The country's third repatriation was carried out with the help of the US, the UN and the Red Cross.

Law passed in May has been condemned and described by UN experts as 'an egregious violation of human rights'.

The art of flash fiction thrives on desire: Readers are given a brief tale that leaves them wanting more. This feeling is also a vital component in the act of writing, illuminating the search for new ways of depicting the world. Our shorter stories this year are based on the theme of desire; some authors have decided it worthy of interrogation in and of itself, while others use it as a path to altogether distinct ideas. What results is a thrilling array of voices, with stories ranging from ancient eroticism to modern longing. In the beginning there was desire, and then there was … that’s for you to find out.

Photographs by Molly MatalonIn GizaBy Sterling HolyWhiteMountain

It is Giza in the middle of the night and I’m wrecked by jet lag thinking about you and in the alley below the flat there is a chained-up dog barking. Bad pop music is blasting out by the pyramids and a gaudy light show plays over the Sphinx’s face and I am certain that when the world ends only the lights of Vegas will remain shining. Since I was a boy I’ve wanted to see the pyramids and there is a voice in me that says I’ve been waiting just as long to catch sight of you but if you did not know love is dead, which is to say so much for all these feelings! Everything is about sex except sex, which is about blah blah blah. I crossed a continent and an ocean and most of another continent and yet here in this desert city I feel like I’m home. Let me explain. There are boys and girls riding horses in the dirt streets and everyone is some shade of brown and the infrastructure here is barely holding together and this home of original empire has been breached and left to its own devices by so many invaders that it is clear Egypt is the original reservation of the world—and somehow in all this I am hopeful. Me and a friend are tracing the beauty that runs from this place of ancient sun to the Athenian peninsula with its Platonic aura still remaining and on to Rome, where the meeting of architecture and emperor was perfected, and still on from there until we find ourselves back in America. What my first glimpse of the Great Pyramid showed me was not a miracle structure of impossible stones but a dream shimmering some 4,500 years over the light-struck dunes. But … let’s get down to it, shall we? Let’s say for argument’s sake there is much good art and some great art and a thousand Great Pyramids’ worth of bad art, but the only art I give a fuck about is your ass. Am I being clear? Is this transmission doing its thing across time and space? Baby, am I … the best you ever had? A request: Don’t answer that. Another: Let’s do this like we’ve never done it, which is something I didn’t do even when I’d never done it. Innocence is a brave thing and almost no one in the age of Instagram has the courage for it. But also let’s do it like we have? Sweetheart, I’m supposed to write about longing, but here I am, writing about something else. Take note: That first kiss, like, my angle of approach, was off, and and and I am telling you! Since our first night together, I have been studying very diligently at the Royal Academy of Smooching. From here on it’s nothing but movie kisses worthy of deleted Indiana Jones scenes. Royal this, royal that. The fans turn slow overhead in the dim rooms of empire’s afterlife, and the shades of British accountants work through the heat and the day’s ledgers and their latest letter to Martha. If I correctly understand this book I mail-ordered from the back of a magazine in 1985, upon returning I am certain to be a master lover and the historians tracing the arc of my adoration for you will … maybe take note! Hieroglyphs are the GOAT of writing systems. Like, just look at that shit. It’s fucking sick. But also … maybe not so efficient. Even more than young men ready to die brilliantly and a willingness to enslave all and sundry to commit a pharaoh to eternity, an empire needs a good writing system. As indicated by an intensive Google search—I almost went to the second page—before it was the Great Pyramid of Giza in Arabic, it was the Pyramid of Cheops in Greek, and before that it was the Pyramid of Khufu in Egyptian, but we both know before that, it was called Pharaoh’s Love Shack in the first language there ever was. You could take your best girl there and get a strawberry shake and a side of mutton and later she might wear your gold-leaf letterman jacket, but only if you were the right kind of pharaoh’s son, which, you know, I am not. In the end it’s always your younger brother with the great traps and the hyenic smile who gets the girl, and you, you ugly brute, you get sent out to carve more arcane but strangely practical symbols into the timeless rock. Thoth, now there’s a true bro for a writer. A deity for language? For art and judgment? America, you absolute plebe, take note. Meanwhile, my friend the dog, who I am certain bears the dark and pointed visage of Anubis, is still barking down below, and with each hopeless yawp he gains my admiration. (In fact he reminds me of myself when I was that age.) Hear me out for real though: Only the losers are worth a writer’s time, and there are way too many winners in the world of American letters now. But—I have two questions for you. First off, did you know the pyramids were once covered in limestone, their walls pale and smooth and rising impossibly bright to the heavens? And two, do you have any idea what you’ve done to me? Jesus Christ on a velvet cross! As a true connoisseur of the high art of gaming, I can only say one thing: Baby, you’ve got me stun-locked. Speaking of spiritual masters, our tour guide is the truth and the light and the way in this city, with its many layers of time, you feel like you might be drowning. I see in him the hard-achieved irony won by way of pain, frustration, and the bewilderment of a high intelligence waiting for the world to, like, catch the fuck up. He leads us through his homeland with the sly smile and wink of a lesser god who is lesser only because he chose it. I said I was an American Indian and he put his hand on his head to indicate a feather and we both laughed. I have not thought about the Egyptian afterlife since I was but a young reservation boy in the Wild, Wild West but now here I am, thinking about feathers and hearts. This fine eve I would cut out my heart and place it upon the scales of judgment for a chance to strip you down and do things to you that would bring the UN to my doorstep. Whatever. I will go down like a true Hollywood gunslinger—shooting blanks—only to be resurrected once more by that pharaonic ass. I know, I know! I just wanted to say that word. Here’s another one: callipygian. That's Greek for “a great ass.” Say it in your best Pacino. We’ve got such a gumbo going here, this piece is surely a violation of the Great Literary Treaty of 20__. You remember the one, we traded irony for safety. Anyway. How about this: Is anyone as over the discourse as me, because I am terribly, murderously over it. Behind us only slaughter, ahead only more, and all these people—I need a term that fuses philistine and dilettante, somebody help me out here—can talk about is being offended. Well, this stupidity is harming me, and still there is still no legitimate talk about Indian Country and it’s pretty goddamn clear there never will be. But don’t worry, me and my peeps are used to it. We just throw up a jeep wave and crank up the volume. What I want to discuss, though, is how life lately looks like the barrel of a gun set to my temple. Maybe it’s in my mouth? You know, for variety’s sake. My love—can I say this, is it too soon, I don’t understand the rules, my sense of timing is appalling—maybe be my oasis and I’ll be yours? May we drink deeply from each other ’til the sun falls finally on our day. I kiss your neck a few times and feed you the gelato flavor of your own choosing and maybe … we eat some hot dogs? I don’t know. The guy driving me and my friend all over kingdom come has the most beautiful eyes I’ve seen. Second only to yours, of course! They are green and unguarded and he cannot speak a lick of this language of empire that is my only option and he has the genuine heart of someone from where I am from. He could be a cousin of mine. Did I tell you I once was a tour guide? I, too, took foreigners—some people call them Americans—through my many-thousand-year homeland and talked about the before times and if they liked me enough I got tipped! It was really something! An ex once told me she was tired of the Indian thing and, if you can believe it, that was the moment she became an ex! You said I could not compare you in any way to fruit but … I kind of like fruit. What if I said you were like a mango that was actually like a supernova I happened upon while perusing the night sky with the telescope of my bitter heart and there you were, a phenomenon of such scope and size one finds oneself tempted to use a parallel but nonetheless commensurate description such as: There you were, the smoking-hot gunner bitch on the back of the apocalyptic jeep at the edge of the world. (There’s a dog at her side. It’s me.) She wears designer sunglasses and always has a toothpick in her mouth, but she has a heart of—well, probably some kind of fruit. Being in the midst of one of the great, dry expanses of the world has me in a mood. I am thinking of a J.Lo track that, on occasion, comes up in my list of liked songs. When others hear it, they likely want to shake their asses to the sick beats, or discuss how dated the sound is, but when I hear it, my gaze, driven by the note of elegy threading through the song, drifts dramatically out to the horizon. There are pyramids out there, I am certain of it. They stand silent and implacable and contain still the fury and horror and religiosity of original vision, and all beauty begins with them and comes to us across time from them—I kid you not. At the end of the long hall of the mind they shimmer massively. I will put my hands on you. We will do the oldest thing.

The BoysBy Tess Gunty

The boys were born with their fists clenched. Motherless almost as soon as they arrived, flexible cartilage ossified in fields of hot dust. As babies, they dozed in acres of corn, drooled between sweet rows of genetically modified symmetry, and cried for milk, but most of the mothers were sick or buried or ash by then, so the boys sucked rubber from their fathers’ fists instead. No one understood the disease and there wasn’t enough money to care. Fathers rocked cottoned fat calm, kissed putty heads, loved for two.

The boys learned to hop and climb, operate scissors, fear strangers, count to 10. Fathers recorded first words and ticked door-frame heights in graphite. At the schoolhouse, the boys kicked each other’s shins and learned how it felt to hurt and be hurt. As teenagers, their bodies stormed alone. Sometimes they undressed each other. It made some feel found, some less lonely, others lonelier still. A sighting of a live girl or woman was rare—most had died off by then—but when one did occur, the boys stared without blinking, no matter her age or appearance. The boys collected pictures of female bodies to study them. They wondered if female heartbeats sounded different from their own. Older boys told stories: Girls can grow strawberries just by looking at dirt. Girls have scales when they’re born and can jump over 10 feet high. It was a girl who started the Water Tower Fire last year. Girls have tails.

At the high school, the boys studied agriculture, medicine, law enforcement.

By the time they began to work, most of the boys had developed asthma. Their cartilage calcified and their prefrontal cortexes matured. Bad habits became personalities, and tiny pieces of freedom crumbled away each year. After sweating for hours in the fields, they gulped buckets of hose water and pressed ice to their wrists. They collected food tickets, small paychecks, and nonperishables. Prepared themselves for a drought or a flood or a war.

The Department of Agriculture sent the boys gifts of cured meat at Harvest.

The land was starving the livestock and the livestock were starving the land—animal meat, milk, and skin waned sparse, imported, expensive. Soon it became too hot to grip metal tools without gloves, so hot each boy could only work in shifts of 30 minutes. Smoke stampeded the town from the west; gifts of cactus meat and dried cowpeas began appearing on doorsteps at Harvest instead of jerky.

Two nurses painted the death ward sky blue. Nine females left. Family visitors only. Eight, five, three. Eventually, none.

In their isolated plot of America, the boys launched spades into dirt, operated gleaming machines, sprayed chemicals to keep the crops alive, and beheaded cobs from their stalks. They stood quietly, obedient and theistic. Mr. Wolff promised them imported women. Each hoped to find the fabled girl, the one they heard stories about, hiding in a corncrib on the outskirts. Some invented tales about her for the younger boys. She eats raw birds. She eats nothing at all. She can go three weeks without water. You can’t imagine. And this last was their refrain: You can’t imagine.

The younger ones countered, rolled their eyes, helplessly believed.

The boys punished the earth for its infertility and infidelity—for turning girls into dust. For killing their mothers. Despite the supercrops, which were resistant to heat and drought, malnutrition flared. Kernels were dried, ground, fried, grilled, baked, popped, boiled, consecrated, and hated. Motherless boys became men.

Some of the men considered abandoning the familiar, hot dust for someplace else, perhaps a place with women and water and sand, but travel required a vehicle and a passport and border fees and provisions, all of which required money they had never come close to possessing, and the essential things—wallets, ribs—had thinned. They were men of tanned necks, high-school diplomas, and meager savings. Some questioned the existence of other communities—they’d only seen images, all taken before the Water Tower Fire, the droughts, the floods. Perhaps this desiccated life was a kind of miracle. They loved each other, worked hard and laughed into dawn, always waiting for something essential to change. Lying on a hard bed of cornmeal, each man cried for milk until his fists unclenched.

GroceriesBy Sarah Wang

Oat milk. Eggs. Blueberries. Tortillas. Sour cream. Pilsner. What was he forgetting? JW switched the shopping basket from one hand to the other. His left wrist was still messed up. It had been six weeks. Too stoned at the gym. He blamed it on his new cannabis company.

The chip display was admirable, with boxes stacked elaborately into a proscenium arch. There were so many flavors now: special limited edition, mash-ups. He reached for the last bag of habanero dill ranch pizza. A tang alighted his tongue as the chips communicated to him through the propylene. Man, was he stoned.

“Excuse me!”

A shrill voice cut through the air.

“Hey!” a woman said. She was heading straight for him.

He looked around. Who was this lady talking to? Her cycling jersey and stretch shorts scared him.

“Do you know how to drive?”

She reached out to knock the chips from his hand. Instinctively, he lifted his arm. B-ball reflex. She jumped up and swatted at the bag, slamming him with the side of her body. The hard soles of her shoes clopped as she stumbled.

“You cut me off!” she shouted. “Asshole!”

JW stepped back. His hand was still in the air, not on account of any conscious intention but merely because his amygdala had taken over. The woman swiped the bangs out of her flushed face and lunged. He spun, dodging her flailing arm.

“You’ve got the wrong person,” JW said. “It’s not me.”

By this time, a few people had gathered around the two.

“What’s going on here?” a man asked.

“This murderer turned into the bike lane.” She crossed her arms over her heaving chest. “He’s endangering lives. He tried to RUN ME OVER!”

The people looked at the two of them, the angry woman and JW. He finally managed to lower his hand to his side, but the chip bag had popped in his grip. This was all happening so fast. The crowd multiplied. Now there were seven.

“I’m shopping,” JW said. He held up the basket as proof.

“After committing attempted vehicular manslaughter!” The woman began sobbing.

His mind was swaddled in a fog of THC. He wanted to run, but that would only make him look guilty. If he ran, people would give chase. It was animalistic.

“Wait, are you—” an older man looked at JW.

“You were on Dancing With the Stars!” a woman shouted.

The crowd stared at JW as if the cyclist were not there. He felt light-headed. This was not what he wanted for his Wednesday morning after therapy.

Sobbing turned into wailing as the woman tried to regain the crowd’s attention. She crumpled over, holding her face in her hands. The launched cries bounced off JW’s body, a horrible echolocation.

How could he have done whatever in the bike lane? Whatever she was saying. He’d been here for 20 minutes already. Aside from being stoned, he was a slow shopper. He liked to take his time. See what was new. What was on sale.

A teenager pointed her phone in the woman’s direction. A guy wearing a Zankou Chicken T-shirt pulled his phone out too and began filming. JW was thankful that they seemed to be exclusively filming the cyclist and not him. Couldn’t risk the investors pulling out. He stepped to the left in case he was in the frame, still holding the deflated bag and his basket of groceries. His wrist hurt. He must have twisted it just now. In the melee.

“Don’t film me. I’m not a criminal. I’m a victim,” she gasped. “Film HIM!”

“Lady, this man said he is not the person you’re looking for,” Zankou guy said.

A newcomer sidled up to the teenager. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“This lady is freaking out.” The teen shrugged.

“Oh, one of those,” the newcomer said.

“You don’t care about the environment. I do! I care!” the cyclist yelled, pointing at JW.

The newcomer looked at JW and did not look away. The woman who had recognized him from Dancing With the Stars was whispering to the older man. Then all three stared at JW. People didn’t recognize him as much anymore. Mostly just people in his community. Middle-aged women, sometimes. JW was middle-aged himself now. Too old to go viral. Not for this.

JW shook his head, as if to express sympathy for the cyclist. His media training kicked in. Keep the audience’s allegiance. He didn’t need to deflect. The cyclist was the only one in the camera’s frame. All he had to do was let it ride.

“Stop it!” the cyclist screamed. “Stop filming meeeee.”

She grabbed a bag of chips from the display and threw it at the teen.

More people showed up with grocery carts. A woman and her three children. A guy in a suit. Two store employees. A couple. A dude cradling low-fat milk and a box of French-toast cereal who also looked stoned. Some watched the cyclist as she ducked around the back of the chip display. Some watched JW, but he couldn’t tell if it was because they recognized him or because he was the accused.

“Help!” the woman screamed. “Help me!”

The cannabis line that JW had spent a decade trying to secure investors for had just launched last week. His garage was full of merch: T-shirts, Ping-Pong paddles, rolling papers, vapes, even waffle irons. His teenage face was on all of it.

“You don’t call the police. I call the police!”

Middle-aged yet suspended in adolescence. JW had decided, fuck it. Use his decades-old character for branding. Give them what they wanted. It was the only way to get funding. The ’90s were back: the rare guest-starring roles his agent booked, the series canceled after one season, his ex going to the press. He’d had to pay for lawyers and good PR because of her. Thankfully, only internet tabloids picked up the story, framing it as “jealous ex trying to get more alimony.” Charges dropped.

The cannabis line was the most media attention he had gotten in decades. Nothing could jeopardize it. What would he have left? JW inched close to an onlooker, positioning himself behind her.

“HEEEELLPP!”

The crowd encircled the cyclist. Half a dozen phones were out. She yanked bags off the display and threw them on the floor. Chip bags surrounded her clopping shoes. She stomped. Pop. Pop. Pop. Kicked broken chips across the polished linoleum.

“Your mother gave birth to rats. You’re all on welfare!”

He kept taking slow steps backwards, away from the crowd. Internet evidence of him at the scene would only bring ruin. His ex’s allegations would resurface; the bills from his PR team would pile up again.

In times like this, regret washed over JW. If he’d only pursued basketball instead of acting. He’d had the chance. In high school, the bleachers would rumble, the gymnasium resounding with people calling his TV character’s wildly popular name to cheer him on. Kids stomping, jumping. Cheerleaders flying through the air in his honor.

He could have had a career. NBA. Nike. Gatorade. American Express.

“Go back to where you came from. All of you!”

The woman who’d recognized him from Dancing With the Stars pivoted toward JW, aimed her phone at him. He lowered his head. His stomach dropped.

The manager was here now. The police were on their way.

His wrist throbbed. All he wanted was to go home and pour himself a pilsner. Work on the list his therapist had suggested making. Post the video of his daughter making a branded waffle. Try these chips.

Phoebe Moffat—The Early YearsBy Diane Williams

“Can I,” she asked, “sit here and lean up against you?”

He said yes at first, but then he said, “It’s too warm,” because he had reversed what was once one of his more conspicuous characteristics—his interest in her.

And to make a point about such conduct—Leonardo da Vinci once referenced shoemakers, of all things! He remarked that many men can take pleasure in seeing their own works worn out and destroyed.

And hadn’t Andre Bach formed and reformed this woman, so that she could be more to his liking? And she had once been confident she would get to spend as much time in his little house and on the grounds as she wished.

She had especially loved the open wood that was nearby, with its overhanging trees and masses of ferns, and she had adored hurrying across his green lawn. Then she was too free. Perhaps nobody is supposed to be.

“I must go now,” Andre said—“I am afraid.”

Andre ought to say something more to the woman than, “Aren’t you tired? I am.” But no matter—because Andre Bach had changed.

Early WritingBy Eileen Myles

The thing about being written about that’s a problem is that nobody wants YOU to have the whole thing, to say it. I don’t want to be in your reality. I want to be in my girlfriend’s and I want her to be in mine and I think about a space that is this sweet overlap but for instance I don’t want to hear how she talks about our relationship to her friends. Every time I say something about her to my friend on the phone I think why is it so easy here to describe what she does but facing her my version melts. Writing, however, is the place where we are able to put them inside of our story and so they are like little tiny people in the palm of your hand. I loved when they  were both writers and we could be in this big story together. And nobody wrote it. The inside was jagged, happy we all could allude to it in our poems. And one time he told us his fantasies and they were disgusting. And hers were just like her poems and were filled with compensations for the sparse pleasures of her childhood and now there was an abundance of people as opposed to the grim few in Brooklyn. I enjoyed being a poet but even then I wanted a house like the one I have now. I was adamant that I needed to get famous then when I was young. I mean it’s interesting because if that person had gotten what they wanted I can’t even imagine how that would look. It’s easy to say I’d be dead and it might be true. When I think of Kurt’s 27-year-old body sprawled on the floor it just gets weirder and weirder. When I think of Will bleeding out in the bathtub. When I think of Heather leaning forward to her bed, strangling herself. Christina doing the same. Emma with a scarf in Italy. Tootsie, some lonesome place turned blue. I wouldn’t have died like them because I kept retracting my wishes. Though I may’ve bumbled into it. So the house I would have bought keeps disappearing with my dead body in it. My dog walks toward the door and sees that it’s a screen and shuffles back. I’ve trained her to be like that. I joke with friends that you break their spirit. I’m thinking about the impossibility of telling my young story while I was young. If I wrote anything larger than a poem or did a play again and again if it was good or read the poem that brought the house down a second night instead of needing to be different all the time no I just thought reaching for success seemed fraudulent. I thought a calculated arrival would never work because my hand would vanish as I was reaching, vanishing back into the mists of my shifting dream. I remember I wanted to be a rake, a large man in a leather jacket irresistible in his insouciance, French. I couldn’t tell my lovers who I was at 31 but in my dream he grew large. I would write a novel, a soft green story in which everyone I knew had slightly altered names and I would declare at least there who I wanted to be and I sat down daily in my apartment at my desk and I deployed the result. Not being satisfied with my house I built another one and I could even build another one inside of that. This is that. By the time I was writing my novel about our relationship it was already losing its elasticity and there was a need for other projects. I was bringing in the bread. In my head. Often the paper I wrote on was used and had some other typing on the other side. My friends were all poets making poetry magazines out of rough, thick paper that received the chemicals and the pounding of the keys to produce magazines and there were often too many copies of page 63 (I wrote on them) and I think I even had extra pages from my own little book and I would write my novel on the other side so that it indeed really felt like a draft. That paper was too thick to go someplace else. It wanted to be here. I had a way to be away from them now and not even me but a person in the future writing like this in a small apartment I made bigger by the effort of returning every day and it was like building another room or a tunnel to the world. Last winter she showed me several passages from her novel in which I appear from when she was obsessed with me. I have become in some ways the person I long ago planned to be but I am not that person. It just works that way having badly and then repeatedly and then successfully done that and now here they (I) walk out into the world to be pursued by her and rejecting her and eventually being depicted in print. I read it. First of all she didn’t use page numbers, my total pet peeve. Because I want everything to be over all the time. I’m waiting. What is that relationship to pleasure. Is there any. I am releasing and I am counting. All the time. I have a phone date in 11 minutes. It’s Sunday. I write in little bursts. So I appear in my friend’s novel as I bluntly wrote myself as I appear in the world and am not and therefore am hiding (happily) in the house inside the house inside the house. But that’s not it. That would be too cute. Her writing is very good and I even think she’s learned from me but not too much. It’s all her. That’s the thing that’s weird about the people who have taught you something and you dwelled for a while in that teaching and that love and they declare “I taught you nothing” but they tipped your hand and expanded your map if this doesn’t sound like fundraising prose the horse was gifted with a number of jumps but it’s still the horse and at first you stop at the jump and say no I don’t do that. And then you do and it’s odd but occasionally brilliant. And occasionally it sticks. Your love for a teacher enhances your game. They were not my teachers. They were my lovers. I would go to my home and I was in practice for my life. I had a collarless shirt. I wrote 58 pages. I showed it to him. She would not look. Firstly he was mad and ashamed that I depicted myself as an arrogant and lazy preening man. Putting him and his wife and his children inside my world was the worst hauteur. What about me? he cried. They were now in my little crystal ball and I was making those mesmerizing waving hands and the power of my childhood indeed the magic I saw had always been coming that way. I was Nature Boy. He would not look inside my ball and see the tiny family and his dream, which was merely patriarchal (“You’re predictable!”), was even worse. There-was-only-one-man-in-the-family-and-it-was-him. But I was cute and six feet tall and lazy. I wore a leather jacket. I had bangs. I was a mooch. They were utterly charmed by me and that was my hustle. No no he screamed. He sneered that the writing was bad. So terrible. It’s a miracle. I realize that deep in my archive is a folder that contains this very bad novel. If I have a bad day here—most days increasingly magic and trippy and not real—I am growing my life! I am growing another. I want my writing to be transporting. I want to take you away. But on bad days I am writing exactly like that large lazy seductive man until he had to do a thing and my poorly named characters (ho-ho) were a beloved jumble by confused this hung-over and amphetamine driven I was hungry, I was young I didn’t even know how to sit down I watch a cat walking stealthily across my yard and they know a dog is living here who is sleeping right near me in the tiny writing house the bad writing is the sleeping dog that just doesn’t know and what’s swift and good is the smart tippy-toeing cat that manages to make their way across the yard without a ruckus and here all here now here here in my crystal ball even the kindness I feel now toward the one who sits down writing badly, full of all their louche and sexy desires, frankly offensive, banging paper to make him a house that got them here. I hope it will be magic.

Ella StaywokeBy Kiese Laymon

Ella Staywoke’s real name was Ella Steward but we called her Ella Staywoke because she stayed saying woke things when DeVante and I least expected it.

Like, out of the blue, Ella told me she needed me and DeVante to drive her up north so she could go to the doctor. I asked her why and what procedure she had to get up north and she said, “Y’all mean.”

DeVante was probably the most gifted 14-year-old in the history of Jackson, Mississippi, next to Ella Staywoke. I was gifted as hell at 14, but slightly novice at being gifted at 16.

DeVante’s greatest invention, if you let DeVante tell it, was calling people “ol’ blank-blank-blank-ass nigga” without blinking.

Like, if you ate an apple too fast, DeVante would call you an “ol’ eating-apples-like-they-plums-raisins-grapes-ass nigga,” or if you failed a test, he’d call you an “ol’ TikToking-when-you-shoulda-been-stik-studying-ass nigga.”

If one of us called DeVante a name he didn’t like, DeVante could slap the taste out of your mouth better than any ninth grader, except for Ella Staywoke.

Slapping the tastes out of folks’ mouths, describing smells perfectly, staying woke and weird, memorizing everyone’s pass codes to their phones through her peripheral vision, and plotting revenge were just five parts of what made Ella Staywoke the most gifted new teenager in Jackson.

That was, until last week.

Last week, DeVante got jumped by two old 16-year-old MAGA-hat-wearing jokers from Pearl.

It all started when DeVante went out of his way to embarrass this snake-lipped kid who was also named DeVante. We called him Mean-White-Ass DeVante, or Mean-Ass DeVante for short. Mean-Ass DeVante called Our DeVante “a bowlegged transgender activist” in the parking lot of church. It hurt for a lot of reasons, mostly because DeVante actually was a 14-year-old bowlegged transgender activist, but also because no one had ever dissed someone by calling them any kind of activist before where we stayed. DeVante was pissed, but he appreciated how fresh Mean-Ass DeVante was with his disses for a white boy from Pearl.

When everyone looked his way, DeVante said out loud that he never knew that a white boy could smell like nut sack, urine, dookie, and rotten rutabagas through his MAGA drawers. I didn’t even know they made MAGA drawers. Then, as loud as he could, in front of the whole church parking lot and the one white person who went to church, DeVante called Mean-Ass DeVante an “ol’ mean catching-yo-dookie-in-a-MAGA-hat-then-wiping-yo-MAGA-ass-with-the-same-MAGA-hat-when-you-need-to-be-scrubbing-yo-stank-MAGA-ass-ass nigga.”

It wasn’t the most dynamic diss DeVante has ever slung, even though “ass” was used three times, but it did its job.

Even Mean-Ass DeVante’s own cousin started laughing. And when the Mean-Ass DeVante got in DeVante’s face, DeVante apparently slapped Mean-Ass DeVante across his mouth twice with both hands.

That’s four slaps right in the middle of the church parking lot.

Then he ran to tell Ella Staywoke and me what he did. The sad thing is that when he ran up on Ella Staywoke and me, I had on that new Axe and I was just starting to finally spit my game I’d been practicing for months. “You loud,” Ella Staywoke kept saying. “You real loud.”

Ella Staywoke said she wanted me to stop spitting game. But she only said it once, and she squeezed my hand when she said it. So.

I did not stop.

Anyway, when DeVante found Ella Staywoke and me in the woods, he told us what happened. Ella Staywoke did this strange thing where she grabbed his hand, thanked him, and then started crying. DeVante grabbed her other hand and he started crying. I wanted to cry too, but I didn’t know what we were supposed to be crying about.

That’s when DeVante told us that his mama and grandmama were most definitely going to beat his ass for saying the word “nigga” in front of white people, even if those white people were MAGA white people.

Ella Staywoke and I told DeVante we had to leave him in the woods because Uncle Robert said we could play this old Nintendo game called Duck Hunt in his old callus-smelling room at four that afternoon. Uncle Robert was in the top 30 singers in Jackson who still used Auto-Tune.

Uncle Robert never allowed DeVante in his room, because he said DeVante was “too girlish and too confused sexually” to be around his expensive clothes.

We hated Uncle Robert for that.

Before we left, DeVante hugged me for the first time in our lives. “Don’t ever be mean to folk who would never be mean to you,” he whispered in my ear. “It’s okay to be scared of hurting niggas.”

Then he hugged Ella Staywoke and whispered something in her ear too.

Ella Staywoke and me waited for an hour in Uncle Robert’s room, but Uncle Robert never showed. While Ella Staywoke was playing Call of Duty, I was going through Uncle Robert’s diary. He kept the turquoise diary at the bottom of a box of shotgun shells. The diary was covered in duct tape, and it had a lock on it. I’d asked Ella Staywoke if we should read his diary.

Ella Staywoke had helped me take the duct tape off the diary and let me use her pocketknife to break the lock.

“What you gone say if Robert finds out you broke in?” Ella Staywoke asked me.

“I’m gone lie,” I told her. “Shid. Listen to this sentence. Uncle Robert think he so smooth.”

“When she talked with me about sad memories, I would ask her why she rested her head in sad places. We could get rid of sad memories. She said I was becoming a sad memory …”

After I finished reading the entry, Ella Staywoke’s eyes started leaking but the rest of her face didn’t make a sound. I told her again that kissing me might feel better than she thought. Ella Staywoke fake-laughed and started biting the nail bed of her left thumb. When she got a nail sliver off, she used it to clean the dirt out of the nails on her right hand.

“Your uncle,” she said, “him and his friend, they was real mean to me and DeVante two months ago.”

“Mean how?”

“They just, you know, wrapped themselves up in some mean,” she said. “All of us. Now we gotta unwrap it.”

“Huh?”

“They made me and DeVante be mean to each other. That’s all.”

I asked Ella Staywoke if “wrapped themselves up in mean” was a new phrase she and DeVante had made up without telling me.

“Naw,” she said. “It ain’t new. I don’t really want to be in this room no more. Can we leave?”

“How come?”

“It’s too familiar.”

“Too what?”

Later that evening, Mean-Ass DeVante, the white boy who got slapped four times in the church parking lot, and another one of his friends dragged DeVante back into the woods. Our DeVante slapped, punched, kicked, and bit the best he could, but they ended up beating DeVante down with T-ball bats. They didn’t ever hit him directly in the head, but they crushed his larynx. DeVante’s body stayed spread out in those woods all night before we found him. We only found him because one of the boys put a video of the beating up on Instagram Live.

I told Ella Staywoke about my plan to kill Mean-Ass DeVante and his friends for what they’d done to DeVante. Ella Staywoke described the smell of sap oozing from a tree as “golden frozen time” and then said she wasn’t interested in killing anyone this year.

“They did what all y’all do sooner or later,” she said.

“Who is ‘y’all’?” I asked her.

“Y’all mean,” she said. And Ella Staywoke starting biting on the fingernail of her right thumb for what felt like two whole minutes.

I tried to hold her hand.

Ella Staywoke jerked back.

I tried again. Ella Staywoke slapped the taste out of my mouth. “Ask, nigga.”

“Ask?”

“Stop being so fucking mean,” she said. “And ask. Please. I don’t want y’all to touch me the way y’all want to touch me. It’s too familiar. I just want to go home.”

“Okay,” I told her. “Pick you up at seven tomorrow for the trip up north. You got the directions?”

“Yeah,” Ella Staywoke said. “I got the directions.”

“Wonder what the doctor’s office gone smell like up north?” Ella ignored my question and started walking home.

“Bleach,” I heard her say down the road a little. “Probably bleach.”

That night, the night of Our DeVante’s funeral, I walked home knowing I’d lost DeVante, Ella Staywoke, and myself to a mean we were all too young to name. And even though none of us were even 17 yet, that same mean—whose hard belly we giggled, wondered, and wiggled in—felt so familiar, so blank-blank-blank-ass-Mississippi.

Chinese president visited far western region where the UN has accused China of possible 'crimes against humanity'.

Japan and the UN nuclear watchdog insist the plan is safe while China and others disagree.

The first time I saw Siamak Namazi was while I was in my cell in Evin Prison, in Tehran. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the longest-held American hostage in Iran was being kept only a few hundred meters away from where I crouched on stained and threadbare carpet, my eyes fixed on a dusty wall-mounted television screen. I didn’t understand Farsi back then, but I knew Amrika, and had come to recognise the word jasoos, too, given the abandon with which the term was thrown about the interrogation room.

This gaunt, bookish-looking man on my screen, whose hollow eyes flitted toward the camera every few seconds—he was supposed to be “America’s top spy”?

I was more incredulous still when the narrator cut to footage of an elderly man with wispy white hair and a kind face: Baquer Namazi. Suspenseful music played over dramatically backlit images of father and son posing with flags and symbols of the Great Satan. The bold and noble Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had captured two dangerous American infiltrators, bravely rescuing Iran from an ungodly, diabolical plot.

[Read: Iran has become a prison]

Part of me wanted to groan, or roll my eyes, or even laugh. But I had learned to be wary. I felt a deep disquiet seep into my gut. The Namazis’ charges were ludicrous, but they were also deadly serious. In a place like Iran, people are routinely executed for less.

The first time I saw Morad Tahbaz was through the back window of a meeting room attached to the prison duty officer’s station. Tahbaz was the first defendant in a group case involving Iran’s premier environmental-conservation NGO, and two of his co-defendants were my cellmates. They had told me that Tahbaz had been moved from the men’s section of our IRGC-controlled interrogation unit to what was referred to as “the villa,” a self-contained room with a small garden annex where the IRGC prefers to keep long-term prisoners, such as the Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. The conditions were supposed to be better there, and as a British American, Tahbaz was one of the IRGC’s highest-value prisoners. I watched Tahbaz pace listlessly around a narrow, paved courtyard, stopping to inspect a leafy potted plant before retreating back inside. He was rumoured to have survived cancer while in custody. Even back then, in 2019, there were murmurs of a deal to secure his freedom—a deal that never materialised, until now.  

From my chats with low-level IRGC functionaries, I understood there to be a ranking of sorts as to which foreign prisoners fetch the highest price. Complete foreigners are generally more valuable than dual-nationals. Western Europe is better than Eastern Europe is better than Japan. The Chinese whisk their citizens away in a matter of months; detainees from the developing world can expect to serve their sentences in full. Americans and Israelis are the most expensive hostages to extract, and are therefore the most coveted.

“At least you’re not an American” was a phrase I’d sometimes hear from Iranian political prisoners trying to encourage me not to lose hope. As an Australian researcher arrested after being invited to attend an academic conference in Iran, I was lower down the value chain than Siamak Namazi or Morad Tahbaz, but my freedom was still considered worthy of significant concessions. I served two years and three months in two Iranian prisons before being exchanged in a prisoner swap for three convicted IRGC terrorists held in Thailand. Like Namazi, Tahbaz, and a third American hostage, Emad Shargi, who are reportedly on the cusp of being freed under an agreement between the United States and Iran, I had received a 10-year sentence for the wholly unsubstantiated charge of espionage.

Dealmaking with the Islamic Republic is a grubby business, albeit one that is becoming normalized given the sheer frequency with which Iran is now resorting to hostage-taking to achieve foreign-policy, or even budgetary, objectives. Hostage diplomacy is on the rise worldwide, as the global rules-based order is buffeted by a resurgent authoritarianism coupled with the growing international perception of a United States in decline. Iran is one of its most egregious perpetrators, and so far Tehran has been able to simultaneously defy both international human-rights principles and basic laws of economics in commanding higher and higher prices for a proliferation of foreign hostages held in its prisons.

Namazi, Tahbaz, and Shargi are the public faces of the latest iteration of Iran’s lucrative hostage-taking enterprise, which has reportedly secured the Islamic Republic both a prisoner exchange, involving Iranian nationals held in American prisons, and the transfer of $6 billion in Iranian funds frozen in South Korean banks under sanctions. This is the second cash-for-hostages deal between Iran and the United States this century. The first involved $1.7 billion in frozen assets from a historical arms purchase, which the Obama administration transferred in 2016 in conjunction with the certification of the JCPOA nuclear deal, and contingent upon the release, officially, of four American citizens, including Rezaian. A similar deal was reached between Iran and the U.K. in 2022, in which a historical military debt of £400 million was transferred to Tehran in exchange for two British Iranian hostages.

Every time a hostage is freed, those of us who have survived Iran’s prison system collectively rejoice. We are a surprisingly large cohort, and our numbers swell further as Iran’s hostage-taking grows bolder and more blatant. Namazi, Tahbaz, Shargi, and two other Americans whose names have not been released have been removed from prison and placed under house arrest, in anticipation of the second phase of the deal: The arrival of the $6 billion into a Qatari bank account. The Qataris will ostensibly act as guarantors to ensure that the Iranians use these funds only for humanitarian purposes.

Such provisions should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism, however. Nothing is preventing Iran from, for example, moving the equivalent of $6 billion from school and hospital funding across to the military or the IRGC, before plugging the gap with the South Korean money. Although our community of former Iran hostages is thrilled that five innocent Americans are soon to be freed, many of us have felt compelled to speak out against any deal that might conceivably incentivize Iran’s hostage-taking further.  

I remember the moment I was released from Evin as though it was yesterday: A flurry of bureaucracy, last-minute taunts from my IRGC captors, a furtive final glance at the gray and soulless courtyard at the entrance of the interrogation unit. Being forced to stand in front of the gates of Evin to film a bizarre interview, excerpts from which would make it into a 15-minute-long propaganda clip that aired on that evening’s news broadcast. The IRGC’s opulent private hangar at Mehrabad airport. Squeezing the Australian ambassador’s hand goodbye as she led me up the stairs to board the plane that would spirit me out of Iranian airspace. And finally, the feeling that I could breathe deeply again, for the first time in nearly two and a half years.

I am overjoyed for Namazi, Tahbaz, Shargi, and the others. I know that all five of them right now are probably tempering their elation with pragmatism, warning themselves not to be seduced by false hope. One year into my incarceration, I was left behind in a prisoner-swap deal that saw two Australian backpackers released from Evin. I know that the American hostages will be reminding themselves that nothing is over until it’s actually over. Namazi and Tahbaz have also felt the pain of being left behind: $1.7 billion was not enough to buy Namazi’s freedom in 2016, and Tahbaz, also a British national, was left out of last year’s £400 million deal with the U.K. I can’t speak for what they are feeling, but I suspect they would be aghast to know that, in spite of the eye-watering sum of money involved, the current deal will once again leave U.S. nationals behind.

Late last month, when news of a new American hostage deal began circulating, it was reported that U.S. negotiators had angered their Iranian counterparts by seeking to add one additional American to the deal at the last minute. The families of two U.S. permanent residents, considered U.S. nationals under the 2020 Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act, had been campaigning vocally for their loved ones’ inclusion. One of these, Virginia resident Shahab Dalili, was reported in Iranian media to be the unnamed American. Dalili has already served seven years of a 10-year sentence, yet his family has been waiting for the State Department to formally grant him “wrongfully detained” status since 2019. Although such a designation is not a requirement for the U.S. government to negotiate a prisoner’s release, it elevates the management of the detainee’s case to the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs (SPEHA), which is explicitly tasked with bringing Americans home. Under the Levinson Act, permanent residents as well as citizens are eligible for SPEHA representation.

Similarly, the lawyer of California resident Jamshid Sharmahd applied to the State Department for a wrongful-detention designation within a month of Sharmahd’s shocking abduction by IRGC agents from Dubai International Airport in July 2020. The Sharmahd family is still awaiting the U.S. government’s decision, in spite of the fact that the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled that Jamshid was a victim of arbitrary detention back in April 2022 and called for his immediate release. He was a legal resident of the United States for almost 20 years and is owed protection under the Levinson Act, but the State Department continues to deflect responsibility onto Germany, where he holds citizenship. Sharmahd has been sentenced to death in Iran and could be executed at any moment.

We know that Dalili has heard of the deal, because he has already recounted his anguish at being left out of it to his family on the phone from Evin Prison. This is a kind of despair that eats away at you from inside. You feel abandoned and worthless; you see year after pointless year stretching out before you on an endless loop; you find that your carefully cultivated and closely guarded will to go on has somehow evaporated.

That some hostages are simply more valuable than others has long been the case. Just ask former Marine Paul Whelan, who has been left behind twice now in American prisoner swaps with Russia, and might even suffer this fate a third time as the State Department negotiates with Moscow over the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. The feeling that you are one of the unimportant ones, that someone has judged your freedom not worth whatever resources must be expended—this pain diminishes even the pure elation of eventually gaining one's liberty.

The public outcry against the current deal, particularly from the Iranian American community as well as among Iranians themselves, has in my mind been largely justified. The United States has long been resolute in refusing to negotiate with non-state-actor hostage-takers, including terrorist groups, yet has found itself led down a slippery slope by a notoriously slippery Iranian regime whose hostage-taking apparatus is dominated by the IRGC, which is itself a proscribed terrorist organization. The exchange of $1.7 billion for four hostages in 2016 has become $6 billion for five hostages in 2023, yet in spite of the enormous markup, U.S. nationals are still being left behind. What is worse, Iran emerges from this deal further emboldened and motivated to take yet more hostages, perhaps in exchange for other large sums of sanctioned money frozen abroad in places such as Japan.

Six billion dollars is an awfully large amount of money. It could cover a hell of a lot of arms shipped to Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Ansarullah. It could cover the salaries of thousands of Basij and IRGC militiamen, with additional bonuses for torturing, raping, and beating protesters. And it could keep the children of regime officials in overseas property and luxury goods for many lifetimes.

Cash-for-hostages deals encourage regimes like Iran’s to view innocent human lives as commodities that can be bought and traded for profit. Over the decades, the Islamic Republic has refined its hostage-taking business model into an extortion racket that is one of its most powerful foreign-policy levers. As long as countries like the United States are willing to acquiesce to its insatiable demands for ever-increasing sums of ransom, we can expect Iran to commodify a seemingly endless supply of hostages.

International cooperation is clearly necessary if Iran’s behaviour is to be curtailed in any systematic way. The Islamic Republic now targets the citizens of a wide array of Western nations; our governments should be on the same page as to how to respond when a citizen is taken, so that the approach of one country does not inadvertently undermine another’s. But even in the absence of such a multilateral accord, the United States can adopt a much stronger response than it has done.

Financial payments, regardless of where the funds come from, provide an incentive for hostage-taking, and as such they are fundamentally at odds with the U.S. government’s responsibility to ensure the security of its citizens. They are also a slap in the face to the brave people of Iran, many of whom are in the streets, risking their life to denounce the regime in the name of freedom, democracy, and gender equality—values that America professes to hold dear. The U.S. government should be no less steadfast in refusing to pay state-backed hostage-takers like the IRGC (a proscribed terrorist organisation) than it is when the Islamic State (also a proscribed terrorist organisation) or another non-state actor captures an American.

[Read: How to be a man in Iran]

The U.S. government needs to understand that Iran’s regime views conciliatory measures, such as declining to enforce sanctions, not as friendly gestures to smooth the path to negotiation, but as signals of weakness. Instead the United States should come up with a firm, punitive response to any further Iranian hostage-taking and announce this policy publicly, leaving the Islamic Republic no doubt as to America’s determination to follow through. Punishing and wide-ranging sanctions should be on the table, as should a crackdown on assets and visas for the family members of top regime officials, many thousands of whom live or study in the West. Such an approach could be modeled on the successful campaign targeting Russia’s oligarchs that followed the invasion of Ukraine. The United States should also press allied countries to follow its lead in listing the IRGC as a terrorist organisation.

We can welcome the release of Siamak Namazi, Morad Tahbaz, Emad Shargi, and others, and at the same time call for an end to cash-for-hostages deals that reward and enrich nasty authoritarian regimes such as the Islamic Republic. Hostage diplomacy is a wicked conundrum that offers no clean solution: Every option available to diplomats is a bad one, and every action risks either consigning victims to indefinite suffering or creating new ones. The American way is not, nor should it be, to abandon innocent citizens detained overseas. Washington should continue to negotiate for its hostages abroad and to find creative ways to bring them home. But there should be no more cash bonanzas for hostage-takers, and punitive measures should be publicly and preemptively adopted to send a clear signal that in the future hostage diplomacy will be punished and discouraged, not tolerated and rewarded.

Hundreds of thousands of malnourished children at risk of dying in humanitarian crisis of 'epic proportions', UN says.

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Did you miss Diversity Day a few months back? It falls each year on May 21, and is formally designated by the United Nations as “World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development.” Personally, I always celebrate the day. I have a cake, and sometimes even a party.

Admittedly, that date also happens to be my birthday. And in truth, I am not sure I’d mark the day with festivities if it weren’t my birthday: Do we really need the UN to urge us to go out and celebrate diversity? Few people could disagree with the value of diversity, but somehow, the bureaucratic hectoring makes it seem a bit spinach-y: good for us but not very enjoyable. A better way to think about diversity, in my view, is how it can make us happier every day.

The truth is that diversity is indeed very good for us, both as a society and as individuals. Useful research has shown that connections forged among different groups of people—what social scientists call “bridging social capital”—reliably enhances peace, prosperity, and social progress. Unfortunately, to seek out such connections goes against many of our instincts, which are to find comfort in the familiar. Not only that, but some of the most beneficial kinds of diversity, such as encountering variety in values and attitudes, are the hardest to pursue and adopt. With a bit of knowledge and practice, however, we can all get better at it—and get happier as a result.

One of the most common findings in the research on friendship is that humans have a strong homophily bias—that is, they prefer to hang around people who are like themselves. This is broadly true for attitudes and values, personality, and demographics such as race, age, education, job, and gender. This bias undoubtedly has its roots in evolution. Those similar to us are more likely to be kin or clan. As several scholars have argued, similarity makes communication easier and facilitates trust, and improves our ability to predict others’ behavior. In short, homophily probably kept your ancestors safer, and still today can lower the mental and emotional effort of dealing with other people.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Don’t avoid romance]

But like so many things that make life more comfortable in the near term—say, sitting on the couch and watching TV instead of going to the gym—homophily bias is suboptimal in the long run. Doing the work to increase the diversity of your relationships can increase well-being, improve certain types of performance, and enhance social adeptness. For example, in studies looking at cross-group friendship among college students, scholars have found that greater diversity increases academic and social skills and improves satisfaction with college. Even among children, diverse friendships are beneficial: One 2011 study showed that in racially and ethnically diverse elementary-school classrooms, children who had more diverse friendships felt less ignored and less socially excluded.

When we think about making more diverse friendships, we usually think of racial or ethnic differences. This is definitely beneficial, but that definition of diversity actually tends to be the easier kind for many people. As the psychologist Angela J. Bahns has shown in her research, people who report on surveys that they personally value diversity are indeed more likely than others to have friendships with a high variety of race, religion, and sexual orientation. At the same time, these subjects were also the most likely to have friend groups that were homogeneous in political attitudes and social values. Apparently, that Celebrate Diversity! bumper sticker generally refers to looking different while thinking the same.

Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.

This is a shame, because diversity of attitudes can be one of the most beneficial kinds. Management researchers have long found that diversity of ideas and ideology leads to better, more creative business outcomes. But new research takes this further, showing that under the right circumstances of respectful, courteous exchange, explicit political disagreement on teams leads to superior performance. In a 2019 article in Nature, scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Chicago studied the quality of Wikipedia entries on disputable topics that had been written and edited by different groups. They found that in the context of Wikipedia’s strong collaborative and civil norms, the highest-quality entries had been produced by the most politically polarized teams, compared with politically homogeneous teams. This was because individuals were inhibited by their peers from presenting only one side of the issue in question.

Unfortunately, too many forums where conflicting attitudes come into play tend to reward abuse (as is usually the case on social media). Other communities, such as academia, are often so ideologically homogeneous that the necessary balance for beneficial diversity of attitudes to flourish is difficult or impossible to achieve.

Knowing that diversity in your social life is good for your happiness and success is one thing; making it happen is another. Here are three ways to get started:

1. Talk to strangers.
The social path of least resistance is to stay in your traditional friend group, where interactions are familiar and easy. But as the psychologists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder have demonstrated, this posture is partly based on overestimating how awkward or unpleasant it will be to meet new people. In their experiment, they asked some groups of participants to initiate conversation with strangers on trains and buses, and other groups not to. They found that almost everyone thought beforehand that not talking to strangers would be more pleasant than doing so; their results showed that participants discovered the opposite was true.

You might want to reject this advice out of a sense of politeness, because you feel that trying to get more diversity into your life by interacting with strangers would be an intrusion. This concern is misplaced. In a separate experiment in their study, Epley and Schroeder found that the strangers who’d encountered their subjects had an equally positive experience. And in follow-up experiments, the researchers found confirmation that strangers were almost always interested in talking.

2. Become a social scientist.
Now, onto the harder-to-achieve kind of diversity, in attitudes and viewpoints. Unless you are hoping to free up the seat next to you on a bus, I don’t recommend initiating a conversation with a stranger with your strong opinions about recent Supreme Court decisions. Even if the person happens to agree with your view, you will probably seem unhinged and inappropriate. What works better is modifying your personal environment to make it more inviting for others to give their views without feeling threatened. The best way to do this is to ask people you meet socially for their honest views on issues.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Aristotle’s 10 rules for a good life]

If this seems terribly difficult, it can help to imagine that you are a social scientist doing research: Seek out people with whom you’re likely to disagree, and solicit their views in a friendly way. Your goal should be to understand them deeply—you might offer alternative views, but you don’t want to contaminate your work by seeming combative. This approach will set people at ease, give you more interesting friends, and occasionally even change your mind—or you will change theirs, in part by the model of your curiosity and intelligent listening.

3. Celebrate heresy.
If you want to go all-in, try creating a friend group that explicitly encourages heterodox thinking. Some of the most rewarding social circles I’ve belonged to were those in which everyone thrilled at hearing ideas far outside their comfort zone, politically, philosophically, and morally. The point isn’t to agree at all; it is to have your mind expanded without the threat of canceling or risk of being canceled.

This is the spirit of 19th-century free thinkers, who questioned everything without fear or favor. Perhaps the greatest proponent of this way of thinking was the writer Robert G. Ingersoll, dubbed “the Great Agnostic” for his willingness to question everything. In his 1877 book, Heretics and Heresies, Ingersoll wrote, “Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress.”

Here is one final way to embrace—in a literal sense—diversity: If you are in the dating pool, try starting a romance with someone very different from you. I’ve previously written about the growing tendency among daters to seek a partner with maximum compatibility in background, personality, and attitudes. Dating apps often facilitate this, making it possible to pair up with, well, yourself. Compatibility can be a way to minimize potential conflict, but not a way to maximize surprise, adventure, and excitement, which are fundamental to romance. That explains researchers’ finding that when prospective daters text each other, a spark of attraction is more likely when people perceive dissimilarity from their own personality.

Perhaps this suggests how the UN should reframe Diversity Day. To get more sorely needed romance and adventure into our world, next May 21 could be reframed as International Date-Your-Opposite Day.

China announced a complete ban on the import of Japanese seafood after the Fukushima nuclear power plant began releasing wastewater into the Pacific Ocean today (Aug. 24). The release, planned for months, was approved as safe by the UN’s atomic oversight body, but it faces loud opposition from Beijing, as well as from …

Read more...

The epigraph for the first 2024 Republican presidential debate came from Vivek Ramaswamy. “It is not morning in America. We’re living in a dark moment,” he said, midway through the melee in Milwaukee. He seemed to speak for every candidate on the stage during a dour and punchy evening on Fox News.

Ramaswamy was a fitting messenger for the mantra, because the debate was his coming out party. He was, if not definitively the winner of the debate, clearly the main character. No candidate was so eager to get in the mix on every issue, none so ready with quips, none so eager to land a blow on rivals, and none so likely to be the target of blows himself.

“Who the heck is this skinny with a funny name and what the heck is he doing on this debate stage?” Ramaswamy joked at the outset, borrowing a line from President Barack Obama. It’s a set piece that he’s unlikely to have to use again. Anyone watching the debate knows now.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Ramaswamy’s central role was that anyone other than Trump was able to claim the spotlight. The former president dominates polling in the Republican primary, but he skipped the debate, choosing instead to grant an interview to Tucker Carlson, a meeting of two men united by their grievances against Fox News. Ahead of the event, many pundits expected that Trump would manage to dominate, even in absence. But other than a single question about the former president’s felony indictments, moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum were remarkably effective at avoiding Trump’s shadow.

That was perhaps the only thing at which they were effective. The candidates, even mild-mannered ones like Pence, were able to steamroll the moderators, claiming far more time than allotted and dodging almost every question asked of them. The debate nearly featured a fascinating moment early on, when Fox played a video of a Catholic University student asking the candidates to assuage young people’s concerns about climate change. The moderators asked the candidates to raise their hands to say whether they believe humans are causing climate change. But the candidates rebelled, refusing to do so, and in the end only Ramaswamy and DeSantis gave clear answers. (They do not.)

This kind of domination of the stage and disrespect for moderators was innovative when Trump started doing it in the 2016 primary, but other Republicans have learned from him. And it was Ramaswamy, the most MAGA candidate on stage, who blew through the guidelines most. He jumped in on question after question, and reaped applause for it. He grinned broadly as rivals attacked him, and then used the response time that earned him to talk more. He openly mocked his rivals, at one point pantomiming a person testing the air by licking a finger while Governor Ron DeSantis tried to explain his position on Ukraine. “You have put down everybody on this stage,” former Ambassador Nikki Haley grumbled at one point.

This made Ramaswamy a target of many attacks, especially from former Governor Chris Christie, former Vice President Mike Pence, and Haley. Christie quipped that the last skinny guy with a funny name to stand on a debate stage was Barack Obama and said, with some reason, that Ramaswamy sounded like ChatGPT. Pence sneered that this moment was no time for “on-the-job training” for a novice like Ramaswamy. “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows,” Haley snapped.

Haley also had an unexpectedly strong performance. It’s no easy task for a former governor and ambassador to the U.N. to portray herself as an outsider, but she was quick on her feet and managed to attack the Republican establishment without falling into the DeSantis trap of veering into far-right rhetoric. She attacked rivals for voting for huge government spending increases, and blistered Pence and others for claiming they’d pass a federal abortion ban despite the barriers to that in Congress. “Be honest with the American people,” Haley said.

The big loser in all of this was DeSantis, who desperately needed to show he was still the clear second-place candidate, and failed to do so. Though he avoided adding to the gaffes that have sometimes haunted him on the campaign trail, he also added few highlights. He reached for personal anecdotes, including about his own children, and ended up sounding clinical. DeSantis also dodged question after question: He didn’t explain how he’d cut federal spending, whether he wanted a federal ban on abortion, how he’d fight crime (other than a weird aside about George Soros), or what to make of the Trump indictments.

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is perpetually the subject of rumors of an impending breakout but never seems to actually break out, seemed to recede on the stage, where his affable affect and slow pace of speaking proved no match for the vitriol around him. Christie got in a few good lines, but did nothing to change the fact that his campaign is doomed, nor did Pence. Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota squeaked onto the debate stage, but that won them little more than a front-row seat to the fireworks.

Watching how Ramaswamy handles his new turn in the spotlight will be interesting. He’s charismatic, a smooth orator, irreverent, and funny. But it’s easy to imagine his shtick will wear thin. Ramaswamy sounds good, but once you slow down and think about what he said, it often makes little sense or means nothing. (A recent profile by my colleague John Hendrickson showcases Ramaswamy’s problems of substance.) He also projects the air of smarmy student-government president, which means that while Ramaswamy is aiming to be the next Trump, he risks instead becoming the next Ted Cruz. But Ramaswamy’s debate performance is sure to increase speculation that he could also be the next Mike Pence—or at least take his place at Trump’s side as a vice-presidential candidate.