The Michael Decon Program

[whoozit]

Sure. Keep yukking it up guys. Talking about dinks almost touching and what not.  All while poor Senda has literal holes in his brain,
How can you look at yourselves in the mirror?

He really got his pipe cleaned in jail.

[whoozit]

I wasn't offended, But I couldn't tell if you were trying to make it dig at me, or if you really misremembered, or if I'm in the new dimension today or... look I'm not going to lie it's been a wild few months, and now I know exactly how Taylor Swift felt when Kanye went up on stage and sexually assaulted her with all those noodles.

No dig intended.  It just sounded like something you might say.

[Jackstar]

You too.

I'm thinking the refusal to proofread at all, is actually making me more impressive. That, or China is taking control of my prepositions, which of course would be all right with me as long as they give me a cookie with a fortune every time.

[K_Dubb]

Sure. Keep yukking it up guys. Talking about dinks almost touching and what not.  All while poor Senda has literal holes in his brain,
How can you look at yourselves in the mirror?

You have to go and bring up Senda at a time like this!  I am frantically doing last-minute squats and pullups; hopefully the pump will survive the trip.

[whoozit]

You have to go and bring up Senda at a time like this!  I am frantically doing last-minute squats and pullups; hopefully the pump will survive the trip.

No Tunis cake for you!

[K_Dubb]

I'm thinking the refusal to proofread at all, is actually making me more impressive. That, or China is taking control of my prepositions, which of course would be all right with me as long as they give me a cookie with a fortune every time.

Here's your fortune buddy Confucius say man who fuck with queer get kicked in rear.

[Jackstar]

No dig intended.  It just sounded like something you might say.

Maybe in my early twenties, while I was still unable to acquire sex, cannabis, or oxygen reliably. I was kind of struggling with a negative outlook on life at the time, and I say "kind of" because is it a really a struggle if a person doesn't know there's an alternative?

You know what? Maybe I said it in my late twenties. Maybe someone else said it and I agreed cuz I wanted to look cool, too. The possibilities are endless!

[attachment=1,msg1444700]


Except for the possibility that I actually think that there's no one on my side. Take my advice: if you get a chance to work with The Quincunx don't say no, say, "yes, yes, maybe, maybe, yes." They might not respect you any extra, but I will.

[K_Dubb]

No Tunis cake for you!

Fuck tunis cake I need two more abs!

[whoozit]

Maybe in my early twenties, while I was still unable to acquire sex, cannabis, or oxygen reliably. I was kind of struggling with a negative outlook on life at the time, and I say "kind of" because is it a really a struggle if a person doesn't know there's an alternative?

You know what? Maybe I said it in my late twenties. Maybe someone else said it and I agreed cuz I wanted to look cool, too. The possibilities are endless!

[attachment=1,msg1444700]


Except for the possibility that I actually think that there's no one on my side. Take my advice: if you get a chance to work with The Quincunx don't say no, say, "yes, yes, maybe, maybe, yes." They might not respect you any extra, but I will.

You almost make me want to start a “Things That Sound Like Something Jackstar Might Say But Wouldn’t” thread but not quite.  I digress as this was not the point of your post, but I do accept your fealty, especially the reward oath-breaking with vengeance part.

[pate]

He hasn’t turned on me. He still calls me his buddy. ::)

You are on my buddy list, Doc!  I will not return the evil of "ignore" with a similar evil!

Hear, a vidya:

https://youtu.be/6aOacBxG1XA

-Executive Producer, GabCast

[Dr. MD MD]

You are on my buddy list, Doc!  I will not return the evil of "ignore" with a similar evil!

-Executive Producer, GabCast

pate, stop being so silly! We both know ignore just means I have to click an extra link to see what you wrote about me now. :

P.S. Sometimes when you get too retarded (like when you post the same vid over and over again and somehow think that’s funny) I actually do ignore you though, for the sake of sanity and all that is holy.

[Dr. MD MD]

I've been waiting for a follow up this entire time!

Ask and ye shall receive:

None of this happened the way you think it did’
For years, the clients of a Colorado funeral home kept their loved ones’ cremated remains. Then the FBI called.
Elena Saavedra Buckley
Image credit: Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
June 10, 2019 From the print edition
Last summer, Debbie Schum walked onto the campus of Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, carrying a petite gift bag. The bag had red and pink swirly designs, a look that 54-year-old Schum, a lifelong tomboy who wears her gray hair in a limp mohawk, felt awkward carrying. When the FBI called, suggesting she bring the bag to their outpost at the school, they were adamant about punctuality. Schum arrived 20 minutes before 2 p.m. and climbed the stairs to the second floor of a beige brick building. The bag held a container of cremated human remains. They belonged to LoraLee Johnson, known as Lora, Schum’s best friend for nearly 30 years.

The ashes hadn’t met their intended fate. On June 13, 2017, Johnson passed away from bladder cancer at Schum’s home in Hotchkiss, a small community surrounded by orchards and farms in western Colorado. In her will, Johnson, an artist and proud Aquarius, asked Schum to mix the cremated remains with glitter and ground herbs. She wanted them scattered at Orvis Hot Springs in the town of Ridgway, where she and Schum had spent many hours soaking.

The day after her death, Johnson’s body arrived at Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors in Montrose, Colorado, a big-box town of 19,000. A 42-year-old woman named Megan Hess owned Sunset Mesa, and Hess’ mother helped her with the business. After Johnson’s body went to the funeral home, Schum said it took seven weeks for the ashes to return in the gift bag. By that time, the memorial Johnson’s friends wanted had been repeatedly delayed. Schum cared about the remains, but they felt incomplete as they were. Then, a year later, the FBI called.

At the university, Schum spoke to a woman at an intake table in the hallway, who asked her to wait. Special Agent in Charge John Busch and another FBI employee eventually appeared. Schum followed them into a small room, placed the bag on the floor and sat down.

The agents began asking her questions about Sunset Mesa: Did she originally contact them? No, hospice did. At what time did she visit the business? Around 1:30 p.m., the day after Johnson’s death. What arrangements were made?

At Sunset Mesa, Hess asked for $1,000 cash for the cremation. Schum didn’t have enough in her wallet, so Hess suggested that she donate Johnson’s bladder â€" untouched by chemotherapy and radiation after Johnson rejected both treatments â€" to cancer research. The cremation would be free if she did so, but Johnson hadn’t wanted any part of her body removed. Considering the saved money and the benevolence of donation, Schum, with some guilt, took the offer.  


“What would you have said if she asked you to donate the entire body?” Schum remembers Busch asking.

Schum considers herself a fierce rationalist, the kind of person who’s usually irritated by hypotheticals. “They didn’t ask me that,” she said firmly. She wouldn’t have agreed if they had.

Busch paused. “I’m sorry to inform you that none of this happened the way you think it did.”



Debbie Schum in her home in western Colorado, where she brought what she thought was a bag containing her friend Lora Johnson’s cremated remains. The FBI later took the bag and its contents as evidence in a body-brokering scheme.
Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
THE AGENTS TOLD SCHUM THAT THEY SUSPECTED Sunset Mesa had sold Johnson’s entire body, potentially one of hundreds to meet a similar end. According to FBI letters and emails sent to families, the bureau began investigating Hess’ businesses in October 2017. Along with Sunset Mesa, Hess ran a nonprofit called Donor Services Inc., through which she sold donated bodies or their parts to various companies. This unregulated field, which itself is legal, is known as “body brokering,” and it supplies cadavers to industries that seem benign â€" university labs, medical schools â€" as well as plastic surgery classes, car companies and the military. An FBI review of her donor files showed that Hess allegedly sold bodies that were meant for cremation without proper consent.

After Reuters interviewed concerned former employees of Sunset Mesa, the FBI raided the business in February 2018. Soon after, the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies opened its own investigation, which found that Hess failed to maintain necessary records for years and had disposed of bodies without required permits. She entered an agreement with the agency to surrender her business registration, and Sunset Mesa is now permanently closed. The FBI has confirmed the existence of its criminal investigation and acknowledged that it has tested cremains for “foreign substances,” but little else about the case has been publicly revealed. With suspicions swirling, some of the funeral home’s alleged victims have filed civil suits accusing Hess of fraud, civil conspiracy and other violations. Hess, who did not respond to multiple interview requests or a list of questions, has denied the accusations. No one has yet been charged.

For many family members, the lasting anger comes from the idea that, no matter how much meaning their loved one’s body carried, someone else could have viewed it as a product, taken it apart, put it in a box and sold it.
The university’s Forensic Investigation Research Station tested 128 samples of cremated remains, and some, including those thought to belong to Johnson, were taken to FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. Alleged victims were told that these “central” cases, of which there are about 50, involved bodies that were sold whole. Because cadavers transfer between buyers â€" and are sometimes dismembered in the process â€" their ultimate destinations are hard to track. Relatives learned that their loved ones’ remains, if indeed sold, were unlikely to ever be found.

Concerns metastasized past Montrose into many western Colorado towns and beyond, creating a vast web of people, many living in rural communities, touched by the investigation. The story reveals the thin barrier that separates most Americans from the grisly methods, and possible abuses, of the death care industry. For many family members, the lasting anger comes from the idea that, no matter how much meaning their loved one’s body carried, someone else could have viewed it as a product, taken it apart, put it in a box and sold it. Life felt permanently altered for many. “Why would you even dream that this could be possible?” one woman wondered. 

In the room with the agents, Schum was stunned. She could only say, “What are you talking about?” She said it many times. The bag on the floor had suddenly become an intruder. Lora might not be inside it, and no one knew what was. She handed the bag to the agents so they could test its contents. “Take your time,” she said. “It’s not her anyway.”

“Did it come in this little gift bag?” Schum remembers Busch asking. “What did you think of that?”

“I thought it was tacky.”

The agents told her they would be in touch. Schum went back to her car, thinking that, for someone who just heard that her friend’s body was lost, she was doing pretty well. She stopped at Walmart to pick up trash bags and other household supplies on the way home. Once inside the store, everything hit her.

Schum started “freaking out,” something she rarely does. She began crying and fled to the restroom to hide, but it was busy. She abandoned her filled shopping cart in an aisle. Somehow, she made it home. Once there, she rifled through the documents relating to Johnson’s estate, looking for a receipt, anything, from Sunset Mesa. All she found were business cards.


Debbie Schum’s shadow falls on a shed at her home in western Colorado. Schum’s friend LoraLee Johnson spent her final days in the home.
Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
THE FBI AGENTS COULDN'T TELL Schum where Johnson’s body had gone, but they did ask her if she had ever heard of “plastination.” She took this as a hint. Plastination is a process that halts a body’s decay by removing the skin and replacing the fluids with liquid polymer. The body is then positioned with clamps and foam blocks to “cure.” After hardening in its position, a process that takes months, it ends up displayed in classrooms or exhibits. It is one of many possible fates for a brokered body.

Selling corpses is a shadowy industry, but it doesn’t necessarily operate outside the law. Tissue and organs for transplant go through a highly regulated process, but non-transplant tissue, the kind used for scientific and medical research, can be sold when obtained consensually through the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act. Around 20,000 people donate their bodies for this purpose each year, often through university programs. There’s a greater demand for cadavers than those programs can satisfy, though, so independent brokers and tissue banks, where bodies are stored and distributed, have stepped in to fill the void.


The death certificate of LoraLee Johnson, which lists cremation as Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors’ method of disposition.
Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
Almost no laws control what happens to non-transplant tissue once it is donated; a cadaver can theoretically be sold or leased many times. Brokers, especially those working without proper consent, take advantage of the resulting gaps. The money is often enough to justify their behavior â€" a complete body usually sells for between $3,000 and $5,000, but prices can peak much higher, according to the Reuters investigation. Brokering scandals have occurred near Los Angeles, Detroit, Phoenix, Albuquerque and even the medical schools at Tulane and UCLA.

In Colorado, there are few regulations to catch shoddy behavior, such as illegitimate body trading, by mortuaries. It is the only state in the country that does not license funeral home and crematorium operators, and its regulatory agencies have little authority to inspect these businesses. In response to the Sunset Mesa investigation, in June 2018, Colorado lawmakers made it illegal for anyone who owns more than a 10 percent interest in a mortuary or crematory to have interest in a non-transplant tissue bank.

The state’s Department of Regulatory Agencies had received complaints about Sunset Mesa for years, including one from a former Delta County coroner, but no disciplinary action occurred until after the 2018 FBI raid. The agency’s eventual investigation alleged that Hess used unmixed concrete as a replacement for the ashes. “What we have here is an orchestrated event,” Hess wrote in her response, claiming that a state investigator and another local funeral home owner cooked up the story. “You do not become the number-one funeral home in town by doing a bad job.”

Hess dealt with hundreds of customers since becoming the owner of Sunset Mesa in 2011. According to more than 50 stories from interviews and legal documents, those contacted by the FBI had experiences similar to Schum’s: discounted or free cremation services in exchange for a donated organ, with little attention paid to the lack of forms or receipts. Others never agreed to donate anything. Many remembered Hess as a warm, sweet woman who put them at ease. Some families kept the ashes they received at home, while others buried them next to a spouse in Florida, or scattered them under a tree in Oregon, or flew them to an ancestral village in Ireland. Months or years later, in 2018, they learned they might be the victims of a crime.


During a gathering at the home of Terri Reid, members of the Facebook group for alleged victims share their experiences with each other.
Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
When Schum and I first spoke on the phone last October, she wanted to dispel the idea that she was in an emotionally fragile state. She described the Sunset Mesa ordeal as “usurping her grief” â€" more frustrating for the emotions it hijacked than the new ones it produced. She despised Hess and her family for their possible deception, and she wanted justice. But she also seemed disturbed by how quickly the investigation had made her feel like a stranger in her own world. Schum has experienced other losses in her life. But losing her friend twice, first to cancer and then to the underworld of the cadaver market, reminded her that, no matter how much she attempted to confront death, there were many unimagined trap doors.

The FBI set up an online survey for Sunset Mesa’s clients to discover whether they might be relevant to the investigation. Some didn’t respond at all, but Schum wanted as much information as the FBI could give her. Then she did more research. She looked for Johnson in plastination company databases, searching for a familiar, albeit skinless, face. She combed through tangentially related articles. She read about the industry in Annie Cheney’s Body Brokers. “Relatives rarely have the opportunity â€" or the inclination â€" to accompany their deceased loved ones into the realm of hospital morgues and funeral homes,” Cheney writes. “But once death comes, they are quick to release them into a world which, for many, is a kind of wilderness.”

“The most succinct way to say this,” she said, “is that I really, really need to call Lora and tell her this totally bizarre and horrible thing that happened to my friend Lora.”
Schum struggled to define her feelings. The body had been stolen from her, in a way, but Johnson was already dead â€" the body wasn’t her anymore. Why, other than their fraudulent and disrespectful nature, were the accusations so upsetting? It defied Schum’s compulsion to categorize. “There’s no file folder for this,” she said. “When there isn’t one, it swims in your head until you can create one.” Like the death of a loved one, the incident felt incomprehensible, but there was no funeral-like event to usher her into its fact. 

“The most succinct way to say this,” she said, “is that I really, really need to call Lora and tell her this totally bizarre and horrible thing that happened to my friend Lora.”



A painting Johnson made for Schum as a housewarming gift when she first moved into her home six years ago.
Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
IN OCTOBER 1989, 24-year-old Schum got off a plane in Grand Junction after spending the summer in Alaska with her boyfriend, a raft guide. It was 1 a.m. and cold, and the next bus to her neighborhood wouldn’t leave for hours. She knew an artist who lived in a warehouse in town and, hoping to crash on his floor, she walked there and knocked on his window. Johnson, who had been dating the artist, appeared on the other side of the glass. She opened the window about six inches, and Schum began fumbling out an introduction. Johnson stopped her. “Do you need somewhere to sleep?” she asked.

They went to Orvis Hot Springs the next morning and became fast friends. In their early years of friendship, Johnson dragged Schum into the New Age art scenes in hippie-leaning communities of Colorado. Even so, the two were vastly different. Schum matured into an Ayn Rand-loving, orderly atheist, while Johnson believed in reincarnation, loved to wear makeup and was a chronic procrastinator. But they shared an immense conversational world, spending most evenings together on long phone calls. Their friendship, buoyed by cell signals, was largely bodiless.

Johnson played a vital role in her friend’s life as they grew into adulthood. Schum’s mother was emotionally and verbally abusive; her daughter believes she had some kind of personality disorder. She often made Schum feel as if she was responsible for her volatile and dangerous moods. After Schum dropped out of high school and left home, she began to examine her emotions. She learned to scrutinize them and file them into place, a technique she honed in years of counseling. It made her feel more in control than she ever did as a child. She could get carried away with analyzing herself, but conversations with Johnson helped her integrate the lessons of therapy into everyday life.

Johnson was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2015. She elected to forgo medical treatment in favor of $6,000 sessions with alternative therapists and faith healers. But when her disease progressed to stage four, Schum knew she could no longer care for her friend over the phone. She drove the hour to Grand Junction, picked up her friend and moved her into her house in Hotchkiss.


The room in Schum's home where Johnson spent her last days. Johnson's grandmother was also an artist and made the painting in the 60s.
Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
IT WAS THE FIRST TIME THE FRIENDS had seen each other in over a month. Johnson’s cheeks were sunken, and she could no longer sit upright. She lay in a hospice bed in Schum’s study, looking out the window at the yard and listening to a chorus of wind chimes on the nearby porch. She kept her sense of humor, once asking a hospice nurse if she could bring Brad Pitt to feed her grapes and fan her with peacock feathers. But eight days after she moved in, she died, late at night, with Schum holding her hand.

The Sunset Mesa investigation put Schum in a position where she needed her friend more than ever. When she heard about a private Facebook group for alleged victims, she joined, hoping that others could help make the situation more coherent. Today, the group hosts some 400 people.

Schum became the de facto leader. She was active, squeezing updates out of the FBI victim specialists via text and posting them as fodder for frenzied theory building. The members pored over each other’s cases, digging into the grim details of how their loved ones were possibly dismembered. “The group is a double-edged sword,” Schum said. “One of the benefits is that we can talk about this, and we can put our crumbs of information together. But one of the cons of the group is it’s overwhelming.”


A group of people from the Montrose, Colorado, area gather to talk about their experiences with Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors, now under investigation by the FBI.
Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
“The group is a double-edged sword. One of the benefits is that we can talk about this, and we can put our crumbs of information together. But one of the cons of the group is it’s overwhelming.”
But it was only a virtual community. Schum wanted more than that, feeling that they needed a physical representation and an organized response to media requests. She posted about having a gathering. In September 2018, over 100 people assembled on a cloudless afternoon at Confluence Park in Delta, 20 miles north of Montrose. It was a central location for many while still avoiding Sunset Mesa itself. On the grass under an awning of ragged tree branches, the attendees, mostly women, passed around a microphone. They spoke about their loved ones.

In 2015, Judy Cressler’s father died of lung cancer incurred after years of uranium mining; he called the disease “Charlie.” He decided to donate his body to cancer research through Sunset Mesa. The FBI told Cressler that her father’s body was actually sold to a plastination company in Saudi Arabia.

Rick Neuendorf’s wife, Cherrie, died on Dec. 11, 2013, on his birthday. When they met, Neuendorf was a police officer and Cherrie a crisis intervention counselor. They started dating after working on a call together. His family held a service for her at Sunset Mesa, and she was supposedly cremated. He later learned that her entire body was shipped somewhere unknown. As a cop, he blames himself for not noticing anything suspicious.

Terri Reid’s husband, William, refused treatment for his cancer. They had discussed cremation and, since both of them loved fishing, decided that they wanted their ashes mixed in a tackle box that had belonged to Reid’s grandfather. The FBI told her that, less than 24 hours after Sunset Mesa picked him up, his entire body was shipped out of their facility.

“We all have a different story about what we found out,” Reid said later. “But, bottom line, it’s all the same story.”

The gathering was an event designed to redeem their grief, a funeral for all the funerals that had been nullified. It signaled a coordinated anger, and it helped Schum confirm that others shared her sense of living in a dream â€" something she both needed and feared.


Left, Rick Neuendorf blames himself for not noticing anything suspicious about his interactions with Sunset Mesa after the death of his wife. Right, Judy Cressler and her son Shane Williams. Instead of being donated to science as he wished, Cressler's father was allegedly sold to a plastination company.
Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
WE ARE WILLING TO PAY, often a lot, for the services scaffolding death. The National Funeral Directors Association reports that in 2016, the median cost of a burial service was $7,360. But in the past 10 years, the number of funeral homes in the country has steadily declined. Cremation’s popularity is partially responsible.

Only in the 19th century did cremation find a footing as a business venture in the United States, advertising its utility, hygiene, progressiveness and secular nature. In the early 20th century, crematoriums flourished on the West Coast. The custom of scattering ashes soon followed. The right to scatter cremains proved controversial in state legislatures, with funeral home owners calling it a “deplorable vogue.” They prophesied that the nation’s public land would soon be carpeted in fragments of human bone. When legislation did pass, California, Alaska and Washington led the way. (Currently, Washington is also spearheading green burial, or “human composting.”)

Dealing with death, by the numbers
20,557
Number of funeral homes in the U.S. in 2009

19,136
Number in 2019

16,100
By population, number of people per funeral home nationwide

32,185
Average number in the West

30,115
In Colorado

$7,360
National median cost for funeral with viewing, burial and ceremony in 2016

$2,419
National median cost for direct cremation and container in 2016

55.1%
Projected cremation rates in 2019 nationwide

69.7%
In the West

73.5%
In Colorado

8%
Percent of people in the East who prefer cremation, and who would choose to not have a ceremony

10%
In the South

18%
In the Midwest

20%
In the West

17.2%
Percent of funeral homes nationwide that offer pet cremation       

Source: National Funeral Directors Association and National Directory
of Morticians

Today, about half of all people who patronize the funeral industry choose cremation. Western states, save for Utah, still cremate far more bodies than the rest of the country, with only Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and Florida incinerating at similar rates.

Cremation is an economical choice â€" efficient, fast and relatively cheap. But the method holds transcendent meaning, even if traditional burial is still preferred by some of the nation’s dominant religions. Religious historian Stephen Prothero, in his book Purified by Fire, writes that cremation in the U.S. could make mourning “more, rather than less, ritually dense and spiritually meaningful” than other options. If they’re not scattered, ashes can be kept much closer to the family than they would be six feet underground. (One former Sunset Mesa customer, along with her sister, had what they thought were their mother’s ashes tattooed into their skin.) While cremation allows a body to skip grotesque decay, it acknowledges that with death come many transformations.

The cadaver market works against change. It preserves corpses to be used aboveground multiple times, leaving the body neither alive nor in a state of vanishing. Death, both in the flesh and in a loved one’s mind, is a process, but a preserved cadaver is eerily paused â€" long enough for the body to receive a price tag.

Marla Bishop of Crawford, Colorado, is one of the people the FBI contacted, but she doesn’t spend much time in the online victims’ group. In 2017, her uncle, Gary Goldman, who had dementia, moved into assisted living in nearby Olathe, a farm town known for its sweet corn. One day, Goldman escaped the facility. Five months later, hunters found his bones in a field a mile away. Goldman’s remains found their way to Sunset Mesa. Bishop decided to cremate them, and what she thought were his ashes arrived in an ornate box that she described as “a tomb for a gerbil.” Hess also catered Goldman’s memorial service.

When Bishop dropped off the box at Colorado Mesa University for testing, she realized she felt differently than the others in the building. “I was more at peace than other people, because my uncle went back to the earth,” she remembered. “I’m more spiritual, thinking that wherever he is, he went already. It was weird, having no attachment to those cremains.”

Bishop knew that had her uncle not had five months to decompose, giving her five months to reckon with it, she would have been as shaken as the other families. “At this point, it’s a novel,” Bishop told me, “and all my heartache is gone.”

In November, the university’s forensics lab finished its tests. They divided the samples into groups of different-sized materials and carefully picked them apart, using pinpoint metal detectors. Then they released their findings.


Connie Hanson holds a handful of what Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors told her were the cremated remains of her son, Frederick “Rick” Hanson. Connie Hanson believes it’s burnt trash, including wires and battery casings.
Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
MANY PEOPLE HAD THEORIZED that the alleged cremains would simply prove to be unmixed concrete, or maybe cat litter. Instead, they were consistent with bone. After the results, Schum realized that she was even further from the possibility of closure.

The samples contained organic material, but families also received other results â€" dental fillings, jewelry fragments, Swiss Army knife parts and floral wire, none of which had belonged to the loved ones in question. Some suspect that Hess simply mixed materials in bulk, including ashes, and doled out scoops to her customers.

With no resolution and no timeline from the FBI, some of the alleged victims began acting on their own. So far, four civil suits have been filed. In one, the judge ordered Hess to pay nearly $500,000 to a customer named Julee Glynn, and the court found Hess liable in civil law for the body-brokering claims. One class action suit named a swath of defendants â€" including Hess and her family; David Haisman, owner of the Four Corners Cremation & Burial Society; the hospice company Schum used and multiple potential cadaver buyers. The suit also named Montrose County Coroner Thomas Canfield, alleging that he had deliberately directed bodies to Hess for a cut of the profits. Canfield would not comment on the ongoing case, and other defendants have denied the charges and sought dismissals.

Montrose, meanwhile, remains in limbo. The FBI investigation continues, but its details are obscured, and the alleged victims often feel isolated with the information they have.

“As a journalist, I’ve covered many events that are related to tragedies,” Erin McIntyre told me. McIntyre, who now owns the Ouray County Plaindealer, is a former Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reporter. She began looking into Hess in 2016, uncovering the complaints amassed by the Department of Regulatory Agencies. When children die or drunk-driving accidents occur â€" even when a serial pet poisoner struck Grand Junction â€" people usually respond by holding candlelight vigils. “But I have to say, I’m not sure if it’s the nature of the accusations,” she said of Sunset Mesa, “but I am a little surprised that we haven’t seen some sort of community acknowledgment.” Other than the September gathering at the park, there has been little public reckoning. Some in and around Montrose still refuse to believe this happened. Last Thanksgiving, McIntyre’s cousins, who read her articles, wondered aloud whether it was “fake news.”


Terri Reid poses with the tackle box in which she planned to keep the ashes of her dead husband.
Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
In March, the Sunset Mesa building was sold to Life Choices Family Resource Center, a Christian group that provides pregnancy and sexual health services. “We feel like we’re bringing life where there wasn’t life,” Executive Director Gigi Bechthold told the Montrose Daily Press.

But Hess still lives in Montrose, and residents sometimes confront her. She has maintained a defiant stance. Recently, representing herself, she filed a motion for dismissal in one of the civil suits, writing that “no matter how sensational the accusations … there is only one thing that matters. Evidence.”

People convicted in criminal cases involving body brokering have received as much as 20 years in prison. This March, a U.S. representative from Illinois introduced a bill that would give the secretary of Health and Human Services oversight over entities dealing with non-transplant tissue. “Body brokers have made an untold amount of money at the expense of grief-stricken loved ones,” Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush, D, the bill’s sponsor, said in a statement. “By introducing this legislation, we are sending a clear message that this practice is unacceptable.”

On the private Facebook group, some have discussed getting together to mingle the anonymous ashes and scatter them as a group. Even though the materials Schum turned in are still with the FBI, the other samples feel like proxies for Johnson. To Schum and others, it felt somewhat healing to know that the families took care of someone’s ashes, no matter who that person was. “We have decided that, one way or another, we are going to treat these cremains with the respect that they deserve,” she said.


Even the surroundings of Debbie Schum's home are a reminder of Sunset Mesa. Both her neighbor and the person that used to own her home are alleged victims.
Luna Anna Archey/High Country News
I VISITED SCHUM IN EARLY APRIL at her home. The sky threatened to thunderstorm over her acre of land, tucked into layered hills of juniper, but it never did. Recently, Schum had paid off her house and closed Johnson’s estate, both important strides. But she was still going to sparsely attended victims’ group meetings, and, when I arrived, had an article about one of the lawsuits open on her computer in the room where Johnson died. 

Most people touched by the Sunset Mesa investigation are not like Schum. They do not spend their time digging into the details or going to meetings. They talk to attorneys rather than journalists, or they talk to no one at all. I spoke to a former funeral home owner in the region who said that, in his view, some of the alleged victims are too fixated. “So much so, that my professional opinion of their constant need to be personally noticed and recognized by media, and overall lack of focus on moving forward, had crossed over to what we in the death care industry call ‘complicated grieving,’ ” the funeral home owner, who asked to remain anonymous, wrote me. “I see their behavior now as ‘obsessive’ when it comes to being recognized and sympathized for themselves, when really a healthy grieving process, by now, would be at the stage of ‘acceptance.’ ”

“I have to deal with this in my own way. Don’t tell me to shrink that when I can expand it.”
Schum, though, sees her attitude as her most truthful way of grieving. It reflects what’s happening in her head. She still believes in confronting whatever’s there, the way she used to do when talking to Johnson. “I have to deal with this in my own way,” she said. “Don’t tell me to shrink that when I can expand it.”

Part of that process is recognizing what can’t be entirely overcome. She frequently recalls her first meeting with Agent Busch and the way it damaged her “sense of wanting to be prepared for, even to prevent” incomprehensible experiences. Losing control of herself seems to haunt her as much as the memory of what she learned that day. “I don’t want that kind of thing to ever happen again in my life, but it’s going to,” she said. “I know it’s going to.”

We walked around her backyard under an approaching ceiling of dark blue clouds. She identified the plants we passed â€" lavender, forsythia, daffodils â€" with an eager focus. Little could be seen from her property other than more juniper, more hills and the snowy peaks rising past them. Only one other person came into view: a man driving a red tractor into his driveway across the road. Schum pointed to him and told me that he was also an alleged victim of Sunset Mesa. So is the person who used to own her house. Her world is calm, private and cultivated, but it is permanently laced with the new reality.

I wondered what role Johnson played as Schum gradually integrated the Sunset Mesa case into her life. “I don’t know, and that’s what bothers me the most,” she said. She’s been missing her friend more, which, while painful, seems like a start. The loss of Johnson â€" the being, not the body â€" is being allowed to surface. When Schum talked about it that day, it was the first time I had ever seen her cry.

Recently, Schum had a dream. In it, she was helping Johnson move into a new house. She glanced down at her friend’s feet. One of them was missing. The next time she looked, Johnson’s lower leg had vanished, and then both of her hands.

“Lora, where are your hands?” she asked. As in some of her previous dreams, Schum hoped that Johnson would be able to communicate with her, to tell her where she had gone, where to find her. But her friend could only look at her and say, “I don’t know.”

Elena Saavedra Buckley is an editorial fellow at High Country News. Email HCN at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. Follow @elenasb_

[Dr. MD MD]

Here's your fortune buddy Confucius say man who fuck with queer get kicked in rear.

[pate]

Dobie Gray rocks!

https://youtu.be/NIuyDWzctgY

I swear the plants in the background are the "Devil's Lettuce."

-p

ediot: apogees in advance if that wasn't Dobie Gray, sometimes the brothers all look the same to me.  Ima YT.

[Dr. MD MD]

No, pate. K_Dubb is Bellgab’s Nipsy Russell.



Checkout those lapels. You could probably land a passenger jet on them.

[pate]

No, pate. K_Dubb is Bellgab’s Nipsy Russell.



Checkout those lapels. You could probably land a passenger jet on them.

His teeth are so white I can hardly see the suh-wheat lapels.  Is this guy a cousin of Nipsy Russel:

https://youtu.be/pJBYmZN8Wkc

As a YT I would have the secrets of whiter teeth;  I wish to drink coffee and smoke tobacco with wild abandon.

Thanks, buddy!

-p

[Corona Kitty]

https://discord.gg/QxG4hEt

Join us on discord.

[pate]

come to discord

https://youtu.be/6aOacBxG1XA

-Executive Producer, GabCast

[Corona Kitty]

https://youtu.be/dKo0LFeIfpo

Going live this Saturday at 6:30 pm pst

[Dr. MD MD]

Synthetic Biology Could Bring a Pox on Us All
New methods are making it easier than ever to produce life-saving vaccinesâ€"and life-taking viruses that humanity is not prepared to fight.
box with sign that says caution biohazard
New methods are making it easier than ever to produce life-saving vaccinesâ€"and life-taking viruses that humanity is not prepared to fight.SINEAD KENNEDY
AT AROUND 11:30 am on July 1, 2014, a scientist from the Food and Drug Administration went inside Room 3C16, a cold-storage area at the National Institutes of Health Labs in Bethesda, Maryland.

The FDA had been using the space since the early 1990s to store samples for biological research but had been cleaning it out in preparation for a move to a nearby campus in Silver Spring.

The scientist who entered saw 12 mysterious cardboard boxes on a crowded shelf in the far left corner of the storage space and pried one open to see what it contained. Inside, dozens of long vials were packed in rolls of white cotton and sealed with melted glass; many of the labels were worn to the point of illegibility. The scientist noticed one vessel that held some loose, freeze-dried material. Its label bore a single decipherable word: “variola,” another word for smallpoxâ€"a disease that the 19th-century British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay deemed “the most terrible of all the ministers of death.”


The highly contagious virus spreads through close contact, bodily fluids, or contaminated objects. It starts like chicken pox: The victim runs a high fever and is prone to vomiting. A rash develops in the mouth and spreads quickly over the entire body, like tiny marbles pushing up from under the skin. Some 30 percent of people who contract the virus die within two weeks. Those who survive are often scarred, blinded, or disfigured.

Smallpox ravaged the world for centuries. It wasn’t until 1796 that English physician Edward Jenner famously discovered how to turn the immune system against the disease. Even so, it took centuries for the vaccine he created to be fully deployed. Smallpox killed an estimated 500 million people in the 19th and 20th centuries before it was finally eradicated worldwide in 1980. Yet here in this cluttered Maryland lab were six forgotten vials of the dreaded poxvirus, including at least two live samples still capable of growing and infecting untold masses.

During a two-year investigation into the origin of the vials, the FDA determined that they dated to February 10, 1954. But the agency couldn’t figure out how or why they ended up in a cold-storage room at the NIH. The incident triggered a government-wide search for other dangerous materials that may have been overlooked and led to revisions in the FDA’s policies on the storage of infectious agents. The 60-year-old smallpox strains were destroyed under the watch of World Health Organization officials.

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The existence of the vials raised another chilling possibility: Could smallpox make a comeback? If these samples were left behind, who knows how many others could remain. The US maintains enough of the smallpox vaccine to protect all 328 million Americans. But in the decades since the disease was eradicated, scientists have discovered that several groups of peopleâ€"those with HIV, pregnant women, newborns, and cancer survivors among themâ€"are at risk for complications from the vaccine, such as heart inflammation and brain infections. It’s likely that most of these people would be advised to avoid taking the remedy, as would anyone sharing a home with them. Given those significant limitations, many health officials and researchers believe there’s a pressing need for a better smallpox vaccine.

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It’s this mission that possesses David Evans, a veteran virologist at the University of Alberta in Canada. The son of a medical health officer in what was the British colony Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Evans has been studying poxviruses for more than 30 years.

As one of the world’s foremost experts on smallpox, Evans believes it’s only a matter of time before the diseaseâ€"or one of its ugly cousins in the pox familyâ€"could resurface, brought to life by a hostile government, a terrorist, or an amateur biohacker using gene editing and commercially available DNA fragments.

If that occurs, he says, the world needs to be ready with the safest, most efficient vaccine possible. The best way to improve upon a vaccine is to make one derived from the virus itself.

So two years ago, in a Hail Mary attempt to defend against potential bioengineered viruses, Evans and his research associate did something unthinkable: They revived an extinct cousin of smallpox called horsepox, using mail-­order DNA.

The Frankensteinian act stirred outrage among the international scientific community, which cast Evans as the Walter White of synthetic biology. Despite the fury he provoked, Evans has no regrets. Better he be the first to resurrect these deadly specters, the virologist maintains, than someone with nefarious intentions. “Nothing will stop the state actor or technically sophisticated country that decides to want to do this,” Evans adds, so better to be prepared.

This image may contain Bottle and Shaker
SINEAD KENNEDY
WHEN SMALLPOX WAS eliminated nearly 40 years ago, after millions of people were given the vaccine in Africa, Asia, and South America, it was hailed as one of the greatest achievements in human history. In a grim act of Cold War diplomacy, the last two smallpox samples were stored for future study at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Siberia. Ever since, the World Health Organization has kept tabs on the samples to ensure they are safe.

In 2001, Evans joined the WHO’s scientific advisory committee on smallpox. The aim for many in the group was for Russia and the US to destroy those final samples of smallpox for good. “The hope and expectation,” Evans says, “was that the committee would say, ‘Yep, we’re all done, they’ve dealt with all these research goals. You can close it down and autoclave the viruses.’ ”

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The following year, however, an experiment by scientists at the State University of New York at Stony Brook suggested that simply destroying the samples might not be enough. On July 11, 2002, the researchers revealed that they had synthesized the polio virus, which had been wiped out in the US in 1979. It was the first time a virus had been created from scratch with synthetic DNA. The work was funded by the Pentagon in part to establish whether terrorists could pull off such a feat. The answer was yes. It took the SUNY researchers three years to cobble the virus together using mail-order DNA and genetic sequences referenced from an online public database. The experiment’s surprise success raised the possibility of a cyberpunk-style era of biowarfare, and the possibility that an exponentially deadlier disease, smallpox, could be cooked up in a lab through the science of synthetic biology.

For Evans, the study proved that no virus could truly be considered extinct. “I said, ‘Yeah, well, there’s the writing on the wall for ­people­ concerned with eradicating smallpox,’ ” he recalls. After polio’s revival, he was one of the first to warn the WHO about the potential resurrection of smallpox. But his warnings fell on deaf ears. Though Evans comes across as a measured scientist, his frustrations were mounting. He felt like Chicken Little and feared that action wouldn’t be taken until it was too late. “You know the way the world works,” he tells me. “It focuses on crises, right? It wasn’t a crisis.” At least not yet.

ON A CRISP falls day in September in Edmonton, Evans sits behind the desk of his cluttered office at the University of Alberta wearing a blue button-down shirt and khakis. He has wispy gray hair and small, round glasses. There’s a large microscope on his windowsill and shelves weighed down by thick books about viruses. Two stickers on his computer capture his natural skepticismâ€"one reads “Really?” and the other “WTF?” (“I’m suspicious of reporters,” he tells me within the first few minutes of our meeting.)

Buying samples of synthetic DNA is surprisingly easy. The trade is overseen by the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, an industry-­led group that works with government agencies to screen orders and buyers. But such oversight can’t prevent someone from purchasing hazardous DNA samples on the black market. A cursory search online brings up dozens of sources for samples from China, Germany, and beyond. China “is kind of notorious for having unregulated pharmaceutical companies, right?” Evans says. Chinese biohackers could “be quite capable of running an unregulated DNA synthesis company.”

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In June 2015, thanks in part to research by Evans and his colleagues into synthetic biology, public health advisers issued a report warning of smallpox’s potential return. “With the increasing availability of DNA fragments that can be synthesized from simple chemicals, it would be possible to ­re-create variola virus,” the report found, “and that could be done by a skilled laboratory technician or by undergraduate students working with viruses in a relatively simple laboratory.”

The following year, the US national intelligence director at the time, James Clapper, cited bioengineered pandemics as one of his agencies’ biggest concerns; the Worldwide Threat Assessment report added genome editing to its appraisal of current weapons of mass destruction and proliferationâ€"alongside North Korea’s nukes, Syria’s chemical weapons, and Russia’s cruise missiles. As Bill Gates warned in 2017 at the Munich Security Conference, “the next epidemic could originate on the screen of a terrorist intent on using genetic engineering to create a synthetic version of the smallpox virus.”

If that wasn't enough, a disturbing mystery emerged out of Russia. The Siberian Times reported in early 2017 that professor Ilya Drozdov, the 63-year-old micro­biologist who ran the state research facility where Russia’s sole smallpox sample is held, vanished from his hometown of Saratov in southwestern Russia. No further information has been made public. A WHO spokeswoman said it was not in the organization’s “mandate to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.”

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David Evans raised alarms about the possibility of reviving poxvirusesâ€"and then revived one himself.
SINEAD KENNEDY
FOR YEARS, EVANS had been urging his colleagues to upgrade their smallpox defenses. But it wasn’t until he met Seth Lederman that he found a like-minded scientist with the will and resources to do something about it. The CEO and cofounder of a New York company called Tonix Pharmaceuticals, Lederman was interested in funding research to develop biodefense technologies and drugs.

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Lederman shared Evans’ apprehension about the potential for a smallpox epidemic. “There’s an urgent need for a new vaccine,” he says. Smallpox vaccinations ended in 1978, meaning that the roughly 5 billion people worldwide under the age of 40 have not been inoculated.

Lederman, a former associate professor of medicine at Columbia University, was prepared to commit his company to coming up with a solution. He was convinced that the secret to a better vaccine could be found in horsepox, a lesser-known cousin of smallpox. Horsepox isn’t known to be harmful to humans, but its genetic makeup is closely related to smallpox. In theory, the closer one can get to a virus’s origins, the more effective the vaccine that can be derived.

Evans was intrigued. But the Centers for Disease Control maintains a single sample of horsepox, extracted from an infected horse in Mongolia in 1976, and Evans said it was unlikely he would be able to use the sample for commercial purposes. There was another option for getting their hands on some horsepox, Evans told Lederman: They could ­re-create the virus from scratch using synthetic DNA, similar to the way researchers had synthesized polio a decade earlier. The horsepox genome sequence had been published by researchers in 2006, offering up a road map for the virus’s revival.

Evans didn’t know if he could succeed. Despite his Cassandra warnings, no one had ever engineered a virus in the smallpox family. Lederman decided the attempt was worth the gamble. He offered Evans’ lab $200,000 to try to bring horsepox back to life.

When I ask Evans if he had any doubts about ­re-creating a cousin of smallpox, he hesitates. “You do think about that,” he says, “I don’t like controversy.” He had seen what had happened when polio was synthesized and had spoken with those researchers. Evans accepted that many would not agree with his choice. But he also believed, emphatically, that people already knew how to create such a virusâ€"it was just that no one had achieved it yet. This was his chance, then, to prove that a synthetic version of a poxvirus was not only conceivable but a looming reality. “As long as people kept debating whether it was possible,” Evans notes, “nothing was ever going to be done about it.” It was time to put those questions to rest.

In 2016, with approval from the University of Alberta’s biosafety office, Evans purchased 10 DNA fragments from GeneArt, a DNA synthesis company based in Regensburg, Germany. The synthetic DNA, which arrived by FedEx as vaporized powder, was harmless. “If you wanted to, you could eat it,” Evans says, “My guess is that it would have a fizzy tang, like Pop Rocks.”

SYNTHETIC BIOWEAPONS
How worried should we be about warring countries or terrorists turning synthetic viruses, bacteria, and microbes into bioweapons? For some doomsday scenariosâ€"the creation of, say, a wholly manufactured monster mashup of bad virusesâ€"the answer is not very. But there is still plenty to freak out about. Last year, the US Department of Defense commissioned a report from bio­security and synthetic biology experts to assess the threats. Here are some of their most urgent warnings, ranked by concern level. â€"SARASWATI RATHOD

REVIVED VIRUSES (HIGHEST): A bioterrorist, armed with basic lab equipment and online databases filled with genetic blueprints for deadly viruses, could conceivably re-create a fatal disease like smallpox or the Spanish flu. Illnesses with relatively small genomes, like polio, are easier to resurrect than more genetically complex diseases like smallpox or herpes.

MICROBIOME INTERLOPERS (HIGHEST): Microorganisms inhabit our guts, mouths, and skin and help us in many ways. A rogue microbe slipped into the mix could, in theory, cause our good bugs to produce harmful chemicals. In practice, this would be really hard to do, but the novelty of this technique put it on the list of top concerns.

SOUPED-UP BACTERIA (HIGHEST): Because their genomes are more stable, bacteria tend to be easier to modify than viruses. While you might not be able to get the building blocks for a deadly pathogen (like the one that causes anthrax) from a mail-order genetics company, you could modify a more benign bacterium to make it resistant to antibiotics or able to produce more toxins.

MUTATED VIRUSES (HIGH): Introducing mutations into a virus’s genome almost always leads to a gentler form of the bug. That’s how a vaccine for measles was created. But scary stuff could also be made. In 2014, researchers found that just five mutations could transform an avian flu into an airborne virusâ€"making it far more likely to spread (at least among ferrets).

MODIFIED IMMUNE SYSTEMS (MEDIUM): It might be possible to develop and deliver a specially engineered virus or chemical capable of suppressing the body’s defenses or turning them against it. However, the human immune system is highly complex, and we still don’t fully understand it, making manipulation difficult.

The arduous job of assembling the horsepox genome fell to Evans’ research associate, a young microbiologist named Ryan Noyce. Noyce wears his dark hair short and favors socks that read “Get shit done.” Like Evans, he has devoted his career to studying the nuances of viruses.

Building a virus from scratch is like assembling Lego blocks. A decade ago, Evans had improved on a process that uses a “helper virus”â€"another form of a pox­virusâ€"to kick-start the replication of DNA. In this case, once the helper virus started growing inside a cell, Noyce would use pipettes to introduce a solution containing the horsepox DNA. “You’re laying down a piece here, a piece here,” Evans says, “mortaring them together.” The fragments affix to each other using an enzyme called DNA ligase, which acts as a kind of glue. If the DNA fragments are introduced into a cell in the right way, under just the right conditions, they’ll join together through a natural biological process and hopefully grow into a virus.

Noyce had to get every step of the process exactly right, from the sequence of the fragments to the timing of their insertion into the cell. If any part of the chain fails, the entire process falls apart. “It takes a tremendous amount of planning and timing and design work,” Evans explains.

Every weekday morning at 7:30, Noyce crossed the University of Alberta campus to reach Evans’ dimly lit lab. He’d don his long white lab coat, then spend 10 hours moving between his computer and a microscope, stitching DNA fragments together based on horsepox’s previously published genome sequence.

One day, after 18 months of meticulous work in the lab, Noyce looked through his microscope and saw it: a clearing of cells infected with the horsepox virus. He’d successfully re-­created a poxvirus. But the rush of excitement was quickly tempered by the realization of what of was to come. Noyce believed that if they could help develop better vaccines, that “would outweigh the potential negatives” of reviving a pox. But given the history of the virus, Evans says, “We knew that there was going to be controversy.”

The trio published their findings in the scientific journal PLOS One in January 2018â€"and the blowback was swift and brutal. Critics accused Evans and Noyce of opening a Pandora’s box that could send humanity back to the dark ages of disease. The Washington Post’s editorial board wrote that “the study could give terrorists or rogue states a recipe to reconstitute the smallpox virus.” Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, denounced the research on National Public Radio: “Anything that lowers the bar for creating smallpox in the world is a dangerous path.” Gregory Koblentz, director of the biodefense program at George Mason University, warned in the journal Health Security that the synthesis of horsepox “takes the world one step closer to the reemergence of smallpox as a threat to global health security.”

The PLOS One paper also triggered calls for tighter regulation. Elizabeth Cameron, vice president of global biological policy and programs for the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit that works to prevent attacks by weapons of mass destruction, issued an ominous warning that “the capability to create and modify biological agents is outpacing governmental oversight and public debate.”

Evans still bristles over the criticism, which he feels missed the point. “One of the very irritating things on the reporting on our work was the idea that somehow it was so easy,” he says. “No it’s not. Ryan busted butt to make this.” For now, synthesizing a virus, as Evans and Noyce have, requires a high level of expertise. But while such a feat may be difficult to achieve, even Evans admits that “you make it more accessible to people simply by letting them know it can be done.”

THE RESEARCH PAPER seemed to spur the federal government to shore up its defenses against the threat that someone could create and unleash a synthetic virus. In June, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a 231-page study warning that even existing viruses like the common flu could be tweaked in a lab to evade immune responses and resist therapeutics (see sidebar). Several efforts are now underway to better assess potential threats before it’s too late.

Darpa has launched an initiative called Safe Genes to protect service members from the accidental or intentional misuse of genome-editing technologies. The agency is trying to develop military tools to both counter and reverse the effects of synthetically created bioweapons. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has announced its own initiative to find better methods for detecting and evaluating synthetic bioweapons. The system is designed to prevent rogue actors from getting their hands on the building blocks needed to make a dangerous virus.

To make better screening tools, the government enlisted Ginkgo Bioworks, a biotech startup founded by a group of MIT PhDs. Based in an old Army warehouse along Boston Harbor, Ginkgo’s main business is making custom microbes for use in everything from sustainable agriculture to perfumes. But with its government contracts, the biotech company helped build an algorithm that can recognize any genetic sequence on the “threat list” of potentially harmful viruses and bacteria. The softwareâ€"a literal antivirus programâ€"would be voluntarily installed on the servers of every company that synthesizes DNA. It’s like a wanted list for genetic riffraff. “If somebody tries to synthesize horsepox, alarm bells go off,” says Patrick Boyle, Ginkgo’s 34-year-old head of codebase. At that point, the DNA company can ask questions of the buyer and, if warranted, deny the sale.

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Of course, even these automated checks can’t prevent determined buyers from obtaining samples through less scrupulous vendors on the black market. As with computer viruses, new strains appear from the ether before society is aware they exist. The same is true for trying to keep ahead of potentially lethal synthetic DNA.

LEARN MORE

The WIRED Guide to Crispr
The scientists at Ginkgo never expected to be policing the DNA trade. But as tools like Crispr allow for cheaper and easier creation of new biological organisms, technology is quickly surpassing enforcement measures. In 20 years, Boyle predicts, it will be possible to synthesize smallpox from home. He likens this moment to the early days of computing, when the concept of computer viruses was still new: “If I was working for the US government, I would have wanted to fund an effort in antivirus software in 1975,” he says. “That’s exactly the thinking we’re doing now,” but with synthetic biological viruses.

At this uncertain juncture, synthetic biology is entering new territory. It’s only a matter of time before others with the skill and wherewithal follow Evans and Noyce’s lead and replicate other viruses. Although not all viruses are deadly, scientists and bioengineers are in a race to predict and defend against new threats. There’s no telling when a manufactured disease will become a reality. If that occurs, the culprit might be a lab-trained terrorist or a basement biohacker, a bumbling grad student or a Russian microbiologist on the lam.

In the meantime, Evans and Noyce’s horsepox work is now the basis of a new smallpox vaccine called TNX-801. It’s being developed by Tonix, the pharmaceutical firm that funded their research. In a study published last year, the vaccine was shown to successfully protect mice from a relative of smallpox.

Today, Evans and Noyce are using what they learned in the horsepox effort to try to use DNA fragments to engineer oncolytic viruses, which target and destroy cancer cells. Past the lab where they work, down a quiet hallway and inside a windowless room, a beige freezer hums at â€"79 degrees Celsius. Inside, the synthetic horsepox samples remain under lock and key.

[Dr. MD MD]

Amid the human crush of Old Delhi, on the edge of a medieval bazaar, a red structure with cages on its roof rises three stories above the labyrinth of neon-lit stalls and narrow alleyways, its top floor emblazoned with two words: birds hospital.

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On a hot day last spring, I removed my shoes at the hospital’s entrance and walked up to the second-floor lobby, where a clerk in his late 20s was processing patients. An older woman placed a shoebox before him and lifted off its lid, revealing a bloody white parakeet, the victim of a cat attack. The man in front of me in line held, in a small cage, a dove that had collided with a glass tower in the financial district. A girl no older than 7 came in behind me clutching, in her bare hands, a white hen with a slumped neck.

The hospital’s main ward is a narrow, 40-foot-long room with cages stacked four high along the walls and fans on the ceiling, their blades covered with grates, lest they ensnare a flapping wing. I strolled the room’s length, conducting a rough census. Many of the cages looked empty at first, but leaning closer, I’d find a bird, usually a pigeon, sitting back in the gloom.

FROM OUR MARCH 2019 ISSUE


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The youngest of the hospital’s vets, Dheeraj Kumar Singh, was making his rounds in jeans and a surgical mask. The oldest vet here has worked the night shift for more than a quarter century, spending tens of thousands of hours removing tumors from birds, easing their pain with medication, administering antibiotics. Singh is a rookie by comparison, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he inspects a pigeon, flipping it over in his hands, quickly but gently, the way you might handle your cellphone. As we talked, he motioned to an assistant, who handed him a nylon bandage that he stretched twice around the pigeon’s wing, setting it with an unsentimental pop.

The bird hospital is one of several built by devotees of Jainism, an ancient religion whose highest commandment forbids violence not only against humans, but also against animals. A series of paintings in the hospital’s lobby illustrates the extremes to which some Jains take this prohibition. In them, a medieval king in blue robes gazes through a palace window at an approaching pigeon, its wing bloodied by the talons of a brown hawk still in pursuit. The king pulls the smaller bird into the palace, infuriating the hawk, which demands replacement for its lost meal, so he slices off his own arm and foot to feed it.


Jainism’s highest commandment forbids violence not only against humans, but also against animals; at a bird hospital in Old Delhi, vets treat broken wings, administer medicine, remove tumors, and more. (Hashim Badani)
I’d come to the bird hospital, and to India, to see firsthand the Jains’ moral system at work in the world. Jains make up less than 1 percent of India’s population. Despite millennia spent criticizing the Hindu majority, the Jains have sometimes gained the ear of power. During the 13th century, they converted a Hindu king, and persuaded him to enact the subcontinent’s first animal-welfare laws. There is evidence that the Jains influenced the Buddha himself. And when Gandhi developed his most radical ideas about nonviolence, a Jain friend played philosophical muse.

In the state of Gujarat, where Gandhi grew up, I saw Jain monks walking barefoot in the cool morning hours to avoid car travel, an activity they regard as irredeemably violent, given the damage it inflicts on living organisms, from insects to larger animals. The monks refuse to eat root vegetables, lest their removal from the earth disturb delicate subterranean ecosystems. Their white robes are cotton, not silk, which would require the destruction of silkworms. During monsoon season, they forgo travel, to avoid splashing through puddles filled with microbes, whose existence Jains posited well before they appeared under Western microscopes.

For many scientists, the resonant mystery is no longer which animals are conscious, but which are not.
Jains move through the world in this gentle way because they believe animals are conscious beings that experience, in varying degrees, emotions analogous to human desire, fear, pain, sorrow, and joy. This idea that animals are conscious was long unpopular in the West, but it has lately found favor among scientists who study animal cognition. And not just the obvious casesâ€"primates, dogs, elephants, whales, and others. Scientists are now finding evidence of an inner life in alien-seeming creatures that evolved on ever-more-distant limbs of life’s tree. In recent years, it has become common to flip through a magazine like this one and read about an octopus using its tentacles to twist off a jar’s lid or squirt aquarium water into a postdoc’s face. For many scientists, the resonant mystery is no longer which animals are conscious, but which are not.

No aspect of our world is as mysterious as consciousness, the state of awareness that animates our every waking moment, the sense of being located in a body that exists within a larger world of color, sound, and touch, all of it filtered through our thoughts and imbued by emotion.

Even in a secular age, consciousness retains a mystical sheen. It is alternatively described as the last frontier of science, and as a kind of immaterial magic beyond science’s reckoning. David Chalmers, one of the world’s most respected philosophers on the subject, once told me that consciousness could be a fundamental feature of the universe, like space-time or energy. He said it might be tied to the diaphanous, indeterminate workings of the quantum world, or something nonphysical.

These metaphysical accounts are in play because scientists have yet to furnish a satisfactory explanation of consciousness. We know the body’s sensory systems beam information about the external world into our brain, where it’s processed, sequentially, by increasingly sophisticated neural layers. But we don’t know how those signals are integrated into a smooth, continuous world picture, a flow of moments experienced by a roving locus of attentionâ€"a “witness,” as Hindu philosophers call it.


Hashim Badani
In the West, consciousness was long thought to be a divine gift bestowed solely on humans. Western philosophers historically conceived of nonhuman animals as unfeeling automatons. Even after Darwin demonstrated our kinship with animals, many scientists believed that the evolution of consciousness was a recent event. They thought the first mind sparked awake sometime after we split from chimps and bonobos. In his 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes argued that it was later still. He said the development of language led us, like Virgil, into the deep cognitive states capable of constructing experiential worlds.

This notion that consciousness was of recent vintage began to change in the decades following the Second World War, when more scientists were systematically studying the behaviors and brain states of Earth’s creatures. Now each year brings a raft of new research papers, which, taken together, suggest that a great many animals are conscious.

It was likely more than half a billion years ago that some sea-floor arms race between predator and prey roused Earth’s first conscious animal. That moment, when the first mind winked into being, was a cosmic event, opening up possibilities not previously contained in nature.

There now appears to exist, alongside the human world, a whole universe of vivid animal experience. Scientists deserve credit for illuminating, if only partially, this new dimension of our reality. But they can’t tell us how to do right by the trillions of minds with which we share the Earth’s surface. That’s a philosophical problem, and like most philosophical problems, it will be with us for a long time to come.

Apart from Pythagoras and a few others, ancient Western philosophers did not hand down a rich tradition of thinking about animal consciousness. But Eastern thinkers have long been haunted by its implicationsâ€"especially the Jains, who have taken animal consciousness seriously as a moral matter for nearly 3,000 years.

Many orthodox Jain beliefs do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. The faith does not enjoy privileged access to truth, mystical or otherwise. But as perhaps the world’s first culture to extend mercy to animals, the Jains pioneered a profound expansion of the human moral imagination. The places where they worship and tend to animals seemed, to me, like good places to contemplate the current frontier of animal-consciousness research.


Hashim Badani
At the bird hospital, I asked Singh whether any of his patients gave him trouble. He said that one refused to be fed by hand and sometimes drew blood when he tried to pick it up. He led me to another room to see the offending bird, an Indian crow whose feathers were record-groove black but for a sash of latte-colored plumage around its neck. The crow kept fanning one of its wings out. Light from a nearby window filtered through the feathers, as though the wing were a venetian blind. Singh told me it was broken.

“A few days after the crow arrived, it started using a special call when it wanted food,” Singh said. “None of the other birds do that.” The bird’s call was not an entirely unique case of bird-to-human communication. A grey parrot once amassed a 900-word vocabulary, and in India, a few have been trained to recite the Vedic mantras. But birds have only rarely assembled verbal symbols into their own, original proto-sentences. And, of course, none has declared itself conscious.

That’s too bad, because philosophers tend to regard such statements as the best possible evidence of another being’s consciousness, even among humans. Without one, no matter how long I stared into the crow’s black pupil, wishing I could see into the phantasmagoria of its mind, I could never really know whether it was conscious. I’d have to be content with circumstantial evidence.

In Japan, one crow population uses traffic to crack open walnuts: The crows drop a nut in front of cars at intersections, and then when the light turns red, they swoop in to scoop up the exposed flesh.
Crows have an unusually large brain for their size, and their neurons are packed densely relative to other animals’. Neuroscientists can measure the computational complexity of brain activity, but no brain scan has yet revealed a precise neural signature of consciousness. And so it’s difficult to make a knockdown argument that a particular animal is conscious based strictly on its neuroanatomy. It is suggestive, though, when an animal’s brain closely resembles ours, as is the case with primates, the first animals to be knighted with consciousness by something approaching a scientific consensus.

Mammals in general are widely thought to be conscious, because they share our relatively large brain size, and also have a cerebral cortex, the place where our most complex feats of cognition seem to take place. Birds don’t have a cortex. In the 300 million years that have passed since the avian gene pool separated from ours, their brains have evolved different structures. But one of those structures appears to be networked in cortexlike ways, a tantalizing clue that nature may have more than one method of making a conscious brain.


At the bird hospital in Old Delhi (Hashim Badani)
Other clues can be found in an animal’s behavior, though sifting out conscious acts from those that are evolved and mindless can be difficult. Tool use is an instructive case. Australian “firehawk” raptors sometimes fly bundles of flaming sticks out of forest fires and into neighboring landscapes, to flush out prey. Maybe that means the raptors are capable of considering a piece of the physical environment, and imagining a new purpose for it. Or maybe something more rote is going on.

Crows are among the most sophisticated avian technologists. They have long been known to shape sticks into hooks, and just last year, members of one crow species were observed constructing tools out of three separate sticklike parts. In Japan, one crow population has figured out how to use traffic to crack open walnuts: The crows drop a nut in front of cars at intersections, and then when the light turns red, they swoop in to scoop up the exposed flesh.

As Singh and I talked, the crow grew bored with us and turned back to the window, as though to inspect its faint reflection. In 2008, a magpieâ€"a member of crows’ extended family of corvids, or “feathered apes”â€"became the first non-mammal to pass the “mirror test.” The magpie’s neck was marked with a bright dot in a place that could be seen only in a mirror. When the magpie caught sight of its reflection, it immediately tried to check its neck.

Read: What mirrors tell us about animal minds

Singh told me this crow would soon move upstairs, to one of the roof’s exposed cages, where the birds have more space to test their still-fragile wings, in view of an open sky that must surely loom large in a bird’s consciousness. With luck, it would quickly return to the spirited life preferred by wild crows, which sometimes play like acrobats in high winds and ski down snowy surfaces. (Birds that die at this hospital are buried along a riverbed outside Delhi, an apt touch in the case of the crows, which sometimes hold funeralsâ€"or, if not funerals, postmortems, where they gather around their dead like homicide detectives discerning cause of death.)

I asked Singh how he felt when he released birds on the rooftop. “We are here to serve them,” he said, and then noted that not all the birds leave right away. “Some of them come back and sit on our shoulders.”


According to the Jains, all animals are conscious beings, capable of experiencing emotion. (Hashim Badani)
Crows are not among the shoulder-perchers, but Singh sometimes sees former crow patients hovering around the hospital. They might be looking for him. Crows recognize individual human faces. They are known to blare vicious caws at people they dislike, but for favored humans, they sometimes leave giftsâ€"buttons or shiny bits of glassâ€"where the person will be sure to notice, like votive offerings.

If these behaviors add up to consciousness, it means one of two things: Either consciousness evolved twice, at least, across the long course of evolutionary history, or it evolved sometime before birds and mammals went on their separate evolutionary journeys. Both scenarios would give us reason to believe that nature can knit molecules into waking minds more easily than previously guessed. This would mean that all across the planet, animals large and small are constantly generating vivid experiences that bear some relationship to our own.

The day after I visited the bird hospital, I left Delhi by car, on a road that follows the Yamuna River south and east, away from its icy source among the serrated ridges of the Himalayas. Delhi’s sewage has blackened long stretches of the Yamuna, making it one of the world’s most polluted rivers. From the road, I could see plastic bottles floating on its surface. In India, where rivers have a special place in the spiritual imagination, this is a metaphysical defilement.

Millions of fish once swam in the Yamuna River, before it was desecrated by the human technosphere, which now reaches into nearly every body of water on Earth. Even the deepest point in the ocean is littered with trash: A grocery bag was recently seen drifting along the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

We last swam in the same gene pool with the animals that evolved into fish about 460 million years ago, more than 100 million years before we split from birds. The notion that we are kin across this expanse of time has proved too radical for some, which is one reason the ever-changing universe described by Darwin has been slow to lodge in the collective human consciousness. And yet, our hands are converted fins, our hiccups the relics of gill-breathing.

Scientists have sometimes seemed to judge fish for their refusal to join our exodus out of the water and into the atmosphere’s more ethereal realm of gases. Their inability to see far in their murky environment is sometimes thought to be a cognitive impairment. But new evidence indicates that fish have minds rich with memories; some are able to recall associations from more than 10 days earlier.

Read: A classic test of animals’ minds has a fish problem

They also seem to be capable of deception. Female trout “fake orgasms,” quivering as though they’re about to lay eggs, perhaps so that undesired males will release their sperm and be on their way. We have high-definition footage of grouper fish teaming up with eels to scare prey out of reefs, the two coordinating their actions with sophisticated head signals. This behavior suggests that fish possess a theory of mind, an ability to speculate about the mental states of other beings.

A more troubling set of behaviors has emerged from experiments designed to determine whether fish feel pain. One of the most intense states of consciousness, pain is something beyond the mere detection of damage. Even the simplest of bacteria have sensors on their external membranes; when the sensors detect trace amounts of dangerous chemicals, the bacteria respond with a programmed flight reflex. But bacteria have no central nervous system where these signals are integrated into a three-dimensional experience of the chemical environment.


Delhi’s sewage has made the Yamuna, once home to millions of fish, one of the world’s most polluted rivers. (Hashim Badani)
Fish have many more kinds of sensors than bacteria do. Their sensors flare when the water temperature spikes, when they come into contact with corrosive chemicals, when a hook rips through their scales and into their flesh. In the lab, when trout lips are injected with acid, the fish do not merely respond at the site. They rock their entire bodies back and forth, hyperventilating, rubbing their mouths against their tanks’ sides or gravel bottoms. These behaviors cease when the fish are given morphine.

Read: How much pain should animals endure for science?

Such actions call the ethics of the research itself into question. But the experiences of lab fish are nothing compared with those endured by the trillions of aquatic animals that humans yank, unceremoniously, out of oceans and rivers and lakes every year. Some fish are still alive, hours later, when they’re shoveled into the sickly lit, refrigerated intake tubes of the global seafood supply chain.

Fish pain is something different from our own pain. In the elaborate mirrored hall that is human consciousness, pain takes on existential dimensions. Because we know that death looms, and grieve for the loss of richly imagined futures, it’s tempting to imagine that our pain is the most profound of all suffering. But we would do well to remember that our perspective can make our pain easier to bear, if only by giving it an expiration date. When we pull a less cognitively blessed fish up from the pressured depths too quickly, and barometric trauma fills its bloodstream with tissue-burning acid, its on-deck thrashing might be a silent scream, born of the fish’s belief that it has entered a permanent state of extreme suffering.

The Jains tell a story about Neminath, a man from deep antiquity who is said to have been sensitive to the distress calls of other animals. He developed his unusual fondness for animals while tending cattle in pastures on the banks of the Yamuna River, in his home village of Shauripur, which I reached four hours after leaving Delhi.

Neminath is one of 24 Jain “Fordmakers,” prophetlike figures who crossed a metaphorical river, freeing themselves from the cycle of birth and rebirth, before showing others the way to enlightenment. The Fordmakers’ life stories tend to emphasize their nonviolent natures. One is said to have floated perfectly still in the womb, sending not so much as a ripple through the amniotic fluid, to avoid harming his mother.

Only a few Fordmakers are confirmed historical figures, and Neminath is not one of them. The Jains say Neminath left his village for good on the day of his wedding. That morning, he mounted an elephant, intent on riding it to the temple where he was to be wed. On the way, he heard a series of agonized screams, and demanded to know their origin. Neminath’s elephant guide explained that the screams came from animals that were being slaughtered for his wedding feast.

This moment transformed Neminath. Some versions of this story say he freed the surviving animals, including a fish that he carried, in his hands, back to the river. Others say he fled. All agree that he renounced his former life. Rather than marry his bride, he set out for Girnar, a sacred mountain in Gujarat, 40 miles from the Arabian Sea.


Jain pilgrims climb Girnar, a sacred mountain in Gujarat, 40 miles from the Arabian Sea. (Hashim Badani)
My own ascent up Girnar began before dawn. It followed the usual topography of enlightenment. I was to climb 7,000 steps, all built into the mountain, by nine in the morning, so as not to be late for a ritual at an ancient temple near the peak.

The trail was only 50 miles from Gir National Park, where, the day before, I’d seen two Asiatic lions, nearly indistinguishable cousins of Africa’s lions. Once the region’s apex predator, the Asiatic lion almost went extinct during the British empire’s colonization of India, when no viceroy could visit a maharaja’s palace without a hunt in the local forest. Even today, the Asiatic lion still ranks among the rarest of the large feline predators, rarer even than its neighbor to the north, the snow leopard, which is so scarce that a glimpse of one padding down a jagged Himalayan crag is said to consummate a spiritual pilgrimage.

I did my best to put the lions, which have recently expanded to Girnar’s forests, out of my mind as I passed small huts and tents in the dark, at the trail’s base. Daylight brought langur monkeys onto the trailside boulders. One watched a vendor set up his stall to offer food and water to passing Jain pilgrims. The monkey waited until the man’s back was turned, at which point he scampered in to grab a banana. In Gir National Park, I’d seen deer using these monkeys as a treetop surveillance system. The monkeys sat high in the trees, keeping watch for leopards and lions, which blend into the woodland’s pre-monsoon palette of amber and gold. Monkeys that spotted a stalking cat let out a specific call. Deer weren’t the only ones that recognized and used these calls; the lion tracker who had been with me in the park did too.

On the hike up Girnar, barefoot women kept passing me, wearing iridescent saris in bright shades of orange, green, or pink. Their delicate silver anklets tinkled as they went. When I reached a trail marker that said I was still 1,000 steps from the temple, I removed my pack and hopped up onto a wall, letting my legs dangle.


​Hashim Badani
Two switchbacks below, an aged Jain monk in a white robe was struggling up the steps. He looked lonely, and seemed to be having trouble breathing. When Jain monks and nuns renounce worldly life, they sever all family ties. They embrace their children one last time, and vow never to see them again, unless chance brings them together on the rural back roads where the monks and nuns wander for the rest of their lives, carrying all their possessions on their back.

The monk and I had the trail to ourselves for a moment. All was silent but for a buzzing sound that I traced to a spindly black wasp bobbing above a dense clump of bougainvillea. The last ancestor this wasp and I shared likely lived more than 700 million years ago. The insect’s appearance reinforced this sense of evolutionary remoteness. The elongated shape and micro-tiled matte finish of its eyes made it seem too alien to be conscious. But appearances can deceive: Some wasps are thought to have evolved large eyes to observe social cues, and members of certain wasp species can learn the facial features of individual colony members.

Lab-bound honeybees can learn to recognize abstract concepts, including “similar to,” “different from,” and “zero.”
Wasps, like bees and ants, are hymenopterans, an order of animals that displays strikingly sophisticated behaviors. Ants build body-to-body bridges that allow whole colonies to cross gaps in their terrain. Lab-bound honeybees can learn to recognize abstract concepts, including “similar to,” “different from,” and “zero.” Honeybees also learn from one another. If one picks up a novel nectar-extraction technique, surrounding bees may mimic the behavior, causing it to cascade across the colony, or even through generations.

In one experiment, honeybees were attracted to a boat at the center of a lake, which scientists had stocked with sugar water. When the bees flew back to the hive, they communicated the boat’s location with waggle dances. The hive’s other bees would usually set out immediately for a newly revealed nectar lode. But in this case, they stayed put, as though they’d consulted a mental map and dismissed the possibility of flowers in the middle of a lake. Other scientists were not able to replicate this result, but different experiments suggest that bees are capable of consulting a mental map in this way.

Andrew Barron, a neuroscientist from Macquarie University, in Australia, has spent the past decade identifying fine neural structures in honeybee brains. He thinks structures in the bee brain integrate spatial information in a way that is analogous to processes in the human midbrain. That may sound surprising, given that the honeybee brain contains only 1 million neurons to our brains’ 85 billion, but artificial-intelligence research tells us that complex tasks can sometimes be executed by relatively simple neuronal circuits. Fruit flies have only 250,000 neurons, and they too display complex behaviors. In lab experiments, when faced with dim mating prospects, some seek out alcohol, the consciousness-altering substance that’s available to them in nature in broken-open, fermenting fruit.

Read: Bees love getting high on caffeine

Many invertebrate lineages never developed anything beyond a rudimentary nervous system, a network of neurons dispersed evenly through a wormlike form. But more than half a billion years ago, natural selection began to shape other squirming blobs into arthropods with distinct appendages and newly specialized sensory organs, which they used to achieve liberation from a drifting life of stimulus and response.

The first animals to direct themselves through three-dimensional space would have encountered a new set of problems whose solution may have been the evolution of consciousness. Take the black wasp. As it hovered above the bougainvillea’s tissue-thin petals, a great deal of informationâ€"sunlight, sound vibrations, floral scentsâ€"rushed into its fibrous exoskull. But these information streams arrived in its brain at different times. To form an accurate and continuous account of the external world, the wasp needed to sync these signals. And it needed to correct any errors introduced by its own movements, a difficult trick given that some of its sensors are mounted on body parts that are themselves mobile, not least its swiveling head.

If one of the wasp’s aquatic ancestors experienced Earth’s first consciousness, it would have been nothing like our own.
The neuroscientist Björn Merker has suggested that early animal brains solved these problems by generating an internal model of the world, with an avatar of the body at its center. Merker says that consciousness is just the multisensory view from inside this model. The syncing processes and the jangle and noise from our mobile bodies are all missing from this conscious viewâ€"some invisible, algorithmic Stanley Kubrick seems to edit them out. Nor do we experience the mechanisms that convert our desires into movements. When I wished to begin hiking up the mountain again, I would simply set off, without thinking about the individual muscle contractions that each step required. When a wasp flies, it is probably not aware of its every wing beat. It may simply will itself through space.

If one of the wasp’s aquatic ancestors experienced Earth’s first embryonic consciousness, it would have been nothing like our own consciousness. It may have been colorless and barren of sharply defined objects. It may have been episodic, flickering on in some situations and off in others. It may have been a murkily sensed perimeter of binary feelings, a bubble of good and bad experienced by something central and unitary. To those of us who have seen stars shining on the far side of the cosmos, this existence would be claustrophobic to a degree that is scarcely imaginable. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t conscious.


A Jain temple near the top of Girnar, the mountain where an ancient “Fordmaker” is said to have achieved total consciousness, with access to all animal minds. (Hashim Badani)
When the monk arrived at the wall where I was resting, the wasp flew away, rising up toward the sun until I lost it in the light. The monk was wearing a white mask like those that some Jains wear to avoid inhaling insects and other tiny creatures. I nodded to him as he passed, and lay back against the warm stone of the mountain.

The monk was a white dot some six switchbacks up by the time I hopped off the wall and continued the climb, my legs stiffened by the break. I reached the entrance to the temple complex with only 15 minutes to spare. Its marble courtyard shone brilliant white, as though bleached by the mountain sun.

Ducking under a row of elegant golden medallions, I entered the temple’s interior chamber, where dozens of candles flickered in intricately carved wall niches, and on platforms that hung from the ceiling on chains. The stone ceiling was carved into a lotus flower, its delicate unfurling petals symbolizing the emergence of a pure, ethereal soul from the Earth’s muddy materials.


A Jain temple near the top of Girnar (Hashim Badani)
Forty Jains were sitting on the floor in neat rows, their legs crossed in the lotus position. The women wore fresh saris they’d carried up the mountain for the occasion. The men were dressed in all white. I wedged into a spot in the back.

We faced a dark, tunnel-like space lined by two sets of columns. At the far end, candlelight illuminated a black marble statue of a seated male figure. Its barrel chest was inlaid with gemstones, as were its eyes, which appeared to float, serenely, in the dark space, inducing a hypnotic effect, broken only when the man sitting next to me tugged my shirt. “Neminath,” he said, nodding toward the statue.

It was here on this mountain that Neminath is said to have achieved a state of total, unimpeded consciousness, with perceptual access to the entire universe, including every kind of animal mind. Jains believe that humans are special because, in our natural state, we are nearest to this experience of enlightenment. Among Earth’s creatures, no other finds it so easy to see into the consciousness of a fellow being.

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The pilgrims started singing, first in a low hum and then steadily louder. One wheeled a giant drum next to the tunnel’s entrance and struck it with a dark mallet. Two others bashed cymbals together. Men and women walked in from opposite doors, converging, in two lines, on either side of the tunnel. A woman wearing an orange sari and a gold crown crossed in front of Neminath, lifted a vessel over his black-marble head, and poured out a mixture of milk and blessed water. When she finished, a white-robed man from the other line did the same.

The singing grew louder until it verged on ecstatic. The pilgrims raised their arms and clapped overhead, faster and faster. A climax seemed to loom, but then it all dropped away. The drums and the bells and the cymbals went quiet, leaving a clear sonic space that was filled by a final blow on a conch.

The shell’s low note was long and clean. It rang out of the temple and over the ancient peaks. As it trailed off, I wondered whether, in the centuries to come, this place might become something more than a Jain house of worship. Maybe it will become a place to mark a moment in human history, when we awakened from the dream that we are the only minds that nature brought into being. Maybe people will come here from all corners of the Earth to pay their respects to Neminath, who is, after all, only a stand-in for whoever it was who first heard animal screams and understood their meaning.

[Dr. MD MD]

How a Stroke Turned a 63-Year-Old Into a Rap Legend
The story of Dr. Rapp

Clarence Williams / L.A. Times
Story by Jeff Maysh
JANUARY 16, 2019
HEALTH
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Dr. sherman hershfield woke up one morning and was surprised to find himself behind the wheel of his car. Somewhere between his Beverly Hills apartment and his practice in the San Fernando Valley, the silver-haired physician had blacked out. Somehow he’d avoided a crash, but this wasn’t the first time. “I didn’t know what was going on,” he admitted.

Apart from his frequent blackouts, Hershfield was in fine health for a man in his 50s. He was tall and lean, ran six miles a day, and was a strict vegetarian. “I believe a physician should provide exemplary motivation to patients,” he once wrote. “I don’t smoke and have cut out all alcohol.” Hershfield specialized in physical medicine and rehabilitation, and for decades had helped patients with brain injuries learn to walk again and rebuild their lives. Even with his experience, Hershfield didn’t know what was wrong inside his own head.

Perhaps the mystery blackouts were caused by stress, he wondered. Hershfield was the medical director of the rehab center at the San Bernardino Community Hospital, but he also ran a private practice 76 miles away in Winnetka, offering nonsurgical spinal treatments. “Sometimes I worked from 6 a.m. to 3 a.m.,” he recalled, adding that the pressures had cost him his first marriage. At the hospital, Hershfield often slept in the doctors’ lounge, where colleagues nicknamed him “Dr. Columbo,” after the disheveled television detective.

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Not long after the blackouts started, Hershfield suffered a grand mal seizureâ€"the type most people imagine when they think of seizures. He was driven to the emergency room, thrashing and writhing like a 6-foot-4-inch fish pulled out of the water. Concerned doctors at the UCLA Medical Center rushed him into an MRI machine and, this being the late 1980s, wondered whether he might have pricked himself with a needle and contracted aids. Instead, the scan revealed that his blackouts were actually a swarm of small strokes, and his illness was diagnosed as antiphospholipid syndrome. Hershfield’s immune system was mistakenly creating antibodies that made his blood more likely to clot. Those clots, if they entered his bloodstream and brain, could kill him at any moment.

Doctors prescribed blood-thinning medication and forced Hershfield to quit driving, but he was still fit to practice medicine. Like many other survivors of stroke, he sometimes stuttered, and his speech became slurred. His personality also seemed to change. He suddenly became obsessed with reading and writing poetry. Soon Hershfield’s friends noticed another unusual side effect: He couldn’t stop speaking in rhyme. He finished everyday sentences with rhyming couplets, such as “Now I have to ride the bus. It’s enough to make me cuss.” And curiously, whenever he rhymed, his speech impediments disappeared.

Astroke, or “brain attack,” can happen to any of us at any time. One occurs every 40 seconds in the United States. Strokes can lead to permanent disability and extraordinary side effects: Some patients become hypersexual or compulsive gamblers. Others have even woken up speaking in a fake Chinese accent. “There was a famous guy in Italy who had what they called ‘Pinocchio syndrome,’” said Alice Flaherty, a joint associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “When he told a lie, he would have a seizure. He was crippled as a businessman.”

One of Flaherty’s most famous cases is that of Tommy McHugh, a 51-year-old British man who suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhageâ€"a stroke caused by bleeding around the brain. McHugh’s stroke changed his entire personality. A grizzled ex-con, he became deeply philosophical and spent 19 hours a day reading poetry, speaking in rhyme, painting, and drawing. He’d never been inside an art gallery before, he joked, “except to maybe steal something.”

For Hershfield, a love of poetry was also completely out of keeping with anything in his past. He was born in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1936, and while his mother was a concert pianist, he followed his father into medical school, graduating in 1960. In Flin Flon, a Canadian mining city, he mended the heads of injured hockey players, then became a resident at the University of Minnesota before serving in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. In 1973, he arrived in Southern California and set up his practice, where he had little time for reading anything but medical journals.

His problems started during the medical-malpractice crisis of the 1970s. Lawsuits against doctors became popular, and the annual cost of Hershfield’s liability insurance rose from $864 to $3,420. In protest, he quit working all but emergency cases, and took a job frying fish at Thousand Oaks Fish and Chips for $2 an hour. Newspapers across America wrote about the doctor who fried fish while wearing hospital scrubs; one noted that Hershfield “looked like he was about to have four cod fillets wheeled into surgery.” He explained: “I’ve always been a person of high moral values. I’ve thought, what the hell do I want out of life? And it comes out, I want to be happy.”

Hershfield did return to medicine, but things went from bad to worse when his business partner and best friend started to abuse drugs. “He was an excellent surgeon, a handsome man who had everything going for him … but he was unable to control his fears and constant bouts of withdrawal and depression, and he tried five times to take his life,” Hershfield recalled. He was there when his friend’s heart finally stopped, after six days on a respirator.

By 1987, Hershfield had filed for bankruptcy. A year later, he became the medical director at the rehab center, where he butted heads with management over his “odd” ideas, such as opening a hospice where pets could stay with their dying owners. That was around the time the blackouts started.

In the 10 years following his stroke, Hershfield dedicated his free time to a Buddhist organization called Soka Gakkai International, where he loved to chant for hours. He had met his second wife there, Michiko, a beautiful Japanese divorcée he impressed with his intellect and his three medical certificates. Michiko told me that her husband “changed a lot” after his stroke. “He used to like Japanese haiku poemsâ€"you know, five, seven, five.”

Read: Can music be used as medicine?

Hershfield also embraced his Jewish heritage and volunteered at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish global human-rights organization. “I did the Holocaust in rhyme,” he recalled of the educational poem he’d perform on the bus. The city now sounded like a swinging rhythm section: Brakes hissed. Horns honked. Passengers rang the bell. As Hershfield recited his rhymes alone, he had become just another crazy person talking to himself on public transport. Then, one afternoon, as he waited at a bus stop in Hollywood, a man selling jewelry overheard him and suggested he take his lyrics to Leimert Park.

“Where is Leimert Park?’” Hershfield asked. He had never been there.

Intrigued, he rode a bus headed into South Central, past Crenshaw’s Magic Johnson theater, the neighborhood’s megachurches, and liquor stores. At the foot of Baldwin Hills he found itâ€"an area with one of the largest African American populations in the western United States. If Leimert Park was 100 people, just one was white.

Since the 1960s, Leimert Park had been the center of African American culture in Los Angelesâ€"Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, and Richard Pryor had all lived within five miles of the place. To outsiders, it was known only as a hot spot during the Los Angeles riots in 1992. The jazz poet Kamau Daoud told me that locals still refer to the riot as “the rebellion.” The village would not quickly forget the four white police officers who beat the black motorist Rodney King half to death.

It was the very late 1990s when Hershfield stepped off the bus, dressed like a doctor who lived in Beverly Hills. He walked in polished shoes to the beat of the drum circle that gathered in the park, past the row of Afrocentric bookstores and shops selling colorful fabrics, where saxophone music leaked from every door and window. At 43rd and Leimert, he found a crowd of teenagers surrounding a community arts center called the “kaos Network.” This had to be it: Spontaneous rap battles were breaking out, and dancers writhed on the sidewalk, seizure-like. At the entrance, a young man sized him up.

“Would you like to hear something?” Hershfield asked politely.

“Sure, what’s your name?” the man asked.

Hershfield looked at him.

“My name is Dr. Rapp.”

Established in 1984 as a media-production center, kaos Network was famous for “Project Blowed,” an open-mic workshop for up-and-coming rappers. Since 1995, the project had turned the dance floor into a living Venn diagram of performers from various gang-controlled neighborhoods, mostly African American teenagers wearing baggy pants, Timberland boots, and caps pulled down just above the eyes.

“It was underground, powerful, strong, and scary for people if they weren’t ready, because it was really volatile,” explained the proprietor, Ben Caldwell, a 73-year-old African American filmmaker with a tidy, graying beard. “I would have to take a deep breath every time, because it was a bunch of alpha males.” The project was a tough breeding ground for rappers, who hoped to “blow up,” such as the underground performer Aceyalone, or more mainstream stars, such as Jurassic 5. But Hershfield knew nothing about any of this.

“He said he wanted to do a rhyme on the Holocaust,” Caldwell remembered. “I thought that was really insightful. I thought that it would be something good for the kids to hear.” This was unusual, but not against “da mutha f**ckin rulz” pinned to the door, which began: “project blowed is presented for the love of hip-hop entirely for black people.” The sign continued: “do not get violent because this is a black-owned, black-operated business.”

The entrance fee was $2 to perform, $4 to watch, and rappers were expected to “perform a polished piece of music,” wrote Jooyoung Lee in Blowin’ Up, a history of the club, adding: “The open mic is a lot like peer review.” Emcees with the skill to rap spontaneouslyâ€"“freestyling”â€"enjoy the greatest respect. But when a rapper forgets his lines, stutters, or shows up unprepared, the crowd forces them offstage with a devastating chant:

“Please pass the mic!”

The DJ demanded Hershfield’s backing music. He handed over a cassette tape of Chopin. Piano music filled the room. Regulars in the audience, known as “Blowdians,” looked at one another.

“They all were going, ‘Uh hunh, uh hunh,’” Hershfield recalled, but they quickly tired of the classical music.

“Okay,” someone said. “Get rid of that music and let’s hear you rap.”

Alone on the stage, Hershfield gripped the mic and began:

“God, this is a tough thing to write

The feeling I got in my heart tonight

Just to think of the Holocaust

So deep and sadly blue

And still so many people

Don’t think it’s true.”

The crowd was silent. Here was an old man, reading a poem.

“The first time he was up there, he wasn’t that successful,” Caldwell said. But out of respect, the audience didn’t chant him off. Project Blowed calls itself the longest-running open-mic session in the world, and they’d never seen anyone like Hershfield onstage. “First of all, he’s Caucasian around all these people of color,” said one regular, called Babu. “I thought he was some kind of spy.” Hershfield was also the oldest person in the room: “If you up in your mid-thirties and still ain’t got it,” a Blowdian called Trenseta would say, “leave hip-hop alone, and go get you a little job at International House of Pancakes or some shit!” Hershfield was now 63, a dinosaur in rap years.


Clarence Williams / LA Times
As he emerged into the hot South Central night, Hershfield heard a voice from Fifth Street Dicks, the neighboring coffee shop: “If you can’t keep up with those kids, then you’d better do something else,” shouted Richard Fulton, a large man with graying dreadlocks. Fulton’s jazz café was a hotbed of African American writers and artists, and he’d seen many beat poets try their luck in Leimert Parkâ€"none of them from 90210, America’s ritziest zip code. “At that time I thought I was rapping,” Hershfield later recalled. “I wasn’t rapping. I was just reading poetry. It didn’t have any beat. When you’re on rap street, you gotta have that beat.”

Undeterred, Hershfield put aside his Tchaikovsky records and listened to NWA and Run-DMC. He played rap music in the bath, Michiko told me. When she found out he was preparing for rap battles in South Central, she told him, “You’re crazy!” But she couldn’t stop him from returning to Project Blowed every week, sometimes making the six-and-a-half-mile journey from Beverly Hills on foot.

“Sherman’s leaving at 10 o’clock at night and going to Crenshaw,” she told her son, Scott. “He’s hanging out with kids and rapping.” Scott, who had transitioned from a teenaged professional skateboarder into a hip-hop DJ, was now in his 20s and was scoring regular gigs at Hollywood’s celebrity-filled clubs. When he saw his stepfather rapping at home, he felt embarrassed.

“Sherman, you’re kinda just rhyming, putting words together, but you know so many Latin words, you should rap about neurology, really get into the science of it … that would be amazing,” he said. Scott encouraged his stepfather to be more like the hip-hop rappers he admired. “Even though I’m from the West Coast, most of the stuff I really liked was East Coast ’90s hip-hop … I was into KRS-One.”

In the mid-1980s, KRS-One had emerged from the Bronx as the emcee of Boogie Down Productions, with the seminal album Criminal Minded. As a solo artist, he’d created one of hip-hop’s most enduring records, Sound of Da Police, and was now a leading rap scholar and lecturer. One evening in October 1999, Hershfield heard that KRS-One was speaking about rap history at an event for hip-hoppers in Hollywood, and decided to swing by. “Try to imagine a hip-hop gathering,” KRS-One told me late last year. “You know, emcees from the hood, breakers, DJs, music is blasting. I’m giving you permission to stereotype. Then in walks this dude.” It was like Larry David had wandered into a Snoop Dogg music video.

During the Q&A, Hershfield grabbed the mic and started to tell his story.

He explained that he was getting his language back together after a stroke by listening to rap records. “One of which was one of my songs,” KRS-One recalled.

Hershfield couldn’t stop himself.

“I started to have a stroke,” he rapped. “Went broke.”

The room fell silent.

“I started to think and speak in rhyme. I can do it all the time. And I want to get to do the rap, and I won’t take any more of this crap.”

The crowd erupted.

When Hershfield rapped about his struggles, not history lessons, he inspired the audience.

“He got a standing ovation,” recalled KRS-One. He gave the doctor his telephone number and suggested they hang out.

Read: The revenge of autobiographical rap

“I didn’t know anything about him,” Hershfield recalled. “I just knew that he was in the same category as Tupac Shakur.” When Hershfield told his stepson about his new friend, Scott was stunned. “You know, you should really listen to his music and listen to his lyrics,” he told his stepfather. But inside, Scott was thinking: Let’s see how long this lasts. KRS-One?

A few days later, the rap icon arrived at Hershfield’s office. KRS-One gave the doctor a signed copy of his book, The Science of Rap. He, too, was fascinated with neurology, he said. “I was already talking about the concept of how rapping synthesizes those two hemispheres of the brain,” KRS-One told me. He asked Hershfield whether he’d like to be part of an experiment, and offered him rap lessons.

“When you’re trying to teach someone to rap, you ask them to sing along with a song they might have heard,” KRS-One told me. He hit play on “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang. The song began:

“I said a hip-hop / Hippie to the hippie / The hip, hip a hop, and you don’t stop …”

Then he pressed rewind and encouraged Hershfield to give it a try.

“He nailed it,” said KRS-One.

“He had the cadences and the rhythms,” he added. But the doctor needed to work on his delivery, breath control, and enunciation. And so an unlikely friendship blossomed between the Blastmaster and the Buddhist. They were both interested in spirituality: The rapper’s name, KRS, came from the Hare Krishna volunteers he befriended in a youth spent on the streets of the Bronx. And just as Hershfield had lost his business partner to suicide, KRS-One had lost his right-hand man, the DJ Scott La Rock, who was shot in 1987. The loss was life changing for the rapper: His lyrics became more political and philosophical; he launched a movement called Stop the Violence.

To KRS-One, Hershfield was a pioneer of rap theory. “He was talking about neuroplasticity before I heard about it on PBS,” KRS-One recalled.

KRS-One suggested they write a book together or record an album in New York.

He told the doctor: “I visualize you as revolutionizing hip-hop.”

Hershfield returned to Project Blowed, where he vowed to win over the crowd. The elder statesmen of Leimert Park took Hershfield under their wing, making sure he got time on the mic, and that he got home safely. “People respected him, and he could work on his chops, work on his brain,” Caldwell told me. “It was interesting to see how well we all accepted him.” Caldwell encouraged Hershfield to experiment. “He wanted to do Jewish chants,” he recalled. “And I was like, ‘That is so fucking tight.’”

The younger members of Project Blowed were also drawn to Hershfield. Up-and-coming rappers in South Central suffered from an “existential urgency,” Lee wrote in Blowin’ Up. Theirs was a race to “make it” in hip-hop, before their life was derailed by gang violence. Like them, Hershfield was rapping against the clock, unsure when the next seizure might strike.

Richard Fulton, the coffee-shop owner, became especially close with Hershfield. Fulton was a cancer survivor and former drug addict who had once pushed a shopping cart along Skid Row’s Fifth Street. That was before he found Godâ€"and jazz. Against all odds, a reborn Fulton launched his coffee-and-music operation. His caffeine was strong and the jazz loud. As with Hershfield, Fulton’s second life was dominated by a love for music. His catchphrase was “Turn the music up.”

Hershfield and Fulton were kindred spirits, said Erin Kaplan, a journalist who frequented Leimert Park. Both men were enjoying “second chances,” she explained, and living “on borrowed time.” Hanging out at Dick’s, Hershfield brushed shoulders with beat poets, rappers, chess players, and jazz musicians. It was there that he fell into the rhythm of Leimert Park.

Every week for two or three years, Hershfield climbed onstage at Project Blowed and gave his everything, sweat on his brow, steam on his glasses, fists pumping. Sometimes he electrified the crowd; other times …“Please pass the mic!” He learned to self-promote and name-check “Dr. Rapp” in his lyrics just like the pros; he wore customized T-shirts and learned to freestyle. He performed on the stage and in impromptu “ciphers” under streetlamps, until the sun came up.

“He was tight,” the rapper Myka 9 told me, while he smoked in an alleyway before a performance in Culver City. “He had a little bit of an angular approach. He had flows, he had good lines that were thought out. I remember a couple of punch lines that came off pretty cool.” Myka 9 recalled socializing with Hershfield at house parties in South Central and described him as “a cult personality in his own right.”

At home, the doctor’s wife was worried. “I don’t understand why he goes to that area,” Michiko told me. Her husband was too generous and trusting, she added. “I bought him nice clothes, Italian-made suits. A couple of times he came back with dirty clothesâ€"he’d given the nice suit to somebody else.” With his designer threads and prescription pad, Hershfield was a mugger’s dream.

“I keep telling him it’s dangerous,” Michiko told me.

Hershfield insisted he was safe. These people were his friends, he said.

Not everyone in the world of hip-hop was enthusiastic about Hershfield. A letter arrived from a lawyer representing a different Dr. Rap, who advised him to find a new name, or face legal action. Hershfield, who actually had a doctoral degree, rebranded to Dr. Flow, but it was too late. His reputation was spreading.

In early 2000, Hershfield attended a talk about violence and rap music at the California State University at Los Angeles. Sitting on the panel was one of gangsta rap’s pioneers, Ice-T, who argued that violence was an unavoidable part of rap culture. “I’m a person who deals with violence always in my music,” he told the audience. “Masculinity runs this world. The person who’s violent gets control. Peace gets nothing.”

Hershfield was infuriated.

“You can’t live by hate!” he yelled out, before trading comments with Ice-T in an ugly scene that required the moderator’s intervention.

Hershfield was appalled by gang violence and its needless killings. Internally, he was struggling with the fragility of his existence: He had survived a deadly stroke, and life was a precious gift.

No one was more devastated than Hershfield when Fifth Street Dick’s cancer returned. Hershfield was one of the many Leimert Park regulars who surrounded Fulton’s bedside. He found his friend unable to speak, the tumor in his throat so large that his tongue protruded from his mouth. Fulton could only communicate by writing notes, and knew his life was ebbing away. But Hershfield couldn’t accept it.

“If I can just get him to chant, he’ll recover,” Hershfield said, as decades of medical experience were drowned out by denial.

He started his Buddhist chant:

“Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.”

Friends urged Hershfield to stop, but he wouldn’t listen. Fulton, 56, could barely breathe, let alone speak.

“We’re going to tap into his life force,” Hershfield insisted.

But on March 18, 2000, jazz filled Fulton’s room as he declined a final morphine shot, and instead told nurses in a note, “Turn the music up.”

Back at Project Blowed, Hershfield intensified his efforts to dominate the mic. But his double life soon became strained as his two worlds splintered. “His friends in Beverly Hills did not approve of this at all,” said Kaplan, Hershfield’s journalist friend. “They were so shocked. Let’s just say none of his friends showed up at open-mic night.” By choosing rap nights instead of night shifts, Hershfield soon fell into another financial crisis. “I think he was more obsessed with rapping than he was going to work,” his stepson, Scott, told me. Sometimes, Michiko told me, the guys from Leimert Park would lend Hershfield money for the bus.

Soon Hershfield’s voice became hoarse from shouting rhymes over African drums and staying out all night. Then, during one particularly hot evening, everything went black. “Dr. Rapp had a seizure,” recalled Tasha Wiggins, who worked for kaos Network. “Other rappers caught him. Everybody stopped what they were doing, trying to nurture Dr. Rapp.” As Hershfield lay unconscious on the floor, the crowd started chanting his name.

Those who have been struck by the strange side effects of brain injuries often speak of their gratitude. Just before he died of cancer, Tommy McHugh, the British convict who became an artist, said his strokes were “the most wonderful thing that happened.” He added that they gave him “11 years of a magnificent adventure that nobody could have expected.” Flaherty described McHugh’s hemorrhage as “a crack that let the light in.” McHugh and Hershfield both experienced symptoms of what the physician and author Oliver Sacks called “sudden musicophilia,” an eruption of creativity following a brain injury or stroke. But for Hershfield, rhyming was no longer a symptom, but a cure.

It was as if the side of Hershfield’s brain that held the rhymes had healed the broken side that had short-circuited. Brain scans on rappers carried out by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders discovered that during freestyle rapping, brain activity increased in the brain areas that engage motivation, language, mood, and action. Hershfield said rapping kept his seizures under control, and even after he collapsed that night in Leimert Park, he used hip-hop to regain his speech and return to the stage.

Read: Mapping creativity in the brain

Soon Dr. Rapp’s notices at Project Blowed started improving.

“His name was on the lips of the multitudes,” recalled Ed Boyer, a Los Angeles Times journalist who first heard rumors about South Central’s rapping doctor in April of 2000. Boyer tracked down Hershfield to his office and visited Project Blowed to hear him perform. “I’ve seen Dr. Rapp rock the whole house,” Tasha Wiggins told Boyer as Hershfield climbed onto the stage. Another Project Blowed member, Gabriela Orozco, said, “Oh, I think I’m going to cry. I mean … he’s doing it.”

As Dr. Rapp stepped into the spotlight and the DJ’s needle found the groove, he became lost in his rhymes:

“Me, I’m just a beginning medical intern of rap

Trying to express and open my trap …”

Hershfield’s stepson, Scott, remembers the morning he opened the Times and saw a photograph of Dr. Rapp, wearing an Adidas tracksuit, mid-flow, on the paper’s Metro pages. “The whole thing was so bizarre,” he said.

Dr. Rapp had finally “blown up.”

Radio and television crews from Canada and England soon descended on Leimert Park looking for Hershfield. Ben Caldwell showed me footage from a Japanese television station, which filmed Hershfield as he waited to take the mic. He looked like a retiree standing in line for an early-bird dinner special. Then he laid down his rhymes as the crowd bobbed their heads in appreciation. Afterward, Hershfield took a nap on a couch. “He did that quite regularly,” Caldwell said, sighing. “Everybody liked the doctor, right, even the hard-core gangster types. They liked him for his chutzpah.”

Hershfield told reporters that Leimert Park had opened his eyes to a whole new world. “There are lots of misconceptions by white people about the area,” he said. “It’s very cultural, with a lot of interesting places.” Project Blowed was “the Harvard of rap,” he said. “This is my foundation. I find it very beneficial.”

Though he never recorded an album with KRS-One, Hershfield owed his underground rap career to the Blastmaster. KRS-One, who now lives in Topanga Canyon, California, told me: “He mentioned one of my songs brought him back. He was in a comaâ€"they were playing music for him to try and wake him up.” He added, “I’ve met a lot of people, but a few people I will never forget. [Hershfield] saying rap healed him … that just stayed with me … It’s part of my confidence in hip-hop.”

Instead of embarking on a world tour, Dr. Rapp continued to pay his dues at Project Blowed every week. Like a true underground star, he shunned mainstream success. He did appear in a documentary about Leimert Park, not as a novelty act, but as a regular member of the crew. “I can’t clearly tell you whether [rap] helped him,” said Michiko, “but I can tell you he was happy when he was doing rap music.” Hershfield represented Project Blowed until ill health forced him to quit both music and medicine. He died from cancer in Los Angeles, on March 29, 2013, at age 76.

Today, Project Blowed lives on, every third Tuesday at kaos Network in Leimert Park. The area remains the “hippest corner in Los Angeles,” according to the recording on the club’s answering machine. But Leimert Park is now fighting a new battle, against soaring property prices and gentrification. The reason Hershfield was accepted at Project Blowed, said Caldwell, was that he arrived with an open mind, and he listened and learned. “That’s one wonderful thing I like most about black American communities,” he said. “As long as you don’t try to tell them how to do their own culture, you’re good.” Ever since Dr. Rapp’s days, performers from all races and backgrounds have jumped onstage, Caldwell added. But the moment they stutter or slur, it’s always the same:

“Please pass the mic.”

JEFF MAYSH is a crime reporter living in Los Angeles.

[K_Dubb]

[Dr. MD MD]

Consider the Roadkill
Jul 20, 2020
There are myriad arguments for and against eating roadkill. Can they all be true at the same time?

In 2016, Tim Bento logged on to Facebook to post in Britslist, a public buy-and-sell group for Whatcom County, Washington, that has more than 58,000 members. But Bento wasn’t buying or selling. He was publicly listing his cell-phone number and asking for roadkill.

“I told people to put me under their contacts as Deer Tim, and that if they saw one deer hit, I would go and get it, process it, and share some of the meat with them,” says Bento. “That would be an easy way for them to remember me.”

Since then, Bento has received texts from around 50 people letting him know what they’ve seen and where. He’s after deer and elk, but so far he’s only had luck with deer. Usually, he’ll get around two or three a month, resulting in about 50 pounds of meat. Sometimes miscommunication means someone has hit a domestic cow instead of an elk cow, or sometimes Bento is just unavailableâ€"out to dinner, out of town. But if he is around, and there’s meat within a manageable radius, he will drive to it.

Initially, if he couldn’t get to an animal, Bento felt a pang of disappointment, protective over what he saw as a meat source. But that feeling quickly faded, he says, as he soon realized the obvious: in a state where more than 5,000 deer and elk are hit every year, there’s more than enough for everyone.

Despite some public skepticism, Bento, who grew up hunting wild pigs with his stepdad in Kaneohe, Hawaii, is proud to be resourcefulâ€"to glean something from nature and call it good. Especially when you remember that livestock makes up between 14.5 percent and 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions. “A lot of people don’t want to use a plastic straw or have this sentimentality when it comes to the environment,” he says. “It’s kind of ironic. Because roadkill salvaging is putting something to good use.”

When Bento does get a deer, he cuts the meat into chunks and steaks that he, bags, labels, and stacks in his freezer. He’s also had pepperoni and landjäger sausage made. Most often he cubes the venison, roasting it in an Instant Pot or putting it into a stew. What he doesn’t useâ€"namely, the animal’s head, hide, and limbsâ€"he loads into the rectangular mouth of a blue 4,500-pound incinerator on his five-acre property. “Ashes to ashes,” he says, “dust to dust.”
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Katherine LaGrave
KATHERINE LAGRAVE
Katherine LaGrave is a New Yorkâ€"based features writer and editor.
Three and a half million years ago, the earliest meat-eating humans were more than likely not spearing their prey. They were three feet tall, after all, and had no hunting tools. Instead, to get animal protein, they improvised, cracking open bones left behind by saber-toothed tigers for marrow (the big cats’ teeth weren’t strong enough to crush skeletons) or running in a group to scatter lions, leopards, cheetahs, hyenas, and jackals away from slumped carcasses, which they would then pick clean with small, nimble fingers or simple, sharp tools made from rocks. Sometimes they’d feast on animals that were victims of too much water or a lack of it: a drowned gazelle after a flood, maybe, or an antelope felled from drought that scorched the cracked savanna. We were not hunters but scavengers first.

How we eat meat has changed significantly in the millennia since our shorter ancestors roamed the earth, says Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, whose research centers around the evolution of the human diet, with a focus on meat eating. But like the earliest carnivorous humans all those years ago, some of us are still scavenging, improvising with what’s left, making something out of anything that would otherwise go to waste: roadkill.

In the past decade, laws allowing roadkill salvaging have snowballed. Montana legalized the practice in 2013, Washington in 2016. Oregon began allowing it in January 2019. In October, 2019, California became the 29th state to sign off on roadkill salvaging, with a pilot programâ€"featuring an app for requesting the necessary permit that allows motorists to pick up deer, elk, pronghorn antelope, and wild pigâ€"that will go into effect in 2021. “It is the intent of this act to make available to Californians tens of thousands of pounds of a healthy, wild, big game food source that currently is wasted each year following wildlife-vehicle collisions,” the bill reads.

As urban sprawl and a warming planet continue to displace animal populations, accounting for that impact on nature matters.
That deer, elk, and moose are the most commonly salvaged animals across states is of little surprise. All are members of the Cervidae family and have similar behavioral patterns and pockets of peak activity. With running speeds of 30 to 40 miles per hour, they can bound in front of moving cars faster than you can hit the brakes. Thanks to their buildâ€"long legs and a substantial body massâ€"they are also likely to bounce off the side of a car or over it and not get caught beneath its wheels.

Perhaps predictably, states with large hunting populations often have the most robust roadkill programs. Idaho has an easy-to-use model for documenting roadkill, allowing self-reported salvaging. Claimants have 72 hours to obtain a permit, which requires information about the animal species and estimated age, as well as where and when it was hitâ€"a wild turkey at milepost 16.10 on Route 6, a coyote at milepost 25 on U.S. 12, a black bear farther down U.S. 12 at milepost 32.70. Most of the self-filed accident reports seem rushed if not remorseful, tapped out mere minutes after seeing or experiencing a collision:

I know for certain it is a Red Fox. It ran oit across the the road at a very bad time, unavoidable.
Deer ran across road had my eyes on the first one when the second came running out.

Hit by white pick up on Teton Creek bridge south of Driggs, I called Teton County sherrifs Dept. Asked if I could salvage the animal. Approximately 3-4 year cow moose.

There is no federal statute on roadkill. Whether an animal carcass is salvageable depends on the individual, the species, and the season. The multitude of determining factors not only make it difficult to assign a standard regulatory framework, but they give scientists pause, too.

“There are just all these big holes of uncertainty,” says Ben Chapman, a professor and food-safety specialist at North Carolina State University. “If we’re raising animals for food consumption, we’re looking at the health of those animals throughout the entire process. When it comes to roadkill, we literally don’t know.”

Chapman likens eating meat from roadkill to eating meat from hunting, with similar risks around diseases like brucellosis, which can cause fevers, sweating, body aches, and joint pain in humans, and trichinosis, which has symptoms ranging from diarrhea to pink eye. Chapman also says that the infections animals get in the wild can increase the likelihood that they’ll shed foodborne pathogens and have other illnesses humans can get when eating that meat. Put plainly, sick animals are likely to lead to sick humans.

Sick animals are also hard to identify when they’re dead. Still, though there are no hard-and-fast rules, there are some ways to mitigate risk when picking up roadkill, with processes similar toâ€"but not exactly the same asâ€"those used by hunters. Avoiding animals that have suffered intestinal trauma, and only taking animals whose time of death is known, are both key. (Pathogens live in the gut, and if the intestines have ruptured, this can greatly increase the probability of illness. Processing the animal quickly will also reduce the likelihood of the spread of bacteria.) One man told me that when he comes upon roadkill, he checks for clear, glossy eyes and blood that hasn’t coagulated. Another said they have a by-the-numbers rule and won’t take anything they know has been dead longer than ten minutes. For others, anything in the summer, when temperatures are warmer and meat is quicker to spoil, is a no-no.

Chapman, for his part, recommends that anyone salvaging roadkill contact game officials in their respective geographic areas to learn about how illnesses like chronic wasting disease, a contagious neurological disorder now found in nearly 30 states, affects certain populations of deer, elk, and moose. Though no cases of CWD transmission to humans have been reported, research shows that its proteins can infect monkeys and mice that carry human genes. (Despite other theories about contaminated meat, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that there is “no evidence that you can get infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 by eating food, including wild hunted game meat.”)

It’s hard to persuade advocates of eating roadkill that what they’re doing is risky and unhealthy. “Isn’t eating meat that’s been pumped full of hormones just as damaging? Aren’t wild animals that consume wild foods the real organic meat?” they’ll counter. (They may have a point: game meat is traditionally lower in calories and fat than livestock meat, and it’s high in polyunsaturated fats and conjugated linoleic acids, which promote the loss of body fat.) Even PETA is on their side, writing about roadkill in a FAQ, “If people must eat animal carcasses, roadkill is a superior option to the neatly shrink-wrapped plastic packages of meat in the supermarket. Eating roadkill is healthier for the consumer than meat laden with antibiotics, hormones, and growth stimulants, as most meat is today.”

But at some point, says Chapman, the debate can become irrelevant. “A lot of the food-safety discussions we have are, ‘I have enough food, and now I want to make that food safe.’ But if I don’t have enough food, whether it’s safe or not becomes a whole other question on risk reduction for that individual,” he says. “All the stuff I’m talking about changes, I think, when someone says, ‘But I don’t have any food. And there’s food right there.’”
Each year in the U.S., there are more than a million accident claims involving animals. There are also millions of undocumented accidents, and some statisticians suggest that the actual figure could be up to six times as high. But even by estimating conservatively and putting the number of accidents at slightly more than two million a year, what one professor found when he crunched the numbers is staggering: 2.1 million deer struck by cars annually would yield more than 41 million pounds of meatâ€"equivalent to 80,124 cows or 8,268,750 five-pound chickens. Given that the average cost of ground beef is $4.46 per pound and a whole chicken retails for around $1.57 a pound, this free and ready protein source is, for many, hard to overlook.

Others don’t have as much choice. In 2018 in this country, 11.1 percent of households were food insecure, for a total of 37.2 million people without enough to eat, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And though food insecurity has declined steadily since 2012, serving roadkill meat is one way food banks and charities across the nation are meeting the need.

North Valley Food Bank in Whitefish, Montana, served 2,335 households in the first quarter of 2020 and 3,012 in the second. Among food shelves in Montana, North Valley is unique in that it has an in-house processing facility, which allows it to directly accept meat from a variety of sourcesâ€"roadkill included.

One man told me that when he comes upon roadkill, he checks for clear, glossy eyes and blood that hasn’t coagulated. Another said they have a by-the-numbers rule and won’t take anything they know has been dead longer than ten minutes.
On average, North Valley Food Bank receives ten deer a year from the local game warden, who contacts the nonprofit when he has an animal to deliver. (North Valley only accepts roadkill between October and May, when temperatures are cooler and the threat of meat spoiling is reduced.) Once it arrives at the back of the food bank, the deer is hoisted up on metal hooks, skinned, and gutted. It’s then broken down by a team of volunteer butchers, who grind the venison before portioning, packaging, and placing it in boxes of food to be picked up once a week.

Despite criticism of the practice from food-safety lawyers, who allege that charitable organizations serving roadkill is “highly discriminatory,” health experts counter that the greatest risk of illness from wild game is often the result of how it’s prepared, not the actual meat.

And to food-box recipients in Whitefish, venison isn’t just accepted reluctantly as a substitute for a different proteinâ€"it’s actually requested, says Jessy Lee, North Valley’s executive director. “We have quite a number of customers who ask for game meat specifically, so we’re fortunate to be able to have some consistent avenues for making sure that we have it available,” she says. “Roadkill increases our ability to provide organic meat to people experiencing poverty. I think this community feels a lot of pride toward our ability to use meat that would otherwise be wasted potentially.”

In Alaska, where state troopers have lists of charities and families signed up for roadkill meat, volunteers like Laurie Speakman drive trucks for the Alaska Moose Federation. Speakman has worked with the AMF since March 2012, covering a 60-mile radius on the Kenai Peninsula. She is on call 24/7 to retrieve and deliver the animals, which can weigh about half as much as a sedan. (Think of the AMF, Speakman quips, as a tow truck for your moose.)

When she gets to a site, Speakman snaps photos of the animal on her phone, jots down the location and GPS coordinates, weather, road conditions, and its age and sex, all of which will go in a collision report available to the Department of Transportation, Department of Fish and Game, and Department of Public Safety. She then pulls out a metal ramp, placing one end on the edge of the Ford F-250 flatbed truck and another on the ground so it’s perpendicular, wraps a winch around the moose’s neck, and drags the animal onto the bed. Usually, she is in and out of the scene in less than eight minutes.

In the past eight years, Speakman has picked up more than 900 moose and delivered them to charities. “I do love what I do,” she says. “I do not like the fact that the moose are getting hit and killed on our roads, but the end result is families are being fed.”
The idea of hitting an animal intentionally to salvage the meatâ€"hunting with a car, if you willâ€"is one trotted out widely by those opposed to roadkill salvaging, who worry that legalization will create loopholes for meat-hungry hunters.

It’s a point with little statistical evidence. Although studies show small subsets of drivers do swerve to smash slow-moving animals like snakes and turtles, more accidents are caused by drivers trying to avoid large mammals like deer, elk, or moose, which can severely damage a vehicle and cause the loss of human life when colliding with a car traveling at 70 miles per hour. Such accidents are also blights in strictly financial terms: according to State Farm, the national claim cost per claim average for deer collisions from 2016 through 2017 was $4,179. In other words, there are certainly cheaper ways to get deer than to hit them with a car.

In his 13 years as a Vermont game warden, Sergeant Chad Barrett says he has only heard of one instance of someone intentionally hitting an animal. “I don’t think it happens very often,” he says. Instead, Barrett finds, most animals are clipped in errorâ€"a case of brakes tapped too late, eyes taken off the road for a split second, a tricky curve where the sight line is diminished.

Much like hunting in Vermont, taking roadkill is highly regulated. After colliding with an animal or finding one on the road, would-be salvagers first have to notify a local warden, who will give them a tag before “releasing” the animal. If there’s no one to claim the salvage, wardens are responsible for recording and disposing of the roadkill themselves. But before depositing an animal in the woods or transporting it to a dumping site, wardens decide whether or not its meat can be saved.

Barrett, who works in the state’s northwestern district, keeps three roadkill lists: one for people who want bear, one for those who want moose, and another for those who want deer. The deer list is the longest (with around 25 people), followed by moose (15) and bear (10). Barrett is just one of Vermont’s 35 wardens, though, and guesses each of his counterparts has a list with about as many names.

“Our standing policy is that if something is salvageable, to get it somewhere, to someone,” he says.
On the day I reach Daniel Vitalis by phone, he’s out harvesting wild rice near his home in the Lakes Region of Maine; at intervals, it’s easy to hear the water lapping against the side of his canoe. Vitalis, a forager, hunter, and gatherer, subsists off what he sources from the land around him. He taps scarred maples for syrup, clambers along rocky, snow-glazed coastlines for black sea ducks, and packs bear meat out of the backcountry on his shoulders. Stop by his home and you’re likely to catch him pulling a batch of shelled acorns out of the oven or brewing dried yaupon tea leaves.

Vitalis got on a roadkill list a few years ago after calling his county sheriff’s office. Since then he’s picked up around 15 deer. He has few qualms about taking a damaged animal and culls what he can. After carving away the meat and carefully snipping out the organs, he drags the carcass into the woods on his property to bury or let animals scavenge.

For Vitalis, it’s not just that it’s good meatâ€"it’s a philosophically driven decision, an application of the idea that he wants to be part of his ecology. That by living off of what’s in the wild, he’s a stakeholder in protecting the environment. A steward, in some small way, of its success and at the mercy of its seasons and strife.

“You hear people say they care about the environment, and I’m like, What environment and how?” he says. “I don’t see how people are ever going to become stewards of an ecosystem when they don’t actually have any resources that they extract from that ecosystem.”

He continues, “You get into these things like carbon-offset credits, where it’s, ‘OK, you can wreck that forest as long as you pay for this forest over here.’ But if my deer come from that forest, or my mushrooms come from that forest, I have incentive to say, ‘Wait, you can’t just destroy that because you’re going to offset it somewhere else. That’s my kitchen.’”

Despite criticism of the practice from food-safety lawyers, who allege that charitable organizations serving roadkill is “highly discriminatory,” health experts counter that the greatest risk of illness from wild game is often the result of how it’s prepared, not the actual meat.
But picking up roadkill results in more than just food for humans. Some use the meat to set their traps for animals like coyotes, who kill their livestock, while many feed their dogs with it. Others say that by clearing roadkill from the road, they’re helping officials who would otherwise have to fill out a report themselves before dragging the animal into a ditch, dumping it into a landfill, or coordinating a donation.

Take the long view, and salvaging roadkill is helping solve the roadkill problem in the first place. After all, the reporting component of roadkill salvaging generates more comprehensive maps of animal crossings and migration patterns, serving as what Fraser Shilling, a research scientist and the codirector of the Road Ecology Center at the University of California at Davis, calls “constant ecological monitoring tools.”

“If we ignore wildlife and wildlife movement, we ignore the gradual degradation of these ecosystems,” says Shilling, whose team is currently working to measure the total effect of roadkill on wildlife populations in California. “It’s not a trivial activity, the recording. Doing it systematically is really a way of accounting for our impact on nature.”

And as urban sprawl and a warming planet continue to displace animal populations, accounting for that impact matters. With the records, transportation agencies can identify habitat-linkage zones, upgrade roads and update road speeds, build underpass and overpass tunnels, and try and eliminate wildlife-vehicle collisions.

A better system of reported roadkill, then, doesn’t just mean people are putting to use protein that has long been a punchline. It means they are helping build a database of information that will minimize the number of roadkill. It means, somehow, a world safer for animals and for humans.

[Dr. MD MD]

The Ecoâ€"Yogi Slumlords of Brooklyn How did a couple who built an empire of yoga studios and homes with “living walls” end up as pandemic villains?
By Bridget Read

Gennaro Brooks-Church at 1214 Dean Street as nearly 100 activists protest his attempt to evict his tenants. Photo: Ben Verde
The battle of 1214 Dean Street commenced on a warm afternoon in early July. Angie Martinez, a 24-year-old Brooklyn native and barista, returned home to the Crown Heights rowhouse she shared with eight roommates to find her landlords, Gennaro Brooks-Church and his ex-partner, Loretta Gendville, crowding the front door with their three children, two dogs, two handymen, and a mattress. Martinez had been paying them $865 a month via Venmo for a room with one window, no heat, and no working fire alarm. The run-down four-story structure, classified as a single-family home by the City of New York, had been illegally converted and rented out by the room. In March, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, several tenants, including Martinez, had lost their jobs, and in April, many in the house had stopped paying rent.

Now, Brooks-Church and Gendville seemed to be moving in. As Martinez approached 1214 from the street, she saw a few of her fellow tenants huddled on the steps outside. Gendville, a wiry blonde in her 40s, screamed at them, calling them squatters. Once inside, she roamed through the house, tenants say, with Brooks-Church close behind. One tenant told Gothamist that Gendville had grabbed her by the wrist as she was getting dressed in her room, ordering her to “get the fuck out.” Martinez called 911. Another tenant discovered Gendville’s two sons, ages 8 and 12, eating Popsicles in the kitchen. “It’s so nice to be home,” one of them said. When the handymen started to change the locks, several tenants decided it was better to leave, grabbing what they could and putting their belongings on the street.

After a while, the police arrived. When Martinez identified herself as a tenant, the cops said they were responding to a call from Gendville and Brooks-Church, who had also apparently dialed 911. They told Martinez that the landlords said they had nowhere else to go. Since it was their house, police said, they couldn’t make the owners leave. They told Martinez to think of the family as her new roommates. At the same time, Gendville and Brooks-Church could not legally remove the tenants on their own: Not only was a moratorium on evictions in place during the pandemic, but the law requires evictions to be carried out by a sheriff armed with a court order.

Returning to her room, Martinez discovered that her mail had been spread out on her bed next to someone’s discarded sun hat. Gendville and the kids eventually left, but Brooks-Church planted himself in the living room. “He was sitting on my chair,” Martinez says. “Just sitting there, all night.”

The next day, he was still there. One of the tenants contacted organizers at the anti-gentrification group Equality for Flatbush, which put out an appeal on Instagram for reinforcements. “urgent,” it read. “Illegal Lock Out in Progress 1214 Dean Street â€" Go and Support Tenants Now!” By the time the sun went down, close to a hundred people, mostly young Brooklynites with their bikes, were crowded into the front yard and spilling onto the sidewalk. They chanted through their face masks at the gray-haired and -bearded Brooks-Church, dressed in a gray T-shirt and shorts, who stood, stone-faced, on the porch above. Someone beat a tambourine. At around 10 p.m., a human chain of protesters rushed the front door, and Brooks-Church, overwhelmed, fled to his SUV. Over the next two days, the occupiers held watch over 1214 Dean, sustained by donated pizza and beer.

As word of the occupation spread, it became apparent that the landlords were not just New Yorkers of considerable means. They were an ethically sourced, non-GMO, unmarried poster couple for a certain Brooklyn-specific subset of their tax bracket. Brooks-Church, 49, was a “green builder” with a construction company called Eco Brooklyn who had spoken about sustainability at the Brooklyn Public Library; he was a vocal advocate for designating the Gowanus Canal a Superfund site, making it eligible for environmental protections. He did CrossFit. Gendville, 45, was the owner of a restaurant called Planted Community Cafe and a local chain of yoga studios, spas, and children’s stores called Area â€" a “mini-mogul,” according to the New York Times. The pair were currently renting out a brownstone they owned on Airbnb not five miles away, with a tree house and turtle pond, for nearly $800 a night. What could drive two yogic, environmentally conscious, vegan brownstoners to kick out their unemployed tenants during a global pandemic?

“You white liberal phony fake selfish motherfucker!” a Connecticut College professor who had biked to 1214 screamed at Brooks-Church during the protest. “You belong in a Charles Dickens novel!”

He was not far off, though the landlords are more Artful Dodger than Ebenezer Scrooge. Underlying their apparent success is a tangle of questionable business and real-estate practices â€" some brazen, others not uncommon for entrepreneurs like Brooks-Church and Gendville, small-time prospectors mining for gold in the postrecession Wild West of Brooklyn gentrification. For those in their orbit, their public cruelty at 1214 Dean Street was not an isolated moment of madness but the inevitable culmination of years of greed and exploitation, exacerbated by the pandemic, in which even those who staked a claim in the Brooklyn boom are finding themselves unable to survive the bust. Though they own two businesses and six properties in one of the country’s most expensive real-estate markets, the landlords were apparently homeless.

“I used to call them the Brooklyn Heights Bonnie and Clyde,” says a former Area employee. “I had a Google alert set on them for just this kind of thing.”



Gennaro Brooks-Church and his then-partner, Loretta Gendville, became media darlings during the Brooklyn boom. Photo: Kelly Marshall (Brooks-Church); Philip Greenberg (Gendville).
By all accounts, Loretta Gendville is not a yogi. She did, however, predict the exact moment that two things were about to take off in Brooklyn: yoga and babies. Gendville grew up outside Chicago and moved to Williamsburg in her early 20s, trained in Swedish massage. Her first venture â€" funded, she said, with “small private loans” and her American Express card â€" was a spa in Carroll Gardens in 1998. Two years later, she opened her first yoga studio, on Smith Street, followed by her first retail store, Area Yoga & Baby, which carried maternity and workout clothes.

Gendville met Brooks-Church in an Area Yoga class, according to a person who has known the couple for more than a decade. He was “this sexy Spanish guy,” a flâneur type. He had grown up mostly on the resort island of Ibiza, the son of outlaw parents, hippies hunted by the Feds for two antiwar bombings in the ’80s until his mother turned herself in and his father reportedly got caught in Arkansas trying to pick up $6 million in cocaine. Brooks-Church became an adherent of Human Design, a pseudoscience combining astrology and chakras, which was created on Ibiza in 1992 by an advertising executive named Alan Krakower, who claimed to have received messages on the meaning of life from an entity called “the Voice.”

Brooks-Church worked as a photographer before moving to New York in 1997 to study comparative religion and creative writing at Columbia. After he and Gendville began dating, they purchased the house at 1214 Dean Street in 2002 and lived there together for a time. In 2008, they bought another old brownstone, this one in the tonier Carroll Gardens, at 22 2nd Street, for $1.4 million. There, they raised their daughter and had two sons. They had planned to refinance their mortgage to pay for a gut renovation of the house, but the global financial collapse made it impossible to get a loan. Brooks-Church was forced to renovate the house himself, and, in his telling, his eco-building business was born.

During the Great Recession, “Northwest Brooklyn” â€" the real-estate designation for the area that stretches from Brooklyn Heights to Park Slope â€" fared better than its neighbors to the east, where families of color were three times as likely to default on their mortgages. The mostly white stroller neighborhood where Gendville and Brooks-Church had invested didn’t just survive â€" it exploded. “Even in the dumps of a recession, as storefronts go dark in other parts of New York, the Smith Street boomlet churns on,” the Times observed. Gendville rapidly expanded her company to fit the new demographic’s needs. By 2012, she had nine Area Kids stores in the borough, along with two yoga studios, a spa, and a salon. Bloggers complained that Area’s mandala logo was the neighborhood’s Starbucks mermaid, but Gendville received accolades for her green and “aggressively local” businesses, which banned plastic bags long before the city did. In 2015, Gendville somewhat notoriously put up a Bernie Sanders poster in one of her stores a few months after Hillary Clinton had visited the location. “Hillary Clinton is, you know, more in the game with all of the corporations, which I’m against,” she told BuzzFeed. (According to public records, Gendville has not voted since 2012.)

Brooks-Church, meanwhile, fashioned himself as a kind of Brooklyn frontiersman, turning up in local-news stories for various eco-adornments he made to the 2nd Street brownstone, including a freshwater pond and a tree house. In 2011, he tried to build a literal man cave under his front yard, a project eventually shut down by the Department of Buildings. On his blog, Eco Brooklyn, he sneered at neighbors who complained about his efforts and knocked commercial developers, calling Bruce Ratner, the megadeveloper behind the Barclays Center, a “scumbag liar” who lacked “the integrity, leadership, and understanding of how Brooklyn works.” A 2013 profile of Brooks-Church in Bklynr, a local publication, reads like dreamy brownstone porn. “In the kitchen, light streamed in through floor-to-ceiling windows,” it gushes, “as his girlfriend, a baby in her arm, cooked up some eggs on a stainless steel range. Their two other children ran around the townhouse on floors made of salvaged wood.”

But the couple were scattered, chaotic bosses. Even as the eco-renovations and Area outlets proliferated, the empire seemed to operate on a shoestring. Gendville flitted between storefronts in her van; Brooks-Church would appear unannounced to make repairs at studios during class. Nearly a dozen yoga teachers, most of whom were employed as independent contractors rather than full-time staff, say that pay at Area was low and rarely on time. Teachers liked the freedom they had under an absentee Gendville to design their own classes, but some tired of having to show up at 2nd Street to ask for their checks in person. “It was just kind of a mess all the time,” says Keri Setaro, who ran yoga-teacher training at Area. Another calls Gendville “the Queen of Loopholes.” Work-study students cleaned the yoga studios, unpaid, during “karma hours” in exchange for classes, and employees did double duty as receptionists at the Area spa or wrapping gifts at Area stores. “She really thought that just because they worked for her, she owned them,” one former instructor says.

Occasionally, employees would be sent to drop something off at 1214 Dean, a linchpin in Gendville and Brooks-Church’s other business endeavor: real-estate investment. Aside from Dean Street and 2nd Street, Gendville owned a two-family home on Beadel Street in Bushwick, which she bought in 1997, and the couple added another Carroll Gardens brownstone on Douglass Street in 2005. By 2009, they owned nearly $3 million in property. For a few years, they also owned a house on Fire Island. (“I thought they were peace, love, and happiness types,” recalls a neighbor. “They were artists.”) In most of their purchases, they managed to put down just 10 percent. “We had great credit and a great track record of always paying our mortgages on time,” blogged Brooks-Church, who claimed to be a licensed real-estate broker. (No record of such an accreditation appears to exist.)

For at least a decade, while they lived at 22 2nd Street, Brooks-Church and Gendville illegally rented out Dean Street to all manner of young, upstart Brooklyn arrivals. The couple approached their landlord role in the same casual, disorderly way they approached the yoga studios. Their tenants, to some degree, didn’t entirely mind. 1214 was run like a commune: Occupants found each other on Craigslist or via word of mouth; very few, if any, signed leases; they paid their rent via apps. “We composted, we had parties, house meetings,” recalls Rachel Rosado, a former tenant who also worked for Gendville at Area. “It was special.”

Your walls will be full of rat skeletons,” the landlord warned tenants. “Their souls will haunt you.
But there were downsides, too. Tenants say the gas was routinely shut off when the landlords failed to pay the bill (Gendville is currently a defendant in four civil suits filed by Brooklyn Union Gas and Con Edison). The heating was often faulty. The floor in one of the bathrooms was caving in. Rats would suddenly appear at parties. Some problems were inherent to the conversion; the house is classified as a one-family dwelling and is not intended to host two kitchens and nine people. Gendville and Brooks-Church weren’t registered as the landlords with the Department of Housing Preservation & Development. Instead, they posted signs on their rental properties that warned DO NOT LET ANYONE FROM THE CITY IN. NO EXCEPTIONS. The reason became clear in 2018: After the Fire Department responded to a small oven fire, the FDNY reported the illegal conversion and the couple were fined more than $2,000. Over the past two years alone, according to the city, Gendville has racked up $49,130 in unpaid fines from a host of violations at 1214.

When tenants demanded Brooks-Church take care of the rat situation, he warned them that their “walls will be full of rat skeletons. Their souls will haunt you.” A debate over whether he would shovel snow in front of the home, as required by tenant laws, ended with him writing, “So sue me.” Gendville was kinder but equally unhelpful. “It was a good-cop, bad-cop type of thing,” says one tenant. Another agrees: “Gennaro was the muscle, the henchman.” Tenants would joke about the irony of Brooks-Church sending them aggressive emails refusing to maintain the property above his “Eco Brooklyn” signature.

The rent rose, but tenants felt powerless. As the city’s affordable-housing shortage deepened, finding a room in Brooklyn often felt like choosing between bad and worse. “Trying to find a place in New York is always some level of desperation,” says one tenant, who stumbled across 1214 after a previous housing debacle.

Gendville and Brooks-Church’s business ventures ran like a well-oiled, if extremely tenuous, machine. On the surface, they catered to the upper crunchy crust of Brooklyn, hawking imported wooden toys, prenatal-yoga classes, and rooftop gardens to gentrifiers with money to burn. But it was “yoga on the outside, pure capitalism on the inside,” as one former Area employee puts it. Behind the scenes, Gendville and Brooks-Church were exploiting the city’s growing underclass for a short-term, reliable cash flow: employees working without benefits and tenants paying up to $1,000 each for a single room in an illegal conversion. By this year, it appears, the landlords were pulling in nearly $10,000 a month at Dean Street alone.

They squeezed every drop of money they could out of every setup. Brooks-Church offered workers free yoga classes in exchange for a day of labor in his building business. Gendville offered free classes to guests when the couple began renting out both of their Carroll Gardens brownstones on Airbnb and Vrbo for at least $200 a night. Multiple guests at the Douglass Street listing complained in reviews that it looked as if someone had been living in the rooms right up to the moment they arrived. The couple and their children, according to yoga teachers, would sometimes sleep in the yoga studios because every other property was occupied.

And still they kept expanding. In 2016, as the next wave of gentrification gathered speed, the couple spent $1.4 million to purchase two properties in Flatbush and East New York. They took out additional mortgages on two of their other homes, accruing more than $2 million in debt in only four months. And why not? Brooklyn home sales continued to break records, and the market’s consensus was as giddy as it was unsustainable. “There was no limit,” recalls Jonathan Miller, a New York real-estate analyst and appraiser. “Even though we always know there is a limit.”


Furious protesters storm 1214 Dean Street, occupying the house for two days. Photo: Scott Heins
It didn’t take long for the limits to assert themselves. By 2017, just as retail spending was beginning to dip dramatically in the face of online shopping, Gendville had 14 Area stores in the wealthiest neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Commercial rents in the city were becoming untenable, and storefront vacancies had doubled in a decade. Gendville’s employees were baffled that she kept relentlessly taking on leases, given how little she seemed to enjoy running a business. “Loretta likes shiny new things,” says Paula Loose, a former yoga teacher.

Others were struck by the contrast between Gendville’s seemingly endless capital and the ragtag conditions in her stores. “Our eyes would get bugged when we’d hear she was taking on another lease,” recalls one teacher. “We’d go, ‘Oh my God, why doesn’t she just get us toilet paper?’ ”

In a profile on the news site Brooklyn Ink, Gendville hinted at an impending pivot. “Online shopping is hurting businesses all over,” she lamented. She had installed nearly $16,000 worth of infrared saunas in one of her studios, which she turned into a spa called Area Sweat. “I’m looking to move into being more health related and less retail,” she said. “More yoga, spa, and vegan food.”

Then, after almost 20 years, Gendville and Brooks-Church’s romantic partnership came to an abrupt and acrimonious end. Gendville began a relationship with a 22-year-old named Shepherd Lantz, who had been working as her children’s manny. Online, Lantz advertised himself as a carpenter, a pet sitter, a waiter, and a handyman. He had modeled in a portfolio of erotic photography; he had been to Burning Man. After he started working at Area doing odd jobs, he and Gendville were seen holding hands and kissing in the back of yoga classes.

Gendville was thrilled over the new romance, but teachers worried about her increasingly erratic behavior. One morning, Setaro came into a studio for a 7 a.m. class to find a group of naked people sleeping under yoga blankets after a party. “When I told Loretta, she was just like, ‘Oh. Okay,’ ” Setaro recalls. Another time, Lantz was found in the studio with an air mattress; one teacher heard he and Gendville had been spending the night on it. A class had to be canceled at the last minute so Gendville could undergo a personal ayahuasca ceremony. In February 2017, she and Lantz were arrested at the Gowanus Whole Foods for shoplifting $1,149 worth of items in a nighttime spree. (The charges were eventually dropped.) The next year, Gendville gave birth to a baby girl. Lantz was the father.

The tenants at 1214 Dean Street were pulled into the drama. “I, LORETTA own 70% of dean street and Gennaro is not sharing his rent collection information with the bookkeeper,” Gendville wrote to an email chain of tenants with Brooks-Church cc’d.

In 2018, Brooks-Church began renting an apartment on Court Street, which he appointed with $30,000 in plant-covered “living walls.” He had clearly begun to move on: “My sex appeal has definitely increased,” he told the Times. “I’m on social dating apps, and they love my living walls.” The hustle continued. Brooks-Church sublet rooms in his new apartment on Airbnb; as tenants at 1214 continued to deal with utility cutoffs and rats scuttling in the walls, guests on Court Street left five-star reviews. That same year, Gendville was charged $17,000 in penalties for renting out rooms at their building on East 54th Street in Flatbush for “illegal transient use.” The fines remain unpaid.

Around the same time, Gendville opened her vegan restaurant, Planted Community Cafe, along with a nascent CBD business. She closed all but three of her yoga studios; some teachers heard she’d paid dearly to get out of at least one lease. In June 2019, she wrote Area employees with an offer. “I am super busy with the new cafe & baby #4 and trying to unwind my responsibilities just a little bit lol,” she said. “I am open to ideas & partnerships or selling leases.” But nothing materialized. Teacher turnover remained high, and those who remained complained of cold studios, spotty Wi-Fi, and broken sound systems. Class prices, however, went up.

Then the pandemic hit. In March, all nonessential businesses in the state shut down. Almost overnight, the revenue streams Gendville and Brooks-Church relied on vanished: The restaurant and yoga studios closed, Airbnb rentals came to an abrupt halt, and a quarter of all New York tenants stopped paying rent. The couple were carrying nine mortgages, totaling $4.6 million, on six properties. Even if the houses they own are worth more than $9 million, as estimated by Zillow, that money in the short term is inaccessible. In April, Gendville requested a continuation on a loan from Citibank, as her yoga teachers began asking her for their last checks. She responded that her computer had been stolen and she was waiting for a loan. The best way to get paid, she said, was to friend her on Venmo. “This is not only irresponsible as a business, but it is cruel,” one teacher wrote to the Area email group. “I am fed up with this.” That Gendville and Brooks-Church tried to move into a house that was still occupied by tenants, in the middle of a highly publicized eviction moratorium, is perhaps the most revealing indicator of their distress. It is also an indication of how little they feared punishment.

One reading of Brooks-Church and Gendville’s faltering empire is a tale of a couple who simply got in over their heads. From what Miller, the appraiser, can surmise, the math stopped working “well before COVID,” given the double whammy of falling retail sales and rising commercial rents. “They can’t keep it going without selling some of the assets,” he says. “They’re running into roadblocks of their own making.”

Another way to look at their downward spiral is as a parable of a housing market that is not primarily intended, or even incentivized, to actually house people. “We don’t finance housing in this country,” says Ron Shiffman, a city planner and tenured professor at Pratt’s School of Architecture. Instead, housing serves as a “financing tool.” The market encourages buyers, whether Saudi princes or the owners of yoga studios, to treat homes like banks, as places to put their money, whether or not they actually live in them. It also motivates developers to build luxury properties with the highest returns, housing fewer residents. In New York, the pandemic brought the dangers of this system painfully to light, as mass economic devastation made many people, even landlords like Gendville and Brooks-Church, suddenly desperate for real-time shelter. “The housing market isn’t meeting the needs of people who are working, who are living, in New York,” Shiffman says. Brooklyn’s runaway success, it turns out, was built on an economic disparity so intense that it has created a microgeneration of gentrifiers like Brooks-Church and Gendville who are now being priced out themselves.

There isn’t a more explicit symbol of a housing market totally divorced from its human context than the eviction attempt at 1214 Dean. The tenants were largely in their 20s and 30s. Many were queer, Black or brown, and employed in low-wage service jobs. In April, after several of them were laid off, they told Gendville and Brooks-Church that they would be withholding their rent. The following month, they received a one-line email from Brooks-Church informing them that the house would be put on the market “within the next month or two.” Then, on July 2, tenants say Brooks-Church suddenly showed up at the house, demanding they pay their rent. He woke up two women who were sleeping in a room on the top floor; they jumped up to dig money from their wallets. Another woman who had recently lost her job was in her room, recovering from an emergency craniotomy to remove a mass of brain tumors. After Brooks-Church left, she emailed Gendville, begging for a move-out date of August 15. “I’m under the most stress I have ever been in my life,” she wrote. “I hope you can empathize with my situation. I am sorry this year has happened to anyone.”

“I don’t know who you are,” Gendville wrote back. “Who is this?” The following week, when she and Brooks-Church showed up at 1214 with their kids, they put the woman’s belongings out on the street, including the get-well gifts she had received during her hospital stay.

By August, no tenants remained at 1214. The woman who’d had surgery found a new place, but her rent has doubled. She will be undergoing chemo and radiation for the next nine months and has thousands of dollars in unpaid hospital bills, most of which will likely not be covered by Medicaid. Martinez, who found another rental in Flatbush, says she walked past Planted Community Cafe a few weeks ago. Gendville, who was sitting under a rainbow Pride flag, waved at her manically. “Like you’re for queer rights,” Martinez seethes, “when you’re trying to displace a house with queer people in the middle of a pandemic, illegally.”

There are now 50,000 impending evictions looming in New York. One result of the pandemic is that its devastation is so massive as to create a vast new contingent of housing militants. “Our thing is public shaming,” Imani Henry, the founder and lead organizer of Equality for Flatbush, told The Nation. Now he has an entire army of shamers at his disposal. Out-of-work New Yorkers are suddenly free to dedicate themselves to standing in a neighbor’s yard and screaming at a landlord. The Battle of 1214 Dean Street made it all the way to BoCoCa Parents, the Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens neighborhood listserv, prompting a call for a boycott of Gendville and Brooks-Church’s businesses.

The landlords so far remain unrepentant. Brooks-Church told the New York Post he is being targeted as a white man. He declined to comment for this story; Gendville would say only that there was “no eviction.” In an email to outraged Area Yoga teachers, she sarcastically thanked them “for all of your judgments. Very yogic behavior!” She ended by saying that “I have to go back to ‘work’ … not everyone can sit around judging people and complaining all day.”

The pair have also become coronavirus skeptics. Gendville has been spotted serving at both Planted cafés â€" there are two now â€" without a mask. She says she has antibodies. The brownstone at 2nd Street has anti-mask signs in its windows. Brooks-Church recently participated in a U.K.-based online discussion called “Corona Talks,” in which he was described as “outspoken against the civil-liberty issues the lockdown raises.” He has started a new company called Elixir Works, which offers a “delicious and powerful immune booster” containing everything from bee pollen to tree lichen. It costs $37.50 a week, with a monthly subscription.

[chefist]

What's the pissant talking about today?  :

[chefist]

The Ecoâ€"Yogi Slumlords of Brooklyn How did a couple who built an empire of yoga studios and homes with “living walls” end up as pandemic villains?
By Bridget Read

Gennaro Brooks-Church at 1214 Dean Street as nearly 100 activists protest his attempt to evict his tenants. Photo: Ben Verde
The battle of 1214 Dean Street commenced on a warm afternoon in early July. Angie Martinez, a 24-year-old Brooklyn native and barista, returned home to the Crown Heights rowhouse she shared with eight roommates to find her landlords, Gennaro Brooks-Church and his ex-partner, Loretta Gendville, crowding the front door with their three children, two dogs, two handymen, and a mattress. Martinez had been paying them $865 a month via Venmo for a room with one window, no heat, and no working fire alarm. The run-down four-story structure, classified as a single-family home by the City of New York, had been illegally converted and rented out by the room. In March, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, several tenants, including Martinez, had lost their jobs, and in April, many in the house had stopped paying rent.

Now, Brooks-Church and Gendville seemed to be moving in. As Martinez approached 1214 from the street, she saw a few of her fellow tenants huddled on the steps outside. Gendville, a wiry blonde in her 40s, screamed at them, calling them squatters. Once inside, she roamed through the house, tenants say, with Brooks-Church close behind. One tenant told Gothamist that Gendville had grabbed her by the wrist as she was getting dressed in her room, ordering her to “get the fuck out.” Martinez called 911. Another tenant discovered Gendville’s two sons, ages 8 and 12, eating Popsicles in the kitchen. “It’s so nice to be home,” one of them said. When the handymen started to change the locks, several tenants decided it was better to leave, grabbing what they could and putting their belongings on the street.

After a while, the police arrived. When Martinez identified herself as a tenant, the cops said they were responding to a call from Gendville and Brooks-Church, who had also apparently dialed 911. They told Martinez that the landlords said they had nowhere else to go. Since it was their house, police said, they couldn’t make the owners leave. They told Martinez to think of the family as her new roommates. At the same time, Gendville and Brooks-Church could not legally remove the tenants on their own: Not only was a moratorium on evictions in place during the pandemic, but the law requires evictions to be carried out by a sheriff armed with a court order.

Returning to her room, Martinez discovered that her mail had been spread out on her bed next to someone’s discarded sun hat. Gendville and the kids eventually left, but Brooks-Church planted himself in the living room. “He was sitting on my chair,” Martinez says. “Just sitting there, all night.”

The next day, he was still there. One of the tenants contacted organizers at the anti-gentrification group Equality for Flatbush, which put out an appeal on Instagram for reinforcements. “urgent,” it read. “Illegal Lock Out in Progress 1214 Dean Street â€" Go and Support Tenants Now!” By the time the sun went down, close to a hundred people, mostly young Brooklynites with their bikes, were crowded into the front yard and spilling onto the sidewalk. They chanted through their face masks at the gray-haired and -bearded Brooks-Church, dressed in a gray T-shirt and shorts, who stood, stone-faced, on the porch above. Someone beat a tambourine. At around 10 p.m., a human chain of protesters rushed the front door, and Brooks-Church, overwhelmed, fled to his SUV. Over the next two days, the occupiers held watch over 1214 Dean, sustained by donated pizza and beer.

As word of the occupation spread, it became apparent that the landlords were not just New Yorkers of considerable means. They were an ethically sourced, non-GMO, unmarried poster couple for a certain Brooklyn-specific subset of their tax bracket. Brooks-Church, 49, was a “green builder” with a construction company called Eco Brooklyn who had spoken about sustainability at the Brooklyn Public Library; he was a vocal advocate for designating the Gowanus Canal a Superfund site, making it eligible for environmental protections. He did CrossFit. Gendville, 45, was the owner of a restaurant called Planted Community Cafe and a local chain of yoga studios, spas, and children’s stores called Area â€" a “mini-mogul,” according to the New York Times. The pair were currently renting out a brownstone they owned on Airbnb not five miles away, with a tree house and turtle pond, for nearly $800 a night. What could drive two yogic, environmentally conscious, vegan brownstoners to kick out their unemployed tenants during a global pandemic?

“You white liberal phony fake selfish motherfucker!” a Connecticut College professor who had biked to 1214 screamed at Brooks-Church during the protest. “You belong in a Charles Dickens novel!”

He was not far off, though the landlords are more Artful Dodger than Ebenezer Scrooge. Underlying their apparent success is a tangle of questionable business and real-estate practices â€" some brazen, others not uncommon for entrepreneurs like Brooks-Church and Gendville, small-time prospectors mining for gold in the postrecession Wild West of Brooklyn gentrification. For those in their orbit, their public cruelty at 1214 Dean Street was not an isolated moment of madness but the inevitable culmination of years of greed and exploitation, exacerbated by the pandemic, in which even those who staked a claim in the Brooklyn boom are finding themselves unable to survive the bust. Though they own two businesses and six properties in one of the country’s most expensive real-estate markets, the landlords were apparently homeless.

“I used to call them the Brooklyn Heights Bonnie and Clyde,” says a former Area employee. “I had a Google alert set on them for just this kind of thing.”



Gennaro Brooks-Church and his then-partner, Loretta Gendville, became media darlings during the Brooklyn boom. Photo: Kelly Marshall (Brooks-Church); Philip Greenberg (Gendville).
By all accounts, Loretta Gendville is not a yogi. She did, however, predict the exact moment that two things were about to take off in Brooklyn: yoga and babies. Gendville grew up outside Chicago and moved to Williamsburg in her early 20s, trained in Swedish massage. Her first venture â€" funded, she said, with “small private loans” and her American Express card â€" was a spa in Carroll Gardens in 1998. Two years later, she opened her first yoga studio, on Smith Street, followed by her first retail store, Area Yoga & Baby, which carried maternity and workout clothes.

Gendville met Brooks-Church in an Area Yoga class, according to a person who has known the couple for more than a decade. He was “this sexy Spanish guy,” a flâneur type. He had grown up mostly on the resort island of Ibiza, the son of outlaw parents, hippies hunted by the Feds for two antiwar bombings in the ’80s until his mother turned herself in and his father reportedly got caught in Arkansas trying to pick up $6 million in cocaine. Brooks-Church became an adherent of Human Design, a pseudoscience combining astrology and chakras, which was created on Ibiza in 1992 by an advertising executive named Alan Krakower, who claimed to have received messages on the meaning of life from an entity called “the Voice.”

Brooks-Church worked as a photographer before moving to New York in 1997 to study comparative religion and creative writing at Columbia. After he and Gendville began dating, they purchased the house at 1214 Dean Street in 2002 and lived there together for a time. In 2008, they bought another old brownstone, this one in the tonier Carroll Gardens, at 22 2nd Street, for $1.4 million. There, they raised their daughter and had two sons. They had planned to refinance their mortgage to pay for a gut renovation of the house, but the global financial collapse made it impossible to get a loan. Brooks-Church was forced to renovate the house himself, and, in his telling, his eco-building business was born.

During the Great Recession, “Northwest Brooklyn” â€" the real-estate designation for the area that stretches from Brooklyn Heights to Park Slope â€" fared better than its neighbors to the east, where families of color were three times as likely to default on their mortgages. The mostly white stroller neighborhood where Gendville and Brooks-Church had invested didn’t just survive â€" it exploded. “Even in the dumps of a recession, as storefronts go dark in other parts of New York, the Smith Street boomlet churns on,” the Times observed. Gendville rapidly expanded her company to fit the new demographic’s needs. By 2012, she had nine Area Kids stores in the borough, along with two yoga studios, a spa, and a salon. Bloggers complained that Area’s mandala logo was the neighborhood’s Starbucks mermaid, but Gendville received accolades for her green and “aggressively local” businesses, which banned plastic bags long before the city did. In 2015, Gendville somewhat notoriously put up a Bernie Sanders poster in one of her stores a few months after Hillary Clinton had visited the location. “Hillary Clinton is, you know, more in the game with all of the corporations, which I’m against,” she told BuzzFeed. (According to public records, Gendville has not voted since 2012.)

Brooks-Church, meanwhile, fashioned himself as a kind of Brooklyn frontiersman, turning up in local-news stories for various eco-adornments he made to the 2nd Street brownstone, including a freshwater pond and a tree house. In 2011, he tried to build a literal man cave under his front yard, a project eventually shut down by the Department of Buildings. On his blog, Eco Brooklyn, he sneered at neighbors who complained about his efforts and knocked commercial developers, calling Bruce Ratner, the megadeveloper behind the Barclays Center, a “scumbag liar” who lacked “the integrity, leadership, and understanding of how Brooklyn works.” A 2013 profile of Brooks-Church in Bklynr, a local publication, reads like dreamy brownstone porn. “In the kitchen, light streamed in through floor-to-ceiling windows,” it gushes, “as his girlfriend, a baby in her arm, cooked up some eggs on a stainless steel range. Their two other children ran around the townhouse on floors made of salvaged wood.”

But the couple were scattered, chaotic bosses. Even as the eco-renovations and Area outlets proliferated, the empire seemed to operate on a shoestring. Gendville flitted between storefronts in her van; Brooks-Church would appear unannounced to make repairs at studios during class. Nearly a dozen yoga teachers, most of whom were employed as independent contractors rather than full-time staff, say that pay at Area was low and rarely on time. Teachers liked the freedom they had under an absentee Gendville to design their own classes, but some tired of having to show up at 2nd Street to ask for their checks in person. “It was just kind of a mess all the time,” says Keri Setaro, who ran yoga-teacher training at Area. Another calls Gendville “the Queen of Loopholes.” Work-study students cleaned the yoga studios, unpaid, during “karma hours” in exchange for classes, and employees did double duty as receptionists at the Area spa or wrapping gifts at Area stores. “She really thought that just because they worked for her, she owned them,” one former instructor says.

Occasionally, employees would be sent to drop something off at 1214 Dean, a linchpin in Gendville and Brooks-Church’s other business endeavor: real-estate investment. Aside from Dean Street and 2nd Street, Gendville owned a two-family home on Beadel Street in Bushwick, which she bought in 1997, and the couple added another Carroll Gardens brownstone on Douglass Street in 2005. By 2009, they owned nearly $3 million in property. For a few years, they also owned a house on Fire Island. (“I thought they were peace, love, and happiness types,” recalls a neighbor. “They were artists.”) In most of their purchases, they managed to put down just 10 percent. “We had great credit and a great track record of always paying our mortgages on time,” blogged Brooks-Church, who claimed to be a licensed real-estate broker. (No record of such an accreditation appears to exist.)

For at least a decade, while they lived at 22 2nd Street, Brooks-Church and Gendville illegally rented out Dean Street to all manner of young, upstart Brooklyn arrivals. The couple approached their landlord role in the same casual, disorderly way they approached the yoga studios. Their tenants, to some degree, didn’t entirely mind. 1214 was run like a commune: Occupants found each other on Craigslist or via word of mouth; very few, if any, signed leases; they paid their rent via apps. “We composted, we had parties, house meetings,” recalls Rachel Rosado, a former tenant who also worked for Gendville at Area. “It was special.”

Your walls will be full of rat skeletons,” the landlord warned tenants. “Their souls will haunt you.
But there were downsides, too. Tenants say the gas was routinely shut off when the landlords failed to pay the bill (Gendville is currently a defendant in four civil suits filed by Brooklyn Union Gas and Con Edison). The heating was often faulty. The floor in one of the bathrooms was caving in. Rats would suddenly appear at parties. Some problems were inherent to the conversion; the house is classified as a one-family dwelling and is not intended to host two kitchens and nine people. Gendville and Brooks-Church weren’t registered as the landlords with the Department of Housing Preservation & Development. Instead, they posted signs on their rental properties that warned DO NOT LET ANYONE FROM THE CITY IN. NO EXCEPTIONS. The reason became clear in 2018: After the Fire Department responded to a small oven fire, the FDNY reported the illegal conversion and the couple were fined more than $2,000. Over the past two years alone, according to the city, Gendville has racked up $49,130 in unpaid fines from a host of violations at 1214.

When tenants demanded Brooks-Church take care of the rat situation, he warned them that their “walls will be full of rat skeletons. Their souls will haunt you.” A debate over whether he would shovel snow in front of the home, as required by tenant laws, ended with him writing, “So sue me.” Gendville was kinder but equally unhelpful. “It was a good-cop, bad-cop type of thing,” says one tenant. Another agrees: “Gennaro was the muscle, the henchman.” Tenants would joke about the irony of Brooks-Church sending them aggressive emails refusing to maintain the property above his “Eco Brooklyn” signature.

The rent rose, but tenants felt powerless. As the city’s affordable-housing shortage deepened, finding a room in Brooklyn often felt like choosing between bad and worse. “Trying to find a place in New York is always some level of desperation,” says one tenant, who stumbled across 1214 after a previous housing debacle.

Gendville and Brooks-Church’s business ventures ran like a well-oiled, if extremely tenuous, machine. On the surface, they catered to the upper crunchy crust of Brooklyn, hawking imported wooden toys, prenatal-yoga classes, and rooftop gardens to gentrifiers with money to burn. But it was “yoga on the outside, pure capitalism on the inside,” as one former Area employee puts it. Behind the scenes, Gendville and Brooks-Church were exploiting the city’s growing underclass for a short-term, reliable cash flow: employees working without benefits and tenants paying up to $1,000 each for a single room in an illegal conversion. By this year, it appears, the landlords were pulling in nearly $10,000 a month at Dean Street alone.

They squeezed every drop of money they could out of every setup. Brooks-Church offered workers free yoga classes in exchange for a day of labor in his building business. Gendville offered free classes to guests when the couple began renting out both of their Carroll Gardens brownstones on Airbnb and Vrbo for at least $200 a night. Multiple guests at the Douglass Street listing complained in reviews that it looked as if someone had been living in the rooms right up to the moment they arrived. The couple and their children, according to yoga teachers, would sometimes sleep in the yoga studios because every other property was occupied.

And still they kept expanding. In 2016, as the next wave of gentrification gathered speed, the couple spent $1.4 million to purchase two properties in Flatbush and East New York. They took out additional mortgages on two of their other homes, accruing more than $2 million in debt in only four months. And why not? Brooklyn home sales continued to break records, and the market’s consensus was as giddy as it was unsustainable. “There was no limit,” recalls Jonathan Miller, a New York real-estate analyst and appraiser. “Even though we always know there is a limit.”


Furious protesters storm 1214 Dean Street, occupying the house for two days. Photo: Scott Heins
It didn’t take long for the limits to assert themselves. By 2017, just as retail spending was beginning to dip dramatically in the face of online shopping, Gendville had 14 Area stores in the wealthiest neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Commercial rents in the city were becoming untenable, and storefront vacancies had doubled in a decade. Gendville’s employees were baffled that she kept relentlessly taking on leases, given how little she seemed to enjoy running a business. “Loretta likes shiny new things,” says Paula Loose, a former yoga teacher.

Others were struck by the contrast between Gendville’s seemingly endless capital and the ragtag conditions in her stores. “Our eyes would get bugged when we’d hear she was taking on another lease,” recalls one teacher. “We’d go, ‘Oh my God, why doesn’t she just get us toilet paper?’ ”

In a profile on the news site Brooklyn Ink, Gendville hinted at an impending pivot. “Online shopping is hurting businesses all over,” she lamented. She had installed nearly $16,000 worth of infrared saunas in one of her studios, which she turned into a spa called Area Sweat. “I’m looking to move into being more health related and less retail,” she said. “More yoga, spa, and vegan food.”

Then, after almost 20 years, Gendville and Brooks-Church’s romantic partnership came to an abrupt and acrimonious end. Gendville began a relationship with a 22-year-old named Shepherd Lantz, who had been working as her children’s manny. Online, Lantz advertised himself as a carpenter, a pet sitter, a waiter, and a handyman. He had modeled in a portfolio of erotic photography; he had been to Burning Man. After he started working at Area doing odd jobs, he and Gendville were seen holding hands and kissing in the back of yoga classes.

Gendville was thrilled over the new romance, but teachers worried about her increasingly erratic behavior. One morning, Setaro came into a studio for a 7 a.m. class to find a group of naked people sleeping under yoga blankets after a party. “When I told Loretta, she was just like, ‘Oh. Okay,’ ” Setaro recalls. Another time, Lantz was found in the studio with an air mattress; one teacher heard he and Gendville had been spending the night on it. A class had to be canceled at the last minute so Gendville could undergo a personal ayahuasca ceremony. In February 2017, she and Lantz were arrested at the Gowanus Whole Foods for shoplifting $1,149 worth of items in a nighttime spree. (The charges were eventually dropped.) The next year, Gendville gave birth to a baby girl. Lantz was the father.

The tenants at 1214 Dean Street were pulled into the drama. “I, LORETTA own 70% of dean street and Gennaro is not sharing his rent collection information with the bookkeeper,” Gendville wrote to an email chain of tenants with Brooks-Church cc’d.

In 2018, Brooks-Church began renting an apartment on Court Street, which he appointed with $30,000 in plant-covered “living walls.” He had clearly begun to move on: “My sex appeal has definitely increased,” he told the Times. “I’m on social dating apps, and they love my living walls.” The hustle continued. Brooks-Church sublet rooms in his new apartment on Airbnb; as tenants at 1214 continued to deal with utility cutoffs and rats scuttling in the walls, guests on Court Street left five-star reviews. That same year, Gendville was charged $17,000 in penalties for renting out rooms at their building on East 54th Street in Flatbush for “illegal transient use.” The fines remain unpaid.

Around the same time, Gendville opened her vegan restaurant, Planted Community Cafe, along with a nascent CBD business. She closed all but three of her yoga studios; some teachers heard she’d paid dearly to get out of at least one lease. In June 2019, she wrote Area employees with an offer. “I am super busy with the new cafe & baby #4 and trying to unwind my responsibilities just a little bit lol,” she said. “I am open to ideas & partnerships or selling leases.” But nothing materialized. Teacher turnover remained high, and those who remained complained of cold studios, spotty Wi-Fi, and broken sound systems. Class prices, however, went up.

Then the pandemic hit. In March, all nonessential businesses in the state shut down. Almost overnight, the revenue streams Gendville and Brooks-Church relied on vanished: The restaurant and yoga studios closed, Airbnb rentals came to an abrupt halt, and a quarter of all New York tenants stopped paying rent. The couple were carrying nine mortgages, totaling $4.6 million, on six properties. Even if the houses they own are worth more than $9 million, as estimated by Zillow, that money in the short term is inaccessible. In April, Gendville requested a continuation on a loan from Citibank, as her yoga teachers began asking her for their last checks. She responded that her computer had been stolen and she was waiting for a loan. The best way to get paid, she said, was to friend her on Venmo. “This is not only irresponsible as a business, but it is cruel,” one teacher wrote to the Area email group. “I am fed up with this.” That Gendville and Brooks-Church tried to move into a house that was still occupied by tenants, in the middle of a highly publicized eviction moratorium, is perhaps the most revealing indicator of their distress. It is also an indication of how little they feared punishment.

One reading of Brooks-Church and Gendville’s faltering empire is a tale of a couple who simply got in over their heads. From what Miller, the appraiser, can surmise, the math stopped working “well before COVID,” given the double whammy of falling retail sales and rising commercial rents. “They can’t keep it going without selling some of the assets,” he says. “They’re running into roadblocks of their own making.”

Another way to look at their downward spiral is as a parable of a housing market that is not primarily intended, or even incentivized, to actually house people. “We don’t finance housing in this country,” says Ron Shiffman, a city planner and tenured professor at Pratt’s School of Architecture. Instead, housing serves as a “financing tool.” The market encourages buyers, whether Saudi princes or the owners of yoga studios, to treat homes like banks, as places to put their money, whether or not they actually live in them. It also motivates developers to build luxury properties with the highest returns, housing fewer residents. In New York, the pandemic brought the dangers of this system painfully to light, as mass economic devastation made many people, even landlords like Gendville and Brooks-Church, suddenly desperate for real-time shelter. “The housing market isn’t meeting the needs of people who are working, who are living, in New York,” Shiffman says. Brooklyn’s runaway success, it turns out, was built on an economic disparity so intense that it has created a microgeneration of gentrifiers like Brooks-Church and Gendville who are now being priced out themselves.

There isn’t a more explicit symbol of a housing market totally divorced from its human context than the eviction attempt at 1214 Dean. The tenants were largely in their 20s and 30s. Many were queer, Black or brown, and employed in low-wage service jobs. In April, after several of them were laid off, they told Gendville and Brooks-Church that they would be withholding their rent. The following month, they received a one-line email from Brooks-Church informing them that the house would be put on the market “within the next month or two.” Then, on July 2, tenants say Brooks-Church suddenly showed up at the house, demanding they pay their rent. He woke up two women who were sleeping in a room on the top floor; they jumped up to dig money from their wallets. Another woman who had recently lost her job was in her room, recovering from an emergency craniotomy to remove a mass of brain tumors. After Brooks-Church left, she emailed Gendville, begging for a move-out date of August 15. “I’m under the most stress I have ever been in my life,” she wrote. “I hope you can empathize with my situation. I am sorry this year has happened to anyone.”

“I don’t know who you are,” Gendville wrote back. “Who is this?” The following week, when she and Brooks-Church showed up at 1214 with their kids, they put the woman’s belongings out on the street, including the get-well gifts she had received during her hospital stay.

By August, no tenants remained at 1214. The woman who’d had surgery found a new place, but her rent has doubled. She will be undergoing chemo and radiation for the next nine months and has thousands of dollars in unpaid hospital bills, most of which will likely not be covered by Medicaid. Martinez, who found another rental in Flatbush, says she walked past Planted Community Cafe a few weeks ago. Gendville, who was sitting under a rainbow Pride flag, waved at her manically. “Like you’re for queer rights,” Martinez seethes, “when you’re trying to displace a house with queer people in the middle of a pandemic, illegally.”

There are now 50,000 impending evictions looming in New York. One result of the pandemic is that its devastation is so massive as to create a vast new contingent of housing militants. “Our thing is public shaming,” Imani Henry, the founder and lead organizer of Equality for Flatbush, told The Nation. Now he has an entire army of shamers at his disposal. Out-of-work New Yorkers are suddenly free to dedicate themselves to standing in a neighbor’s yard and screaming at a landlord. The Battle of 1214 Dean Street made it all the way to BoCoCa Parents, the Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens neighborhood listserv, prompting a call for a boycott of Gendville and Brooks-Church’s businesses.

The landlords so far remain unrepentant. Brooks-Church told the New York Post he is being targeted as a white man. He declined to comment for this story; Gendville would say only that there was “no eviction.” In an email to outraged Area Yoga teachers, she sarcastically thanked them “for all of your judgments. Very yogic behavior!” She ended by saying that “I have to go back to ‘work’ … not everyone can sit around judging people and complaining all day.”

The pair have also become coronavirus skeptics. Gendville has been spotted serving at both Planted cafés â€" there are two now â€" without a mask. She says she has antibodies. The brownstone at 2nd Street has anti-mask signs in its windows. Brooks-Church recently participated in a U.K.-based online discussion called “Corona Talks,” in which he was described as “outspoken against the civil-liberty issues the lockdown raises.” He has started a new company called Elixir Works, which offers a “delicious and powerful immune booster” containing everything from bee pollen to tree lichen. It costs $37.50 a week, with a monthly subscription.

bwahahha...love it. 

[Silphion]

bwahahha...love it. 

We may live in an age of remorseless illiteracy,
but through such dedicated efforts of one and all,
congealing our world with encyclopedic waste,
we can carry on our part in propounding the guilt.

[Corona Kitty]

I guess he's still upset.

[K_Dubb]

I guess he's still upset.

I don't know what you did to him papi but he still seems to be very sore down there ayyyy