Sarah Yager | The Atlantic

How the Most Remote Community in America Gets Its Mail

2025-05-07T07:30:00-04:00

Photographs by Elliot Ross

Just after 8 o’clock one spring morning, 2,000 feet below the rim of the Grand Canyon, Nate Chamberlain, wearing chaps and cowboy boots, emerged from the post office in Supai, Arizona, with the last of the morning mail. He tucked a Priority Mail envelope into a plastic U.S. Postal Service crate lashed to one of the six mules waiting outside. Then he climbed into the saddle on the lead mule, gave a kick of his spurs, and set off down the dirt road leading out of the village.

It was the beginning of what may be the country’s most unusual USPS route—the very last to deliver mail by mule. The mule train would travel eight miles along a creek lined with cottonwoods, through a narrow gorge, and up a switchbacking trail carved into the cliffside to reach a hitching post at the top of the canyon, where a sign reads US MAIL DELIVERY ZONE. There, Chamberlain would drop off the outgoing mail with a driver—who would take it another 68 miles to the next post office, in the town of Peach Springs—and pick up the incoming mail to deliver back to the village.

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Supai, the only village on the reservation of the Havasupai Tribe, is one of the most remote communities in the country. It is accessible only by foot, and by helicopter when the weather allows. The mule train, which makes the 16-mile, six-hour loop up and down the canyon five days a week, is perhaps the most extreme manifestation of the USPS mandate to “render postal services to all communities.” Mail delivery in Supai involves a feat of logistics, horsemanship, and carefully placed hooves. It is slow and drudging work—starting at 3 a.m., when Chamberlain rises to feed the pack string, and continuing to sundown as fences are fixed and horseshoes are replaced—that belies an era of instant delivery, optimized everything, and “government efficiency.” It also offers a glimpse into what the Postal Service can mean for rural America, at a moment when the agency’s future is uncertain.

Elliot Ross for The Atlantic

Top: Nate Chamberlain and his mules descend 2,000 feet to reach Supai. Bottom: In addition to letters and packages, the mules have delivered lab work, and even mini fridges for Supai’s tourist lodge.

For centuries, the Havasupai Tribe ranged across the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, hunting and foraging along the plateau in the fall and winter, and descending into the canyon in the spring and summer to grow corn, beans, melons, and sunflowers along Havasu Creek. But that changed as America pushed westward. In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed an executive order restricting the tribe to 518 acres at the bottom of the canyon.

Just over a decade later, the federal government established a school in the village—aimed, like others of the era, at assimilating Native children. With it grew demand for better connection to the outside world. Rufus Bauer, the first teacher sent to Supai, wrote in an 1896 report to the commissioner of Indian Affairs that getting the mail required the Havasupai to make “a horseback ride of 60 miles over a stony, grassless desert, where there is not one drop of water for man or horse.” He added, perhaps unnecessarily, “They do not exactly enjoy the trip.”

[Philip F. Rubio: Save the Postal Service]

The Supai post office was established later the same year. At the time, rural postal delivery was expanding across the country. The postal system is older than the Declaration of Independence; it was founded in 1775 to allow consistent communication across the colonies—uniting America even before there was a federal government. As the nation grew, Congress gave the organization a monopoly over letter delivery as a way of ensuring affordable access to mail for all Americans—not just those who lived along profitable urban routes.

Over time, Supai would come to depend on the post office. With the loss of the tribe’s hunting grounds and much of its farmland, the traditional Havasupai way of life started to disappear, and pretty much everything the village needed—groceries, household goods, medicine—arrived there on the back of a USPS mule.

“That old saying, you ever look that up?” Charlie Chamberlain asked me when we met at a café near the post office in Peach Springs. “I used to know it by heart, the old saying, that we deliver mail in all kinds of weather.” He pulled out his phone to search for it: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. “That’s not a false statement, for what we do.”

Chamberlain moved to Supai with his wife, a member of the Havasupai Tribe, back in 1973. Her uncle had delivered the mail there for many years, and offered to train Chamberlain.

[From the January 1875 issue: The American post-office]

The route involves risks not listed in the unofficial USPS motto. In the winter, ice can accumulate on the narrow switchbacks, which drop 1,000 feet in the first two miles. Temperatures in the summertime can exceed 110 degrees. Mules (and horses, which are sometimes used in the pack string) can get spooked by blowing debris and the occasional rattlesnake. During monsoon season, rainwater rushing down the canyon walls can turn the desert floor into a surging river within minutes.

Chamberlain recalled once taking shelter with 11 of his animals at a high point above the trail as floodwater rose below them. He could hear boulders crashing against one another in the water. When he rode back up the trail the next day, the marks left by the water were higher than his head, even on horseback. Staying out of trouble means learning to watch the sky, he told me—and beyond that, having “a real strong faith in God.”

Chamberlain still holds a contract with USPS for delivery to Supai but no longer rides the route himself; after 25 years on the trail, he and his wife, who was ill, left Supai to be closer to a hospital. He now employs Nate—his nephew—and other locals to handle the deliveries.

[Read: Why we all have a stake in the U.S. Postal Service]

Nate Chamberlain told me he has broken bones and taken spills that have required hundreds of stitches. Last summer, he had to spend the night under a rock overhang with his mules after a severe flash flood raised the creek some seven feet in 15 minutes, washing out the trail. In the worst scenarios, animals have died. (Charlie and the packers who work for him rotate their animals on a regular schedule to prevent them from getting worn down.)

Supai is home to about 200 people, according to the latest census, though some estimates range much higher. (The Havasupai tribal council, which tracks tribal enrollment, declined to participate in this story.) For residents of the small village, the mule train helps set the rhythm of daily life. Lynanne and Scott Palmer told me that when they moved to Supai, in the late 1970s, the arrival of the mail in the afternoons was a social event: Residents would gather outside the post office as their letters and packages were unloaded, along with food and other supplies to restock the small village store.

This has changed somewhat over the years, as the tourism industry has grown. Tens of thousands of visitors now pass through Supai each year to see the waterfalls that cascade down Havasu Creek to the confluence with the Colorado River. Helicopters run several days a week during the high season, carrying tourists from the canyon rim to the village. The helicopters also bring in some supplies, and carry residents out of the canyon to go on weekend shopping trips in the cities of Kingman and Flagstaff, hours from the rim.

But the helicopter schedule is seasonal, and weather-dependent: High winds can easily blow the aircraft against the sandstone cliffs. Mules are still the most reliable form of transport—bringing with them, as Charlie described it, “everything that you can put a stamp on.” Besides letters and packages for community members (including lots of Amazon orders), the USPS mule train transports medicine and lab work for the village clinic. Supai doesn’t have a traditional bank, so the post office supports an informal financial system, bringing in cash for the tribe’s use and letting residents send and receive money orders. The tourism industry, now the main source of income for the tribe, also relies on the mule train: Nate told me that the supplies for the lodge where tourists stay—linens, even mini fridges—come through the mail.

Even now in Supai, as Lynanne Palmer put it, “Life runs around the post office.”

Elliot Ross for The Atlantic

Tens of thousands of tourists pass through Supai each year to visit the canyon’s waterfalls.

In late March, while the mules continued their work in Supai, demonstrators gathered in 150 cities across the United States to speak out against an anticipated “hostile takeover” of the Postal Service.

President Donald Trump has, in recent months, mused about a major reorganization of USPS, which he describes as a “tremendous loser for this country.” He has said he is considering merging the independent agency with the Commerce Department. Trump suggested that such a move would help the Postal Service—which has been losing billions of dollars a year, amid declining mail volume and rising operating costs—turn around its fortunes. But many see the proposal as a prelude to privatization, an idea Trump floated during his first term and raised again just before taking office a second time.

[Read: What happens if Trump comes for the mail?]

Experts believe that even partially outsourcing delivery to companies such as Amazon and FedEx would disproportionately affect rural America, where longer distances and fewer consumers mean that many postal routes operate at a loss. Brian Renfroe, the president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, told me that without the USPS’s universal-service obligation, consumers in rural areas could expect higher prices or even to lose service altogether. “I can assure you a private delivery company is not going to have any interest in delivering mail by mules,” he said.

The reason the mule train has persisted for more than a century, Charlie Chamberlain told me, is that it’s the most cost-effective way to deliver the mail to Supai. “We can do it cheaper than they can in a helicopter,” he said. “When it’s time to bid on a new contract, I can outbid them.” As a contractor, he doesn’t collect benefits. “I never have taken a vacation in all the years I’ve done this,” Chamberlain said. “There’s no such thing.” The route may seem like the opposite of government efficiency. But that’s true only if you don’t accept the premise that the post office should be for everyone.

The Postal Service reflects the nation’s founding vision: to create a country both expansive and united. Supai has seen the worst of that vision. But the mules, unbothered by politics as they trod up and down the canyon, still carry with them a reminder of what America promised to be.

This article appears in the June 2025 print edition with the headline “Mail by Mule.”

Big-Sky Country

2023-02-13T06:00:00-05:00

Photographs by Christopher Churchill

In 2005, the photographer Christopher Churchill visited a Hutterite colony on the Montana Hi-Line, a sparsely populated stretch of prairie along the Canadian border. He was traveling the United States for a project about faith, hoping to find commonalities among divergent beliefs. But as he spent time in the small religious community, surrounded by endless wheat fields and tracks that once formed the main line of the Great Northern Railway, he soon became interested in another American belief system: capitalism. Churchill was struck by the way commerce had shaped even this isolated landscape—and also by how the colony, in which members live and work together and share the proceeds of their labor, offered an alternative view of prosperity.

Top: A church in Inverness, population 77, flanked by power lines and grain bins. Middle left: Near railroad tracks in Butte, Montana, Churchill stumbled across a bare-knuckle boxing match. Middle right: A boy holds a longboard in Ennis, a town established during the Montana gold rush that is now a gateway for tourists visiting Yellowstone National Park. Bottom: A Hutterite boy in Gildford.

The experience got Churchill thinking about how individual lives intersect with broader economic forces. It became the inspiration for a new project, focused on “the American dream,” that brought him back to Montana last summer. The resulting photographs, some shot in black-and-white and some in color, contain traces of American industry, class divides, and westward expansion: power lines interrupting the horizon, the glint of a belt buckle, the wind blowing through a reservation town. But the people Churchill met in brief encounters on his drive across the state take the foreground.

Top left: A woman sits on her front porch in Anaconda, just down the street from the grand town library—a gift from Phoebe Hearst, whose husband invested in the copper industry, which brought entrepreneurs rushing to the state until the mines went bust. Top right: Two brothers lean against a pickup at the Last Chance Stampede and Fair in Helena, before going to the 4-H livestock sale there. Bottom left: A young father holds his baby on the Blackfeet Reservation. Bottom right: A Hutterite woman in Gildford.

There is something precarious in these images, yet also defiant. A toughness and a tenderness. Churchill’s subjects look directly into the camera, their expression demanding interpretation. This elusiveness offers its own revelation: A dream, after all, is a matter of one’s own perception. Hutterite children bounce on a trampoline, their long skirts floating against the open sky. The girl in the center seems to smile, suspended in mid-air. It is impossible to know whether she is going up or down.

Hay bales near Great Falls, Montana

This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline “Views of Montana.”

Jon Tester Wins in Montana, Despite Trump’s Best Efforts

2018-11-08T06:00:00-05:00

Before he arrived at the balloon-decorated Holiday Inn in Great Falls, Montana, for his Election Night watch party, Jon Tester was 80 miles away on his farm in Big Sandy, taking the engine out of his ’86 Chevy pickup.

When the race was finally called on Wednesday morning, the engine still had a blown head gasket—but the 62-year-old farmer and two-term Democratic senator had managed to get his political career to turn over one more time.

The outcome had been far from certain. President Donald Trump, enraged that Tester had derailed his nomination of Ronny Jackson to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs earlier this year, had made unseating the senator a personal project. Polls showed Tester and his opponent, Republican State Auditor Matt Rosendale, running neck and neck in the lead-up to Election Day.

[Read: Jon Tester bets the farm]

Voter registration in Montana was at a record high as people headed to the polls, and turnout has surpassed any midterm showing since at least 1994. Gallatin County, a Democratic stronghold in the mostly Republican state, was among the last to report results. The county clerk and recorder, Charlotte Mills, told Montana Public Radio in an interview nearly two hours after the polls had closed that the line of voters at the courthouse was still stretching out of the building. “It’s been out the door and up the block the entire day,” she said.

The last voter in line filed his ballot around 11 p.m. The state uses a paper system, and collecting results from far-flung precincts on a snowy, foggy evening contributed to the slow returns. A crash on Highway 191, the only direct thruway from West Yellowstone to the county election office in Bozeman, delayed the driver bringing stacks of ballots from the southern end of the county.

Tester’s victory, when it was announced at last, came despite Trump having visited the state four times in the past five months to rally for Rosendale. It was a remarkable focus on a state with just over 1 million people. When Donald Trump Jr. accompanied Rosendale on a two-day “Montana Victory Tour” bus trip in late October, they stopped in some towns where a non-negligible share of the population could fit inside Air Force One.

Trump won Montana by more than 20 points in the 2016 election, and he attempted to leverage partisan flash points—from Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation to the migrant caravan—in his attacks against Tester.

[Read: Trump is about to get a rude awakening]

“You need a man who’s going to vote for your agenda,” he told voters during his most recent rally in the state, just before bringing Rosendale onstage. “Your agenda is Make America Great Again.”

His strategy might have backfired.

Tester appears to have won with just over 50 percent of the vote—the first time he has ever captured a majority. He had the edge with women voters and took a whopping 67 percent of the youth vote, according to exit polls. And he won a higher share of independent voters than he did in 2012.

Tester has prevailed as a Democrat in a state that leans Republican largely on the strength of his local appeal: he flies back from Washington, D.C., to work on his farm nearly every weekend, and emphasizes the value of knowing your neighbors. Rosendale summed up his own platform as “Trump Conservative.” The race came down to partisanship versus place.

As Tester put it to me when I interviewed him earlier this year, riding through a wheat field in his combine: In Montana, a state with a pioneer history, “everybody’s got a little libertarian streak in them.”

That independence means a hard road to victory for a senator representing the supposed party of big government. But it also holds a lesson for Trump: Montanans like to make their own decisions.

Jon Tester Bets the Farm

2018-10-25T06:00:00-04:00

Senator Jon Tester and I are in the cab of his Case IH combine, rolling through a field on his 1,800-acre farm outside Big Sandy, Montana. I’m trying to get him to talk about identity politics and the future of the Democratic Party. He’s trying to harvest wheat.

It’s a Tuesday morning in August. This year’s harvest happens to coincide with the closing weeks of one of the most closely watched Senate races in the midterm elections. Tester is campaigning for a third term as a Democrat in a state that went for Donald Trump by more than 20 points. The inside of a combine might not be the obvious place for a senator facing such a challenge, but wheat, he notes, doesn’t harvest itself.

Tester is some 300 pounds and north of six feet in his cowboy boots, with a flattop haircut and three missing fingers from an accident with a meat grinder when he was 9 years old. He is wearing a frayed baseball cap and a blue button-up with dirt smeared on the front.

He looks less like a standard-bearer of the Democratic Party than like the kind of guy who long ago abandoned it.

I ask about the charge that the Democrats have forgotten the white working class—a demographic that includes most of the voting population of the state.

“If we become a party of ‘These guys are for the white guys, and these guys are for the brown guys,’ I don’t think that’s healthy for the country at all,” he says over the thrum of the combine engine. “I think we’ve got to be for everybody.”

What does he make of rising stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the perceived leftward swing of the party?

“I think difference of opinion is a good thing.”

Tester is sticking to the center, and that shouldn’t come as a surprise. He first won office in 2006 with a less-than-1-percent margin over the Republican incumbent, Conrad Burns, and scraped through a tight reelection campaign in 2012. He has never won a majority. His success has relied on attracting independents and getting conservatives to cross party lines.

He is now defending his seat against both his opponent, State Auditor Matt Rosendale, and the president of the United States.

The trouble started this spring, when Tester, as the ranking member of the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, released a list of allegations of professional misconduct against Ronny Jackson, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs. Jackson denied the allegations but withdrew from consideration the next day.

The president would not let go so quickly. “Tester should resign,” he tweeted. In July, Trump flew to Great Falls, Montana, to rally for Rosendale. He dedicated much of his speech to Tester. “I know a lot of people from Montana,” Trump told the crowd. “You’ve got to explain that one to me. How did he get elected?”

[Read: What is the point of a Trump rally in 2018?]

That’s a question the Tester campaign hopes it can still answer. Trump has since visited Montana twice more to rally for Rosendale—both times in the center of crucial districts for the Democrats. His most recent appearance came shortly after Tester’s vote against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

“The Democrats have truly turned into an angry mob, bent on destroying anything or anyone in their path,” Trump said. “And your senator is one of them.”

Support for Trump has cooled in Montana, but he still has the approval of the majority of voters in the state. Rosendale, who had been trailing in the race all summer, has gained considerably in recent weeks. Polls now show the race as a toss-up.

For Tester, who at this moment has one hand on the steering wheel of the combine, victory in November depends on convincing a base of mostly Republican voters that he can offer something that transcends party: an up-close understanding of life in rural America.

Twenty-four hours earlier, Tester stood inside the Democratic Party field office in Missoula, Montana, surrounded by dozens of supporters and several sweating tubs of ice cream: “Flattop Fudge” and “Sharla’s Strawberry Rhubarb,” named in honor of his wife of 41 years.

He had come to rally volunteers to knock on doors and make phone calls, and his folksiness was on full blast. “What the hell is a field organizer?” he boomed, eyes twinkling at the crowd, to a campaign worker who had just introduced herself. “Do you go out and organize weeds in the field?”

From a distance, Montana might look like just another red state in the expanse between the coasts. The state legislature is Republican-controlled, and voters have gone for a Democratic presidential candidate just twice since the Truman administration. But the Democratic Party has captured more than half the governorships and more than three-quarters of Senate seats over the past century. The state leads the nation in ticket-splitting in national elections.

The dominant politics are a kind of anti-politics: “We don’t like big government, we don’t like big business, we don’t like outsiders,” David Parker, a political-science professor at Montana State University, told me. “That can help you as a Democrat. That can help you as a Republican.”

Tester is a pro-gun social moderate who has strayed from Democratic ranks on issues such as banking reform and public-land use. But perhaps more central to his appeal is his image as the Politician Next Door.

He is the only sitting U.S. senator who is also a working farmer. He drives an old pickup and says “I’ll be damned.” If he doesn’t know you, he probably knows your neighbors.

He moved through supporters in the field office like a pastor at a church potluck. When I introduced myself, he asked where I was from, and I named the small town in Montana near where my parents had farmed when I was growing up.

Tester talks with Marvin L. Stewart, 82, before a parade at Crow Fair in Crow Agency, Mont., on August 19, 2018. Tester is being challenged by Republican Matt Rosendale for the Senate seat. (Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call)

“Goddamn,” he said. Did I know a guy by the name of … ? The guy in question turned out to be the son of the cafeteria cook at my elementary school, which was 300 miles away from Big Sandy and had just over a dozen students when I graduated from sixth grade.

In a state as sparsely populated as Montana, with 1 million people scattered across 147,000 square miles, seeing eye to eye with your voters can be more than a metaphor. And in a campaign year without a full recess, and with crops to get in, Tester was trying to maximize his time.

He had already done half a dozen interviews before the ice-cream social, and from there was heading to a meeting with the chamber of commerce before making an appearance at a Pearl Jam concert at the university football stadium. The bassist, Jeff Ament, also grew up in Big Sandy—the son of the barber who gave Tester his first flattop—and the band was putting on the concert to help get out the vote.

When he finished speaking outside the stadium, Tester was mopping sweat from his face with a wad of tissue. Concertgoers flowed toward the admissions gate, parting around volunteers with voter-registration clipboards like they were rocks in a stream. “No politics tonight,” a girl in an ankle bracelet murmured, leaning into her boyfriend.

The show started late. Stage lights twisted and flashed to the pulse of the amplifiers. Weed smoke drifted up toward the mountains. By the time the band members came out for their second set, wearing T-shirts that read TESTER in the shape of the state of Montana—Eddie Vedder’s under a bomber jacket decorated with stars and stripes—the senator and his wife were in their pickup headed up the highway, on the four-hour drive back to Big Sandy.

On the combine the next morning, Tester squinted out the windshield at the grain bristling on the horizon. He had gotten a late start, but if the weather cooperated and nothing broke down, he would cut 70 acres before flying back to Washington.

He and Sharla raise wheat, peas, barley, and safflower on the same stretch of dirt his grandparents homesteaded a century ago. They have no hired help, and their two kids have grown and moved away. So nearly every weekend, he takes two flights from D.C. to the airport in Great Falls, then drives 80 miles back to the farm. Most Mondays, he wakes up before 3:30 a.m. to fly back to D.C. in time for the evening vote.

The Founders didn’t look at government as a full-time job, he told me. The Montana state legislature, where he got his first job in politics outside of a stint on the Big Sandy school board, meets only every other year. The rest of the time, lawmakers are home working next to the people they represent.

“I think it’s the best model in the world,” he said. “It makes it so you still stay connected to the real world.”

The farm has been a defining feature of his candidacy since his first campaign ad in 2006 showed him tossing hay bales out of a barn loft. It has now become a main line of attack on his opponent.

Rosendale, who made his career in real estate on the Eastern Shore of Maryland before moving to Montana in 2002, called himself a rancher throughout his primary campaign—until Talking Points Memo reported that the state Department of Revenue was unable to find records of Rosendale having ever owned a cow.

That was a score for Tester and his supporters, who have cast “Maryland Matt” as an East Coast multimillionaire and political opportunist. The campaign has emphasized that Rosendale purchased hundreds of acres of farmland when he moved to the state for the purpose of converting them into a subdivision. The Montana Democratic Party created a video mash-up of Rosendale pronouncing Montana with a distinctly mid-Atlantic accent.

[Read: How home-state pronunciations can shape elections]

Rosendale’s strategy in the general election has been to switch the focus to Washington. He points to Tester’s townhouse on Capitol Hill, and to the fact that Tester has received more than $500,000 in campaign contributions from lobbyists this year—more than any other senator, as of this writing—as evidence that he has become a fixture of the Democratic establishment. Rosendale often repeats a line that Trump has used during each of his visits to the state: “A vote for Tester is a vote for Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.”

For his part, Rosendale—whose staff did not respond to requests for comment on this article—describes himself as “a conservative who’s willing to back the Trump agenda.” Amid the fallout from the TPM article, he changed the first line of his Twitter bio from “conservative rancher” to “Trump Conservative.”

“He’s put all of his eggs in the rubber-stamp basket,” Tester told me, in a mash-up of barnyard and D.C. clichés that spoke to a central claim of his own candidacy: He makes decisions by going out and talking with his voters. The biggest question he gets from Montanans, he says, is: Why can’t members of Congress work together? He promotes the fact that Trump has so far signed 20 of his bills into law.

“I think there’s plenty of folks out there, whether they agree with me or not, they appreciate the fact that you’re listening to them,” he said. “And I think that’s how you win. I don’t think it has anything to do with a D or an R when it comes right down to it. It has more to do with: Do you really understand the challenges we face?”

Downplaying the role of political parties, for someone in Tester’s position, is a survival tactic. It may also be a pretty good read on how Montanans vote.

A few days before hitting the campaign trail with Tester, I was walking through a cow pasture with my dad, a fourth-generation Montanan who ranches in the southern half of the state. He and my mom met working as legislative aides for Max Baucus, the state’s longest-serving Democratic senator, before leaving politics behind to raise a family back home.

He told me a story about Baucus’s first bid for the Senate, in 1978. In the last days before the election, Baucus was losing the lead over his opponent, Larry Williams, when the state AFL-CIO mailed out 50,000 copies of an old photograph showing Williams with long, shaggy hair and wearing what looked like love beads. The photo ran in newspapers across the state and on page A2 of The Washington Post, and Baucus vaulted into office with an 11-point victory.

The lesson was simple: Montanans vote for Montanans.

But his victory points to something deeper about how place relates to politics. The political scientist Katherine Cramer, who spent years doing field work in small-town Wisconsin, uses the term rural consciousness to describe the perspective through which the people she met saw their political choices. For many rural residents, she found, a sense of not getting a fair share of resources, representation, or cultural status has contributed to a powerful tribal identity—one based not just on race or class but on geography.

Kal Munis, a sixth-generation Montanan who is now a graduate student in the University of Virginia’s politics department, recently led an experimental study that suggests how Cramer’s theory of rural resentment might manifest in voting behavior. He and his co-author showed participants a campaign mailer featuring a fictional Senate candidate against one of three randomly chosen backdrops: “urban” (the skyline of the largest city in the participant’s state), “rural” (scenery from the state’s largest state or national park), or a control that showed no geographic markers. Rural participants were less likely to approve of the “urban” candidates compared with the control, and less likely to agree that those candidates understand their needs—an effect that didn’t hold in the opposite direction.

The phenomenon might be even stronger in Montana, where even the cities have the feel of small towns. David Parker, the MSU professor, believes that the state’s history of resource extraction—from the copper kings to the railroad companies to the sodbusters who depleted the topsoil and fled during the Dust Bowl—has created a sense of being “under siege from without.”

The resulting strains of individualism and collectivism—a guardedness against outsiders, and a strong sense of community among those who stayed—could help explain why Montanans don’t split easily across party lines. “I have probably never voted for a straight ticket in my life, and I am a Democratic U.S. senator,” Tester told me.

Tester has been able to win two terms as a Democrat in a state where most people identify as Republican for one of the same reasons Trump swept rural America by almost two to one: He tells voters he sees them.

[Read: Will the ‘Trump 10’ pay a price in 2018?]

But a race through the center of the most polarized electorate in modern history will test whether place identity is still stronger than partisanship.

At a meet-and-greet with Rosendale in Billings, among several Make America Great Again hats and one straw cowboy hat, I met a soft-spoken man with white hair named Sonny Broesder. Broesder graduated a year behind one of Tester’s older brothers at Big Sandy High School and later became the superintendent of the district. He grew up a “staunch Democrat,” he told me: the son of a union man and an admirer of John F. Kennedy. He had voted for Tester in 2012. But he had come to the meet-and-greet because he felt that the party had moved away from him.

Before he retired from education five years ago, he was growing more and more frustrated with policies initiated in Washington, D.C., that he felt had no relationship to what worked for a rural state. Along with several others in the room, he was also worried that the Democratic Party was drifting toward socialism. He was all for extending a helping hand, he said. But the federal government seemed to be getting bigger and bigger, and nobody—Tester included—seemed to be thinking about the taxpayers like him who were holding it up.

“I think there should be that sort of attitude where I want somebody who’s going to go back there and represent my values, and it may be a Democrat,” he said. “But right now it’s so divisive.”

Still, even Broesder wasn’t sure that the division would change the fundamental way Montanans vote. The day before Trump came back for his second rally in the state, Broesder told me he had spent the morning making phone calls to likely Republican voters on behalf of the Rosendale campaign. He had spoken with about a dozen people so far. Three told him they decide how to vote based on the person, not the party. They were still making up their mind.

Tester was 21 years old when he took over the farm from his parents. The place feels suspended in time. He and Sharla live in a modest house with peeling paint and planters out front full of plastic flowers. A butcher shed in the yard still features the meat grinder that claimed his three fingers. He sometimes turns up bricks from the original homestead when he’s plowing the fields.

“We wouldn’t be here without the government’s help back in the 1930s,” Tester told me.

FDR inspired him to become a Democrat. His family arrived in Montana just before the droughts descended and blew many homesteaders back out with the dust clouds. The New Deal brought price stability and better ways of caring for the land.

But that way of life is receding. There were 40 students in his graduating class at Big Sandy High School; now there are hardly more than that in the whole school. The population of the county is just over half of what it was at the peak of the homestead era.

His positions—regulating against market consolidation, investing in rural infrastructure like airports and broadband, addressing climate change—are personal for him.

He is 62 years old. He says he wants to farm long enough to turn the place over to one of his grandkids. The oldest, 11, recently drove a tractor by himself for the first time.

Every few circuits around the field, Tester pulled the combine alongside a semitruck parked by the road to pour out the grain from the holding tank. He would haul the load to a grain elevator in nearby Fort Benton to be cleaned and milled.

“These goddamn weeds,” he said, getting out of the cab and climbing the tank to knock loose the plant gunk that was stopping up the machine.

The farm has been the foundation of his political career. It’s probably his best hope for staying on Capitol Hill. But as I watched him disappear into the tank, the enormous machine a speck against the vastness of prairie and sky, it also seemed like a refuge from all that.

“Agriculture drives most people crazy,” Tester told me at the ice-cream social. “It keeps me sane.”

Wasn’t that all anyone was looking for—a sense of place? He got back into the cab, and together we watched the blades start churning again through the golden wheat.

When the semi load was full, Sharla came out to take over the combine, and Tester got behind the wheel of the truck. The sun was high as he turned out of the field and back onto the road.

The Wheels of Crime Are Greased With Olive Oil

2015-06-22T20:25:06-04:00

Food fraud isn’t new: ancient laws dictated that sellers of fake seed corn or impure spices be mutilated or burned at the stake. But regulators have recently started to uncover just how extensive the problem is—from extra-virgin olive oil spiked with soybean oil, to hamburgers made with horse meat, to baby formula fortified with melamine. All of this threatens consumer health, and possibly funds even more- nefarious crimes.

Prison Born

2015-06-21T07:30:00-04:00

Alyssa mayer was four months pregnant the day a police officer showed up at her motel room in Kingston, New York. It was late afternoon in August 2013, the sun dragging toward the Catskills on the west side of town. Earlier that week, her boyfriend, who’d been sleeping at her place since he found out about the baby, had missed a curfew check. Both of them had recently gotten out of prison on parole, and weren’t supposed to be around anyone else with a criminal record. With the authorities looking for him, they could both get in trouble. So they’d packed some clothes and driven to a Super 8 and hoped for some idea of what to do next. Mayer was going out to pick up a pizza when she ran into the officer in the hallway.

She and her boyfriend had grown up together around Kingston. The area had been a manufacturing center for IBM until the company started laying off workers in the early 1990s, around the time Mayer was born, leaving not much more than strip malls and fast-food joints, along with rising crime rates, in stretches of the Hudson Valley. After Mayer’s parents split up, when she was a toddler, her mother worked two jobs and would return home seeming distant. Mayer spent a lot of time at her grandmother’s house and, later, on the streets in the rough part of town. In high school, she moved in with a cocaine dealer she met one day at a gas station. He bought her new clothes, manicures, anything she wanted. By the time the relationship ended, she was making sales of her own.

In 2009, when Mayer was 18, she fronted six grams to a friend who had just gotten out of prison. He told her he was broke and needed to make a quick deal. As it turned out, he had already made one with the local narcotics team. Some time later, the cops kicked in the front door of her apartment, and she ended up with a three-year felony sentence.

When Mayer learned she was pregnant, in the summer of 2013, she had already returned to prison twice for parole violations. She called a clinic to make an appointment for an abortion. She knew she wasn’t in the best position to be a parent—she had started a new job and believed she could turn her life around, but she wasn’t sure that her boyfriend wanted to do the same. She didn’t want her child to be raised without a father, like she had been. Once her boyfriend found out, though, he swore to her that they would work things out. So she didn’t show up for the appointment, and instead got a tattoo across her collarbone that read Blessed. Not long after that, they went on the run.

The officer who handcuffed Mayer in the motel didn’t seem to care when she told him she was pregnant. Neither did the parole judge, who charged her with fraternizing with another parolee and skipping curfew and ordered her back to prison. As she stripped down at the intake facility and stepped forward to be searched, she faced the question that thousands of American women do each year: What happens to a baby born in detention?

Over the past four decades, as the inmate population in the United States has grown into the largest in the world, the number of children with a parent in custody has risen to nearly 3 million. For corrections officials and policy makers, those relationships can fade into the background. But not when a child is born on the inside.

For as long as women have been doing time, prisons have had to contend with the children they carry. In 1825, a pregnant inmate named Rachel Welch received a whipping so severe that it was suspected of causing her death not long after she gave birth. Nearly 200 years later, the clashes are less violent but perhaps no less consequential: the vast majority of women who give birth while incarcerated in the United States must hand over their baby within a few hours of delivery, to family, friends, or the foster-care system. For some mothers—even those with short sentences—these separations turn out to be permanent. And with a nearly 800 percent increase in the number of women in custody since the late 1970s, the births are happening on a scale that is hard to ignore. An estimated one in 25 female inmates is pregnant when the prison doors lock behind her.

In recent years, the flood of women into the correctional system has prompted a growing number of states to create programs known as prison nurseries, which allow women to keep their newborn children with them behind bars. Inmates who qualify can raise their babies for a limited time—ranging from one month to three years, but in most states 18 months—in separate housing units on prison grounds. Eight states now offer prison nurseries, all but one of which have opened in the past two decades; Wyoming recently finished constructing a facility that will bring the total to nine.

Research associating participation in the programs with lower recidivism rates among mothers has helped make nurseries a rare shared cause for prisoner advocates and officials looking to manage costs. The idea, though, is more than 100 years old. First popularized around the turn of the 20th century, nurseries flourished for a time, but started to close about 50 years ago, as correctional attitudes became more punitive and prison administrators began to question the costs and the effects on children.

Stephaine Reis and Major, 10 weeks old. Reis was serving time for criminal possession of a controlled substance. (Wayne Lawrence)

Today, as nurseries return to prisons teeming with an unprecedented number of inmates, the questions are even more pressing. Should institutions that limit so many basic rights allow inmates to be active parents? Most important, what does spending the first years of life in prison mean for a child?

Inside the barbed-wire enclosure of Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum-security women’s prison an hour north of New York City, about a dozen of the newest residents played within the confines of a three-foot-high baby gate. The morning program was under way in the prison’s Infant Development Center, where sunlight slanted through flowered curtains. A small boy with a pacifier banged a drum. Staff in smocks and stocking feet circulated, some rocking babies, while a toddler sat in pajamas and surveyed her options: a row of dolls on a shelf, piles of board books, crates of balls and squishy blocks. A menagerie painted on the back wall—a lion, a koala, a monkey swinging from a banana tree—stood out brightly against the cinder block.

Bedford Hills is home to the country’s longest-running prison nursery, which opened with the rest of the facility in 1901. Set amid the colonial estates and horse pastures of Westchester County, the brick buildings sit on a rise surrounded by maple and oak trees, whose leaves were just turning when I visited in October.

The prison is the reception center for all female inmates in New York, so Mayer had learned about the nursery when she landed in Bedford Hills the first time, before she was transferred to a lower-security facility upstate. While at Bedford Hills, she could sometimes see mothers and babies in the yard during their recreation period, or a row of strollers parked outside the Infant Development Center. But as she waited in the county jail a few years later—facing just over a year of additional time, and entering her third trimester—she didn’t know whether she wanted to keep her own baby in prison. “I didn’t want my son to experience what I did,” she told me. “Being locked up all the time.”

Working with an advocate she met through her lawyer, Mayer looked into community programs that would offer an alternative to prison, but none would agree to take her while she was pregnant. She ran through the list of who could take custody while she was gone. Her boyfriend had ended up with extra charges for a gun the officer had found at the motel, and was going to be locked up for another seven years. She didn’t want to ask her family, either: she and her mother still weren’t close, and she didn’t want to burden her grandmother, who had already raised several children and grandchildren and was now caring for her aging husband. So when Mayer arrived again at Bedford Hills, in December 2013, she filled out an application for the nursery. Two months later, she gave birth to her son at the local hospital. She named him DeVanté, after his father. They rode back to the grounds together in a prison van.

I first met Mayer outside the Infant Development Center, where she was picking up her son, who had just turned eight months old, at the end of her morning shift sorting packages and cleaning in the visitor-reception area. Now 24, she wore a pink T-shirt over her prison-issue pants, and her curly brown hair hung loose over the tattoo on her collarbone. DeVanté was propped on her hip, a diaper poking out of his elastic-waist jeans, sucking down a bottle.

The two of them were living with 12 other mothers and their babies in the nursery’s housing unit, one floor in a building set apart from the general population. Although Bedford Hills is a maximum-security facility, most inmates in the nursery program are less serious offenders—the screening process tends to eliminate women with a history of violent crime or involvement with the child-welfare system—and the unit looks more like a college dormitory than a cellblock. Mothers with newborns live along a corridor of double rooms, moving into singles once their babies are four months old. (The age limit for children at Bedford Hills is one year, but women who will be out before their babies turn 18 months old can apply for an extension so they can leave prison with their child.) Mayer and DeVanté shared a small room with pastel walls and a window looking out on the trees beyond the prison fence. Her narrow bed stood a few feet from his crib, photos of her boyfriend taped to a metal locker between them.

After Mayer put DeVanté down for a nap, we sat on couches in the unit’s rec room. Light filtered in from an attached sun porch, where decorations for an up-coming Halloween party were spread across the floor. The mothers spend all their time in the self-contained nursery, except while they are attending their daily programs—GED classes, substance-abuse treatment, career training—when their children are watched in the Infant Development Center. The unit has its own dining room, and a kitchen where the women can cook. They go outside for recreation in a private yard. In the evenings, they play together or watch Netflix in the rec room. DeVanté liked to settle in with a book. “He just wants to sit on my lap,” Mayer said. “He’s a mommy’s boy.”

Despite the toys and bright paint, the nursery is recognizably a prison—a fact made clear by the corrections officer stationed just inside the entrance. The seclusion makes for a sense of community—the women trade advice and babysit for one another when someone wants to go to the gym or the library—but also isolation. And the sleep deprivation that every new mother endures gets worse when all of your neighbors also have newborns crying at night. But Mayer believes that the experience has created a special bond between her and her son. “Nothing has made me want to change before,” she said. “Kids make you want to change.”

They don’t, of course, guarantee that you can. Many nursery participants have older children back home. But administrators point out that the program provides support and structure that women might not have had on the outside. “We’ve had mothers say, ‘I have two other kids, and I didn’t know the color of their eyes,’ ” Jane Silfen, the nursery director, told me. “They can connect with their babies here. If they were on the outside, they’d be doing everything but that.”

“The long-term goal is that women leave better off than they came in,” Karen Graff, the nursery manager, told me. In addition to doing administrative work—ordering baby wipes, coordinating visits from a lactation specialist and a pediatrician, overseeing clothing donations from Westchester residents—Graff, who is a trained social worker, helps mothers with daily challenges that range from soothing a baby who won’t stop crying to navigating tensions with corrections officers. “A lot of my job is just listening,” she said. “So many women have a long history of extreme trauma.” She tries to get them to reflect: How did you get here? How do you want to parent your children while you’re here? What happens when you go home?

The program seems to be working: research has suggested that women who participate in the nursery at Bedford Hills are significantly less likely to return to prison than inmates in the general population. Results like these have drawn interest from other states. A few weeks before my visit, a group of legislators and corrections administrators from Connecticut came to tour the nursery. Members of the state’s general assembly had raised the possibility of starting a similar program at the Connecticut women’s prison, York Correctional Institution, and the delegation had traveled to Bedford Hills to talk with administrators and inmates.

Eric Coleman, a co-chair of the Connecticut legislature’s judiciary committee, told me that he first learned about prison nurseries a few years ago, from a legislative clerk. The clerk had been translating for a group of prosecutors visiting from Russia. When the conversation turned to corrections, the prosecutors expressed surprise at the American policy of separating mothers from their babies. In their country, they told the clerk, children born to inmates could stay right there with them. Why didn’t prisons in the United States allow the same?

Much of the rest of the world manages to uphold public safety without routinely taking newborns from their incarcerated mothers—some with accommodations that would be unthinkable in an American prison. At the Preungesheim Prison in Frankfurt, Germany, women can keep their children on the grounds until they are old enough to go to school. Mothers with older children at home are allowed to spend days with their family as a kind of work release—cooking and cleaning and tucking their kids into bed before checking back into prison for the night.

According to a comprehensive survey from 1987—the low point for American prison nurseries—the U.S. was one of only five responding United Nations member countries (along with the Bahamas, Canada, Liberia, and Suriname) that did not generally provide accommodations for a baby born during a woman’s prison term.

Amanda Losurdo and Keegan, 12 weeks old. Losurdo was serving time for a second DWI offense.(Wayne Lawrence)

This was not always the case. The country’s first prisons exclusively for female inmates opened after the Civil War, built on the idea that specialized attention, rather than warehousing in the attics of male penitentiaries, would be more likely to successfully reintegrate law-breaking women into society. By the 1900s, a new model of detention for women, the reformatory, had cropped up in some 20 states. Whereas the penitentiary model focused on restricting freedoms, reformatories—which mostly held women for moral offenses, like prostitution and “manifest danger of falling into vice”—made it their mission to correct behavior, instructing inmates in everything from physical fitness to table manners to vocational trades.

Reformatory administrators focused on rehabilitating the women in their charge. “We must guard against institutionalizing them,” the board of directors at the Connecticut State Farm for Women declared shortly after the facility opened in 1918. “Our training here must fit them for the work they are to do when they go out.” That training often included child-rearing. Many of these early women’s prisons provided separate facilities where young children could stay with their incarcerated mothers.

Estelle Freedman, a historian at Stanford, told me that prison nurseries had originally been guided by an ideology of maternalism, the belief that innate virtues accompany motherhood. The presence of children in prison, the thinking went, could have a virtuous effect on “fallen women.” But as decades passed, that optimism waned. Drug use increased, as did the population of black inmates in the Northeast and Midwest, where the reformatory movement had concentrated, and Progressive-era reformers gave way to a generation of “corrections officials,” whose attitude toward incarcerated women was fast becoming, as Freedman put it: “There’s nothing we can do about them.”

In the 1960s, a pair of social workers who visited a nursery in West Virginia—where a prominent activist once called the presence of children “a pleasant humanizing influence”—signaled what would soon become the new correctional mind-set: “Prison is no place for a child.”

Over the next few decades, as lawmakers answered Richard Nixon’s call for a war on drugs with zero-tolerance policies and mandatory sentencing minimums, prison terms got longer, and judges were given less discretion about how to dole them out. Women—particularly women of color—counted high among the casualties. Since the 1970s, the female incarceration rate has increased twice as fast as the male rate. At the same time that incarceration became the main answer to a slate of the country’s social problems, the states that still had nurseries stopped operating the programs and repealed the laws that governed them. Through the ’70s and into the early ’80s, every facility except Bedford Hills closed; administrators cited concerns about security, insurance costs, management problems, and child welfare.

As nurseries disappeared, the prison explosion of the 1980s flung families even farther apart. Farming and manufacturing jobs were drying up across the country, and small towns and rural areas competed for prison-construction contracts and the employment opportunities they would create. New facilities were built far from the urban centers where many offenders lived, so inmates who were parents usually ended up more than 100 miles from their families—and because there were so few women’s prisons, many mothers were even farther away. Most did not see their children until they were released. And those reunions, in many cases, were brief: by the early ’90s, the rate of inmates, male and female, re‑arrested within three years of release had reached nearly 70 percent. More than half would return to prison.

Corrections officials were unprepared for the influx of women, many of whom were unmarried mothers of young children. In 1992, the National Institute of Corrections held a training to address the growing population of female prisoners. The superintendent of Bedford Hills stood up to speak about the nursery program, catching the attention of an audience member named Larry Wayne.

Wayne was then the superintendent of the Nebraska Correctional Center for Women, which had a visitation program that allowed children to stay with their mothers a few nights each month. The program not only provided an incentive for good behavior but also had what Wayne called “a therapeutic effect” on the whole population. A nursery seemed to promise even more benefits. Two years later, using Bedford Hills as a model, Nebraska’s corrections department opened a nursery of its own.

Administrators in Nebraska invited Joseph Carlson, a new hire in the criminal-justice department at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, to evaluate their program. His first results, published in 1998, showed a 13 percent drop in misconduct reports among women who joined the nursery. He also found, based on early data, that only about a third as many nursery participants returned to the prison compared with inmates who had been separated from their infants before the program started. “The potential for rehabilitating and training the mother inmate far exceeds the costs to the state and taxpayer,” Carlson wrote. He calculated that nursery supplies, staff salaries, and medical expenses would total about 40 percent less each year than foster care for the babies who would otherwise end up there, and predicted more-significant savings from a decline in recidivism. “If this trend keeps up, the program would pay for itself over time.”

Other corrections departments soon followed Nebraska’s lead. South Dakota opened a nursery the same year that Carlson published his report, and Washington State followed in 1999. When Ohio opened a nursery a few years later, prison administrators cited the promising results in Nebraska. New York released its own data in 2002, reporting that the recidivism rate for participants was half that of the general population. In 2009, Carlson published the 10-year results of his study, which showed that while 50 percent of mothers who had been separated from their newborns had returned to custody, only 17 percent of nursery participants had. By that time, nurseries had opened in Illinois, Indiana, and West Virginia.

Policy makers were interested not only in reducing the number of women in prison but also in improving outcomes for their children. Some research suggested that children of incarcerated parents were at elevated risk for academic, behavioral, and emotional problems, as well as future involvement with the criminal-justice system. More than half of the mothers in Nebraska’s nursery program reported to Carlson that their own mothers had been incarcerated. “The cycle has to be broken,” he wrote, “and education of the mother is one of the first places to begin.” When Wyoming passed a nursery-funding proposal in 2012, the warden of the women’s prison at the time, a former employee of the Nebraska prison, told a local newspaper that he saw the impact of a nursery reaching down generations. “We want [the mothers] to be successful at raising those children,” he said, “so those children don’t repeat the sins of the parents.”

The claim that nurseries could benefit children as well as their mothers has a radical extension: children not only should be allowed in prison but might be better off there. That idea is, unsurprisingly, controversial.

“I don’t think any children should be in prison,” James Dwyer told me last year, as legislators in Connecticut considered a proposal for a nursery. “Period.”

Dwyer, a family-law professor at the College of William & Mary and the country’s most outspoken critic of prison nurseries, disputes the idea that advocates of the programs have child welfare in mind. Screening inmates for fitness as parents based on a history of child abuse or violence, he told me, is missing a larger point: incarceration itself is a marker of unfitness. In a paper published last year in the Utah Law Review, Dwyer further argued that allowing mothers who have broken the law to keep their children in prison is not only unwise but unconstitutional:

There would likely be widespread public outrage if any state began putting mentally disabled or senile adults in prisons with incarcerated relatives in the hope that this would reduce recidivism and provide some benefits to those incompetent adults.

Objections to putting innocent children in prison go back to the heyday of nurseries. “If we were more than three degrees removed from the level of the chimpanzee,” a writer for the Newspaper Enterprise Association declared in 1930, “the bare announcement that thre [sic] was even one baby in prison, anywhere in the land, would stir us to a yell of protest that would rock that prison to its foundations.”

The shortcomings of raising a baby in prison are probably most obvious to those actually doing it. DeVanté was an easy infant, Alyssa Mayer told me, even taking naps when they were closed in their room for the twice-daily attendance count. But now he wanted to crawl around and explore. He had started scooting up and down the corridor outside their room and lurching around the rec room, holding on to couches for support. He would be 14 months old when she was up for release, and she was already thinking about how much catching up they had to do: he had never seen the ocean, never been on a swing. “Sometimes I think I’m selfish for keeping him here, even though he doesn’t know what’s happening,” she said. “If he was home, there’s so much more he would experience.”

Those who advocate on behalf of incarcerated mothers are also quick to point out the drawbacks to parenthood in prison. In February, the Women in Prison Project at the Correctional Association of New York released a report finding that pregnant inmates were routinely shackled during labor and recovery—sometimes with waist chains after a C-section delivery—despite a 2009 law restricting the practice. Other problems are more subtle. Gail Smith, the founder of Chicago Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Mothers, served on an advisory committee for the Illinois prison nursery a decade ago and recalls the “control-oriented thinking” that permeated the early planning process. “Staff members were discussing the ‘parameters’ of breast-feeding and when mothers would and would not be permitted to feed their babies,” she told me. “I was appalled that these administrators could think … that it was appropriate to deny a hungry infant sustenance until the scheduled time convenient for corrections officers.” Advocates argue that funding could be better invested in community-based alternatives to incarceration, where women can parent their newborns without all the restrictions inherent to the prison environment.

Such alternatives, though, remain scarce for pregnant women—and many have no better places for their newborns to go. Most incarcerated mothers, unlike incarcerated fathers, were primary caregivers for their children before getting arrested, and family members or others who take custody are in many cases poor, sick, or overburdened. Researchers don’t know exactly why children of inmates might be at elevated risk for behavioral problems, but evidence suggests that the disruption of family life could play a significant role. For Dwyer, this is a reason for prison officials to encourage adoption.

But short of that extreme, prison nurseries may actually be the most stable environment for babies of incarcerated mothers. New York implemented a legal standard in 1930 for nursery admission matching the one that guides custody decisions outside prison: the best interests of the child. In 1973, an inmate in a New York jail named Kathleen Apgar, who had given birth while awaiting trial for murder, brought a suit against the local sheriff for taking her newborn son from her at the hospital. The state supreme court, ruling in Apgar’s favor, wrote that in addition to adequate food, shelter, and medical care, a child’s best interests included “the constant care and attention of its natural mother”—even if the mother was an accused murderer. That notion, which is at the heart of the disagreement between nursery advocates and critics like Dwyer, is only now being researched in depth for children starting life inside prison.

In 1945, an austrian-born psychoanalyst named René Spitz conducted a seminal study of childhood in incarceration. He used a 16-mm camera to film two groups of babies and toddlers—one being raised by their mothers in the nursery of a penal institution for delinquent girls, and the other by the staff of a “foundling home,” a shelter for abandoned youth. His findings revealed developmental gaps. Even the oldest children in the foundling home, who were between 18 and 30 months old, were incontinent. Few could walk, talk, or eat without assistance. Even though the facility was kept clean and a physician visited every day, more than a quarter of the children died from a disease outbreak.

Which makes what Spitz found in the nursery especially striking: Children who were less than a year old could already speak a few words. They were so mobile that without close supervision, they would shimmy up the bars of their cribs and dive onto the floor. The biggest challenge, Spitz reported, was “how to tame the healthy toddlers’ curiosity and enterprise.”

Spitz searched for an explanation for the contrast. Food and housing conditions in the two institutions were similar, and the children in the foundling home came from more-favorable family backgrounds. The most significant difference? The “nursery provides each child with a mother to the nth degree,” he concluded, “a mother who gives the child everything a good mother does and, beyond that, everything else she has.”

Seventy years later, Spitz’s proposition has gained support from the first longitudinal study of prison-nursery outcomes. Starting in 2003, a team of researchers led by Mary Byrne, a professor at the Columbia University School of Nursing, followed 100 children and their mothers as they went through the nursery program in New York and reentered their communities. (The study participants were drawn from Bedford Hills and a neighboring medium-security facility, where the New York corrections department had opened a second nursery program in 1990. The two programs consolidated a few years ago.)

Byrne’s research is based on attachment theory—a line of thought that surfaced about a decade after Spitz’s study, holding that children develop a secure sense of themselves and others through the stability and attentiveness of caregivers in the first stages of life. The theory suggests that early caregiving can have profound implications on everything from brain development to the quality of future relationships.

For a paper published in 2010, Byrne’s team interviewed nursery mothers and found that only a third had formed secure attachments to their own parents. So what the researchers discovered when these mothers’ babies reached their first birthday was surprising: 60 percent showed signs of secure attachment, on par with a comparison group of children growing up in stable middle-class families outside prison, and a significantly higher rate than that of sample groups of at-risk children. “Their children should be in trouble,” Byrne told me. “But they’re not.”

Looking more closely at the results, the researchers found that children who stayed the longest in the nursery had the best outcomes. About half of the mothers had less than a year left on their sentence when their baby was born, and had returned home by the time of the assessment. The rate of secure attachment among those children, while still not significantly different from the rate for the comparison group of middle-class children, was lower than among their peers who had stayed in the nursery for a full year. Byrne hypothesized that rather than being harmed by the correctional setting, the babies actually benefitted from the structure the prison provided—particularly the restriction of drugs and alcohol, as well as the parenting support their mothers got from staff and other inmates. (The longitudinal study included parenting guidance from a nurse practitioner, which Byrne believes also contributed to the outcomes.)

Crystal Degnitz and Aliviana, 10 weeks old. Degnitz was serving time for attempted burglary. (Wayne Lawrence)

James Dwyer points out that the attachment findings might be optimistic if extrapolated to nursery participants as a whole. The results included only children who were with their mothers at the time of assessment. As Byrne documented in a subsequent paper, more than 40 percent of pairs in the longitudinal study were separated before the mother left prison, in most cases because the baby reached the age limit or because of disciplinary action against the woman. Byrne noted that the misbehavior in those cases did not seem to pose any obvious threat to the children. (At Bedford Hills, the kind of mistakes any sleep-deprived new mother might make—leaving an extra blanket in the crib, drifting off with your baby on your chest—can become grounds for losing custody. The safety and well-being of the babies is the program’s primary concern, administrators told me, and behavior that puts them at even slightly elevated risk cannot be tolerated.)

Although separation in the first year can be damaging, experts say that babies who form secure attachments to their mother early on may be better off even if they are later split up. A study led by a member of Byrne’s team and published last year compared a group of 3-to-5-year-olds who had spent between one and 18 months in a prison nursery with a group of children the same age who, as infants or toddlers, had been separated from their incarcerated mothers. Most of the children were living with their mothers at the time of the study, but some in each group were with alternate caregivers. They faced comparable amounts of trouble at home, measured by the adults’ drinking and drug use, reliance on public assistance, and harsh treatment. But the preschoolers who had lived with their mothers in the nursery displayed significantly lower levels of depressed, anxious, or withdrawn behavior. The study concluded that participation in a nursery program may be a “buffer” against environmental risks when children leave the prison.

Byrne is now starting to analyze how the children in the longitudinal study fare as they go through grade school. What her team has found so far, she told me, is that children raised in the nursery perform no differently from other kids across a number of measures. The study design is limiting; for example, her team couldn’t randomly assign women or children to the nursery. But Byrne’s research suggests that prison nurseries could provide children of incarcerated mothers a better starting place than any existing alternative.

Alyssa Mayer and DeVanté left Bedford Hills at the end of April. Her mother—now the closest family she has in the area, since her grandmother moved out of state—came to pick them up the day they were released. It had been an emotional morning: saying goodbye to people who had become like family to her and her son, and not knowing what would come next. DeVanté had never ridden in a car without bars on the windows. They stopped at a grocery store on the way home, and he gaped as they moved through the aisles, picking out fresh fruits and vegetables. After dinner, she curled up in bed with him to watch TV—for the first time, just the two of them.

Three weeks later, when I visited Mayer at her mother’s house—a tidy split-level about half an hour from Kingston that she bought several years ago—DeVanté seemed to have settled into life on the outside. He swiped on an iPad and babbled at Siri, toddled between rooms playing peekaboo, helped himself to a bowl of candy. His hair had grown out in thick curls, and he had a gap between his front teeth that showed when he smiled. Mayer lifted him onto the kitchen counter and pulled up a Barney sing-along on YouTube. He bobbed his head and pumped his small hands toward the ceiling. She laughed. At Bedford Hills, she’d had a radio that she would play so he could dance, but only a couple of stations came through. “That’s what happens when he listens to hip-hop.”

Mayer told me DeVanté had brought her closer to her mother. “His bond with her is keeping my bond with her,” she said. And she knew she was lucky to have a place to go. Still, she looked forward to getting a job and moving into her own place in the city. She had always wanted to be a nurse, but knew that her record could keep her from getting a license. For now, she was open to anything that would pay the bills. At Bedford Hills, she hadn’t had to worry about things like food and shelter, diapers and child care. Leaving the program, she knew her choices mattered for both of them.

“It’s not like I can just get up and decide, Tonight I’m going to go to the bar,” Mayer said. “He gives me that second thought I should have had a long time ago.” That weekend, her mother had offered to babysit so she could go out with friends, for the first time since she’d come home. They were planning to go to a restaurant in the next town: she wanted to stay away from the nightlife in Kingston. She had broken things off with DeVanté’s father, who was still in prison upstate, because she’d heard he was keeping contacts in the streets. “You can’t be in the middle of picking yourself up and pick somebody else up at the same time,” she said. “I feel like I have more-important things to put my effort into.”

Before I left, she picked up a potted plant from the kitchen window, a ruby globe with spiny ridges on a corrugated green stalk. “It’s a moon cactus,” she said. “It was originally just a regular green cactus, but this happens”—she pointed to the globe—“when it lacks chlorophyll.” The mutation that gives the moon cactus its bright color also keeps it from thriving on its own, so the seedlings have to be grafted onto another succulent so they can grow. She and DeVanté had bought the plant for Mother’s Day. She set it back on the windowsill, where it could soak up the light outside.

The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious

2014-09-10T08:00:00-04:00

At the supermarket near his home in central Virginia, Tom Burford likes to loiter by the display of Red Delicious. He waits until he spots a store manager. Then he picks up one of the glossy apples and, with a flourish, scrapes his fingernail into the wax: T-O-M.

“We can’t sell that now,” the manager protests.

To which Burford replies, in his soft Piedmont drawl: “That’s my point.”

Burford, who is 79 years old, is disinclined to apple destruction. His ancestors scattered apple seeds in the Blue Ridge foothills as far back as 1713, and he grew up with more than 100 types of trees in his backyard orchard. He is the author of Apples of North America, an encyclopedia of heirloom varieties, and travels the country lecturing on horticulture and nursery design. But his preservationist tendencies stop short of the Red Delicious and what he calls the “ramming down the throats of American consumers this disgusting, red, beautiful fruit.”

His words contain the paradox of the Red Delicious: alluring yet undesirable, the most produced and arguably the least popular apple in the United States. It lurks in desolation. Bumped around the bottom of lunch bags as schoolchildren rummage for chips or shrink-wrapped Rice Krispies treats. Waiting by the last bruised banana in a roadside gas station, the only produce for miles. Left untouched on hospital trays, forlorn in the fruit bowl at hotel breakfast buffets, bereft in nests of gift-basket raffia.

For at least 70 years, the Red Delicious has dominated apple production in the United States. But since the turn of the 21st century, as the market has filled with competitors—the Gala, the Fuji, the Honeycrisp—its lead has been narrowing. Annual output has plunged. And even still, a gap is growing between supply and demand from American consumers. Earlier this month, Todd Fryhover, the president of the Washington Apple Commission—whose growers produce the majority of apples in the United States—recommended that this harvest, up to two-thirds of the state’s Red Delicious yield be exported.

How did such an unlikeable apple become the most ubiquitous in the country? And as its dominion here ends, where will it invade next?

* * *

If you want to make an allegory of the Red Delicious, you might see in it the story of America: confident intrusion on inhabited soil, opportunity won in a contest of merit, success achieved through hard work, integrity pulverized in the machinery of industrial capitalism. In the 1870s, Jesse Hiatt, an Iowa farmer, discovered a mutant seedling in his orchard of Yellow Bellflower trees. He chopped it down, but the next season, it sprang back through the dirt. He chopped it down again. It sprang back again. “If thee must grow,” he told the intrepid sprout, “thee may.”

A decade later, Hiatt’s tree bore its first fruit. The apples were elongated globes with red-and-gold striped skin, crisp flesh, and a five-pointed calyx. In 1893, when Stark Brothers’ Nursery of Louisiana, Missouri, held a contest to find a replacement for the Ben Davis—then the most widely planted apple in the country, strapping and good-looking but bland—Hiatt submitted his new variety, which he called the Hawkeye. “My, that’s delicious,” Clarence Stark, the company’s president, reportedly said after his first bite.

But not for the first time in apple lore, one sweet taste precipitated a fall. Stark Brothers’ soon secured the rights to the Hawkeye, changed its name to the Stark Delicious (only after the branding of the Golden Delicious, in 1914, did it become the Red Delicious), and began an ambitious marketing campaign. Over the next two decades, the nursery spent $750,000 to promote the new apple, dispatching traveling salesmen to farms across the country and exhibiting the Delicious at the 1904 World’s Fair. After the completion of the Great Northern Railway, Clarence Stark sent trainloads of seedlings to newly established orchards in the Columbia River Valley, their leaves trembling as the engines rumbled West.

With its hardy rootstocks and juicy, curvaceous fruit, the Red Delicious quickly became a favorite of growers and consumers from coast to coast—and as its commercial success grew, so did its distance from Hiatt’s Hawkeye. In 1923, a New Jersey orchardist wrote to the Starks to report that one limb of a tree he had purchased from the nursery was producing crimson apples while those on the other limbs remained green. A chance genetic mutation that made the apples redden earlier had also given them a deeper, more uniform color, and customers were lining up for a taste. Paul Stark, one of Clarence’s sons, travelled up from Missouri and laid down $6,000 for the limb. News of the deal spread, and soon The Gettysburg Times reported that more than 500 horticulturists from 30 states had gathered at the orchard to discuss the “freak bud” that produced “the marvel apple of the age.” Their meeting marked the beginning of an era of fruit improvement, as growers began to seek out and cultivate similar mutations.

By the 1940s, the Red Delicious had become the country’s most popular apple, with the broad shoulders and lipstick shine of a Golden Age Hollywood star. The cosmetic changes were a boon for industrial agriculturalists: Apples that turned rosy before they were fully ripe could be picked earlier and stored longer, and skins with more red pigment tended to be thicker, which extended shelf life and hid bruises. But as genes for beauty were favored over those for taste, the skins grew tough and bitter around mushy, sugar-soaked flesh. Still, by the 1980s, the Red Delicious made up 75 percent of the crop produced in Washington. By the time selective breeding had taken its toll, according to Burford, a few big nurseries controlled the market, planting decisions were made from the remove of boardrooms, and consumers didn’t have many varieties to choose from. The Red Delicious became “the largest compost-maker in the country,” he said, as shoppers routinely bought the apples and threw them away.

Then in the 1990s, new varieties that American growers had originally developed for overseas markets—including the Gala and the Fuji—began to edge into the domestic market. Shoppers had been “eating with their eyes and not their mouths,” Burford said. And now their taste buds had been awakened. A sudden shift in consumer preferences, paired with growing competition from orchards in China, took the industry by surprise. Between 1997 and 2000, U.S. apple growers lost nearly $800 million in surplus crop. They had “made the apples redder and redder, and prettier and prettier, and they just about bred themselves out of existence,” a marketing director for one Northwestern fruit company told The New York Times, shortly after President Bill Clinton approved the largest bailout in the history of the apple industry.

Since then, Red Delicious production has declined by 40 percent. While the apple is still by far the most common in the U.S.—growers produced 54 million bushels of Red Delicious in 2011, compared to just 33 million bushels of its closest competitor, the Gala—the industry is adjusting to a changing market. Todd Fryhover told me that new quality controls like ethylene inhibitors have helped ensure that apples arrive fresh and crisp in the supermarket, but he also acknowledged that tastes have shifted. Exports of Washington’s Red Delicious yield have hovered around 48 percent in recent years. This year, Fryhover recommends that 60 to 65 percent of the apples be shipped abroad. “You can’t keep producing the same thing all the time and ignore what people are asking for,” he told me. American consumers “want Galas, they want Fujis, they want Goldens, Grannies.” International buyers provide demand for the Red Delicious that “currently doesn’t exist in the U.S.”

Beyond North America, the biggest export markets for the Red Delicious are in Southeast Asia. China, which now produces more apples than any other country in the world, has in recent years been a major buyer of Red Delicious from Washington orchards. There, Fryhover points out, the color red symbolizes good fortune. But according to Tom Burford, the international success of the Red Delicious largely relies on targeting shoppers in places where the fruit is unfamiliar. Like Americans just over a decade ago, he said, “they are unaware of what an apple should express.”

In the homeland of the Red Delicious, meanwhile, consumers are slowly returning to apples they can believe in.

The Cesarean-Industrial Complex

2014-08-13T20:09:44-04:00

Since 1887, when the American Journal of Obstetrics noted that a pregnant woman gored by a bull was likelier to survive than one who had a Cesarean section, surgical childbirth has gone from an act of desperation to the most common major surgery in the U.S. Yet compared with vaginal deliveries, Cesareans have a higher risk of complications, and a higher price—unnecessary C-sections cost insurers an estimated $5 billion a year. And that doesn’t factor in an even greater expense: new research finds C-section babies to be more prone to various long-term health problems.

Doritos Locos Tacos

2014-06-25T21:06:24-04:00

1. Taco Bell invited a group of snack manufacturers to its California headquarters in 2009 for an “ideation session.” Market research had shown that Millennials wanted food to deliver an experience, not just energy, and the company was searching for an innovation their customer base would talk about with friends. A team from Frito-Lay handed over a mock-up of a taco shell sprinkled with Doritos seasoning. “We saw it and knew, Wow,” says Stephanie Perdue, Taco Bell’s vice president of marketing. “This is one of those eureka moments.”

Taco Bell

2. Taco Bell and Frito-Lay paired their R&D teams to come up with the recipe. In one early attempt, they reportedly used a paint gun from Home Depot to blast plain tortilla shells with cheesy dust. The first taste testers rated the concept higher than the experience. “They said, ‘This looks like you went in the back of your kitchen and sprayed nacho-cheese powder on it,’ ” Perdue says. “Which is exactly what we did.”

3. Partnering with a popular brand meant ready customers—and high expectations. “They wanted the best of both worlds,” Perdue says: classic Taco Bell filling in a casing with “the same crunch, the same texture, the same seasoning on your fingers” as a Doritos chip. But an extra-crunchy taco shell could shatter on the factory line or in the hands of a customer, and neon-orange fingers are less appealing when they're preparing your meal—or somebody else’s. Over the course of two years and roughly 40 prototypes, the R&D teams reinforced the tortilla with a new kind of masa, cranked up the nacho flavor to contend with the taste of the ground beef and toppings, and invented a paper “taco holster” to keep employees’ hands clean during assembly.

Taco Bell

4. The Doritos Locos Taco debuted in more than 50 restaurants in California and Toledo, Ohio, and customers helpfully documented the unwrapping. In one YouTube video, a 20‑something New Yorker named Nat Christiana announced—before biting into his taco with a resounding crackle—that he’d driven to Toledo for the experience. Taco Bell used the story in a commercial for the national rollout, declaring the new menu item so alluring that “Nat drove his friends 965 miles to get it.” (After commenters suggested that Christiana get a life, he posted another video to clarify: he’d happened by Toledo on a cross-country road trip, and anyone who would drive more than 900 miles just for a taco is “a crazy person.”)

5. The company also built anticipation for the rollout on Twitter, promising to deliver a truckful of DLTs to the person with the most retweeted #DoritosLocosTacos tweet before the creation arrived in restaurants. When the DLT went on sale, fans posted taco-centric selfies on Instagram—and the logo-bearing holster proved as useful for advertising as for architecture. Taco Bell borrowed some of the photos for another commercial.

6. Perdue says Taco Bell trawls social media to get new product suggestions from fans—and it releases its innovations on the same platforms. A year after launching the original DLT, the company introduced a Cool Ranch version on Vine, the mobile video service, and a few months later it promoted the Fiery DLT with a series of original ads by YouTube “influencers.” In April, the company previewed its latest edition (with chicken filling instead of beef) in a short film on Snapchat.

7. With about 1 million Doritos Locos Tacos sold each day—and more than $1 billion in sales so far—the product launch is the most successful in Taco Bell history. Now fast-food competitors are sacking the chip aisle: Subway started offering a Frito-laden enchilada sandwich in February, Taco John’s introduced the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Burrito in April, and Pizza Hut has reportedly been considering its own partnership with Frito-Lay. (Last spring, in an Ouroboros of collaboration, the snack titan even came out with limited-edition Doritos Locos Tacos–flavored tortilla chips.) The industry has tapped into an “incredibly powerful idea around mash-ups,” Perdue says, “when two brands come together and do something different.”

Supertrees

2014-06-25T21:06:24-04:00

After Singapore declared its independence, in the 1960s, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew defined the new city in contrast to its economic rival: Hong Kong, another liberated British colony and growing global port, was, as he recently recalled, “just tarmac, concrete, tall buildings, and chock-full of people.” Lee set out to attract international development by making Singapore into a “garden city,” planting thousands of trees and camouflaging infrastructure with tropical greenery, which had once carpeted the island. By 2003, inspired by the rise of ecotourism, Singapore’s National Parks Board had conceived of another hybrid of enterprise and environmentalism: a $1 billion initiative to develop three iconic green spaces adjacent to the main business district, on the city’s Marina Bay.

The “Supertrees,” designed by the British landscape-architecture firm Grant Associates on the site of a former parking lot, are the focal point of the first and largest of the Gardens by the Bay. They loom over 133 acres of blooms and foliage: 18 steel-and-concrete trunks between 80 and 160 feet high, draped in climbing vines and flowers and crowned with zigzagging wire branches. Lit up at night, the Supertrees look like futuristic cocktail glasses.

Andrew Grant, the lead design director, was inspired when he visited his brother in Australia and toured the Valley of the Giants, where an aerial walkway winds through a canopy of towering karri and tingle trees. His creative vision also borrowed from Princess Mononoke, an anime film about the human destruction of an enchanted forest and the hero’s quest to revive it. “We merged the physical reference … with the magical experience,” says Keith French, the project director. Since the gardens opened to the public in 2012, the Supertrees have drawn millions of visitors to the intersection of realism and fantasy, nature and the built environment.

1. Photovoltaic cells convert sunlight to electricity for lighting the Supertrees at night. 2. Trunks channel and release biomass exhaust from two conservatories on the edge of the bay, helping to control the climate for 250,000 rare plants from around the world. 3. An aerial walkway transports visitors between gardens inside the trees and an international food court—offering milkshakes, curry laksa, and a panoramic view—atop the tallest structure. 4. Canopies provide shade for visitors on the ground below.

5. Grant Associates worked with National Parks Board horticulturists to collect more than 200 plant species for the surface of the tree trunks and the interior gardens, including orchids from Ecuador, cacti from Costa Rica, and tropical climbers from Florida and Southeast Asia.

Meanwhile in San Francisco

2014-06-25T21:06:24-04:00

A chapter about two communities off Mission Avenue reveals a divide wider than the single block between them. (Wendy MacNaughton/Chronicle)

If you rode the commuter train between San Francisco and Oakland in the late aughts, you might have noticed Wendy MacNaughton sitting across the aisle, quietly drawing you in her sketchbook. Or more likely, you didn’t notice. MacNaughton, then crossing the Bay twice daily for her job at an advertising agency, was teaching herself a less attention-grabbing, more dynamic art form: capturing subjects on the move, drawing without looking down, using her pen not just to express but to observe.

Now a New York Times best-selling illustrator, MacNaughton has collected her observations in a new book, Meanwhile in San Francisco. She started the project in 2010 as a series for the online magazine The Rumpus, toting her sketchbook to the public library and to chess games in the park, depicting communities and citizens in whimsical watercolor portraits and handwritten snippets of dialogue. Together, the “illustrated documentaries” reveal a city not featured in newspapers or travel guides. “Drawing, for me, is this vehicle to look,” she says. “It forces me to slow down and pay attention to things that I might not otherwise notice.”

Portraits of Bill and Bigface, two of the residents MacNaughton met while reporting on Sixth Street. (Wendy MacNaughton/Chronicle)

For a chapter on Fifth and Sixth Streets, near the Mission District—where latte-sipping techies are separated from the occupants of shelters and low-budget hotels by only a single block—MacNaughton spent almost a month standing on street corners and leaning against buildings, using up four or five Micron pens each day. She dressed neutrally in the hopes of slipping undetected between the communities. But a sketchbook is more approachable than a reporter’s notepad or camera, she says, and “people constantly come up to me and ask me what I’m drawing.” That interaction is now central to her process: whereas she once captioned her sketches of train passengers with what she imagined they were thinking (“I was totally projecting,” she says, “You know, I'm so unhappy in my job”), listening exposes more than she can see.

After a day in the field, MacNaughton brings the sketches back to her studio to paint while the colors are still vivid in her memory. She uses watercolors for their “immediate mark on the page.” Then she lays out the drawings alongside her notes from curbside encounters and overheard conversations (neatly reprinted and cut into strips), and arranges them into a narrative. MacNaughton’s family goes back five generations in San Francisco, but Meanwhile represents what she discovered only by drawing it: “Everybody has a city,” she says. “And they’re all so different. And they’re all going on at the exact same time, in the exact same place.”

A self-portrait of MacNaughton at work on Meanwhile in San Francisco. She spent several years observing and sketching more than a dozen locations across the city. (Wendy MacNaughton/Chronicle)

Our Gullible Brains

2014-04-16T22:02:39-04:00

Can a person be bright? Cold? Soft? Sweet? When the psychologists Solomon Asch and Harriet Nerlove posed these questions to a group of 3- and 4-year-olds in 1960, the response, on the whole, was skeptical. “Poor people are cold because they have no clothes,” one child said. By second or third grade, though, children could understand the psychological meanings of these so-called double-function terms and how they relate to the physical world [1].

“Embodied cognition” is a subset of psychological research that explores the way physical sensations can evoke abstract concepts. Take warmth, for example. In one study from 2008, a research assistant asked subjects to hold her cup of coffee (either hot or iced) and then had them fill out a personality-impression questionnaire. Subjects who had held a hot cup judged others to be more caring and generous than did those who had held a cold one [2].

Researchers have also found that weight seems to correspond with perceived significance, giving new credence to the expression a loaded question. Evaluating information on a heavy clipboard has been shown to increase estimates of monetary value [3]. Heavy clipboards also add heft to the résumés of job candidates, according to another study, which further found that subjects who completed a sandpaper-covered puzzle rated subsequent social interactions as more difficult than did those who worked on a nonabrasive version [4]. And bad taste may offend more than the palate: study subjects who drank a bitter herbal tonic made harsher moral judgments about fictional scenarios than those who drank berry punch [5].

The field of social psychology has been criticized for valuing quirky results over methodological rigor, but biological connections do help explain behavior. Researchers have discovered that moral disgust stimulates the same facial muscles that unpleasant tastes do [6]; that activity in the part of the brain that lights up when you touch a rough surface correlates with judgments of harshness in social interactions [7]; and that the insula, which processes both temperature and trustworthiness, appears to be a neural link between physical and interpersonal warmth [8].

If these findings still seem dubious, it’s worth noting that some similar research has been debunked. In 2012, an article in this magazine profiled a University of Pennsylvania researcher who had recently discredited one study that connected higher physical vantage points—the top of an escalator versus the bottom, say—with more-generous behavior. But you might also consider your proximity to salt water—a recent study has found that smelling something fishy (literally, fish) can provoke suspicion [9].

The Studies:

[1] Asch and Nerlove, “The Development of Double Function Terms in Children” (Perspectives in Psychological Theory, 1960)

[2] Williams and Bargh, “Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth” (Science, Oct. 2008)

[3] Jostmann et al., “Weight as an Embodiment of Importance” (Psychological Science, Sept. 2009)

[4] Ackerman et al., “Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions” (Science, June 2010)

[5] Eskine et al., “The Bitter Truth About Morality: Virtue, Not Vice, Makes a Bland Beverage Taste Nice” (plos One, July 2012)

[6] Chapman et al., “In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust” (Science, Feb. 2009)

[7] Schaefer et al., “Rough Primes and Rough Conversations: Evidence for a Modality-Specific Basis to Mental Metaphors” (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Oct. 2013)

[8] Kang et al., “Physical Temperature Effects on Trust Behavior: The Role of Insula” (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Sept. 2011)

[9] Lee and Schwarz, “Bidirectionality, Mediation, and Moderation of Metaphorical Effects: The Embodiment of Social Suspicion and Fishy Smells” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Nov. 2012)

Why You Can't Keep a Secret

2014-02-19T21:15:28-05:00

Though his 18-year-old patient Ida Bauer was “in the first bloom of youth,” Sigmund Freud wrote in 1905, she had come to him suffering from coughing fits and episodes of speechlessness. She’d become depressed and withdrawn, even hinting at suicide. During one session, as he tried to help her uncover the source of her sickness, Freud observed Bauer toying with a small handbag. Interpreting the act as an expression of repressed desire, Freud concluded, “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”

Sometimes a handbag is just a handbag, but modern research does support the idea that secrecy can be a source of mental and physical distress. Keeping a secret, as the idiom suggests, requires constant effort. In one recent study, subjects asked to conceal their sexual orientation in an interview performed worse on a spatial-ability task, reacted more rudely to criticism, and gave up sooner in a test of handgrip endurance [1]. And the bigger the secret, the harder it is to keep. Another study found that subjects asked to recall a meaningful secret perceived hills to be steeper and distances to be longer than those asked to recall a trivial secret. When researchers requested help moving books from their lab, the subjects harboring meaningful secrets lifted fewer stacks [2].

All of that mental exertion might actually wear a body down: research shows an association between keeping an emotionally charged secret and ailments ranging from the common cold to chronic diseases [3]. Other evidence in favor of disclosure includes multiple studies showing that writing about a traumatic experience can boost the immune system [4], and the finding that teens who confide in a parent or close friend report fewer physical complaints and less delinquent behavior, loneliness, and depression than those who sit on their secrets [5].

One reason secret keeping is such hard work is that secrets, like unwanted thoughts, tend to take up more brain space the more one tries not to think about them. But not everyone is equally prone to this self-defeating cycle. Researchers have identified a small class of “repressors,” who experience fewer intrusive thoughts about sensitive information they are suppressing: these clandestine elite may keep their secrets so tightly wrapped that they manage to hide them even from themselves [6].

The Studies:

[1] Critcher and Ferguson, “The Cost of Keeping It Hidden” (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, online June 2013)

[2] Slepian et al., “The Physical Burdens of Secrecy” (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Nov. 2012)

[3] Finkenauer and Rimé, “Keeping Emotional Memories Secret” (Journal of Health Psychology, Jan. 1998)

[4] Pennebaker, “Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process” (Psychological Science, May 1997)

[5] Frijns et al., “Shared Secrets Versus Secrets Kept Private Are Linked to Better Adolescent Adjustment” (Journal of Adolescence, Feb. 2013)

[6] Geraerts et al., “Suppression of Intrusive Thoughts and Working Memory Capacity in Repressive Coping” (American Journal of Psychology, Summer 2007)

How Women Change Men

2013-11-20T21:07:21-05:00

Soon after Jay Z welcomed his first child, Blue Ivy Carter, last year, a poem the rapper had reportedly dedicated to his new baby girl zipped around the Internet. “Before I got in the game, made a change, and got rich / I didn’t think hard about using the word B----,” it opened. “I rapped, I flipped it, I sold it, I lived it / now with my daughter in this world / I curse those that give it.” The poem turned out to be a hoax, but a spate of recent research backs the idea that close relationships with women can dramatically sway men’s attitudes and behavior, at home and at work, for better and for worse:

Male CEOs typically pay their employees less and themselves more after having sons, but this trend doesn’t hold with daughters. In fact, male CEOs with firstborn daughters actually pay their employees more, giving female employees the biggest raises [1].

Men who have daughters also grow less attached to traditional gender roles: they become less likely to agree with the statement that “a woman’s place is in the home,” for instance, and more likely to agree that men should wash dishes and do other chores [2].

Having a sister, however, has the opposite effect, making men more supportive of traditional gender roles, more conservative politically, and less likely to perform housework [3].

Men with stay-at-home wives likewise favor a traditional division of labor. They tend to disapprove of women in the workplace, judge organizations with more female employees to be operating less smoothly, and show less interest in applying to companies led by female executives. They also more frequently deny promotions to qualified women [4].

Working with women, on the other hand, can encourage egalitarianism at home. Men take on more housework after switching from a male-dominated occupation, like construction or engineering, to a female-dominated one, like nursing or teaching, even after controlling for changes in income and hours [5].

But nontraditional career tracks don’t always mean nontraditional domestic roles: men whose wives outearn them actually do a smaller share of housework than their breadwinner peers [6].

Evidently, the takeaway for women who want advancement at work and chore-sharing at home is this: work for a male CEO with lots of daughters, no sisters, and a working wife, and marry a man with plenty of female colleagues and a paycheck that’s bigger than yours.

The Studies:

[1] Dahl et al., “Fatherhood and Managerial Style: How a Male CEO’s Children Affect the Wages of His Employees” (Administrative Science Quarterly, Dec. 2012)

[2] Shafer and Malhotra, “The Effect of a Child’s Sex on Support for Traditional Gender Roles” (Social Forces, Sept. 2011)

[3] Healy and Malhotra, “Childhood Socialization and Political Attitudes: Evidence From a Natural Experiment” (The Journal of Politics, Oct. 2013)

[4] Desai et al., “The Organizational Implications of a Traditional Marriage: Can a Domestic Traditionalist by Night Be an Organizational Egalitarian by Day?” (Kenan-Flagler Research Paper, March 2012)

[5] McClintock, “Gender-Atypical Occupations and Time Spent on Housework: Doing Gender or Doing Chores?” (presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association,
Aug. 2013)

[6] Bertrand et al., “Gender Identity and Relative Income Within Households” (NBER Working Paper, May 2013)

Why You Look Like Your Dog

2013-10-23T19:08:17-04:00

Last fall, a 77-pound dachshund named Obie visited the Today show for a spot on pet obesity. “No doubt,” a veterinarian announced to Al Roker as they stood over the table where Obie lay splayed like a pork loin, “this is the biggest dachshund I’ve ever seen.” Roker wondered aloud whether the biggest dachshund might be part of a bigger problem: “Is there a correlation between overweight pet owners and overweight pets?”

Plenty of research has established that pets are good for our health; less is known about whether we might be bad for theirs. But Roker may be on to something. According to one recent study, as U.S. obesity rates shot up over the past half century, the average weight of animals living among humans also increased [1]. Another study linked pet owners’ body mass indexes to their dogs’ fat accumulation [2], backing up a 1970 survey that found that obese dogs were much more likely to be owned by obese people than by those “of normal physique” [3].

Could there be something to the old adage that people resemble their pets? The phenomenon has been amply documented. Researchers around the world have repeatedly found that strangers can match photos of dogs with photos of their owners at a rate well above chance [4]. Perhaps people are drawn to animals that look like them. In a study of female college students, those with longer hair judged flop-eared dogs—spaniels, beagles—to be more attractive, friendly, and intelligent than dogs with pointy ears; women with shorter hair concluded the opposite [5]. And the apparent affinity between owners and pets is more than fur-deep: One analysis found self-described “dog people” to be less neurotic than “cat people,” who were more curious [6]. Another study, which cross-referenced personality-test scores and breed preferences, noted that disagreeable people favored aggressive dogs [7].

While the Law of Attraction—like attracts like, or in this case, adopts like—might explain some of these similarities, there's reason to think pets also emulate their owners. A 2011 study found that dogs tasked with opening a door preferred whichever of two methods of door-opening they had just observed their owners use (head or hands/paws), even when offered a treat for the opposite choice. Researchers concluded that dogs possess an “automatic imitation” instinct that can override both natural behavior and self-interest [8]. Dogs are also more susceptible to yawn contagion (an indicator of social attachment) when it’s their master, rather than a stranger, doing the yawning [9].

Which brings us, finally, to kiss contagion: thanks in part to the slobbery smooches canines lavish on their human companions, people appear to share more types of skin bacteria with their dogs than with their own children [10].

The Studies:

[1] Klimentidis et al., “Canaries in the Coal Mine” (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, June 2011)

[2] Nijland et al., “Overweight in Dogs, but Not in Cats, Is Related to Overweight in Their Owners” (Public Health Nutrition, Jan. 2010)

[3] Mason, “Obesity in Pet Dogs” (The Veterinary Record, May 1970)

[4] Nakajima et al., “Dogs Look Like Their Owners” (Anthrozoös, June 2009)

[5] Coren, “Do People Look Like Their Dogs?” (Anthrozoös, 1999)

[6] Gosling et al., “Personalities of Self-Identified ‘Dog People’ and ‘Cat People’ ” (Anthrozoös, Sept. 2010)

[7] Egan and MacKenzie, “Does Personality, Delinquency, or Mating Effort Necessarily Dictate a Preference for an Aggressive Dog?” (Anthrozoös, June 2012)

[8] Range et al., “Automatic Imitation in Dogs” (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Jan. 2011)

[9] Romero et al., “Familiarity Bias and Physiological Responses in Contagious Yawning by Dogs Support Link to Empathy” (plos One, Aug. 2013)

[10] Song et al., “Cohabiting Family Members Share Microbiota With One Another and With Their Dogs” (eLife, April 2013)

Weeping of a Disappointed Womb

2013-10-02T13:15:00-04:00

(Wikimedia)

In 1968, eight years after the FDA approved the birth control pill and one year after it was legalized for unmarried women, the publishing house of the LDS church released Living, Loving, and Marrying, an instructional handbook for youth of the faith. In a chapter titled “What Every Young Girl Should Know,” Lindsay R. Curtis, M.D., an OB-GYN and Mormon missionary, illustrated an egg’s journey from the ovaries with a series of pen-and-ink cartoons. If the egg is fertilized, one cartoon shows, she will wear lipstick and a veil as she meets her sperm groom in the Fallopian tube.

(Living, Loving, and Marrying, 1968)

But no honeymoon in the uterus awaits the unfertilized egg. She will tumble from the body alone, her eyes wide with terror, reaching back with her small egg hands toward the chute that ejected her. A caption explains:

If the egg that is given off by the ovary is not fertilized, it merely passes on through the uterus, out the vagina, and is lost. The outer cells lining the uterus are then discarded for the month along with blood that is released as they tear themselves away from the wall. This is called “menstrual flow.” It is said that menstruation is the “weeping of a disappointed womb,” when pregnancy does not occur.

(Living, Loving, and Marrying, 1968)

Curtis, who co-authored the book with a family counselor named Wayne J. Anderson, knew something about wombs. He was the first OB/GYN resident at the University of Utah, and led the women’s surgical section at Walter Reed hospital; he would go on to produce a nationally syndicated medical-advice column, “For Women Only,” and popular titles including Sensible Sex and Pregnant and Lovin’ It. Wombs, he surely knew, have no tear ducts. But while at odds with the latest medical wisdom, the portrayal of menstruation as malfunction was well timed.

Living, Loving, and Marrying arrived in bookstores against the tides of social change. Divorce rates were rising as states started to loosen the legal grounds for dissolution, making way for the next decade’s crop of no-fault laws. Women were gaining access to contraception and opportunities in the workplace. Birth rates were dropping. Curtis and Anderson dedicated their book to those couples who “seriously set about this business of ‘making our marriage work.’” And if marriage was a business, the reproductive system was its factory floor.

Past fears of a changing social order had inspired similar messages about procreation. A century before Living, Loving, and Marrying, Brigham Young delivered a sermon in Tooele, Utah, comparing birth control to infanticide. He warned that “the attempts to destroy and dry up the fountains of life,” among other “unnatural” behaviors, “are fast destroying the American element of the nation; it is passing away before the increase of the more healthy, robust, honest, and less sinful class of the people which are pouring into the country daily from the Old World.”

Young’s message was a call to industry, probing the fresh wounds and insecurities of a country in the early stages of Reconstruction. An empty womb was a failure of patriotism: If an egg is lost—destroyed, dried up, passed away—so too is the nation. Like Curtis and Anderson, Young talked about the missed opportunity of pregnancy in tones of violence, destruction, and disappointment.

The anthropologist Emily Martin has argued that such descriptions pervade even scientific literature, reflecting subtle assumptions about gender. “Menstruation not only carries with it the connotation of a productive system that has failed to produce, it also carries the idea of production gone awry, making products of no use, not to specification, unsalable, wasted, scrap,” she writes in The Woman in the Body. She points, for example, to the work of Walter Heape, a late-19th-century English biologist who studied the periods of langur monkeys. Heape determined that at the end of each cycle, the lining of the uterus:

… is cast away, leaving behind a ragged wreck of tissue, torn glands, ruptured vessels, jagged edges of stroma, and masses of blood corpuscles, which it would seem hardly possible to heal satisfactorily without the aid of surgical treatment.

He marveled at the “powers of recuperation” required to recover from “such a completely devastating action as menstruation.” The physical result of a fertilized egg, we understand, is something generated, developed, birthed. That of an unfertilized egg is something purged. Martin notes that modern medical textbooks still describe menstrual bleeding with the language of pathology: While men “produce” sperm, women “shed” eggs.

Beyond weeping wombs, innumerable myths about menstruation fostered the idea that a period is somehow deviant, unnatural—even supernatural. A menstruating woman’s canned tomatoes will spoil, her jams and jellies will fail to set, her bread dough won’t rise. Her blood can cure leprosy or headaches, or be turned into a potion that will bind a man in love. The folklore endures. When Playtex surveyed Canadian women last fall to find out what advice they received when they got their periods, the responses included warnings against getting a cavity fixed while on your period (because the dental filling will fall out) or getting a perm (because your hair won’t curl). Earlier this year, Kimberly-Clark launched a campaign called “Generation Know” under their Kotex brand, with a sleek website and ad series intended to correct common misinformation about periods.

The project has a long history to revise. Circa AD 77-79, Pliny the Elder chronicled the dangerous powers of menstruation in his Natural History:

On the approach of a woman in this state, must will become sour, seeds which are touched by her become sterile, grafts wither away, garden plants are parched up, and the fruit will fall from the tree beneath which she sits. Her very look, even, will dim the brightness of mirrors, blunt the edge of steel, and take away the polish from ivory. A swarm of bees, if looked upon by her, will die immediately.

For the record, Pliny also believed that kissing a mule could remedy a cold, and advocated healing fractures with a paste of honey and charred field mice. Though his guess is as good as any for what’s happening to the bees.

American Support for Drones—by the Numbers

2013-06-19T22:05:15-04:00

Welcome to Marlboro Country: Philip Morris Stakes a Last Claim in the West

2013-03-15T10:25:35-04:00

The iconic cowboy disappeared from television decades ago. But with the help of a Montana dude ranch, the cigarette company is keeping his legend alive.

Philip Morris Inc.

The invitation reached Rachel Munyon as she returned home to her California apartment one evening in December 2011. Ripping open the cardboard flap of the thick Fed-Ex express envelope, she pulled out a letter.

"Congratulations!" it read: she was a winner in Marlboro's "Rock the Ranch" sweepstakes. All she had to do was fill out the enclosed paperwork and submit to a background check, and she and one guest of her choice would be heading off on a four-day, all-expense-paid ranch vacation. "I just started screaming and freaking out and, like, jumping up and down," she told me.

Rachel called her boyfriend to share the news, and later that night, the two went out to dinner and completed the stack of forms. Several weeks later, they received a package with their finalized itineraries, round-trip plane tickets, a check for the associated taxes, and a pair of MasterCard gift cards to cover the cost of checking luggage. Then came a box holding two red-and-black wheeled duffel bags.

In February, the couple boarded a flight to southern Montana, wearing baseball caps emblazoned with the logo of the Crazy Mountain Ranch.They would join roughly a hundred other guests from across the country, some of the thousands who arrive each year for a luxury stay in the heart of the Rockies, courtesy of Philip Morris USA.

Though most of Marlboro's domestic tobacco is grown in the silt of Appalachia, the brand has long carried a flavor of the American West. The marketing concept goes back to the 1950s, when Philip Morris added filter tips to the product line in response to the first studies linking smoking and lung cancer. Early market research suggested that the public viewed filters as effective but effeminate, and Marlboro, which for decades had been sold as a premium ladies' cigarette, needed a way to stand out from a new set of competitors.

Philip Morris turned to the Chicago-based Leo Burnett agency, whose advertisers dropped Marlboro's price point and long-time "Mild as May" slogan, and staged a new campaign featuring icons of male autonomy: sun-cured men repairing cars, cleaning guns, cupping a flame in tattooed hands, or squinting into the distance over whirls of smoke.

Sales increased 3,241 percent in 1955, the year the new ads rolled out. Those featuring the cowboy -- "an almost universal symbol of admired masculinity," as Leo Burnett wrote to Philip Morris's advertising director in a letter outlining the campaign -- drew the strongest response.

By the early 1960s, just before the Surgeon General's advisory committee issued its verdict on the health risks of smoking, the theme had evolved into the mythical "Marlboro Country," where cowboys in white hats rode horseback between golden grass and blue skies, or sat around a campfire with an open red-topped pack posed next to the crackling flames. The message beckoned over airwaves and from newspaper pages: "Come to where the flavor is."

Then the ads disappeared -- first from broadcast media after Congress passed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act in 1970, and later from billboards and other outdoor spaces as part of the Master Settlement Agreement in the late 1990s. When the FDA won regulatory control over the tobacco industry a few years ago, the agency tightened limits on the sale of branded merchandise and banned sponsorships of sporting and entertainment events. Tobacco companies also pulled campaigns from many print publications to comply with rules against targeting youth.

As traditional advertising avenues were cut off one by one, Philip Morris started to develop more-direct methods of customer outreach. In the early 1970s, a Marlboro chuck wagon toured the state fair circuit, serving up sourdough biscuits and publicity. The next decade saw the development of the company's customer database, a repository of smoker information drawn from bar giveaways and event signups.

Then in the 1990s, with the Master Settlement looming and the lobby for FDA regulation underway, attention shifted to an emerging business strategy known as "relationship marketing." Where traditional marketing emphasized individual sales, this new model traded in human economics:investments in individual customers, through direct communication and rewards, could pay off in long-term loyalty and word-of-mouth promotion. And so, in the spirit of new enterprise, Marlboro again looked West.

***

Crazy Mountain Ranch is settled beneath the eponymous range -- named, legend goes, after a madwoman who disappeared in its jagged slopes during Westward expansion. Peaks cut into the sky like sawteeth. The ranch's lodge-pole entrance gate straddles grassy foothills about 30 miles northwest of Livingston, Montana, an hour and a half from the nearest commercial airport, at the end of a gravel road that curls like smoke around the rises. Nick Fullerton, the architect who designed the original guest facilities, says that the drive "takes you out of this world that we're in today, and kind of prepares you for the sight once you get there."

The dude operation, surrounded by 18,000 acres of secluded grassland and a working cattle outfit, was known as Deadrock Guest Ranch until Philip Morris bought the place from the publishing entrepreneur Glenn Patch in 2000. Patch had borrowed the name "Deadrock" from the fictional town in the novels of Tom McGuane -- who owns a ranch just over the county line -- for his own creative venture: a full-scale recreation of a 19th-century frontier settlement. He hired Fullerton for the task in the early 1990s. The architect's team hauled together the remains of a few crumbling homesteads on the property, and rigged new structures with reclaimed materials and antique furnishings scavenged from around the region. The town, which Philip Morris later expanded, features some 20 buildings -- including a saloon, a two-story hotel, and a stone jail -- with period facades hiding modern plumbing and electrical wiring.

The ranch operates as a customer retreat eight months out of the year, shutting down during the cold, gray stretch before the first snow falls and again while grass fights through the melting slush. Every rugged detail is carefully calibrated. Employees dressed in red western shirts and cowboy boots pick up guests and their duffel bags from the airport in a convoy of tour buses. More employees, on horseback, wait along a stretch of road between the entrance gate and the frontier town. A dispatcher radios the riders after the convoy passes through the gate, and when the first bus crests the hill just before town, they gallop out from behind trees, whips cracking, to lead guests down the slope onto main street.

When Rachel and her boyfriend arrived in the ice of February, the horses were stabled, but the buses were met by more employees in red shirts and boots who carried their bags into private rooms. Each bed was piled with gifts: a Stetson hat, boots, wool socks, a heavy and light jacket, and five packs of each guest's preferred Marlboro-brand cigarettes, selected in the pre-trip paperwork. (The pile used to include a number of smaller gifts, but the ranch recently switched to a system of wooden tokens, good for $150, which can be used to "purchase" digital cameras, coffee mugs, t-shirts, and other souvenirs at the General Store.) The only place guests could spend their own money was inside the saloon bathroom, where a quarter-fed vending machine dispensed pain medication.

Depending on the season, daytime activities at the ranch include trips to nearby Yellowstone Park, skeet shooting, river rafting, scenic horseback rides, and cross-country skiing. During their winter visit, Rachel and her boyfriend mushed a dog sled, rode a zip line between stands of Ponderosa pines, and spent a day snowmobiling on the upper bounds of the property. "I was calling my mom every day saying, I can't believe this, it's getting better!" she said. After gourmet dinners, guests gathered for parties in the saloon with live music, entertainment, and an open bar. One night,employees built a bonfire on an outdoor patio and passed out skewers of chicken and rattlesnake meat, while wood and tobacco plumes twisted toward the stars.

***

Rachel discovered the Crazy Mountain Ranch eight years ago, when she turned 21 and logged onto Marlboro's Web site for the first time. She'd started smoking Marlboro Menthols when she was 17, but Philip Morris, like all the major U.S. tobacco companies, restricts direct marketing communications to smokers 21 or older -- a voluntary measure, according to the company, to prevent contact with an underage audience. (The site's age-verification form, which requires each visitor to enter his or her name, address, last four social-security digits, and preferred smoke or smokeless product, is also a funnel to the mailing list.)

On the site, Rachel came across a gallery of ranch photos, showing people having fun against a backdrop of beautiful scenery. She had never been to Montana, but had always loved Western movies and cowboys. The site shared few details about how to visit, though, and none of the friends or family members she asked had heard about the place. Then out one night in early 2011, she met a guy whose girlfriend had won a trip and brought him along. He raved about the experience, and Rachel was mesmerized. She scoured the web for information in past winners' blogs, and started placing daily calls to Marlboro's 800 number, bombarding the customer service representatives with her interest in going.After almost a year of persistence, she received a form for the limited-entry Rock the Ranch sweepstakes.

Marlboro selects other winners straight from the customer database, in a process David Sylvia, a spokesman for Altria Group -- the parent company of Philip Morris USA -- would describe only as "more thought than randomness." Mike, an IT consultant from Alabama whose friend Shawn received an unsolicited invitation seven years ago and invited him as a guest, thought at first that the offer must be a scam. Shawn had signed up for a Marlboro promotion at a bar one night in college, about 10 years before, but had since quit smoking. Now he was being offered the vacation of a lifetime, for free?

"It sounded too good to be true," Mike told me. "There's a catch. We're going to get out there, and they're going to try to sell us a timeshare, or there's going to be some brainwashing session for Philip Morris." He completed the required paperwork and packed his things in the red luggage that arrived one day in the mail. But, he said, "I think I was still skeptical until we got on the plane."

He arrived at the ranch to find scarcely a trace of the Marlboro brand.The ranch property isn't exempt from federal or state regulations, like the law that any object featuring the brand -- right down to the dinner menus -- must also carry a warning from the Surgeon General. But Philip Morris also seems to avoid subtler opportunities to push their products,even asking employees who smoke to take cigarette breaks in an alley between buildings, out of guests' sight.

Mike's suspicions faded as he shot clay pigeons, tried out a branding iron, and hiked with Shawn through the mountains. "In retrospect, and prior, certainly, to going on the trip, I just kept going over in my mind: what could possibly be their motive for doing this?" he said. "During the trip itself, it was not really something that was on your mind, just because you're having so much fun."

This hands-off approach, of course, has its own marketing role. Tobacco companies have traditionally hitched their brands to abstract concepts, appealing to the desires and aspirations of their intended audiences as much as to their taste preferences. Relationship marketing, which exploded at the close of the 20th century, presented an opportunity to relate those ideas without the frame of a television screen or magazine spread. Camel targeted its base of trend-conscious urbanites with a "VIP Club" whose members could access special travel deals and product discounts. Virginia Slims, whose cigarettes were usually featured in ads dangling from the fingertips of attractive, fashionable young women, solicited sweepstakes entries for a $50,000 shopping spree.

Marlboro bought up acreage. "One of the core elements of the Marlboro brand are these ideas of spirit, freedom, and adventure," Sylvia said. "The goal of the ranch out in Montana is to really allow the consumers to really experience those elements firsthand."

Internal documents made public as part of the Master Settlement Agreement explain Marlboro's own stake. In the two years prior to the purchase of the Crazy Mountain Ranch, Philip Morris had rented Patch's land -- along with another ranch in Montana's Gallatin Valley and a third in Arizona -- for occasional smoker promotions. Company communications discussing future marketing strategies refer to the success of the ranch promotions in developing loyalty and conversation among those most coveted demographic groups: young smokers and their friends.

"This program generated news and excitement among young adult smokers," one executive wrote to Marlboro's vice president in a memo discussing the planned ranch purchase. According to post-trip surveys, ranch visits increased the likelihood that both winners and guests -- particularly those between 21 and 29 -- would purchase Marlboro in the future. Trip winners also went on to purchase Marlboro significantly more often than other types of cigarettes. The vast majority of visitors reported leaving the ranch with an improved image of the brand, and a high likelihood of telling their friends back home about the experience. (Both winners and guests must be 21 or older to be eligible for the trip, but Sylvia declined to comment on whether the invitations target young customers in particular.)

Marlboro has become the top player in the American tobacco market -- controlling 43 percent of retail as of 2012 -- with a strong base of young and loyal customers. Marty Barrington, the CEO of Altria Group, announced at a consumer conference last fall that Marlboro had outscored every major competitor for brand equity -- a measure of customers' likelihood to choose a product over similar options in the marketplace.

He also highlighted the "excellent demographics" of Marlboro smokers: the brand's share of 21- to 29-year-olds is higher than those of the two largest competitors combined. While the approximate retail value for sweepstakes prizes in the last few years has been roughly $5,000, a single pack-a-day smoker can contribute tens of thousands of dollars to Big Tobacco's coffers over a lifetime, even after discounting federal and state taxes -- and before adding revenue from new customers drawn in by extension.

And if the Crazy Mountain Ranch offers Marlboro rare sanctuary from pressures beyond the fence, it does no less for those who visit. Most states have passed laws against lighting up in restaurants, workplaces, or bars. Smokers are gouged by excise taxes while their habit is decried by public health campaigns. In the frontier town, cigarette smoke is invisible in ubiquity -- a relief, for some, from attention off the property, which may threaten sales more than any advertising ban. Although Rachel said she understands the social stigma against smoking, and doesn't plan to be a smoker for the rest of her life, she enjoyed the brief respite offered by the Crazy Mountain Ranch."If I'm out shopping, [or] leaving a restaurant, I don't smoke till I get to my car," Rachel said. "Because you do get looked at a lot. It's hard."

Her experience reflects a changing market, one that clouds the outlook for cigarette promotions like the ranch. "The rate of cigarette smoking in the United States has been declining for over 30 years, and we expect that it will continue to decline," David Sylvia told me. A recent Gallup poll found that just one in five adults reported smoking in the previous week. That rate that has never been lower -- it's less than half of what it was when Marlboro's cowboy first gazed past the camera. Philip Morris's cigarette sales flat-lined last year, just above a three percent industry-wide decline.

In October 2011, with business flagging, Altria announced a plan to cut $400 million in costs, primarily in "cigarette-related infrastructure," by the end of this year. Opportunity is rich overseas: in 2008, Altria spun off its foreign operations to free them of U.S. legal and image entanglements, and Philip Morris International has been reaching into markets like China, where some 40 percent of the world's cigarettes are produced and smoked.

But "cigarette smoking still is legal in this country," Sylvia said, "and Philip Morris USA will continue to try to market in a responsible way so that when adults who do smoke decide which brands to choose, that they'll choose Marlboro."

Along with the rest of the industry, Philip Morris has been emphasizing the small but growing smokeless category, and some companies are expanding into new territory altogether (Lorillard, one of Altria's major competitors, recently purchased a company that manufactures electronic cigarettes). According to Sylvia, "One of our goals is to find ways to reduce the harm related to tobacco use. What that means for the long term, for the Marlboro brand, and thus the Marlboro ranch? It's hard to say."

The pursuit of free land in the West is, after all, a dated idea. The U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier closed in 1890, and the Crazy Mountain Ranch is marked with the footprints of earlier pioneers: stretched out in the southern shadow of the Crazies, where William Clark passed on his return journey from the Pacific coast, its buildings raised from fallen ones. But for now, the parties and the promise carry on in Marlboro Country, as the sun burns down into the western horizon, glowing orange and then extinguished.

John DeGioia

2012-10-24T22:41:53-04:00

President, Georgetown University

When DeGioia became the first head of an American Jesuit university trained in academia rather than in a seminary, he represented—depending on who you asked—either Georgetown’s twin religious and scholastic traditions or the Catholic Church’s slipping hold on its affiliated schools.

Eleven years into DeGioia’s tenure, the question arose anew when he leapt to the defense of Sandra Fluke, a law student branded a “slut” and a “prostitute” by Rush Limbaugh after she testified before Congress in support of the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that health-care plans—including those of religiously affiliated institutions like Georgetown—provide free contraception. DeGioia urged respect for discourse—and bothered some fellow Catholics by seeming to defend a message contradicting the Church’s stance.

The controversy might have ended there, but DeGioia stoked it again with the announcement that Kathleen Sebelius—the secretary of health and human services, and the overseer of the contraception mandate—would speak on campus. Members of the Church and even some faculty criticized the invitation. But DeGioia held fast to his decision, again casting his school as a sentinel for the free exchange of ideas—and reminding us why an institution like Georgetown exists in the first place. “That there was real conflict here,” he told me, “just captures the sense of the complexity that universities are uniquely qualified, uniquely capable, of embracing and engaging.”

See all our 2012 Brave Thinkers.

Arne Duncan: 'We Have to Get Better Faster Than We Ever Have'

2012-03-27T19:13:01-04:00

During an interview today, the secretary of education defended his plan for America's schools and explained why it isn't the same as No Child Left Behind.

The Atlantic

Arne Duncan says his fourth year as secretary of education is marked by a "huge sense of urgency."

During an interview at The Atlantic's Jobs and Economy of the Future Town Hall, Duncan's lanky frame was folded into a chair but his message was veined with exigency. He stressed the role of quality teachers in improving student outcomes, and expressed his belief in incentive measures to better performance. "Great teachers, regardless of socioeconomic challenges--which are very real, we need to address them holistically -- great teachers make a huge difference in students' lives," he said.

Judy Woodruff, who conducted the interview, pressed Duncan to address criticism of Obama's signature education initiative, the swiftly-titled Race to the Top program, which provides grants to reward school innovation and reforms. Some argue that Race to the Top's emphasis on testing and value-added teacher evaluations is perpetuating the problems of No Child Left Behind, a program Duncan has been working to dismantle since taking office in 2009. Many have raised concerns that mandating results will overshadow the individual needs of students and punish teachers for factors outside their control.

Duncan responded that testing data is just part of his equation: Effectiveness, he said, can be gauged by a combination of factors, including attainment and subjective reports from student surveys. "At the end of the day, what I'm most interested in is getting those graduation rates to 100 percent, getting those dropout rates down to zero, and making sure that every high school graduate is college and career ready." (In the event's introductory remarks, Microsoft executive Brad Smith had cited a recent report predicting that 62 percent of students will need some college education to be employable in 2018. Only 42% of students now continue past high school.)

Duncan also emphasized that Race to the Top encourages solutions at the state and local level, allowing more individual and freedom. "No Child Left Behind was very prescriptive, top-down from Washington," he said. "You want students learning and improving every year. But how they do that--that's the art of teaching."

Technology will play a major role in bringing American education up to speed, Duncan said. His remarks preceded the formal release of Opportunity for Action: Preparing Youth for 21st Century Livelihoods, a report by the International Youth Foundation that emphasizes the vital role technology now plays in workplace success for nearly every occupation across the globe. "In education, we move far too slow," Duncan said.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world isn't waiting around. Duncan pointed to the rapid adoption of technology in South Korea, whose education ministry recently announced a $2.4 billion project to digitize all elementary school materials by 2014. "We're either going to follow, or, as a nation, we're going to lead," he said. "I really think we should be leading here."

Duncan described his own two children's enthusiasm for Khan Academy--the free online educational video library launched in 2009 by a recent MIT graduate, which now draws over 2 million users a month. He touted technology as an equalizer for disadvantaged students, specifically in inner city and rural schools. "I think technology can provide access to world-class education that so many children have been denied. The combination of great teachers and great technology, I think, can give children a real chance that they haven't had for decades in this country."

Making New Promises in Indian Country

2012-03-23T11:15:05-04:00

A Montana reservation has a higher homicide rate than some of the country's most murderous cities. Here's what Obama, and the state's school superintendent, are doing to help.

A young tribal member in traditional dress attends a celebration on Montana's Crow reservation. Reuters

On December 2, President Obama delivered the keynote address at the third annual White House Tribal Nations Conference. His adoption into the Crow Tribe on the 2008 campaign trail had been a historic step in the relationship between the federal and tribal governments, and that warmth still lingered in the applause that greeted his appearance onstage.

That morning, Obama announced, in his administration's latest effort to reduce obstacles facing Indian communities, he had signed an executive order to lower the dropout rate and start closing the achievement gap for Native American and Alaska Native students. "Standing in this room, with leaders of all ages," he said, surveying the densely packed auditorium at the Department of Interior headquarters, "it's impossible not to be optimistic about the future of Indian Country."

Miles away that same morning, with the sky still draped like black velvet over the hard-bitten mountain town of Pryor, Montana, a 15-year-old boy leveled his .243 hunting rifle during a family fight and blew a hole in his father's chest. It was the fifth homicide in two months on the Crow Indian Reservation.

According to the 2010 census, the population of the reservation is just under 7,000. With a total of six suspicious deaths recorded last year, the homicide rate stood at 87.4 per 100,000 -- more than double the rate in Detroit, and nearly 50% higher than the rate in New Orleans, according to the most recent annual FBI data. Officials and members of the affected communities have been quick to label the crimes as isolated events, and a newly appointed police chief for the Bureau of Indian Affairs has announced plans to expand the 11-person force covering more than 2.2 million acres of reservation land. But just a few weeks ago, an altercation in Pryor between a police officer and a community member ended in gunshots and stirred the town again.

The recent violence flanking Obama's executive order raises troubling questions. Can school reform help alter the dark picture sketched in national statistics: crime rates more than twice and up to 20 times the U.S. average, unemployment estimated at 15.2%, soaring levels of sexual assault and domestic abuse? And how can reform be truly effective in the environment these problems have created?

***

To reach Pryor from I-90, you turn south at Billings and follow a skinny two-lane highway that snakes around cottonwood trees and coulees for 30 miles to a reduced speed sign that marks its otherwise seamless transition into the main street of town. Past the post office and the boarded-up Castle Rock Café and the corner gas pump, Plenty Coups High School sits beneath a ridge of sediment and pine. The boy with the rifle was a cross-country runner and an honor roll student at the school, where his father had gone before him. Less than a third of students made it to graduation last spring -- others drifted out of town, dropped out with kids to care for, or just stopped showing up.

Dan McGee, the principal of Plenty Coups and superintendent of the Pryor school district who started last June, is no stranger to tough conditions in his students' lives. But he was shocked by the news that December morning, suggesting a level of despair even he had never guessed at. "I thought, I can't imagine ever having to make that choice," he told me, picturing his student taking aim.

But while the shooting was extreme, McGee is all too familiar with home situations that remove kids from the classroom: family transience due to job insecurity and lack of transportation, and missed days and slipping grades that make the prospect of return even more daunting. Finding a job after graduation is hard even with a diploma, andunemployment perpetuates the cycle of poverty that hampers academic success.

"Children are coming to school with everyday trauma. We need to treat that before they sit in a class and learn about math."

With the lowest graduation rate in the state and a long record of depressed test scores, Plenty Coups is one of three high schools enrolled in Montana's Schools of Promise Initiative, a three-year, $11.5 million project aimed at turning around the state's persistently lowest-performing schools. State Superintendent of Schools Denise Juneau, who designed the program using funds from a federal School Improvement Grant, is hopeful that the initiative -- now at its midway point -- can play a role in boosting not only academic performance, but also the communities enveloping each failing institution.

Juneau is tall and broad-shouldered, with dark bangs and eyes the concentrated blue of river water. When we met in her office on a snowy day this winter, she explained that her commitment to Indian education began long before Montana received the federal grant. A member of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, Juneau attended high school on the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana, where her parents were both teachers. After graduating from Harvard's Graduate School of Education, she taught high school English on a North Dakota reservation and back in Browning. She took over as director of Indian education for the state in 2006 and held the post until her election to superintendent two years later -- a position that made her the first Indian woman to hold a top statewide office in Montana.

While Schools of Promise was not conceived as a program to target Indian students, all the participating schools are on reservations. Juneau identifies their common denominator as a specific type of poverty -- deep, isolated, generational, and concentrated -- permeating the surrounding populations, and breeding conditions that have helped to land them in the state's bottom five percent. "Children are coming to school with trauma, everyday trauma, that they live under: violence in the homes, alcoholism in the community, unemployment that's 80 percent, not just during the recession," she said. "We need to help treat that before they can even go sit in a class and learn about math."

Schools of Promise is following the "transformation model" of school turnaround, one of the four types sanctioned by the Department of Education's Title I funding program. Compared to models that mandate full staff replacement or attempt to resurrect failing schools under charters, the milder transformation model, which aims to fortify existing personnel and policies, can allow schools to comply with DoE standards without implementing much actual change. But in isolated and impoverished areas, said Sam Redding, the director of the Center on Innovation and Improvement, who has studied reform implementation in rural areas, the other options are often unviable. Montana has no charter law, and firing sprees cause upheaval in tiny, remote communities, where existing teachers are often deeply embedded and new ones almost impossible to recruit. Even closing schools isn't an option. "You can't send kids elsewhere when there is no 'elsewhere,'" Redding said.

For Juneau, though, "transformation" is a literal order. Her initiative employs buttresses on every level: from instructors who help teachers implement classroom and curriculum changes, to school board coaches, to "transformation leaders" who work with administrators on execution and best practices. Academic influences off school grounds are also considered: Juneau's office recently acquired a $600,000 state grant for mental health services, which is now funneling into the Promise communities in a system of wraparound services -- identifying and strengthening existing support structures for individual students, and looping caregivers and mentors into sustainable frameworks.

And perhaps the most important contribution that Juneau brings to the Promise schools is an understanding of the history that pushed each of them to the breaking point.

***

Stretching back to 1588, when Jesuit missionaries in Florida commandeered the instruction of tribal children, efforts in Indian education have been bound by outside motives. Over the next 300 years, religious settlers continued to build and operate mission schools amid native communities. Meanwhile, starting with a 1794 treaty and carrying on for most of a century, the U.S. government offered teachers and educational resources to tribal leaders in exchange for chunks of their ever-shrinking territory.

In the unification years after the Civil War, the Bureau of Indian Affairs established federal boarding schools to help tribes -- in the words of Thomas Jefferson Morgan, then-Commissioner of Indian Affairs -- "conform to 'the white man's ways.'" Mandatory attendance laws forced students into barracks-like facilities, often far from home, where they were given English names and forbidden to use their native languages. Juneau's great-grandfather was among the children shipped by train to Pennsylvania's notorious Carlisle Indian School, where "before" and "after" photographs were taken to gauge successful assimilation.

A shift arrived with the 1928 Meriam Report, commissioned by the Secretary of Interior, which uncovered abuses of Indian students in boarding schools and issued a series of recommendations for education policy: emphasize local day schools to avoid uprooting students from their families and communities; reinstitute native cultural education; interfere less. In the 1930s, John Collier, FDR's new appointee for Commissioner of Indian Affairs, began to put the suggestions into practice. The cornerstone of Collier's reform agenda was the Indian Reorganization Act, which shifted decision-making authority away from the federal government and toward tribes. But when he departed around the end of WWII, progress unwound. The following decades were characterized by the termination movement, which forced integration by removing federal funding and refusing to recognize tribal sovereignty. When that failed -- leaving tribes with neither support nor the structure for self-sufficiency -- the self-determination movement took over, setting up today's government-to-government relationship.

Aware that her Promise initiative is being built on the shards of many broken ones, Juneau is attempting a new, collective approach to change. By introducing community liaisons -- local residents hired as full-time state employees to serve as bridges for families and schools -- she hopes to incorporate the voices of those who, after students, are most affected by the reforms. "We're saying, 'We're schooling in a different way now. We want you to come in, and we want you to support your child and your student,' rather than, 'We're going to do this job,'" Juneau said.

Savannah Sinquah, the community liaison for Pryor, graduated from Plenty Coups in 2002 and moved off the reservation to study business administration at the University of Montana. She was working as a family/parent advocate for Indian students in the Billings public school system when she heard about the liaison job in the fall of 2010. When we spoke on the phone this February, she had just wrapped up a pep rally for the Plenty Coups cheerleading and basketball teams. Community elders had been invited to speak at a school-hosted luncheon before the rally, and later, in the gym full of students and parents, administrators had praised the teams' perseverance through what Sinquah called "the hardest year we've ever experienced." The idea behind events like these, Sinquah said, is to infuse school activities with cultural and community relevance, welcoming parents who have been hesitant to cross the school threshold.

For generations, the proliferation of boarding and religious schools excised parental involvement in education. Many parents today, both Sinquah and Juneau pointed out, have been left without a clear sense of their responsibility or power to help their children succeed academically. Sinquah recently launched Pryor's first PTA organization to encourage parents and guardians to assume a role in the school's transformation and operations.

The initiative is also sending teachers into communities through a program of home visits, coordinated by the liaisons, to discuss mutual goals with parents and guardians and build working relationships. Don Wetzel, who coordinates the community liaison program for all the Promise schools, said that the visits are meant to "bring in both teachers in a student's life -- at school and at home." When a father shares that his daughter wants to become an engineer and the girl stops coming to class, the teacher can call the father and explain: If this is your daughter's ambition, this is what she needs to do to reach it -- and this is how you can help her.

According to Juneau, the home visit system is also crucial for school faculty, many of whom are non-tribal members and didn't grow up on the reservation, and who may have internalized the idea that some families just don't care. "Hearing, 'I want my child to go into the military, I want my child to be a dentist, I want my child to be able to go out and do this,'" she said, "and knowing that, despite being in deep poverty and being in the conditions that they are, every parent still loves their child, and they have hopes and dreams for them -- I think that's been a significant learning process for some of the teachers."

Sinquah said that the program has been especially useful in Pryor, "where you think you know everybody." She recalled one visit to a family that had been viewed by many in the community -- including Sinquah herself -- as shiftless and self-indulgent, interested less in the classroom than in the next party. She was shocked when the student's mother opened up about her faith in education and regret for her own failure to graduate, explaining how she always told her son: "You're going to be the hero, because you're going to be the first in the family to finish high school." The mother pointed out a row of perfect attendance awards hanging on the wall. "She said, 'I put them there to remind him that he's our champion. I don't want him living on food stamps like we are.'"

The initiative's emphasis on forging connections between academic and community life extends even into the classroom, encouraging teachers to put national and global studies in a relatable context. On a recent day in Pryor, a science lesson about renewable and nonrenewable resources veered into a discussion of what natural resources mean for tribes, how they are managed, and how federal and local choices might impact or endanger them. "Kids were like, 'How do we change this?'" Sinquah told me. "'How do we change all of the things that are happening to us in the world?'"

And there, in those questions, is the real future of Indian Country.

***

Past reform failures have left behind refuse -- "a state public school in the middle of an entire sovereign nation that has a specific relationship with the federal government," in Juneau's concise summary -- that can hobble movement forward. One school board, wrestling with the budget concerns of its teachers union, failed to draft a required memorandum of understanding before the state's deadline. Another school was removed from the program after the first year, largely because it opposed a section of the federal funding guidelines that mandated firing any principal who had overseen more than two years of low performance. The school's board of trustees, which had originally agreed to replace the long-time principal on entering the program, has since restored the displaced official and expanded his title to principal/superintendent.

Although Juneau sent the letter cutting ties with the school, she believes that the "urban perspective" of federal officials makes it hard for them to grasp the nuanced dynamics of reservation school districts, which are often, like Pryor, tiny and rural. "You go in and fire the whole teaching staff -- and given the low performance, and given the community, who's going to go there?" she asked. "I talk with teachers all over the state, and they're like, 'Well, those schools...' And I'm like, 'Go to those schools! I could come to your community and it would be easy to teach. You want a challenge? Head out there.'"

Some teachers already working in the Promise schools, especially those who have been teaching for years, have been resistant to instruction themselves, said Sinquah. But facing the issues of recruitment and retention, Juneau is intent on working with those who have already proved their commitment to schools -- introducing incentives for teachers who get better, and trying to make it easier for them to do so. A team of mental health experts from the University of Montana that came to evaluate the Promise schools found that, through daily encounters with the turbulence in their students' lives, teachers were absorbing "secondary trauma"; Schools of Promise is now teaching them methods of self-care.

***

While Juneau sees parallels between Obama's goals and those of past administrations, she is pleased that his executive order explicitly recognizes the some 90 percent of Indian students attending public schools, a factor that has often been absent in the past. She is also hopeful that progress will come from its clear agenda: the order calls for detailed action plans and performance reports from the Department of Education, the Bureau of Indian Education, and the National Advisory Council on Indian Education -- a partnership model that she, unsurprisingly, supports.

But ultimately, Juneau said, the rhetoric has been similar throughout history. "I think that what happens on the ground, on the state level and the local level, is really what we should pay attention to."

Test scores across the Promise schools have shot up since the program began. Levels of reading proficiency have risen 15 percent, and levels of math proficiency doubled in the last year. Though scores still lag well below the state mean across all academic categories, the increases have gone a long way toward closing the gap.

But the Promise team and the money won't be around forever, and the question remains what impact the initiative will have in the long-term. Over the next year and a half, responsibility will increasingly shift back onto the schools alone. Juneau stresses that even if current structures remain, lasting success will depend on outside factors, like economic growth, keeping pace with school improvements. "It needs to be a full-court press," she said. But getting more students to graduate, pursue postsecondary education, and pour their acquired skills back into their communities could help create a new kind of cycle on the reservation.

Take Savannah Sinquah, who traces her own educational success back to her sophomore year business teacher at Plenty Coups, who taught students how to write college essays, helped them research careers, and set up individual job-shadowing trips for everyone in the class -- connecting for the first time, Sinquah said, lessons in the classroom to a future outside it. That teacher, who has since moved away from Pryor to follow her husband's work, was part of the reason Sinquah chose to study business in college, and gave her a background that helped her score internships with the university's athletic department and with Nike.

But Sinquah found that she "wasn't happy, at the end of the day, making sales." She felt pulled back to the school system, wanting to do for other students what that teacher had done for her -- show the promise of an education. When the funding for Juneau's program runs out next year, Sinquah plans to begin graduate work toward a degree in school counseling. Coming back to work in Pryor one day, she said, has always been her dream.

Family Planning on the Range: The Battle Over Bison Contraceptives

2011-11-22T08:50:38-05:00

Could contraceptives offer protection for the nation's last continuously wild herd of American bison?

At feeding time, residents of the Brogan Bison Facility cluster around a hay bale, blinking at flecks of alfalfa dust that swirl in the air and settle in their shaggy coats. The herd, chewing and lowing, mills in a holding pasture near Corwin Springs, Montana, surrounded by sweeping mountain views and a seven-strand wire fence. Blue-painted squeeze chutes are settled in the dirt nearby, bordered by a swath of prairie grass that stretches for a few miles until it meets the northern border of Yellowstone National Park. This, under a graying sky beginning to spit the first snowflakes of another long winter, is the unlikely center of a contentious debate over birth control.

The bison, gathered after drifting out of Yellowstone earlier this year, are potential subjects of a USDA study of GonaCon, a contraceptive vaccine for wildlife. Originally developed by the USDA as a non-lethal form of pest control, GonaCon works by lowering the concentration of sex hormones in the bloodstream to weaken fertility and the urge to mate. The contraceptive was recently approved in Maryland and New Jersey for curbing the population of wild deer. Now researchers are hoping to use GonaCon to stop the spread of brucellosis, an infectious bacterial disease that causes pregnant ungulates to abort their calves.

The Greater Yellowstone Area is the last known reservoir of Brucella abortus bacteria, believed to have been introduced to the park's bison by domestic cattle at the beginning of the 20th century. Roughly half the bison population in Yellowstone tests positive for exposure to the disease, which is primarily transmitted by contaminated birthing materials deposited on grazing grounds. Brucellosis also poses a threat to neighboring cattle herds when infected animals wander over the park's invisible boundaries. Researchers from the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) are interested in whether temporary sterilization with GonaCon can prevent the shedding of bacteria-riddled afterbirth and help block disease transmission.

The USDA has spent close to two billion dollars over nearly eight decades trying to stamp out the disease, which carries hulking environmental and financial consequences. Bison who leave the park to seek food at lower elevations are routinely rounded up and quarantined, and those found to have the disease are slaughtered. When brucellosis crops up on cattle ranches, herds must be quarantined and infected members butchered. Additionally, the bacteria can pass to humans through unpasteurized milk. Jack Rhyan, a veterinarian medical officer and wildlife pathologist with APHIS, and the study's principal investigator, said that the focus on brucellosis is driven in part by its implications for public safety. "Animal health is directly related to human health," he said.

But while the GonaCon study is still in the nascent stages, some conservationists are already voicing concerns. Stephany Seay, media coordinator of Buffalo Field Campaign, a group that advocates for protection of the Yellowstone herd, views the USDA study as an experiment in population control. "Brucellosis is being used as a tool to manipulate the movement of wild bison," she told me. According to Seay, GonaCon is a means of catering to ranchers who don't want to compete with bison for grassland. "This is a centuries-old range war," she continued.

Indeed, the interests of land-users have historically clashed with bison and their habitat. Once scattered over the Great Plains, the American bison population was demolished in the late 1800s by settlers hungry for meat, hides, and room for westward expansion. Numbers dwindled from an estimated 30 million to fewer than one thousand. By the turn of the century, Yellowstone held the nation's only remaining wild population of plains bison. Biologists have determined in recent years that the herd is one of the last to retain genetic purity, with no traces of interbreeding with cattle.

From Seay's perspective, the significance of the Yellowstone herd is reason to encourage tolerance over further tampering. She and the Buffalo Field Campaign have fought to expand range rights for bison. "The dispersal of wildlife lessens the prevalence of disease," she said. "By allowing bison to roam, you're thereby also reducing risks." Ranchers anxious about contagion, she suggested, could immunize their animals against brucellosis rather than meddle with neighboring wildlife.

But while bison remain in the essentially artificial environment of Yellowstone National Park, bounded by a patchwork of land and legal rights, some degree of management may be necessary--even beneficial--for the animals inside. Marty Zaluski, Montana's state veterinarian, pointed out that the goals of the USDA and bison advocates are, to some degree, in alignment. "It's a non-lethal method to reduce the infection rate while slowing the population growth, and therefore reducing the number of animals that go to slaughter," he said. "I really don't comprehend why this is such a lightning rod for conservationists' concerns when you look at the alternatives."

Zaluski, who has also been a vocal advocate of immunization, sees GonaCon as a valuable addition to the disease-fighting quiver. He maintained that birth control could do more than buffer direct impacts of the disease in Yellowstone's herd. "Brucellosis is limiting the ability to take the bison from this area and restore them in other parts of the country," he said. GonaCon, with its potential to wipe out infection, could make the public more open to the concept of a free-roaming herd. "Ultimately, the entire nation loses by not being able to benefit from and enjoy Yellowstone bison."

USDA APHIS is in the process of conducting an environmental assessment to determine whether the proposed study should move ahead. The assessment is scheduled to wrap up by early January, and the results will be made available for public comment. If approved, work could begin this spring--around the time a new generation of bison calves tests their wobbly legs.

Image: Jim Parkin/Shutterstock.