Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• Is Ginni Thomas a Threat to the Supreme Court? - Behind closed doors, Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife is working with many groups directly involved in controversial cases before the Court. - link

• Why President Biden Bet on a Senate That No Longer Exists - On the eve of the President’s first anniversary in office, members of the chamber he served for so long voted for paralysis over action. - link

• A Welcome Unfreedom - Quarantining with my mother in her homeland, I questioned the U.S. approach to the pandemic and public health. - link

• Ayşegül Savaş Reads “Long Distance” - The author reads her story from the January 31, 2022, issue of the magazine. - link

• Sergio García Sánchez’s “Modern Life” - The artist talks about how his visits to museums inspire him to create. - link

From Vox

• The never-ending suffering of the legacyquel -

  

  The new Scream movie and The Matrix Resurrections explore what happens when stories never end.

  Spoilers for the Scream and Matrix franchises follow.

  Midway through Scream, the fifth feature film entry in the Scream slasher movie franchise, a roomful of nervous youths have a discussion of terminology with Dewey Riley (David Arquette), one of the series’ core trio of characters.

  The fact that these new characters, who are mostly a bunch of teenagers with connections to the kids from the original film (no matter how tenuous), are being stalked by a killer in the famous Ghostface mask is one thing. But they’ve also been joined by Dewey and eventually the series’ other two main characters, Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) and Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell). Is this a sequel? Is this a reboot? No. As one of the kids explains, it’s the purgatory between both — alternately known as the requel or the legacyquel. (I’m going to use legacyquel because it’s a great play on words.)

  Dewey, who has to this point survived four slasher movies and is literally getting too old for this shit, doesn’t much care about which term the kids use. But he’s also aware he’s trapped in an unending Sisyphean ordeal, doomed, forever, to not quite escape the bloody tendrils of the past. The kids might be excited at the thought that they are part of a major film franchise (the Scream movies have always been winking and meta-textual), but Dewey has had enough of this. He would rather live his life in peace and watch his ex host a morning show.

  Of course he gets dragged back in to the slasher nonsense. Of course he’s living in a legacyquel. And of course he’s unable to make it out of this story alive. Dewey, who has been near death in seemingly every Scream movie finally dies at the hands of Ghostface, because the film needs to establish that the stakes are different this time. Higher.

  Similarly, the first act of The Matrix Resurrections, the recently released legacyquel to the original Matrix trilogy, involves Neo (Keanu Reeves) drudging through a work-a-day life as a world-famous video game designer. He’s most famous for a trilogy of games called The Matrix, and now his video game company has been asked by its parent company Warner Bros. to make a fourth Matrix game. It’s goofy meta trickery that sets the stage for one of the film’s big questions: Why does this movie even exist?

  The film offers an initial answer to that question in the very same scene as the order to make a new Matrix game. His old nemesis Smith (played here by Jonathan Groff), now reborn as his business partner, offers the following bit of wisdom: “I know you said the story was over for you, but that’s the thing about stories. They never really end, do they? We’re still telling the same stories we’ve always told, just with different names, different faces.” Stories are eternal; certain characters just end up being conduits for them. Enjoy the show.

  I really liked Scream and loved The Matrix Resurrections. But they also left me wondering if they were ultimately about the same basic idea: If storytelling is, on some level, about either catharsis or the subversion of same, then what happens when you have to tell stories that keep jerking catharsis away from their characters, like Lucy with a trauma-filled football?

  What if you were trapped in a story that never ended?

  I have a habit of thinking about movies and TV shows through the lens of what the emotional experiences of living through those stories would be like for the characters if they were real people. One example, Meredith Grey, the hero of Grey’s Anatomy, has endured so many disasters both natural and manmade, in addition to nearly dying from Covid-19, that it’s a wonder she’s not borderline catatonic and can keep going to work.

  To some degree, that’s the buy-in of serialized storytelling: These characters are going to go through a lot, and you’re going to buy that they’re not completely leveled by it emotionally. In the best serialized stories, the writers, directors, and actors combine to convince you that, say, Meredith really is that stalwart and steadfast because she is a doctor, and doctors are stalwart and steadfast. It’s taking an idea inherent in our culture and pushing it to its absolute extreme.

  But in serialized TV shows, we expect things to keep rolling along to some degree. Film sequels are a different beast, and legacyquels are really different. Both Matrix Resurrections and the new Scream need to convincingly tie off stories for characters old and new in a way that will stand as a successful wrap-up for the entire story, but they also need to leave just enough room for the story to continue if need be.

  What sets apart the legacyquel is an attempt to build satisfying stories for characters we know from older entries in the franchise and for characters brand new to this particular story. Yes, Sidney and Gale face off with Ghostface again, but so do sisters Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Tara (Jenna Ortega). If there are more Scream movies, the franchise’s many keepers surely hope you’ll be just as excited to find out what Sam and Tara are up to as you were Sidney and Gale. That way, the franchise’s future is not tied to actors who might not want to keep coming back for more movies every few years.

    <img alt="Sam brandishes a knife while she looks for Ghostface." src="https://cdn.vox-

  cdn.com/thumbor/ZIh8cTUTIGUeWwSkIX0R7pXZHoA=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23183070/barrera.jpg" /> Paramount Pictures

The irony here is that the addition of new “generations” of characters means the stories of these franchises can’t end. They’re doomed to cycle endlessly, grinding up more and more people. The recent Star Wars trilogy that began with The Force Awakens in 2015 literally served as a revisiting of most of the initial trilogy’s ideas, themes, and memorable moments, now with a set of new, younger characters to carry us through. (Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewy were all still there, of course.)

Because these sorts of franchise films are often the main game in town when it comes to getting anything made within the studio system, all kinds of narrative baggage gets piled on top of them, in a way that becomes much more untenable within the world of feature filmmaking. If Sidney Prescott has survived five separate slasher movies and if Neo has died and been resurrected in his pursuit of ending the Matrix’s hold over those who would rather be free, their emotions start to feel alien and unrecognizable.

That potential distance has led to one of the more fashionable ways to describe big-budget storytelling right now: These stories are really about trauma. And, yes, if I had survived five separate slasher movies, I would be really, really traumatized. Part of the appeal of Sidney, then, is that we know she won’t let these events get her down. By the fifth movie, she’s treating hunting down a psycho killer as basically just a thing she’s gotta keep doing, like Meredith Grey at her hospital. Characters like Sidney and Neo are inspiring because of how they keep rising above what would crush most of us. (Also, Sidney can survive seemingly any knife wound, and Neo can stop bullets with his hands, both of which are also admirable qualities.)

But the legacyquel drags entirely new batches of characters into the central stories of the franchise, which ends up feeling slightly like a cycle of trauma perpetuating itself. If we accept that these stories are “about trauma” on some level (and I have doubts, but I’m going with it for purposes of this argument), then the continuation of the story is a continuation of the trauma. And if new people are getting dragged into the story, then the trauma becomes cyclical. Sidney and Neo aren’t spreading damage themselves, but by being in mere proximity to them, you’ll probably end up dead or horribly injured anyway.

The perversity of blockbuster suffering

There’s an occasionally overt religiosity to the ordeals these characters must endure the longer their franchises go. Neo and his love Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) are literally resurrected, after all.

But that religiosity extends beyond what the characters go through to the experiences of the audience itself. When the characters in a Scream movie argue about the rules of the genre and/or franchise they exist within, they present their arguments almost as ones over doctrinal differences. Being in a slasher movie is different from being in a slasher sequel is different from being in a slasher legacyquel, but we in the audience want to see the familiar beats of the story hit, like stations of the cross.

If it’s a Scream movie, we want some poor girl to die before the opening title, we want a collection of characters who get whittled down to a core handful, and we want there to be two killers working in tandem. You can subvert one or two of those things — the girl in the pre-titles sequence in the new Scream survives, for instance — but you can’t subvert all of them.

This endless procession through pain and catharsis, over and over, starts to take on the feeling of ritual. We sit down in our theater seats, we pull out our popcorn, and we wait for Sidney and Neo to do the things they do. If they don’t do them in exactly the way we expect them to, there will be angry outcry online, as The Matrix Resurrections (which inspired a lot of fan complaints) and the Star Wars film The Last Jedi showed. We want to know our faith has not been misplaced.

Amusingly, Resurrections and especially Scream write these ideas into their very text. Resurrections features a number of Matrix fan characters, one of whom turns out to be a most likely unwitting dupe of the movie’s main villain. And the big bad in Scream is literally a toxic fan, who yells at a handful of terrified survivors about how there are certain things that must be done to make a good slasher movie.

Warner Bros.

But that’s just it: If you’re a character in one of these movies and you only continue to exist because there’s an appetite for more of your adventures, then literally any fandom of the property is toxic. I’m not trying to suggest here that you and I are literally responsible for the endless suffering of Sidney Prescott.

We’re not the ones stabbing Sidney, nor do we have the power to greenlight more Scream movies. But so long as we keep going to those movies, they’re going to keep getting made, and Sidney will forever be trapped in a maze of knives because we don’t want to see the Scream formula shaken up all that much. Sidney’s a great movie character, one of the best in the slasher genre, played brilliantly by Campbell, so it makes sense we’d want to spend time with her. But the price of getting to hang out with her is also having to watch her nearly die, over and over again.

The sense of an unwelcome cycle repeating itself extends behind the scenes too. The filmmakers of Resurrections and Scream are incredibly inventive. The Matrix sequel was spearheaded by Lana Wachowski, one of the most innovative directors currently working, and Scream hails from Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, whose 2019 horror movie Ready or Not was a blood-drenched bit of darkly comedic class commentary. And yet how can these filmmakers continue to make movies in this environment? They can continue pumping out new installments in established franchises, that’s how!

There used to be room for many stories within the American film industry, but now, unless you’re willing to make movies for very small budgets that often limit the scope of what you can do, you’re only telling a handful of stories we already know. We’re still telling the same stories we’ve always told. The difference is that we won’t let the characters we love escape them to do something else. They’re stuck in the spiral, and they’re dragging all of us down with them.

• Welcome to the Memory Issue of the Highlight -

  

  Survivors of early school shootings reflect, the growing popularity of the word “trauma,” scientists’ efforts to understand memory, and more.

    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-

  cdn.com/thumbor/YYgW4HsU995yniG4Y5QuEoQvF0Y=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21899595/VOX_The_Highlight_Box_Logo_Horizontal.png" />

  Years from now, when, presumably, Covid-19 becomes endemic, how will we remember this moment? As an odd blip in our long and eventful lives, or as a transformative period whose realities we won’t soon forget?

  It feels impossible to know. Memory is slippery, a mystery even to those who’ve devoted themselves to studying it.

  For this month’s issue of the Highlight, we were inspired by memory — its effect on our culture and our health, as well as the attempts to understand and harness it.

  In our cover story, it haunts the survivors of a particularly tragic period of school shootings in the 1990s and 2000s. Marin Cogan spoke with several survivors who came of age in an era when schools, parents, and others were wholly unprepared to help them deal with the aftermath of mass shootings. The memories live with them today, even as some reach their 30s and 40s, triggering feelings with each new bout of school violence. Yet each has arrived at a complex understanding about what it means to survive.

  Interrogations of our personal histories in the hopes of understanding our traumas have become commonplace in recent decades — so much so that Google searches for the term “trauma” have risen steadily over much of the past two decades, peaking in 2021. But the term now is everywhere, fodder for TV shows, TikToks, and memes. Now, writes Lexi Pandell, experts are concerned that the word is being overused and its meaning is rapidly being diluted.

  Also in this issue, Vox’s Brian Resnick looked at scientists’ efforts to understand why we remember what we remember — an undertaking that’s not as straightforward as it may sound. “No experiment can capture the whole of our human experience with memory and explain every instance of it,” writes Resnick. If scientists could harness “memorability,” could they help design a more memorable world for students, for the memory-impaired, and for others?

Our bodies have their own way of remembering. Our brains, for example, forge connections between neurons early in our development, a process that can be visibly disrupted by illness or trauma. Similarly, our primary or baby teeth, as they grow, capture the conditions of their surroundings, like growth rings in a tree. Reporter Jackie Rocheleau explores an effort among a small group of scientists to discover what stories may lie in our teeth, and how they might help doctors better understand children’s health.

And finally, our issue concludes with a look at the way New Orleans remembers and celebrates those who’ve died. “Covid-19 has exacerbated our country’s inarticulateness around grief,” writes Nicole Young. “So many Americans have had to bear theirs alone.” What can our nation learn from the communal mourning of a New Orleans funeral second line?

Will Staehle for Vox

The school shooting generation grows up

After coming of age in a world wholly unprepared to deal with the aftermath of mass school shootings, an early wave of survivors is now in their 30s and 40s, grappling with the present.

By Marin Cogan

How trauma became the word of the decade - Coming Tuesday

The very real psychiatric term has become so omnipresent in pop culture that some experts worry it’s losing its meaning.

By Lexi Pandell

Michael Waraksa for Vox

Why do we remember what we remember? - Coming Wednesday

The mundane photographs that are helping scientists probe the mysteries of memory.

By Brian Resnick

Getty Images; illustration by Amanda Northrop/Vox

The secret lives of baby teeth - Coming Thursday

Why some scientists are trying to discover more about our bodies’ “little living archives.”

By Jackie Rocheleau

What New Orleans can teach us about mourning - Coming Friday

As we reckon with the mass deaths from Covid-19, the collective power — and joy — of the funeral second line reminds us that grief is a burden that can be shared.

By Nicole Young

• The school shooting generation grows up -

  

  After coming of age in a world wholly unprepared to deal with the aftermath of mass school shootings, an early wave of survivors is now in their 30s and 40s, grappling with the present.

  

  Part of the Memory Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

  The details are embedded in Sam Leam’s memory, even though it happened more than 30 years ago, when he was just a kid. Recess on a chilly January day. Waiting with friends by the tetherball courts for a chance to play. A sound like the crack of fireworks, and a simple thought running through his head: It’s too early for Chinese New Year. Plugging his fingers in his ears. His classmates running and screaming. Following them into the school, and watching a panicked teacher drag students into his room. The teacher shutting the door on him. Continuing down the hallway. Falling, and being unable to get up. Crawling down the hall. Another teacher closing her door. Reaching his classroom, where his teacher pulled him in. Another kid, telling Sam that he’d been shot.

  Courtesy of Sam Leam

  Leam was 7 when a man brought a semi-automatic weapon to Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, killing five children who were immigrants from Cambodia and Vietnam, and injuring about 30 others. Leam was one of them, shot three times, twice in the buttocks and once in his arm. The shooting took place in 1989. At the time, mass shootings at schools were incredibly rare. Leam couldn’t have known that tragedies like the one he experienced would, a decade later, be a horrible national trend, and that while uncommon, they would only continue, becoming more frequent in the decades after. At the time, he was just a kid, struggling to make sense of what happened.

  It wasn’t easy. “My mom, coming from the killing fields of Cambodia and surviving her own trauma, didn’t want to talk about it. I remember asking her certain things about the school shooting,” he said, but “it was traumatizing for her, too.”

  Kristan Lieb for Vox

    <img alt="An image of text reading: “As children, they practiced tornado and fire drills at their schools. 

  Because of what happened to them, their kids have active shooter drills, too.”" src=“https://cdn.vox- cdn.com/thumbor/CEngTKKeCzCLUnm-xB749dNeZGE=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23170042/03_Survivors_small_inset_image_quote1.png” />

  The kids who lived through the start of the school shooting era have grown up. Most of them came of age in the late ’90s and the 2000s, when mass shooters started showing up in schools in Pearl, Mississippi; West Paducah, Kentucky; and Springfield, Oregon (though some, like Leam, survived them even earlier). Now adults in their 30s and 40s, many with children of their own, they are navigating a world in which what happened to them was not an anomaly but the beginning of a recurrent feature of American life. As children, they practiced tornado and fire drills at their schools. Because of what happened to them, their kids have active shooter drills, too.

  There’s no real guidebook for recovering from what they experienced. What distinguishes the thousands of survivors of the early wave of school mass shootings from those who came after is that they experienced those shootings in a world wholly unprepared to deal with the aftermath. Few got the mental health treatment now considered necessary for survivors of mass violence. As a result, many were left on their own, to process their trauma in the countless years — and school shootings — since.

  Steve Kagan/Getty Images

  ---

  

  When Leam came back to school after the shooting, he remembers, a group of Buddhist monks were there to lead a cleansing ceremony in the cafeteria. A therapist used a large teddy bear with a moving mouthpiece to speak to him. He was comforted by it, and by the chance to say that he was afraid of the spirits that he worried might now be haunting the school. Beyond that, he didn’t receive any formal counseling for years.

  Courtesy of Missy Jenkins Smith

  His experience was not unusual. Missy Jenkins Smith was 15 years old when a classmate opened fire at her high school, in West Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997. Jenkins Smith, who had just left her morning prayer circle, was shot and paralyzed. The shooting at Heath High School was among the first to receive widespread media coverage in the cable news era; three people were killed, and five were injured.

  Jenkins Smith received thousands of letters and gifts from well-wishers around the world, which helped her feel supported in her recovery. There were specialists at the hospital who worked with her to adapt to using a wheelchair. But, she said, “I didn’t have anyone who focused on the fact that I saw someone get shot in the head.” Her twin sister, who also survived the shooting, tried group counseling, but the other children in the group were dealing with different problems (a parent making them practice piano when they didn’t want to, for example), which made sharing her own experiences feel absurd.

  Instead of seeing a professional, Jenkins Smith and a few of her friends started an informal therapy group, supervised by their guidance counselor. They held sleepovers and created a safe space to talk about their memories. They stopped, 10 months after the incident, when the shooter pleaded guilty but mentally ill and was sentenced. His plea, they felt, seemed like a logical end point.

  Even when schools had counselors on hand after a shooting, the survivors often didn’t feel comfortable using them. “I refused to see a counselor,” said Kristen Dare, who was 16 in 2001 when a classmate opened fire at her school in Santee, California. “I refused to talk about it. I didn’t want to open up.” Her peers, she realizes now, were struggling, too. The cultural understanding of mental health was totally different 20 years ago; the importance of seeking professional help wasn’t as widely acknowledged as it is now.

  There was also a profound sense of alienation that teenagers felt then, trying to speak with therapists about an experience that was most likely new to them, too: How can I explain this to an adult who has no idea what I’ve been through?

  “I only wanted to talk to people who understood. I didn’t want to talk to people who didn’t see what I saw or understand how I felt,” Dare said. “I found it more therapeutic to be among my peers who had the same understanding as me.”

  Heather Martin, who survived the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 by hiding in a teacher’s office with her classmates, felt the same way. “I didn’t want to be around people who hadn’t gone through it,” she said.

  I wanted to reach out to the adult survivors of school shootings because I have something in common with them. When I was in sixth grade, a student from my school brought a gun to a dance. He killed one of our teachers and wounded three other people. It happened in 1998 — a few months after the shooting in West Paducah, and almost exactly a year before Columbine — at which point our town’s tragedy was swept away in the public consciousness by other, even deadlier acts of violence.

  I did not witness the shooting firsthand, but I was standing right next to the dance hall where the shooter was, and had to run and take cover in a concession stand when the shooter came outside with the gun. I crammed in with other students, crouched down on the ground, until an adult came and told us we were safe. Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about what happened, and about other kids who had these experiences. Back then, the phenomenon seemed so new that we didn’t have the language to discuss it. Talking to adult survivors was a chance to learn about their experiences. It was also an opportunity to better understand my own.

  Because of my distance from what happened, I’ve never thought of myself as a survivor; to me, it would feel insulting to the students more directly affected. Some of those I spoke with also didn’t recognize themselves as victims who might be in need of help. Each shooting created concentric circles of trauma. Often, the further out someone was, the less justified they felt seeking treatment.

  

  Courtesy of Hollan Holm

  Hollan Holm was in the same prayer circle as Jenkins Smith in West Paducah, and he was shot in the head, though his injuries weren’t life-threatening. In the days following the incident, he remembers thinking that he needed to get back to class sooner than the other students who were more seriously hurt. He was in school again just a few days after the shooting.

  Holm and his friend Craig Keene dealt with their injuries in a typical teenage fashion: They made jokes. Of the five students injured who survived the shooting, they were among the least seriously hurt, and dark humor is how they processed it with each other, ranking themselves by the severity of their injuries and teasing each other about it. I spoke to Holm and Keene on the same afternoon in September, and Holm pulled out his 1998 yearbook to read what Keene wrote: “sup number #5 I got an exit [wound]. #4 (craig)”

  Keene, though, was unusual among school shooting survivors of the era: He recognized that he was struggling, and sought help. “I had this huge bandage that covered half my neck; it was like a highlighter for ‘the kid who was shot.’ While I had that bandage on, things went really well,” Keene said. “After that came off, people kind of stopped asking and caring, and that’s when things got pretty rough for me mentally. I felt invisible.” He lost interest in sports and had difficulty sleeping — he couldn’t shake the sense that he was still in danger. He doesn’t remember much of the details about those early therapy sessions, but he is certain that they helped.

  For Holm, it would be decades before he sought treatment. “I guess I wasn’t injured enough to justify going to a trauma counselor, which is just kind of insane and sad,” Holm said, reflecting on his attitude at the time. He remembers going to see his pastor once to discuss it. “It was really grossly inadequate. That’s what you get when you let a 14-year-old boy lead his own mental health response to a crisis.”

  Jenkins Smith doesn’t remember there being much conversation about what happened outside of her group. She got a sense of why when she connected with classmates at her 20-year high school reunion. “They felt like for them to have a problem was ridiculous because there were people that were worse than them.” Jenkins Smith felt tremendous sympathy for them, and then she felt something unexpected. “I felt kind of lucky,” she said. “Because I was a victim, because I was injured, it did give me that ticket to heal.”

  ---

    <img alt="A side view of two bound books shows a drawing made across the ends of their pages, of a portrait 

  frame amid vines and flowers." src=“https://cdn.vox- cdn.com/thumbor/qEgIfhAnu5aEu6G_jVK80mBkWwk=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23170094/09_Survivors_large_images_books2.png” />

  Each survivor was trying to make sense of an experience with mass tragedy with a brain that was still developing. They’d spend years processing and reprocessing the trauma as they got older. Experts still don’t have a complete picture of the different ways that brain development can affect the processing of trauma. “As a field, we’re still figuring it out,” said Laura Wilson, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Mary Washington and editor of The Wiley Handbook of the Psychology of Mass Shootings.

  Still, the field of psychology has come a long way in understanding how children and teenagers might experience post-traumatic stress. “Young people are in a lot of ways more resilient,” Wilson said, but they also have less life experience to help them make sense of violence, making them more susceptible to destabilizing shifts in their worldview. It might be harder for young people to feel safe again after experiencing a mass shooting.

  Mass shooting trauma can be different from the kind of trauma experienced after natural disasters, because the traumatic event was caused by another person. “You have more individuals that may develop something like PTSD, depression, or anxiety following a man-made disaster,” said Robin Gurwitch, a psychologist and professor at Duke University Medical Center and a member of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.

  Age also affects how the symptoms of post-traumatic stress might manifest. Younger children might experience sleep disturbances, difficulty focusing, and other troubles at school, while adolescent and young adults may also withdraw from their regular activities and relationships, and engage in more risk- seeking behaviors. Untreated symptoms, Gurwitch said, can lead to a greater risk of addiction and the development of other mental and physical health issues later in life.

  Mark Leffingwell/Boulder Daily Camera/AFP via Getty Images

  Martin was a senior at the time of the Columbine shooting; she and her classmates finished their last few weeks at a nearby school. She eventually went off to college, and didn’t tell people there that she was a survivor of what was then the deadliest school shooting in American history. Still, she couldn’t escape it. Once, during class, a fire alarm went off, and she started crying. Another time, a teacher asked her to write a persuasive essay on gun violence, and when she tried to explain why that might be difficult, the teacher told her she needed to write it or fail the class. She failed, and later dropped out.

  

  “I stopped going to classes, and I started using recreational drugs,” Martin said. “I knew I wasn’t okay on a surface level, but I refused to believe it was because of Columbine.” She went to a few sessions of therapy, and tried to move on with her life. Yet the trauma kept resurfacing. She was triggered by the 9/11 terror attacks and, years later, by the mass shooting at Virginia Tech that killed 32 people. “I was horrified, I cried, I freaked out,” she said. “I felt jealous that nobody would remember Columbine.”

  Later, Martin went back to college, graduated, and became a teacher. As an adult, she co-founded a group to help support other survivors of mass shootings. Looking back at it now, she thinks, “I was so desperate for people to know my story and know I wasn’t shot, but I’m struggling. It’s a horrible thing to admit and even recognize in yourself.”

  Zach Cartaya, a classmate of Martin’s who hid with her that day, experienced a similar trajectory. “I suppressed it through my college years with drugs and alcohol,” he said. After graduating from college, he started a career in financial services, and he, too, found the aftershocks of the shooting creeping up in unexpected ways. His job required regular meetings in conference rooms. At first, they were fine. Yet over time, he said, “those meetings got harder and harder for me. I hated being in them. My skin started to crawl.”

  One day, during a meeting, Cartaya realized he couldn’t breathe. “I got up, jumped the table, ran out the door, got in my bed, and didn’t talk to anyone for three days,” he said. He met with his doctor, who ran a battery of tests to make sure there wasn’t some underlying medical cause. When there wasn’t, the doctor sent him to therapy. Cartaya tried different treatments, including eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR), a form of therapy that has been proven effective for patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. “I’ve come a long way, and managed to keep a lid on it,” he said, but not until after “things got pretty dark and scary.”

  The discovery that everything was not okay, that they were still struggling with what happened, came from events large and small. The survivors of the West Paducah shooting felt it when a school 30 miles away in Marshall County, Kentucky, had a shooting in 2018. Those moments of revelation could be more subtle, too. Leam didn’t receive a PTSD diagnosis until four years ago, when a doctor he was seeing for severe back pain suggested he try seeing a therapist.

  Courtesy of William Tipper Thomas

  Another survivor, William Tipper Thomas, who was paralyzed in a school shooting just outside Baltimore, Maryland, in 2004, said a recent small moment — snapping at his sister during a FaceTime call — helped him realize he was still dealing with trauma-related stress. His sister found it so unusual that she drove from her home in Virginia to his place in Baltimore to confront him about it, leading to him seeking treatment. Thomas had never seen a therapist. When the shooting happened, he was an honors student weeks away from graduating and fulfilling his dream of playing college football. Suddenly, he had to orient himself to using a wheelchair. The argument with his sister, he realized, came just after doing a photo shoot on the field of his college alma mater, where he was supposed to have played.

  

  The timing ended up being significant. In May 2021, Thomas realized he’d crossed an important threshold. He was 17 when he was shot, and he’s 35 now. “I’ve spent more time in the wheelchair than I have walking,” he said. He feels that he’s had a certain level of healing, psychologically and emotionally. Being in a wheelchair, though, makes it hard to forget. “I think about it often because I’m constantly reminded of it,” he said. “It’s hard to heal from things that you’re consistently and constantly reminded of.”

    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-

  cdn.com/thumbor/cRxDmdqgAqb4CAr9skKxbfHlkT8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23170112/14_Survivors_large_images_Will__1.jpg" />

  Photos by Rosem Morton for Vox

  ---

  Will Staehle for Vox

  Long after Jenkins Smith was released from the hospital, and after her informal therapy group disbanded, reporters continued to reach out to her, eager to track her story of recovery. At times the interest could be overwhelming, but she also found some value in it: Here were adults who were genuinely interested in her experiences and thoughts, providing an open forum for her to discuss what happened. “I started using reporters as counselors,” she said. “It was therapeutic to me, and I really didn’t have that realization that that’s what I was doing with it until later on in life.”

  Though I couldn’t exactly relate to her experience, I instinctively understood it. I’ve never found it necessary to seek treatment for what happened on the day of my school’s shooting, but it looms large in my memories. It was my first and most powerful experience with collective trauma. What has helped me process my feelings as an adult has been writing about it, again and again and again. But perhaps nothing was as helpful as talking with these adult survivors.

  There was so much overlap in our experiences. To know that others felt like they weren’t impacted directly enough to need help — even some students who had been shot — was both surprising and reassuring. We were all looking back at the ways we tried, as kids, to comprehend the incomprehensible. We were all considering what life was like back then, what’s different now, and what’s stayed the same.

  The survivors I spoke with come from a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences. They grew up in suburbs, rural areas, and cities. Their experiences with guns were mixed. Some, like me, grew up in homes and communities where lots of people owned guns, regardless of their politics. Others had never touched one before. Many, but not all, grew up to favor stricter gun control; a handful of them owned guns themselves. (Leam owns an assault rifle, the kind of weapon he was shot with, but he said he wouldn’t mind if the government banned them.) Dare decided that she doesn’t want guns in her house; Jenkins Smith, despite her initial discomfort, has allowed them because hunting is a part of the culture where she lives, and she wants her children to experience it.

  They also had different feelings about how we should discuss the perpetrators of the shootings. Martin asked me not to name the shooters in my article; the media coverage of Columbine focused intensely on the psychology of the shooters, which inspired copycats. Fannie Black, who survived a shooting in 1997 when she was a teen at Bethel High School in Alaska, felt differently. It’s always bothered her that no one ever talked about her school’s shooter when discussing what happened. “No one ever talked about bullying,” she said. She knew the shooter, watched him get bullied, watched him unsuccessfully try to seek help. “This could have been prevented,” she said.

  As a teen, Jenkins Smith forgave the boy who shot her. He then proceeded to mail and call her from prison, until her dad called the authorities and told them to make it stop. As an adult, she went to meet with him in prison. She wanted to see what he remembered, and if he was remorseful, though she was almost nine months pregnant at the time and wasn’t sure it was a great idea. He couldn’t remember much, she said, but he did apologize for what he’d done. “I felt like I got what I needed,” she said. “There was no reason for me to talk with him again.”

  

  Many adult survivors have entered the life phase where they are having children. Some have decided not to. “Around the time that it would have made sense for me to have kids,” Cartaya said, “I was realizing I didn’t want to bring children into a world where this stuff was still happening.” Others, though, are now raising kids, some with fellow survivors, in the towns where they grew up. Dare and her husband both attended Santana High School, but they weren’t a couple at the time of the shooting. They didn’t talk much about what happened until it was time for their son to enter high school, and Dare’s husband told her he didn’t want his son to attend their high school, because it would mean too many trips back to a place that was still difficult to visit. “I had no idea it bothered him,” she said. “We had never talked about our experiences of that day.”

  Nichole Burcal and her husband are high school sweethearts; they were both in the cafeteria of Thurston High School when their classmate opened fire. Even though they were together, they too had different experiences: Burcal was shot; her husband wasn’t. As one of the injured, she says she received offers of free counseling and scholarships. But he didn’t, she said, “even though we were [both] in the middle of it.” Later, their oldest son attended Thurston High. When it came time to sign him up for cross-country in the school’s cafeteria, she found that she couldn’t do it. “I still can’t go in the cafeteria,” she said, “even 20 years later.”

  The impacts of trauma can last a lifetime, but psychologists are much better equipped to deal with young trauma survivors today than they were 20 years ago. “The field of child trauma has grown exponentially over the years, and that’s a good thing because we know more treatments are readily available now for children,” Gurwitch said. Cognitive processing therapy, in which a patient learns to reframe unhelpful thoughts about a traumatic event, and trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy have been shown to help children and adolescents recover from traumatic experiences. Parent-child interaction therapy has also proven helpful for young children.

  Something else has changed, too: The adult survivors with school-age children have had to process the reality of their children going through active shooter drills. (Research suggests that the drills increase stress and anxiety in students, with little evidence that they’re effective.)

  Holm remembered the day his daughter came home from kindergarten and told him and his wife about a drill where they had to turn off the lights and be quiet so the bad guys couldn’t find them. It was the kind of moment, he said, in which “you step outside of yourself and you take a look at your entire life leading up to that moment. It reprioritizes everything. … This thing that happened to me is now affecting my daughter.”

  The following year, when students in Marshall County had a shooting at their school, Holm and other West Paducah survivors met with the students affected, to offer them help. He also wrote an op-ed for his local paper, and started speaking out at rallies for greater gun control. “I was silent for 20 years, and it never went away,” he said, “and these kids kept getting injured and it’s frustrating.” Doing nothing was no longer an option.

  Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for March For Our Lives

  Holm wasn’t the only one who took action. After the Aurora, Colorado, shooting in 2012, Martin and another classmate decided to start a group, the Rebels Project, named after the Columbine school mascot, to lend support to and connect with other mass shooting survivors. “When we started, all we knew is that we wanted to help in ways we didn’t have access to in 1999,” Martin said. Since then, the group has met with victims to offer their help and hosts an annual meetup for survivors.

  Keene focuses on helping another way. He is a social worker who does therapy with kids, including in his old school district. “Hollan is so outspoken and eloquent, he speaks at rallies, and he’s so good at that,” Keene said of his old high school friend. “The way I deal with it is I pour it into these individuals who are sitting across from me at work.”

  There’s been one undeniable difference in the media landscape since the first generation of survivors grew up — young people are more able to make their voices heard about the issue. When Parkland, Florida, students seized on media attention after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to call for greater gun control, “I was extremely proud of them,” said Thomas, who now works as an engineer and started his own foundation aimed at violence prevention for young people in Baltimore.

  A few years ago, Leam took his oldest son with him to an event commemorating the 29th anniversary of the Cleveland Elementary shooting. Getting diagnosed and treated for PTSD has helped Leam cope with the loud noises that used to trigger him, and with the pain of seeing his trauma repeated in countless other schools. Before treatment, “I could be driving and break down in tears, just thinking about what these kids are going through over and over again,” he said.

  Still, he hasn’t talked to many of his fellow Cleveland survivors about what happened — even at the anniversary event. “I wish we did more back then to talk about it, and the repercussions from it,” Leam said. “Because I think it could have changed my life.”

  Kristan Lieb for Vox

  Will Staehle for Vox

  Marin Cogan is a senior correspondent at Vox.

  Will Staehle is an award-winning designer based in Seattle. He’s been one of Print magazine’s New Visual Artists and an ADC Young Gun. He has had a solo exhibit at the Type Directors Club.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Women’s Football Asia Cup | All India matches cancelled after COVID-19 outbreak in camp - India on Sunday failed to field a team against Chinese Taipei following 12 players’ RT-PCR reports coming positive

• Smriti Mandhana named ICC Women’s Cricketer of the Year - The stylish left-hander was rewarded for good performances in England, Australia in 2021

• Former Zimbabwe batsman Brendan Taylor admits receiving money from Indian businessman for spot-fixing - Taylor clarified he was blackmailed and never went through with the arrangement

• Navratilova says Tennis Australia ‘capitulating’ to China over Peng - Peng supporters in Australia said they were planning to hand out 1,000 “Where is Peng Shuai?” T-shirts at Melbourne Park this week

• Australian Open 2022 | Medvedev loses temper but wins match to reach quarterfinals - The Russian second seed found the American serve-and-volley exponent a tough nut to crack at Margaret Court Arena and his frustration spilled over after losing the third set

From The Hindu: National News

• Billboards across Ernakulam highlight issue of Mass - Issue of fully congregation-facing Mass celebration

• Revamped CGHS website and mobile app launched - It will enable delivery of healthcare services without venturing out, says Mandaviya

• Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani practitioners can now issue fitness certificates - National Commission for Indian System of Medicine releases order in this regard

• Karnataka to complete Smart City projects ahead of Centre’s deadline - The smart city projects are under way in Bengaluru, Shivamogga, Mangaluru, Tumakuru, Hubballi-Dharwad, Davangere and Belagavi

• Punjab Assembly polls | BJP to contest on 65 seats, Punjab Lok Congress on 37, SAD (Sanyukt) on 15 - JP Nadda said Punjab is a border State and security is a very important issue as far as assembly elections are concerned

From BBC: Europe

• Russia-Ukraine tensions: UK warns of plot to install pro-Moscow ally - The Foreign Office takes the unusual step of naming a former Ukrainian MP as a potential Kremlin candidate.

• German navy chief resigns over Ukraine comments - Kay-Achim Schönbach said the idea that Russia wanted to invade Ukraine was nonsense.

• Auschwitz: Dutch tourist fined over Nazi salute at former death camp - A 29-year-old woman - who says it was a bad joke - is charged with engaging in Nazi propaganda.

• Covid: Clashes at Belgium protest against restrictions - A rally sees violent exchanges in Brussels as tens of thousands marched against Covid restrictions.

• Stowaway found in South Africa plane wheel at Amsterdam airport - A man is discovered alive in the wheel section of a plane that landed in Amsterdam from South Africa.

From Ars Technica

• Bitcoin drops to six-month low as investors dump speculative assets - Cryptocurrencies tumble in wake of global stock sell-off, proposed Russian crypto ban. - link

• It’s a good time to learn the immune system—and this is the book for it - Philipp Dettmer, a self-described immune enthusiast, invites us into his world. - link

• Europe is in the middle of a messy nuclear showdown - Will green energy goals suffer as aging nuclear infrastructure is phased out? - link

• Retired FBI agent has new theory about who betrayed Anne Frank’s family to Nazis - Vincent Pankoke ID’d Jewish Council member Arnold van den Bergh as most likely culprit. - link

• A white supremacist website got hacked, airing all its dirty laundry - Patriot Front says it’s aligned with American heroes. Leaks paint a darker picture. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• Just found out that the Oscars is a big fucking lie all the way along -

  Those people they invite to their ceremonies are all paid actors

  submitted by /u/SomeEdgyCunt_inChina
  [link] [comments]

• A man was driving on the highway in the US when suddenly he was hit by a drunk driver, breaking his right arm, puncturing his lung, and putting him into a short coma -

  Despite not having insurance, he left the hospital without any financially crippling debt that would haunt him for the rest of his life and compromise his future savings.

  submitted by /u/Row_the_boat2
  [link] [comments]

• A human couple meets an alien couple -

  So naturally, they decide it would be fun to swap partners. The alien woman goes off with the human man and the alien man goes off with the human woman. The alien man and human woman get undressed and he asks her, “Is it long enough?” She replies, “It could be a bit longer I suppose.” So the alien man slaps himself on the forehead a few times and it grows longer! Then he asks her, “Is it wide enough?” and again she says. “I guess it could be just a bit wider.” So he starts tugging at his own ears and it gets a bit wider.

  ​

  An hour or so later the human couple get together to discuss. The man asks the woman, “So how was your experience with the alien man? Be honest!” She says “Honestly? No offense to you, but that was the single greatest sexual experience of my life. What about you and the alien woman?” The man replies, “Don’t get me wrong, it was good and all but she kept slapping me in the head and pulling at my ears really hard.”

  submitted by /u/ihatethatguy009
  [link] [comments]

• What do you call a homosexual Russian knight? -

  Sergei

  submitted by /u/whoarewetointerfere
  [link] [comments]

• A journalist asked Tim Cook why iPhones are so expensive -

  “Well”, said Tim Cook, “that’s because the iPhone replaces a whole bunch of devices. A phone, a camera, a watch, a music player, a video player, a PDA, a voice recorder, a GPS navigator, a flashlight, a calculator, a portable gaming console, and many other things. Surely, a high price is worth paying to replace so many devices!”

  “Then why are Androids so much cheaper?”, asked the journalist.

  “Because,” said Tim Cook, “an Android replaces just one device. The iPhone.”

  submitted by /u/BrandonBensonPHyB
  [link] [comments]