This is the grave of John Howard Griffin.

Born in 1920 in Dallas, Texas, Griffin grew up in the liberal white southern relatively well off class of the time. His mother was a concert pianist. He was a good student who spoke good French and he won a scholarship to go to college at the University of Poitiers in France. He studied language and literature there and then moved to the École de Médecine to study, well, medicine. But as you can see, this would have put Griffin there when the Germans invaded France in 1940. Griffin did not immediately go home. Instead, he fought the Nazis as part of the French Resistance, which had about 1,000 times as many claim they were involved in 1946 than actually were involved in 1941. Specifically, Griffin was involved in helping Jews escape. There was a group of Austrian Jews who had made it to Saint Nazaire, where he was working on the docks as a medic. He helped smuggle them aboard a ship and get them to safety.

Speaking of safety, Griffin returned to the U.S., where joining the actual military to fight Nazis was a lot safer than working in the Resistance, though that’s not why he returned home. He joined the Army Air Forces upon his return and was stationed in the South Pacific. He also was the lone soldier stationed on the small island of Nuni in the Solomons, where he engaged in an early anthropological study of the people to pass the time. He was a long ways from the front lines here, but hey, he was assigned there and he was doing his job. He also had problems with one of the biggest killer of American soldiers in the Pacific. No, I’m not talking about war here, I’m talking about malaria. He had a bout of malaria that set in his spine and he couldn’t walk for awhile. Yikes. Oh, also, while he was there, he married a Polynesian woman who he left when he got to go back to the U.S. Now that’s a classic imperialist move right there.

Now, in 1946, Griffin lost his sight. Probably. He was blind until 1957. This was from the long-term effects of being near a Japanese bomb. However, some 2024 studies in French of this incident suggest that he might have faked the blindness. I don’t read French, so I can’t evaluate the claim. But people have questioned this for a long time. The main reason–why did he suddenly regain his sight in 1957 without any explanation? And it’s not like he just could see some light again or shadowy figures, he could see like anyone else. So this is a really weird situation.

Griffin was certainly an unusual person, no question about that. The blindness, whatever that meant here, did not stop him from living a successful life. After leaving his Polynesian wife behind so he could look back on his exotic sex fondly while not being hemmed in by what it would mean to bring a woman from the Solomon Islands back to Texas as his wife, Griffin married a good white woman and had a couple of kids with her. She was also a student of his, because of course she was. He started writing as well, beginning with a 1952 novel called The Devil Rides Outside, about a composer who goes to a French monastery to study Gregorian chants. He had spent enough time in France that this probably was something he could reasonably pull off. He wrote a lot about his blindness. Then he wrote a novel about a man lost in the Solomon Islands for a year, something he did know. He also became a professional photographer.

Griffin’s interest in amateur anthropology influenced what we know him for today–and if you don’t know the name, you definitely remember his famous 1961 book Black Like Me. I read this in school–5th grade? Maybe? As an aside, I am always amazed and maybe a little skeptical by people’s claims that they remember learning this or that in high school or even younger. Why would you remember this, outside of something being super memorable? I certainly don’t remember much in ways of specifics from my school days. But I do remember Black Like Me, although that guess about 5th grade could be off by 3 or 4 years for all I remember. It does seem more appropriate for something like 8th or 9th grade. Anyway, whatever about remembering stuff like this, who really cares when you read or learned something.

Black Like Me is such a strange project to me. For a white man to decided to “become black” and then walk around asking questions in 1959 in the American South is a choice that feels more suicidal than anything else to me. When I visited this grave–and I had not thought about Griffin for years before this–my first question was, how did he pull this off? Turns out he saw a dermatologist in New Orleans who was intrigued by the idea and given methoxsalen while tanning all day, which darkened his skin a bit. He then used makeup so, yeah, there was some blackface involved. I wonder how many people he was really fooling here. However, given America’s weird one-drop rule of racial characteristics, plenty of very light-skinned people were considered black and subject to the laws of segregation. So he pulled it off.

Griffin then spent six weeks traveling around the South as a black man, accompanied by a photographer. Black Like Me was a big hit when it came out. For a certain kind of white, hearing about race from another white just meant more than what black people were saying all the time. These were mostly liberals, since race haters didn’t care what he had to say. One of the things that he couldn’t believe and neither could his white readers is how many whites approached him to ask about sexual life. I’m not sure why this would have been surprising except for this one thing–whites, even liberal ones, simply didn’t ask a lot of questions about what race relations were really like. It’s like walking around today knowing ICE is bad but we mostly don’t ask too many questions and just go along our way. That’s not true of all of course, but most people would rather just not know, even if they hate ICE.

Griffin’s book led him to be super hated by southern whites. In fact, he took his family to Mexico for several months. He was hanged in effigy in his hometown of Mansfield, Texas. In 1964, KKK members caught up to him and beat him. He spent his later years in Fort Worth, where he lectured about race relations sometimes. He had become friends with Thomas Merton in 1962 so he started a project writing about the famed Trappist monk. But he didn’t finish it. Griffin developed Type 2 Diabetes. Treatments weren’t great at this time. So it killed him in 1980. He was 60. His friends finished the Merton book for him and that got published in 1983.

John Howard Griffin is buried in Mansfield Cemetery, Mansfield, Texas.

If you would like this series to visit other authors about race in American life, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Alex Haley is in Henning, Tennessee and Harper Lee is in Monroeville, Alabama. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

The post Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,210 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

trangoldin:

To the Trans Girl Who Just Lost at the Supreme Court: So Did I 26 Years Ago

Thank you for updating to Woman 51.0.

This release includes important security updates, several unexpected hardware changes, a completely redesigned relationship with alcohol, and expanded support for saying “absolutely not” without explaining yourself.

New Features

• Night Sweats now activate regardless of room temperature, thread count, fan speed, or whether you finally found a position that didn’t hurt your hip.
• Your bladder has been upgraded to Toddler Mode and now requires emptying immediately before bed, forty-three minutes after bed, and once more at 2:47 a.m. simply because.
• Hair has been retexturized and redistributed using an algorithm nobody understands.
• Crying now supports additional file types, including: exceptionally kind veterinarians, finding cash in an old coat pocket, women finishing marathons after starting their period, and finding the matching Tupperware lid.

Performance Improvements

• Metabolism has entered Museum Mode and is now preserving every carbohydrate for future generations.
• Hangovers now begin during your second glass of wine.
• Sleeping “weird” may require three to five business days of recovery.
• Knees have been upgraded to Dolby Surround.
• Impulse control has been reduced by approximately 75 percent and may result in unexpectedly slapping a man who calls you “sweetheart” while attempting to convince you to switch internet providers on your front porch.

Memory
To improve performance, the following have been removed:

• Why you walked into this room
• That actor’s name
• The word “colander”
• Approximately 40 percent of all nouns

Lyrics from every song released between 1986 and 1998 remain fully indexed.

Sleep
Sleep has been completely redesigned. Instead of sleeping through the night, you’ll now wake at 2:47 a.m. with absolute certainty that you’ve forgotten something important.

Diagnostic testing confirms you have not.

You may also experience an unexplained surge of rage directed at no one in particular, followed by an urgent desire to contact people you have not thought about in years.

You’ll be awake until 4:11.

User Advisory: Feelings experienced between 2:47 a.m. and sunrise should not be considered actionable. Apple recommends postponing all outgoing communications until the operating system has completed its morning startup sequence.

Relationships
Your tolerance for nonsense has been reduced by 97 percent.

This is functioning as intended.

The following messages are now automatically routed to Spam:

• “Hey stranger.”
• “You up?”
• “Let’s just see where things go.”
• “I’ve just been really busy…”
• “I’m an awful texter.”

The bug causing users to mistake potential for compatibility has been permanently resolved.

This feature will not be restored.

Behavioral Changes
Facial expressions now accurately reflect internal thoughts. This feature cannot be disabled.

People-pleasing has been moved to Legacy Support and will no longer receive security updates.

Tolerance for uncomfortable bras, loud restaurants, and mediocre or boring men has been permanently removed.

You will no longer spend three days wondering whether you were too harsh. Initial testing suggests you were not.

Battery
Battery life has decreased, yet battery management has dramatically improved.

Power is now reserved almost exclusively for:

• dogs
• friends
• tacos
• deadlifts
• beach sunsets
• leaving parties without saying goodbye

Background applications devoted to impressing everyone else have been permanently restricted.

Reddit-Recommended Workarounds
The following fixes have not been verified by Apple, but are consistently reported by users.

• Dating younger men appears to restore approximately 12 percent of available RAM.
• Weightlifting four times a week significantly improves both posture and your willingness to leave a date the moment he says he’s “not really into labels.”
• Group texts with female friends continue to outperform years of individual therapy.
• Users report eating significantly more tacos after age forty. Engineering has no explanation.
• Purchasing concert tickets before asking if anyone wants to go has been shown to reduce people-pleasing by up to 84 percent.
• Users overwhelmingly report the operating system performs best when regularly fed protein, sunshine, laughter, and absolutely no mixed signals.

Known Issues

• Standing up may produce a sound, and it is no longer possible to determine whether the sound came from your knees, your mouth, or any other body part.
• You may suddenly remember an embarrassing interaction from 1997 while shampooing.
• Reading restaurant menus without your glasses remains unsupported.
• One shoulder may mysteriously hurt all the time now.
• You may become disproportionately angry at slow walkers, open-office floor plans, or hearing the phrase “circle back.”
• Warranty coverage no longer includes sleeping on hotel pillows.

Engineering has quietly confirmed these are not bugs.

Thank You for Updating
Version 51.0 removes several features without your consent, but it also installs better ones.

Boundaries are now enabled by default, your bullshit detector is operating at full capacity, and after years of granting administrator privileges to anyone with a decent smile and inconsistent texting habits, the operating system now asks one simple question before allowing access: “Does this person actually improve my life?”

If not, the request is automatically denied.

Attempts to override this setting using chemistry, nostalgia, loneliness, or six margaritas are no longer supported.

American Diplomacy Is Increasingly More About Performance Than Results

I’m not going to sit here and listen to you bad mouth the United States of America — Eric “Otter” Stratton

You probably know the scene in Animal House. The one where Dean Wormer warns he’s going to revoke Delta’s charter. The boys from Delta stand and walk out.

Last week, in a scene where diplomacy imitates art, the US delegation to the UN stood and walked out of a meeting during remarks by the French Permanent Representative.

The US delegation was aggrieved over French criticism of an earlier US vote against a second term for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. It was a lopsided 144–10 vote in favor, where the United States was one of the 10 opposed. It joined others that included Russia, North Korea, Nicaragua and Israel. The French had rebuked the US for being on the side of authoritarians. US Ambassador and Alternate UN Representative Dan Negrea promised to continue American walkouts until France renounced its “condescending and disrespectful” rhetoric.

Historically, walkouts by US delegations at international gatherings were reserved for such egregious acts by our adversaries as then-Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic remarks toward Israel or baseless accusations against the United States. I was part of a US delegation that walked out of a Moscow conference when a senior Russian official accused the United States of creating and supporting ISIS. Unlike the walkout in New York, previously, we didn’t walk out alone. Our allies walked out with us in a display of unity in condemning the speaker.

The US squabble with France is less important than the insight into how this administration conducts diplomacy and the results it gets, or doesn’t. Like most things in this administration, its diplomacy has become performative. It is built on big, empty gestures that mimic Trump’s own behavior: bullying, impatience, and whatever the outcome, claiming success. This is an administration that seems to want to provoke confrontation to get its way rather than commit to difficult, time-consuming negotiations. Nor does it seem to have skin thick enough to absorb the criticisms often targeting the US positions and continue with the question at hand. When it doesn’t win, it retreats, but not without screaming that it really won. It sees the world as zero-sum transactions so that it always claims to get everything, even when it gets nothing.

Diplomacy, when done effectively, entails grinding conversations, finding leverage (sometimes in the form of coercion), and knowing what is the minimum you’ll accept and the maximum you’ll give. It also involves drawing on expertise to grasp the full scope of an issue and to fully form a position. It is best done quietly, and occasionally, with a certain amount of ambiguity. None of that seems to be relevant now.

The marginalization of expertise across the US government and dismembering of the traditional Washington foreign-policy process have made American diplomacy little more than an amplification of Trump’s pronouncements on Truth Social.

There’s no process anymore because he is the process.

I recently asked someone I knew in Washington about the vagaries of US Ukraine/Russia policy, believing that a lasting solution that doesn’t reward Russian aggression and secures the peace depends on coordinated US-European. efforts. “Nobody knows. They’re just making shit up” was the response. This after Washington had done its damnedest to repeatedly cut the Europeans out of any US-orchestrated discussions with Ukraine and Russia. Vice President Vance used his speech at the 2025 Munich Security Conference to hector Europe to deal with migration — “the threat within” to Western civilization — rather than the threat of Russia.

But nothing underscores making up foreign policy as you go more than the handling of the war with Iran. In the absence of consulting with allies in hopes of building a coalition, having a clear strategy with achievable objectives, or a compelling rationale for war to persuade the American and international publics of the rightness of our cause, Trump has bumbled into a war that he has no idea how to get out of, our Gulf allies are likely to negotiate their own settlement with Iran that gives it some degree of control of the Strait of Hormuz, and US influence is waning, in addition to a now persistent threat to the global economy. Trump’s self-proclaimed little excursion is rapidly becoming a strategic defeat that will count lost US credibility and leadership among its casualties because diplomacy has remained an afterthought.

With no Washington process to inform and coordinate foreign policy decision making, then it seems the result has been to default to Trump’s lead. Throughout my career, the rule of thumb when dealing with a foreign interlocutor was simple: when in doubt, quote the President or the Secretary of State. Still true, if you can find some coherence in it, but more than once, Marco Rubio has had to revise his answers to fit the President’s narrative. Rubio’s justification for the war with Iran or the process for ending it has been an evolutionary cycle driven by the President’s press comments du jour.

The non-career ambassadors Trump has dispatched — whom columnist Max Boot called Trump’s “mini-mes” in a column in The Washington Post — have taken that a step beyond, in modeling the President’s disdain for others. They are creating a record of offending their host countries. US Ambassador to France Charles Kushner, for example, refused two summonses to the French MFA in a breach of longstanding diplomatic protocol. Ambassador Tom Rose announced the embassy would cut ties with the speaker of Poland’s parliament over statements that Trump did not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

At embassies and at headquarters, our diplomats persevere amid staffing cuts and a lack of leadership. The State Department fired more than 1,300 Foreign and Civil Service employees, has made “fidelity” a part of the evaluation process, and geared recruiting toward finding candidates who ideologically fit the Administration’s “America First” world view. More than 100 ambassadorships are still unfilled. They struggle to keep up. In the meantime, the work on the most pressing problems has been outsourced with no particular results. Trump’s special envoys Witkoff and Kushner, in the words of a foreign diplomat I know who has seen them up close, are 0 for 3 in producing any results for Gaza, Ukraine, or Iran. He was spectacularly unimpressed.

During Trump’s first term, I checked his Twitter posts first thing every morning. It would determine how the day was likely to go. The difference then versus now is that there were filters that blunted the worst of his musings or translated them into actual, existing policy. Now, those filters are absent.

US diplomacy seems to be reduced to reprising Kevin Bacon screaming, “All is well,” amid chaos, and no one is listening.

Every year, organizations and institutions invest heavily to convene practitioners, experts, and leaders in shared physical spaces. Between registration fees, travel logistics, and dedicated time away from daily operations, industry benchmarks reflect a massive collective investment in face-to-face gathering. We make this investment because we recognize something fundamental: deep alignment, strategic breakthroughs, and genuine human connection cannot be replicated through a screen.

I have experienced the power of this investment firsthand. Over the past two years, I have logged hundreds of hours across policy forums, civic engagement summits, corporate strategy sessions, global affairs convenings, and higher education conferences as I try to acclimate myself to my new career in academia. Sitting in a room where people get to hear game-changing ideas, innovative frameworks, and sharp analyses of our most pressing issues is an extraordinary privilege. As someone whose dream and ambition is to routinely stand on those very stages and deliver powerful keynotes, I believe deeply in the unique magic of the physical room. There is nothing like the energy of high-caliber minds coming together to tackle the future of our fields, to prepare the current and next generation of leaders, and to figure out how we interact with a complex world.

The gathering itself is not the problem. The problem is that our panel architecture has not evolved to match the value of the human beings inside the room.

If you have attended a professional conference recently, you know the script. A moderator introduces four experts with reading-list biographies. Each expert takes twelve minutes to deliver what is essentially an abstract of an executive summary. The moderator asks two polite, scripted questions. Then, with six minutes remaining, the floor opens for Q&A, accompanied by the mandatory, desperate plea from the stage to please make sure your question is a question and not a statement.

We tend to blame the attendee who then steps to the microphone, clears their throat, and delivers a three-minute monologic manifesto. We roll our eyes and tweet about microphone etiquette. But that attendee is not a nuisance; they are a symptom of a design failure.

When people insist on making speeches from the floor, it is a clear indicator that the event provided zero space for meaningful human interaction, zero opportunity for relational friction, and zero avenues for participants to process, challenge, or contribute to the ideas floating around the room. The comment-as-question is simply a desperate attempt to be recognized as an active, thinking entity in a space that has spent three hours treating everyone past the second row as a passive receptacle for content.

We have built a conference culture optimized for broadcasting rather than processing. In an era where information is instantly accessible and trivially easy to summarize with a single prompt in a large language model, gathering experts in a physical room just to perform information transmission misses the point. If a presenter is going to deliver a dry report that attendees will run through an AI summary tool anyway, they should not do it from a dais. They should send a link.

The true value of gathering in person has never been the unidirectional broadcast of information. The value lies in what happens when ideas collide, when theoretical frameworks are tested against messy operational reality, when professionals are allowed to sit with genuine disagreement, and when sustained relationships are forged across institutional divides. Yet, the modern professional conference seems almost explicitly designed to prevent those dynamics from taking root.

Consider the physical reality. We ask high-performing practitioners to sit in standard banquet chairs in structured rows for six to eight hours a day. We know, scientifically and intuitively, that prolonged sitting on unpadded surfaces degrades cognitive function, drains energy, and induces physical strain. We expect people to be creative, strategic, and collaborative while enduring hours of physical immobility.

Then there is the networking problem. We like to pretend that the real work happens in the hallways during coffee breaks. But we have erased the social scaffolding required for actual human connection. Research published in Harvard Business Review on social capital reveals that without deliberate structure, over 80 percent of participants in unstructured networking environments default to self-segregating, talking almost exclusively to people they already know or standing alone on their phones. Throwing two hundred tired professionals into a foyer with paper cups of lukewarm coffee and expecting transformative connection to occur is not a strategy; it is lazy design. In this century, people need structured pathways to learn how to talk to each other again.

If we want to honor the immense value of these gatherings, protect the health of our attendees, and elevate the impact of the brilliant speakers on stage, we must re-engineer how we assemble.

First, we need to implement a strict no-reading rule on stage and replace passive panels with Live Friction Sprints. Presenters should be given seven minutes max to lay out a single, high-stakes trade-off, an unresolved operational dilemma, or a provocative vision. Immediately following, turn the house lights up, divide the room into rapid-response working pods, and give the audience twenty minutes to test, debate, and apply the framework to real-world scenarios. The experts should not sit back on stage sipping bottled water; they should roam the floor as designated evaluators, listening to how practitioners are wrestling with their ideas in real time.

Second, we must trade polite consensus for structural engagement. The most transformative moments in professional life do not happen when everyone nods along to sanitized, safe platitudes about institutional alignment. They happen when an operational practitioner directly challenges a theoretical model, or when an insider forces a room to confront uncomfortable realities.

Conference organizers must stop building panels where four people agree on every premise. We need formats built for disciplined collision. Create Fishbowl Arenas where opposing viewpoints are debated on stage, but leave two chairs permanently open for audience members to walk up, deliver a sharp counter-analysis, and step back down. Build Real-Time Simulation Labs where attendees are assigned competing institutional roles and forced to negotiate a crisis under tight time constraints. When you give people a complex problem to solve together rather than a lecture to endure, the artificial awkwardness of networking disappears. Trust is built through shared tension and shared labor, not small talk over fruit platters.

Third, we must radically re-engineer the physical environment and break the sitting monopoly. Throw out the straight-line lecture hall layout. If a room cannot be configured to allow people to face one another, stand comfortably, or move, it is the wrong layout.

Integrate physical movement directly into the intellectual work. Some of the sharpest, most rigorous debates happen when people are in motion. Convert passive morning sessions into Cohort Walking Briefings, where small, structured groups walk outside or through designated hallways while debating a specific prompt, returning to the room only to pitch their conclusions. Movement increases blood flow, lowers stress, and flattens the artificial hierarchies that form the moment someone steps behind a podium.

Fourth, treat relationship building as a core tradecraft rather than an afterthought. Connection is not an innate talent that magically activates during a cocktail hour; it is a discipline that requires architecture. If an event claims to build a network, it must actively facilitate the mechanics of that network.

Abolish the generic mixer and replace it with Problem-Matched Micro-Cohorts. When participants register, group them not by their job titles or seniority, but by the specific operational headache they are trying to solve that year. Maintain these four-to-five-person cohorts as anchor groups throughout the entire conference, scheduling mandatory fifteen-minute debriefs after major keynotes. When you give people a structural home base and a shared mission, you eliminate the social anxiety of cold outreach and replace it with immediate, functional peer-collaboration.

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