The 27-Year-Old Guy Who Tweets for Steak-umm Is Millennial Angst Personified

Nathan Allebach doesn’t consult a formula, research keywords or track online trends before he hits “send” on one of his tweets. That would, in a lot of ways, defeat the point of his abstract craft. Sometimes, he bolts awake in the middle of the night with a genius idea for a truly dumb shitpost. Other times, he lets loose his views on the world while stuck in a mid-day doldrum.

On September 26th, the 27-year-old published a tweet thread underlining his reflections on why young people feel so alone online and in their physical lives — only he did so as Steak-umm, the East Coast frozen steak brand noted for its use in discount Philly cheesesteaks.

Steak-umm on Twitter: "why are so many young people flocking to brands on social media for love, guidance, and attention? I'll tell you why. they're isolated from real communities, working service jobs they hate while barely making ends meat, and are living w/ unchecked personal/mental health problems / Twitter"

why are so many young people flocking to brands on social media for love, guidance, and attention? I'll tell you why. they're isolated from real communities, working service jobs they hate while barely making ends meat, and are living w/ unchecked personal/mental health problems

The seven tweets got nearly 100,000 combined likes. And all of a sudden, everyone was talking about Steak-umm. Over the course of a year, Allebach has ushered this family-owned frozen steak company into Twitter fame, jumping from 4,600 followers in December to nearly 36,000 today. Plenty of brands — think Wendy’s, Moon Pie and Denny’s — have gone viral by taking on a bizarre or confrontational voice to appeal to the teens. But the Steak-umm Twitter account has elevated this to an art form, sometimes trying to sell you meat, and sometimes just tweeting bullshit that has nothing to do with meat.

This evolution of a brand is happening through a guy who never had aspirations in marketing, preferring to play and record music with a series of small bands. But a bad breakdown with anxiety and depression in his early 20s and some soul-searching led him, in classic millennial fashion, to his father’s ad agency, Allebach Communications, for a glorified unpaid internship. “He knew I’d used social media to promote myself and my art. I just kind of fell into it like that. It didn’t really resonate with me at all, to be honest. I felt like I was just doing it as a job, and I had a lot of privileged guilt about it because it was my dad’s agency,” Allebach says.

It was only when he took over the Steak-umm account last summer that he saw a blank slate worth experimenting with, and a company open to more unconventional marketing tactics. Though Steak-umm had tried Twitter in the past — only to quit after it fell into some unrelentless trolling — in a stroke of luck, a new marketing exec was a good friend of the agency’s. He vouched for Allebach, kick-starting a slow process to fill the account with memes, low-res shitposts, ironic puns and plenty of therapeutic life lessons (each with the now iconic sign-off phrase “steak-umm bless”).

Steak-umm on Twitter

a lot of people write about self love/care online. it warrants constant reminders. yet at the same time, people need more than a tweet. they need connection. purpose. a sense of belonging. reach out to help someone in these ways- you can make a big difference Steak-umm bless

Steak-umm on Twitter

https://t.co/eMWebhQcBi

Now a success story, Allebach has spent a lot of late nights alone, staring at the blue-hued light glowing from the ever-present screen of his iPhone, wondering why he does what he does. The media, meanwhile, has been speculating, too. “Steak-umm Is Woke and Now Everything Is Hell,” cracked the AV Club. “Steak-umm Exploits Millennial Angst to Sell Sliced Steak,” wrote Eater. Mashable, meanwhile, wagged its finger at the brand’s rehash of “anti-consumerist advertising.”

Matt Novak on Twitter

Why is everything just weird now?

The Atlantic’s Taylor Lorenz, who writes about online subcultures, agrees with the criticism that the millennial-snark humor of certain brands on Twitter is rapidly becoming stale. What Steak-umm has tapped into, however, is a different kind of engagement, she says. “The one I hate most is Denny’s. It’s so cheesy now, but old people think it’s funny and relatable to teens,” she says with a laugh. “We’re in this dark time culturally, and it’s hard to relate to young people unless you go full-on depression mode. But Steak-umm is being existential in its angst. That’s hard for a brand to do in an authentic way, but they’re trying.”

Allebach’s online interactions have so far correlated to growth in sales for Steak-umm, which motivates the company’s owners, and his parents’ agency, to keep him at the steering wheel of the brand’s image. But how in the world could that momentum last given the fickle trends of advertising? Can a brand’s voice ever stay authentic if it gets too popular? And does it even matter if a brand loses integrity? I recently talked to Allebach about what he’s learned in a whirlwind year of taking a brand viral, and what it says about the society who loves the approach.

Steak-umm on Twitter

https://t.co/axfFFXyQ2h

What’s the strategy behind building a personality around frozen shaved meat, exactly?
The thing that separates the Steak-umm account from any other brand that I’ve seen is the fact that we don’t have many boundaries with how I’m allowed to be on it. Obviously, I’m not gonna curse, and I’m not gonna create politically polarizing statements. But as far as the way the content’s delivered, it’s never in what you’d call a traditional brand voice.

Even an account like MoonPie — and I know the guys who run that account, and they’re hilarious, like seriously mega-geniuses — but even with them, they’ve created a brand where every single post that they do, it comes from a very specific voice, and it has very specific connotations to the product. Whereas what I’m allowed to do, like with that rant that went viral, can have literally nothing to do with the product. We’re just able to jump outside those boundaries. It’s not like a crazy difference. But when you read the things that I tweet, it’s apparent that it’s just a kid or a young adult tweeting from behind a screen. It sometimes sounds very branded, but most times, it kinda sounds like a friend is talking, in some weird way.

It’s a weird balancing act because I do work within an agency structure. So I’m bouncing ideas off of my coworkers, and we’re getting things approved, and we’re still working together on projects. But the end of the day, these tweets are just coming from my brain. I’m just firing them off.

We shit-post memes — the more 4chan-y, Reddit stuff, and that’s fun for an audience that comes to our page for that type of content. And then we have this whole branch of the Steak-umm bless thing, which is more of the philosophical, therapeutic style rants that I’ve done for about a year. I posted one about ghosts ’cause it’s Halloween soon, and about how movies always depict ghosts and evil spirits as haunting the main characters. In actuality, when you get to the end of the movie, you discover in some contextual or conceptual way that it’s the main character who created this ghost and is holding onto it.

Steak-umm on Twitter

some people joke about ghosts haunting them this time of year, but often we're the ones who can't let them go. we channel our bad memories into them. our guilt, bitterness, confusion, and trauma. they follow us everywhere. maybe it's time to set your ghosts free Steak-umm bless

You ever get into trouble for a post?
There was one around Christmas time. I posted a nativity scene meme. It was one of those that was already popular, so I created one that replaced verbiage with Steak-umm innuendoes. We have a big mix in our audience, of people who think Steak-umm is inherently funny to make fun of, and then older people who have been eating this stuff for 30 years and are more conservatively minded. One of the latter must’ve called. The company pretty much just said, “Back off the Jesus memes.”

Were you surprised by how people reacted starting last fall?
Yeah. I think the Huffington Post was the first place to pick us up, and then it just snowballed. AdWeek picked it up. Our regional Philadelphia newspaper picked it up. Our impression rate on social media kind of doubled on itself each month from there. Once the media started to pick up on what we were doing, the client knew it was successful. Then we were able to get data back in January or February that showed how it was helping sales. We weren’t doing any advertising, including paid ads on Twitter or Facebook or anything. We could literally attribute all of the increase in sales to the tweeting. So it became a real job for me. At the end of the day, it still comes down to return on investment: “What are you doing for me? Are we generating sales? And are we generating more brand awareness?”

How the lines are blurring between brand and consumer and their emotional relationship is a fascinating topic. Do you feel conflicted?
I know I feel morally pulled back and forth on it. There are people who make critiques about it and say, “Oh, well, you’re advertising a product, but you’re trying to be a person, and you’re manipulating people.” My take on that is always, it’s right in your face. We’re Steak-umm. I’m not trying to hide the fact that it’s a brand. At the same time, I do understand the depth of how subliminal advertising can be, and how no one’s immune to it. I think that maintaining an awareness of the tension between running a company and trying to create a transparent, relational persona is super important. As soon as you lose sight of that tension’s existence, then you’ve lost the plot.

The people who are interacting with Steak-umm are mostly somewhere between 14 and probably 23, I’m gonna say. There are definitely millennials, and there’s definitely older people doing it, but those younger generations grew up saturated with social media. That inundation of blurred media signals, and not really knowing how to interpret what they are, is definitely aided by the creation of this whole subculture of online, weird, absurdist humor, like r/SurrealMemes or DankMemes. There are swaths of kids who have seen every type of ad; now they’re willing to push the boundaries past whatever is left, you know?

What does it say about young people being so appreciative of brands taking on this voice and having this role? Are we just kind of interested in the Dadaist aspect of how weird it is to have a “Steak-umm bless” serve as a form of daily therapy?
There’s something cool about someone who clicks with the same absurdist humor, as if they’re in on a joke. But there’s also a portion of the audience that’s confused, and trying to figure out how they feel about the world. The rant that went viral resonates because of the idea of loneliness. And there’s obviously a mental health epidemic going on, and more people seem anxious, depressed or isolated. I can’t even tell you how many people, mostly kids, have DM’d me about how they don’t know what to go to college for, they don’t know what to do as a career…

Seriously?
Oh, hundreds. Literally hundreds of kids asking me what they should do for a career. It’s obvious that whatever’s happened in their lives, they’re not getting that information in their real life, and they’re going to these insane outlets like a brand on Twitter because they think it’s relatable, and they say, “Oh, whomever runs this gets it. I’ll ask them what they think.”

This experiment, this voice, doesn’t work if everyone does it, right? Aren’t we even kind of heading toward that bubble?
The concern is very warranted. There’s a few brands that I’ve noticed recently… I’ll name names. Corn Nuts is pretty new on Twitter, and they followed almost every single person Steak-umm follows — all in one day. I’m not even kidding. It must have been at least 200 or 300 people who tagged Steak-umm asking, “Why did Corn Nuts just follow me, Steak-umm — did you do this?”

So that account is spouting off millennial lingo, and it’s interesting, because I don’t think it’s that funny, personally. Maybe it’s working for them? I don’t know. But they’re a sign of what’s gonna happen, because now there are more case studies, and more brands are gonna be giving more young people the reins. There are going to be growing pains. I know I’m good at what I do, but so much of that has to do with luck and timing, and the type of brand it is. I’m talking to a company next week about their social media activity, and I already know that what they wanna know is whether I can do for their company what I did for Steak-umm.

Maybe we really are nearing the finish line of how far we can push social media in this way because we’ve completely broken down the fourth wall, and I don’t know what comes after that. Wendy’s had a specific approach to being sassy; MoonPie has an approach to being quirky; and obviously, now you have more brands being absurdist or whatever. What happens when you use up all the obvious approaches?

I have a friend who does this work who jokes about how what’s next is that one of these huge brands is gonna drop an f-bomb on the account and own it. Like, we’re gonna see how far we can push this envelope of what a brand is.

Has this job impacted your mental health?
Yes. Definitely. I mentioned before, like in December or January when it was really popping off, I tweeted around 5,000 or 6,000 times in each one of those months. It was literally day-in and day-out. On average, at this point, I tweet about 1,000 times a month, and even that feels like all day, all night. That doesn’t include responding to DMs or our content calendar scheduling, so it’s a lot of work.

But in that period when I was just on Twitter 24/7, I was going through some personal issues with my fianceé at the time, and work was obviously hectic, and I didn’t notice how much it was affecting me until it really did. It was a month or so into that period that I realized that social media was like a drug. Younger people are normally aware of social media addiction in general, and I kept playing it off like it wasn’t going to affect me because I was aware of it. But when you’re dealing with that level of people interacting with you on a daily basis… I wasn’t sleeping. I was staying up ’til like three or four in the morning tweeting, and then waking up at nine or ten and going into work and tweeting all day again. It jacked me up for a bit.

I was seeing a therapist at the time, too. Once I hit the wall, he pretty much told me, “Alright, now is the time to scale it back. Just scale it back.”

I like the pressure of doing what I do, but I think running Steak-umm social was touching on anxieties that already existed in my mind. I’ve dealt with anxiety and depression in the past; I have a panic disorder. Once you’re not on a regular sleep schedule and you’re dealing with onslaughts of comments, good and bad, you [struggle to] compartmentalize all of it. I guess from the content I put out, it’s clear I’m a very temperamentally existential person, and I kind of played up the existentialism in my own anxieties. Seeing a therapist is the best thing you can do as a social media manager (laughs).

Is this a career for you now? And what do you take from this experience with Steak-umm?
Almost everyone I talk to about it says the same thing. “It’s crazy to see the tweets go viral because it’s literally just you.” It really does sound like me in real life. Prior to all this, I was the same person as I am right now: weird, out there, talk too much, kinda cocky, kinda crazy, but enjoying putting ideas out there. I’ve always been a people person; I’ve always been into developing people’s potential and ideas.

So the coolest thing for me is it gave me a chance to see the type of things that I say work, within thousands of online relationships. Having that resonate was very indicative of like, okay, I know I’m not a psychologist, I know I’m not a brand expert, I’m not a PhD. But I have a decent handle on emotional intelligence, and I love talking to people.

And I think in the future, whether that’s through brand consulting, personal consulting or business consulting, I want to get into helping other people find a way to be themselves in a way that makes them successful. Everyone always says, “Just be yourself,” but the truth is, some people suck, you know? I hate that saying, ’cause I know a lot of people who are just being themselves, and they wouldn’t get anywhere in life.

I’d love to find some kind of pathway into helping other people find real, authentic people to run their brands and their companies. You have these seminars and these social media influencers and everybody’s using the words like “authentic,” “community” and “transparency.” People go into meetings saying, “We have to be more transparent.” But they aren’t transparent, so it inherently doesn’t work. You have to be willing to break down the fourth walls that prevent any kind of authenticity from showing up.

Eddie Kim is a features writer at MEL. He last wrote about the awfully familiar history of doppelgänger crimes.

More Eddie:

• Why Millennial Men Don’t Go to Therapy
• The SoCal Skater Dude Who Doubles As YouTube’s Philosopher King
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• Their Diet? 100 Percent Meat. And They Say They’ve Never Felt Healthier.

The 27-Year-Old Guy Who Tweets For Steak-umm Is Millennial Angst Personified was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Manny Balestrero should have never walked into that life insurance office. But on January 14, 1953, he did, looking to borrow $325 from his wife’s policy in order to pay for some critical dental work she needed. The next night, as he unlocked the door of his modest stucco home in Queens, he heard a voice from behind him. “Hey, Chris!” a man called out, referring to him by his formal first name.

Balestrero turned and spotted three police officers. They were detectives, and they were adamant that Balestrero needed to come with them, as he was suspected to be a serial robber who was hitting targets all over Queens. Balestrero had no idea what to say — he was a bass player at the Stork Club, happily married if struggling a bit financially. Yet as the detectives toured him through a string of Queens liquor shops, drugstores and delis, as well as that Prudential life insurance office, a string of witnesses confidently proclaimed him as the culprit.

Balestrero’s real-life mix up with a doppelganger is the subject of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 docu-drama The Wrong Man, which has a happy ending of sorts: Balestrero was eventually exonerated when the police found and arrested the real culprit in the middle of another robbery. Claiming that someone who looks like you committed the crime is a gambit as old as our criminal justice system — and one that more often than not falls flat. But in this case, it turned out to be true.

It’s basically an extension of the misidentification defense, where you argue that the victim or eyewitnesses involved aren’t remembering the incident correctly or with enough precision. With a doppelganger defense, though, the defendant is basically saying that the people who claim it was them did remember the face of the assailant correctly — but that it wasn’t their own.

The phrase has hit mainstream consciousness thanks to Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court nominee currently mired in controversy over his alleged sexual assault of schoolmate Christine Ford when he was 17 and she was 15. Ford has testified that she was attacked by Kavanaugh at a house party in July 1982, where the alcohol was flowing amid people she either knew or knew of. She says a “stumbling drunk” Kavanaugh cornered her in a room, climbed on top of her, and attempted to tear her clothing off while holding his hand over her mouth, all the while groping her. “I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” Ford told The Washington Post.

Kavanaugh, in response, has been adamant about his complete innocence. “I am not questioning and have not questioned that perhaps Dr. Ford at some point in her life was sexually assaulted by someone at some place, but what I know is I’ve never sexually assaulted anyone,” he said in a Fox News interview.

Along those lines, conservative activist Ed Whelan attempted to come to Kavanaugh’s rescue with a hypothesis that a classmate of Kavanaugh’s, who he claimed looked similar, had been the culprit — even doxxing the man with a tweet revealing his full name and home address, among other details. Whelan quickly realized this was a mistake (and possibly libel), but the theory spread rapidly across the digital seas of the right-wing.

For her part, Ford has been adamant that she would “never” mix up Kavanaugh’s face with another’s. And while misidentifications plague the criminal justice system generally, the real-life “doppelganger defense” is more rare and challenging to prove than people assume, says Peter Johnson, a lawyer and criminal defense expert who lectures at UCLA. “The accused needs a good alibi, and if the alibi is bad, then who was it? The burden isn’t supposed to be on the defendant with that question, but in practice, of course they’re confronted with that,” he explains. “When a defendant claims it was someone else in the face of other credible evidence, it requires additional investigation. Most people with power and money can explore that defense.”

Kavanaugh and Ford obviously aren’t in a formal trial process, just a rapid FBI background investigation — one that many legal experts think falls short, given the agency has no ability to subpoena information from relevant players. But what do the incredibly rare proven cases of doppelganger crime actually tell us about the claim that Ford is simply misremembering the person behind the face? As it turns out, there’s a reason why such instances are so uncommon. A review of three publicized mix-ups shows that while they’re complicated crimes, the factors that fueled them are extremely distinct from what Kavanaugh’s defenders can claim.

The Time an Innocent Man Served 17 Years

A 2015 study found that the likelihood of having a real-life doppelganger, with facial features in all the right proportions, is a one-in-a-trillion shot. Yet look at a photo of Kansas City resident Richard Jones and his criminal doppelganger, and you’d be hard-pressed to call them anything but doppelgangers. They both have caramel-hued skin, neat braids of black hair and the same trimmed goatee. Even their eyes sport the same downward turn and folded eyelids.

Jones found his doppelganger while stuck behind bars for a robbery he didn’t commit in 1999. He kept hearing from inmates that another man who had served time looked just like him, and even shared the same first name. Jones wanted to do anything to cut his 19-year sentence short, so he reached out to the Midwest Innocence Project, pleading for legal help. A pro-bono team tracked the other man, named “Ricky” Amos, down. He lived near the site of the robbery, in Rowland Park, Kansas, whereas Jones lived in Missouri at the time. “When I saw his picture, it just made sense to me,” Jones told the Kansas City Star. “They say you can’t see the picture clearly if you [are] in it, but if I was outside this picture I would have seen the same thing.”

The cops never found any DNA evidence, but they hunted down Jones months after the robbery thanks to the testimony of a man who admitted that he’d only met Jones once (while high on drugs, to boot). It didn’t matter much to the jury, which was convinced by the fact that witnesses and the robbery victim had picked Jones out of a photo lineup. “There’s an element of laziness by prosecution and police, where once someone identifies a suspect in a photo, it’s like, ‘Hey, all is good, the jury is going to believe us,’” says UCLA’s Johnson. “More pre-trial investigation could have prevented this.”

When the two witnesses, victim and prosecutor were shown side-by-side photos of Amos and Jones last summer, no one could tell them apart. After hearing an appeal, a judge ordered Jones be set free in June 2017, though he had served all but two years of his sentence. A thin silver lining is that people from around the internet raised more than $25,000 for him to get a new start as a free man.

The Time the Best-Friend Lookalike (Maybe) Pulled the Trigger

A May 2009 case seemed pretty open-and-shut to San Francisco prosecutors: Detectives had recovered a phone from the scene of a shooting at Visitacion Valley, where 19-year-old Eric Campos lay dead from a bullet to the head. The phone belonged to 16-year-old Orlando Ware, and a quick call search showed that he’d phoned Campos just hours before the killing, likely for a drug deal.

The cops arrested Ware, but soon realized that a second man had been at the scene. It didn’t take much sleuthing to realize it was Ward’s closest friend. They were both lanky black kids with braids, and they’d worn matching puffy jackets with diamond stitching while meeting Campos. Law enforcement speculated that Campos was chasing after Ward and his friend over stolen goods when Ward turned to shoot him down.

But some of the findings threw them for a loop. In the pocket of the friend’s jacket, investigators found the weed and ecstasy they believed had been stolen from the victim. And both puffy jackets tested positive for gunpowder. Nonetheless, prosecutors on the case pushed forward with Ward’s cell phone as the lone piece of physical evidence, and delved into his background for context. Ward was just 15 when he caught his first offense, as an accessory to a robbery of a 23-year-old woman in San Francisco in July 2006. He got a lucky break, given that he was released on probation with conditions that he obey a curfew, seek counseling and not skip school.

Over the next 10 months, he broke probation multiple times, ultimately turning himself into a juvenile detention facility after a bad gunfight with a rival gang. In another lucky break, just days after he was booked, then San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced an early-release program for qualifying incarcerated juveniles. Ward walked free and eight days later killed Campos, prosecutors said.

Perhaps the prosecution thought the jury would be swayed by this record, and Ward’s story did spark debates about whether or not criminal justice reforms were too lenient. In the end, however, a lack of convincing evidence and the unwillingness of the prosecution to thoroughly consider the doppelganger accomplice led to a not-guilty verdict.

The Time the Doppelganger Was Executed

Carlos DeLuna was executed in 1989 for the murder of 24-year-old Wanda Lopez, a gas station attendant in Corpus Christi, Texas. Until his dying day, DeLuna claimed that his doppelganger, a man in Corpus Christi named Carlos Hernandez, had been the one to stab her.

The attack happened on the night of February 4, 1983, and reports were convoluted from the moment the first 911 calls came through. One witness inside the gas station store claimed the attacker wore a flannel shirt; another from the street identified a man in a white dress shirt. Simultaneous reports had the suspect running both north and east after the stabbing. Later that night, police found DeLuna hiding under a pickup truck in a puddle of water, missing a shirt but with a wad of $149 in his pocket. The crime scene was “incredibly bloody,” as one police report noted, and witnesses claimed the killer had struggled with Lopez, but no blood was found on DeLuna’s shoes or pants. A white shirt found two days later, purportedly the one that DeLuna ditched, also showed no blood.

Things got more bizarre in trial. DeLuna claimed that Hernandez appeared out of the blue to say “hello” while he was hanging out with his two sisters earlier on February 4. He recognized Hernandez as someone from his childhood, and proposed going out for a drink at a nearby bar to catch up. Amid rounds of beer, Hernandez got up to grab something from the gas station across the street. That’s when DeLuna claims he witnessed the man attacking Lopez. In a panic, he walked out of the bar and began running when he heard sirens, he testified.

The problem was that DeLuna was the opposite of a reliable narrator. His alibi had holes — one of the two sisters was at a baby shower, and he lied to his parole officer that day about where he was. He also had two attempted violent rapes on his record, which made jurors fixate on his penchant for violence against women. Police didn’t investigate the doppelganger, Hernandez, because DeLuna refused to pick out his mugshot from a database of men with the same name in Corpus Christi. He never explained why.

But 2006 and 2012 reviews from the Chicago Tribune and Columbia Law School found major evidence of discrepancies in the murder trial. The Columbia team specifically found Hernandez had a history of robbing gas stations and assaulting women with knifes. They also found friends and acquaintances of Hernandez who claimed he had bragged to them about killing Lopez and watching DeLuna take the blame. In fact, he later served 19 months in prison for stabbing another local woman with a knife nearly identical to the one used to kill Lopez.

Even DeLuna’s lawyers didn’t know what to make of the case, with one speculating that perhaps DeLuna and Hernandez were in it together. Another lawyer suggested that DeLuna feared snitching on Hernandez, who ultimately died of cirrhosis while in prison in 1999. But the victim’s family appears to believe DeLuna’s side, with Lopez’s brother releasing a statement in 2006 that read in part, “I am convinced that Carlos DeLuna did not kill my sister and that Carlos Hernandez was the real murderer.”

These three cases, as well as the tale of Manny Balestrero, show us that though some men have become entangled with a lookalike criminal, the context around it is critical and unique. While victims and eyewitnesses misidentifying suspects remains a major issue for law enforcement and the courts, the vast majority of these instances deal with strangers or unfamiliar environments. In other words, doppelganger defenses are strong when there’s too little consistent information; they often crumble when time is spent to understand each person’s background and motives (and when the victim knows the perpetrator).

The critics of Christine Ford suggest that, as with unreliable witnesses, she’s misremembering the evening. Yet that ignores the differences between having to recall the face of an attacker you’ve never seen before and that of acquaintances like Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge, whom Ford says was in the room, laughing loudly at Kavanaugh’s attempt at raping her.

It’s true that Ford admits she can’t remember some details of the night, including how she got home, which her detractors have seized upon. But she and others have painted a precise, unflinching portrait of a young Kavanaugh, with additional reporting (on his friends and activities) that explain why he could have been in that bedroom with her. This is also consistent with expert opinions on how stress cements certain traumatic memories and not other, more banal ones. It’s also, given the topic at hand, inconsistent with the doppelganger theory.

“Without getting into who did what exactly, I can’t say that it makes sense,” UCLA’s Johnson says of the assertion that a lookalike assaulted Ford. “It sounds clearly like Dr. Ford knew him in advance. This isn’t really how misidentification works in wrongful convictions, and the doppelganger defense wouldn’t actually apply, I think.”

Eddie Kim is a features writer at MEL. He last wrote about the lives of illiterate men.

More Eddie:

• Why Millennial Men Don’t Go to Therapy
• The SoCal Skater Dude Who Doubles As YouTube’s Philosopher King
• What Activists Are Doing to Fight the Rampant Growth of Bestiality
• Our Love of Guns Is Often Passed Down from Father to Son
• Their Diet? 100 Percent Meat. And They Say They’ve Never Felt Healthier.

The Awfully Familiar History of Doppelgänger Crimes was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

While educational achievement has improved over the last 30 years, there hasn’t been much change in the number of American adults who are functionally illiterate

For more than 40 years of his life, James Hall couldn’t decipher a restaurant menu by himself unless it had photos. He couldn’t navigate a bus schedule, choosing either to memorize the rhythms of its arrivals, or if he was somewhere unfamiliar, asking another person at the stop. He couldn’t read the details of a bank statement, use a computer to research a recipe or comprehend the front page of the newspaper in Cleveland, where he grew up.

This had been the case since he first started elementary school. Putting letters into words and words into sentences felt like trying to grab smoke from the air with his fists, despite the fact that Hall didn’t struggle to speak. But he’d gotten used to life in this in-between purgatory, supporting himself just fine through jobs as a janitor or in kitchens — jobs that he could talk his way into, with minimal testing or paperwork. In the meantime, he worked to put aside regrets about not learning how to read and write properly, focusing on the things he could do. “You learn to manage it. It’s almost like losing a limb,” he says.

Even as metrics for educational achievement have improved over the last 30 years, there hasn’t been much change in the number of American adults who are functionally illiterate — approximately 32 million, or 14 percent of the country, according to the Department of Education. Those who are functionally illiterate might be able to sound out words or understand basic phrases, but largely struggle to read and write in everyday life. One comprehensive survey of U.S. illiteracy rates between 1993 and 2003 found “no significant change” in reading ability. Additional research in the last decade showed that while some Americans score among the highest in the world in literacy, the U.S. also has a larger-than-average cohort of adults who fail basic reading and writing standards.

As for Hall, he loves to tell the story of the time in sixth grade when his principal and several teachers gathered to, essentially, tell him they were giving up on trying to educate him. To Hall’s surprise, his mother showed up, despite a crippling back injury that made walking a challenge. She crawled up the stairs to the third floor of his Cleveland public school, ignoring the pain, so she could tell her son’s teachers what she thought they must hear. “I had a row of teachers saying, ‘Well, Ms. Hall, we don’t think James will get any further than he has now in school,’” he recalled. “I remember her mustering up the strength to reply, ‘Don’t tell me what my son will or will not do. I know him better than I know all of you sitting here.’”

Hall thought about that story every day after his mother’s death in 2002, after a long struggle with cancer. For him to live and die without knowing how to read and write felt like a betrayal toward her belief in him. Still, he wasn’t sure where to turn. And so, he left town instead, deciding to leave Cleveland behind in 2003 (shortly after he turned 40) and create a life somewhere else. He chose warm and photogenic L.A., but faced a major problem: Finding a job and locking down housing. He still couldn’t read or write well enough to handle a paper application on his own.

Without income or a place to stay, he ended up homeless for a stint in Downtown L.A.’s Skid Row district. That autumn, he meandered into the grand Central Library building and saw a room on the first floor offering lessons for adults struggling with literacy. “I had avoided it, to be honest, for so long. Just a lot of doubt, I guess,” he says of the moment. “But I’d made a promise to my mother to be more sufficient and take care of myself. I kept hearing her belief in me, and I didn’t want to let that go just because it was hard to learn to read and write.”

Within a year, Hall found a job as a janitor at a community college, which didn’t require formal qualifications and rarely involved reading or writing, and found an affordable apartment that he’s lived in for the last 15 years. But committing to literacy tutoring was easier said than done, and a decade passed before he found the right balance and the right tutor, Greg Bristol, whom Hall credits with having a patience and rigor that’s accelerated his learning.

Hall, who is now 54, and Bristol, 74, are among hundreds of student-tutor pairs in the L.A. Public Library’s adult literacy program, which offers one-on-one and group sessions at branches around the county. About 500 to 700 students are matched with tutoring services each year, according to Managing Librarian Kelly Tyler, with many more visitors referred to other resources or programs. Those who want one-on-one learning must commit to at least six months of meeting twice a week with their tutor. Many pairs stay together for far longer — Hall has been learning with Bristol for more than five years.

Young people fall through the literacy cracks for all sorts of reasons — commonly because they weren’t able to identify and treat a learning disability, but also because of behavioral or emotional struggles that make it difficult for a student to focus in class, or a disruptive home life that prevents them from attending school. Hall was the lone boy among five other sisters, raised by a single mother who needed to work long hours to provide. Not having a father figure left him especially unsettled and unfocused, he says. Hall also struggled to set aside his insecurities about growing up with a learning disability and the embarrassment he felt in school. (“Someone told us I might have a problem, but I never got a diagnosis,” he says.)

But finding ways to address illiteracy must be a bigger societal goal, Tyler says, given that an inability to read and write limits one’s economic potential, disrupts health and financial planning, and can lead to literacy problems with one’s kids, among other issues. “We should care about these problems because it doesn’t just impact the individual, but all of us, and it’s an economic issue as well as a moral one. There are studies that clearly document the taxpayer cost of someone lacking literacy education and struggling over their lifetime,” she adds. “We see that one of the leading indicators of a child’s performance in school is their mother’s literacy level. Access to health care is impacted by literacy. And these effects are all more likely to hurt non-white Americans who already struggle with resources.”

As Reddit user “nonreader” detailed in a Q&A about his illiteracy (with the help of his girlfriend), the inability to read and write led to everything from his paychecks being shorted (by an employer who knew he wouldn’t figure out his pay statement) to a stint in jail for signing a statement of admission to the police when he actually intended to claim innocence. Though he works as a bouncer, he doesn’t have a driver’s license, can’t use a computer, and stores his own cash because he “doesn’t trust the bank.” “I know why I can’t read, because I’m stupid,” he wrote, bluntly.

Still, he adds, “I’ve learned how to work around it. I pay my own way in life, and I have plenty of money. I pay most of my girlfriend’s bills. I get by without reading without too many problems. It’s really not that hard to get through life without reading.”

While people like “nonreader” learn how to cope with illiteracy, it leaves scars on how their lives unfold. Poor reading and writing skills, as well as dropping out of school, have both been linked to a higher probability of committing crimes or going to jail. And those who end up incarcerated are unlikely to find help — 70 percent of prisoners test at the lowest level of literacy, according to research.

That cycle is why Tyler feels urgency to connect as many potential students to literacy programs as possible at the L.A. Public Library. That means offering flexible schedules for those who work lengthy hours, and making sure that the volunteer tutors are adaptive and understanding when it comes to helping new people. “A lot of people struggle with a classroom environment for many different reasons,” she explains. “So they can really benefit from having this one-on-one depth because there’s obviously going to be an aspect of both friendship and mentorship that comes from spending so much time with someone.”

Bristol and Hall have bonded over the flow of their sessions together, despite their differences in age, race — Hall is black, Bristol is white — and background. Bristol readily acknowledges that he grew up “lucky” in a stable middle-class family of devoted readers who put him through good schools, unlike Hall. Yet the latter praises his tutor for his calm, patient manner and ability to read Hall’s emotions, all while breaking big tasks into smaller assignments for him. “He’s never gotten upset about trying to help me learn. Well, actually, he raised his voice once when he knew I was trying to give up,” Hall says with a smile.

“You try to keep going step-by-step, and then each step is hard because you’re tired. He gets tired after an hour and a half of lugging along,” Bristol adds. “And we just keep pushing it. This isn’t a simple thing. It’s like physical therapy when you have somebody who’s got an injury. The physical therapist has to keep working with them and stretching and stretching. That’s painful. Eventually, you get over that.”

“It took me a long time to choose action, but it’s a promise you have to make up here,” Hall says, pointing at his temple. “I’m done with letting things get in the way of what I want to achieve.”

Sometimes then, the small goals mean just as much as the big ones. Hall grew up fascinated with the lives of kings and queens, and visited London for his 50th birthday to see that history in person. That wasn’t long after he began sessions with Bristol, and for the first time in a long time, Hall felt motivated to try to read for pleasure. “Those monarchies were worlds that I used to fantasize about in my head,” he says. “But I admit, going back and reading about them was just so much better.”

Eddie Kim is a features writer at MEL. He last wrote about the men around the world who live in the shadow of government oppression.

More Eddie:

• Why Millennial Men Don’t Go to Therapy
• The SoCal Skater Dude Who Doubles As YouTube’s Philosopher King
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• Our Love of Guns Is Often Passed Down from Father to Son
• Their Diet? 100 Percent Meat. And They Say They’ve Never Felt Healthier.

The Lives of Illiterate Men was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The village of Min Gyi erupted with the staccato blast of rifle fire early on the morning of August 30, 2017, startling everyone awake. The gloom of the pre-dawn light hid hundreds of soldiers from the Myanmar army, dubbed the “Tatmadaw.” They’d planned all night for a morning of mayhem. And so, when the villagers emerged from their homes amid the commotion, the soldiers were waiting.

Men and boys were ripped from their front yards and forced into a march toward the forest on the hillside, promised that their peaceful surrender would grant them their lives. Many of the remaining women and girls, however, were stripped of their clothes before being raped by squads of soldiers. Those who refused to come outside were locked in their homes; the Myanmar troops had no problem leaving the property alight in flames, with the people left inside as added fuel.

Later, from the forest, rang gunshots. Some of those doomed men must have heard what the military had done to nearby villages like theirs. Others probably never imagined how vicious the fury could be.

More than a dozen Rohingya communities in Myanmar have faced the same end since 2012, despite condemnation from around the world of the government’s violent crackdown on the minority group. There are about one million Muslim Rohingya people in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, and the violence the group sees from military forces is recounted in explicit detail in a blistering U.N. report that landed earlier this month. The report notes that its estimate that 10,000 Rohingya have been killed is a “conservative” figure. “The gross human rights violations and abuses committed in Kachin, Rakhine and Shan States are shocking for their horrifying nature and ubiquity,” the report states. “Many of these violations undoubtedly amount to the gravest crimes under international law.”

The Rohingya are one of a number of ethnic or religious minority groups around the world that are suffering, and oftentimes dying, as the result of government policies or mass social discrimination. In most cases, the violence rages within the borders of a nation while other countries struggle to intervene directly.

Why are these minority groups brutalized by the majority powers that be? A lot of it has to do with longstanding differences in identity. Blame also lies with political power struggles that took place in the last 200 years.

“Oppression of minorities is a tale as old as time, but in the 20th century, following the end of World War II, a lot of the violence we’re witnessing is the deep historical roots of oppression from colonial forces that divided and conquered parts of the world, giving priority to some groups over others to help control and rule territories,” says Hannah Garry, founding director of the International Human Rights Clinic at USC.

Whether in Southeast Asia, Central Africa, the Middle East or Eastern Europe, certain groups of people live under conditions more suited for a prison camp than a free city: Surveillance, curfews, restrictions on imports of basic goods and the threat of physical harm. Men in these places are disproportionately more likely to get tortured or killed, usually with zero consequence to the attackers. Here are three examples of the crises taking place in the present, with major questions about how to stop the killings still left unanswered.

The Rohingya in Myanmar

The brutal violence against the Rohingya, an “Indo-Aryan” group with its own language and customs, in the past year stems from a small insurgency operation last August by Rohingya rebels. Dozens of men, some armed with guns but most only with bats and knives, swarmed together to strike a military base and security outposts along Rakhine state, on the country’s western border. The men had seen enough of travel restrictions, closed schools, supply blockades and mistreatment from soldiers since 2012. “In Rakhine State, Muslims are like in a cage, they cannot travel outside,” one man told U.N. staff. “There are no human rights for the Muslims of Rakhine. I don’t know why God sent us there.”

The attack killed just 12 soldiers, but the blowback was severe. Within hours, the military began “clearance” operations on dozens of Rohingya villages in the region. The continued violence has made 750,000 people flee their homes, many into neighboring Bangladesh, where they live as refugees under dire conditions. “Bangladesh isn’t my country,” 24-year-old Kadir Ahmed told Human Rights Watch. “I want to go back to our land. If the Myanmar government hadn’t killed and tortured us, we wouldn’t have left.”

This is happening despite the fact that the Rohingya have occupied swaths of Myanmar since the 12th century. More recently, waves of Rohingya people re-entered Myanmar in the 19th century, when the British won control of it in a series of wars. New pro-migrant policies meant more workers to farm commodities, which in turn raised profits for the colonists. The Rohingya were promised, among other things, a “Muslim National Area” for their part in the economic boom. That never came to be — instead, when Myanmar broke free of British rule in 1948, Myanmar officials who had overseen decolonization refused to even grant the Rohingya citizenship, instead labeling their immigration in the early 1800s as illegal and invalid.

A 1982 law doubled down on that belief, and the Myanmar military has also claimed its violent crackdowns are only in response to “terrorist threats,” a claim that the U.N. flatly rejects in its report. Yet much of the Buddhist public in Myanmar also doesn’t sympathize with the Rohingya, whom they call “Bengalis” in a nod to their perceived “illegal” status. “They’re terrorists to the native population,” one noodle seller in Yangon, the nation’s capital, told CNN. Even de-facto state leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a former political prisoner who won the Nobel Peace Prize, has downplayed the atrocities, citing international “misinformation” about the crisis.

China’s Uyghur Muslims

Kashgar is a city in northwest China that has two millennia of history behind it, as it was a key stop on the famed Silk Road that brought spices, fabric and other exotic goods into the West. It lies 2,700 miles from the government seat of Beijing, in the dry mountainous terrain of the Xinjiang region, with distinct ethnic groups and a devotion to Islam that distinguishes it from the Han Chinese that form 92 percent of the nation’s population. These days, that difference is cause for deep scrutiny from the government, which treats the Uyghur Muslims as an active threat to their ability to rule.

Drive a half-hour south of Kashgar and you can find a new compound built for those who need “re-education” to be loyal to the nation’s agenda. This is where 30-year-old Kayrat Samarkand found himself last year, surrounded by tall walls trimmed in barbed wire, with armed guards waiting at the top of two watchtowers. Stuck in a room with 14 other men, Samarkand woke every day to a thorough search by guards before spending hours and hours listening to speeches from Communist Party “core leader” Xi Jinping, singing along to communist songs, chanting “Long live Xi Jinping!” and doing manual labor. “Those who disobeyed the rules, refused to be on duty, engaged in fights or were late for studies were placed in handcuffs and ankle cuffs for up to 12 hours,” Samarkand told the Washington Post.

The U.N. estimates more than one million Uyghurs have been jailed in similar fashion, with reports that waterboarding and other forms of torture are common. Uyghurs are increasingly prohibited from expressing their Muslim-ness, with a ban on fasting during Ramadan and police stopping men who wear long beards or headscarves in public. They’ve created restrictive travel rules, requiring people to show their papers at will to an increasing number of Chinese security forces. Meanwhile, a cutting-edge surveillance system tracks faces and information around the clock.

“This type of oppression is more common when countries are unwilling to be pluralistic in terms of giving equal rights to all groups, where priority of place is given to some over others, and where divisions in society are used by politicians to polarize and get a majority behind them,” USC’s Garry says. “It’s a common play, especially when there are valuable resources to manipulate.”

The Uyghur Muslims have long resented Beijing’s treatment, with many believing the Chinese government wants tighter rule because of the massive natural gas and coal reserves in Xinjiang. The oppression has escalated since a series of riots in 2009 that left 200 Han Chinese dead. In the government’s eyes, the “terrorist attacks” justified the current response.

Those fighting for autonomy argue that Xinjiang’s 10 million Uyghurs have been living there since long before the communist People’s Republic of China was established in 1949 and claimed control of the region. For now, Uyghurs continue to disappear for months at a time. And sometimes, they never come home.

Albinos in Africa

Albinism, the genetic condition of not having pigment in your skin and hair, is relatively rare in America, occurring in around 1 in 20,000 individuals. In sub-Saharan Africa, however, albinism can be far more common, even around 1 in 1,000 people in certain populations.

Those born with the condition quickly learn to navigate a guarded life of suspicion and paranoia. They’re often reviled and treated as outsiders in countries like Malawi, Tanzania and Burundi, where an albino person might be forced to eat outside on the ground or be refused clean water to drink. They’re commonly bullied in schools and struggle to find jobs. Most bizarre of all, albinos in sub-Saharan Africa are actively hunted and killed, as some people believe their skin and body parts are valuable — anywhere from $2,000 for a limb to $75,000 for an entire body.

“People believe that albino body parts mixed with traditional medicine can make people rich,” Franck Alphonse, the director of the Tanzania Albino Center, told CNN in 2009. “It’s a thriving business … witch doctors are asking business people to bring the body parts of albinos, who aren’t considered human beings.”

Abductions can happen with albinos of any age or gender. In February, 22-year-old MacDonald Masambuka went missing in Malawi and was found months later with his legs and arms hacked off. Other victims are much younger, as with the abduction of nine-year-old Mayeso Isaac at the hands of 10 men last year, or the toddlers that have literally been ripped from their mothers while sleeping. Sometimes, the ones coordinating the abduction are parents, siblings, friends and neighbors. Eunice Phiri, a 53-year-old Malawi woman with albinism, was tricked by her brother and two other men into tagging along on a trip to Zambia last January. Her mutilated body was found five days later in Kasungu National Park.

Dozens of killings have been recorded in Malawi in the last several years, with many more suspected unreported. One major problem is the inability of Malawi’s underfunded law enforcement to solve cases and prosecute crimes. Another is the major cultural schism in the way people think about crimes against those with albinism. The uncle of a young Malawi boy, for example, was fined the equivalent of $30 for his role in the 2015 murder of his nephew. The lack of serious punishment led Ikponwosa Ero, the U.N.’s expert on albino communities, to conclude that in many cases, “stealing a cow may attract a higher penalty” than killing a human with albinism in Africa.

Whether in Africa, China or Myanmar, one common thread that ties together these stories of oppression is the inability of the international community to step in before unrest devolves into full-on crisis. The reaction depends on geopolitical realities, Garry notes, as nation-states often choose to play it slow and soft with an economic partner even if its leaders condemn the ally’s actions (or inaction) in private. Other times, like with Africa’s albino crisis, countries choose not to intervene because the government has already publicly condemned the acts and is attempting to handle it.

The use of international criminal trials after the Cold War and the creation of the U.N.’s “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine in 2005, which empowers its Security Council to bring international military forces to stop war crimes or acts of genocide, are key tools in the fight for human rights, Garry says. The caveat is that these developments all react to a crisis rather than actively work to prevent it. “Nation-states must be anticipating and trying to mitigate situations before they evolve into serious oppression, and while that’s not easy to do, more pressure being put on states to uphold fundamental rights for all groups is something we need,” she says.

Especially because, as one Rohingya refugee told the State Department, it takes time to stem the bloodshed when most of the people of a nation don’t seem to mind it.

Eddie Kim is a features writer at MEL. He last wrote about how to build a school with LeBron James.

More Eddie:

• Why Millennial Men Don’t Go to Therapy
• The SoCal Skater Dude Who Doubles As YouTube’s Philosopher King
• What Activists Are Doing to Fight the Rampant Growth of Bestiality
• Our Love of Guns Is Often Passed Down from Father to Son
• Their Diet? 100 Percent Meat. And They Say They’ve Never Felt Healthier.

The Men Around the World Who Live in the Shadow of Government Oppression was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

King James’ educational advisor on making his I Believe School in Akron a reality

An eight-year-old LeBron James sometimes didn’t attend school because there was no one who could give him a ride. He sometimes skipped class outright, instead playing video games by himself at the ramshackle one-bedroom home in Akron, Ohio, owned by a friend of his mom, who would disappear during the day. Other times, Gloria James and her son were simply too entangled in the task of securing a place to sleep and food to eat that night. “We’ll just skip today,” they’d tell each other. Then another day would rise and fall, and another, with no attendance in class.

Ultimately, James skipped nearly 100 days of school as a fourth grader in Akron. He had moved a dozen times in the three-year span between age five and eight, with Gloria struggling on welfare and relying on a network of friends to give them shelter when the rent ran dry. He didn’t play sports. He barely had friends. He lagged on basic reading, writing and math skills.

What got James back in school was the stabilizing force of Bruce Kelker, the Pee Wee football coach at James’ elementary school who first discovered his athletic talent. Kelker offered to house James, with Gloria (who could live with a friend) welcome at any time to see her son. Toward the end of 1993, Kelker and his live-in girlfriend decided to move, but another youth football coach at the school, “Big” Frank Walker, extended his suburban Akron home to James.

James credits both families for steadying his life and getting him back in school, and the saga between fourth and fifth grades has become one of the superstar’s favorite allegories. But more than just a motivational tale, James has taken his experience and molded it into a philosophy on what it takes to keep poor and stressed-out kids on the right track.

That philosophy now exists in physical form with the I Promise School, a new campus that opened a month ago as part of the Akron Public Schools system. It debuted with 240 third- and fourth-graders who are struggling academically and largely from underprivileged families. The school will grow to include first through eighth grades by fall 2022, but the fundamental features of the program are already in place.

School days are longer, running from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., as is the school year (from July through May) in order to take pressure off working parents. Students receive free breakfast, lunch and snacks. There’s a new grading system in place for the kids, as well as “support circle” sessions each day to help students learn how to calm their emotions and talk through challenges. Parents, too, are given more feedback at school (in individualized meetings with advisors) and also offered help in the form of housing and job-placement services, GED classes and a food bank — all things that James’ mother, Gloria, could have benefitted from too.

“When I did go to school or was playing sports, being around kids and around people who have fun and kind of speak the same language as you, it served as an escape from the drugs and the guns and the things that go on every day,” James told CNN’s Don Lemon after the opening. “That’s why I’m opening this school, so that kids’ minds, and their bodies, can get away from that. I mean, we even made the hours of being in school longer. Not only do we want them here, we want them to know we care.”

LeBron James on Twitter

The jitters before the first day of school are real right now!!! Tomorrow is going to be one of the greatest moments (if not the greatest) of my life when we open the #IPROMISE School. This skinny kid from Akron who missed 83 days of school in the 4th grade had big dreams...

James is no stranger to charitable causes, given that he already worked with Akron Public Schools to set up the I Promise program and even pledged $41 million to give all eligible program students a free ride to college. But even for him, building a campus and a curriculum that pushes new ideas on schooling is a task unlike any he’s approached before. Doing so required more than James and his foundation — it required working within the Akron school system to build something not just innovative, but sustainable.

This is where Nicole Hassan and a squad of veteran Akron Public Schools staffers stepped in, organizing half a dozen “design teams” last year to hash out every ambition they could bake into the DNA of I Promise School. The teams spent months debating features that today form a public school unlike any other in the country. It’s supported in part by the LeBron James Family Foundation — it’s pledged $2 million a year to support the school’s growth — but otherwise funded by taxpayers as part of the Akron system. It’s an experiment in what a public institution can do to help kids in the most crucial aspect of their development into adulthood. “The hope is that this can become a model for more schools across the country in urban centers where young students need the most hope,” Hassan says.

But how, exactly, did James and his advisors build such a school while working within the complexities of a major public school system? I spoke to Hassan for the answer, including details on how the curriculum of the school is designed, why it’s critical to “look at a student’s whole life” and how James is more than a shiny name attached to the project.

First of all, what’s your background in education?
This is my 18th year working with Akron Public Schools. I started as a classroom teacher, and was in the classroom teaching fifth and second grade for about 12 years. Then I moved to the district level as an instructional coach, where I was supporting teachers and students with curriculum and instructional practices. Then, the last two years, I’ve been specifically working with the LeBron James Family Foundation. I’m kind of coordinating and aligning their educational programming.

Prior to the school, for six years, we had students entering LeBron’s I Promise program, which currently has students from third to 10th grade. So at that time, my role was to coordinate the programming they were providing through 40 different Akron public schools. We had a few students here, a few there, but we were dealing with 27 elementary schools in our district alone. So really, the discussion came up about whether we’d be more effective if we could house everyone in the program in one physical location.

What was your initial impression when LeBron’s foundation came to you and began discussing this project? Even the fact that such a big name was attached — was that an advantage?
I was extremely excited. Not just about LeBron, but the ideas they wanted to bring to the students, because their basic tenet is that we’re a family, and that we need to embrace kids where they’re at and help them get to where they need to go. In my opinion, one of the most important things educators must do is to truly love their students and deal with the whole child, not just their academic performance. Often, in urban districts, you have such a strong focus on academics because your test scores aren’t where they need to be.

As for having LeBron on the team in a meaningful way, it really helps as far as bringing other people from the community in to back us up, offer partnerships and provide resources that other students have not had.

Who was involved in shaping that early vision for the school’s master plan?
When that conversation came up, my partner [Akron Public Schools Family Liason Keith Liechty] and I were tasked with creating six different design teams, composed of Akron Public Schools’ administrative team as well as teachers, educational experts, students, parents and community leaders, along with the foundation of course. For four months, the process was just to dream big. Anything that we knew as being innovative or out-of-the-box in education, we tried to put into a plan. We visited various schools across the country that were known for these best practices, as well as several conferences to learn more about emerging areas that we didn’t have enough info on.

Were there certain aspects of this I Promise master plan that were immediate and obvious from the beginning?
The major feature we looked at when we were traveling was trauma-informed education. I spent many, many years researching, reading and practicing trauma-informed strategies in my classroom and with other teachers, but I’d never seen a school that was considered to have a full trauma-informed program.

How exactly do you implement that, and why is it so important for kids in the Akron school system?
First, I should say that not all of our students in the building have experienced trauma. A trauma-informed curriculum is good for all students — they just have more benefits and resources to tap into. But what we find in urban districts, particularly, is that the prevalence of trauma in their lives is almost exponential compared to a suburban area. That trauma consists of anything from community violence, to domestic violence, to a natural disaster, to even something as small as a dog bite. So when we have to explain it to folks that don’t believe that trauma exists in students, we say it’s just like extreme stress.

If you wake up every morning and you don’t know where you’re going to end up that night, or if you don’t have food in your house and you’re hungry when you get home, or if you’re alone because your mom works nights, all of these things create the stress. And a lot of our students experience that.

That stress has a major impact on the student’s ability to learn, right?
Why it’s so important to acknowledge this in the school setting is because the research says that when students are in this extreme state of stress, it actually changes the way their brain functions and processes information. So, if we aren’t doing something to transition students into the school, they aren’t going to be capable of learning because of the way their brain processes information. There’s a lot of research behind this also affecting behavior, and that’s what I think most people realize about trauma, is that when students have a tough background, or a tough home life, they misbehave.

That’s not the only indicator. Actually, a larger percentage of students that have experienced trauma are introverted, quiet and subdued than they are at the extreme levels of behavior. What the constant is between all of them is they’re not processing information in their neo-cortex, so they aren’t able to retain, recall and problem-solve critically as well as they should.

Hence the need to look beyond the classroom to the student’s home life?Right. And it extends further at I Promise because we also then extend that approach to the families with a variety of wraparound supports. We’re trying not just to change the academic outcome, but the social-emotional outcomes, which then create generational change within the community.

What’s a key aspect of the school that you’re still feeling out and following closely now that we’re a month in?
What we’re still hashing out is standard-based grading and mastery learning, which we went to several conferences to learn about. It’s a shift for the district because we’re the only school doing this. And it’s a shift for parents, too. Teachers are getting used to it more, where they’re not looking at giving letter grades of A-B-C-D but rather asking the question, “Have you mastered the standard?” And what smaller targets do you need to get there? It’s about conveying to the parent that your child is a year and a half behind, so they’re not going to get an A, but we’re making progress. We try to explain this different way of grading to parents who have lived their whole lives understanding the typical metric. There’s an adjustment process.

When you think of a public school district, you think about a lot of standardization and a lot of rules on what a school can look like. How was a school with as many new ideas as I Promise even possible?
Currently, Akron Public Schools has a few different specialty schools. We a have STEM middle school and high school. We have an Akron early college, we have the performing arts school. So Akron public schools has been familiar with the idea of doing, in a centralized location, something different with specialty schools.

However, the ambition of the people behind this definitely is what made it happen. We came up against a lot of roadblocks just because of the systems in place within the public school system and in the teachers’ union and different things. But as we worked through each of these things, all of the administrative leaders were very collaborative and cooperative in helping us get what we want. And I’ve seen ripple effects of things that we’ve already started changing within the administrative levels in our district just because of the energy that the foundation and design teams brought to the table.

The concept of holistically involving and assisting families is pretty crucial to the school’s stated mission. What help are you offering?
We have a family resource wing of the building where we have the Akron-Canton Food Bank in-house, so families can come to the school to get staple foods to get them through ’til the next paycheck. As you continue down the hallway, we have our actual family resource center. Director Vicky McGee is essential to the program because she has a knack of building a relationship with every single person that walks in the door, regardless of how they come at her. Sometimes when families are frustrated, they have a lot of angst, but she’s able to break down barriers immediately.

What she does then is complete what we call an “I Promise Family Plan,” and she identifies areas of need. But instead of just providing them with resources, she helps them set goals that are related to those needs, too. Our county has a vast network of agencies and resources, so Vicky sorts through all of that and funnels families directly to what they need. A lot of times she makes those phone calls right there in the meeting with the parents, so that they don’t have to leave and then not get it done.

Right next door to Vicky is our “I Promise To Chase Your Dreams” room, and that’s where we provide GED classes on site, two days a week. The morning and evening classes are the first step toward a GED for a lot of our families. We also will be starting ESL classes here at the building in January.

I know we talked about students’ trauma and how their experiences outside of the classroom can affect their performance in the classroom, but how does parental stress affect a kid’s education?
You can think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for this idea. If the family is stressed about providing basic needs for their children, then they’re not able to attain greater purposes either as individuals. Then that personal stress ends up misdirected, sometimes at the students, because when you’re working multiple jobs or trying to find work but don’t have the right credentials or face other kinds of challenges, those are stressors that can build up. It also means that schooling isn’t on the forefront of their mind because they’re so busy attaining the other needs of their family.

Can you walk me through the admission process, and what the demand for year one was like?
There are so many people who have called that want to enroll their kids. We stick to the equation that was developed by the design team for admission, which is based on academic reading scores. They have to be scoring below the 25th percentile in reading, which is about a year-and-a-half to two years below grade level. So from that pool of eligible students, it’s a lottery system. If you didn’t make the lottery, there’s no other option. We had a set of twins that were separated, for example. But if we make that exception, we’ll have other people who will expect some exceptions. So we stick to our guns.

By every account, LeBron was personally involved in this process. But how deep into the weeds did he get?
He reflected on his own experiences as a student and thought about how the elements that helped him could be stronger and what areas could have been better for him. We started our design process with this major document that just listed different things that were important to LeBron and to the foundation team — it was for us educators to take and make it into an educational system. He says all the time that if every student could go to school and be loved every day, that in itself is going to change their perspective. LeBron gave the philosophy, and then we made it into practice.

And he actually shows up in digital form around the school with video messages and other words of encouragement every day. What do the students make of that?
If you were to stop any kid in the hallway, I think for sure they’d be the first to tell you that they think LeBron believes in them and that he expects them to work hard. Every morning they start the school day by saying “The Promise” that he helped develop, which goes through the tenets of working hard, dreaming big and doing their best every day. It’s a huge, huge motivator.

What have you heard in terms of first impressions from parents now that the school has been open for more than a month?
One of the biggest things that we’ve seen is parents saying how different their child is at home, how they’re excited to come to school instead of hard to pull out of bed. We started school a month before everyone else, and so we asked children to give up part of their summer and they didn’t fight it. They were excited to be there.

We had a family event last night, and I spoke to one mom who said that for the last three years in school, they’ve been trying to get their daughter to be more confident and more outgoing because she has a lot more potential than she believes. And she said within a short period of time, she’s already seen a big difference with how she handles day-to-day stuff at home because she’s walking around with more self-assurance.

And from the teachers?
I know the teachers love being here all the time too, but we for sure ask them to give more of themselves than in their previous job. The administration is cognizant of needing to make sure that they take care of the teachers so we don’t burn out. So, a lot of the things that the foundation has done is to support that. At the end of this month, they’re sending the entire staff and a guest for each to the symphony so that they can have a night out. We regularly have lunches provided and snacks and different things to help keep staff positive because it’s a hard job. But I also think if you were to stop any of them in the hallway, they wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

LeBron himself is a public school kid and felt passionately that I Promise should stay in that system. Why is it important to you that that’s the case?
The biggest point is with it being public is that it’s something that can carry over across the country. Our mission is to be a nationally recognized model for urban education. The common idea is that it’s easier to do a charter school, or it’s easier to do private because you don’t have to work within the confines of a public school system. But then those schools are only available to certain students, whereas every community has a public school. I want the elements of I Promise to be the norm for our district and spread across the nation so that in Chicago, in Detroit and in other areas where students have a lot of trauma, they’re utilizing these practices as well.

Of course, one of the things we’d love to see is that other communities help support such a school. A lot of our contributions have been from community partners beyond LeBron’s foundation. It’s important that LeBron’s a part of it, but he definitely couldn’t do it alone, and I think other communities could generate the same contribution. Honestly, if we believe that education is the way to create generational change and improve a community, then communities need to start supporting the school system in a real way.

Eddie Kim is a features writer at MEL. He last wrote about why female soldiers are killing themselves at an alarming rate.

More Eddie:

• Why Millennial Men Don’t Go to Therapy
• The SoCal Skater Dude Who Doubles As YouTube’s Philosopher King
• What Activists Are Doing to Fight the Rampant Growth of Bestiality
• Our Love of Guns Is Often Passed Down from Father to Son
• Their Diet? 100 Percent Meat. And They Say They’ve Never Felt Healthier.

How to Build a School With LeBron James was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Women in the military are 250 percent more likely to commit suicide than civilian women

Stephanie Shannon was just 20 years old when she landed in Saudi Arabia in a tan camouflage uniform still crisp around the edges. She’d enlisted in the Army in November 1989, motivated by the opportunity for a career and seduced by the promise of learning disciplined bravery. Just nine months after she entered basic training, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein mobilized his forces in an attempt to invade and annex Kuwait, a tiny oil-rich nation southeast of Iraq. Shannon, the latest soldier in a family of military men, was ready.

She took a 33-hour flight to the eastern edge of Saudi Arabia, and the work began quickly once she landed. Shannon was tasked with trucking munitions across the desert and into battle, fighting off enemy ambushes and literal shifting sands along the way. She quickly picked up her peers’ nonchalant mood around fighting and death (“You can’t care about it too much,” she says). What she couldn’t get used to was the loneliness of being a woman — one that constantly attracted the eyes, jeers and prods of male soldiers around her.

“There were 16 of us, and something like 500 of them,” Shannon says. Each day brought another joke about what a man would do to her, propositions for sex and comments about her body. She couldn’t tell if the words bothered her more or less than the groping. Late at night, she stared at the ceiling and reminded herself that she was lucky — unlike some women she knew who had been raped or attacked. But during the day, she more often than not found herself avoiding friendly interactions with men. She even wore more layers to cover her figure, despite the Saudi heat.

Complaining and fighting back only drew more attention to her, including an intimidating meeting with her superiors in which they accused her of disobeying orders. She couldn’t shake the feeling that her sergeant had thrown her the worst jobs, at the worst times, to try and break her down as retribution. Sometimes, that meant a 12-hour shift by herself on a patrol. Other times, it meant brutal physical labor. In one instance, after she hurt her back tossing water containers from a truck, Shannon grew angry as she wondered why her commanding officer made a 5-foot-3, 150-pound soldier do a job that men twice her size had been assigned.

“Every day, someone is messing with you. It causes a wound and the wound can’t heal because you can’t talk about the trauma and you can’t report it. You end up feeling like an outcast,” she recalls. “It became clear my leaders were looking out for someone else besides me. So I just endured it.”

It would be 20 years after her stint in the desert that Shannon first heard a doctor say the words “post-traumatic stress syndrome,” a diagnosis spurred by the harassment she endured, the stress of war and the pain of Gulf War Illness, a mysterious ailment that affects service members who deployed to Iraq in 1991. The diagnosis in 2011 explained why she had stumbled through so many days in a thick fog of depression and anxiety after leaving the military in 1998 with a newborn son and an interest in social work. “Throughout that time, I was constantly suicidal. It didn’t take much to make me think about it,” Shannon says. “The one thing that kept me back from it was my son. I didn’t have anyone who could take care of him. So I stayed.”

Like Shannon, tens of thousands of veterans contemplate suicide every year, and VA estimates suggest more than 7,000 veterans die from suicide annually — about 20 people a day. The majority of these deaths are men, with the suicide rate about double for male veterans compared to their female peers. Yet while the overall rate of veterans killing themselves has steadily risen since 9/11, grossly outpacing civilian suicides, female veterans have seen a 62 percent increase in suicides between 2001 and 2015 versus a 30 percent increase with their male peers. And compared to civilians, women in the military are 250 percent more likely to kill themselves — a stunning statistic given that the suicide rate gap between male veterans and civilian men is only about 18 percent.

The increased suicides come even as the country’s active-duty military is smaller than it’s been in the last 20 years, with 1.3 million troops. And while the number of women in the military has increased over time (composing 15 percent of the military today, versus 11 percent in 1990), that population change doesn’t explain why so many more young female veterans are killing themselves.

For those working to support veterans as they transition from military service back to the civilian world, the boom in the female suicide rate is more than an anomaly — it’s a crisis. President Barack Obama signed a bill in 2016 that called for more resources for female veterans, but change is coming slowly. Meanwhile, the experts who work with these women directly, many of whom are veterans themselves, say that the biggest factor may be how isolated women feel in a workplace that’s hyper-masculine — and frankly, rife with sexual assault.

About one in four female service members report having been assaulted or coerced for sexual acts in some way, according to research from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Much has been written about the aftereffects for these women, including the fact that sexual assault is a leading predictor of homelessness for female veterans. It’s also an influence for suicide, with a 2016 VA study finding that military sexual trauma significantly raises the risk of a veteran attempting it. “People who don’t know they need help or how to get it, they struggle to get any momentum going with basic benefits. I needed a homelessness coordinator at the VA to straighten everything out for me when I was at my lowest point,” Shannon says. “It’s isolating to be broke and mentally drained.”

The women with the worst statistical outcome are those who live in rural areas and do not or cannot seek services at their local VA office: They’ve seen a 98 percent increase in suicide rate since 2001. But challenges with access have long been a problem for male and female veterans alike, due to long waitlists and complicated screening processes that can take years to complete. Even worse, women run into inadequate services (like a lack of basic mammograms) or uncomfortable situations such as group therapy with a roomful of men. “It’s much easier for male veterans who need inpatient health care to get a slot,” Retired Navy Capt. Lory Manning, now a director of government affairs with SWAN, told Rewire.News. “Not all VA facilities have slots for women to have inpatient health care.”

Even beyond medical treatment, female veterans struggle to find venues to share their struggles while feeling safe from male judgment. Catherine, a 20-year Navy veteran who is now an expert on mental health (and who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her professional relationships within the military), says that the isolation felt within the military can get worse in civilian life. Veterans groups like the American Legion or AmVets tend to be filled with men, which brings many women back to square one in terms of feeling out of place. “Even coming out, you see that the resources and groups are all male-dominated. That can be really uncomfortable to navigate,” she says. “Women veterans work together to make things better, like by sharing a good resource if we find it. But many women can’t identify that support group. If you move back home after deployment, maybe you find support from people you already knew. If you move to a new city, however, it’s really hard.”

The social isolation comes in layers, often with an undercurrent of sexism, even from civilians. “I’ve had people get angry and demand proof that I served. Then ask all these condescending follow-up questions to try to call me out,” writes one woman on Reddit. “The dude at Dunkin’ Donuts saw my USAA card (bank for service members and their families) and asked me what my dad did in the military… I told him I was in and he was furious, didn’t believe me, schooled me on Stolen Valor and then angrily gave me my coffee. I was still on active duty.”

There are other factors to consider when asking why female veterans are committing suicide at increasing rates. Research suggests that traumatic childhood events, including emotional and sexual abuse, are much more common in service members than the civilian public. Lower educational achievement is also linked to increased suicide rates, and the majority of enlisted troops only have a high school degree.

As for the 250 percent gap between female veteran suicides and civilian female suicides? It may be because of a much more concrete reason: Women who have served are trained in firearms and have access to them far more frequently than their civilian counterparts. Studies show the latter more frequently use hanging or overdoses to attempt suicide, whereas veterans, like their civilian male counterparts, end up with guns in their hands. “Clinical intuition indicates that women who have had training with firearms, and work in an environment that’s dangerous and exposed combat, are more likely to use violent methods to commit suicide,” Steve Xenakis, a psychiatrist who served in the Army for 28 years, told government watchdog organization Pogo. “In a sense, the military is an equalizing and egalitarian environment that offers opportunity, but with unintended consequences.”

Experts agree that the key to solving this crisis is trying to find women who served and funneling them toward collectives that can either help them with their trauma or use their experiences to recruit and help others. Catherine notes that female veterans often try to fall into the social role expected of a woman — having kids, taking care of a family or spouse, caring for aging parents, etc. In doing so, she says, women can leave their own needs behind. “And if you have a friend who’s died by suicide, or if suicide is close to you, it can feel more and more like an option,” she adds. “In my experience, women have a tough time asking for help when they transition to civilian life. As a community, we need to be asking them if we can help.”

That’s why Shannon, now 49, formed the Michigan Women Veterans Empowerment organization, which travels around the state to recruit members and hold conferences to bring female veterans together. She isn’t sure whether the VA will reform quickly enough to help more women, or whether legislation to help protect women in the military will pass anytime soon. And so, she’s done the only thing she could think of — taken matters into her own hands. “We need people with boots on the ground on the outside,” she says. “Female vets aren’t visible enough, and the communities that can help them aren’t either.”

Eddie Kim is a features writer at MEL. He last interviewed three Hawaiian-shirt-clad Boomers on millennials stealing their look.

More Eddie:

• Why Millennial Men Don’t Go to Therapy
• The SoCal Skater Dude Who Doubles As YouTube’s Philosopher King
• What Activists Are Doing to Fight the Rampant Growth of Bestiality
• Our Love of Guns Is Often Passed Down from Father to Son
• Their Diet? 100 Percent Meat. And They Say They’ve Never Felt Healthier.

Why Female Soldiers Are Killing Themselves at an Alarming Rate was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By several accounts, 2018 was the Summer of Sleaze, headlined by Justin Bieber and his arsenal of garish aloha shirts (or, as mainlanders know it, the “Hawaiian” shirt) that made him look like your best friend’s semi-flaky South Beach cocaine dealer, circa 1982. Bieber’s fondness for a particularly, er, loud palette of shirts may put him on the extreme end of the aesthetic, but since celeb style tends to inform consumer trends, Bieber’s fits (or something like them) can now be seen on a male mannequin near you, whether it be via the dirt-cheap fast-fashion retailer H&M or timeless designer favorite Louis Vuitton.

In other words: Aloha shirts are hip for real, whether you’re going lowbrow or highbrow. And millennials in particular can’t seem to get enough of them.

This is an odd but not unexpected turn of events for David Bailey, who has worn an aloha shirt every single day for the last 30 years. Actually, scratch that: “I’ve missed maybe three days,” he says, before cracking a laugh. Bailey, 73, is perhaps the greatest hunter-gatherer of aloha shirts in America, having amassed an estimated 15,000 in his cocoon of a shop, Bailey’s Antiques and Aloha Shirts, which is a 10-minute drive from tourist-thronged Waikiki Beach in Honolulu.

Dig into the endless shelves and spirals of clothing and you might stumble across rarities like a hand-painted vintage rayon shirt from the 1960s, or perhaps a modern reproduction of a classic design worn by Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity. Some shirts go for under $5, while many others have appreciated in value since they first came off the sewing line. Anthony Bourdain dropped $3,000 here in 2008 while taping his travel show No Reservations. King of Margaritaville Jimmy Buffett got one for $5,000. Meanwhile, Nic Cage, never one to be outdone, spent $10,000 on a vintage shirt.

“The thought of wearing just a plain white or blue collared shirt is totally boring,” Bailey explains. “What we’re seeing is people who get into aloha shirts by having one, then five, then 50. Manufacturers I talk to are seeing increased sales everywhere, especially on the East Coast and in Europe. We’ve got Hawaii Five-0 and now Magnum P.I. back on TV, showing off the aloha shirt look. The vibe is ripe.”

How the shirt came to be is a matter of academic debate, but there’s agreement around the idea that it was influenced by the colorful Japanese fabrics that were being imported to Hawaii in the early 20th century, and widely used by Japanese families to sew their own clothing. The brightest, most eye-popping colors and patterns were initially reserved for children and young women, says DeSoto Brown, historian at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. Chinese businessman Ellery Chun had a major influence in the 1930s when he began producing patterned shirts en masse, and Brown credits teens and other young people for fueling the fad of the aloha shirt as a form of local streetwear, during a time when most Americans were dressing conservatively.

“In the late 1930s, there was a brief moment of Hawaii being very fashionable for very wealthy young mainland people, who were part of what was called ‘café society.’ After Doris Duke built her house here, which got a ton of national publicity, other rich young people started vacationing here, or even buying their own houses,” Brown continues. “They wore alohawear in publicity or news photos, which not only helped spread awareness of it, but also made it desirable for other people to copy.”

That blew up in the 1950s and early 1960s, when Elvis Presley and Sinatra donned aloha shirts in films, and the Polynesian tiki-culture craze swept across the U.S., starting on the West Coast. “By the 1970s, old aloha shirts first got recycled by hippies who were trying to look oddball, to break with the established expectations. By the 1990s, the cliché of the ‘Fabulous ‘50s’ was also in place in American culture, and a small part of that was the old-fashioned-style aloha shirt,” Brown explains.

For many boomer men like Bailey, however, the aloha shirt isn’t a summer fad — it’s a long-lasting love built on an earnest appreciation for the practicality and style of a unique clothing tradition. The shirt represents the ultimate compromise between buttoned-up and laid-back — an alternative to the prim look of the midcentury white-collar man, and later, the Gordon Gekko pretension of the 1980s. And so, while millennials are certainly buying into the beachy-cool vibe of the aloha shirt, we found three men who have fallen in love with the garment exactly because it tries not to be hip. Here’s what they have to say…

David Bailey, 73, Collector of Antiques and Vintage Shirts, Honolulu

I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but I traveled all around when I was in college, studying as an exchange student in Japan at Waseda University and also at the University of Hawaii. I settled down back in Santa Barbara and ran some jewelry stores — I was trying to sell gold chains. It was a true hand-to-mouth operation, though. My background was more being a collector — whether it was stamps, bugs or miniature Buddhas — and I was just looking for a steady income. One day, I collaborated with an antique shop and put up a single rack of vintage clothes. It wasn’t too long before it was obvious that vintage clothes was a better sell than antiques or gold chains.

I rented a garage for $20 a month and spent a lot of time going to big local swap meets and buying what looked good. After a year, I had a thousand shirts, mostly rayon fabric from the 1960s. The dream was to do a vintage clothing shop in Hawaii, and I found a $1,000 a month storefront on Kalakaua Street. That was 1980. The first year I sold five times what I did in the jewelry business. For the next 20 years, I just went to flea markets before the sun came up. Half the shirts in the store are from that time period. And obviously, it was fun to have first pick of my favorite shirts to wear.

These days, I mostly look at eBay and other sites. What’s been happening more and more is that our early customers are coming back, having outgrown their aloha shirts with age, and we take their shirts and give them other ones. Alongside the repeat customers, we get a lot of tourists, especially Japanese tourists. And we have a number of stores in Australia, Japan and Europe that buy from us wholesale. The prices are ridiculous out there — we’ll sell something for $30, and I’ll find the same shirt resold at $250 in Australia! But I guess that’s not unusual when Louis Vuitton is releasing an aloha shirt, and more and more high-end manufacturers are seeing good business.

The good news is that younger workers know that going to work while wearing a noose around your neck doesn’t help productivity. The idea of casual office wear started here, in Hawaii, with Aloha Fridays as a local social campaign. That’s where Casual Friday comes from. And that’s why I’ve worn an aloha shirt every day for decades. The bad side is that rents have gone to the moon around us in Waikiki Beach. It’s totally corporate here now, with a brand like Tommy Bahama paying $100,000 a month to sell their stuff. The mom-and-pop shops for aloha shirts are all going away, despite the popularity of the shirts themselves.

Eric Peterson, 66, Film Production/Camera Work, L.A.

I have dozens of aloha shirts, and I wear them every single day. It’s my little uniform. You get to my age, it’s nice to have a standard look to lean on, and not have to overthink it. I can’t quite remember where I first noticed the aloha shirt, however. I think as much as anything else, I learned about them by reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and realizing my hero, Hunter S. Thompson, wore them (laughs). I definitely saw them in Los Angeles once I moved here. Growing up on the East Coast, you didn’t see aloha shirts that much.

I really started to get familiar with the shirts when I got a job with Disney on this dinosaur movie, and spent about a year in Polynesia and in Australia. One of our grips wore aloha shirts as his daily uniform. I’m pretty sure I bought my first one when I got back to L.A. But really, much of the buying started around a decade ago, when I discovered eBay as a source for them. I found a few brands that I really liked — my favorite is Reyn Spooner — and I just keep going back.

The favorite design I own is the Japanese crashing wave motif, popularized by the artist Hokusai. They’re very modern looking, almost minimalist. But that’s the thing about aloha shirts: They can look dressy in their own way, especially with the traditional ones that are reverse-printed so that the colors look muted. I saw a guy on the street who had big pineapples on a super vibrant shirt, and I wasn’t even sure if that would qualify as a real aloha shirt. Clearly, the style has defied a single time period. It’s an aesthetic that reinvents itself. But if aloha shirts are back in, well, I haven’t noticed.

I will say, I bought a beautiful one at Bloomingdales in New York City not too long ago. It was expensive, from a high-end trendy label that I can’t recall, but beautiful. Then I saw it on a bartender in a Budweiser commercial, so I guess my taste is vindicated (laughs).

John Carlson, 67, Professor, San Francisco

Honestly, I thought they were out of style now. There was a resurgence of Hawaiian shirts about eight or ten years ago. My daughter and I were at a conference, and we showed up for dinner and a few of the cooler guys had on Hawaiian shirts. My wife told me I should try them on myself, and I thought, Okay, it’s cooler than a golf shirt and way dressier than a T-shirt, so at least it’s versatile. When I traveled across Europe last summer, I took three Hawaiian shirts because I felt like I could fit in anywhere with a collared shirt that had some flair.

I’ve always thought there’s a huge difference between wearing a collared shirt and not. I would never go to a function in a T-shirt. But the Hawaiian shirt gives you such a wide variety of patterns, anywhere from subdued to crazy. I’ve got one that’s just a bunch of WWII bombers! I don’t wear it in public too often, but a shirt like that can tell others about your interests. You can find a pattern of just about anything these days. Admittedly, my favorite is the first one my wife and daughter got me — a floral pattern in dark blues and greens, just a touch classy.

I must’ve really noticed the Hawaiian shirt for the first time in the early 1970s, with a guy who had just moved from Hawaii. It was bizarre to see. It looked like the kind of fabric you’d see on early 1960s furniture. But I thought it was beautiful, too. There was just so much fanfare in that era because it was the first time for many to be able to fly to Hawaii, and the culture affected everything. Actually, on second thought, I must’ve seen the shirt for the first time on the original Hawaii Five-0.

I wear them regularly now — it reflects my lifestyle since I’m basically in retirement. I wouldn’t wear them as a full-time professional. I’m surprised they’re a fad, though. I don’t want to fit in with everyone else, especially if the young tech workers are adopting it! I don’t want to look like the old guy who’s trying to be young, and I especially don’t want to look and talk like a techie.

Eddie Kim is a features writer at MEL. He last wrote about how the makers of sexual harassment training videos say business is booming after #MeToo.

More Eddie:

• Why Millennial Men Don’t Go to Therapy
• The SoCal Skater Dude Who Doubles As YouTube’s Philosopher King
• What Activists Are Doing to Fight the Rampant Growth of Bestiality
• Our Love of Guns Is Often Passed Down from Father to Son
• Their Diet? 100 Percent Meat. And They Say They’ve Never Felt Healthier.

Three Hawaiian-Shirt-Clad Boomers on Millennials Stealing Their Look was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Linda Conley encountered her first sexual harassment training assignment in 1997, as lead script writer and researcher for Kantola Training Services. The company had acquired a smaller firm that had its own video series on harassment in the workplace, and it was Conley’s task to review it for redistribution by Kantola. The company’s legal expert, however, had revealed a major problem in a subtle moment of a video on “quid-pro-quo” harassment, in which a superior pressures an employee about sexual favors in return for professional advancement: The conclusion showed the superior being reprimanded and receiving a suspension for his abuse. “Our legal expert was blunt: This person needed to be fired for it to be current with the times,” Conley says. “So we brought back the original actors and re-recorded the vignette from scratch.”

Over the last 22 years, Conley has met with those who understand sexual harassment and abuse best — researchers, advocates, investigators and victims — and used real-life cases in narratives and scenes that have taught hundreds of thousands of employees about harassment in the workplace. But even the seasoned production manager was taken aback by the force, fury and volume of the #MeToo revelations, especially when she read the details of the sordid sprees of powerful men like Harvey Weinstein. “I was deeply disappointed. Shocked, really,” she says. “The extent that people hurt women. You know, sometimes when I’m writing a script, I tell myself I can’t include a detail or scenario because it sounds too unreal. But now we know all these real-life stories that would be deemed too offensive by an HR manager if I put it in a video.”

Kantola itself has spent the last 30 years producing and selling video programs on sexual harassment, diversity, leadership and other workplace issues to 89 companies listed in the Fortune 100 and countless other public and nonprofit organizations. Now more than ever, though, they’re experiencing a boom period. “People are reaching out a lot. #MeToo has changed a lot in the last year,” says Kantola CEO Allen Noren. “Organizations are getting much more serious about it. It’s so much more lurid now, in terms of the world knowing how bad harassment can be. We have clear details of what men like Harvey Weinstein have done. And where we are allows us to be more explicit with our training courses, too.”

But not everything has changed. In particular, sexual harassment training has long had the same problems in its execution. A 1997 study found that sexual harassment training didn’t significantly change employee behavior for the better, and a 2001 report found similar results — while men who did the training were more likely to say sexual behaviors at work were bad, they were no more likely to notice or report such behaviors. A 2016 report from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) concluded that trainings have failed to prevent workplace harassment because companies are “focused on simply avoiding legal liability” and use trainings to claim in court that they did all they could.

Another issue is that requirements on sexual harassment vary largely from state to state. For instance, 33 states have no requirements at all, while others like California or Maine require training for companies only with a certain number of employees. “It’s led to an industry of sex harassment training that’s been adapted to the letter of the law. But the law isn’t broad or generous on what constitutes sexual harassment. So subtle behaviors that can escalate into a dangerous situation or affect productivity often don’t qualify as sexual harassment in court,” says Sheerine Alemzadeh, co-executive director of the nonprofit Healing to Action and an expert on gender violence. “Usually then, the training is on incidents that are actionable. And that leaves people confused about what they can talk about.”

The confusion isn’t helped by the fact that the industry of sexual harassment training is still relatively young. The first videos, like 1981’s The Power Pinch, debuted months after the federal government first delivered guidelines on how to spot and manage sexual harassment at work. Power Pinch is maybe the earliest example of the format in which actors play out various forms of abuse in short vignettes, with a “host” or voiceover dictating what went wrong (or right) before delivering some questions for viewers to mull.

The video begins with a man with thick brows and square glasses, creeping up on a woman standing at a filing cabinet. Jazzy muzak floats in the background as he corners her and throws a hand on her shoulder. “Gotcha, babycakes!” he says in her ear, as she lets out a frustrated sigh. It then cuts to what appears to be a staged set of a tiny neighborhood watering hole, with actor Ken Howard (aka the coach in The White Shadow) leaning over the bar as if we’re meeting him for happy hour. “Good ol’ sex. What’s wrong with that?” Howard says to the camera, his words soundtracked by a funky bass riff. “Everything, as a matter of fact, when it’s unwelcome and when it occurs at work. And yet this thing called sexual harassment, which affects thousands each year, is taken about as seriously as a dirty joke.”

Watched with hindsight, these early 1980s videos seem comically ham-handed. Later in The Power Pinch, the thick-browed harasser offers to pour the same woman a cup of coffee, before purposefully spilling powdered creamer on her dress and rapidly pretending to help her by wiping her chest with a napkin. A similar PSA from the same era depicts a woman at a copier, who turns as a male peer enters the room. “You know, you’re doing a great job, but you’re not using all of your assets. With a body like that, you could really go places,” he says, eyeballing her. “Be a little more sexy. You’re talking about your job, here!”

As a longtime lawyer and harassment expert hired by companies to assess and improve workplaces, Patti Perez has seen a laundry list of problems with this widely accepted training format, even as the videos and scripts have evolved into something more nuanced. Now an executive with compliance-training firm Emtrain, Perez says one of the biggest issues is that mid-level managers and CEOs alike still see harassment training a “dreaded check-the-box activity,” an attitude that can rub off on their cohorts. “Other problems with how training has been done? [A focus] on what not to do, rather than what good behavior looks like. Failure to teach about civility and how to intervene if you see or hear something. Making it a one-and-done course. The goal of scaring, blaming and shaming, rather than increasing understanding and empathy, both necessary for behavior change,” she writes in an email.

Kantola’s Conley has mulled these flaws for a long time. When she first joined Kantola back in the late 1990s, the company was still in the early phases of developing its harassment curriculum. Older videos had a soft touch with its lessons, often focusing on defining the term or why it’s illegal rather than digging into the subtleties of abuse, Conley explains. Kantola’s buyers at the time were largely in middle management or in HR, and cared a lot about whether employees would “push back” on a lesson about sexual misconduct in the workplace, she adds. These days, though — even pre-#MeToo — Conley’s scripts feature detailed, true-to-life examples of abuse culled from in-depth interviews with people who innately understand workplace harassment, either as victims or advocates or both. It can take her up to six weeks to write up a package of video lessons. In all, she’s completed “40 or 50” original lessons.

Still, per Conley, much has stayed the same — even as societal understanding of sexual harassment has grown. Some lessons are “easy and obvious” to craft, as with scenarios in which a group of coworkers goes too far with a joke that offends another employee. But more insidious, long-term examples of abuse, as when a superior grooms an employee to accept immoral actions and behavior, are still difficult to communicate in the video-training format, she says.

“We try to come back to a pair of characters several times for these quid-pro-quo type scenarios, but it’s tough in a short video. You can’t make people watch a 90-minute clip that shows how a toxic relationship develops when a manager grooms their target and constantly sees what they can get away with,” she says. “Workplace compliments is another subject that’s challenging because you don’t want to jump down someone’s throat for an innocuous comment, but the same compliment can be wrong if they’re using it as a tool to belittle someone or focus attention on their appearance. In real life, how do you know what they meant?”

Sexual harassment was first recognized by the federal government because of a political gambit from a powerful white racist. When the proposed Civil Rights Act hit the floor of the House of Representatives in the spring of 1964, politician Howard W. Smith was there to push right back. The House Rules Committee Chairman had long been confused (and quite disgusted) by the idea that black people needed equal rights in public and in the workplace. In the final stretch of House debate over the new bill, Smith pulled out his trump card. The act would already ban workplace discrimination on the basis of color or race, but Smith proposed an amendment, adding “sex” to the list. Women deserved protection too, he claimed.

Hordes of men in the House burst into laughter at Smith’s idea, dismissing the notion that women needed workplace protections in an era when men did the breadwinning. Liberals immediately wondered whether Smith was trying to derail the entire Civil Rights Act by making it the subject of ridicule, a view held by many modern historians. Conservatives argued about whether Smith was legitimately trying to protect white women from encroaching racial change. Either way, the proposed amendment passed, as did the act itself on July 2, 1964.

More than 50 years have passed, but there’s still plenty of chaos waiting in the legal process for victims who want to report a complaint or take a case to court. Any claim must first be made to the EEOC, which works to resolve cases in mediation rather than federal court. Its 2016 report showed that the EEOC is able to reach settlements and give victims compensation in only about a quarter of reported incidents (6,750 in 2016, totalling $40 million in damages). Victims with cases that can’t be resolved by the agency are given the green light to take it to federal court, but only have three months to file a lawsuit.

Things only get harder from there. For decades, federal judges have leaned into a shockingly slender definition of what constitutes a hostile work environment, and even cases with repeated gropings, sexualized comments or propositions for sex have been shut down. Less than 2 percent of job discrimination lawsuits, which includes sexual harassment claims, make it to a jury, and only 4 percent of victims receive compensation. In acknowledgement of the minefields in the court process, some companies have defined sexual harassment as broadly as they can, giving the EEOC the power to punish employees even if the courts don’t, Elizabeth Tippett, a harassment policy expert and professor at the University of Oregon, writes in an op-ed. The issue? They haven’t been particularly bullish about leveraging that power for victims’ benefit, she says.

For all those reasons, preventing such behavior remains the priority, and sexual harassment training has tried to keep up with society’s own shifts over recent years. The aesthetics of many videos certainly have improved, with more professional staging, casting and camerawork. Emtrain’s Perez sent me links to short training videos that riff on current events (like that Google engineer’s manifesto on “political correctness” and female engineers) and work in concepts like “emotional intelligence,” rather than offering a to-do list. The scenarios depicted in training videos have also become more subtle, says Kantola’s Noren, with a greater emphasis on annoying behaviors, not just obvious harassment.

The experts I spoke to agree that using training to engage men in a conversation, rather than just lecturing via Powerpoint, is the right move. Perez, for one, has had success using small-group seminars where she guides the conversation. Alemzadeh also notes that tying harassment training together with diversity and inclusion training, rather than making them distinct “courses,” can inspire more positive questions and self-examination about why men hold the cultural prejudices they do, including about women.

That said, like always, change is slow. “I talked to an HR manager recently, and she confided that the COO of her company has said her job is to be a spy on the employees. If that’s the attitude, it’s going to be hard for any training to have the right impact,” Noren says. “It’s a multi-year project to change culture and make people feel empowered and comfortable. That’s why training has to be an ongoing thing in each office.” Moreover, even after #MeToo, for every company willing to invest in more and better training, there are 10 others who don’t bother with training at all or keep hitting rewind on their outdated presentations. And the disproportionately white-male universe of top managers remains in power in corporate America.

Still, Kantola’s Conley is proud to be shaping lessons on sexual abuse as a woman. She is grateful to have avoided any serious harassment herself, but stresses that any team working on the subject needs to include a woman’s perspective. Even men on Kantola’s production teams have expressed disbelief or confusion over what constitutes harassment, she says. After two decades, Conley is certain that her experience has brought more nuance to the training, and made the material more appealing for women who are watching.

As for the future, her optimism is, admittedly, blunted by the monolithic nature of abuse itself. “I don’t think human nature has changed that much in the last 20 years,” Conley says. “I hope our training has helped changed an office’s culture. But even today, people joke that they can’t say some joke because it’s sexual harassment, and then say it anyway. Unfortunately, I don’t think harassment is going away anytime soon. And people need a lot of reminders if we want to see real change.”

Eddie Kim is a features writer at MEL. He last wrote about the military men of Twitter who are defying soldier stereotypes.

More Eddie:

• Why Millennial Men Don’t Go to Therapy
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• Our Love of Guns Is Often Passed Down from Father to Son
• Their Diet? 100 Percent Meat. And They Say They’ve Never Felt Healthier.

The Makers of Sexual Harassment Training Videos Say Business Is Booming After #MeToo was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

They’re not a single bloc. Nor the staunch conservatives they’ve been made out to be

When Matt began working for a major U.S. bank in his mid-20s, he never expected he’d have a front-row seat to the implosion of the financial industry in 2008, the result of corrosion from toxic investments backed by the credit of vulnerable Americans. Every day, though, he woke up to take phone calls and emails from people who were most devastated by the economic crash — “working-class folks” who demanded to know where their savings had gone.

“One day, I decided to quit, and in a fit of self-righteousness, decided to do the most selfless job I could be proud of: I decided to join the Marine Corps,” Matt says. “I believed the story of how the U.S. military was a liberating force, on the side of justice, around the world. I bought in.”

Matt enlisted in late 2009, and went on to serve in an expeditionary unit based off the coast of Libya during the Arab Spring. His second tour took him to Afghanistan in 2013, where he manned an M1A1 Abrams tank as a gunner. One evening, while on patrol, the tank rumbled over a bomb tucked under the dirt surface of the road. The ensuing explosion tossed Matt like a ragdoll within the steel cabin. Somehow, he survived in one piece.

Things began to change after that, however. Matt would forget names of men in his squad, and lose track of what he was saying. He struggled with anxiety and mental blocks and was ultimately medically retired from the Marines with a traumatic head injury and PTSD in 2016. The retirement brought a sensation of uselessness, and he mulled suicide. He was saved by a combination of therapy and Twitter, where he went to reflect and ramble on his time as a Marine and current life as a veteran. The twist was that he did so anonymously, under the moniker of “The Warax,” a riff on the Dr. Seuss character that “speaks for all trees.”

Angry Staff Officer on Twitter

Lol at all these dudes who're like, "I speak for all veterans." You're not the Lorax and we're not trees, ya weirdos.

The Warax on Twitter

@surrealmwshort @pptsapper You have summoned me.

Today, he’s one of a number of funny, incisive and critical servicemembers and veterans on Twitter who are using the platform to speak out against divisive politics, public officials who exploit veterans’ causes, sexism in the military and myriad other social issues. In doing so, they’re pushing back against the stereotype of the conservative military man and fighting the way that politicians and talking heads alike use veterans as a “prop” (as Matt puts it) for their own agenda. Whether it’s President Trump, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker or Fox News host Tucker Carlson, veterans continue to be used by public figures to represent a political perspective or moral value, despite the fact that veterans themselves cannot be discussed as a single bloc, Matt says.

Tomi Lahren on Twitter

Make America Great Again means prioritizing Americans over illegal immigrants. Veterans over refugees. https://t.co/rhmFUzBmLz

Donald J. Trump on Twitter

So many veterans groups are beyond happy with all of the money I raised/gave! It was my great honor - they do an amazing job.

The Warax on Twitter

scott i am The Troops and if you do not eat my entire butt you are disrespecting me https://t.co/QKe12Oab6P

There are a number of standout accounts, but I spoke to three millennial men in particular who have garnered loyal followings by writing honestly and satirically about both current events and their experiences in the military. (Two of them asked to remain anonymous, as they’re active military members.) Here’s what they had to say…

Angry Staff Officer (@pptsapper), 32, Army

I’ve been in for about 10 years, and enlisted out of college. I eventually completed ROTC and got my commission as an officer in the Army. I’d always wanted to enlist, and I knew that if I got older and didn’t do it, I’d regret it. What I didn’t expect was to still be in after 10 years. I was much more conservative politically back then. I bought into the idea that we were totally right to be in Iraq and that our leadership would never lead us astray. Then you learn more about how the military is a human institution. I love what the Army stands for, but it often doesn’t meet its own standard.

Angry Staff Officer on Twitter

At this point, next time I deploy I'm gonna have to leave room in my will for "all the shit I *didn't* die for" just in case I DO die and some people want to drag my name out for their dumbass cause

I’m an engineer officer now, but one of the things I learned in the infantry is that you see a dick-measuring contest everywhere. It’s never about proficiency. It’s about eyeing uniform bling and judging people. You see people who are supposed to be great leaders, only to realize they’re just full of themselves and make terrible decisions. I got real tired of it all. One common idea is that if you’re not in infantry, you’re a piece of shit. And a lot of these guys choose to treat minorities, women and the LGBTQ community as if they’re all less than them.

Angry Staff Officer on Twitter

Caning" on the floor of Congress does *not* have good connotations in U.S. history. Rep. Brooks (SC) beat Sen. Sumner (MA) with his cane because he didn't like Sumner's anti-slavery speech. https://t.co/2t3RYXbmmm

I remember being in the infantry and being one of those guys who said women can’t do this or that, and that they don’t deserve to be here with the men. But then, as I became a commissioned officer, I took time to think about it. I’m no big, jacked-up strong dude and I did fine, so maybe it’s not a body-strength problem. And the excuses from men worrying soldiers will be having sex in the ranks or there would be emotional issues, I mean… isn’t that a male problem? If we can give an 18-year-old a rifle and tell him, “Hey, go shoot that kind of guy, but not the other dude there,” shouldn’t we also trust him to keep his pants on? This is supposed to be a disciplined military, right?

Angry Staff Officer on Twitter

As a person in uniform, I feel respected when members of this nation can respectfully and peacefully protest police violence without being browbeaten by elected officials. It's the flag of the United States, not the flag of the United States military. https://t.co/KSnQKqNVhY

I started tweeting while I was in Afghanistan. The anonymity was a self-protection thing — the higher-ups had strict rules for being on social media. But I wasn’t tweeting about operations. I just wanted to vent. I remember one tweet that got a huge reaction. I said that, as a soldier from a Jewish background, I stand in solidarity with our Muslim brothers and sisters in uniform. Many people that I respected DM’d me to say thanks, but it also introduced me to the world of the alt-right, people telling me I should get back in the oven or making aspersions about my family. The hypocrisy was interesting.

It’s weird, veterans haven’t always been considered this singular bloc in American history. Sure, we’ve honored them in the past, but we didn’t create this special social class. And on both the left and right, it feels like one exists today, as if a veteran’s words are more hallowed. But we don’t speak for America. When you start using the military as a symbol of your perspective, using the parents of fallen soldiers as mouthpieces, it all makes me queasy. Just being a vet doesn’t make you more qualified to have an opinion on how this country should be run.

The majority of my followers aren’t military, but these open and honest representations of service members helps break down that civilian-military divide. We’re just like you. In fact, we are you.

Cav the Knife (@CombatCavScout), 32, Army

I come from a military family, so I didn’t have too many doubts when I went into college and ROTC with the plan to become a commissioned officer and then deploy. Being a cavalry officer in the Army meant that I’d be fighting on the ground. It wasn’t political for me. The fight is gonna be fought, and there are gonna be Americans in harm’s way no matter what. So I’d rather be there and help keep them safe than not. I deployed to Eastern Afghanistan in 2009, and it was surreal stuff. I got my combat badge in the first week or two.

Cav the Knife on Twitter

If you followed me because you're a Christian conservative 2A-lover who ❤s troops because we all think like you, prep for a rude awakening.

I joined Twitter in late 2010. The first thing that drew me there — you’re gonna laugh at this — was Charlie Sheen’s public mental breakdown. I felt for him falling apart, but it was a trainwreck and I wanted to experience it through Twitter. I quickly found, however, a community of veterans or people in national security. I have a couple of international relations degrees so it was amazing to freely interact with people in that field, including academics.

Cav the Knife on Twitter

Right after the part about a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State. American gun owners aren't well-regulated and a militia is no longer necessary to secure our State. https://t.co/rf3ynSP3hp

There weren’t much politics in my home, but I’ve begun embracing them in the last few years, and using Twitter to talk about them. You might not be interested in politics, but it’s interested in you. It still affects you, and others. And maybe it’s because I grew up in a family that stressed service to others, but I have to confront the fact that I’m a straight white man who can go through life without much of a care in the world. I guess I’m a minority in that I’m a non-Christian in the Deep South, but has that ever really cost me anything? Nope. So I see that the world is bigger than me, and I try to advocate for other people, because I’m in a position to try. What am I serving in the military for if not to help Americans in some meaningful way?

I don’t necessarily try to subvert stereotypes about the military, but it’s important for people to see that we’re not a faceless white guy in a uniform. The majority of the military is white and conservative, but a large number of service members don’t share that background or views. That includes the assumptions about what we think of social issues.

Cav the Knife on Twitter

👏🏻 She 👏🏻 can't 👏🏻 consent 👏🏻 if 👏🏻 you 👏🏻 can 👏🏻 destroy 👏🏻 her 👏🏻 career 👏🏻 if 👏🏻 she 👏🏻 says 👏🏻 no 👏🏻 https://t.co/8noBkkMoJj

Some of the stuff I’m most proud of is being open about my journey with PTSD and my engagement of mental health professionals. I go to therapy regularly, and I talk about it because there’s a huge stigma in the military about seeking treatment. I know people who still believe that you can lose your security clearance for seeking mental health treatment. That’s incorrect. I know people who think it’ll kill your career. That’s incorrect. I’ve been in therapy for years, and I continue to be promoted and take on roles with more responsibility. So I’m proud when other service members come to me and say, “Hey, I appreciate your honesty, and you inspired me to get help. I’m a better person for it.”

The Warax (@IAmtheWarax), 34, Marine Corps

The Marine Corps is… special (laughs). It’s like the Marine Corps really believes in the stereotypes about being a tough guy. The younger men play that up; they act like the dumber you are, the cooler you are. It’s a strange culture, and it was a place where it was difficult to express liberal viewpoints without being called a pussy. Some people would even use their rank and position to put forward political ideas that held no water. One example: The whole fake Jade Helm conspiracy thing was picking up in 2012, and friends of mine really believed it. And they thought if you didn’t believe it, you were a sheep. Like, goddamn guys, that’s really crazy.

The Warax on Twitter

As a leader in the Marine Corps I helped perpetuate a culture of sexual violence and victim-blaming. I wanted to protect my Marines, and so I echoed sentiments and beliefs to them that I now know to be wrong. It's my greatest failing as a leader and I want to talk about it...

If you’re thinking of a veteran, you’re probably imagining a white male combat vet with a long beard or whatever. But it’s not correct because the majority of people in the military work jobs that have nothing to do with combat. Or they’re so much more diverse in background than you imagine. They’re so removed from the stereotype of what a soldier is. It was frustrating to me that so many people felt disenfranchised by that. I wondered what it would feel like to serve the country but not in a way that captures the respect of the country.

The Warax on Twitter

whenever i eat from a buffet i just mix all that shit together bc if the marine corps taught me one thing it is that food is punishment and should never be enjoyed thank you

What really pissed me off was the disrespect from people who had never served in the military. It’s a joke in the military where we call each other “pogues,” like people in support roles, rather than grunts, the guys who fight. But now I saw this insult, “pogue,” being directed at soldiers from civilians. What the hell is this? I saw it happen with some anti-war activists, some folks in the Democratic Socialists of America or Veterans Against the War, when they delivered talking points about why they oppose the wars. Instead of debating the point, all these folks started attacking people’s service.

More largely, there’s more than one kind of soldier. It helps to be able to talk about these topics, especially from an anonymous account. Topics like what it feels like to be a veteran who’s queer. To be honest, I want to spend more time writing some of these more serious pieces — people really thanked me for the article on suicide. I’m grateful for that.

The Warax on Twitter

the answer to the question "why are we still fighting in afghanistan" is as complicated as you want to make it. but as you tease those reasons apart, at the end of every string, you will find the same rot: moral cowardice.

I hope there’s change in the military. Servicemen are having more conversations about sexual violence and abuse, for example. But what I see is that the Marine Corps identifies problems and spends more time making sure people don’t find out about them, rather than solving the problems. And if people try to talk about that, there’s a willingness throughout the Corps to treat them like a heretic for it. Jim LaPorta, a Marine and a defense reporter, has written extensively about sex crimes, including the “Marines United” scandal of sharing revenge porn. He took a ton of flak from Marines because they were angry he was dragging the Corps through the mud. Which is crazy, because it’s not Jim LaPorta who was sharing pics of naked Marines and taking advantage of rank to force himself on subordinates. It’s an example of the real barriers to progress.

But I have to tell myself a lot to take a fuckin’ break from social media because it’s toxic and overwhelming, too. Y’know, it’s nice outside. Get fresh air. Remind yourself that life can move on.

Matthew Moores on Twitter

five years ago today my friends and i drove into an ambush that destroyed two tanks and could have killed all of us. but we didn't die. forever grateful to my bomb bros and w/ special thanks to the IED that taught us there's no obstacle in life too great to overcome.

Eddie Kim is a features writer at MEL. He last wrote about the last of the bookies.

More Eddie:

• Why Millennial Men Don’t Go to Therapy
• The SoCal Skater Dude Who Doubles As YouTube’s Philosopher King
• What Activists Are Doing to Fight the Rampant Growth of Bestiality
• Our Love of Guns Is Often Passed Down from Father to Son
• Their Diet? 100 Percent Meat. And They Say They’ve Never Felt Healthier.

The Military Men of Twitter Who Are Defying Soldier Stereotypes was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Supreme Court says sports gambling is now legal. As such, legit sportsbooks are starting to dominate as a new season of football kicks off. Where, though, does that leave the black-market bookmaker?

John was a fresh-faced twentysomething bookie, not long out of college, when the cops kicked in the door of his uncle’s gambling den, located deep within the seventh floor of a Manhattan walk-up. The officers rushed in with their guns drawn, and John stiffened into a panicked rigor mortis. He watched blankly as one pressed his uncle face-first against the wall, cuffing his wrists before turning to John. Shit, he thought. This is it. There goes my career.

Then he noticed his uncle’s face, grinning. The cop who had cuffed his uncle was now making small talk with him, while other officers searched the apartment before taking seats around the dining table. The mood in the room had changed in the snap of a finger. “My uncle, he looks at me and says, ‘The cops don’t wanna be here. They were hoping we weren’t here,’” John recalls. “Well, fuck, here we are. We all laughed and sat around for a while. These poor guys in vests had to run up seven stories to catch a few bookies instead of going after a murderer.”

Plus, as John points out, “Remember, cops like to gamble too.”

Almost 25 years later, John remains a bookie, short for “bookmaker,” or someone who collects bets from individuals, sets odds for game outcomes and pays out winnings. The common format is that a bettor puts down $110 to win $100 — the $10 take that the “house” charges is called the “vigorish,” aka “juice,” which helps fund the bookie’s operation. This is the basic case with all bookmakers, whether they’re a major company in a Las Vegas casino or one who works his local sports bar. The difference is that sports bets have been legal in Nevada but illegal almost everywhere else, making the black-market bookie a cornerstone in U.S. cities from coast to coast. Some have even become celebrities through the hustle: Perhaps the most famous of them all, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, was portrayed by Robert De Niro in the 1995 film Casino (as “Sam Rothstein”).

John, now 46, originally entered the business when his uncle noticed his love of sports and urged him to start a sheet and gather bettors, rather than toil away doing manual labor around New York City. The cash he handled grew over time — from a few hundred in a boiler room to a couple thousand at a casino to, ultimately, $10,000 bags of cash at the golf course. In his 30s, he moved to the West Coast, where he works today. “No matter where you go, the bottom line is, if the flow of cash is good, people will play. Always,” he says.

John is guarded about many aspects of this life — he asked that I use a pseudonym and called me from a burner phone for this story — but earnest about the reality of the bookie business in 2018. Big-time bookies with a large stable of bettors can easily clear six figures a week, and even small players can make six figures in a year with just a handful of regular clients. John, meanwhile, says he’s just a “mid-sized fish” who has benefitted from the illegality of sports betting, which has merely funneled customers to the black market rather than stamp out activity.

Now, the biggest shift of his career is here as numerous states begin drafting up plans to create legal, government-regulated sports gambling. In May, the Supreme Court struck down a 1992 federal law banning sports gambling in effectively every state but Nevada. Since then, major sportsbooks have begun prospecting for fresh deals in the U.S. market. Their pickaxes are already hitting paydirt: William Hill, the U.K.’s biggest sportsbook and a dominant operator in Nevada, this week struck a partnership with major U.S. casino chain Eldorado. Others are launching online platforms for betting, as FanDuel did last week in New Jersey.

“It’s a slow process, but by the end of the year, something like 10 states will have legalized sports gambling in some form, shape or size,” says Mark Conrad, director of the sports business program at Fordham University. “Based on just one month in New Jersey, reports from FanDuel have been big on new growth. Other reports say gambling revenues could possibly exceed expectations. Maybe that’s a temporary thing, but it’s certainly attractive to the big players.” (While estimates vary widely because of the shadowy nature of illegal gambling networks, the American Gambling Association suggests that Americans already put down $150 billion on illegal bets every year.)

Essentially, we’re in the midst of a once-in-a-generation gold rush, with both sportsbooks and prospective gamblers salivating for a share. Left on the sideline is the black-market bookie, who faces the same conundrum as the neighborhood weed dealer in a shiny new market of legalized pot.

Legislators are hoping that if legal sportsbooks can provide greater security, more wagering opportunities and stable payouts, the illegal market will subside. Naturally, there’s a cut of cash at stake for local governments and sports leagues, too — upwards of $1.5 billion could flow into state coffers through taxation, according to Moody’s Investor Services, while leagues like the NBA and MLB are negotiating their own fees on bets.

All these expectations contribute to a bleak outlook for future generations of bookies. The “vast majority” of new gamblers will use legalized channels, and the sports leagues, sponsors and brand partners will be motivated to support the legal framework as much as possible, says David Carter, principal of consulting firm Sports Business Group and executive director of USC’s Sports Business Institute. “Some form of the traditional bookie will exist down the road, but it may resemble the diminished and narrow role now played by traditional ticket scalpers, for whom technology rapidly and forever changed their business,” he concludes.

This is a view that rings true with several sports bettors I spoke to. Martin, a 28-year-old who works for a major sports media company, has been betting on game days since he left college and secured a salaried job. He has two longtime bookies — “one for futures, one for game-to-game bets” — he found through friends of friends, and he usually bets between $50 and $200 at a time. “I know it’s illegal, but it doesn’t feel illegal,” Martin says. “The biggest downside is, um, the two-minute hassle to Venmo the bookie each week, I guess?”

Martin is excited for the future of legal gambling, and expects to transition once legal apps and platforms start springing up in California, where he resides. “In 10 years, I don’t see the use for a bookie unless they can find a niche market. I mean, do people in states with legal weed have weed dealers anymore? I don’t know how they’ll compete,” he adds. “I’ve never been sketched out by sports betting, but if you’re new, why would you bother getting a referral to a bookie or finding one solo if you can go legal, even if that has a 5 percent fee or something? Unless you’re making giant bets, it makes no sense.”

Nonetheless, John laughs softly when I tell him the doom-and-gloom predictions. He doesn’t disagree that new bettors will flock to legal platforms. The crux is whether they’ll stay there, or go on to join the deep pockets and “degenerate gamblers” in the black market. Either way, the veteran bookie is unflustered. “We’re not too concerned about it,” he says. “In fact, legalization might open some doors for us.”

John’s optimism stems from his experience working within an illegal market that’s thrived for a century despite efforts to quash it. For one, the decline of the mafia in the past few decades has made law enforcement less motivated to pursue illegal gambling for the purposes of busting a big criminal enterprise, experts say. Others in the industry believe illegal gambling could survive in a stable form as sports betting becomes more normalized than ever before. As Jason, a small-time bookie in L.A., texts: “The metaphor might be more like the opioid crisis and how people get them from doctors AND dealers, rather than the weed analogy.”

Finding a bookie is a unique process for each bettor, but it often involves a low-key communication with a stranger. You might know a friend who has a bookie and request a referral. You might overhear a group of men at a country club talking about their action, and gently inquire if they know anyone who wants a new customer. You might troll the local sports bar and ask a veteran bartender if they know who’s taking action, or just befriend a guy who’s sitting by himself, anxiously commenting on the end of a meaningless football game despite a lack of evidence that he’s a fan of either team.

Once you get the green light from a bookie, the process of betting is discreet. The bookie will send out his wagers for bettors to review, usually via text or a secure web site that records bettors’ picks. In most American team sports, this involves betting on a point spread (concerning the margin of victory a team will have), moneyline (you simply pick who wins, but each team stands to give you a specific payout ratio for what you wager) and over-under (where you bet on whether the total number of points scored will be more or less than a figure). Payouts usually take place within a day or two of the event, and while hard cash used to be the currency of choice, these days more bookies are using cryptocurrency or cash apps like Paypal and Venmo to manage money with clients.

Besides paying off bets via Paypal and Venmo, there’s not much new about any of this. In fact, sports gambling has been a fixture in the U.S. since before a sovereign America even existed. In 1665, the first horse-racing track, an import from British culture, opened in what’s now Long Island. That era also birthed government-sanctioned lotteries, the proceeds of which helped pay for the resources needed to wage the Revolutionary War, according to researcher Ronald Rychlak. Over the next 200 years, sports betting took on a major commercial role in many U.S. cities, growing alongside game-oriented casinos.

Yet by the turn of the 20th century, government officials had become concerned with an increasing number of betting scandals, most notably the 1919 incident in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox attempted to throw the World Series in exchange for bribes. Though the players were acquitted in court, it was more than enough for nervy politicians to bring down the legislative hammer in their states, painting betting as an immoral stain on American sports. While many citizens agreed with that view in public, by the 1950s sport betting was more popular than ever, just behind closed doors. Organized crime swooped in to fund the network and profited handsomely despite laws like the 1961 Interstate Wire Act, which outlawed phone bets across state lines.

The advent of the internet helped revolutionize sports betting, largely because of the creation of offshore sportsbooks that routed bets to countries like Costa Rica and Colombia in order to evade U.S. prohibition. These sites provided a way for some mobsters to maintain a stake in sports betting while lowering the odds of a physical bust, but for consumers, they came with some problems: Bettors ran into scam sites that just stole their deposits, or struggled to get winnings wired to their accounts in a timely manner.

And so, while the human interaction required to find a local bookie can be inconvenient, using them instead of a legal sportsbook has its upsides. The illegal market’s use of cash and cryptocurrency means that those who want to dodge taxes on their winnings have more leeway to do so. John adds that the biggest gamblers don’t want their activities traced or otherwise accessible by government eyes, given they’re handling huge sums of money, sometimes from uncertain sources. This is a view that USC’s Carter agrees with: “Because certain gamblers and some gambling sectors will want to remain as anonymous as possible, the market for illegal bookmaking will always offer this perceived advantage,” he says.

Perhaps the most enticing benefit of all is the availability of credit: “If you’re at a bar or golf course with other gamblers, and you overhear someone debating whether they should take money out of their savings for a $2,000 bet on a legal site, it’s easy to say, ‘Hey, do you want five times that amount on credit?’” John says. “Then another guy overhears, and soon enough people are saying screw the legal route, let’s do this instead.”

John isn’t loose with such offers — as with most bookies, he reviews potential clients as much as possible to vet their trustworthiness and cashflow. Trying to strong-arm flaky bettors into paying back a debt is a tale of the past, he says. (“Taking someone’s knees out is a great way to catch heat from law enforcement,” he deadpans). But the reliability and personal touch of a good bookie, including delaying payments or even outright forgiving debts, has kept clients coming back. John notes he’s now taking wagers from a second generation of bettors who have been referred by fathers and uncles who are longtime customers. “I’m staying afloat because of that trust factor with people, working with them and helping them,” he says.

The big question now is exactly how commissions and fees will shake out in the legal framework that states create. The federal government’s attempt to levy a 10 percent tax on sports books in 1951 made the business a losing proposition, cratering progress toward legalizing and regulating the industry. So states and sportsbooks will have to play a tricky balancing game to make any increased “juice” palatable to gamblers, especially experienced ones, according to Fordham’s Conrad. “If my bookie is offering me -110, and it’s -120 for a pick’em bet with a legal site, I’d probably go with my bookie,” adds Martin. “If I was a casual bettor, maybe the security and ease of a mainstream book would be fine. But I’m gonna be sticking with my bookie. Why would I pay the 5 to 10 percent hike?”

That’s exactly the kind of take that gives John optimism. Older and wiser, on the downhill of his bookie career, he isn’t one to panic about future prospects (unlike his young handcuffed self). He looks forward to the way legal sports betting will increase the share for all parties involved, especially via a new generation of young gamblers. He’s also bluntly pragmatic about his target demographic: “At the end of the day, there are always a lot of degenerates,” John remarks. “It’ll be like guys who smoke cigarettes and wear a nicotine patch.”

Basically, he expects big bettors will happily take their family out to the casino to watch football and throw down a few casual wagers — and then go straight back to “Joe at the Corner Store” for a lot more action.

Eddie Kim is a features writer at MEL. He last wrote about minivans and the men who love them.

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The Last of the Bookies was originally published in MEL Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.