Open Season

This just in. The people of Georgia, speaking through their elected officials, have voluntarily limited their right to carry guns in public. In a law signed by Gov. Nathan Deal, Georgians may not carry weapons past metal detectors in airports and public buildings. And they need permission from their pastor to pack in church. These concessions were part of an overhaul of the state’s archaic gun laws – and yet more evidence of the National Rifle Association’s willingness to compromise in the aftermath of the Sand Hook Elementary School tragedy 17 months ago. In exchange, the Safe Carry Protection Act of 2014 – or the “guns everywhere bill” – allows people to carry their firearms into bars, school zones, public buildings, libraries, really just about anywhere they want, including elementary schools with permission, and right up to the security gate in airports. The legislators did prohibit guns from the state Capitol, which some have suggested is hypocritical. Still, said GeorgiaCarry’s Jerry Henry, “If you are one who likes to protect yourself, you have a whole lot more places to protect yourself.” While Atlanta’s Episcopal bishop told his parishioners, “The prince of peace isn’t spelled P-I-E-C-E. It’s P-E-A-C-E,” past-and-future GOP presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, told “Face the Nation, “I think a well-armed family is a safe family. A well-armed America is a safer America.”

So now we can take our guns to church and open public meetings with sectarian prayer. Not so long ago we seemed to be going in the other direction.

Assessing Obama

Barack Obama is taking a beating these days, from “America the Shrunken” to a president who “doesn't seem excited about all the possibilities for America.” And his “you hit singles” remark brought people back 35 years to Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. Carter actually never used the world “malaise” in his speech that asked us “to join hands [and] commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the American spirit.” But his call for unified sacrifice didn’t go over any better in 1979 than Obama’s description of a diplomacy that seeks to “steadily advance the interests of the American people and our partnership with folks around the world." Such comments are deflating for those who prefer exceptionalism to alliances and robust bellicosity to quiet diplomacy.

While the president’s foes have defied him at every turn, his disappointed friends now give him too little credit for his accomplishments. I admit I miss the Obama who captivated a nation in 2008 by helping us imagine a country in which our economic wellbeing didn’t depend on destroying our environment, our values didn’t countenance torture, and our political discourse actually included dialogue – the Obama who literally embodied a nation ready to transcend black and white.

I wonder sometimes if I mistook his biography for vision, his oratory for leadership, the image for the man? I haven’t given up on Obama. But my belief in his – or anyone's – ability to transform Washington's culture is diminished, and so I will look elsewhere for the possibility of real change.

A Lost Generation

The scene in the courtroom was almost as harrowing as the incident on the street. As four men were bound over for last month’s vicious beating of Steve Utash, their supporters laughed and jeered obscenely, while Utash remained hospitalized in critical condition. He had been driving through a Detroit neighborhood when his truck hit a young boy who had run into the street. When Utash stopped to help, he was attacked and would now be dead but for the intervention of Deborah Hughes, a retired nurse who has seen two of her own children die in the city. Utash is white. His attackers are black. This is the Detroit I know primarily through the eyes of my friend Charity Hicks, who talks despondently of a generation of young men so marginalized that they put little value on human life. With rates of poverty and unemployment far higher than during the Great Depression, much of Detroit has become a wasteland of alcohol, drugs and violence. And no one knows what to do.

• Build more prisons? We already have the world’s highest incarceration rate, which has more than tripled in 40 years.

• Stop coddling the poor? We already pay less for food stamps than prisons and more for prisons than schools.

• Hope they stay in the inner city, killing themselves and each other? Then, as Steve Utash showed, we’d better not go there.

• Launch a New Deal-like jobs program? We have a Congress that won’t authorize a dime for such things.

So we turn our backs, lock our communities and create a system of apartheid that is an American tragedy.

But if you go into these cities, into these neighborhoods, you see signs of hope trying to bloom, signs I'll explore in future posts.

Redemption

Last month the Colorado River crossed the Mexican border for the first time in years. It is on its way to the Gulf of California amid hopes that it will revive its delta, which Aldo Leopold described in 1922 as an ecological paradise but which is now a barren, saline desert. In the midst of the worst drought in the region’s history, prolonged negotiations between the U.S. and Mexico – spurred by scientists and environmentalists – have brought water back to the southern Colorado, and there is hope that the once-grand river, destroyed by economic forces bent on extracting every drop of its water, will flow again to the sea. For the past 13 years, John Trotter has been documenting that story in his photographs. He first went to the Colorado after the attempted-murder conviction of a street gang leader, who had orchestrated a beating so severe that John was “left for dead in a pool of blood.” He had been taking pictures of children playing for the Sacramento Bee.

Still traumatized, he sought relief in something “bigger than my own experience.” He started at the bottom, in the delta where the river is only a dry bed, and he found a landscape as damaged as he was, its people eking a living out of dead land. He empathized. He taught himself Spanish. He kept returning. He watched people working for years to bring water to the delta. It had become, for the Colorado and for his own life, “a redemption story.”

A Short History of Drugs

For some reason, this story, reproduced in its entirety, caught my attention last week: “The Australian Michael Rogers can race again after cycling’s governing body accepted that meat he ate in China probably caused his positive doping test.

“Rogers, 34, an Olympic bronze medalist, raced last October in China, where clenbuterol is widely administered to livestock. He tested positive days later at the Japan Cup.”

I’d never heard of Michael Rogers or clenbuterol and have little interest in professional bicycling. Yet the 51-word article, oddly complete in itself, seemed a parable for the modern world, with its randomly connected elements of big-time athletics, widespread drug use and Chinese food production.

“Clen”, it turns out, has a lot of uses. It relieves asthma, makes horses run faster and cows grow quicker, gives athletes bigger muscles and celebrities smaller waistlines. It was made famous by Kirk Radomiski, the NY Mets felonious batboy and Major League steroid supplier, and by the anorexic look of Victoria Beckham, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. It is discussed ad nauseum on bodybuilding web forums and provides one more way for China to poison its people in its relentless push for economic growth.

Remember when we took drugs to take us out of our bodies, instead of because we were obsessed with how those bodies looked? It seems a long arc of history from a bunch of stoned hippies trying to levitate the Pentagon to a man eating a steak in China and testing positively for anabolic steroids in Japan.

Welfare in Black and White

Surprise. Surprise. Cliven Bundy is a racist. Who knew?

Certainly not the Republican politicians and Fox News pundits frantically trying to reel in their words of support after the pot-bellied Nevada rancher's recent pronouncements on “the Negro." Bundy, who knows a thing or two about welfare from decades of feeding his cattle at the public trough, boned up on African-American culture driving past a public housing project in north Vegas. “And one more thing I know about the Negro: they abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton.”

You’d think they’d get it after years of nominating Neanderthals to carry their banner. But Republicans still get all indignant when Todd (“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down”) Akin turns out to be a misogynist. Or Christine (teaching evolution is big government “imposing beliefs on local schools”) O’Donnell an idiot. Or Michele (“It isn’t that some gay will get some rights. It’s that everyone else in our state will lose rights”) Bachmann a homophobe.

Now American-flag-waving patriot Cliven (“I don’t recognize the American government as even existing”) Bundy wonders, “are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?”

Hmmm, Cliven, good question. In your case, I’m going with government subsidy.

But as all those Germans said in the 1930s, “We had no idea.”

Patriots and Immigrants

On Monday, Patriots Day, a year after the terror bombings, an American won the Boston Marathon for the first time since 1983. His name is Meb Keflezighi. Meb Keflezghi? Was I the only person to do a double take? Does he sound American to you? So I did some digging: birth certificate (long form), called Ed Snowden in Moscow, Wikipedia. His full name is Mebrahtom Keflezighi, and it’s pronounced: mebrāhtōm kifl'igzī. Seriously. I’m surprised they let him within 26 miles of Boston, where they still call John A. Kelley, who ran 61 marathons, won two and has a statue on the course, an “Irishman.”

The last “Bostonian” I remember running Boston was my determined friend John Mason, Justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court and a direct descendant of John Adams. When I couldn’t find his name in the next day’s Boston Globe, I accused him of not finishing. I should have known better. He just didn’t cross the line until after all the reporters had gone home. That’s Boston – and that was John, who fared less well in his race with cancer 10 years ago.

Meb Keflezghi was born in Asmara, Eritrea, from which his family fled in 1987. He was an All-American at UCLA and became an American citizen after graduation. In these times, when defining an American is so contentious, it’s inspiring that a man named Meb Keflezighi won America's oldest race. And I know no one is cheering more loudly than John Mason, who believed passionately in both America and the American Dream.

Gas Man Fights "Unbearable" Erection in North Texas Town

Rex Tillerson and his wife, Renda, of Bartonville joined suit with neighbors to demand the demolition of a 160-foot water tower near their North Texas ranch. The plaintiffs claim the tower is illegal and unsightly, and they oppose Cross Timbers Water Supply Corp’s plan to sell “water to oil and gas explorers for fracking,” arguing the tower compromises their right to live in an “upscale community free of . . . structures that might . . . adversely impact the rural lifestyle they sought to enjoy.” Rex and Renda have joined a growing movement of families, across all walks of life, who are fighting back against corporate intrusions into their back-to-the-land dreams. Indeed, their concerns about “big water” echo those expressed last month by Dune Lankard on the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez fiasco: “It was more than just an oil spill,” Lankard, a member of the Eyak Alaska Eagle clan, told NPR. “We had an Alaskan dream, and that dream was intact for several thousands of years. And our relationship was with that land and sea and all of those animals . . . And so when that was disrupted, that fabric of our way of life and our Alaskan dream was also stolen from us.”

In other news:

• FoxBusiness reported last week that Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson’s 2013 compensation fell to $28.1 million.

• The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Tillersons have dropped out of the lawsuit.

• Exxon has pledged to report in September on the environmental impact of fracking.

• Tomorrow is Earth Day.

Note: I have a memory of a variation on the headline from 50 years ago, but extensive research (i.e. googling) produced no source to credit.

Good Friday

On Good Friday 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head. The assassination came five days after the surrender at Appomattox and the effective collapse of Southern resistance, and the two events have ever since shaped the narrative of American history. In her fascinating new book, Appomattox, Elizabeth Varon disputes the long-held myth that “Grant’s magnanimity” and “Lee’s stoic resignation” initiated “a process of national healing,” arguing instead that the two men interpreted the peace totally differently. For Grant the victory was one of “right over wrong,” and he looked forward to a transformed and prosperous nation. For Lee the defeat was one of “might over right,” and he sought a restoration, without slavery, of the old patrician order. Tragically, Lincoln’s murder helped ensure that Lee’s vision prevailed. We see it in depictions of Grant, “the butcher,” and of Sherman sowing carnage from Atlanta to the sea; of the “Birth of a Nation’s” ruthless Reconstruction when the Klan arose to restore honor and order to a lawless South; of greedy carpetbaggers deflowering a helpless land; of an age of gentility “Gone With the Wind.” And so, despite the Union’s overwhelming victory and the generous terms of the peace, the restoration of the old order – also known as Jim Crow – brutally repressed those whom the war had just emancipated. It took another century for the Civil Rights and Voting acts to address those wrongs – and 50 years more for the Roberts Court to roll them back.

Leading from the Rear

Following its decision to report on its stranded assets,” two weeks ago, ExxonMobil has agreed to disclose its research on the risks of fracking. Both decisions, long resisted by Exxon, came because of shareholder pressure. Enter Harvard University in response to pressure from its shareholders – students and faculty – to divest its portfolio of fossil-fuel corporations. “Climate change poses a serious threat to our future – and increasingly to our present,” wrote university president Drew Faust. “Harvard has a vital leadership role to play [and] a special obligation and accountability to the future.” It will do so in three areas: “supporting innovative research focused on climate change solutions, reducing our own carbon footprint, advancing our commitments as a long-term investor.”

While the last includes laudable and long-overdue initiatives – joining other organizations to develop best-practice guidelines and drive corporate disclosure – it specifically rejects divestment.

I have no problem with that, but Faust seems to suggest that Harvard cannot use its vast fortune in support of its core values. The endowment, Faust wrote, “is not an instrument to impel social or political change,” but a sacrosanct fund that must be above politics. Harvard is a voracious fundraiser, and in building its $32-billion endowment, it made plenty of political decisions.

Small investors are increasingly taking responsibility for their investments. If Harvard is truly committed as an institution to tackling climate change, how can it refuse to put its money where its mouth is? Don't they teach ethics in Cambridge anymore?

The Souls of His Shoes

On our last day in Sicily, we climbed on Mt. Etna, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, whose snow-covered summit rises 11,000 feet above the Mediterranean Sea. Walking on hardened lava left from an enormous eruption in 2002, we came to an ominous hole in the mountain floor. Our guide explained that the source of Etna’s magma is – incredibly – beneath the African continent across the Mediterranean, and then he casually tossed in a rock. “It is a very, very deep hole,” he said. “Listen for the sound of the bottom.” We listened . . . and listened, but there was no sound. It was beyond eerie, and we all immediately stepped back from the rim. I envisioned people walking around China with stones embedded in their heads. I was, for some reason, reminded of George Bush’s remark on first meeting Vladimir Putin in 2001: “I looked into his eyes and saw his soul.” In a career filled with loony utterances, none has proved more delusional. The Decider touted his ability to “read people” and make decisions with “his gut,” but maybe this wasn’t the best way to make policy. The Russians have long built Potemkin villages, and unimaginative men rarely see past the façade. As events unfold in Ukraine and Russia, and we watch Putin metamorphose into Stalin with a pretty face, it’s hard to find much evidence of a soul. I think of Bush bedazzled, and wonder when he looked in Putin’s eyes, whether he saw only the soles of his feet.

Ask Not . . .

Of course you cannot visit Sicily without coming across a corpse. We chanced upon ours on our fifth day, as we walked across the beautiful Madonie Mountains high above the town of Castelbuono. Near the end of a four-hour hike that had begun just below the lingering snow – which came as a surprise to those of us who had packed for the tropics – we arrived at a small shepherd’s hut, where carabinieri in crisp blue uniforms and gold braid drove up the wagon path and strode into the nearby woods. The victim was a young man, whose hands and feet were bound, and who had a single bullet hole behind his right ear. There was no sign of a struggle, but his tongue was missing, presumably as warning to potential informers. Or such, at least, was the tale we spun among ourselves. Slowly, more details trickled out. He was not a young man, but elderly, possibly in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, who had wandered off from his home and been missing for seven days. He had walked a long way to die. Perhaps he had feared becoming a burden to his family and so had come to the most beautiful place he knew, ready in the early spring to return to the earth from which he had come. I will never know. But he has become one of countless people whose lives intersect fleetingly with mine, about whom I know nothing and yet whom I cannot forget.

Slight Memories

Often when I travel, I remember the little things – not the images I bring home in a photograph or a postcard, nor the grandeur of antiquity or the self-importance of men – but an unexpected phrase that voices a larger reality or a gilimpse of a passing scene. • “I want to ask you,” our 72-year-old driver, Vittorio, says as we sit down to dinner the first evening, “what you think is the difference between life and death.”

• As we look out over a broad valley from an amphitheater the Greeks built on a high hill 2,500 years ago, someone asks why the highway below is elevated above the plain. Is it to protect the road from flooding, or an earthquake? “I suppose,” our guide answers with a smile of bemused resignation, “because it costs more.”

• As we descend from the ruins of a 14^th-century castle, we meet a young couple whose two-year-old son is gathering stones. Someone wonders if he is making a barricade. “We know how to build barricades,” says the mother sorrowfully. “We are from Ukraine.”

• In the seaside town of Cefalu, in a small chapel with plain whitewashed walls and stations of the cross hand-carved from dark wood, and on whose ceiling is a simple fresco of Jesus and the words, “Come to me, all who hunger,” a choir of six women and an old man at the organ fill the space with music of incomparable beauty.

From such slight memories come the lasting imprint of my journey.

A Couple of Sicilians

My plane had barely landed in Palermo when I read that Antonin Scalia, one of America’s most infamous Sicilian-Americans, had paved the way for the oligarchs to buy the American government, as the Supreme Court continued to dismantle campaign finance reform in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a decision, in the words of dissenting Justice Breyer, that effectively makes the limit on individual contributions “the number zero.” That mattered little to Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote, “There is no right in our democracy more basic than the right to participate in electing our political leaders” – ignoring the fact that most of us are now less able to participate in a system that facilitates private conversations between people who have money and want legislation and those who make laws and want money. For an example of how that works, see Republican Congressman Dave Camp’s effort to write a tax-reform bill that was loudly acclaimed by the business lobby – until individual businesses noted parts they didn’t like. Suddenly, tax reform is dead and Camp is leaving Congress. Meanwhile, those of us who don’t want to buy the government will be endlessly pressured for donations to stop those who do.

Here in Sicily, where government is assumed to be a wholly owned subsidiary of La Cosa Nostra, President Rosario Crocetta seeks to eradicate corruption and open the government to the people, despite nonstop threats to kill him. The fact that he is an openly gay Catholic must really drive Scalia nuts.

Sicily's Home Front

Advised that Italy had joined forces with Hitler’s Germany, Churchill allegedly responded, “Seems only fair. We had them in the last war.” We tend to equate valor with military bravery – and overlook the violence just below the surface of our relatively safe and peaceful lives. This is not possible in Sicily, where I am headed today. In anticipation, I read Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, which tells the history of La Cosa Nostra and its intricate ties with the Christian Democrats, Italy’s major political party. It is a frightening tale, guaranteed to cure any visitor’s narcolepsy. Unfortunately, I have insomnia.

Robb shatters the image of a mafia operating in the shadows, imposing a corrupt peace and killing only its own dissidents, describing a “Palermo destroyed like Beirut by a war that’s lasted over forty years, the war of mafia power against the poor,” one that caused 10,000 deaths in a decade, stole billions, and came to America with Lucky Luciano, who left Sicily in 1919 and returned with US forces in 1946.

It has been a war with authentic heroes, men who sought justice knowing they would be killed in its pursuit: Alberto Dalla Chiesa, prefect of Palermo, murdered with his wife; Giovanni Falcone, magistrate, murdered with his wife; Rocco Chinnici, chief prosecutor, murdered; Paolo Borsellino, deputy prosecutor, murdered; Mino Pecorelli, journalist, murdered. These and countless others, including Sicily’s current president, Rosario Crocetta, knew the cost we pay by keeping silent and looking the other way. They are truly brave men.

I will try to report on my trip, but I don’t know if I will be able to, so this may be my last post until I get back in mid-April.

Gladiator U

It all began with the communists. The Soviets and East German women, with their bulging gym shorts and five-o’clock shadows, who won all those Olympic medals in the 1960s weren’t amateurs. They were full-time state employees. The Reds were cheaters. Meanwhile, in the free world, another secretive power was creating a sports empire the capitalist way, as the National Collegiate Athletic Association built a multi-billion-dollar business on the carefully cultivated image of the student-athlete. It seemed like a good deal: colleges got millions, and student-athletes got free educations for playing a game they loved, opportunities for lucrative professional careers, and adulation from fans.

But as the NCAA grew its business beyond expectations, cracks appeared. Management thrived – coaches are often their states’ highest-paid employees. But the laborers, ever bigger and faster, battling in the trenches below thousands of rabid fans, are getting shafted. After working 40-50-hour weeks, 2% of college football players make the NFL, where the average career is under six years and the prognosis is “a dramatically shortened life span.”

This may be changing, Last week, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Northwestern’s scholarship football players are university employees, eligible to form a union and negotiate for wages and benefits. The NLRB exposed the charade of big-time college athletic programs. But is the remedy to pay professional workers to provide entertainment in college stadiums? Does a university really fulfill its mission by paying its “players” minimum wage so it can cheat them out of a $200,000 education?

If You Can't Beat 'Em

I have had a lot of response to my “Stranded Assets” post, with requests for more information – and a correction: “Exxon is not the worlds largest energy company. The national oil companies of the Persian Gulf all make it look like a peanut.” Some shared stories of token votes overwhelmed by management and expressed wonder that small shareholders could have any impact. But the perception of the almost mythic power of “multinational corporations” – like that of "big government" – overlooks their origins as a democratic concept that made, at least in theory, economic participation available to a broad public. Perhaps it’s time to stop the impotent handwringing and get involved in the process of governance.

• And from The Economist: “Exxon Mobil, surely the world’s least tree-hugging company, became the first oil giant to say it would publish details of its ‘stranded assets’ – the value of oil and gas fields that it might not be able to exploit if there were a high carbon price or tough rules on greenhouse-gas emissions. Giant Exxon is not doing this because it has gone mushy or caved in to green activists. Rather, it is heading off a shareholder resolution by Arjuna Capital, a fund manager, demanding explanations and actions on environmental threats to the firm. Exxon’s decision is the biggest step so far in a wider business trend: companies publishing information on their environmental impact and vulnerability to green regulation, to attract or placate investors.”

There is more than one way to occupy Wall Street.

All The News That’s Fitting

When Ben Richardson resigned from Bloomberg News on Monday, he became the third newsperson to quit since the company allegedly squashed an investigative report on big money and politics in China. China plays hardball – as Bloomberg found out in 2012, after it published an article on the staggering wealth accumulated by China’s political elite, and the Chinese government cut off subscriptions to the company’s services. Bloomberg has annual sales of $8.5 billion, and China figures prominently in its future plans. So maybe this gives China some potential leverage over news coverage – as Bloomberg’s Chairman Peter Grauer suggested last week when he said his editors “should have rethought” articles that “wander a little bit away” from the organization’s core business reporting. This is one slippery slope. Yes, the financial stakes are unusually large in China, but news organizations have always had to navigate between commercial needs and editorial integrity, at least in countries that pay lip service to a free press. The press is both a private business and a public trust, and the pressures from the former – to write a puff piece on car dealer, to stop pummeling the bank chairman – have always been relentless. That’s why there was once a “fire wall” between the two sides. But that has eroded as old-fashioned publishers have given way to corporate flacks interested only in profits. It’s easy to beat up on Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, but the deeper threat to press freedom is much more subtle than those guys.

Stranded Assets

They probably found it pretty laughable at headquarters when the resolution arrived, signed by DeWitt Sage and me, asking ExxonMobil to disclose to shareholders its plans for dealing with fossil-fuel reserves in a future when political regulations and market forces could significantly reduce their value. The resolution came swiftly back, rejected. But Sage and Blaine, who were merely agreeable front men for the investment strategists at Arjuna Capital, persisted – and, to our amazement, prevailed. It was an ingenious – and important – argument. We approached ExxonMobil not as tree huggers or monkey wrenchers, but as investors concerned about our investment. Exxon carries its reserves as huge assets on its books – even as studies increasingly show they will lose significant value in a carbon-constrained world. The oil and gas may never even get out of the ground, which would be good for Earth’s future but not for Exxon’s shareholders. What, we asked, is the company’s long-range plan to address the risk to these “stranded assets?”

In case you missed it in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Reuters (which headlined a “landmark agreement), I am pleased to announce that Arjuna withdrew our proposal after Exxon agreed to report publicly on its plan to deal with its carbon asset risks. This doesn’t yet mean Exxon will reduce its carbon footprint – there’s also a shareholder proposal on that – but the world’s largest energy company is the first to consent to this unprecedented level of transparency. Thanks to Arjuna.

Both Feet Out of the Grave

Last time, I wrote about the gloomy coincidence of humankind on the verge of discovering the origins of the universe as we race toward Armageddon, as if human existence were in the last act of a Greek morality play. And yet, our quest to unlock the secrets of life is not just the drive to break free of our mortality and become gods. It also manifests our craving to understand the essence of being human. As Satan recognized in the Garden, we have to know because, well, we just have to know. One theory that came out of the recent discoveries I wrote about is that the Big Bang obliterated everything that came before it; and it set in motion a cosmos that will continue to spin off new universes forever. I have no idea if this is true, but it offers us a new way of thinking about the world and our place in it. We’re the only species that strives to separate ourselves from the rest of creation and then subdue it, with the aim of controlling our future. But if these scientists are right, we aren't in control of this journey, and maybe we should rejoice in the gift of our moment here and simply live, doing less harm, seeking more harmony.

Scientists believe there is a yet-undiscovered “fifth force” that complements gravity. Some call it “antigravity.” I like to think of it as “levity.” In a world filled with gravitas, maybe we just need to lighten up.