Quartz “Is it possible that one day English will no longer be the world’s lingua franca?”

No, I don’t think so. English is the first global lingua franca, which puts it in a very useful position, not because it is better than other languages, but simply because it got there first, and there is no major expansion of globalization to shift the balance to another language. Today there are far more non-native English speakers than native speakers, and this means that English isn’t about the USA or the UK, but instead about its international use across cultures. Every day, people who don’t share a language but also who are not native speakers of English, from countries where English is not an official language, communicate to each other in English—for business, for government, for tourism, etc.

Now, to directly answer the question: I don’t see any practical reason why English will be replaced any time soon. Not because I particularly like English (as a native speaker, I actually find many other languages more interesting, or even more aesthetically pleasing). But because it’s already in place. Even if China does take over as the new world superpower in 100 years, it would be a literal global effort to spread Chinese to the point where it surpasses English, and once English is separated from its cultural and political origins (really, this has already happened to a great extent), there’s no need to do that. Could this eventually happen? Yes, sure! Especially if the world changes dramatically. But for the foreseeable future, it seems unlikely that another language will spread like a growing wave that eventually topples English, simply because English is already widely in use, with no new major geography to cover. Trying to fill the world’s oceans with even a very large wave wouldn’t get very far, and that’s basically the situation of English today.

But another way to look at this is: what is English anyway? Well, it’s a language from England, even if it’s no longer centered there (or not even really centered anywhere: it’s global). But languages change. And given enough time, several thousand years, they become new languages. Not overnight. Not in any way we can immediately detect, but just slowly, over time, to whether after a while it’s no longer the same thing. So, my personal prediction is that by the time English is replaced as the global language it won’t be English anymore anyway: so “English” will never stop being the global lingua franca, because it will first cease to be English. That means I’m predicting about 1,000+ years more of English as the lingua franca, and that’s obviously uncertain (again, major worldwide shifts like war could change that), so I could be wrong, but that’s what I think.

Remember, the fall of Latin as a major lingua franca happened only after globalization out of Europe. To some extent that timing might be coincidental, but I don’t think entirely. And even then, French was probably the most important lingua franca afterwards, which is just modern Latin, really. Both were replaced during expansion via globalization. English is in place throughout the world, nowhere left to expand, except of course filling in the limited areas where there is no global lingua franca yet, and that’s already happening. So, until our geography expands (alien invasion or galactic exploration?) or major shifts (global war followed by repopulation?), there’s nowhere left to cause shifts during expansion. English is in place, for better or worse.

To Sleep With Anger begins with a shot of a middle-aged African American man named Gideon (played by Paul Butler) dressed in his Sunday best: a crisp, light-blue suit. On the table beside him is a bowl of fruit and a fading picture of a woman from another time. She’s looking sternly at the camera, while he looks off into the middle distance. The fruit catches fire, followed by the table leg, then by Gideon’s shoes—but the flames consume none of them. It’s an omen weighted with Biblical meaning, an inscrutable signal of the trials that lie ahead. The film then cuts to Gideon waking from a dream with a troubled look on his face.

It’s an arresting opening to one of the best movies of the 1990s, an American masterpiece that remains relatively unheralded almost 30 years after its release. The director, Charles Burnett, is an African American filmmaker whose work has drawn immense critical acclaim but rarely found a wide audience. To Sleep With Anger, made for $1.4 million in 1990, was his biggest film to date, more expensive and more narrative-heavy than the earlier experimental movies that cemented his reputation as an artist (Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding). It featured a major star, Danny Glover, who produced the film and helped secure its financing. But it’s never been seen as much as it deserves, though a new Criterion Collection edition should help change that.

To Sleep With Anger is set in Los Angeles, but its plot is rooted in the folklore of the American South, where Gideon and his wife, Suzie (Mary Alice), have come from. The story follows a middle-class family in South Central L.A. who are visited by their past in the form of Harry (Glover), an old friend who arrives unexpectedly to take advantage of their hospitality. All of these events are grounded in realism—the surreal imagery of the opening doesn’t appear again—but there’s an undertone throughout the film of a spooky tale told around the dinner table, something out of the more superstitious upbringing that Gideon and Suzie left behind when they moved west.

Harry’s arrival coincides with a crisis in Gideon’s family, as tensions between his two sons Junior (Carl Lumbly) and Babe Brother (Richard Brooks) erupt, and Babe Brother’s marriage to Linda (Sheryl Lee Ralph) hits the rocks. Gideon falls ill with a mysterious ailment that leaves him seemingly near death, and Suzie wrestles with her faith and her tendency to rely on older home remedies. Through it all, Harry is there, a gentlemanly presence at the dinner table, always dressed in formal wear but still somehow demonic. Friends of his appear out of nowhere and join him in Gideon and Suzie’s house, where Harry keeps turning the conversation to the past with stories of people long gone, of decades-old wrongs that went unaddressed.

Burnett explained in a 1998 interview for the Journal of American Folklore that Harry is partly inspired by a Georgian folktale character called Hairy Man, who steals the souls of people who bargain with him unwittingly. More than that, however, Burnett sees him as an avatar for a fading generation and way of life. In the script, Harry seems to exist as a repudiation of the moralizing, church-attending life and community Gideon and Suzie have built up in L.A. “You’re not like the rest of Gideon’s friends. Most of them believe if you're not hard at work then you’re hard at sin,” Linda says to Harry, to which he replies, “I don't believe in sin, though there is good and evil. And evil is something that you work at.” It’s hard to tell whether he’s malevolent or just a test to be endured. His presence stirs up trouble, but the family survives it and emerges closer than they were before.

As Harry, Glover, who was then at the height of his success after Lethal Weapon 2, gives his best performance in a storied film career. It’s rare that an on-screen character actually smolders, but Harry seems to change the temperature of every room he’s in. Glover won an Independent Spirit Award, and the movie collected four overall, including Best Director and Best Screenplay for Burnett. The film, which grossed a little over a million dollars, received some critics’ awards and a special citation from Sundance, but it failed to catapult Burnett to wider appreciation.

Burnett was once described by The New York Times as “the nation’s least-known great filmmaker,” which is just about the most backhanded superlative one could hope for. His breakout movie Killer of Sheep, made as his master’s thesis for UCLA’s film school in 1977, is a bracing examination of a black man’s life working a monotonous job at a slaughterhouse in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Though acclaimed at festivals, Killer of Sheep wasn’t theatrically released until 2007 because Burnett hadn’t secured the necessary music rights. In the meantime, it became a piece of art-film legendaria, a calling card from a director who should’ve garnered much more renown than he did.

Burnett’s 1995 police-corruption drama The Glass Shield, which followed To Sleep With Anger, is a plottier and more overwrought film, but a compelling one nonetheless. It was financed by Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax (which demanded a different ending and leaned its marketing heavily on a small role from Ice Cube) and made just a modest impression with audiences and critics. Since then, Burnett has mostly worked in television and in documentaries; he won an honorary Oscar in 2017, but hasn’t released a movie in more than a decade. He’s now reportedly working on a project for Amazon called Steal Away, about the life of Robert Smalls, who escaped from slavery in 1862 and later became a U.S. Congressman.

The news of a forthcoming film from Burnett is exciting and overdue, as is the Criterion edition of To Sleep With Anger (which also contains a fascinating video of Burnett walking around Los Angeles with a fellow pioneering African American director, Robert Townsend). Burnett cemented his place in the filmmaking canon long ago with movies that still have the power to unsettle and transport audiences. His stories, told from a perspective that’s still sorely lacking in American cinema, wrestle with the dark allure of more old-fashioned times without feeling didactic. To Sleep With Anger lingers long after you’ve watched it and only deepens with repeat viewings; Burnett deserves the chance to offer that experience to viewers again and again.

Washington Post

Facebook, which for a generation has encouraged billions of people to widely share their life updates and pictures, is trying to reinvent itself as a place for private communication.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday announced a sweeping reorientation toward privacy, explaining in a lengthy essay posted to his account that he would spend the coming years focusing the company’s distinct apps — WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook — on content that is encrypted, meaning data is scrambled so that outsiders, and even Facebook, cannot read it. But the shift, which shows how the embattled company is positioning itself for an uncertain future marked by consumer distrust, declining growth on its core social network and ongoing fights with regulators around the world, could cause an upheaval in Facebook’s business model of mining people’s information to show them ads.

While offering few specifics, Zuckerberg said the company would move from being a social network where people broadcast information to large groups — a town hall — to a service that is modeled after a living room, where people communicate with smaller, trusted groups.

“As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally, which is why we build social networks.”

Reactions to Zuckerberg’s announcement were swift and skeptical. Privacy advocates said Zuckerberg needs to go beyond touting encryption to provide concrete information about whether less data will be collected and used for Facebook’s profits. “Why does it always sound like we are witnessing a digital version of Groundhog Day when Facebook yet again promises — when it’s in a crisis — that it will do better,” said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit privacy advocacy group in Washington. “Will it actually bring a change to how Facebook continually gathers data on its users in order to drive big profits?"

The promised shift to more secure communications, while good for users, could entail major risks to Facebook’s global position. Many governments oppose encryption, and Zuckerberg acknowledged Facebook may end up getting blocked in some foreign countries as a result. Encryption will also make it harder for Facebook to fulfill what Zuckerberg has described as a core mission of detecting misinformation operatives and other bad actors on the company’s platform, which requires the ability to read the content people post. On Twitter, Facebook’s former chief security officer Alex Stamos said law enforcement and people who care about moderating unwanted content were the “losers” of Wednesday’s announcement.

Jennifer Grygiel, assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University, said Facebook’s changes would severely curtail its ability to moderate content. “What’s not clear is how they are going to make this transition safely. We have already seen the risks associated with WhatsApp and private encryption in India, for example, where misinformation has led to mobs and the loss of life,” she said.

Public trust in Facebook is at record lows, according to studies, the result of crushing privacy controversies last year as well as the misuse of user data that extends back more than a decade. In a reputation score of 100 highly visible public companies, Facebook last year dropped from 51st to 94th, according to a Harris Poll published Wednesday in conjunction with the news organization Axios. In a Pew Research Center study from September, a quarter of the Facebook users polled said they deleted the app from their smartphones last year, and more than half said they adjusted their privacy settings.

Zuckerberg acknowledged the trust deficit in his post. “I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform — because frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we’ve historically focused on tools for more open sharing,” he wrote. “But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.”

But the moves also appear to be prompted by business considerations. Since 2012, Facebook has grown from a single social network, Facebook, to what Zuckerberg refers to as a “family” of four apps, with Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook was long the star, but last year WhatsApp surpassed it in the number of people who use it on a monthly basis, according to industry reports. Zuckerberg recently began emphasizing the number of people who use at least one of its products once a month — 2.7 billion people — over the 2.3 billion monthly users for Facebook alone. Users log on to messaging apps more frequently than the core social network, whose growth has flattened in the United States and Europe.

Usage of Facebook and of Messenger in the United States also appear to have declined by about 10 percent per person between 2017 and 2018, according to Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research Group. The trend is worrisome for Facebook because U.S. users on the core social network are the most lucrative, as Facebook can command high ad prices to target them.

“This move is entirely a strategic play to use privacy as a competitive advantage and further lock in Facebook as the dominant messaging platform,” Ashkan Soltani, a former Federal Trade Commission official and privacy researcher, said on Twitter.

Zuckerberg’s new blueprint for Facebook arrives as regulators around the world, including the United States, are forging ahead with efforts to craft new rules targeting how companies collect and monetize their users’ data. There is widespread trepidation that tech giants know too much about their users — and immense frustration that Facebook in particular has failed to safeguard that data from abuse.

Facebook’s mishaps have triggered an investigation from the Federal Trade Commission, which is considering a multibillion-dollar fine against the social networking company. Facebook also is set to defend itself against a lawsuit Wednesday filed by D.C. attorney general, who alleged the company deceived its users about its data-collection practices.

But some of the ideas Zuckerberg has proposed could result in their own share of regulatory headaches. Already, European officials have criticized Facebook for its plan to merge communications services after initially promising to keep apps including WhatsApp separate, and greater integration between Facebook’s apps may raise antitrust concerns.

Zuckerberg has routinely reaffirmed Facebook’s commitment to privacy when apologizing for scandals. But the difference in Wednesday’s announcement were the structural changes Zuckerberg said he intends to make to Facebook’s wide array of services — changes that he said he hopes will ensure that Facebook, with its damaged reputation and slowed growth, has a place in the future of social media.

WhatsApp, which Facebook acquired for $19 billion in 2014, is the model for Facebook’s new embrace of privacy. While WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted for years, Facebook’s stand-alone Messenger app is not. Messaging within Facebook’s Instagram app is also not encrypted.

In Zuckerberg’s blog, he set out a vision for “interoperability,” meaning that the changes would not only make messaging more private, they would allow people to message and communicate with one another across the company’s apps.

More fluid communication could also help Facebook achieve a goal that so far it has made little progress on: making money off its messaging platforms. Messaging apps, while hugely popular with users, generate a fraction of the revenue compared with the core social network. The company recently introduced advertising on Messenger and also allows businesses to pay to reach customers on WhatsApp.

But Facebook makes the vast majority of its revenue by targeting ads to U.S. and European users of its core social network, and Zuckerberg didn’t address the revenue implications of the privacy shift. Facebook can command the highest ad prices to target these groups because the company has extensive profiles of them and they make the most purchases. If the company cannot read the content of messages, it will lose valuable profiling data.

If Zuckerberg continues to encrypt more services, Facebook could run into more trouble internationally.

WhatsApp’s encryption has gotten the service into bruising fights with governments in India and Brazil, two of Facebook’s largest markets. Brazil has shut down WhatsApp on three different occasions when government officials asked for data that WhatsApp said it did not have. The Indian government has also proposed breaking WhatsApp’s encryption to make the data in it more traceable.

Zuckerberg suggested the future would look different. The company, for example, might allow businesses to communicate with their users not only WhatsApp, but to find new users on Instagram, for example. Currently, the services are distinct.

After making messaging more secure, the company will “build more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services,” he said.

The New York Times

Of the 16 million American adults who live with depression, as many as one-quarter gain little or no benefit from available treatments, whether drugs or talk therapy. They represent perhaps the greatest unmet need in psychiatry. On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration approved a prescription treatment intended to help them, a fast-acting drug derived from an old and widely used anesthetic, ketamine.

The move heralds a shift from the Prozac era of antidepressant drugs. The newly approved treatment, called esketamine, is a nasal spray developed by Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., a branch of Johnson & Johnson, that will be marketed under the name Spravato. It contains an active portion of the ketamine molecule, whose antidepressant properties are not well understood yet.

“Thank goodness we now have something with a different mechanism of action than previous antidepressants,” said Dr. Erick Turner, a former F.D.A. reviewer and an associate professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University. “But I’m skeptical of the hype, because in this world it’s like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown: Each time we get our hopes up, the football gets pulled away.”

The generic anesthetic is already increasingly available for depression, at hundreds of clinics around the country that provide a course of intravenous treatments, and studies suggest it can help treatment-resistant people. It often causes out-of-body and hallucinogenic sensations when administered; in the 1980s and 1990s it was popular as a club drug, Special K.

The cost for these treatments typically is out of pocket, as the generic anesthetic is not approved by the F.D.A. for depression. In contrast, esketamine likely would be covered under many insurance plans, and its side effects, though similar to those of generic ketamine, are thought to be less dramatic.

The recommended course of the newly approved drug is twice a week, for four weeks, with boosters as needed, along with one of the commonly used oral antidepressants. F.D.A. approval requires that doses be taken in a doctor’s office or clinic, with patients monitored for at least two hours, and their experience entered in a registry; patients should not drive on the day of treatment.

Esketamine, like ketamine, has the potential for abuse, and both drugs can induce psychotic episodes in people who are at high risk for them. The safety monitoring will require doctors to find space for treated patients, which could present a logistical challenge, some psychiatrists said.

The cost for a one-month course of treatment will be between $4,720 and $6,785, said Janssen, and experts said it will give the company a foothold in the $12 billion global antidepressant market, where most drugs now are generic.

The approval of esketamine marks a new approach to treating serious mood problems, experts said. Prozac and similar drugs enhance the activity of brain messengers such as serotonin; they are mildly effective, but they take weeks or months for their effects to be felt, and for many patients they provide little or no relief from depression. In contrast, the ketamine-based compounds — several others are being developed — work within hours or days, and are effective in some people who are considered “treatment resistant,” meaning they have not benefited from other antidepressants.

“These are exciting times, for sure,” said Dr. Todd Gould, an associate professor of psychiatry in the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “We have drugs that work rapidly to treat a very severe illness.” Dr. Gould was not involved in the Janssen study but has identified a metabolite, or ketamine breakdown product, that could be developed into another drug.

Experts with long experience in treating depression were encouraged by the news, but also chary. The effectiveness of the previous class of antidepressants such as Prozac and Paxil was vastly exaggerated when they came on the market. And the results of esketamine trials, which were paid for and carried out by Janssen, were mixed.

In each trial submitted, all patients were started on a new antidepressant drug, and given a course of esketamine treatment or a placebo. In one monthlong study, those on esketamine performed better statistically than those on placebo, reducing scores on a standard, 60-point depression scale by 21 points, compared to 17 points for placebo. But in two others trials, the drug did not statistically outperform placebo treatment. Historically, the F.D.A. has required that a drug succeed in two short-term trials before it is approved; the agency loosened its criteria for esketamine, opting instead to study relapse in people who did well on the drug.

In that trial, Janssen reported that only about one-quarter of subjects relapsed, compared to 45 percent of subjects who received the placebo spray. All the subjects had been given a diagnosis of treatment-resistant depression, or T.R.D., having previously failed multiple courses of drug treatment.

“We’ve had nothing new in 30 years,” said Steven Hollon, a professor of psychiatry and behavior sciences at Vanderbilt University. “So if this drug is an effective way to get a more rapid response in people who are treatment resistant, and we can use it safely, then it could be a godsend.”

One question that will need to be answered is how well esketamine performs in comparison to intravenous ketamine.

Theresa, 57, an adjunct professor of English in New York, who asked that her last name be omitted to protect her privacy, has lived much of her life with deep depression. She tried a course of I.V. generic ketamine last summer, at a local clinic, which typically entails a half-dozen infusions, given over a couple of weeks, for about $500 apiece, with follow-up “booster” treatments as needed.

“I remember floating, I was really high,” she said. “I was tripping on sounds, textures and shapes, that was very much a part of it.”

The first infusion provided no relief, she said. But after the third or fourth, she noticed a satisfying “shift” in her underlying mood. “It’s a hard thing to describe. I was still anxious, but I felt somehow more solid, like something gelled within me, and my husband has noticed it, too.”

Dr. Glen Brooks, the founder and medical director of NY Ketamine Infusions, a clinic in downtown Manhattan, said he has treated some 2,300 people, of all ages, with intravenous ketamine, the generic anesthetic. His clients had received a variety of diagnoses, including post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as depression.

“What they all have in common is that other medications have failed,” Dr. Brooks, an anesthesiologist, said. “They’re hopeless, and they think, ‘Nothing else has worked, why should this?’” He said that, in his experience, the infusions quickly reduced symptoms for teenagers and young adults, but seemed to be less effective for people over 50.

The data that Janssen presented to the F.D.A. likewise suggested that esketamine was less effective in people aged 65 and older, barely better than placebo treatment.

Ketamine was developed more than five decades ago as a safer alternative to the anesthetic phencyclidine, or PCP, and is used worldwide, in operating rooms, on the battlefield and in pediatric clinics. The World Health Organization has listed ketamine as one of its essential medicines since 1985.

By the 1990s, interest turned to the drug’s potential to combat depression, when a government scientist named Phil Skolnick argued that targeting glutamate pathways — the primary “excitatory,” or neuroactivating, brain processes — could produce antidepressant effects. In 2000, a team of researchers at Yale University and the Connecticut Mental Health Center, led by Dr. Robert M. Berman, reported that doses of ketamine provided quick relief to seven people with depression.

The field took off in 2006, when a team at the National Institute of Mental Health led by Dr. Carlos Zarate Jr. reported that 18 treatment-resistant people who received the drug intravenously reported that their despair lifted within hours.

“What seems remarkable is that the drug also seems to help domains other than depression, like anxiety, suicidal thinking, and anhedonia” — the inability to feel pleasure — said Dr. Zarate, chief of the N.I.M.H.’s experimental therapeutics and pathophysiology branch. “It seems to have more broad effects, on many areas of mood.”

The apparent ability of ketamine to blunt suicidal thinking is particularly compelling, and Janssen is pursuing this indication for esketamine. In jails and psychiatry wards, suicide is an acute risk for people in crisis, and a fast-acting drug could save many lives, doctors said.

For now, no one knows whether esketamine, or any of the other ketamine-based compounds being studied, are any more effective than the generic anesthetic itself — or, for that matter, whether the out-of-body and hallucinatory “side effects” are in fact integral to its antidepressant properties.

“For that, we will need head-to-head studies,” Dr. Zarate said. “And we don’t have those yet.”

The Atlantic

From the moment Donald Trump took office, California has been ground zero for the resistance against him and his administration, in terms of both grassroots citizen activism and legal and administrative action by its Democratic-dominated state government. But since the inauguration of Governor Gavin Newsom in January, the Golden State has often seemed to be in a state of total war with the White House.

At the same time, California’s once-mighty Republican Party—which gave the nation Earl Warren, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan—is at war with itself, and weaker than it’s been in decades. The GOP’s new state-Senate leader was once quoted as suggesting that California’s epic drought was divine punishment for abortion, and last weekend the party elected its first female and first Latina state chair, only after a bitter internecine fight that left its conservative wing enraged.

Republicans now hold just seven of California’s 53 congressional seats, and fewer than a quarter of the seats in both houses of the state legislature. That lopsided math has left the country’s most populous state acting more like an independent entity than at perhaps any time since the Bear Flag Revolt’s month-long rebellion against Mexican rule in 1846, in the pre-statehood era.

Now California is boldly pursuing its own policies on climate change, automobile emissions, immigration, and trade—all sharply at odds with Trump’s. State Attorney General Xavier Becerra has sued the administration 46 times in the past two years, most recently over Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to finance his border wall with Mexico.

The latest flash point in the long-running battle between Sacramento and Washington, D.C., is Trump’s recent cancellation of nearly $1 billion in federal transportation grants for California’s long-stalled high-speed-rail project, after Newsom infelicitously suggested in his State of the State speech last month that he would abandon the most ambitious goal of the project, linking San Francisco and Los Angeles. Newsom later insisted he’d been misunderstood and only intended to say he would focus first on a route through the state’s Central Valley, from Merced to Bakersfield. But Newsom’s announcement was excuse enough for Trump to withhold further funds for the project, and seek to claw back the $2.5 billion already spent.

“Whole project is a ‘green’ disaster,” Trump tweeted, while Newsom promptly rejoined, “Fake news,” adding, “This is CA’s money … we’re not giving it back.” In succeeding days, Newsom’s Twitter account went on to accuse Trump of “manufacturing a crisis” at the border and “declaring a made up ‘national emergency’ in order to seize power.” He added: “Our message to the White House is simple: CA will see you in court.” Still later, Newsom added, “Instead of fighting the actual threats facing Americans, the President has chosen to undermine our Constitution and fan the flames of nativism & xenophobia. This is not a ‘national emergency.’ It’s a national disgrace.”

The merits of the case aside—the issue of the rail funds is likely to be hashed out in a long court fight—Newsom’s combative stance is good politics in a state where Democrats themselves are torn between the more moderate instincts of their senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, and more firebrand politicians such as Newsom and Senator Kamala Harris.

“There are two viable parties in California,” says Dan Schnur, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and a former longtime GOP strategist who is now an independent. “It’s just that they both happen to be Democratic parties: a centrist, pro-business Democratic Party and a very progressive party that don’t agree on a lot of things. But they’re in perfect lockstep on Donald Trump.”

Newsom himself acknowledged as much to the president in person, as they toured the scenes of the state’s devastating wildfires last fall with Newsom’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, and others, according to an official who was with them that day. After spending several hours together, the official recalled, Trump told Newsom that he had often mocked the governor-to-be in his rallies, adding, “‘Now that I’ve met you and like you, I can’t bring you up anymore.’ And Gavin’s like, ‘No, no, no! Keep bringing me up!’”

But Newsom also has to walk a fine line, because California remains dependent on federal disaster aid for the wildfires, mudslides, and other calamities that have befallen the state in recent months. Through his good working relationship with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Newsom has a helpful back channel to the White House when he needs it. On a trip to Washington this week for the National Governors Association conference, he managed a quick handshake and a brief chat with Trump at a White House dinner, but then quietly made the rounds of the Interior Department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to press his state’s case. “Let me take my partisan hat off,” Newsom told the Los Angeles Times. “People could not be more cordial, more respectful. I’ve been doing this long enough. You can sense sincerity and insincerity.”

For his part, Trump also acknowledges that his personal encounters with Newsom are different from their Twitter jousts. “He called me up the other day, let’s say four weeks ago or so,” Trump told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington on Saturday, “[and said] ‘I just want to tell you, you’re a great president and you’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.’ That’s what he said.” Trump added, “Will he admit it? No, I doubt it.” Then the president went on, “And then he did start talking about, in all fairness, additional money for the fires, which is okay. We have great talks. I like him.”

Still, Trump’s unpopularity in the state remains widespread. Just 36 percent of likely voters statewide approved of the president’s job performance in a January poll by the Public Policy Institute of California.

“For Gavin to be a national leader of the resistance certainly doesn’t hurt whatever ultimate ambitions he may have,” says the longtime Democratic consultant and speechwriter Bob Shrum. If Newsom’s handling of the high-speed-rail announcement was botched, “this won’t harm him at all,” Shrum adds. “Being attacked by Trump in California is not a disadvantage, to put it mildly.”

Trump’s broad unpopularity in a state that is rapidly growing younger and more diverse has also accelerated the decline of a state Republican Party that was already shrinking and is now a third-place entity in voter registration, behind both Democrats and those who decline to state a party affiliation. Those realities helped to account for the November midterm losses that cut the state’s GOP congressional delegation in half, and left party regulars feuding over the proper way forward: double down on Trump and hard-right policies, or strive for a more welcoming tone. Since the midterms, the results have been decidedly mixed.

In January, the Republican caucus in the state Senate chose as its leader Shannon Grove, a socially conservative legislator from Bakersfield, McCarthy’s hometown. “For the sake of millions of forgotten Californians, our caucus will work to navigate government with pragmatism and compassion, and negotiate with fearlessness,” Grove vowed at the time. In 2015, Grove was quoted as having suggested that California’s multiyear drought was God’s retribution for abortion. She denied the account, but went on to say that “God’s hand is in the affairs of man.”

Just last weekend, at its state convention in Sacramento, the party chose Jessica Patterson as its chair. Patterson is a 38-year-old veteran political operative and the chief executive of California Trailblazers, a group that trains GOP legislative candidates. Patterson, who is close to McCarthy, won with 55 percent of the vote, beating out two other, more hard-line candidates, former Assemblyman Travis Allen and a longtime party activist, Steve Frank. Patterson had argued that the party should focus on its Democratic opposition and welcome all stripes of Republicans, while Allen and Frank contended that Patterson was part of the status-quo leadership that had presided over the party’s declining fortunes. After the vote, Allen sounded a grim note. “We can only hope the Republican Party stands to fight again,” he insisted.

Schnur calls Patterson’s election a “good, small step in the right direction,” adding, “It’s better to be a mile outside of hell, heading out, than still in hell.” But Bill Carrick, a longtime Democratic consultant here who advises Feinstein and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, says the outcome is also likely to further inflame grassroots conservative activists who feel that their side lost. “In some ways, this has probably just aggravated the activists,” Carrick says.

California has its share of big problems: a severe shortage of affordable housing (and intractable homelessness), underfunded pension liabilities for public employees, aging dams and other infrastructure that is particularly vulnerable in a landscape prone to earthquakes, a state budget that is still too reliant on personal income-tax receipts, which shrink in hard times, and a bankrupt major public utility facing multibillion-dollar lawsuits over its equipment’s role in sparking wildfires, to name just a few. But by most standards, the state has been on something of a roll, and that reality, coupled with its sheer size, gives the state the power it has so often had—for good or ill—to set the path for the rest of the country, much of which is ultimately going to look more like California than it does now.

“In the era of Trump, this has positioned the state as a key point of resistance: bold enough to believe that the future is once again being forged on the left coast and rich enough to stand up to a federal government focused on dragging America back to an era in which greatness was measured by who was excluded from opportunity,” writes Manuel Pastor, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, in his recent book, State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future. “Texas was once determined to sue the previous president, Barack Obama, on nearly every policy and continues to boast that it is the true national alternative going forward. But its model—based on cheap energy, urban sprawl, and political disenfranchisement—does not seem like a recipe for the national long haul. What California is stumbling toward—still evolving, still incomplete, still vulnerable to its own reactionary voters—is a path to a new American future, one in which the nation becomes more prosperous and more sustainable, more diverse and more cohesive, more engaged and more agreeable. It matters that the state gets there and it matters that the country learns from its path.”

The overcrowded Democratic field is finally starting to shrink. Already this week, Michael Bloomberg, Eric Holder, and Jeff Merkley have announced they won’t run for president. Of those, only Bloomberg was a real surprise. Then came the big one: On Thursday, Sherrod Brown announced he wouldn’t run either.

Brown’s choice followed a decisive reelection campaign in November, and then a widely publicized “Dignity of Work” barnstorming tour of the early primary and caucus states. The Ohio senator acknowledged he was thinking hard about running. But he told America’s best-named newspaper, the Youngstown Vindicator, that he decided the Senate was the best place for his message.

“Being president isn’t something I have dreamed of my whole life or even for years,” Brown said. “My goal for our tour is to make the dignity of work the centerpiece of the Democrats’ 2020 campaign because I believe that’s the way to beat Donald Trump.”

He added that he hadn’t been especially cowed by the process or the fundraising or any other opponent. Among the many candidates, he did have a distinctive niche: He is noisily progressive, but also a man of the people, as comfortable in a union hall as he is at Yale, his alma mater. Think Bernie Sanders, but without the grumpiness and with a Midwestern power base. He is unusually blunt, happy to call Donald Trump a racist without a moment’s hesitation, but unwilling to write off white blue-collar workers who voted for the president—since many of them voted for him, too.

Brown’s departure doesn’t just represent the shrinking of the Democratic field—it might signal the shrinking of the Democratic map, too. Brown seemed like the party’s best bet to win Ohio. The Buckeye State is traditionally the queen of swing states, but Democrats have been shut out at the state level for years, and Trump won the state in 2016. Brown’s reelection campaign showed that a Democrat could still win statewide, but maybe only one Democrat: Sherrod Brown. Also this week, the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA announced it was dropping Ohio from its priority list. Representative Tim Ryan, who represents a Rust Belt district in Northeast Ohio, has some of the same instincts as Brown and is considering a presidential run, but he doesn’t have the same profile.

Having dropped out, Brown will probably automatically jump to the top of short lists of running mates for the eventual Democratic nominee, just as he was high on Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. He’s suggested she might have won if she'd picked him. Brown told the Vindy on Thursday that he’s not interested in being vice president—but he said that last cycle, too.

Even with this week’s exodus, there are still more than two dozen announced or possible Democratic candidates. On the Republican side, former Massachusetts Governor William Weld is considering a challenge to President Donald Trump, and other GOP candidates might run. There will be independent candidates and third-party contenders as well.

As the presidential primaries progress, this cheat sheet will be updated regularly.

Who is he?

Hickenlooper was the governor of Colorado until January, and previously held the most Colorado trifecta of jobs imaginable: mayor of Denver, geologist, and brewery owner.

Is he running?

Yes. Hickenlooper launched his campaign on March 4.

Why does he want to run?

Hickenlooper brands himself as an effective manager and deal maker who has governed effectively in a purple state while still staying progressive. He’s said he thinks the Democratic field could be too focused on grievance and not enough on policy.

Who wants him to run?

Hard to say. Hickenlooper’s aw-shucks pragmatism plays well with pundits, but he doesn’t have much of a national profile at this point.

Can he win the nomination?

Maybe, but Hickenlooper might be too business-friendly (and just plain friendly) to succeed in this primary.

Who is he?

Inslee is a second-term governor of Washington, and was previously in the U.S. House.

Is he running?

Yes. Inslee kicked off his campaign on March 1.

Why does he want to run?

Climate change. That’s been Inslee’s big issue as governor, and it will be at the center of his campaign for president, too.

Who wants him to run?

His campaign will presumably attract environmentalist support, and he hopes that his time as chair of the Democratic Governors Association will help, though he’s already hit some turbulence in New Hampshire.

Can he win the nomination?

It’s a very long shot.

Who is he?

If you didn’t know the Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist before his runner-up finish in the 2016 Democratic primary, you do now.

Is he running?

Yes. Sanders announced plans to run on February 19.

Why does he want to run?

For the same reasons he wanted to run in 2016, and the same reasons he’s always run for office: Sanders is passionate about redistributing wealth, fighting inequality, and creating a bigger social-safety net.

Who wants him to run?

Many of the same people who supported him last time, plus a few converts, minus those who are supporting Sanders-adjacent candidates like Elizabeth Warren or Tulsi Gabbard.

Can he win the nomination?

Possibly. He didn’t last time around, and while this time he has more experience and renown, he also has more competition from candidates inspired by his success.

Who is she?

She has been a senator from Minnesota since 2007.

Is she running?

She announced plans to run in Minneapolis on February 9.

Why does she want to run?

Klobuchar represents a kind of heartland Democrat—progressive, but not aggressively so—who might have widespread appeal both in the Midwest and elsewhere. She’s tended to talk vaguely about middle-class issues.

Who wants her to run?

She’d probably build a constituency among mainstream Democrats. Her exchange with Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing won her a lot of fans.

Can she win the nomination?

Maybe! CNN’s Harry Enten rates her one of the most “electable” potential candidates, a trait that Democratic voters are especially fixated on this cycle. Her launch has been tarnished by a series of stories about harsh treatment of staff, though.

What else do we know?

Sadly, she is not using this fly logo.

Who is she?

A senator from Massachusetts since 2013, Warren was previously a professor at Harvard Law School, helped create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and wrote a book on middle-class incomes.

Is she running?

Yes. She kicked off her campaign on February 9.

Why does she want to run?

Warren’s campaign is tightly focused on inequality, her signature issue since before entering politics. She has proposed an “ultra-millionaire tax” on people worth more than $50 million and a major overhaul of housing policies.

Who wants her to run?

People who backed Senator Bernie Sanders in 2016; people who were Bernie-curious but worried he was too irascible; people who didn’t like Bernie but are left-curious; Donald Trump.

Can she win the nomination?

Who knows? Warren’s platform is in step with the current Democratic Party’s, and her initial Iowa events went well. But she has also underperformed Democratic presidential nominees even in her super-liberal home state, and her handling of a DNA-test reveal to show her claimed Native American heritage was widely seen as a botch.

What else do we know?

She’s got a good doggo.

Who is she?

Harris, a first-term senator from California, was elected in 2016. She was previously the state’s attorney general.

Is she running?

Yes. She declared her candidacy on January 21, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Why does she want to run?

Harris seems to think that a woman of color who is an ex-prosecutor will check a range of boxes for Democratic voters. She has so far staked out a broad platform, trying to appeal to a wide swath of the party.

Who wants her to run?

Mainstream Democrats. She put up immediately impressive fundraising numbers, and she’s enlisted a number of former Hillary Clinton aides.

Can she win the nomination?

Sure, maybe. Harris has impressed in her short time in Washington, but it’s been a short time. Most of the country hasn’t seen her campaign yet.

Who is he?

Beats us! Kidding—but BOOT-edge-edge, the 37-year-old openly gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a veteran of the Afghan War, is one of the lesser-known candidates in the field.

Is he running?

Yes. He announced an exploratory committee on January 23.

Why does he want to run?

BOOT-edge-edge’s sell is all about generation. He’s a Millennial, and thinks that his cohort faces new and unusual pressures and dilemmas that he is singularly equipped to answer. Plus, it’s a useful way to differentiate himself from the blue-haired bigwigs in the blue party.

Who wants him to run?

Buttigieg isn’t really popping up in polls at this point, but he has the support of some Obama alumni. He hopes to reach midwestern voters who deserted the Democrats in 2016.

Can he win the nomination?

Probably not. No mayor has been nominated since New York’s DeWitt Clinton in 1812. Buttigieg also fell short in a 2017 campaign for Democratic National Committee chair.

What else do we know?

It’s “BOOT-edge-edge,” and it’s Maltese for “lord of the poultry.”

Who is he?

Castro was the mayor of San Antonio, Texas, before serving as secretary of housing and urban development under Barack Obama from 2014 to 2017.

Is he running?

Yes. He announced his bid on January 12 in San Antonio.

Why does he want to run?

Castro has long been saddled with the dreaded “rising star” tag, and with Texas still red, he’s got few options below the national stage. He’s emphasized his Hispanic-immigrant roots in early campaign rhetoric.

Who wants him to run?

It’s not yet clear. He’d like to take the Obama mantle and coalition, but that doesn’t mean he can.

Can he win the nomination?

He’s got a tough battle. Four years ago, he seemed like the future of the party; now the stage is crowded with rivals, potentially including fellow Texan Beto O’Rourke. "I am not a front-runner in this race, but I have not been a front-runner at any time in my life," Castro said during his announcement.

What else do we know?

Castro’s twin brother, Joaquin, who serves in the U.S. House, once subbed in for his brother in a parade during Julián’s mayoral campaign, so if you go to a campaign event, ask for proof that it’s really him.

Who is he?

A former four-term congressman from Maryland, he might be even less known than Pete Buttigieg, who at least has a memorable name.

Is he running?

Is he ever! Delaney announced way back in June 2017, hoping that a head start could make up for his lack of name recognition.

Why does he want to run?

Delaney, a successful businessman, is pitching himself as a centrist problem-solver.

Who wants him to run?

Unclear. He’s all but moved to Iowa in hopes of locking up the first caucus state, but even there his name ID isn’t great.

Can he win the nomination?

Nah.

Who is she?

Gabbard, 37, has represented Hawaii in the U.S. House since 2013. She previously served in Iraq.

Is she running?

Yes. She officially announced on February 2 in Honolulu.

Why does she want to run?

Gabbard says her central issue is “war and peace,” which basically means a noninterventionist foreign policy.

Who wants her to run?

Gabbard is likely to draw support from Sanders backers. She supported Bernie in 2016, resigning from a post as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee to do so, and she’s modeled herself largely on him.

Can she win the nomination?

Unlikely. Not only did she have to apologize for past anti-gay comments, but she’s perhaps best known for her unusually friendly stance toward Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Also, her campaign sounds like a bit of a mess so far.

What else do we know?

If elected, she would be the first Hindu president.

Who is she?

Gillibrand has been a senator from New York since 2009, replacing Hillary Clinton. Before that, she served in the U.S. House.

Is she running?

Yes. She announced her exploratory committee on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on January 15 and also in this kind of weird video, which feels like a joint marketing venture with Google.

Why does she want to run?

Gillibrand has emphasized women’s issues, from sexual harassment in the military and more recent #MeToo stories to equal pay, and her role as a mom is central in her announcement video. Once a fairly conservative Democrat, she has moved left in recent years.

Who wants her to run?

Gillibrand could have a fairly broad appeal among mainstream Democratic voters, and she hopes that her time representing upstate New York gives her an advantage with nonurban voters. She has, however, earned the enmity of Clintonworld for her critiques of Bill.

Can she win the nomination?

Perhaps. Coming from New York, she has a fundraising and media leg up.

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Who is she?

If you don’t know the inspirational author and speaker, you know Marianne Williamson's aphorisms (e.g., “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”).

Is she running?

Yes. She announced her candidacy on January 28.

Why does she want to run?

It’s a little tough to say. She writes on her website, “My campaign for the presidency is dedicated to this search for higher wisdom.” She criticized Hillary Clinton for coziness with corporate interests in 2016, and she ran for the U.S. House in 2014.

Who wants her to run?

Williamson has a lot of fans, but whether they really want her as president is another question.

Can she win the nomination?

Stranger things have happened, but no.

Who is he?

Cory Booker A senator from New Jersey, was previously the social-media-savvy mayor of Newark.

Is he running?

Yes. He launched his campaign on February 1.

Why does he want to run?

In the Senate, Booker has been big on criminal-justice reform, including marijuana liberalization. He has recently embraced progressive ideas including Medicare for All and some sort of universal nest egg for children.

Who wants him to run?

He’ll aim for Obama-style uplift and inspiration to attract voters. Booker has previously been close to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and to Wall Street, both of which could be a liability in a Democratic primary.

Can he win the nomination?

Possibly.

Joe Biden ...Who is he?

Don’t play coy. You know the former vice president, Delaware senator, and recurring Onion character.

Is he running?

Even Biden doesn’t know, though he says he’ll decide soon.

Why does he want to run?

Biden has wanted to be president since roughly forever, and he thinks he might be the best bet to win back blue-collar voters and defeat President Trump in 2020. (Trump reportedly agrees.) But Biden seems reluctant to end his career with a primary loss, knows he’s old (he’ll turn 78 right after Election Day 2020), and is possibly out of step with the new Democratic Party.

Who wants him to run?

If you believe the...

The New York Times

Sure, CBD is everywhere. But it hit the Sundance Film Festival with full force only in January, when Charlotte’s Web, a leading purveyor of the substance — the Uber of CBD, if you will — hosted a three-day party, lines out the door, in a converted store and restaurant on Main Street in Park City, Utah.

It was envisioned by the seven brothers behind the company: Josh (43), Joel (39), Jesse (37), Jon (36), Jordan (34), Jared (32) and J. Austin (27), all with the last name Stanley. Five of them were attending Sundance with their proud mother, Kristi Stanley Fontenot, 65, hosting screenwriters, film editors and the like dressed in casual sweaters, jeans and snow boots, at panel discussions on the future of cannabis and alternative healing and at parties serving CBD-infused cocktails.

One night there was a $175 10-course dinner. All the dishes, including the cured black cod to the hazelnut chocolate crunch cake, contained Charlotte’s Web CBD.

Thomas Pierce, a 32-year-old film producer and C.E.O. of an entertainment marketing agency, was among those bingeing on the offerings. “I attended a private dinner for 50, a happy hour event with CBD beer and tacos, and a late party sipping on delicious CBD cocktails,” Mr. Pierce said. “I was in my happy place.”

Josh Hetzler, a producer of “Before You Know It,” a film premiering at Sundance, worked with Charlotte’s Web to distribute CBD to his entire cast and crew.

The brothers were running around the space, letting their personalities shine.

Josh Stanley, the eldest and nerdy one, roped guests into technical, scientific discussions about CBD. “We use liquid chromatography to test all the levels of the cannabinoids in the field,” he told this reporter. “We perfected the art of the oxymoron. The whole plant is standardized.” (A 30-something woman nearby was overheard telling her friend that he looked like the lead singer of a boy band.)

Joel Stanley, the chairman of the company, ran around handing out necklaces that carried bottles of their farms’ soil and taking selfies. He slicked his hair back for the occasion and proudly wore a fluffy gray-and-white-checkered wool sweater. “My brother bought them for all of us in Mexico City,” he told a group congregated around him. “I don’t know why my brothers aren’t wearing theirs.”

J. Austin, the youngest, was there with his boyfriend, Mitch Clough. (They live together in Denver and have a dog named Little Arthur Weasley.) He kept coming up to his mother, hugging her and making fun of her for how much she was loving Sundance. “He’s the fun one,” she said.

Jon, the bearded one (though he has shaved since), mostly hung out at a table with his fiancée, Katie, holding hands and savoring the food. And at a party later Jared was drinking cocktails with his mother at a wooden table at the back, shyly surveying the scene.

While their personalities differ, they all agreed on one thing: They hated the larger-than-life banner of all seven of them posing on the hemp farm hanging on the wall of the party.

“I think most of us are intimidated by it,” Josh said. “We tried to take it down. We can’t handle it.”

“I think we are a marketer’s dream because we have a family dynamic,” Joel said. “They feel like we’re a great big sandbox. We’re, like, O.K. …”

“It’s kind of crazy,” J. Austin said. “I’m the wallpaper for a Sundance party.”

There were more guests at the party than in the brothers’ entire hometown.

Roasting the Marshmallows

They described growing up in poverty in a tiny community named St. Louis, Okla., which has a current population of 158. The four eldest were raised in a two-bedroom trailer with no drinkable water. Even when they moved into a larger house, they said, five boys shared one bed — a water bed with no headboard or frame, just a mattress. (They also have four sisters, Jennie, 41, Joy, 29, Julee, 23, and Jensyn, 21, who aren’t involved in Charlotte’s Web’s daily operations, though Julee worked in customer service the first few years and Jennie is an investor in the company.)

Nick Ferguson, 35, who has known the Stanley family since he was in fifth grade, said almost every time he goes to a bar or restaurant with one of the brothers now, a stranger approaches them.

“They are a good-looking group of dudes, girls have always taken notice,” Mr. Ferguson said. “But now even guys will come up and say, ‘Are you one of the brothers?’ Sometimes they just want to say hi, but other times they want to talk at length about Charlotte’s Web and my buddy has to say, ‘I’m trying to have dinner with my friends right now.’”

Kristi Mahaffey met Rich Stanley through a mutual friend. They were students at Kansas State University and married less than a year from the date they met. “He was very charming and very, very charismatic,” she said. “He kind of had this Tom Selleck look that was hard not to fall for.”

Mr. Stanley was committed to Christianity and God (less so his sales job, which he was continually quitting), so they moved to St. Louis to help grow a Southern Baptist church. With four children and one on the way, all they could afford was the two-bedroom trailer. Mrs. Fontenot said she had to drag all the children to the church every morning to collect drinkable water.

Her mother, Signa Mahaffey, whom the family calls Gammy, helped them move into a three-bedroom home in nearby Shawnee. There, five more children were born. They had tap water, but often couldn’t afford to pay the electricity bills.

“It would get turned off, and Mom would tell us it was campfire time,” Josh Stanley said. “We would get so excited and pull out the candles and roast the marshmallows.”

Jordan remembered how stressful it felt when the car broke down constantly. Jesse asked to be dropped off blocks from school because he was embarrassed by that same car. As a 5-year-old Jared collected pennies to buy gallons of milk because his brothers told him it would fill him up like a meal.

At the film festival, Josh was joking with his mother about how many younger siblings he has. “I am a professional diaper changer,” he said. “I can whip up a formula. I can even nurse.”

The first child was named Joshua David, from the Bible. For the next one, a girl, they couldn’t decide if they should name her Jenny or Danny. “The coin chose Jenny, and it set the J names in motion,” Mrs. Fontenot said.

The brothers fought growing up (and still do). “Josh and I have broken each other’s noses,” Joel Stanley said. At the dinner, Joel was laughing at Josh for being long-winded. Josh was making fun of Joel’s outfit.

If the boys wanted to do anything special, like go on a ski trip with their youth group, they had to raise their own funds. They started a yard-raking business by putting up signs all over town that said, “Rake your yard the easy way. Hire me.” Jared Stanley was particularly skilled at selling candy bars door-to-door, even going into office buildings. “He must hold the world record,” Mrs. Fontenot said.

Josh Stanley remembers using money he made from a paper route to buy pillows from a thrift store so he could sleep on the floor instead of the crammed bed. “One day I just had enough,” he said.

“When I was 13, Joel was 18, and he was basically working full time while a senior in high school,” said Mr. Ferguson, the family friend. “Even though I was young I remember thinking that was a sacrifice.”

He never met Rich Stanley, who left in 1997 when the youngest child, Jensyn, now 21, was a year old. He is now 66 and living in Denver, where he works as an Uber driver. The sons generally talk about him respectfully if coolly.

Still, they rented him a home when they made enough money, and on the phone Rich Stanley said he is a loyal customer. “I use Charlotte’s Web five to six times weekly,” he said. “It has made a noticeable difference in my cognitive thinking and in my joint health.”

In 2007, Kristi married Steve Fontenot, an oil-drilling consultant. But by that point, the boys were on their way to forging their own fortune.

In 2010, Josh asked his mother to come with him to look at office spaces in the Denver area. Since college he had been working with developmentally disabled children in group homes. He had read up on medical marijuana, and he wanted to open his own dispensary.

His mother’s distressed reaction: “Pull the car over right now.”

She later read papers on the topic and then slowly got on board. It wasn’t like the family was oblivious to marijuana. “Josh definitely did pot growing up in high school,” Mrs. Fontenot said. “I knew he was doing it, but it wasn’t disruptive, and I was so busy having babies.”

Josh moved into the warehouse so he could work on his project full time, sleeping on a sleeping bag on the floor. But at the time there was no medical marijuana bill. There was only one constitutional statute, the one he operated on, that said one caregiver could grow six plants for one patient.

By Josh’s own account, he was serving tens of thousands of people. “I knew that is not what the law intended,” he said. At one point the governor’s office called Josh’s lawyers in, and, as Josh recalled, said that he had beaten the system for now but would be in handcuffs soon.

Josh responded by starting the first 501c4 in Colorado to lobby for a medical marijuana bill. Luckily for him, Bill 10-1284 passed in 2010, helping pave the way for regulated medical marijuana sales.

One day he arrived at the dispensary to find protesters, many from a right-wing Christian coalition group holding signs saying Jesus was against him. No banks would lend him money.

At the time, Joel was in Texas working for an oil company. Jon was traveling the world. Jordan was in Colorado clearing the forests for fire prevention as a chain saw operator. Jared was working at a bar. Jesse was playing basketball at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. J. Austin was still in high school.

One night, most of them were in Denver for a concert by John Prine, a country folk singer-songwriter. They gathered at their mother’s house and listened to Josh lay out his vision and arguments. Everyone except J. Austin (still in high school) joined Josh’s endeavor.

At that point Joel assumed the role C.E.O. of the company. Most growers of cannabis at the time were searching for strains that contained high percentages of THC, the extract that makes people high. But the Stanleys were searching for plants that contained more CBD, the extract that purportedly heals.

They crossbred multiple varieties to get one that contained 22 percent and named the products derived from it after their first patient, Charlotte, a little girl with Dravet syndrome, a very rare and destructive form of epilepsy that caused her to have hundreds of seizures.

The brothers were still focused on medical marijuana as a business, but that changed in August 2013 when CNN’s Sanjay Gupta did a special on their success with Charlotte. Fifteen thousand families reached out to them in the next month, they said, and the company decided to focus on CBD. Charlotte’s Web was born.

According to the company, sales have tripled every year since 2015. It currently ranks No. 1 in the world for sales of hemp-based CBD, according to New Cannabis Ventures, an information platform focused on the cannabis industry. In September, in Canada, the company raised $100 million in an I.P.O.

A Toke and a Smile

There is nothing sexy about the Charlotte’s Web lab in Boulder, Colo. It’s a factory operation, filling up to 50,000 bottles of CBD oil a day.

In the lobby there are framed signs attesting to the company’s quality control. The most fun part is a little plaque with a pig on it that Charlotte’s Web’s bank made for it to celebrate the I.P.O. There aren’t even pictures of the good-looking brothers.

But this will probably change soon.

In December the 2018 Farm Bill passed in the United States Congress, legalizing CBD across the United States. As long as it contains less than 0.3 percent THC, and therefore doesn’t get you high, you can grow it, cultivate it, charge for it, even ship it across state lines (there are some restrictions for quality control. Also, some places are declaring where it can be distributed. New York City, for example, just took away the right of food vendors to sell it.)

While Charlotte’s Web isn’t legally allowed to declare any medical benefits, the company said it gets hundreds of letters a week from people saying it works for Parkinson’s, lupus, PTSD and opioid withdrawal. There are people giving it to their pets.

Then there are the casual users, people taking oil at parties to prevent hangovers the next day. Others take it in the morning, because they believe it keeps them calm, alert and feeling good. Some think it helps with anxiety and insomnia.

Mr. Hetzler suggested his film crew try it to ease the physical pain of making a movie. “I remember being approached by one of our crew members after a long day of rigging lights and moving gear,” he said. “He told me the CW balm worked incredibly well.”

It’s a strange reality when the same product is being used for both life’s biggest medical challenges and to prevent hangovers. But that’s where we are with CBD, said Dr. Rachna Patel, the author of “The CBD Oil Solution,” who began prescribing medical marijuana in 2012.

“Typically the way it works is you have a medicine, there is research done on it, scientists figure out what it works for, then people use it,” she said. “It’s the opposite with CBD. People are using it, and then they are like, ‘It works for this,’ and now science needs to study it.”

CNN

When Felice Robinson was hired at General Motors' Lordstown plant in 1995, she thought the rest of her life was taken care of.

Robinson, who was then in her mid-20s, had been bouncing around a series of low-paid retail jobs when she learned the giant factory down the road was hiring. The assembly line position came with generous health care benefits, an hourly wage more than twice what she had been making at a menswear store, and the promise of a secure retirement — if she could hold on to the job for 30 years.

"It was a whole different world," Robinson, who's now 50, told CNN Business in late February. "I couldn't believe how lucky I was, to be making that kind of money without a college degree."

That world has been evaporating for decades now. On Wednesday, when the Lordstown plant will make its last Chevy Cruze and close its doors, it will get even smaller.

For GM, the move is part of an overall strategy to shift away from sedans and toward higher-margin trucks and light SUVs in an era of low gas prices. GM is also pouring money into electric and autonomous cars, which are still primarily in the research and development phase. And with GM's investment in a ridesharing platform called Maven, the company is looking forward to a future in which fewer people own vehicles at all.

For workers, the transition means uncertainty, dislocation and immersion in a labor market with far fewer opportunities for those without training beyond a high school degree.

As recently as the early 2000s, a job in an auto plant could be a launchpad to the middle class, but those jobs are increasingly rare. During the Lordstown plant's heyday in the 1970s, GM was one of the biggest private sector employers in the United States, with more than 618,000 employees. That number is now down to about 103,000. And the jobs that remain are not all what they once were. Since 1990, wages for US auto workers have declined 18%, adjusted for inflation. Retirement benefits have declined as well. As of 2017, only 8% of factories offered pensions.

Those trends are especially pronounced in the Youngstown, Ohio region, an area about halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh in which Lordstown sits. Thirty years ago, about 1 out of 4 local workers were employed by the manufacturing industry. Now, less than half that many are. Since the beginning of the Great Recession, real hourly earnings have dropped by 8% in the area, while rising 11% in the rest of the country.

All that has made GM jobs stick out: Full-time production workers make between $61,000 and $88,000 a year after only a couple years on the job, according to their United Auto Workers union contract, not including additional overtime pay and bonuses. That's well above the average wage in the Youngstown area, which was around $38,000 in 2017.

Unlike during the Great Recession, GM is cutting these jobs — along with about 1,400 more hourly positions at US plants elsewhere — at a time when it's profitable and the national economy is strong. That's an indication that GM sees its future as one with fewer factory-floor workers, not more of them. And for the Youngstown area, losing the last major supplier of the type of jobs that made it a manufacturing powerhouse decades ago is a particularly symbolic blow.

About 400 of the 1,400 people who'll no longer go to work at GM's sprawling Lordstown complex after this week have accepted transfers to other plants, and will keep their healthcare and pensions. Other former workers at the plant, which used to run 24 hours a day, were not as fortunate. As demand for the Cruze weakened over the past two years, its second and third shifts were cut, and 3,000 people were laid off. Many of them won't be offered the same transfer opportunities this latest group will.

GM says that 350 Lordstown workers are eligible for retirement, those who transfer will get $30,000 in relocation assistance, and that it's working to find new employment for anyone who wants it.

"We understand that the decision that was made is very difficult for this community because it impacts people and families," GM spokesman Daniel Flores told CNN Business. "Unfortunately, customers are not buying the product at a volume that would justify continued production. In the end, we made this decision at a point in time where we have the ability to offer opportunities to people who want to keep working for GM."

Robinson thinks she probably has enough seniority to get a placement at one of GM's other facilities, like the metal fabrication plant in Cleveland or the transmission factory in Toledo. She dreads transferring — she'll have to leave her 68-year-old aunt who needs support, as well as the rest of her family and friends, and the town she's always called home. But she has little choice: Despite the strongest US labor market in a generation, the economy is not generating the types of jobs that GM offered her as a young woman.

At least not in Youngstown.

"They have me by a chokehold. There's nothing I can do," Robinson said. "I make $32 an hour. I'm not going to go get a $12-an-hour job. I couldn't survive on that at all. I'm going to get up and go, ride it out, try to get the best gig I can get, and be done with them.

The loss of General Motors won't be the first time the Youngstown area took a shock to the heart.

It's been reeling ever since the sudden collapse of the local steel industry in the late 1970s, when competition from cheap imports — and the failure of American steel mills to compete — led to the disappearance of nearly 50,000 jobs over five years.

Through that time, the auto industry became something of a lifeline. The Lordstown plant, which opened in 1966, hired thousands of workers, and thousands more worked in smaller, independent machine shops that supplied auto parts to GM.

The GM plant floated the local government, providing some $2 million a year in tax revenue, said Terry Armstrong, superintendent of the Lordstown school district. The Lordstown school campus, with its spacious lecture halls and a planetarium, was built without debt.

The unionized jobs paid far above market, topping out in the $30-an-hour range, for reasonably humane tasks like installing seatbelt harnesses, securing engine brakes or driving forklifts. Former GM worker Tom Albright, who retired in 2015, remembers being able to do his work faster than the rest of the line and then relax.

"I could get ahead of the job for three hours, and at that point I could go goof off for three hours," said Albright, whose son still works in the plant. "Those were the good old days. It ain't like that anymore. They get every nickel that they can out of that individual working that job on the floor."

But then cracks started to show in the US auto industry, starting with competition from Japanese automakers in the 1980s and continuing with NAFTA in 1994. Employment slid, as work was outsourced to lower-paying suppliers, including plants in Mexico.

The Lordstown plant wasn't immune to the changes that have been affecting the workforce more broadly.

In 2007, as the automakers were bleeding cash, the union accepted the creation of a lower wage tier for entry-level workers, meaning that they made 45% less per hour and got a 401(k) plan instead of a guaranteed pension. After GM's bankruptcy in 2009, workers told CNN Business, the job became harder, with management pressing for less downtime.

"Slowly but surely, they became less and less thoughtful about the people who worked for them," said Robinson. "It's just not the same company that I used to work for. It's so much more cutthroat, and it's meaner. I know that the old GM is gone."

But many in the community still recognize that those jobs feed families, donate to local charities and buy cars. They also generate other jobs: Since manufacturing brings in capital from outside the area rather than just recirculating it, each factory position is estimated to get three or four more people working in fields like healthcare, food service, retail and education.

That's why, last fall, the United Auto Workers local 1112 and the region's chamber of commerce started the Drive it Home campaign — a community effort to post signs, send letters and work with politicians to convince GM to build another product at the Lordstown plant. It was meant to mimic another push two decades ago when Lordstown was in competition with other cities to win another car model to replace the Chevy Cavalier. That one worked, with the help of officials at the plant who joined the effort.

"The one difference is that this time plant management was not interested in participating," said James Dignan, president of the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber. "The plant management used to be very engaged locally. But they're losing some of that tie and that feel from the company to the community."

Dignan said they're working to get another user for the plant if GM decides to give it up permanently.

But to the local union workers, getting another GM product is far preferable to getting another company. These are their jobs, and they'll likely still have more protections and higher wages than any other employer.

"We don't want Elon Musk coming in. We don't want Amazon building a distribution center," said David Green, who's been president of UAW Local 1112 since last May. He led another local within the plant in 2007 when the company asked to pay new workers lower wages.

"I supported that because the promise was product and job security," Green said. "Do what we had to do to keep working, keep our communities and our families alive and thriving. It feels like they betrayed us a little bit."

So far, the company hasn't shown its cards — and the uncertainty is what gets to people. Why take a transfer, if it seems likely that Lordstown will get a new car within the next year and you could come back? For that matter, what new employer would take a chance on someone who would bail as soon as Lordstown re-opened? Plenty of people remember how GM re-opened its plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee in 2011 after having shuttered it two years earlier.

That's why, for those who have the option, the choice of whether to go or stay is so agonizing — even though the job had its fair share of hardships.

Tammy Vennitti, 55, was laid off with the second shift back in June last year. She had signed up for a training course in order to keep her supplemental unemployment benefits, and then put those plans on hold in January when GM called back those who'd been laid off to fill in for the people who were being moved out to other plants.

Vennitti applied for a transfer to a plant in Toledo, and she doesn't know if she'll get it or whether she'd take it if she did, given that she lives with her 27-year-old daughter and 18-month-old granddaughter. But she needs the healthcare benefits to pay for the blood pressure pills her doctor put her on during the stress of being laid off for months, not to mention care for a body that took a beating over 24 years of lifting 30 to 40 pounds, 400 times a day. GM's gold-plated insurance paid for a shoulder replacement, carpal tunnel surgery and cortizone shots for a knee that had no more cartilage to cushion her bones.

"For 24 years I've done nothing for this company and this union but bend over," Vennitti said. "This is all I've ever done. I never thought it would come to this."

What's next for employment in Youngstown?

The local chamber of commerce said there are 13,000 job openings in the area. Team NEO, an economic development non-profit focused on Northeast Ohio, said there will be strong demand in the coming years for workers in information technology, healthcare and manufacturing. But unlike the manufacturing jobs of the past, which usually did not require education beyond high school, 65% of those jobs will require a post-secondary credential by 2021, the group estimates.

There are plenty of training opportunities, since GM workers get assistance both from the state and the US Department of Commerce through trade adjustment assistance. So far, there's been strong interest in truck driving certificates, an Ohio state official said, since those take only a few weeks to get and pay relatively well.

Some workers saw the end coming early and took steps to prepare. Trish Amato, 43, was hired too late to get a traditional pension, lessening the need to hang on to a GM job. She used GM's tuition benefits to finish her bachelor's degree and get a master's degree in special education.

When she was laid off in 2018, Amato thought about going to the plant at Spring Hill, Tennessee. But she and her partner, whose truck driving job also depends on Lordstown being open, didn't think they could afford the rent in the booming area south of Nashville.

So instead, they're thinking of trading in his big rig for a motorhome and traveling the country, while she teaches online courses from the road — a future that wouldn't have been possible without GM's help in going to school, and that she wouldn't have embraced without GM shuttering the Lordstown plant.

"GM is hard to walk away from because the insurance benefits are awesome," Amato said. "GM gave us a good life. Am I disappointed in what they're doing? For other people, yes. For me, no. If something like this didn't happen, I wouldn't be able to follow a dream."

For the next generation, the question is what kind of wages the new working class jobs will pay.

The local high school has started a training program for the logistics industry, helping prepare kids for jobs in the many distribution centers that are popping up in the area. "That's our way of giving kids a little bit of a leg up," said Armstrong, superintendent of the Lordstown school district, where about 15% of students have parents who worked in the plant.

But, he said: "I don't see them paying what the GM jobs paid."

TJ Maxx, for example, is building a facility that will employ 1,000 people in the area. Job listings for entry-level warehouse workers at its other locations range between $10 and $13.50 an hour.

The GM plant had also been a regular stop for politicians on the stump, from John McCain to Barack Obama, giving kids a sense that their town mattered. On Tuesday, the school held a group photo to support the Drive it Home campaign; students and staff alike wore blue and brought their GM cars.

But after this latest blow, will Lordstown students have confidence in a future in manufacturing?

"It would be really hard to convince many of them of that right now, with the plant closing," Armstrong said. "They're able to make the cars of the future, we just have to make that chance available."

Live Science

For part of the summer in parts of Antarctica, the ice melts into a swampy, slushy stew and refreezes as the temperatures rise and fall. As it melts, it generates hundreds of thousands of tiny little "icequakes."

Now, scientists have captured the daily pattern of these miniature tremors using the same kind of seismographs used to detect earthquakes. They find that the icequakes are caused by the sudden snap of frozen films of ice covering pools of slush.

"In these ponds, there's often a layer of ice on top of melted water below, like you see with a lake that's only frozen on top," University of Chicago glaciologist Douglas MacAyeal said in a statement. "As the temperature cools at night, the ice on the top contracts, and the water below expands as it undergoes freezing. This warps the top lid, until it finally breaks with a snap."

MacAyeal and his team were interested in the daily rhythms of the ice because little is known about the mechanics of a breakup of a large ice sheet. Such breakups have occurred in Antarctica multiple times over the past several decades. The Larsen C ice shelf calved an enormous iceberg into the Weddell Sea in 2017. The nearby Larsen B shelf collapsed unexpectedly in 2002. When floating ice sheets collapse, they don't directly contribute to sea-level rise, because they were already in a marine environment. But they do allow the landbound glaciers behind the ice sheets to flow faster, dumping meltwater into the sea.

The researchers were also interested in testing seismometers as a way to monitor melting ice. They deployed two near McMurdo Station, at the edge of the McMurdo Ice Shelf. One seismometer station was positioned at a dry location where the surface was covered with firn — previous years' snow slowly hardening and compacting into glacial ice. The other was put at a wet, boggy location where the ice was rotten and partially melted. At the wet location, the surface was often coated with a thin layer of ice over pools of slush and meltwater big enough to swallow an adult.

The instruments recorded tremors at these two stations between November 2016 and January 2017.

The patterns at the two spots couldn't have been any more different. The dry station was seismically peaceful. The only tremors detected there were linked to vehicle or ship traffic around McMurdo Station.

At the wet station, though, the seismographs picked up hundreds of thousands of tiny earthquakes, sometimes thousands in one night. These quakes were generally below the 2.5 magnitude at which tremors become noticeable to humans, though people in Antarctica sometimes hear the cracking of the ice, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Strangely, the earthquakes followed a daily pattern. They would increase in frequency for a couple of hours each evening.

The researchers thought the daily quake peaks might have to do with the tides, but one discrepancy ruled out that notion. On Nov. 30, 2016, the spike in icequakes didn't happen. When the researchers tracked daily temperature over the study time frame, they found that the quake peaks corresponded with periods of dropping mercury. On Nov. 30, it just so happened that the temperature warmed instead of chilled over the course of the evening.

What's likely happening, MacAyeal said, is that as the air gets colder, the slushy, melty ponds below the thin layer of surface ice start to freeze. As they freeze, they expand, putting pressure on the surface ice. Finally, the surface ice snaps like a potato chip, sending tiny, undetectable-to-humans tremors out along the surface.

These findings on a small scale are intriguing, MacAyeal said, because more icebergs calve off ice shelves during cold weather compared with warmer weather.

"Perhaps this is happening at longer, slower scales," he said.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a post today (March 6) outlining what he calls a “privacy-focused vision for social networking.” That sounds nice, until you realize that his definition of “privacy” is… confusing.

People’s activities on the social network will no longer default to being viewable by everyone, Zuckerberg notes. Posts and messages will be “ephemeral,” meaning they can’t be viewed months or years after the fact. And every message sent on a Facebook service will be end-to-end encrypted, keeping it safe from hackers and “over-reaching governments.”

These examples provide an interesting picture of the future of Facebook. But they are definitely not examples of “privacy” as it is used in the context of the internet, user data, and social networks. Instead, they show that Zuck is basically aiming to make Facebook more “private”—the way you might refer to a “private party” or your “private parts”—while claiming the company really cares about “privacy.”

The two terms mean different things. You can see the different definitions at work in these two paragraphs near the beginning of the post (emphasis added):

I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform—because frankly we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we’ve historically focused on tools for more open sharing. But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.

I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever.

The first use—”privacy-focused platform”—implies the technological/internet definition. A “privacy-focused platform” sounds something like the messaging app Signal or the search engine DuckDuckGo: These services do not retain any data about any individual user, and they prioritize user anonymity above nearly all other concerns. But in the next paragraph Zuckerberg tries to casually swap in the term “private,” in the generic sense of something that is not public. (Like Zuckerberg’s home, which became extremely private after he bought adjacent lots that might offer views of his master bedroom.)

The post neglects to mention that a “private” Facebook is not mutually exclusive with one that is bad on “privacy,” as Zuckerberg freely admits the company has been historically. Having photos disappear after a month doesn’t mean Facebook won’t use photos of you to train its facial-recognition algorithms. Implementing end-to-end encryption does not mean Facebook won’t use all kinds of other data sources to create a highly individualized profile of you and monetize it by selling targeted ads.

The post ends with this sentiment:

I believe we should be working towards a world where people can speak privately and live freely knowing that their information will only be seen by who they want to see it and won’t all stick around forever.

But if Zuckerberg’s definition of “privacy” has nothing to say about ad targeting or empowering users to determine what happens to their data, that sentiment becomes “their information will only be seen by who they want to see it—and also Facebook.” After all, this is coming from the same company that, when users gave it their phone numbers for two-factor login, used those numbers for ad targeting.

Zuckerberg is a smart guy, and he surely knows the difference between “private” and “privacy.” The fact that he is willingly not making this distinction is telling.