophobia, to name just a few potentially trauma-inducing contexts and actions.[140] McNally presents his conclusion that most traumatic experience is remembered soon after the event, as if his view represents objective scientific research, when much evidence suggests that memories of traumatic events reoccur over time unpredictably. McNally’s bias is apparent in his strong support of Ian Hacking’s curiously fervent effort to discredit the diagnosis of multiple personality (dissociative identity disorder) and Hacking’s effort to blame clinicians attached to recovered memory therapy of the spurious "rewriting" of patients’ "souls."[141] While McNally accounts for those who do recall their traumas, he does not equally offer an explanation for those who do not remember them, and his extensive bibliography and research do not cite key publications that would challenge his results.[142] - Page 19

The other contested term is recovered memory therapy. As far as I can tell, no one practicsing psychotherapy today endorses this term as a descriptive of what they do... there are no self-described recovered memory therapists...

In 2006, there is no army of recovered memory therapists, and Dr McNally’s assumptions about patients with PTSD and those working in this field are troubling. Owing to past debates, those working in the PTSD field are perhaps more knowledgeable than others about malingered, factitious, and iatrogenic variants. Why, then, does Dr McNally attack PTSD as a valid diagnosis, demean those working in the field, and suggest that sufferers are mostly malingered or iatrogenic, while giving little or no consideration is given to such variants of other psychiatric conditions? Perhaps the trauma field has been “so often embroiled in serious controversy” (4, p 816) for the same reason Dr McNally and others have trouble imagining the traumatization of a Vietnam War cook or clerk. One theory suggests that there is a conscious decision on the part of some individuals to deny trauma and its impact. Another suggests that some individuals may use dissociation or repression to block from consciousness what is quite obvious to those who listen to real-life patients." Cameron, C., & Heber, A. (2006). Re: Troubles in Traumatology, and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory/Reply: Troubles in Traumatology and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory. Canadian journal of psychiatry, 51(6), 402.

In his recent guest editorial, Richard McNally voices skepticism about the National Vietnam Veteran’s Readjustment Study (NVVRS) data reporting that over one-half of those who served in the Vietnam War have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or subclinical PTSD. Dr McNally is particularly skeptical because only 15% of soldiers served in combat units (1). He writes, “the mystery behind the discrepancy in numbers of those with the disease and of those in combat remains unsolved today” (4, p 815). He talks about bizarre facts and implies many, if not most, cases of PTSD are malingered or iatrogenic. Dr McNally ignores the obvious reality that when people are deployed to a war zone, exposure to trauma is not limited to members of combat units (2,3). At the Operational Trauma and Stress Support Centre of the Canadian Forces in Ottawa, we have assessed over 100 Canadian soldiers, many of whom have never been in combat units, who have experienced a range of horrific traumas and threats in places like Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. We must inform Dr McNally that, in real world practice, even cooks and clerks are affected when faced with death, genocide, ethnic cleansing, bombs, landmines, snipers, and suicide bombers ... One theory suggests that there is a conscious decision on the part of some individuals to deny trauma and its impact. Another suggests that some individuals may use dissociation or repression to block from consciousness what is quite obvious to those who listen to real-life patients." Cameron, C., & Heber, A. (2006). Re: Troubles in Traumatology, and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory/Reply: Troubles in Traumatology and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory. Canadian journal of psychiatry, 51(6), 402.

Just as Huckleberry Finn was published, the first generation of African Americans raised in the postslavery era began to come of age. Among them were people with musical talent, and at first they went to work in minstrelsy, in the well-worn patterns of show business they’d inherited.

Genetic factors may contribute to vulnerability to stressful situations and to personality characteristics that influence the person’s risk for entering into potentially hazardous situations (Jang et al., 2003). However, a direct genetic link to traumatization is far from clear (Brewin et al., 2000; Emily et al., 2003; McNally, 2003).

Paul McNally is a prick,” he says. “You’ve met?” I raise an eyebrow. “Unfortunately. Usually the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but in Dante’s case it’s like somehow a rotten apple tree produced a wonderful orange.

... in that slow heat that enveloped them, that everything was going to turn out just fine. Or even if they knew there was a chance it wouldn't, they'd still haven chosen to do it anyway.

She's a picture of concern, like some kind of well, bless your heart Southern woman in an old movie. Except that my freshman-year English teacher was from Alabama, and I know what Southern people mean when they say bless your heart.

In March Miles opened for Steve Miller at the Fillmore East, but Miles’s low opinion of Miller created complications. Miller “didn’t have shit going for him,” wrote Miles, “so I’m pissed because I got to open for this non-playing motherfucker just because he had one or two sorry-ass records out. So I would come late and he would have to go on first, and then when we got there, we just smoked the motherfucking place and everybody dug it, including Bill [Graham]!

possible that the gift of consciousness has a direct relationship to the atoms of the sense and purpose in the design of organisms, you know. I mean, we’re surrounded by artifacts of the mind, things we’ve invented. All these things are metaphors—they’re telling me something about what my mind is . . . It’s furious manipulation, man, and it’s coming from my mind. It’s what separates us from IT. I’m curious because I’ve had my fucking mind blown. What is IT?

BLACK MUSIC DIDN’T stop with the blues in Mississippi but followed the river to its end, to New Orleans, an island in a swamp created by the natural levees the river left behind after centuries of floods. It was the only place for miles around dry enough for Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville to stand on and establish it in 1718, naming it for the regent of France, Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans. Philippe was a truly debauched man who slept late and never worked hard and loved food and sex, and the city has honored his memory ever since.

There’s a better way. There has to be education, and the education has to come from the poets and musicians, because it has to touch the heart rather than the intellect, it has to get in there deeply.

Mary: What are you teaching Him at that public high school of yours, Mrs. McElroy? Joshua: She's teaching Me that this town is the armpit of Western civilization.

Patricia: What they did was stupid and cruel and why I am going to write the president of the United States telling him that if there is any place in this country where nuclear bomb testing should be allowed, it's Corpus Christi, Texas.

Gravity is a cruel bitch.

If Jeff was a blackmailer,

Aristotle’s classic dictum: “A whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end.” It is true for a whole life, is it not? That realization has been

Weak, small minded men torturing and murdering women in order to keep their own power.

JESUS: I adore you…I christen you Judas. I did love you, you know.” JUDAS: Not in the way I wanted,

I am not an artist in the independent sense, I’m part of dynamic situations, and that’s where I like it.

And on the wall next to my desk is a huge Rand McNally wall map of the United States and southern Canada. All I have to do is turn and look at it (as I did just now) and I get this strange rush, an odd mixture of hope and foreboding that harkens back to something a Viking might have felt when stepping into a longboat. Or, in my case, an Irishman stepping into a curragh. It’s a vision that blows the walls off your house, zooms you backwards into deep space, and makes anything seem possible. Looking at a map is the seed of adventure. GPS screens don’t do this to me.

The mistake-riddled life is much richer, more interesting and more stimulating than the life that has never risked or taken a stand on anything.

You divide seventy-two by ten and learn that in seven-point-two years you’ll have two million dollars. It works the other way too. Say you have a million dollars to invest and want to double it in five years. You divide seventy-two by five and learn you’ll have to get a yield of fourteen-point-four percent to do it.” “Crazy,” I said. “And this little trick works for any amount you want to invest, from ten bucks on up?” “That’s right.” “Explain it,” I urged. “Why the number is seventy-two and not, say, sixty-four or ninety-three.” Mr. Pettibone shrugged.

linear progression was distorted. So we would just drop the one, we would get lost, we would call it the pulse. We would go on the pulse, so all of a sudden the pulse would lead us to a place, and we were completely lost, we didn’t know where the original one was, so instead of struggling with the one, we would establish a new one, and that was the telepathy that me and Billy had. And they would catch on to our telepathic one, and they would latch on. When the third person went to it, it became legitimate. It would stay illegitimate for a certain amount of time, and we would be able to fly or float on the pulse, and there was no need to sound the one or recognize the one. Sometimes the one was known, and we’d let it go untouched. Other times we all pounced on it and sounded it and made it into a one.

It is only in staring horrors in the face and insisting on their systemic, not accidental, character that theory sustains radical commitments.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

As it turns out, there is a consensus among cognitive behavioural therapists that trigger warnings are counter-productive when it comes to trauma recovery. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explain in The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), ‘avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it’. They quote Richard McNally, the director of clinical training at the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, who writes: ‘Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD’.

Curtis Rouanzoin waves a thin metal rod back and forth in front of my eyes as I recall memories of my mother. He then places headphones over my ears and plays tones that jump from the right earpiece to the left one as I keep remembering and feeling pain, remembering and feeling pain—until I’m just remembering. Lindsay Joy Greene ducks as I send my fist flying into the air with all my strength, releasing anger that feels like it’s been trapped in my wrist for decades. I do it over and over again with each hand, until I just don’t need to anymore. Olga Stevko spends eight hours hypnotizing me. I walk around her office, entering the minds of my parents in search of the things they didn’t get from their parents. Then I imagine flowing these qualities to each person in my family back seven generations and then forward to me in the moment I was conceived, until I feel like I actually grew up with them. Greg Cason gives me homework. Lots of it. Thought records, goal sheets, written exposures, gratitude diaries, behavioral experiments—each one chipping away at my fears and pathological accommodation until I can see them as the delusions they are. Barbara McNally tells me to close my eyes; picture myself and my mother in a room with a white light coming from me and an X over her; and then imagine yelling, “Give me the fucking keys!” as I punch her in the face repeatedly. I am at war. It is a strange fucking war. But I am winning.

On a scale of one to ten, how strong is the emotion attached to the memories we’ve been working on?” Curtis Rouanzoin asks one day. The procedure I’ve been going through with him is called EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, which looks at the way trauma is stored in the brain and attempts to properly process it. “If it used to be a ten, now it’s an eight,” I tell him. Lindsay Joy Greene is trained in a therapy called SE, or somatic experiencing, and she’s been locating trauma trapped not in my brain, but in my body, and releasing the stored energy. One day she asks, “On a scale of one to ten, how much anger do you feel when you recall the memories we’ve been discussing?” “If it used to be an eight, now it’s a seven,” I tell her. Olga Stevko practices her own variant of NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming. Where the experientials with Lorraine were about debugging my operating system, her process is about rewriting the original code. For example, she tells me that inside my mother’s words, “Never grow up to make anyone as miserable as your father makes me,” was a hidden command: Never grow up. As she helps me grow up, it brings my trauma down to a six. Greg Cason specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy, which takes it to a five. And I don’t know what to call Barbara McNally’s method and her bottomless quiver of techniques, but they work, they’re original, and they bring the emotion associated with those memories to a four. And I do so much more: I beat pillows with baseball bats. I tap on energy meridians. I make shadow maps of my dark side. I try psychodrama. Not all of it works, but none of it hurts.

Attraction can happen fast, but that doesn't mean anything if it isn't followed by an emotional connection. Without that, it's just a fun backseat romp that leaves you feeling empty after.

At the urging of Chakrabarti and McNally, the company set up a new team to handle “At Risk Countries,” or ARC. Nobody ever specified what they were at risk of, but the criteria made it clear. To get “At Risk” status, a country had to have a history of violence, a potential trigger for future conflict such as an upcoming election, and a high Facebook market penetration. In other words, the status was reserved for places where Facebook’s products could plausibly cause or exacerbate a genocide or civil war.

haunt me in