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@ -12867,26 +13049,15 @@
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Blinken Is Sitting on Staff Recommendations to Sanction Israeli Military Units Linked to Killings or Rapes.md\"> Blinken Is Sitting on Staff Recommendations to Sanction Israeli Military Units Linked to Killings or Rapes </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Fake Fake-News Problem and the Truth About Misinformation.md\"> The Fake Fake-News Problem and the Truth About Misinformation </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The elections next door Mexico’s cartels pick candidates, kill rivals.md\"> The elections next door Mexico’s cartels pick candidates, kill rivals </a>",
@ -12993,59 +13158,62 @@
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@ -13093,10 +13261,7 @@
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/Sad Little Men.md\"> Sad Little Men </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/La Prochaine Fois que tu Mordras la Poussière.md\"> La Prochaine Fois que tu Mordras la Poussière </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/Zoo Station.md\"> Zoo Station </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/La Prochaine Fois que tu Mordras la Poussière.md\"> La Prochaine Fois que tu Mordras la Poussière </a>"
"title":"🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Rietberg](https://rietberg.ch/en/) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-06-15",
"rowNumber":96
},
{
"title":":hibiscus: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Zürich Pride Festival %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-06-15",
"rowNumber":123
},
{
"title":":sunny: :movie_camera: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out programmation of the [Zurich's finest open-air cinema | Allianz Cinema -](https://zuerich.allianzcinema.ch/en) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-07-01",
"rowNumber":109
"rowNumber":110
},
{
"title":":sunny: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Seenachtfest Rapperswil-Jona %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-08-01",
"rowNumber":126
"rowNumber":128
},
{
"title":":sunny: :runner: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out tickets to Weltklasse Zürich %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-08-01",
"rowNumber":134
"rowNumber":136
},
{
"title":":sunny: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Street Parade %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-08-10",
"rowNumber":124
"rowNumber":126
},
{
"title":"🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Kunsthaus](https://www.kunsthaus.ch/en/) %%done_del%%",
"title":"🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Rietberg](https://rietberg.ch/en/) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-09-15",
"rowNumber":96
},
{
"title":":maple_leaf: :movie_camera: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Zürich Film Festival %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-09-15",
"rowNumber":110
"rowNumber":111
},
{
"title":":maple_leaf: :wine_glass: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Zürich’s Wine festival ([ZWF - Zurich Wine Festival](https://zurichwinefestival.ch/)) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-09-25",
"rowNumber":111
"rowNumber":112
},
{
"title":":snowflake:🎭 [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out floating theatre ([Herzlich willkommen!](http://herzbaracke.ch/)) %%done_del%%",
@ -849,47 +839,52 @@
{
"title":":maple_leaf: :wine_glass: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [Discover the Excitement of EXPOVINA Wine Events | Join Us at Weinschiffe, Primavera, and Wine Trophy | EXPOVINA](https://expovina.ch/en-ch/) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-10-15",
"rowNumber":112
"rowNumber":113
},
{
"title":":snowflake: :person_in_steamy_room: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [Sauna Cubes at Strandbad Küsnacht — Strandbadsauna](https://www.strandbadsauna.ch/home-eng) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-11-15",
"rowNumber":103
"rowNumber":104
},
{
"title":":christmas_tree: :cocktail: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out pop-up bars ([Pop-ups at Christmas | zuerich.com](https://www.zuerich.com/en/visit/christmas-in-zurich/pop-ups)) %%done_del%%",
"title":":hibiscus: :fork_and_knife: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Book a restaurant with terrace for the season: [[Albishaus]], [[Restaurant Boldern]], [[Zur Buech]], [[Jardin Zürichberg]], [[Bistro Rigiblick]], [[Portofino am See]], [[La Réserve|La Muña]] %%done_del%%",
"time":"2025-05-01",
"rowNumber":105
"rowNumber":106
},
{
"title":":hibiscus: :canned_food: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [FOOD ZURICH - MEHR ALS EIN FESTIVAL](https://www.foodzurich.com/de/) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2025-06-01",
"rowNumber":107
"rowNumber":108
},
{
"title":":hibiscus: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Zürich Pride Festival %%done_del%%",
"time":"2025-06-15",
"rowNumber":124
}
],
"03.02 Travels/Geneva.md":[
@ -922,12 +917,12 @@
{
"title":":snowflake: :tada: [[@@Travels|Travels]]: Organise New Year’s Eve %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-10-15",
"rowNumber":130
"rowNumber":136
},
{
"title":":christmas_tree: :shopping_bags: [[@@Travels|Travels]]: Organise a trip to a famous Christmas market (Nürnberg, Salzburg, Praha, Budapest, Wien, Basel, Merano, Esslingen, Strasbourg) %%done_del%%",
<spanclass='ob-timelines'data-date='2024-06-17-00'data-title='Groom change'data-class='blue'data-type='range'data-end='2024-06-17-23'> Juan is being re-affected to Manu Carranza and segundo becomes groom for Sally
</span>
```toc
style: number
```
 
---
 
[[Juan Bautista Bossio|Juan]] changes affectation to Manu & [[Segundo Rubbo|Segundo]] becomes [[@Sally|Sally]]’s groom at [[Polo Park Zürich|PPZ]].
@ -43,9 +43,6 @@ I lift my face from the water and get my bearings: a sea that seems made of ligh
“*Chicos*, over here!” our guide calls. “*Tortuga*!” I reach her just in time to see a hawksbill turtle drift by. Later, we’ll glimpse several more sea turtles, along with a spotted eagle ray, a green moray eel, parrotfish, pufferfish, angelfish, corals, sea fans, and small, colorful darting creatures too numerous to count. The reef below, as John Steinbeck wrote in *The**Log from the Sea of Cortez,* “skittered and pulsed with life.”
Your browser does not support the video element.
Bigeye jack, or bigeye trevally, school in a shimmering tornado. Video by underwatercam/Pond5
The biodiversity packed into this sliver of ocean is partially a result of underwater geology and currents that allowed the only true coral reef in the Sea of Cortez (also called the Gulf of California) to form here some 20,000 years ago. Equally important, however, is a nearby village called Cabo Pulmo. In the 1980s, fishermen whose families had lived in Cabo Pulmo for a century began noticing that they were catching fewer fish, as well as spotting fewer sharks, turtles, and rays. Corals were increasingly damaged by anchors. Then the village’s story took a surprising turn: residents decided to stop fishing the reef and go all in on conservation and ecotourism.
@ -119,9 +116,6 @@ Walking from the arroyo toward the beach, Macklis points out raccoon and bird tr
And then, abruptly, the wetlands end in a massive construction zone crawling with cranes and bulldozers and men in hard hats. “All that over there was mangroves,” Macklis says. “And they took it all out.”
Your browser does not support the video element.
Critics of Costa Palmas are concerned that its construction has destroyed important wetland habitat.
Satellite images confirm that the verdant wetlands around the mouth of the arroyo shrank drastically as construction of Costa Palmas began. The beach accessible to La Ribera residents also shrank as Costa Palmas’ marina cut off the flow of sediment from the arroyo.
@ -191,10 +185,6 @@ And as Angeles Castro presciently observed, mass tourism can alter a place so th
After leaving El Caribe, Blanchflower and I try to drive to Los Cabos’ oceanfront, but traffic is atrocious and the hotels are like barricades, impassable unless you’re staying in one. When we finally get within sight of the ocean, there’s nowhere to park without paying $40. It is manicured and clean and safe, but it feels surreal, nightmarish. We flee.
Your browser does not support the video element.
Private hotels render many beaches in Los Cabos inaccessible to everyone except paying guests. Video by BlackBoxGuild/Pond5
---
In 2023, state and municipal governments in Baja California Sur announced they would revise several of the ordering, or zoning, plans that determine what can be built where. Previous ordering plans were either nonexistent or were written behind closed doors; this time, governments have opened the process to public review and invited people to attend meetings and submit comments. For the first time in recent memory, locals have a platform for expressing concerns about freshwater scarcity, and for speaking out in favor of public beach access and protections for wetlands, waterways, dunes, and endangered species. For the first time, they have a voice.
It was the most talked-about meal in the United States. In the weeks leading up to the luncheon, its organizers received so many requests for seats that they switched the venue to one of Chicago’s largest dining rooms. Newspapers across the country covered the guest list, which included Chicago’s mayor and health commissioner; at least one member of Congress; dozens of bureaucrats, from Washington, D.C., New York, and beyond; and many of the nation’s most distinguished agricultural scientists.
The occasion for this excitement was the world’s first cold-storage banquet: a meal at which only refrigerated foods would be served. On Monday, October 23, 1911, more than four hundred guests sat down amid the drapery and gilt of the Hotel Sherman’s Louis XVI room, unfolded their white linen napkins, and enjoyed a five-course, two-hour meal in which everything but the olives in their dry Martinis had spent months in cold storage. The menu proudly listed each item’s most recent address: the salmon came from a short stay in Booth’s Cold Storage, the chicken had resided at Chicago Cold Storage since December, 1910, and the turkey and eggs had spent the past eleven and seven months, respectively, at the Monarch refrigeration plant. Addressing a reporter, Meyer Eichengreen, the vice-president of the National Poultry, Butter and Egg Association, one of the event’s sponsors, was happy to provide more detail. “Your capon received its summons to the great unknown along about last St. Valentine’s day,” he said. “And the egg in your salad—go right on and eat—well, some happy hen arose from her nest and clucked over that egg when winter was just merging into spring.”
At the time, suspicion of refrigerated foods was widespread. Stomach infections and food poisoning were a leading cause of death in America, and many blamed the mysteries of cold storage, which suspended life’s natural decay and confounded all the clues—proximity of origin, appearance—previously used to determine whether food was safe to eat. The Senate was considering legislation that would place extremely short limits on the time that meat, fish, eggs, and butter could be refrigerated. In the face of this opposition, the banquet was an industry-sponsored attempt to show that cold storage wasn’t just safe; it demonstrably improved what was being eaten. “This hotel has never served a better luncheon,” Lucien Fromente, the Sherman’s head chef, said. Harry Dowie, the Poultry, Butter and Egg Association’s national president, deemed the event proof that refrigerated foods were not just perfectly appetizing but, as he put it, “superior to those we style as fresh.” Even Congressman Martin B. Madden agreed. “I really believe, as you claim, that there is more flavor to cold-storage poultry than the kind that is advertised as freshly killed,” he said, ready to spread the word in the nation’s capital.
Today, nearly three-quarters of everything Americans consume is processed, packaged, shipped, and stored under refrigeration. In the century since Chicago’s banquet, the so-called [cold chain](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/22/africas-cold-rush-and-the-promise-of-refrigeration)—the shipping containers, trucks, warehouses, ripening rooms, tank farms, walk-ins, and fridges through which food moves from farm to table—has transformed what we eat, where it’s grown, the layout of our cities and homes, and the very definition of freshness. But perhaps its most remarkable imprint can still be found in how our food actually tastes, for better and for worse.
In 2010, the open‐data activist Waldo Jaquith decided to make a cheeseburger from scratch, using only agrarian methods. He and his wife had just built a home in the woods of Virginia, where they raised chickens and tended to an extensive vegetable garden. Flush with pride in his self-sufficiency, Jaquith outlined the steps required: bake buns, mince beef, make cheese, harvest lettuce, tomatoes, and onion. Then he realized that he wasn’t nearly committed enough. To really make a cheeseburger from scratch, he would also need to plant, harvest, and grind his own wheat, and raise at least two cows, one for the dairy and another to be slaughtered for the meat.
At this point, Jaquith gave up. The problem wasn’t labor but timing. His tomatoes were in season in late summer, his lettuce ready to harvest in spring and fall. According to the seasonal, pre-refrigeration calendar he was trying to follow, Jaquith would have needed to make his cheese in the springtime, after his dairy cow had given birth: her calf would be slaughtered for the rennet, and the milk intended to feed it repurposed. But the cow that provided his beef wouldn’t be killed until the autumn, when the weather started to get cold. If Jaquith turned the tomatoes into ketchup and aged his cheese in a cellar for six months, until the meat, lettuce, and wheat bun were ready, he could maybe, possibly, make a cheeseburger from scratch. But practically speaking, he concluded, “the cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago.”
And, in fact, it did not. The cheeseburger is just one of many sensory pleasures made possible by a highly industrialized and refrigerated food system. More obvious ones include the delightful anticipation of pouring a crisp beer at the end of the day, the refreshing clink of ice cubes in a soft drink or a cocktail, and, of course, the joy of licking an ice-cream cone in summer. Brewers, such as Frederick Pabst and Adolphus Busch, were among the first to invest in mechanical refrigeration; without it, American-style lager beer was impossible to make year-round or at scale. David Wondrich, a historian of alcohol, has traced the cocktail back to a custom of drinking a blend of spirits, bitters, and sugar in Britain—but it wasn’t until such drinks met continual, affordable supplies of American ice, in the late nineteenth century, that the art of mixology was born. And though the ancient Chinese, Romans, and Persians all mixed snow or ice with fruit juice or dairy products to make chilled desserts, ice cream only became popular outside élite circles in the mid-eighteen-hundreds.
The opportunity to consume frosty drinks and desserts opened up an entirely new vocabulary of sensation. Some found the cold shocking at first. “Lord! How I have seen the people splutter when they’ve tasted them for the first time,” a London ice-cream vender recalled in 1851. One customer—“a young Irish fellow”—took a spoonful, stood statue still, and then “roared out, ‘Jasus! I am kilt. The coald shivers is on to me.’ ” The earliest recorded description of brain freeze seems to have been published by Patrick Brydone, a Scotsman travelling in Sicily in the seventeen-seventies. The victim was a British naval officer who took a big bite of ice cream at a formal dinner. “At first he only looked grave, and blew up his cheeks to give it more room,” Brydone wrote. “The violence of the cold soon getting the better of his patience, he began to tumble it about from side to side in his mouth, his eyes rushing out of water.” Shortly thereafter, he spat it out “with a horrid oath” and, in his outrage, had to be restrained from beating the nearest servant.
Scientists don’t yet fully understand the cause of brain freeze, but the leading theory is that the sudden, blinding pain is caused by a rush of blood to the head and the resulting pressure of brain on skull. Another mystery is why consuming chilled food and drinks is so refreshing, given that they make little actual difference for one’s body temperature. Researchers have proposed that when the temperature receptors in our mouths feel cold, they tell the brain that our thirst has been quenched. The body has other ways to monitor hydration levels—including by checking how concentrated or dilute our blood is—but, according to this theory, the cooling sensation caused by water evaporating from the tongue is an early alert that liquid has been ingested. One study found that water-deprived rats, mice, guinea pigs, and hamsters repeatedly licked a cold metal tube, instead of a hot or room-temperature one, presumably because the chill triggered an illusory sense of hydration.
Cold may also have made food and drinks sweeter—particularly in the ice‐obsessed United States. At least three of our basic taste receptors—sweet, bitter, and umami, or savory—are extremely temperature sensitive. When food or drinks cool the tongue to below fifty-nine degrees, the channels through which these receptors message the brain seem to close up, and the resulting flavor signal is extremely weak. This is why a warm Coca-Cola or a melted ice cream tastes sickly sweet: because they’re intended to be consumed cold, they need to contain *too much* sugar in order to boost the signal, and to register in our brains as sweet at all. (In 1929, the president of Coca-Cola set up a fountain-service training school, where his salesmen were told, “It’s gotta be cold if it’s gonna be sold.”) Washing down your food with ice water or a soft drink, as Americans often do, will have the same effect—a phenomenon that may explain why extra sugar finds its way into so many savory packaged foods, from hamburger buns to salad dressing. Everything simply has to be a little sweeter to taste right if your tongue is cold.
Refrigeration enabled the creation of American icons such as the cheeseburger and the Budweiser, but it also created an entirely new culinary category: the leftover. According to the food historian Helen Veit, the term was first coined in the early years of the twentieth century; before then, dinner scraps were fed to animals or added to a simmering stockpot. The domestic fridge changed that, inviting cooks to serve last night’s meal, often embellished to seem new. In a 1932 pamphlet titled “Cooking with Cold,” Kelvinator, a leading fridge manufacturer, promised that with “a little bit of this and a bit of that... the left-over foods disappear, and are replaced by delightful combinations, well blended by the Kelvinator cold.” Leaving aside its suggestion that one serve “Molded Lamb with Fruit,” Kelvinator wasn’t wrong to claim that refrigeration could make leftovers taste better. After all, chemical reactions continue in the cold, albeit slowly, and some of them improve flavor. Several years ago, *Cook’s Illustrated* investigated this process by serving fresh bowls of beef chili, in addition to French onion, creamy tomato, and black-bean soups, alongside portions that had been made two days earlier. Testers preferred the fridge-aged versions, describing them as “sweeter,” “more robust-tasting,” and “well-rounded.”
# I Was the Person Who Named the ‘Brat Pack’ - I Stand By It
## I Called Them Brats, and I Stand by It
## Forty years and a doc later, I still don’t know why the words “Hollywood’s Brat Pack” caused so much agony.
By , a writer and editor based in New York City. He is the author of “Hollywood’s Brat Pack,” which appeared in New York Magazine in 1985 and is credited with the birth of the Brat Pack.
*New York* Magazine writer David Blum looks back on the cover story that enraged a generation of Hollywood stars. Photo: Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
*New York* Magazine writer David Blum looks back on the cover story that enraged a generation of Hollywood stars. Photo: Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
Most people credit me with the birth of the Brat Pack. That’s flattering, but not really true. What happened was, I destroyed the Brat Pack. The Brat Pack was left for dead on the night I named them in 1985.
I didn’t set out that evening with premeditated murder in mind, just excitement over the possibility of a cover story. I was 29 years old and restless for success in my new job at *New York* Magazine when young actors Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, and Rob Lowe agreed to join me for dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe, presumably so confident in their capacity to charm that they neglected to notice my murder weapon: a notebook and pen. While the *St. Elmo’s Fire* stars amused themselves for hours by repeatedly toasting “*na zdorovye**!*” with vodka shots, shamelessly flirting with an endless parade of eager women, and boldly cutting lines at nearby after-hours nightclubs, I quietly scribbled what I saw. It didn’t take long to land on a line that would perfectly capture the narrative I’d stumbled on — a story vastly more interesting than the one I’d set out to write. Here was [Hollywood’s Brat Pack](https://nymag.com/movies/features/49902/).
I’d originally pitched my editors on a story about Estevez, a lead in the new teen movie *The Breakfast Club* and a budding movie director at the time, and I went to Los Angeles with that angle in mind. But after a Monday night out, and several days trailing Estevez around Los Angeles, I had a notebook bulging with examples of bratty behavior: Estevez worming his way into an empty movie theater for free, trash-talking actors like Andrew McCarthy, asking me to follow him in his car and then gunning his engine to 90 miles an hour through the hills of Malibu. It wasn’t the profile I’d intended to write, but I felt certain the young 1980s stars I’d grouped together in Estevez’s crew would easily survive a headline. If anything, a good lawyer would get my sentence reduced to involuntary manslaughter.
Nearly four decades later, actor, writer and director Andrew McCarthy has released a [Hulu documentary](https://www.vulture.com/article/pretty-in-pink-jon-cryer-andrew-mccarthy-hated-each-other.html) all about the agony inflicted on this era of Hollywood up-and-comers by my two words. Naturally, it’s called *Brats.* In truth, I still don’t understand why some Brat Packers feel so victimized. My headline paid homage to a beloved Hollywood institution known as the “Rat Pack” — a phrase invented by Lauren Bacall to describe several drunk actors, including Frank Sinatra, David Niven, and her husband, Humphrey Bogart. I applied the term to several actors I hadn’t even met or interviewed; I was aware, for example, that the notion of a “pack” first formed on the set of *Taps* in early 1981, involving that hunks-in-uniform movie’s three leading men: Sean Penn, Tim Hutton, and Tom Cruise. For Hutton, the added pressure of already winning an Academy Award at the age of 19 (as the troubled kid in *Ordinary People*) made it an especially stressful shoot, and mandated regular goof-off sessions.
This much had already been documented in “The Angry-Young-Manhood of Timothy Hutton*,”* a cover story published in May of 1984 in *Moviegoer* magazine, in which veteran Hollywood journalist Gregg Kilday writes: “Hutton spends much of his free time with other actors and actresses his own age. His friends include Tom Cruise \[and\] Sean Penn …. the group, says Hutton, offers its members an escape from the constant pressure of their burgeoning careers; by mutual agreement, they avoid talking about their work.” It seemed to me fair game to include Cruise, Penn, and Hutton in my story, along with actors Matt Dillon and Nicolas Cage. Looking back now, I realize I must have deemed the Brat Pack an all-male club — but history has [correctly reconfigured the group](https://www.vulture.com/article/the-brat-pack-revised.html) to include Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, and Molly Ringwald. And some actors have simply decided they were in the Brat Pack, even though they never appeared in my story, hung out at the Hard Rock, behaved brattily or even lived in Los Angeles.
I figured my cover story — with “Hollywood’s Brat Pack” splashed above a publicity still from *St. Elmo’s Fire* that fortuitously caught Estevez, Nelson, and Lowe in a bar, grinning and hoisting brewskis — would likely annoy these young stars for a few days, and perhaps cause some brief agita among Hollywood publicists who tend to want to control the stories that come out about their clients. Nothing prepared me for the firestorm of attention that resulted. It managed a mention in nearly every *St. Elmo’s Fire*\-related story that year; I saw the phrase inserted in dozens of headlines, profiles and reviews. Johnny Carson name-checked the Brat Pack in his monologue.
But I didn’t hear from anyone directly and still assumed that whatever problems I might have created would blow over. I learned much later that the Brat Pack’s agents and publicists had immediately ordered their clients to avoid one another at all costs — no more Hard Rock burgers, no more *na zdorovye!* and especially no more ensemble movies. After a couple of weeks of silence, an exhausted, defeated Emilio finally called me at home. I heard his voice in my answering machine, and quickly picked up, naively hoping he was calling to forgive me. It didn’t go quite that way.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Emilio asked, plaintively.
“I don’t know,” I replied, honestly enough. After a long beat of silence, I added, “I’m really sorry.”
I wasn’t, though. And even after he hung up, I felt certain he’d realize that the phrase would be forgotten. He would have his still-ascending career, and I would have mine. But as all too often happens, the actors’ public responses to my story only served to add fuel to the fire. Lowe and Nelson lashed out at me repeatedly in interviews, “David Blum burned a lot of bridges,” Lowe seethed to the Chicago Sun-Times. “He burned people early in their careers. He took on the wrong people, though. He’s not Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe; he’s David Blum living in a cheap flat.” (I did indeed rent a two-bedroom Upper West Side apartment near an express stop for only $1,500.)
Penn piled on. “All it is, is a condescending load of shit written by some person with a big vibrator up his ass,” the *Fast Times at Ridgemont High* star said dismissively in an *American Film* interview. “Sometimes writers, like actors, like anybody, do their work to impress three or four of their cool friends in Soho.” (For the record, I only had two cool friends in Soho, and they weren’t the least bit impressed.)
Despite this tongue-lashing, I still maintain my story didn’t change anyone’s career trajectory. Sure, in the ensuing decades some members of the Brat Pack would subsequently fail to reach the starry heights they’d dreamed of when they first got famous. Was that my fault? It certainly seemed so to less successful members, who have watched the phrase live on for almost 40 years. In 2017, Judd Nelson told Bret Easton Ellis on his podcast that “I should have punched him out when it happened.” Ahead of the premiere of *Brats* at the Tribeca Film Festival last week, where I appeared on a post-screening panel with McCarthy, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy and Jon Cryer, a friend texted me wise words: “The distance from Judd Nelson to John Wilkes Booth may not be that far.”
But the fact that a Brat Pack documentary even exists in 2024 — let alone deserves a Times Square billboard, a glittering red-carpet premiere and an after-party — demonstrates the lasting and emotionally resonant hold this group of actors had on the culture, then and now. McCarthy’s cleverly edited film, even while purporting to portray the Brat Pack as put-upon by the phrase, manages to smooth over the fact that no real animus exists anymore between the Brat Pack actors and me. At the end of our interview, McCarthy and I even hugged it out, sitcom style. At the *Brats* premiere, Demi Moore introduced herself to me, and clasped my hands in hers as though greeting an old friend.
In truth, the Brat Pack has been ingrained as a happy memory for a generation of moviegoers who came of age in the 1980s, learning life lessons from the likes of directors John Hughes, Francis Ford Coppola, Cameron Crowe, Paul Brickman, Joel Schumacher and Amy Heckerling. They’re avatars of a once-vibrant celebrity culture that minted movie stars to last a lifetime, not a year or two. The epic, enduring star power of Brat Packers like Cruise, Lowe, and Penn — with Robert Downey Jr. and Matthew Broderick right there with them — have kept the Brat Pack brand alive and well. They’ve racked up a remarkable record of durability in an industry that now casts actors aside on a daily basis.
It struck me as an odd omission that the Brat Pack’s current careers and successes don’t even earn a mention in McCarthy’s *Brats*. Maybe all their success contradicts McCarthy’s thesis that the Brat Pack moniker mortally wounded everyone in its path. “You’re called a brat!*”* McCarthy whines to Demi Moore, who correctly pushes back by asking, “Why did we take it as something bad?”
# Jerry West, as a player and exec, sustained excellence during a lifetime of emotional struggle
The night his [Los Angeles Lakers](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/nba/team/lakers/), finally, would return to their place of glory atop the [NBA](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/nba/), [Jerry West](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5559039/2024/06/12/jerry-wests-nba-basketball-genius/) would not be in attendance.
“Oh, I won’t be there,” he told me on the phone, referring to what was then called Staples Center.
Wait, what?
The 1999-2000 Lakers, the team [West](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5558684/2024/06/12/jerry-west-death-nba-remembrance-phone-calls/) had, at the cost of his nerves and health, put together for this very purpose, winning L.A.’s first hoops title in more than a decade, were a game away from conquering the [Indiana Pacers](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/nba/team/pacers/) in the finals. They would be coronated on their home floor. It would be the franchise’s first championship since 1988. It would be the culmination of West’s singular quest, having moved heaven and earth and most of the existing roster to get both Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant on the same team, and having swallowed his own pride to bring Phil Jackson in to coach. It would be marvelous.
And it would be done without West’s presence.
This wasn’t new for West. Such moments, now that he no longer could bring his prodigious talents to the court and impact winning games as a player, drove him to severe distraction. During Lakers home games, he would often drive around town instead. Sometimes, he’d check in to Chick Hearn’s mellifluous voice to see how things were going. That night, though, he kept the car stereo silent. He drove up the Ventura Freeway to Santa Barbara, a hundred miles north of the city.
“I told my friend Bobby Freedman only to call me if there was good news,” West wrote in his searing autobiography, “West by West.”
It wasn’t because he didn’t care, of course. It was because he cared so very, very much.
West’s [death Wednesday at 86](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5558616/2024/06/12/jerry-west-dead/) caused more than one person around the league to choke up.
“It’s a very sad day,” said West’s contemporary and fellow Hall of Famer, Oscar Robertson, on the phone Wednesday afternoon.
West was, for decades, the personification of the sport. Few people’s counsel was more courted, so synonymous was he with the dogged, relentless pursuit of excellence. He was part of a dynasty as a player that couldn’t solve the [Celtics](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/nba/team/celtics/), and then built dynasties as an executive that finally did. He was a 14-time All-Star and 12-time All-NBA selection. Two Lakers behemoths were built on his watch as the team’s general manager: the Magic Johnson-led squad that captured five titles in the 1980s, then the O’Neal-Bryant squads that laid down a three-peat between 2000 and 2003.
As Red Auerbach did for the Celtics, 3,000 miles east, West constantly was at the center of teardowns and rebirths of the Lakers. Decade after decade, the Lakers continued to matter in the NBA, riding Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic and James Worthy through the ’80s, just as Boston continued to pile up the banners after the end of the Bill Russell Era, through John Havlicek, Jo Jo White and Dave Cowens in the 1970s, then Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish and Dennis Johnson. The Cs are currently hunting their 18th NBA title in their finals series this year with the [Dallas Mavericks](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/nba/team/mavericks/); the Lakers, their last title coming in the Orlando Bubble in 2020, are tied with the Celtics at 17.
[I ranked Auerbach one and West two](https://www.nba.com/news/morning-tip-ranking-best-gms-nba-history-jerry-west-red-auerbach-gregg-popovich) on my all-time list of NBA executives in 2017 for NBA.com. Nothing’s changed my mind in the intervening years. They were the ultimate architects, with Auerbach’s intimidating tactics and amazing motivational ability serving as the mechanical rabbit at a dog racing track, as West chased after the Celtics for a generation.
“I secretly liked and admire Red’s brazen ways, and he is one of the coaches I would have loved to compete for,” West wrote. “. … Red was the figure everyone loved to hate, and he didn’t mind it one bit. He didn’t mind being the villain. He would be anything you wanted him to be as long as it helped the Celtics win.”
But West doesn’t take a back seat to anyone when it comes to talent evaluation. He was the best ever. No former superstar as a player was in more gyms in more small towns and in more countries than West was, year after year, trying to find the next great talent. He didn’t get stuck in nostalgia; he still got excited about current players. He raved about [Terance Mann](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/nba/player/terance-mann-5ckD9JvYcPCUx6NM/) when Mann was a little-known second-round pick playing for the [Clippers](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/nba/team/clippers/) in the Vegas Summer League in 2019.
He kept his own counsel about who, and what, he liked.
“It’s not so much trust,” he told me once. “I just think if you ask 10 people, you’re going to get more than one opinion. If you ask five people, you’re going to get more than one opinion. I’d rather not confuse myself by asking 10 people.”
Like Auerbach, West had eternal swag, the way Dr. J and Pat Riley and only a handful of aging luminaries still do. He was still in high demand after he left the Lakers in 2000, moving on to executive roles with the [Memphis Grizzlies](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/nba/team/grizzlies/), [Golden State Warriors](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/nba/team/warriors/) and LA Clippers well into his 80s. It was West’s steadfast refusal to sign off on a proposed trade of [Klay Thompson](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/nba/player/klay-thompson-JyZHl24VVa8twrMw/) for [Kevin Love](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/nba/player/kevin-love-P7SloIegCGEE6wpm/) in 2014 that kept Golden State’s ownership from pulling the trigger, and kept the Splash Brothers from being split up before they went on their franchise-changing championship run.
You still felt his crackling intensity in person, or on the phone. Well into middle age, I’d still get goose bumps when my phone would ring and the caller ID would identify who was on the other line. (He was “TLogo” in my contacts list, [for obvious reasons](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-apr-26-la-sp-crowe-20100427-story.html).) He would always answer pleasantly: “David? Jerry West.”
As if it could have been someone else.
He was, given his pedigree, humble and deferential about his own successes. [West was venerated for the 60-footer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txl1_sVerNk) he hit at the end of regulation of Game 3 of the 1970 finals against [New York](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/nba/team/knicks/) to tie the game and send it into overtime. All West remembered, though, is that the Knicks won 111-108 in OT. He averaged an astounding 46.3 points per game in the Lakers’ Western Division series victory over Baltimore in 1965, which is still the record for highest average in a single postseason series.
He could be caustic and cutting about today’s players, the state of the game, David Stern and anyone else who didn’t measure up to his standards at a given moment. He could be withering about his own team. But if they weren’t winning doing it their way, he had very little patience for them. The portrayal of him in the HBO miniseries “Winning Time” was an ugly caricature of his manic intensity, [one that made his friends and colleagues justifiably angry](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/3172381/2022/03/09/a-total-mischaracterization-portrayal-of-jerry-west-in-hbos-winning-time-sparks-criticism/). He wasn’t someone who foamed at the mouth and spent his days trashing the offices at The Forum in some blinding rage. He didn’t big-time people.
And if anyone could have done so without argument, it was him.
But no one wanted to win more than Jerry West, and he spent his whole life proving it.
He won state titles in high school in West Virginia, at East Bank High School – which, every March 24, the day East Bank won the title in 1956, renames itself “West Bank” for a day in his honor. He won at West Virginia University, where he led the Mountaineers to the NCAA national championship game in 1959, which WVU lost by one point to the University of California, 71-70. He won on the celebrated 1960 U.S. Olympic team, a team just as dominant as the Dream Team would be 32 years later. The 1960 team won its eight games in Rome at the Summer Games by an average of 42.4 points per game. West, Robertson, Walt Bellamy, Jerry Lucas and coach Pete Newell all were inducted individually into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, as was the 1960 team itself as a unit, in 2010.
“We just melded right away,” Robertson said. “Pete Newell was the coach, and he put our starting five together. And we knew what was at stake, because we were all there to make the Olympic team. Jerry was a nice guy. Matter of fact, I knew him through Adrian Smith (who also played on the 1960 Olympic team). I met him through Adrian. He was there with the U.S. Army team. I’m sure our backgrounds sort of paralleled each other, because of where Jerry came from and I came from, we didn’t have anything except basketball.”
The word tortured is often used to describe West. Indeed. Demons, which took root during a difficult and lonely childhood in his native West Virginia, where his imagination was his best friend and he shot thousands of shots so that he wouldn’t have to return home, ate at him throughout his life. There was little love in the West home, and physical abuse of the children at the hand of their father. Jerry West was driven, in the best and worst sense of that word, to strive, to chase perfection, to be hollowed out by defeat and only briefly salved by victory.
“I am, if I may say so, an enigma (even to myself, *especially* to myself), and an obsessive, someone whose mind ranges far and wide and returns to the things that, for better or worse, hold me in their thrall,” West wrote in his book.
West played on the first great L.A. team, after its move from Minneapolis, in 1960, alongside fellow future Hall of Famer Elgin Baylor. They *made* pro basketball on the West Coast, setting a standard of excellence that was held off only by Auerbach, Bill Russell and the Celtics.
Six times during West’s playing career, the Lakers and Celtics met in the championship series. Six times, Boston defeated L.A. The last time, in 1969, West was named the finals MVP, becoming the only player to ever receive the award while on the losing team. The Lakers also played the Knicks in the finals three times between 1970 and 1973. Only in 1972 did West’s team win, giving him one NBA title in nine tries.
“It was great to compete against Jerry,” Robertson said. “Jerry was a tremendous athlete. I don’t know about other guys, but I love playing against great basketball players. Because you have to improve your basketball yourself. You don’t know where you are until you play against great basketball players. And Jerry was, no doubt about it, one of the best of all. I thought Jerry was a great basketball player, great shooter.”
But West could be as stubborn as he was talented.
When the NBA, with great fanfare and not insignificant calling in of decades-long chits, brought its 50 greatest players of all time to All-Star Weekend in Cleveland in 1997, 47 of the 49 living players attended. (Pete Maravich had died in 1988 while playing a pickup game, at age 40; O’Neal was recovering from knee surgery.) West was the only one who didn’t come. At the time, the reason given was that he had just undergone a recent surgery.
The surgery part was true. But that’s not why he didn’t show up. He didn’t show because he was angry with the [Orlando Magic](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/nba/team/magic/), who had accused him of tampering with O’Neal while he was still under contract with the Magic in order to secure Shaq as a free agent.
West was famously blown away by Bryant’s workout for the Lakers before the 1996 draft, and schemed with his close friend, Bryant’s agent, Arn Tellem, to get Bryant to the West Coast. When West was in your corner, you’d never have a fiercer advocate.
There was the famous story, that Lakers executive Mitch Kupchak re-told many years later, of how the Lakers took Vlade Divac in the 1989 draft, with West the single, lone voice opting for the Serbian center over the objections of everyone else in the front office.
“We all picked the other guy,” Kupchak said. “I think it was (Missouri center) Gary Leonard. We all agree. Then (West) leans down into the mic, which was hooked up to New York so that we can announce our choice. Our guy up there was Hampton Mears. And Jerry says, ‘Hampton’– he’s looking at us when he says this – he says, ‘Hampton, the Lakers take Divac.’ The three of us were like, ‘Why are we even here?’ And he says, ‘He’s just too damned talented to pass on.’ And he walked out of the room.”
As ever, the Logo was alone, with his thoughts, his doggedness and imagination, once again, having served him well.
---
## Required reading
• [What was Jerry West really like? On the phone with him, the NBA universe opened up](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5558684/2024/06/12/jerry-west-death-nba-remembrance-phone-calls/)
• [Reactions to Jerry West’s death pour in: ‘A basketball genius’](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5559039/2024/06/12/jerry-wests-nba-basketball-genius/)
• [NBA75: West was ‘Mr. Clutch’ and forever will be brutally honest about himself](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/3095914/2022/02/01/nba-75-at-no-14-jerry-west-was-mr-clutch-and-forever-will-be-brutally-honest-about-himself/)
*(Photo of Jerry West and Oscar Robertson: Vernon Biever / NBAE via Getty Images)*
# Justice Clarence Thomas Acknowledges He Should Have Disclosed Free Trips From Billionaire Donor
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledged for the first time in a new financial disclosure filing that he should have publicly reported two free vacations he received from billionaire Harlan Crow.
The pair of 2019 trips, one to Indonesia and the other to the Bohemian Grove, an all-male retreat in northern California, were [first revealed by ProPublica](https://www.propublica.org/series/supreme-court-scotus). Last year, Thomas argued that he did not need to disclose such gifts. “Justice Thomas’s critics allege that he failed to report gifts from wealthy friends,” his lawyer previously said in a [statement issued on the justice’s behalf](http://www.berkefarah.com/news/2023/8/31/elliot-s-berke-releases-statement-on-behalf-of-client-justice-clarence-thomas-1). “Untrue.”
In the new filing released Friday, however, Thomas [amended his financial disclosure](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24737890-thomas-clarence-annual-2023#document/p6) for 2019, writing that he “inadvertently omitted” the trips on his previous reports.
Last year, ProPublica documented an [array of undisclosed luxury vacations and other gifts](https://www.propublica.org/series/supreme-court-scotus) Thomas has received over the years from several billionaires, including Crow. ProPublica revealed [Crow had treated Thomas to numerous private jet flights and international yacht cruises](https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-undisclosed-luxury-travel-gifts-crow), [covered private school tuition for Thomas’ relative](https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-private-school-tuition-scotus), and [paid Thomas money in an undisclosed 2014 real estate deal](https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-real-estate-scotus).
Legal ethics experts said that Thomas appeared to have violated the law by failing to disclose the trips and gifts.
The Thomas revelations helped plunge the Supreme Court into its biggest ethical crisis in the modern era. [Justice Samuel Alito also failed to disclose a luxury fishing trip](https://www.propublica.org/article/samuel-alito-luxury-fishing-trip-paul-singer-scotus-supreme-court) that was paid for by wealthy political donors, one of whom had cases before the court. In recent weeks, Alito has faced criticism for [politicized flags](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/us/justice-alito-neighbors-stop-steal-flag.html) that flew at two of his homes. The public’s approval of the court has plummeted in the last few years, [polls show](https://news.gallup.com/poll/511820/views-supreme-court-remain-near-record-lows.aspx).
In response, the [court last year adopted a code of conduct for the first time](https://www.propublica.org/article/supreme-court-adopts-ethics-code-scotus-thomas-alito-crow) in its history. The code, however, has no enforcement mechanism.
This is not the first time that Thomas has responded to public controversy about his disclosure practices by amending an old form. The forms are required by a federal law passed after Watergate that says justices must annually report income, assets and most gifts. At least twice before, Thomas has similarly defended his failure to make required disclosures as an unintentional error or a misunderstanding of the rules.
Last summer, [Thomas amended his 2014 disclosure to include the real estate deal](https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-disclosure-filing-harlan-crow-real-estate-travel-scotus) with Crow after ProPublica reported on the transaction. At the time, he wrote that he “inadvertently failed to realize” that the deal needed to be publicly reported and said he “continues to work” with judiciary staff to determine “whether he should further amend his reports from any prior years.”
Thomas engaged an outside lawyer last year to review his past filings. The new filing does not make clear whether that review is finished. The justice and his attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In a [statement last year](http://www.berkefarah.com/news/2023/8/31/elliot-s-berke-releases-statement-on-behalf-of-client-justice-clarence-thomas-1), Thomas’ attorney, Elliot Berke, said that “after reviewing Justice Thomas’s records, I am confident there has been no willful ethics transgression.”
A committee of judges of the Judicial Conference, the principal policymaking body for federal courts, also said last year it had launched a review of the allegations against Thomas. By law, if there is “reasonable cause” to believe a justice intentionally omitted information from a report, the conference is supposed to refer the matter to the attorney general. Such a referral would be unprecedented. A judiciary spokesperson told ProPublica on Friday there is no update on that review.
Even after the new amendments, there are many gifts Thomas received that he has still not disclosed.
As ProPublica previously reported, in 2019, [Thomas flew to Indonesia on Crow’s private jet](https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-undisclosed-luxury-travel-gifts-crow) for an extended island cruise on Crow’s superyacht. If Thomas had chartered the plane and the yacht himself, it could have cost more than half a million dollars. Seven ethics-law experts said that Thomas appeared to have violated federal law by failing to disclose the free travel.
Thomas did not mention the flight to Indonesia or the yacht trip in his new filing. However, he disclosed a previously unknown detail about the trip: that Crow and his wife paid for Thomas’ stay at a hotel in Bali. Thomas acknowledged that he should have reported that.
ProPublica also reported that [Thomas had taken at least six undisclosed trips with Crow to the Bohemian Grove](https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-secretly-attended-koch-brothers-donor-events-scotus). Thomas’ amendments to his reports include only one of those trips. Members typically must pay thousands of dollars to bring a guest to the retreat.
In his new filing, Thomas disclosed receiving one gift last year: photo albums that he valued at $2,000 from Terrence and Barbara Giroux. Terrence Giroux was the executive director of the Horatio Alger Association, a nonprofit that provides college scholarships to low-income students. Thomas is an honorary board member of the nonprofit.
Thomas reported no free trips last year, which would make 2023 an anomaly. Thomas received undisclosed vacations from Crow and other wealthy benefactors virtually every year for more than two decades.
In the disclosure forms released Friday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only other Supreme Court justice to report receiving a gift in 2023. Jackson said she received $12,500 worth of artwork for her chambers at the court, as well as a gift from Beyoncé of four concert tickets, which she valued at $3,711.84.
Alito, who has said he did not need to disclose his fishing trip, received a 90-day extension for filing his disclosure form for last year.
Do you have any tips on the Supreme Court? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at [\[emailprotected\]](https://www.propublica.org/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#4b212438233e2a65202a3b272a250b3b39243b3e292722282a6524392c) and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at [\[emailprotected\]](https://www.propublica.org/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#b8d2cdcbccd1d6f8c8cad7c8cddad4d1dbd996d7cadf) or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.
# Multiple Trump Witnesses Have Received Significant Financial Benefits From His Businesses, Campaign
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive [our biggest stories](https://www.propublica.org/newsletters/the-big-story?source=www.propublica.org&placement=top-note®ion=national) as soon as they’re published.
Nine witnesses in the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump have received significant financial benefits, including large raises from his campaign, severance packages, new jobs, and a grant of shares and cash from Trump’s media company.
The benefits have flowed from Trump’s businesses and campaign committees, according to a ProPublica analysis of public disclosures, court records and securities filings. One campaign aide had his average monthly pay double, from $26,000 to $53,500. Another employee got a $2 million severance package barring him from voluntarily cooperating with law enforcement. And one of the campaign’s top officials had her daughter hired onto the campaign staff, where she is now the fourth-highest-paid employee.
@ -41,9 +41,7 @@ Hanging on the wall of her Fifth Avenue apartment was a photograph showing the t
The president is standing in the middle of the first row, a small smile on his face.
To his left side is his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, and then Helen Thomas, a correspondent for United Press International who would later become the dean of the White House press corps. **Dan Rather** of CBS is crouching at their feet. To Nixon’s right side, so close their
shoulders are touching, is Barbara. Unlike most of the other journalists on the trip, she was neither a White House correspondent nor a TV anchor. She appeared on *Today* but was not yet the show’s co-host. Richard Wald, the network’s executive vice president, had taken a gamble by sending her. Three other NBC correspondents were on the trip and scattered in the photo, each with more experience and higher status than she had.
To his left side is his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, and then Helen Thomas, a correspondent for United Press International who would later become the dean of the White House press corps. **Dan Rather** of CBS is crouching at their feet. To Nixon’s right side, so close their shoulders are touching, is Barbara. Unlike most of the other journalists on the trip, she was neither a White House correspondent nor a TV anchor. She appeared on *Today* but was not yet the show’s co-host. Richard Wald, the network’s executive vice president, had taken a gamble by sending her. Three other NBC correspondents were on the trip and scattered in the photo, each with more experience and higher status than she had.
Still, Barbara managed to plant herself in pride of place, closest of all to the president. She is beaming. Standing behind her is Walter Cronkite. The third female journalist credentialed for the trip, Fay Gillis Wells, a pioneering foreign correspondent then working for Storer Broadcasting Company, is halfway down the row, bundled up in a coat with a fur collar.
An elite handful of analysts, actuaries, and accountants have mastered Excel, arguably the most important software in the business world. So what do they do in Vegas? They open a spreadsheet.
It’s happy hour in Las Vegas, and the MGM Grand casino is crawling with people. The National Finals Rodeo is in town, the NBA’s inaugural in-season tournament is underway, the Raiders play on Sunday, and the U2 residency is going strong at the giant Sphere, so it seems everyone in every bar and at every slot machine is looking forward to something. (And wearing a cowboy hat.) Even for a town built on nonstop buzz, this qualifies as a uniquely eventful weekend.
But I’d wager that if you wanted to see the most exciting drama happening at the MGM on this Friday night, you’d have to walk through the casino and look for the small sign advertising something called The Active Cell. This is the site of the play-in round for the Excel World Championship, and it starts in five minutes. There are 27 people here to take part in this event (28 registered, but one evidently chickened out before we started), which will send its top eight finishers to tomorrow night’s finals. There, one person will be crowned the Excel World Champion, which comes with a trophy and a championship belt and the ability to spend the next 12 months bragging about being officially the world’s best spreadsheeter. Eight people have already qualified for the finals; some of today’s 27 contestants lost in those qualifying rounds, others just showed up last-minute in hopes of a comeback.
The room is set up with four rows and three columns of tables, each one draped in a black tablecloth and covered in power strips, laptops, and the occasional notepad. There’s a long table with coffee in the back, and over the two days we’ve been in this room, carts have occasionally wheeled in with cookies, queso dip, and at one point, surprisingly delicious churros. The unofficial dress code is business casual, the overall vibe somewhere between summer camp and business conference.
Now the room is quieter, more focused. 26 of the contestants are furiously setting up their workspaces. They plug in their computers, clean up their areas, and refill their beverages. A number of players reach into their bags and pull out an external mouse and keyboard — everyone in the room has strong opinions on brands and features, but all agree that what you *really* need is a keyboard with function keys separate from media keys, and then to turn those media keys into more function keys so you can work even faster.
And then there’s me. I’m the 27th competitor, and I’m both the only person in the room using a Mac and the only person who has no idea what I’m doing. I’ve spent the last two days in this room with this group, as they’ve taught each other new Excel tricks and compared notes on the state of the art in the world’s most important piece of software. They’ve been debating VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP and teaching each other how to use the MOD function. I’ve been desperately trying to get my app to update on the MGM’s Wi-Fi.
Image caption: The competitive Excel setup is simple: computer, mouse, keyboard. Every athlete has their favorites.
At 6PM on the dot, Andrew Grigolyunovich, the founder and CEO of the Financial Modeling World Cup, the organization hosting these championships, takes the modular stage in the ballroom. He loads an unlisted YouTube link, which begins explaining today’s challenge, known as a “case.” It’s a puzzle called “Potions Master,” and it goes roughly like this: You’re training to be a potions master in Excelburg, but you’re terrible at it. You have a number of ingredients, each of which has a certain number of associated points; your goal is to get the most points in each potion before it explodes, which it does based on how much of a white ingredient you’ve added.
The Potions Master case, like so many of the puzzles conquered by these competitive Excelers, is not particularly complicated. This is a flashier, faster, deliberately more arcade-y version of spreadsheeting, more like trying to win 10 simultaneous games of chess on easy mode rather than painstakingly taking on a grandmaster. If you like, you can solve the whole thing manually: figure out when the white number gets too high, count the total points until that spot, then double-check it because it’s a lot of numbers, and eventually answer the first question. That’s my strategy, and I think I get it right. Now there are 119 more, worth a total of 1,500 points, and it’s quickly clear I’m not going to finish in the 30 minutes we’ve been allotted.
While I’m squinting into my 13-inch screen and carefully adding 1s and 3s, the other 26 contestants are whirring through their spreadsheets, using Excel’s built-in formula and data visualization tools to organize and query all that data. Everyone in the room seems to have their own way to chew through the ingredient lists and spends the first few minutes turning a mess of numbers and letters into real, proper capital-d Data. They start answering questions a half-dozen at a time, while I’m still checking my mental math.
Almost everybody who participates in competitive Excel will tell you that the app itself will only get you so far. If you can’t hack the puzzle or figure out what you’re trying to do, it can’t make something out of nothing. Your brain will always matter more than your software. But if you really *know* how to make Excel sing, there’s simply no more powerful piece of software on the planet for turning a mess of numbers into answers and sense.
Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only in a hobbyist way. Most of the people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants, and investors play Excel the way I play Scrabble or do the crossword —exercising your brain using tools you understand. But last year’s competition became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, the organizers are trying to capitalize. After all, someone points out to me, poker is basically just math, and it’s all over TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It’s a game. Now it hopes to become a sport.
I’ve come to realize in my two days in this ballroom that understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower. The folks in this room make their living on their ability to take some complex thing — a company’s sales, a person’s lifestyle, a region’s political leanings, a race car —and pull it apart into its many component pieces. If you can reduce the world down to a bunch of rows and columns, you can control it. Manipulate it. Build it and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with a couple of hotkeys and an undo button at the ready. A good spreadsheet shows you the universe and gives you the ability to create new ones. And the people in this room, in their dad jeans and short-sleeved button-downs, are the gods on Olympus, bending everything to their will.
There is one inescapably weird thing about competitive Excel: spreadsheets are not fun. Spreadsheets are very powerful, very interesting, very important, but they are for work. Most of what happens at the FMWC is, in almost every practical way, indistinguishable from the normal work that millions of people do in spreadsheets every day. You can gussy up the format, shorten the timelines, and raise the stakes all you want — the reality is you’re still asking a bunch of people who make spreadsheets for a living to just make more spreadsheets, even if they’re doing it in Vegas.
You really can’t overstate how important and ubiquitous spreadsheets really are, though. “Electronic spreadsheets” actually date back earlier than computers and are maybe the single most important reason computers first became mainstream. In the late 1970s, a Harvard MBA student named Dan Bricklin started to dream up a software program that could automatically do the math he was constantly doing and re-doing in class. “I imagined a magic blackboard that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in, all of the other numbers would automatically change, like word processing with numbers,” he said in [a 2016 TED Talk](https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_bricklin_meet_the_inventor_of_the_electronic_spreadsheet?hasProgress=true&language=en). This sounds quaint and obvious now, but it was revolutionary then.
Bricklin’s software, eventually called VisiCalc, gave many people their first good reason ever to buy a computer. In 1996, Apple CEO Steve Jobs [called VisiCalc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU96Pd_npn4&t=13s) the first of two “explosions that propelled the industry forward” and said spreadsheets were the driving force behind the success of the Apple II. A generation later, a competitor called Lotus 1-2-3 became a key app for the IBM PC. By 1985, after briefly dabbling with a program called Multiplan, Microsoft announced a powerful spreadsheet app of its own, called Excel. At the time, it was an app for Apple’s Macintosh, which was flagging in sales; both Apple and Microsoft thought the best way to compete was with spreadsheets. They were right.
Four decades later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella [called Excel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge8Rdrrut0c) “the best consumer product we ever created.” He doesn’t just see it as an enterprise tool. It’s for everything. Nadella said he simply can’t imagine a world without Excel. “People couldn’t make sense of numbers before, and now everyone can.”
The goal isn’t just getting an answer. It’s understanding all the inputs that allowed us to arrive there.
Looking back, there’s a surprising resemblance between the way we talked about spreadsheets in the ’80s and the way we talk about artificial intelligence now. The same worries about automating people out of jobs; the same questions about whether we could really trust the computers to do all this complicated work so quickly. In fact, in the 1980s, spreadsheet programs were the AI bots of their day. “The aim is to knock some sense into otherwise mindless computers,” *The New York Times*’ David Sanger [wrote in 1985](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1985/02/07/009235.html?pageNumber=81), “getting them to understand — and perform automatically — the tasks that individual users struggle each day not to forget.”
In so many ways, though, the spreadsheet trajectory is the best-case scenario for an AI future. Where current AI tools like ChatGPT try to abstract away the inner workings and underlying data and simply offer you the world through a text box, spreadsheets do the opposite: they promise an ever greater level of control and understanding of the world around you. The people who work on Excel and other spreadsheet tools are perpetually trying to make them easier to use while also giving power users more ways to tinker. If you want to create something with AI, you just type in a prompt and hope for the best. A spreadsheet artist, on the other hand —and there really is such a thing —can paint their creation one cell at a time. The goal isn’t just getting an answer. It’s understanding all the inputs that allowed us to arrive there.
The converse of that, though, is that spreadsheets make plain exactly how easy it is to reduce so much of modern life to a bunch of numbers and formulas in a spreadsheet. Give me some numbers, and my Excel file will predict when you’re going to die. [Dating spreadsheets have become normal](https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/trick-to-san-francisco-dating-17446896.php) in a world where romance is about swipes and statistics. Have a hard decision to make? I have a decision-matrix spreadsheet for you! In a spreadsheet world, everything is comparable, reducible to some base figure that eventually explains everything if only you know how to ask. Spreadsheets promise the world isn’t actually complicated — you just have to know the formulas. I don’t know if that’s beautiful or bleak or both, but it’s certainly big business.
This group that has gathered in Vegas operates like a mix of camp friends, colleagues, and competitors. Most work in financial analysis in some way: on the first day, I had lunch with a financial modeler for a mining company, an actuary, and a certified Microsoft MVP —a Most Valuable Professional, who teaches other people how to use Excel. We sat in the MGM Grand food court eating salads and Chinese buffet talking about the MVP’s expansive kaleidoscope collection and the modeler’s current budgeting challenges given the strange economy and some regulatory complications.
Many of these folks have been playing competitive Excel together for years. Years ago, the main organization for these players was called ModelOff, which was much more strictly a financial-modeling competition. Every year, a bunch of these Excel users would get together, usually in New York or London, and essentially do their job competitively.
The last ModelOff was in 2019, before the pandemic put a stop to pretty much anything in person. But Grigolyunovich, a longtime ModelOff fan and competitor, decided to keep the legacy going. Grigolyunovich is tall, with blonde hair parted down the middle and his shirt permanently tucked in, and exudes a kind of constant low-grade, manic energy. He loves Excel — loves using it, loves talking about it, loves tinkering with the sheets he’s made for this weekend. He created the Financial Modeling World Cup in 2020 in hopes that he could keep the ModelOff spirit alive but also expand it. “I really missed playing” when ModelOff stopped, he says, “because I’d been doing that for seven years. I also wanted to make a better tournament.” The only downside, he says, is that running the competition means he can’t participate anymore.
The Financial Modeling World Cup is really three separate things: There’s the Excel World Championship, the most mainstream (and I use “mainstream” in the loosest way possible) version of competitive Excel, which Grigolyunovich hopes can turn into a popular esport. There’s a similar event for college students, known as the Microsoft Excel Collegiate Challenge. And there’s the Financial Modeling World Cup, which is more like ModelOff —it requires financial knowledge, uses financial cases, and has slightly different rules. The FMWC is the most complex, maybe the most prestigious, and definitely the least exciting of the three.
The Excel World Championship had a viral moment in 2022, when it showed up in a half-hour block on ESPN’s annual “The Ocho” event —a joke from the movie *Dodgeball* before ESPN took the idea and made it real — in which the network airs a day full of sports that would otherwise never make its schedule. The “Excel Esports: All-Star Battle” portion aired at 5AM Eastern, between the 2022 eSkootr Championship and the 2021 World Air Hockey Championship, but enough viewers were excited and surprised to see competitive Excel on TV that it had a bit of an online moment.
Now, Grigolyunovich says the job is to turn that virality into true momentum. He wants the FMWC to be a fun community activity, an educational resource for people of all ages, and an honest-to-God spectator sport. It’s not clear to me whether it’s possible to do all three of those things —and a lot of the people here think it’s not. David Brown, a University of Arizona professor and previous FMWC finalist who also runs the collegiate tournaments, says he thinks competitive Excel makes the most sense as a fun way to teach students some more practical skills, in a sort of Model UN way. Hardly anyone here seems to think Excel esports is a path to true fame and fortune.
Image caption: Excel Esports might not make you rich or famous yet, but the trophy looks great in your Zoom background.
The best way to train for the Excel World Championship, everybody tells me, is to practice with old cases. The great players treat this the way a football player might watch film or run the same play over and over until the timing is perfect; you do a case, then do it again another way, until you’ve sharpened your skills and your muscle memory such that the next time something like it comes up, you’re ready. Every case is different, but they do have a lot in common. Lotteries and slot machines are common case fodder, and there are plenty involving poker. The final case in last year’s championship was about chess, another game with near-infinite variations and permutations. The more you train your brain to work with these mountains of data, the better you get.
Diarmuid Early, a past ModelOff champion and the biggest celebrity in the room —an article once referred to him as “the LeBron James of Excel,” which immediately stuck — is sitting in the back row of the Vegas ballroom, trying not to think about whether he’s trained enough. I’d been hearing about Early for months before we met, and he’s one of two names everyone offers when I ask who they think might win. People speak of him both fondly and with just a little bit of reverence.
In reality, Early — everybody calls him “Dim” — is a friendly, relaxed but fast-talking financial consultant with thinning hair and a slight Irish accent who showed up to Vegas in the middle of the busiest time of his year at work. I catch him in jeans and a gray hoodie, typing furiously on his laptop. In Excel, obviously. “I do bonus planning work with an investment bank,” he tells me, “so the end of the year is Go Time.” He’s already qualified for the finals on Saturday but is a little nervous about how he’ll do this weekend. “I was hoping to be doing more training than I am,” he says, but work has made that impossible. Even during the down moments (and the occasional not-so-interesting moments) of the conference, I keep catching Early swapping his fun spreadsheets for work spreadsheets.
All the important stuff in an Excel competition, Early says, happens in the first few minutes. After reading the instructions, “you’ve got, like, 30 seconds to think, ‘Okay, how am I going to approach this?’ and then it’s just, *go*. If you set off down the wrong path, even if you realize five minutes in that there was a better way to build it, it’s probably not worth going back and changing it.” Some players will just dive into the first question in the first level and take things from there; the ones who win are usually the people who build a system that will eventually answer all the questions. “But if you get that judgment call wrong,” Early says, “and you’re three minutes away from having all the points but what you actually have is none of the points, then you’re dead, right?” He has horror stories of this happening. Everyone does.
“If you ask the same question to five different people, and they have Excel experience, they might think of five completely different ways to do it,” says Peter Scharl, another already qualified finalist. “There are things I do in the Excel competitions that I didn’t know how to do three months ago, six months ago just because of doing it and reviewing what I did or reviewing what other people are doing, reading comments, watching videos.”
In the last couple of years, though, there’s been a shift in the Excel world: you can now write complex, reusable functions called Lambdas in the app and even write Python code directly into a cell. (Microsoft’s Nadella recently called Excel formulas “the world’s most popular programming language,” and he’s probably not wrong.) More than one person in Vegas tells me about the work of Eric Oehm, known to many in the community as the Excel Robot, who builds software that automates a lot of the drudgery of building spreadsheets. Brown jokes that Oehm might give him some particularly cool tools that he hides from Early “because he wants someone to beat Dim.”
Most days of the year, tools like these are a godsend to everyone in this room in Vegas. A faster way to build powerful systems in a spreadsheet? Sold. But in competition, it’s like a performance-enhancing drug. Brown says he suspects eventually, there will be two versions of the Excel World Championship: one in which you can bring all the outside tools and knowledge you want, and one that is just you and a fresh install of Excel. The former version, he thinks, could be wild in what it makes possible, much like Peter Thiel and others think [the so-called “Enhanced Games”](https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2024/01/31/billionaire-peter-thiel-backs-doping-friendly-olympics-rival---what-to-know-about-the-enhanced-games/?sh=16756b8501f2) could make athletic competition all the more impressive.
By now, I’ve asked a few folks if they’re worried about eventually being replaced by AI, and they all basically laugh —have you seen what happens when ChatGPT does even simple math, and do you know how high the stakes are for getting a company’s decade-long projections right? But Excel Robot and Python do seem to spark some existential concern. They might make Excel easier, but they also make it more opaque. And is being good at Excel about getting answers out of the spreadsheet or about understanding where the answers come from?
The energy in the MGM Grand ballroom is noticeably different on Saturday morning. It’s finals day. We’re due for a few more panels and tutorials, and the champion will be crowned this evening.
Before the day’s events kick off, I run into the biggest name in Excel who isn’t competing tonight: Laurence Lau. He is the opposite of everyone else I’ve met this week. Lau is wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses in a room full of khakis and dress shirts, he’s loud and brash and rude to some of the other competitors, and he thinks the whole FMWC is a little ridiculous. He’s also the #1 ranked player in the financial modeling side of the competition, and virtually everyone agrees he’s the best Exceler in the world when he bothers to show up.
If the FMWC wants to be a success, Lau tells me, it needs to be bigger. If it wants to be bigger, it needs the best players and the biggest personalities to show up. Lau believes he’s here to remind everyone of how exciting all this could be, if only the organizers pull a Jerry Maguire and show him the money. (He points out that this whole thing could be bankrolled by Microsoft, the world’s most valuable company, with money found in the couch cushions in Redmond.) Even his jacket — a New York Yankees All-Star Game jacket from 2008, which he says was his favorite team “because I’m a fan of whatever team has the highest payroll” — is his way of reminding everyone that sports are about stars, and stars should be paid like it.
Lau wants the FMWC to have multimillion-dollar prizes, not the measly three grand the winner will get tonight. If this is a sport, it should be a full-time job. Right now, he says, “people do this because they like Excel.” These events will always feel more like a golf weekend with the guys than a PGA championship. And, he reminds me, not everyone likes Excel.
“Most Americans hate their job, right?” They don’t come home from work wanting to look at more spreadsheets. It’s fine for the FMWC to be about education and camaraderie, but then why is it streaming on ESPN? He senses an identity crisis in this room, and it makes him mad that no one will do anything about it.
Lau compares himself to Deion Sanders, the famous football player who took on the “Prime Time” persona to bring more attention to players at cornerback, which, before him, had been one of the lowest-paying positions in the NFL. He’s happy to be the brash jerk in the room, trying to convince people to make the competition worth his while —and maybe build a brand in the process.
The world may not run on spreadsheets, but spreadsheets run the world
His obnoxiousness stands out even more in this crowd, which seems to skew introverted and mild-mannered. Nobody’s exactly competing for stage time with Lau’s antics. But as uncomfortable as everyone appears to be with his shtick, they also seem to understand his point. After all, these people do puzzles for fun and overwhelmingly do financial modeling for work. For all the fun art projects and life-tracking stuff that everyday people do in Excel, the true customers for these tools are the money guys. The ones who used the advent of the spreadsheet to turn Wall Street into a global industry, that built wildly complicated things like collateralized debt obligations and helped usher in a financial crisis in 2008. The world may not run on spreadsheets, but spreadsheets run the world. Maybe all Lau is doing is saying the quiet part out loud, which is surprisingly uneasy in a room full of finance professionals.
Lau heads inside to join a panel of former Excel champions, and I head over to Grigolyunovich to get his take. He’s a little embarrassed by Lau’s whole alter ego bit, it seems, though he does agree in principle with some of his stances. Grigolyunovich says there’s plenty of room for more money — including from Microsoft, which is already a sponsor and would surely be happy to see Excel become must-watch TV. But he’s torn between loving this community and wanting it to be educational and fun for the people who do it while also wanting it to be bigger. And he wonders if there could be another reason Lau’s not competing — maybe he doesn’t like the cameras and the pressure?
Meanwhile, Lau has taken the stage in that Yankees jacket and sunglasses and is explaining to everyone why they shouldn’t even try to compete: because, odds are, they’re not smart enough. When the moderator asks him if this is all just a bit, he laughs. “I can be normal if I need to be,” he says. But he gets back to his point. “My argument is a top Excel analyst is three, four, or five times more productive than your average,” he says, working himself up again. “They’re not getting paid three, four, or five times more than your average person.” He gestures to the audience: “If you work for a company and you’re pretty good at Excel, you are underpaid… so just remember that.” Brown, the moderator, quickly changes the subject.
After the panels end, Grigolyunovich announces the winners of yesterday’s last-chance qualification round. One by one, he reveals the eight names of the top finishers, rounding out the field of 16 for tonight’s finals. (Jakub Pomykalski, an already qualified finalist who did the qualification round for fun, won it by scoring 1,234 of the 1,500 available points —I don’t think he intended to intimidate everyone by doing that, but he did.) I didn’t qualify, which is not remotely shocking but is slightly disappointing nonetheless. And with that, the conference portion of the weekend concludes. As we all file out of the MGM Grand ballroom, everyone receives a Certificate of Completion from the Financial Modeling World Cup. They all look like college diplomas, and mine congratulates me on “successful completion of financial modeling & Microsoft Excel training.”
A few hours and a brisk walk down the Vegas strip later, I arrive at the night’s chosen venue: the HyperX Arena, a 30,000-square-foot esports space with seating for 70, dozens of gaming PCs, a bar, and a large stage in the center. On a typical day, the arena might be home to a *Fortnite* tournament, but tonight, it will be spreadsheets.
The finals don’t start until 7:30PM, but by about 3PM, the arena is already buzzing. Max Sych, the FMWC’s chief operating officer, is onstage polishing the three trophies for the top finishers when he sees me and offers to give me a tour of the arena. He leads me through the room where all the arena’s producers turn its many cameras into a single livestream. We walk through the neon-green Hype Tunnel, where each competitor will enter dramatically and then pause for a selfie before they take the stage. We peek into the VIP room, where sponsors will watch the event.
Finally, we land in the commentary booth, where Oz du Soleil and Jon Acampora are already talking through their plans for the evening. These are two of the best-known figures in the Excel world and the two men responsible for helping viewers make sense of fast-paced spreadsheeting. Acampora makes his prediction: he thinks Early is likely to be in the top two, along with Andrew Ngai, an Australian actuary who won the competition both of the previous two years.
Image caption: Jon Acampora and Oz du Soleil have the daunting task of explaining power-user Excel to casual fans.
At about 6:15PM, the arena’s doors open. The contestants file in, clamber up onstage, and find their PCs. Many of them are wearing Excel Esports jerseys, which I’m just now learning are a thing; they look like soccer jerseys, with the name across the front and sponsor logos all over. A couple players wear green T-shirts that say “I simply” above the Excel logo. (Get it?) A few wear their own clothes. As a group, they look more like a bunch of friends heading to the bar to watch their favorite team’s game, rather than some of the world’s foremost athletes in an up-and-coming global sport.
Group by group, the finalists sit down and begin to prepare their computers. There are eight workstations on the stage for the two semifinal heats. The players aren’t allowed to use premade lambdas or formulas for tonight’s event; they’re all using identical PCs with identical copies of Excel. They are, however, allowed to use their own keyboards, so a number of them start swapping their own for the glowing RGB mechanical sets on the desk. Sych tells them all they’ll be required to wear headphones so as not to hear the commentary or other noise in the arena and tells them they’re only allowed to use YouTube for music. A few start loading playlists — I notice a surprising amount of Taylor Swift. At least one contestant slyly downloads Spotify.
Once they’re done prepping their stations, some of the players mingle onstage, talking strategy and swapping stories of cases past. Ngai, with a hoodie on over his yellow jersey, sits in the front row of the bleachers eating an energy bar. And Patrick Chatain tells me his strategy for the evening. Chatain, a senior studying deep learning at McGill University, is the youngest competitor here but says he’s really not feeling much pressure. Last week, he won the individual competition at the Excel Collegiate Challenge after coming in second the year before, “and this was my last chance at that one.” Now he’s in the big leagues and has his whole career ahead of him.
Nobody practices Excel to get famous
For tonight, Chatain’s plan is to lead with speed. He says he’s hoping to answer the bonus questions — which only a certain number of people can get each round — right away, just to lock in some points. He’s been studying the others and has decided his best chance is not to try and build a perfect system but to just start sprinting from the beginning. It’s a bold strategy, but a necessary one, because the rules are different tonight. Instead of giving every competitor 30 minutes to get as many points as possible, which is how virtually every previous competition has operated, tonight, the person with the lowest score will be eliminated every seven and a half minutes. The players have been telling me — and each other — all week how much this changes things. There might not be time to build a perfect system, because you might already be out; even the game’s most thoughtful and deliberate players will have to play like there’s a fire chasing them down. A lot of players are thinking like Chatain, hoping to score a few quick points or get a bonus to buy some time.
At 7PM, the doors open again, and the fans stream into the 70 seats in the center of the room. They’re mostly friends, family, and fellow competitors — Lau walks in waving an enormous American flag, Scharl’s family starts yelling his name as soon as they see him. I see two signs for Pomykalski: one reads “Jakub the Polish Punisher’’ in cartoonish blue and green letters, and the other says in red, “Jakub never `#REFs`.” (That is a very good Excel joke.) One person holds a handmade sign featuring Clippy saying, “Go Dim!” and almost immediately, a “Clippy, Clippy” chant erupts from the crowd. The night is off to a roaring start.
At 7:30PM on the dot, Stephen Rose, a former Microsoft marketing manager with a graying beard and a shock of black hair who is the evening’s emcee, quiets the crowd. The lights go down, and the livestream begins. As Rose greets the competitors and viewers, I find Grigolyunovich standing off to the side of the bleachers. He’s been running around nonstop for hours getting set up and finally paused to take it all in. He seems sincerely shocked that this is happening. “Back in the ModelOff days, I was really thinking that ‘this deserves to be an esport, with the crowd cheering and the whole world watching.’” He gestures out at that vision coming to life. The whole world might not be tuned in just yet, but this is a step toward that.
Onstage, Rose is bellowing into his microphone, introducing each player with all the gusto of a WWE announcer bringing Roman Reigns into the ring. He has nicknames for everyone: Andrew “The Annihilator” Ngai, Peter “The Swiftie Sensation” Scharl, and Curtis “The Beer Hunter” Landry are a few of his best. Each player has been instructed to come down the Hype Tunnel and pose before making their way onto the stage. The next few minutes provide an exceedingly broad definition of the term “pose.” Scharl mimics LeBron James’ chalk-throwing move, Chatain fist-pumps his way down the tunnel, Ngai stops and grinningly waves at the camera with both hands, and several competitors just walk casually past the green lights.
Image caption: Andrew Ngai came into the weekend a two-time winner — and a favorite to three-peat.
Eventually everyone gets settled, and the competition begins. The night’s first case is called Excel Superheroes, designed by Grigolyunovich himself. In it, there’s a cast of superheroes, each with different strengths and weaknesses, and each player’s job is to forecast how they’ll do competing against one another in lots of different scenarios.
Rose says go, and the most problematic thing about competitive Excel becomes blindingly obvious to me once again: it is damn near impossible to figure out what’s going on. All eight players are moving so fast and doing so many things with keyboard shortcuts and formulas that there’s practically no way to see what they’re doing until it’s already done. What’s happening around me looks like a sport, it’s lit like a sport, and the anxiety levels suggest aggressive competition, but even the other competitors in the room can barely keep up. They’re squinting at the screens in front of each workstation, trying to decipher each move. Really, they’re mostly just waiting for the score to update.
In the commentary booth, du Soleil and Acampora are doing their best to keep up and explain the maneuvers, but watching eight spreadsheet whizzes simultaneously requires multitasking brainpower I’m not sure any human can attain. And if you can figure out what =SUM(CODE(MID(LOWER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C3,”:”,””) means in the few seconds it’s shown onscreen, well, you should come to Vegas next year.
Like the rest of the crowd, I mostly resort to scoreboard-watching and cheer every time the commentators go back to show a particularly cool formula or trick a player did. The scores change wildly and frequently: a lot of players tend to solve a whole level at once, adding dozens or hundreds of points to their total in an instant. They’ll jump from last to second to sixth to first, and as the clock ticks down, things move even faster. Even if you don’t know what’s happening — and I really don’t — it’s still pretty intense.
There’s also drama immediately. Ngai, the reigning champ, is eliminated after the first seven and a half minutes. But when Rose taps him on the shoulder to let him know he’s done, Ngai can’t believe it. He’d gotten a bonus question and solved the first two levels already, and he was in last? From my view in the stands, he had a point: the scoreboard had shown him at the bottom of the scoreboard even as it showed him completing things, then it briefly jumped him to third place, before knocking him down again. Ngai walks offstage, incredulous, and is obviously mad as Grigolyunovich quizzes him to figure out what happened.
For the rest of the heat, the competitors seem to be constantly checking the scoreboard. Every time Chatain submits an answer, he spins around in his chair to make sure it shows up; Scharl and others also pointedly check to make sure they’re getting things right. In the last minute or so of the round, the rankings jump around, and with only a few seconds before the round ends, Pomykalski suddenly puts 204 additional points on the board, dropping Chatain from fourth to fifth and out of the competition. As du Soleil screams in disbelief, Chatain appears shocked. “I looked at the screen when I heard a shout” with about 30 seconds remaining, he tells me right after he walks offstage, “but the audience was on the screen! When the scores came back, there were only two seconds left.”
The second semifinal, a case based on a bunch of numbers games, is less chaotic. Lianna Gerrish, the only woman in the top 16, is eliminated first. Early, the favorite to win, writes a wildly complicated two-line formula into a cell that ends in six parentheses and impresses all the experts in the room. There is a pair of brothers in this heat —Harry and Dan Seiders, who I’m told are very competitive with one another —and at one point, Dan is eliminated, but Rose accidentally taps Harry on the shoulder instead. Early wins, to no one’s surprise, and the eight-person final is set.
We take a brief break, and then it’s time for the last round. After much deliberation with the organizers and the other contestants, Ngai is allowed back in. Whatever went wrong was about the score-keeping system, not Ngai’s answers. But now there are nine competitors and eight computers, so Scharl is shunted offstage to one of the computers around the arena, where he dutifully reloads his setup, searches “Taylor Swift playlist” on YouTube, dons his headphones, and signals he’s ready to go. The crowd chants, “Three, two, one, Excel!” and the final begins.
The final case comes courtesy of one of the event’s sponsors, video game *Eve Online*. In it, each competitor is mining asteroids, building fleets of spaceships, and dealing with market prices for various materials. Their job is to calculate various requirements and costs for building a single ship, then for building the whole fleet, then actually working out how to acquire minerals from asteroids around the universe. It’s hugely complicated: Brandon Moyer, the first finalist eliminated, tells Rose that “I have no idea what that case even was.”
But the others charge along, at least for a while. By about the fourth of the case’s seven levels, nearly everyone seems to stall out —some go back to their initial model and try to solve the whole thing a new way, while others just start trying to attack bonus questions. Early, at one point, looks back to check the scoreboard, only to see his own face on the big screen — he’s just been eliminated in fourth place. As he stands up to leave the stage, Rose says he looks a little frazzled. How does he feel? “A little frazzled, yeah,” Early replies.
Image caption: The youngest finalist in Vegas, Patrick Chatain lost in heart-breaking fashion.
The final three players are Ngai, Michael Jarman, and Willem Gerritsen. Ngai took a commanding lead almost immediately in the round and never let up. With about 50 seconds left in the round, Gerritsen, who has been staring blankly at his screen for a while, just throws his hands up and gives up. A few seconds later, Ngai takes off his headphones and looks over at Jarman, making sure there’s no magic last-second comeback in the works. There isn’t: Jarman stands up and, along with Gerritsen, starts congratulating Ngai. Rose counts down the time, and his voice cracks as he shouts for “our new Microsoft Excel World Champion, Andrew Ngai!” Ngai walks to the front of the stage, waving to the crowd, before thanking all the other competitors and brushing off the “technical difficulties” from the semifinal.
“For the team that organized it,” he says, “don’t feel bad; these things happen. It worked out in the end!”
For such a huge moment, it’s over pretty fast. There’s no drawn-out celebration, no “I’m going to Disney World!” moment, no post-game analysis. There’s just a quick trophy presentation for both these finals and the financial modeling competition, which Lau won — he goes up and collects a trophy he previously told me he didn’t even want, along with a championship ring I’m told he specially requested. Then Ngai is given his trophy and the large championship belt, which is so big it barely stays in place around his waist. Rose thanks everyone in the arena and on the livestream, tells people to come win the championship for themselves next year, and says goodnight.
The players migrate over to the bar, and before long, folks start to filter out. They have jobs to get back to, family vacations to continue in Vegas. Just before I leave the arena, all the finalists, broadcasters, and organizers gather onstage to take a few pictures. Du Soleil crouches in front of the group, and Ngai holds up his trophy. Lau, still in sunglasses and still with the American flag draped over his arm, holds up his prize, too.
This group will go down in history as one of two things. They could be the first generation of a new sport, the ones who turn Excel from a work tool to a playing field and change the way the world looks at spreadsheets. Or they could be just a group of friends and colleagues who like to play games together — but instead of playing *Fortnite* or *Catan*, they play Excel. Like a lot of folks in the room that night, I think I’ve come to hope for the first outcome but would bet on the second. These are the world’s best spreadsheeters, able to turn a chaotic universe into rows and columns and then bend that universe to their will, but the prize for Excel excellence is much higher at the office than it will ever be in the arena. Even the competitors mostly seem happy to spend a weekend doing a Tiger Woods impression before going back to their real lives and real jobs. Nobody practices Excel to get famous.
Grigolyunovich, meanwhile, is already thinking about next year. There will be bigger prize pools —though probably still not enough to get Lau to play — plus more wrinkles in the earlier rounds and more chances for new people to get involved. But tonight, in an honest-to-goodness arena, there was a cheering crowd and real stakes and nonstop drama. Maybe the Excel World Championship will never be mainstream. Maybe the celebrities in this room won’t ever be celebrities outside of it. But Grigolyunovich proved something to himself tonight. Spreadsheets can be anything. They can even be sports.
@ -166,136 +166,6 @@ I laughed at this, baffled by the life cycle of culture—how Jackson’s rules,
“This is what I love,” she told me. “ ‘On Wednesdays, we wear pink’ is not a fuck-you to those who don’t wear pink, but it’s power, almost—it’s like,*we’re*the shit. On Wednesdays,*we*wear pink,*we*smash the patriarchy. It’s everything.” I think she finally felt understood.
**Back in December,** at a wine-drenched Christmas party for a moms group in suburban Maryland, Jessica Jackson got vulnerable. It was deep in the night, and the women were discussing their difficulties—toddlers, divorces—when someone quoted a line from*Mean Girls.*It shook loose a secret. “Do you want to hear something that sounds like a lie but it’s really true?” Jackson told the room. “I’m the real Regina George.”
An article about teens and “relational aggression” led Tina Fey to buy the rights toRosalindWiseman’s book.
As proof, she pulled up an article on her phone, a 2002*New York Times Magazine*cover story entitled [“Girls Just Want to Be Mean.”](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/magazine/girls-just-want-to-be-mean.html) At that time, Jackson was a 16-year-old junior at Northwest High School in Germantown. She loved*Dawson’s Creek*and Britney Spears, and when she spoke to the reporter for the story, she thought it was about some volunteer work she’d been doing with an organization that sought to build better relationships between girls. But in the course of their interviews, Jackson said some bonkers things about her social world, which wound up quite prominently in the*Times.*
At the Christmas party, Jackson read some of these quotes aloud. The most eye-popping pertained to the rules of her high-school clique: “You cannot wear jeans any day but Friday, and you cannot wear a ponytail or sneakers more than once a week. Monday is fancy day—like black pants or maybe you bust out with a skirt.” For several paragraphs this goes on, teenage Jessica laying out her friend group’s dizzying standards for each other. “The rules apply to all of us,” she clarified. When one friend wore jeans on a Monday, “she wasn’t allowed to sit with us at lunch.”
Among the moms at the party, nobody needed an explanation. Jackson’s friends were the Plastics, the catty clique of teen demigoddesses who run the school in*Mean Girls,*ensconced at their cafeteria table, reciting the ludicrous rules of their group. What Jackson said at 16 was rewritten—almost verbatim—into one of the megahit film’s most quoted moments. This was “On Wednesdays, we wear pink.”
Today, Jackson is 38, an HR director at a software company in Rockville. She called me recently while she was leaving work, en route to pick up her kids from school. I asked if she recognized her quotes when she first saw*Mean Girls,*back when it came out in 2004. “Of course I did,” she replied. “Tons of them—‘We wear pink,’‘You can’t sit with us’—I was tickled. I wasn’t mad.”
Jessica Jackson enjoys the film—despite her teen words being voiced by the Plastics. Photograph by Magdalena Papaioannou.
“It would have been cool to tell everyone in the world that I was part of this amazing cult-classic movie,” Jackson explained. But until that Christmas party, she says she’d never brought it up with anyone—not in her adult life. To explain her connection to the movie, she would have had to dredge up the article, which “does not paint me in a very good light. I say the most awful things. I’m the example of the mean girl, I’m the Queen Bee. I’m not even the antihero—I’m the villain.”
Jackson is bubbly and warm, a bleached-blonde suburban mother of two who loves cats and Disney princesses. She’s the kind of person who hosts an International Women’s Day event at her company each year; at one of them, she gave a presentation about how “women can either be a sex symbol, a mother, or a bitch,” then explained how each archetype fits into the corporate world. Aside from her love of pink and fondness for outrageous pronouncements, Jackson is not a person who resembles the Plastics—but somehow she’s partly the model for them. To understand how, you have to rewind a bit, to about a decade before she decreed Mondays jeans-free.
---
**A good place** to start is the rumor. The way I heard it,*Mean Girls*was based on a cohort of exceptionally cruel private-school girls who emerged in [DC in the ’90s](https://www.washingtonian.com/2021/12/16/the-ultimate-guide-to-90s-washington/), girls who were so mean that administrators hired an expert to tame them. For the movie’s 20th anniversary, I figured I’d find some of them—the bullies and the victims—and ask what manner of unholy prep-school viciousness could have possibly inspired such a film.
But here’s the thing: When I started making calls, the rumor fell apart. Yes, at one point that particular school engaged the services of an expert to sort out its girls—but so did dozens of others all over the DC area. The expert was [Rosalind Wiseman](https://rosalindwiseman.com/), who wrote a book about the cruelty of adolescent girls, which Tina Fey went on to adapt. So even though the prep-school thing was false, I figured there must be women in this region whom Wiseman had written about, whose experiences had therefore made it into the film. Hoping to find them, I called her.
According to Wiseman, the*Mean Girls*origin story begins in the 1990s, when she graduated from college and moved back home to DC. Her hope was to work with refugees, but while job-hunting, she invented a side hustle: teaching prep-school girls martial arts. This began at Georgetown Day School, then expanded to Sidwell Friends and to Wiseman’s alma mater, Maret. Soon, her work ballooned to schools all over the area, plus a home for pregnant teens.
At the time, Wiseman was 22 or 23—not much older than her pupils. She listened as they talked about their lives, and it struck her how often they discussed other girls: how important and complicated their friendships were, and how painful and elaborate their cruelties. “I felt it was important to go to the foundations of why girls were doing the things they were doing in their relationships with each other,” she told me. “I wanted to give them the skills to self-reflect as they were operating in the world.”
So Wiseman pivoted, asking schools if she could try out a different kind of workshop—not self-defense but relationship-building, the kind of thing we would now call “social-emotional learning.” Administrators said yes. Within a few years, Wiseman was a fixture at a broad mix of the region’s public, private, parochial, and alternative schools, teaching girls—well, not to be nice, exactly, but to disagree respectfully, to not abuse one another’s trust, to have friendships based in dignity, and to navigate the barbarism of adolescent life.
If you remember the end of*Mean Girls,*then you know approximately what these workshops were like: The junior girls report to the school’s gymnasium, where Ms. Norbury, the put-upon math teacher played by Fey, stands before the bleachers and teaches them to be less cruel. The girls raise their hands if they’ve ever said something mean behind a friend’s back, then they handwrite apologies and read them aloud to their peers. For years, Wiseman led those exercises, almost exactly as they appear in the film.
At that time, Wiseman was working with what she called her “Girls Advisory Board.” It was akin to a focus group: about a dozen teens from all over the region, who would regularly give feedback on her curriculum. “That group of girls were the people who said, ‘Tuesdays we wear that, Wednesdays we do this,’ ” she explained. They had a huge influence on her work, and aspects of their lives appeared in the movie. I asked if she’d give me some names.
---
**Within 16 minutes** of calling me, Zeina Davis was crying. She was remembering the late ’90s, before she joined the Girls Advisory Board, when she attended a Catholic middle school in Rockville. Her peers would torment her for her weight and curly hair, for living in a condo, and for being of Arab descent. “There was a mean-girl virus that was rampant in that school,” she said. “They used to put Wite-Out on their desks, scrape it, and then sprinkle it in my hair to make it look like I had lice.”
Mean Girls made Zeina Davis feel “seen.” But she worries that viewers “still want to be Regina George.” Photograph by Magdalena Papaioannou.
In her lowest moment, Davis fell victim to a particularly cruel ruse: A friend called one of their classmates and asked her opinion of Davis, who was secretly lurking on the phone. The result was devastating. “ ‘Oh, I just want to punch her in the face and she’s so fat and she annoys me so badly,’ ” Davis recalled hearing. Recounting it, she paused briefly to sob. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m 38 years old and it still hurts.”
Middle school was the saddest and most afraid Davis has ever felt. Then, at the beginning of ninth grade, she joined the Girls Advisory Board. Its mission was, in part, to end bullying between girls. Joining GAB felt like a way to solve a problem that had otherwise made her feel helpless—a reclamation of power after a few dreadful years.
Every other Tuesday in the early 2000s, a flock of girls would ride the Metro into DC and disembark at Mount Vernon Square, heading for a rowhouse nearby. They’d pop up the tall cement steps into what was once a dining room, where they’d sit around a huge wooden table and discuss their lives. Members of GAB would help solve each other’s problems, plan events to uplift local girls, and advise Wiseman on her work. “All of us were sharing our innermost fears, our hardest stories, our most embarrassing moments,” Davis said. “We were open with our pain.”
> “I would say hi to people from my classes, then eat a Pop-Tart in the bathroom.”
During those years, Wiseman was writing a book about the social landscape of adolescent girls, which became her bestselling parenting guide,*[Queen Bees and Wannabes](https://rosalindwiseman.com/queen-bees-and-wannabes).*For research, she interviewed Davis extensively, and some of her stories made it in. The three-way-calling attack was one of them, and another was when Davis started at a new school in tenth grade and ate her lunch in a restroom stall. “I didn’t want to look like I didn’t have a friend group,” she explained, “so I would kind of walk in circles and say hi to people from my classes, then I would, like, eat a Pop-Tart in the bathroom.”
When*Queen Bees*came out in 2002, Wiseman was in her early thirties, already a luminary in the burgeoning field of quelling cruelty between girls. For that, she became the central figure of that*New York Times Magazine*story, “Girls Just Want to Be Mean.” The story hit newsstands with a sickly pink cover, the phrase “Mean Girls” splashed across in huge text. Among the story’s readers was Fey, then a head writer at*Saturday Night Live,*who bought the film rights to*Queen Bees.*
---
**In January, at a cafe** in upper Northwest, Margaret Talbot admitted that she’d never seen*Mean Girls.*“I don’t own the phrase ‘mean girls,’ I didn’t even invent it,” she said. “But through this article”—the*Times Magazine*story she wrote—“it did enter the culture, and I feel mixed about it.” It troubles her to hear women called “mean girls,” often to trivialize or diminish them. Still, she thinks the term caught on because it “gets at something real.”
In the early 2000s, Talbot learned of a cutting-edge psychological theory: that adolescent girls are not, in fact, nicer than boys. Instead of socking each other on the playground, they bully through “[relational aggression](https://rosalindwiseman.com/queen-bees-and-wannabes)”—exclusionary cliques, caustic gossip, and arcane social cruelties. “I’d had some personal experience with the ingenuity of girls when they wanted to be dominant in a social setting,” Talbot said, so the theory resonated. It was “a useful antidote to a tendency to idealize girls, to imagine within feminism that women always had each other’s backs.”
To learn about relational aggression, Talbot began following Wiseman around DC, shadowing her at the workshops she was running, then interviewing her while they drove between schools. “She was super-vivid in her descriptions,” Talbot recalled, “and almost anthropological in the way she would lay out these different types of characters and maneuvers.” From Wiseman, Talbot learned about “fruit-cup girls,” who feign helplessness for male attention, and “bankers,” who hoard secrets to deploy as social currency. Her article mentions the diabolical tactic of leaving a message on a girl’s family voicemail asking if she’s gotten her pregnancy test back, knowing that her parents might hear.
“But it’s one thing for an adult like Rosalind to be imposing these categories and seeing these phenomena from the outside,” Talbot said. For her story, she needed “informants from the inside,” some in-the-flesh catty teens to dissect the mechanics of their cliques. That’s how she found Jessica Jackson; Wiseman referred her to a girl she knew whose friend group “was governed by actual, enumerated rules.” In the story, Jackson—then going by her maiden name, Travis—is described as an “amalgam of old-style Queen Bee-ism and new-style girl’s empowerment” whose behavior is in need of reform.
But here’s the thing: Despite her cliquish behavior, Jackson was a member of GAB, a teen who grounded her identity in supporting other girls. “I grew up with a single mom who was a bra-burning hippie feminist turned corporate tech powerhouse,” she explained. Back in the ’90s, she would often hear her mom on the phone with female coworkers, dispensing career advice and telling them what behavior not to accept. “I listened to her empower other women, and I was so in awe of her. I just wanted to do that, too.”
In GAB, Jackson felt like she was “changing the world singlehandedly,” and she was excited for the*Times*to highlight that work; she’d told friends and family to expect the article. But when she read it, she was stunned. On the page, she found an array of barbed remarks about other girls, ones that weren’t off the record but that she’d said without considering they might be relevant enough to print. The story, she felt, presented her as the opposite of everything she stood for. It was humiliating. “I’m the example of the mean girl,” she said. “The whole article listed me as the opposition to \[Wiseman’s\] movement.”
Jackson’s displeasure makes sense; there’s a sting to some of the story’s lines. But Talbot doesn’t remember her as villainous—actually, she said, she came to admire the girl’s “flair and insouciance,” the “ingenuity” of her cliquish behavior. Their conversations made Talbot reconsider the kinds of girls who intimidated her in high school, whose antics are “kind of delightful as long as they’re not actually cruel,” which she didn’t think Jackson’s were. I think the story communicates that. On the page, teenage Jessica strikes me as clever and rollicking, her cattiness a mark of irrepressible verve.
---
**When I finally met Jackson,** at her snug yellow house in the suburbs, she made me a “meantini.” This was a cocktail of her invention: an admixture of ginger ale and vodka, plus splashes of fruit punch and cranberry to achieve the desired level of pink. As she stirred, she seemed breathy and scattered, which she eventually addressed outright: “I am so nervous,” she said. “I’m going to have a drink and then I’ll feel better. Dude, if I cry, I hope the earth swallows me whole.”
The issue was talking to a reporter. The last time she’d done so—besides a previous phone call with me—was for the*Times*story, which is still a source of shame. But on the phone, she’d thought I seemed “normal,” so she invited me over to set the record straight. She’s never been a mean girl, she insisted—though she’s certainly an “undercover celebrity.” That’s due to her odd connection to Regina George,*Mean Girls’*glamorous and tyrannical Queen Bee.
For emotional support, Jackson had invited her friend Tanzi Crayton, whom she met as a teenager in GAB. On a small balcony, the three of us drank meantinis from etched-crystal flutes. We bantered for a while—about our kids, the baffling return of Y2K fashion—before the conversation drifted to*Mean Girls.*Crayton said, “When I’ve watched it over the years, I’m like, ‘That’s Jessica right there—like, that’s a direct quote. You need to send my girl a check.’ ”
At a 2004 viewing in Silver Spring, Jackson and others saw bits of their lives onscreen. Photograph by Paramount/courtesy of Everett Collection.
Once Jackson read the*Times*story, she never returned to GAB, so she wasn’t there in the spring of 2004 when Paramount rented the AFI theater in Silver Spring for an advance screening of*Mean Girls.*Wiseman, the guest of honor, brought friends, family, and an assortment of GAB alums, Crayton among them. “I just remember being so starstruck,” Crayton said. “When Ros’s name came up in the credits, we were all cheering. And I saw little traces of us that were incorporated in some of the lines and the scenes.”
I called a few GAB alums to ask about this—about how it felt when they first saw the movie and encountered various fragments of their lives, like when Lindsay Lohan’s character eats lunch alone in a bathroom stall and falls victim to a three-way-calling attack. “It felt a little like, wow, these are my stories. Oh my God, that’s my childhood,” Zeina Davis said. “I definitely feel like I have a hidden part in*Mean Girls.*”
But her connection to the movie is bittersweet, particularly due to the three-way call, which is essentially a humorous aside. “It certainly made me feel seen,” she said, “but to have it played out as kind of a laughable moment—I’m like, it was real pain. They didn’t show how horrible it made me feel afterward, crying and begging my parents not to make me go back to school.” She worried that the film had glamorized something ugly. “You do not walk away from that movie and think, ‘We’ve got to change society.’ I do feel like you walk away and you still want to be Regina George.”
Crayton initially loved the movie—she bought T-shirts and posters for her room—but over the years, she’s reassessed. “I don’t think that people really got the true nature of what*Queen Bees and Wannabes*was about,” she said. “They touched a little bit on that in the end—the girls mended those fences and were able to coexist without being so nasty to one another. But everybody always quotes the crazy stuff, the bad stuff, the catty stuff. Nobody ever quotes any of the good things.” She calls it a “complicated movie,” one that’s genuinely funny but also perpetuates the “myth that young women can’t get along.”
Notably, Jackson’s relationship to*Mean Girls*is less fraught. “It wasn’t a public statement about me, it didn’t say my name,” she said. Hearing her teenage remarks in the mouths of various Plastics felt “so surreal,” but it “wasn’t obvious to anyone else the way it was obvious to me.” This freed her to love the movie: She thinks it’s hilarious and likes the positive ending.
> “Everybody quotes the crazy stuff, the bad stuff, the catty stuff. Nobody ever quotes any of the good things.”
As for Wiseman, she consulted on*Mean Girls,*but she first watched it in full at the AFI screening. “My experience of that was this kind of like—horror is a strong word, but it was like seeing a picture of yourself that you’re not really sure you want everybody to see.” She found the characters “so real” and “scary” and their meanness true to life. But after the movie came out, she learned that girls were dressing up as the Plastics for Halloween. “And it’s like, damn, girls subvert everything I do, all the time. I try so hard, but the opponent is formidable.”
---
**After a few pitchers** of meantinis, dusk fell, a string of lights blinked on, and the chill pushed us inside. Crayton headed home, but there was still something I wanted to understand—namely, the provenance of the rules. In the film, they’re authoritarian and exclusionary, a way to assert dominance over friends and create distance from social inferiors. Wearing pink on Wednesdays is not nice.
Days before, on the phone, I’d asked Jackson directly if she was a Queen Bee. “So, let’s do some layers here,” was her bristling reply. “When you’re confident and bold, are you a bitch? Are you Miranda Priestly? Do I only get to be either Taylor Swift from ‘Teardrops on My Guitar’ or Regina George?” For what it’s worth, Jackson has a “wild affinity” for Regina, for her fashion and brazen self-regard. Still, she said, the character is “not a representation of myself in high school, even though her quotes and my quotes are the same.”
Skeptical, I asked to see Jackson’s yearbooks, so she popped down to the basement and emerged with a stack. Opening one, she pointed to a picture of a jaguar mascot. “You see that? That’s me in there.” Before I could follow up, she’d moved on. “These were easily the most popular girls,” she said, her finger atop some identical blonde twins who apparently later became Ravens cheerleaders. Then she noticed another girl. “Anybody’s Regina George would be her, because everyone hated her but wanted her to like them.”
Remembering high school, Jackson was ebullient. Beside her couch, she performed a cheer that she’d invented as a freshman for a senior she had a crush on, a football player whose various castoffs she’d kept as totems: a pencil he bit, the program he fanned himself with at graduation. It didn’t feel like I was watching a dictator.
But if Jackson wasn’t mean, then why the rules? When I asked, she seemed bewildered. “It wasn’t a big-enough part of our lives or friendships that I remember, like, how we came up with them. Let’s say they were, at best, a phase.” She added that she and her friends “wanted to wear skirts on the same day. We made up all kinds of random songs and fake little clubby things. We weren’t the mean girls by any means.”
But as I puzzled, two of Jackson’s comments rattled around my brain. “Teenage friendships are a lot like teenage love,” she’d said. “Her laundry ends up in your clothes, you’re in each other’s closets and cars and dinner tables and bedrooms.” That thought seemed related to this one, an offhand remark about the actor Sydney Sweeney: “I just want to be her best friend really hard. We would braid each other’s hair and I would tell her all my secrets. I want us to smell the same. I want our periods to sync up.”
To Jackson, friendship seemed to mean sameness and melding—mingled laundry, matched perfume. So I asked if she thought the rules were about formalizing intimacy. “Wow, what a poignant point,” she replied. “Like, you killed it.”
“I’m also going to throw this out there,” she added. “There is a Disney movie called*Wish Upon a Star*starring Katherine Heigl, from the ’90s. I loved that movie. I watched it over and over again.” The movie features a Plastics-like popular clique, “and I remember those gals having specific rules about, like, shaving your legs every day, and this or that. I never forgot that.” Then she brought up the Pink Ladies from*Grease.*(“What made them friends? They had the jackets, it was a thing.”) “So maybe it has something to do with that,” she mused.
Of course, I thought—it’s classic high school, emulating movies to make life feel cinematic. But Jackson had slightly misremembered the plots. She described those two cliques as essentially benevolent, when both are a little mean. In*Wish Upon a Star,*the happy ending involves Heigl’s friends abandoning their rules, and in*Grease,*the Pink Ladies mock Sandy at a party—Sandy, who never gets to wear the pink jacket and belong. The misreading, though, is telling; it’s why the women of GAB are vexed about*Mean Girls,*that even though the ending is harmonious, it’s possible no one remembers it right.
About a week after our meantinis, Jackson called me on the phone. While we talked, she texted me two things she’d just encountered online. One was a social-media post from NARAL Pro-Choice America that said, “On Wednesdays, we fight for abortion rights.” The second was a screenshot of a [pink crew-neck sweatshirt](https://thespark.company/en-us/products/on-wednesdays-we-smash-the-patriarchy-feminist-sweatshirt) with “On Wednesdays, we smash the patriarchy” across the chest. She suggested we both buy it so we’d match.
I laughed at this, baffled by the life cycle of culture—how Jackson’s rules, a form of ritualized closeness filtered through film tropes, were themselves made into a villainous and exclusionary teen-movie speech, which then became iconic enough to meme, and now has been appropriated by corporate girlbossery into political sloganeering and Instagram products, which Jackson—the original Plastic—scrolls past on her phone. But it meant something to her, this reframing: her high-school quotes reclaimed from meanness, now a call to action, asking women to support one another.
“This is what I love,” she told me. “ ‘On Wednesdays, we wear pink’ is not a fuck-you to those who don’t wear pink, but it’s power, almost—it’s like,*we’re*the shit. On Wednesdays,*we*wear pink,*we*smash the patriarchy. It’s everything.” I think she finally felt understood.
*This article appears in the [April 2024](https://www.washingtonian.com/2024/03/21/april-2024-great-places-to-live/) issue of Washingtonian.*
**A** hint of blue on the horizon meant morning was coming. And as they have for the past fifty-four years, Audrey and Gary Revell stepped out their screen door, walked down a ramp, and climbed into their pickup truck. Passing a cup of coffee back and forth, they headed south into Tate’s Hell—one corner of a vast wilderness in Florida’s panhandle where the Apalachicola National Forest runs into the Gulf of Mexico. Soon, they turned off the road and onto a two-track that stretched into a silhouette of pine trees. Their brake lights disappeared into the forest, and after about thirty minutes, they parked the truck along the road just as daylight spilled through the trees. Gary took one last sip of coffee, grabbed a wooden stake and a heavy steel file, and walked off into the woods. Audrey slipped on a disposable glove, grabbed a bucket, and followed. Gary drove the wooden stake, known as a “stob,” into the ground and began grinding it with the steel file. A guttural noise followed as the ground hummed. Pine needles shook, and the soil shivered. Soon, the ground glowed with pink earthworms. Audrey collected them one by one to sell as live bait to fishermen. What drew the worms to the surface seemed like sorcery. For decades, nobody could say exactly why they came up, even the Revells who’d become synonymous with the tradition here. They call it worm grunting.
Audrey and Gary Revell took to each other in high school. In 1970 when Gary graduated, he asked Audrey to be his wife, and they married at his grandfather’s place down in Panacea, about thirty miles south of Tallahassee. For his entire life, he’d lived on an acre six miles west of Sopchoppy, Florida, in an area known as Sanborn. The place is set deep in the heart of the Apalachicola National Forest, a vast expanse of flatwoods and swamp that covers over half a million acres struck through with rivers. It’s where he and his siblings grew up in an old church building, where his great-grandfather had settled after finding his way up Syfrett Creek into the wilderness. It’s whereAudrey and Gary settled after their wedding. “I was only sixteen, so I feel like I grew up here,” Audrey told me. Soon after, they started looking for ways to make ends meet, and Gary suggested, “We might ought to look into that worm thing.”
His family was already deep into worm grunting. Three generations preceded him, and by 1970, his uncles Nolan, Clarence, and Willie weren’t only harvesting the worms to sell as bait but were working as brokers with their own shops that distributed the critters throughout the South. It didn’t hurt that Audrey fell in love with it immediately. The work was seasonal, busiest in spring. During other parts of the year, their family trapped for a living, dug oysters, logged, raised livestock, and set the table with what they grew in their yard or caught in the water or in the forest. “That’s how we learned the woods,” Gary said. “We went in every creek, water hole, pig trail. You name it.”
By the 1970s, the cottage industry had reached its peak. Then Charles Kurault arrived in 1972 to film a segment for his eponymous CBS show,*On the Road with Charles Kurault*. The attention led the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to start regulating the harvest of worms, investigating unreported income, and implementing permit requirements. Back then, the sound produced by grunters in the first hours of daylight was as common as birdsong in this forest, and hundreds of thousands of worms were carried out in cans. Folks who once turned to grunting to make ends meet seasonally were soon in the woods year-round during that decade, competing to summon the bait to the surface and sell to brokers among the counties set between the capital city and the Apalachicola River. Millions of worms left those counties bound forfishing hooks across America. Money followed the pink fever, but as with any rush, the demand eventually dimmed as commercial worm farms caught on and soft, plastic lures became popular.
By that point, Audrey and Gary had decided to shape their own outfit. His uncles had told them, *You ought to just think about keeping all that money to yourself.*The couple had grown tired of depending on others for work. So, they set up their own shop full time, cultivated clients as far away as Savannah, and delivered bait all over the South, driving it themselves, or sending it north in sixteen-ounce, baby blue containers via Greyhound buses. “All the money was coming our way, what little we made,” said Gary. “We struggled with it for a long time, because when you get off the grid like that and try to do it for yourself and you’re young, it’s hard.”
I wanted to know what spending their life in the woods hunting for worms meant, but I also wanted to know where this mysterious, artful tradition came from. In the UK, there are a handful of worm-charming competitions and festivals in Devon, Cornwall, and Willaston that began in the 1980s and another in Canada that started in 2012. I’d heard of similar events in east Texas, of people using pitchforks and spades as well as burying one stick in the ground and rubbing it with another to coax worms up to the surface. Later, I even found a newspaper clipping from 1970 reporting on the first International Worm Fiddling Championship, in Florida. I searched for a deep well of literature on the practice but found nothing. Certainly, worm grunting predated the Revells. But why did rubbing a stick stuck in the ground with a metal file conjure earthworms? The only way to understand was to follow the Revells into the woods.
**I**n February, I carved out toward the Revells’ place from St. Teresa, a strip of homes along the Gulf coast. Going first through Tate’s Hell, then turning west through the tiny town of Sopchoppy, I slipped into the forest as the distance between each home grew wider and wider. I found myself in a sea of slash and longleaf pine. Six miles later, I met Gary Revell in his driveway beneath an eastern redbud throwing its first spray of pink flowers. “Morning, Mike,” he said with a contagious warmth. In their kitchen, I met Audrey, who had already poured a cup of coffee, set out milk and creamers, and had a jar of sugar in hand. A few minutes later, we piled into their truck and drove down a narrow vein of road near Smith Creek. A horned owl drew a line through the trees, where the yellow flowers of Carolina jessamine crawled over palmettos. Black water pooled in ditches alongside the narrow road lined with bald cypress and the periodicsweet bay magnolia. By the time we reached where we were going, I had no sense of how far we’d gone or where we were.
Although the northern borders of the Apalachicola National Forest press right up against the Tallahassee airport, the place is remote. Across nearly six hundred thousand acres, you could spend lifetimes trying to map its dizzyingly vast flatwoods, hydric hammocks, and cypress stands. Two hundred and fifty million years ago when our contemporary continents formed, Florida’s peninsula broke off a fault line belonging to what’s now West Africa; they share the same basement rock today. Fifty-six million years ago, as sea levels receded, the Suwanee Current flowed from the Gulf of Mexico across what’s now Florida’s panhandle, bisecting Georgia before running into the Atlantic. And over the next twenty million years, Florida appeared first as an island separated from North America by a sequence of patch reefs before sea levels continued to fall and a bridge formed with Georgia, revealing this very forest. A few thousand years later, the bones of the southern Appalachians, ground into dust by glacialerosion, washed out of the Apalachicola River Valley and formed barrier islands that rim Apalachee Bay today. That river carried sediment down through Georgia and into the Gulf, which flanks the western edge of the forest. And as you move east, the New River, the Ochlocknee River, and the Sopchoppy River flow through the forest made up of two districts. An archipelago of sinkholes and hardwoods is lacerated by thin roads that mirror oxbows in the rivers. In 1936, when the land was declared a national forest, it became one of America’s southernmost pockets of wilderness and among the world’s most unique ecosystems. As the Revells told me, many are afraid of the place, scared to step foot out of the car. “I’ve walked all over all these woods, so I love them,” Audrey said. “A lot of times when we’ll be going to work in the mornings, we won’t meet a single car. It’s just nice being out here mostly alone. You know?”
That first morning I spent with them, the Revells made their way to a part of the woods called Twin Pole. The forest service had recently burned a block of woods there, which meant the ground would be clear and easier to work. As we got closer, I could smell the sweet fragrance of smoldering slash pines and palmettos. For centuries, pine scrub and prairie throughout the South has burned naturally and been torched deliberately, first by Indigenous peoples like the Timucuan or Apalachee and then later by ranchers and land managers to replenish the soil and promote growth. Worm grunters follow the forest service’s burns like a compass, as the open ground makes it easier to spot worms and avoid venomous snakes.
“Alright, Mama,” Gary said to Audrey before changing into a pair of boots, fastening knee pads, and slipping on gloves. We walked through the burnt palmettos, coated in a film of black soot, before he pointed to a few holes in the soil. They were clues to where worms were and where they were headed. He took his stob, one his son had hewn out of black gum, and knocked it a foot into the earth with his steel file before rubbing the file against the stob’s head. He called each pass a “roop.” With every roop, he mirrored the sound himself, groaning first in a low pitch then ascending to an abrupt stop. Gary would roop, pause, tell a story, then start again. It didn’t take long before a dozen large earthworms began crawling around the earth between us as Audrey gathered them by hand.
“Gary can call up any kind of animal,” Audrey said. Screech owls,ducks, even a bull they once came across in the woods. Once, after he called to a quail, Audrey swears the bird landed on his head. I looked down as Audrey picked up worms and could see this was a corollary. As Gary rooped and talked, Audrey drew concentric circles around him, picking up the largest worms and carefully placing them in a one-gallon paint can. Audrey noted the difference between worms—“milky” that are lighter in color and frail, and dark pink worms that last longer on the shelf. Gary roops most of the time, but Audrey does sometimes, too. “They’re coming up tail first,” Gary said. He gazed down and read the ground: Here were some castings left by worms; some mounds of fresh earth; a transition in the ground that meant prime moisture. The Revells’ intuition was like that of the fishermen they were collecting bait for, a catalog of knowledge assembled from spending time out here and bound together by deep curiosity. Gary knocked his stob down against the serpentine root of a palmetto and demonstrated how to change the pitch. “When I see that,” he said, pointing to some larger holes, “I know he’s right here somewhere close.”
With a couple of paint cans filled, about 500 worms in each, Audrey and Gary headed back to their truck, collecting scraps of trash and some firewood along the way. An hour later, they dumped their catch out in a shed where they store their worms, counting them out by hand and then placing them in five-gallon buckets filled halfway up with sawdust they collect in the forest. Folks that know them come and collect worms from the shed themselves, leaving the money they owe in a box on the wall. Often, they’ll leave notes scrawled on pieces of cardboard, check registers, and even a cast-off piece of packing tape that read, “I got 200. I paid back the ten I owe.”
For two convenience stores in Wakulla County, Audrey and Gary are the source for worms. At home, they pack the bait in clear plastic cups with baby blue caps and deliver them each week. In the decades since the Revells struck out on their own, the market has winnowed with the advent of artificial baits and farmed nightcrawlers, and so have the venues to sell worms. In good years, they earned $30,000, according to a 2009 piece in the*Tampa Bay Times*, but they told me they didn’t want to discuss what they make today. Some years, they harvested oysters for part of the winter and then baited throughout the warmer months. The two found their way through, together, evenwhen bad weather, drought, and competition reshaped the way they worked. They started traveling farther into Liberty County, hiking deep into the flatwoods to avoid previously worked pieces of land. In summer, when the temperature turned mean, they worked Tate’s Hell at night. “This earthworm deal is something that you got to live with and stay on top of to be able to survive it,” Gary said, “and we can say we’ve lived a very good life.” They’d raised their two sons this way, spent their lives living with the forest, watching almost every sunrise out there together. “It ain’t been no easy deal, but there’s really nothing on earth I’d trade for it,” Gary said. Today, one of the Revells’ sons, who is now forty-eight, marks the fifth generation of their family collecting the pink currency from the forest.
In the nineteenth century, Gary’s great-great-grandfather paddled up the Ochlocknee and into a branch that bent into the trees before it dissolved into a shallow stream. Audrey and Gary live in that area today, near a creek named for one side of his mother’s family, the Syfretts. As kids, Gary and his two brothers, Lucious and Donald, came up in the woods, often passing the days with three cousins opposite the creek from them. “We didn’t have a lot of people around, but we had this forest, and that kept us occupied.” Their father, Frank, was an equipment operator for the county during the week, but worked alongside his brothers on the weekends, grunting in the forest at first light. Fifty years ago, he could earn as much as a hundred dollars in two days of baiting, which dwarfed what he made in a week for the county, roughly eight hundred dollars in today’s money. Gary tagged along any chance he got. That’s how he first heard the tale of his great-grandfather’s worm discovery in the 1940s. Living along the Ochlocknee River, his great-grandfather fished often, and developed a sense of what baits worked where and when. While repairing his car one day, he’d left it running, jacked up the chassis, and removed a wheel. As the tire rolled away and his eyes followed it, he saw the ground strewn with pink worms.
As the story goes, his great-grandfather tested the theory elsewhere, leaving the car to idle and seeing worms sprout up on the spot. It was clear the vibrations stirred the worms, making it easier to collect bait and therefore sell it. This is how the mysterious practice became central to the Revells’ lives.
##
The Revells’ intuition was like that of the fishermen they were collecting bait for, a catalog of knowledge assembled from spending time out here and bound together by deep curiosity.
Later, the men noticed worms appearing when they chopped wood or ran saws against saplings. Gary remembered using an axe handle as a stob, rubbing the blade of another axe against it. Some folks in north Florida called it worm fiddling, worm rubbing, worm snoring, worm charming, and, of course, worm grunting. Styles and materials for coaxing worms to the surface varied. Some people preferred hickory stobs and used steel leaf springs from cars as a file. The Revells used different-shaped stobs for different sorts of soil, but they always used black gum, persimmon, or cherry wood, and preferred flat, thick steel files.
What’s strange is that despite the widespread practice of worm grunting, I couldn’t find a definitive origin story. There wasn’t a deep well of folklore to draw from online: not in the University of Florida’s special collections archive, the Florida State University archives, or those of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. I searched my copy of the Federal Writers’ Project’s guide to Florida, organized by Stetson Kennedy and partially written by Zora Neale Hurston, with no luck. I couldn’t find anything that went farther back than the 1970s. But after another pass through the newspapers at the University of Florida, I found a path that stretched back more than a century.
**O**n Friday, July 16, 1946, the*Bradford County*(FL)*Telegraph*ran a front-page item, “Know Anything about ‘Worm Grunting’?” They asked readers to submit letters, offering a five-dollar prize for “the best replies to a series of questions on this fascinating subject.” Among them: how long had the practice existed, who told them about it, where they grunted, what they looked for, what they used, and what time was best to do it. Three months later, the paper published six letters. Dave Crawford from Starke wrote that he’d learned of it in 1933. Some claimed that it had existed at least since 1896, another since 1866, while one reader claimed it had been around in some form since 1786. One man wrote, “When I was a small boy, there was an old colored woman that worked for us. In the afternoon she would take me out and teach me to grunt for worms. She told me her mother taught her to grunt worms.” Those anecdotal accounts raised the question of whether this was a tradition that extended back to the period of chattel slavery in America oreven farther, before Indigenous peoples were forced from the land that settlers would come to call Florida.
The Revells’ tales of grunting echoed those long-ago anecdotes. Readers referenced an axe handle method, or crosscut saws, and an iron and a stake—all before Audrey or Gary were born. The winning letter from Dave Crawford revealed a bit of poetry and intuition that grunters still practice today: “When the wen is from the west the werms come up good and when you see the birds feeding on the ground and the red heads flying from tree to tree you can grunt up better. Just get a old ax or tire iron and a good pine stob about 2 feet long and a old lard bucket and get down by the swamp where it is wet and boy go to rubing and get busy and grunt long and loud and the old boys will come out they hiding place.”
That tradition endures, largely unchanged here in the Apalachicola National Forest. Yet, it’s vanishing like so many other foodways, forms of heritage, and ways to earn a living in this part of the country. Lots of folks preferred this work to other forms of labor, such as driving an Uber in town or food delivery, but commercial fishing, crabbing, and the shrimp industry have shrunk with each passing year due to increasing regulation, depleted fisheries, climate change, and cheaper imported seafood. The same is true for oyster harvesting, once a mainstay of the region’s foodways. After years of oyster decline partly due to overharvesting and negligent water management, in 2020 the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission mandated a five-year halt in harvesting oysters from the Apalachicola Bay. It was part of a $20 million plan to restore the habitat and population. That ban promised to leave local oyster tongers without work until 2025. As for worm grunting and its slow decline, the passage of time is responsible, too. “All the old people is gone,” Gary said. “That was the key to the whole thing. They set it up.”
In 2002, a committee was organized to preserve the tradition and put on the first annual Sopchoppy Worm Gruntin’ Festival. Every second Saturday in April since, Rose Street and Winthrap Avenue fill with vendors, bands, and demonstrations. There’s a ball and an annual queen. Media outlets flock to Wakulla County to cover the festival, often centering the Revells in their pieces. In 2009, they appeared on the Discovery Channel’s*Dirty Jobs*. That same year, Jeff Klinkenberg profiled the Revells for a cover story in what is now the*Tampa Bay Times*. Nobody could say definitively why the worms responded to vibrations, though, until a neuroscientist arrived in Sopchoppy with a theory.
**A**s a kid in Maryland during the 1970s, Kenneth Catania had a curiosity about the woods near his home that shaped his career path as a neuroscientist with a bent toward ecology and biology. His obsession with moles came later during a job at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. And that obsession eventually grew into a dissertation on star-nosed moles, which revealed how their sensory cortex evolved and developed to process information. This, by proxy, revealed how all mammals’ senses evolved. In 2006, he earned a MacArthur Fellowship or “Genius Grant.” The award came with $500,000. Two years later, he headed for the Apalachicola National Forest, thinking that the moles there might help him unravel another mystery about a different group of underground creatures.
For years, he’d wanted to visit the worm festival in north Florida, but annual field work always overlapped. Finally, in 2008, he drove to meet the Revells in Sopchoppy. He arrived with a question shapedby a few sentences written a century earlier by Charles Darwin about worm behavior as it related to moles.
Darwin published his last book in 1881,*The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms With Observations on Their Habits*. A sentence that struck Catania read, “It has often been said that if the ground is beaten or otherwise made to tremble, worms believe that they are pursued by a mole and leave their burrows.” Darwin continued, “Nevertheless, worms do not invariably leave their burrows when the ground is made to tremble, as I know from having beaten it with a spade, but perhaps it was beaten too violently.” Seventy years after Darwin’s shovel experiment failed, Dutch biologist and Nobel Laureate Nikolaas Tinbergen claimed that herring gulls tapped their feet to drum up worms, employing “exploitative mimicry.” By 1982, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins had built off that notion, staking claim to the idea of “rare enemy effect,” by which predators cast themselves in the role of another predator to exploit their prey’s behavior.
Then in 1986, a paper by John H. Kaufmann of the University of Florida drew a connection between wood turtles’ stomping to draw worms to the surface and the work of worm grunters. “Many humans collect earthworms for fish bait by hammering or scraping on a stake driven into the soil…. There is now evidence that wood turtles, Clemmys insculpta, use the same principle in obtaining earthworms for food,” Kaufmann wrote. He also noted an earlier paper from 1960 by Tinbergen that identified a corollary in herring gulls among other birds like flamingos and geese that drummed up prey by “paddling.” Especially fascinating is that Tinbergen hypothesized that the worms mistook the birds’ paddling for the vibrations of a mole. “That’s what drew me down there,” Catania told me. He wondered whether worm grunters were unintentionally mimicking a predator, possibly a mole like Darwin and Tinbergen suggested. “Nobody had formally studied it,” he said.
On that first morning in Florida, Catania’s alarm woke him at five. He got ready and met the Revells, who charmed Catania immediately as he took a seat in the cab of their truck. As they drove into the forest, he thought of this Darwinian theory that shaped his own hypothesis: that earthworms had developed an escape response to vibrations caused by a foraging mole. “What’s beautiful about the system there is the earthworms are native, so they evolved there, and if the moles are there, they evolved there, too,” Catania said. Most importantly, he wanted to find out if the vibrations generated by worm grunting echo that of a digging mole and, if so, how the earthworms respond.
As they rode along, Catania noticed mole tunnels crisscrossing the backroads. He saw more around the stand of trees where Audrey and Gary worked. Catania was spellbound as he watched the couple work. Weeks later, he returned with recording equipment, marking flags, and a garden trowel. He spent hour after hour, day after day in the forest, dropping geophones into tunnel routes, hoping to record the vibrations of moles digging, as well as those produced by Gary’s grunting. For every worm Audrey picked up, he placed an orange flag in the ground, mapping just how many worms appeared, in what directions, and how far from Gary’s stob. Then, he stalked moles underground, using stakes placed along their routes to reveal where they were headed, and used the garden trowel to catch them. Back at the Revells’ place, they took a handful of worms, placed them in a five-gallon bucket, and dressed them in a pile of sawdust. Catania picked up a mole and dropped it into the bucket. The worms fled to the surface. “Okay,” Catania thought, “things are pretty clear.”
He replicated this experiment in larger bins with controlled variables. The result was the same. As soon as the mole entered the soil, the worms fled to the surface. Catania later recorded the sound of an eastern American mole digging and compared it to his recordings of Gary rooping. It was a sonic match. The vibrations were almost identical.
Catania’s work with the Revells confirmed Darwin’s theory set forth more than 125 years earlier. Worm grunters had unknowingly applied “exploitative mimicry” like that employed by herring gulls or wood turtles to lure the worms to the surface. Catania published his paper that same year in*PLoS ONE*, a peer-reviewed journal. The*New York Times*even ran a small story about his findings, as did NBC News and other outlets. Before he returned to Nashville, Catania received a parting gift from Audrey and Gary—a rooping iron that had been in their family for decades. As he drove north that day, he stopped one last time in the woods, drove a stob into the soil, and rooped with a clear sense of what was happening underground.
**O**n my final morning with Audrey and Gary, a seam of blue sky between the pines grew brighter as they drove out into the forest. Slowly, the first signs of light threw deep shades of purple against the clouds before pink, then scarlet bands passed through the trees. “That’s beautiful,” said Audrey.
They parked their truck along the road, collected their gear, and walked into the woods. As we neared a brake of trees, Gary passed me the stob and file, pointing to a patch of earth, and I clumsily drove the stob down. I tried to place my hands on the file the same as Gary, and I slowly slid the steel at an angle. A deep noise followed, and I just smiled, rooping again and again. I varied speed and angles, making some wince-worthy goose noises on bad passes, but I found a rhythm, and soon I’d drawn up a dozen worms. I moved a few times, continuing to work, removing some layers. When I finally got up, Gary asked, “So, Mike, what do you think?” My chest throbbed and sweat ran down my neck. “It’s fucking hard work,” I said.
Back at their place, Audrey made some sweet tea and showed me a couple albums of photographs she’d made of flora and fauna in the forest. She told me of terrestrial orchids “as pretty as one you would buy,” of the pitcher plants in spring, and the white “worm flowers” that signal damp ground. “You never know what you might see,” she said. Finally, she brought out some scrapbooks and clippings of articles from the*New York Times*,*Scientific American*, and the*Tallahassee Democrat*. In 2010, the Revells received Florida’s Folk Heritage Award, an honor recognizing Floridians who preserve living traditions. Governor Charlie Crist presented the award in a ceremony at the state Capitol. As we looked through those reminders of their life in the forest, Audrey and Gary turned serious. “I’m a steward of this forest,” he said. “I don’t do nothing to try to abuse it or change it.” I asked Audrey what the forest meant to her. “Everything,” she said.
That afternoon, as I prepared to leave, I found myself moved in a way I hadn’t been in years, fascinated by their connection to the forest, above ground and below. “As much as we’ve done it, I’ve thought, ‘Man, you’ve got to be crazy,’” Gary said of their work. “But, if you take me away from it, I ain’t worth nothing. I’m one of the last.” I drove away with a sore palm and a cup of worms beside me.
# The big idea: can you inherit memories from your ancestors?
Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, genetics has become one of the key frameworks for how we all think about ourselves. From fretting about our health to debating how schools can accommodate non-neurotypical pupils, we reach for the idea that genes deliver answers to intimate questions about people’s outcomes and identities.
Recent research backs this up, showing that complex traits such as temperament, longevity, resilience to mental ill-health and even ideological leanings are all, to some extent, “hardwired”. Environment matters too for these qualities, of course. Our education and life experiences interact with genetic factors to create a fantastically complex matrix of influence.
But what if the question of genetic inheritance were even more nuanced? What if the old polarised debate about the competing influences of nature and nurture was due a 21st-century upgrade?
Scientists working in the emerging field of epigenetics have discovered the mechanism that allows lived experience and acquired knowledge to be passed on within one generation, by altering the shape of a particular gene. This means that an individual’s life experience doesn’t die with them but endures in genetic form. Theimpact of the starvation your Dutch grandmother suffered during the second world war, for example, or the trauma inflicted on your grandfather when he fledhis home as a refugee, might go on to shape your parents’ brains, their behaviours and eventually yours.
Much of the early epigenetic work was performed in model organisms, including mice. My favourite study is one that left the neuroscience community reeling when it was [published in Nature Neuroscience, in 2014](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24292232/). Carried out by Prof Kerry Ressler at Emory University, Georgia, the study’s findings neatly dissect the way in which a person’s behaviours are affected by ancestral experience.
The study made use of mice’s love of cherries. Typically, when a waft of sweet cherry scent reaches a mouse’s nose, a signal is sent to the nucleus accumbens, causing this pleasure zone to light up and motivate the mouse to scurry around in search of the treat. The scientists exposed a group of mice first to a cherry-like smell and then immediately to a mild electric shock. The mice quickly learned to freeze in anticipation every time they smelled cherries. They had pups, and their pups were left to lead happy lives without electric shocks, though with no access to cherries. The pups grew up and had offspring of their own.
At this point, the scientists took up the experiment again. Could the acquired association of a shock with the sweet smell possibly have been transmitted to the third generation? It had. The grandpups were highly fearful of and more sensitive to the smell of cherries. How had this happened? The team discovered that the DNA in the grandfather mouse’s sperm had changed shape. This in turn changed the way the neuronal circuit was laid down in his pups and their pups, rerouting some nerve cells from the nose away from the pleasure and reward circuits and connecting them to the amygdala, which is involved in fear. The gene for this olfactory receptor had been demethylated (chemically tagged), so that the circuits for detecting it were enhanced. Through a combination of these changes, the traumatic memories cascaded across generations to ensure the pups would acquire the hard-won wisdom that cherries might smell delicious, but were bad news.
The study’s authors wanted to rule out the possibility that learning by imitation might have played a part. So they took some of the mice’s descendants and fostered them out. They also took the sperm from the original traumatised mice, used IVF to conceive more pups and raised them away from their biological parents. The fostered pups and those that had been conceived via IVF *still* had increased sensitivity and different neural circuitry for the perception of that particular scent. Just to clinch things, pups of mice that had not experienced the traumatic linking of cherries with shocks did not show these changes even if they were fostered by parents who had.
The most exciting thing of all occurred when the researchers set out to investigate whether this effect could be reversed so that the mice could heal and other descendants be spared this biological trauma. They took the grandparents and re-exposed them to the smell, this time without any accompanying shocks. After a certain amount of repetition of the pain-free experience, [the mice stopped being afraid of the smell. Anatomically, their neural circuits reverted to their original format](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26420875/). Crucially, the traumatic memory was [no longer passed on](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30292395/) in the behaviour and brain structure of new generations.
Could the same thing hold true for humans? [Studies on Holocaust survivors and their children](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32312110/) carried out in 2020 by Prof Rachel Yehuda at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical School, New York, revealed that the effects of parental trauma can indeed be passed on in this way.Her first study showed that participants carried changes to a gene linked to levels of cortisol, which is involved in the stress response. In 2021, [Yehuda and her team carried out more work](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33173192/) to find expression changes in genes linked to immune-system function. These changes weaken the barrier of white blood cells, which allows the immune system to get improperly involved in the central nervous system. This interference has been linked to depression, anxiety, psychosis and autism. Since then, [Ressler and Yehuda](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33339956/) have collaborated, [with others,](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-05850-028) to reveal epigenetic tags in PTSD afflicted war zone-exposed combatants. They are hoping this information could aid PTSD diagnosis or even pre-emptively screen for individuals who might be more prone to developing the condition before they enter the battlefield.
In all times and across all cultures, people have paid their dues to their ancestors and pondered the legacy they will leave for their descendants. Few of us believe any more that biology is necessarily destiny or that our bloodline determines who we are. And yet, the more we learn about how our body and mind work together to shape our experience, the more we can see that our life story is woven into our biology. It’s not just our body that keeps the score but our very genes.
Might this new understanding increase our capacity for self-awareness and empathy? If we can grasp the potential impact of our ancestors’ experiences on our own behaviour, might we be more understanding of others, who are also carrying the inherited weight of experience?
We are, as far as we know, the only animals capable of “cathedral thinking”, working on projects over manygenerations for the benefit of those who come after. It’s an idealistic way to think about legacy, but without it we will struggle to tackle complex multigenerational challenges such as the climate and ecological emergencies. Our knowledge of epigenetics and its potential to massively speed up evolutionary adaptation could support us todo everything we can to be the ancestors our descendants need. Conflict, neglect and trauma induce unpredictable and far-reaching changes. But so do trust,curiosity and compassion. Doing the right thing todaycould indeed cascade across generations.
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Dr Hannah Critchlow is a neuroscientist and author of [The Science of Fate](https://guardianbookshop.com/the-science-of-fate-9781473659315) and [Joined-Up Thinking](https://guardianbookshop.com/joined-up-thinking-9781529398397) (Hodder).
## **Further reading**
[The Epigenetics Revolution](https://www.guardianbookshop.com/the-epigenetics-revolution-9781848313477?utm_source=editoriallink&utm_medium=merch&utm_campaign=article): How Modern Biology is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance by Nessa Carey (Icon, £11.99)
[Genome](https://www.guardianbookshop.com/genome-9781857028355?utm_source=editoriallink&utm_medium=merch&utm_campaign=article): The Autobiography of Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley (4th Estate, £10.99)
[Blueprint](https://www.guardianbookshop.com/blueprint-9781472137890?utm_source=editoriallink&utm_medium=merch&utm_campaign=article): How Our Childhood MadeMakes Us Who We Ar*e* by Lucy Maddox (Robinson, £10.99)
# Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe
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Kris Hansen had worked as a chemist at the 3M Corporation for about a year when her boss, an affable senior scientist named Jim Johnson, gave her a strange assignment. 3M had invented Scotch Tape and Post-it notes; it sold everything from sandpaper to kitchen sponges. But on this day, in 1997, Johnson wanted Hansen to test human blood for chemical contamination.
> What newspaper columnists gave the city is painfully missing today.
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The death of the city columnist has gone unreported even by the handful of us still writing imitations of the thing, including me over the past decade [at the Daily News](https://www.nydailynews.com/author/harry-siegel/).
@ -65,7 +64,7 @@ All that’s just the 1970s, after he capped his fully formed emergence in the 6
Breslin belonged to the world of newspapers. The term “columnist” was born from and will die with the printed page and the daily paper.
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I don’t mean to poke at myself or my peers by saying that no one writing for a living in New York City has anything like his rhythm or presence now. There used to be someone like him in every city, a person who made his own name — and it was mostly him — by giving voice to the place’s characters and making some sense of its plot. No more.
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