"No speaking about politics," "No references to religion" and "No commenting on the music" are among the 10 rules plastered on the door of Beirut's oldest communist bar. Terrez Saieda, a 56-year-old with dark shadows under her eyes, doesn't enforce every rule, but she has thrown a few people out for fighting about politics in the past.Saieda is the owner of Abou Elie, a small bar where young and old Lebanese communists still hang out.

In 1968, I was 6 years old. My family was holed up in a derelict shack on Stierlin Road in Mountain View, California, out by the city dump. The place was so small that my younger sister and I bunked on the back porch.Our neighborhood was made up of sprawling family farms interspersed with clusters of World War I-era homes. There was a bar with six stools, a corner store and a handful of weathered Victorian mansions. It's all gone now.

If there's a sunny place for shady people I'm going to find it. If humans are tribal, then my sense of belonging to this tribe has been a lifelong bug. I could blame Jack Kerouac for his stated appreciation for "the mad ones ... the ones who are mad to live," but I can't abide by the commonplace he pegs as the counter to the madness he prefers. Which means driving around Puerto Rico with my then-girlfriend looking for trouble and somewhere cool. Something off the beaten path.

This is the latest edition of OZY's Huddle newsletter, which brings you a smart, flavorful conversation-starter for your next game watch party. No stale takes allowed. Add The Huddle to your OZY email subscriptions here.

Hierarchies are everywhere, from family-run businesses to multinationals, and under the spotlight as never before. On the plus side, command chains enable control and coordination. They also have many drawbacks, as the British academic John Child highlights in his recently published book, Hierarchy.

The entire ring was engulfed in a blizzard of gold confetti. Somewhere in the middle of the glitter stood 21-year-old Nong Stamp. She had just become the first fighter in ONE Championship history to win titles in two different disciplines — Muay Thai and kickboxing — and with a belt slung over each shoulder, she was being celebrated accordingly. It looked a bit like the last scene in a movie. The fighter had scaled her Everest; it had been done.

In 1915, H.O. Fishback, the county commissioner for Washington state, refused to pay $1.75 to provide ice cream to inmates at the county jail. "Ice cream is a little too good for prisoners," he said, suggesting that if they needed a treat, pies should be provided instead. "And thus another question in the prison reform movement is introduced," reported the Ice Cream Trade Journal. For as long as there have been prisons, the amenities offered to inmates have varied greatly.

Guns are weird things.Weird because sometimes their symbolic impact gets in the way of any attempt to understand them, as they fundamentally are tools with which we build nothing but extensions of our desire for the world to hew to our own designs. In other words: They're ways to make a point. They also occupy a space, at least in the American mind, that's damn near totemic.

Because this is a good way to put children on the right track to handle their emotions and stress. When Carol Ewen, a school psychologist in Missoula, Montana, walks into the elementary classroom of a teacher she’s trained in the PAX Good Behavior Game (PAX GBG), she might find students crawling around on the floor like babies or acknowledging a “Spleem.

Hours before India's Home Minister Amit Shah announced the revocation of Jammu and Kashmir's special autonomy on Aug. 5, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi had snapped all telecommunication lines between the contested region of 7 million people and the outside world. More than a month later, much of that communications blockade remains in place. But while that blackout has drawn global headlines, it's far from unique.