Deseret Magazine - March 2021

M AG A Z I N E

RELIGIOUS

FREEDOM IN THE

BALANCE Josh Hammer & Mike Leavitt

by

DOUBLE-WIDE

STROLLERS:

THE RETURN OF THE SUPER-SIZED FAMILY

THE

FOREVER FAMILY HOW THE NEW SCIENCE OF GENEALOGY IS HELPING THE LOST BECOME FOUND

AMY CHUA THE TIGER MOTHER

LOOKS BACK AMERICA’S

SELF-SILENCING MAJORITY by

MARCH 2021

ISSUE 02 Volume 01 deseret.com

Bari Weiss

THE ANSWER IS? WHO

IS KEN

JENNINGS

H O M E O F YOUR NEW

FORD BRONCO

TheBroncoKing.com

THE VIEW FROM HERE

BY N A ME H E R E

THE ENDURING POWER OF FAMILIES

BY HA L B OYD

T

he Netherlands’ Li Jie was down two games in the first round of the International Table Tennis Federation’s 2017 Qatar Open. Jie’s opponent, Japan’s Hitomi Sato, bounced in anticipation.

Then it happened. Jie served the ball, and the two players commenced a mesmerizing back-and-forth that went uninterrupted for 10 straight minutes, setting a modern record with 766 total consecutive shots.

The late Urie Bronfenbrenner, an American psychologist, once observed that our development as humans occurs within the context of “escalating psychological pingpong games between two people who are crazy about each other.”

Children react to the volleys and serves of mom and dad, even as parents also learn from their children. “As partners become familiar with each other,” Bronfenbrenner continued, “they adapt to each other’s style. …

Each player, in effect, challenges the other.”

If this sounds like hard work — whether in pingpong or life — you’re right; but, what brings us back to the table is unstinting filial love. This love, and the development it cradles, has consequences that reverberate well beyond a family’s four walls.

The home provides a foundation for our public ordering.

This month’s magazine offers vignettes of the family in different circumstances and settings, showing them shape and engage the world around them.

4 DESERET MAGAZINE

Lois Collins gives us a look at the resiliency of home life amid the pandemic (see page 22); Ethan Bauer paints a portrait of one family’s struggle to keep ranching alive in the American West, (see page 52); Libby Copeland takes us on a journey through the world of DNA testing and genealogy as seekers find a way home through family history (see page 44); Bethany Mandel’s personal essay examines the subculture of parents who choose to have large families in an age of declining birthrates (see page 16). And Amy Chua, who introduced the world to the concept of the “Tiger Mother,” looks back on lessons learned in the years since.

Family is our great mediating institution. There is always a gap between the life of the group and the life of the individual. Families, at their best, bridge that gap. They allow personal expression and growth within the context of shared duties, responsibilities and relationships.

The Constitution, has a similar function. When we think of our founding document, we imagine the physical parchment with the words “We the People” calligraphed across the top. But there are unwritten constitutions — ways in which we order ourselves privately that come to impact our public orderings. The essays and reporting this month suggest that much of this ordering begins at home. It begins with the pingpong-like interplay between brother and sister, parent and child, citizen and citizen — it begins with the intimacy of our homes and hearts.

ELEVATING THE

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DISCOURSE. SALT LAKE CITY: 4,226

Journalism is so much more than clickbait headlines and one-sided finger pointing. At Deseret News, we’re committed to giving readers in Utah and across the nation an outlet for principled, illuminating journalism—where context matters and finding solutions is just as important as highlighting problems.

Join us as we examine the “why” behind today’s most important stories in our new expanded weekly edition, our online coverage, and our new monthly magazine.

CHICAGO: 577 LOS ANGELES: 305

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NEW YORK: 36

P R I N C I P L E D, I L L U M I N AT I N G , N E W S .

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CONTENTS

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WHAT I’ VE L EA RN ED : VANESSA QUIG LEY

20

BY ER ICA EVA N S

WORDS OF W ISD O M GREG MCKEOW N

28

A S TOLD TO JENN IF ER GR A H AM

R EL IG IOUS L IBE RTY H A NGS IN THE BA L A NCE T HIS SUMMER

30

DOUBLE-WIDE 16 STROLLERS: THE JOY OF THE BIG MESSY FAMILY From Manhattan to the Beltway, the big family is back by bethany mandel

IN THIS TOGETHER

22

Despite a flood of hardships for families, some teens have found a silver lining during the COVID-19 pandemic by lois m. collins

A DARK HORSE

24

How a high school dropout cracked the code to success by lauren steele

BY JOSH H A MMER

THE CULTURE WA R AND COMPROMI S E

32

BY MIKE L EAVITT

THE L AST WORD : THE T IG ER MOM LOOKS BACK

BY L O IS M. CO L L INS

82 CITY OF ANGELS, CITY OF GRIEF

34

LA has been hit as hard as any American city by the pandemic. Exploring life in a city gripped by loss by jesse katz

THE SILENCED MAJORITY

66

In red America and blue America, an epidemic of self-censorship is threatening democracy by bari weiss

10 DESERET MAGAZINE

THE FOREVER FAMILY

44

How the new science of genealogy is helping the lost become found by libby copeland

TH E S O U L O F S O C I E TY C A N N OT B E O U TS O U R C E D

STANDING IN THE SHADOW OF ZION

52

Ranching, rodeo and a generational family’s struggle to maintain its Western way of life by ethan bauer

70

“We the People” must “be the people” by boyd matheson

KING OF THE KNOW-IT-ALLS

72

I once regarded my oddball command of facts as useless. Then we all met Ken Jennings by michael j. mooney

CONTRIBUTORS

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MAGA Z IN E

EDITOR JESSE HYDE CREATIVE DIRECTOR DAVID MEREDITH DEPUTY EDITOR CHAD NIELSEN EDITOR-AT-LARGE HAL BOYD

LIBBY COPELAND

JOSH HAMMER

BARI WEISS

Libby Copeland is an award-win­ning jour­nal­ist who has writ­ten for The New York Times, The Atlantic and Smithsonian magazine. Copeland was a reporter and edi­tor at The Wash­ing­ton Post for 11 years, has been a media fel­low and guest lec­tur­er, and has made numer­ous appear­ances on tele­vi­sion and radio. Her most recent book, “The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are,” out in paperback in late March, was named to The Guardian’s list of The Best Books of 2020.

Josh Hammer is the opinion editor of Newsweek, a syndicated columnist, a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation, counsel and policy adviser for the Internet Accountability Project, and a contributing writer for American Compass.

Bari Weiss is a journalist and the author of “How to Fight AntiSemitism,” which won a 2019 National Jewish Book Award. From 2017 to 2020 Weiss was an opinion writer and editor at The New York Times. Before that, she was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal and a senior editor at Tablet Magazine.

STAFF WRITERS ETHAN BAUER ERICA EVANS LOIS M. COLLINS KELSEY DALLAS JENNIFER GRAHAM MYA JARADAT SOFIA JEREMIAS JEFF PARROTT ART DIRECTOR PIERCE THIOT DESIGNERS MIA MEREDITH ALEC FRANCIS DESIGN INTERN S.M. KNOERNSCHILD COPY EDITORS TODD CURTIS CHRIS MILLER WHITNEY WILDE RESEARCH FENDI WANG

Jesse Katz is a former staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, where he won two Pulitzer Prizes. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, New York and Rolling Stone, and his work has been anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing.

MIKE LEAVITT

12 DESERET MAGAZINE

CORRESPONDENT MICHAEL J. MOONEY

CONTRIBUTING WESTON COLTON ARTISTS BRIAN CRONIN HANNAH DECKER CRAIG FRAZIER RANDY GLASS BRAD HOLLAND KYLE HILTON MICHAEL MABRY COURTNEY MCOMBER PASCAL SHIRLEY

JESSE KATZ

Mike Leavitt was elected three times as governor of Utah and served from 1993 to 2003. During his 11 years of service, Utah was recognized six times as one of America’s bestmanaged states. Leavitt was chosen by his peers as chairman of the National Governors Association, Western Governors Association and Republican Governors Association.

He also served as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush. He is the founder of Leavitt Partners.

CONTRIBUTING JAMES R. GARDNER EDITORS LAUREN STEELE

BETHANY MANDEL

Bethany Mandel is a widely published writer on politics, culture and Judaism.

She is an editor at Ricochet.com and a contributor to the Washington Examiner blog and magazine.

DESERET NEWS PRESIDENT & JEFF SIMPSON PUBLISHER

PASCAL SHIRLEY

Pascal Shirley is a photographer based in Los Angeles focusing on lifestyle, portraiture, travel and food photography. He received his MFA in photography at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where he studied under Larry Sultan, Jim Goldberg and Todd Hido. He was honored as one of PDN’s top 30 photographers in 2015 and has been a part of many group exhibitions up and down the West Coast. During the winter you will often find him snowboarding in Mammoth Lakes. He loves to go on road trips and seek out hot springs throughout the West with his pup, Sailor.

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MODERN FAMILY

DOUBLE-WIDE STROLLERS: THE JOY OF THE BIG MESSY FAMILY FROM MANHATTAN TO THE BELTWAY, THE BIG FAMILY IS BACK

BY B ET HA N Y MA N DEL

H

aving a fifth child makes no sense.

We already have two boys and two girls. Their bedrooms are easily sectioned. Our minivan is too small for yet another car seat and, if we’re being honest, the car won’t easily sell (you just can’t scrub five years worth of mashed Larabars out of carpet). When my husband Seth and I started dating, we talked about our future family. And today, it’s exactly how we wanted it.

Even. Symmetrical.

Which is why my existential crisis is so strange. I look at my four kids, and by golly, I like them. It makes me want more. Watching each personality emerge is like unwrapping a surprise present that I’m basically guaranteed to love, no matter what’s inside. And I say this with an intimate understanding of the frenzy that comes with parenting young children.

I was thrilled at the idea that my fourth pregnancy would be my last; but, after a year or so, when the fourth baby started pushing away as I tried to nurse, I tearfully told my husband that this just couldn’t be the end. I just wasn’t ready to be done nursing a baby, and I don’t even like nursing. I confessed that I just couldn’t be done with any of it.

At the playground, I chatted with another mother of four who was similarly torn over whether to go for a fifth. When I told her we decided to take the plunge, she asked me “Why?” I didn’t have a ready answer. Just that I like my kids and so, well, why not? My nonchalance, however, belied deeper reasons behind our decision.

I was an only child, and my parents passed away when I was in my teens. Until my daughter was born eight years later, it felt like something had been missing within my soul. In corresponding with Meghan McCain — the political commentator and daughter of the late Sen. John McCain — she expressed similar feelings, which she shared publicly on social media right after the birth of her first child, a

16 DESERET MAGAZINE

daughter: “This is the first time since my Dad passed that the part of my heart that broke off and left with him no longer feels missing.”

When we had our second, I wondered how I could possibly love our baby boy as much as I already loved his older sister. But, to my surprise, the heart grows and grows.

Large families are becoming a rarity in American life. During my own childhood, siblings were something of a foreign curiosity. I remember watching television shows and noting the portrayals of sibling fights. They seemed unrealistic, over-the-top. Today I laugh because

WE’RE INCHING TOWARD A DEMOGRAPHIC WINTER: THE SCENARIO IN WHICH THE ELDERLY LIVE LONGER BUT THERE AREN’T ENOUGH YOUNG PEOPLE.

my life consists largely of policing various household brawls. And yet, even the obvious unpleasantries of constant squabbling give me a strange degree of comfort. As a child I saw the vibrancy of a full family as an exotic drama, but now I’m playing a leading role in our own homegrown production.

• I I • Even before COVID-19 accelerated the trend, the United States had the lowest number of

births in more than three decades. Not since 1986 (the year of my own birth) has the U.S. had so few babies born. Like most Western nations (and a handful of Eastern ones) we’re inching toward a so-called demographic winter: the scenario in which the elderly live longer but there are fewer young people around to make it all balance out.

But in my reporting, I discovered a strongwilled cohort of mothers bucking the trends.

They’re buying up minivans, bunkbeds and double-wide (sometimes triple-wide) strollers.

Like me, many of these parents are religious.

From Jews to Catholics, and from evangelicals to Latter-Day Saints, they seem to take Genesis seriously: “Be fruitful, and multiply.” But there’s also another group: only children, usually from divorced households. Also like me, they took drastically different roads than the ones they witnessed as children, deciding that a house filled to the brim is better than one echoing in silence.

Media personality and bestselling writer Jennifer Fulwiler is the mother of six. Fulwiler is Catholic, but she converted to the faith, beginning her journey to motherhood while solidly in the atheist camp. Some Catholic families are large, in part, because the faith eschews almost all mainstream forms of birth control. But Fulwiler says that, for her, other factors played a role in her family choices.

She told me that becoming religious and finding herself suddenly associating with accomplished matriarchs in large families helped her envision that she might choose a similar path. Fulwiler and her husband were also both only children. And they never planned on a large brood when they wed; Fulwiler grew up saying she never wanted kids at all.

Looking back, she says, the hardest part about having six children in the span of eight years wasn’t juggling diapers or dealing with morning sickness; instead, it was telling others that she was pregnant. “I was pregnancy-shamed, and ILLU ST RATI ON BY HANNAH DECKER

MARCH 2021 17

MODERN FAMILY

it made me feel unconfident. It got in my head,” she told me. “I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I am irresponsible. Maybe I am neglecting my children.’”

This was a theme that came up repeatedly in my conversations with mothers and fathers of large families; at the first two announcements friends and relatives were happy. The third was met with more hesitation, and then by the fourth, they were being asked if and when they would be “done.”

The most striking exception to this phenomenon came when I spoke with Latter-Day Saint mother Lia Collings, then due with her seventh. Certainly no community is immune to the downward fertility trends in America, but a large-scale Pew Research study released in 2015 found that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint had the highest completed fertility rate of any faith group studied (3.4 babies per mother, or twice that of the average woman in the U.S. today).

When we spoke, Collings, a writer and community activist, was weeks away from her due date. She lives in Orem, Utah (dubbed “Family City, USA”), with her husband Justin, a constitutional law professor at Brigham Young University. Unlike almost every other parent I spoke with, the Collings’ announcement was met uniformly with celebration.

“What a gift to the world!” she was repeatedly told by family and friends alike, many of whom also had large families.

I asked Collings why they decided on a seventh. She described for me a recent scene in her home: some children were playing together; another was practicing the harp; yet another napped languidly nearby in the living room. Perhaps the moment stood out because of its contrast with the normal chaos of family life. But, for me, it called to mind a different scene — one from the Coen Brothers film, “Raising Arizona.”

Nicholas Cage’s character dreams of “a land not too far away, where all parents are strong and wise and capable, and all children are happy and beloved.” He concludes: “I don’t know.

Maybe it was Utah.”

But beyond Utah, almost everyone I spoke with recounted feeling a heightened sense of joy when surrounded by their sizable broods. Take Fulwiler (the mom who said she was “pregnancy18 DESERET MAGAZINE

shamed”). Her youngest is now 7 years old and Fulwiler tells me that the naysayers actually come to visit her house because of the “fun” and active vibe. “It’s hard not to call people out on it now that we’re on the other side,” she said. Sure the early years were “very, very, very hard,” but today the Fulwilers are filled with nothing but appreciation for the choices they made. “I didn’t know life could be so amazingly wonderful having a big family.”

• I I I • Research on whether children make us happier is mixed. The prevailing thought is that the added stress of raising children takes a toll. And

AS I WATCH MY KIDS’ INTERACTIONS, I CAN SEE HOW THE BACK-ANDFORTHS, THE NEGOTIATIONS, THE RECONCILIATIONS CAN PREPARE CHILDREN FOR ADULTHOOD.

sociologists like Nicholas H. Wolfinger find that diminished levels of happiness persist even after children are grown. Curiously, however, the same findings don’t hold when it comes to women with larger-than-average families.

While Wolfinger’s analysis finds that women ages 50 to 70 who had one or two children were less likely than their childless peers to say they were “very happy,” when it came to women with three or more kids, there was “no appreciable differences in happiness” between them and their childless peers. Trying to explain the findings, he hypothesized that women who really like children may simply be happier if they choose to have more of them.

But there could also be another explanation: More children really do bring us more joy that helps make the stress bearable.

Jane Brosseau, another only-child while growing up, is now the mother of 10. She recently moved to Washington state from Fairfax, Virginia, and similarly echoed the desire to give her children a different childhood than the one she had; though, like Fulwiler, she says her choice wasn’t meant as an outright rejection of her childhood, which she described as happy with a great deal of travel and attention.

Brosseau outlined her “why” for choosing a different path succinctly: “We didn’t put a number on it. We never felt like we were done.”

Brosseau admits that she did feel “done” after eight children. But as Jeff Goldblum’s character says in “Jurassic Park,” “Life finds a way.”

The family welcomed two more children backto-back in quick succession.

She told me about the birth of her eighth child in July 2016. Three months later, “we were pregnant.” With that announcement they had the “craziest comments you can imagine. That was the hardest one to announce.” When her ninth was born she had a 2-year-old, a 1-yearold and an infant all at the time of the new baby’s birth.

The early days of the COVID-19 lockdowns showed Brosseau the highs and lows of life super-sized. “The first month or two of COVID, I would walk out (of the grocery store) with a full cart and people gave me the nastiest looks,” Brosseau explained. “I wanted to say, ‘I have 10 kids, this is only four days of groceries.’ We had a few days where we only had one roll of toilet paper between 12 people.”

But being a distinct social unit also has benefits. Together the family spent a fair amount of time talking about Brosseau’s experience as an only child, and her husband’s family with only one other sibling. The kids, she said, “were blown away” imagining quarantine life without siblings.

Stress during quarantine went to a whole other level for Rachel Campos-Duffy and her husband, Sean Duffy, with the open-heart surgery of their ninth child last March, a daughter, Valentina, born with Down syndrome several months earlier. Their daughter’s diagnosis inutero forced the Duffys to radically reevaluate their priorities; Sean Duffy stepped down from

his Wisconsin congressional seat and Rachel momentarily stepped back from her role as a Fox News contributor.

Like Brosseau, the Duffy family didn’t set out to have a large family; quite the opposite, in fact. She told me, “I never thought I’d have nine kids. I never planned it. I never wanted it. I was just open to whatever happened.” Because both Rachel and Sean are Catholic and from larger families (Rachel is the third of four and Sean the 10th of 11), they didn’t experience quite as much resistance, but she did feel that her father was worried about how Rachel’s childbirth choices might impact her career.

“He worries, and he’s right, that every time I’m about to take a professional leap I have a baby. It has impacted my career. You can’t have a Barbara Walters level career if you have nine kids.” But Rachel did feel that having such a large family made her a better pundit and more relatable.

And the babies proved to be a blessing. “I have given up big jobs for sure, but every time I have had a child, Sean or I somehow make more money,” Rachel said laughing. “In Spanish we say that every child comes with a loaf of bread under their arms. In our case that has definitely been true. Each child has brought some unexpected amazing opportunity, bonus or raise. And God never failed to deliver (pun intended).”

everyone faster is a jerk.”

Oppenheimer posits that those from smaller families also feel a sense of judgment from those with larger broods. The phrase “I can barely manage with two” is one Oppenheimer hears frequently, to which he responds, “It’s not that hard if you’re willing to do a worse job and lower your standards.” But Oppenheimer made clear that we make choices that are right for our own family.

Many parents with whom I spoke saw their childbearing choices as a direct embrace or a direct rejection of the family size they had growing up. All, however, expressed a similar sentiment to fellow big family parent Jim Gaffigan, who said of his family’s decision to have five children in Manhattan: “Well, why not? …

•V • “IN A WORLD THAT IS INCREASINGLY ATOMIZED, KIDS MAKE US MORE SOCIAL ANIMALS.”

• IV • Thinkers like Jonathan Last — and more recently Ross Douthat — have pointed to the potential impact of what they call “car seat economics” — laws that require ever-larger and more expensive car seats for longer periods of time. “Obviously car seats aren’t as big a deal as the cost of college or childcare or the cultural expectations around high-intensive parenting,” Douthat observes.

But they do seem to be of a piece with a culture oriented toward smaller families. And this may explain some of soft pregnancy shaming. One father of five, Mark Oppenheimer, a writer and host of the popular Tablet podcast “Unorthodox,” explained to me, “Everyone feels judged by everyone else’s choices.” Oppenheimer compared it to driving on the highway, “Everyone slower than you is a moron and

chance of divorce. A study, released by scholars at Ohio State University, explained that “when you compare children from large families to those with only one child, there is a meaningful gap in the probability of divorce.” Adding siblings, the thinking goes, gives children a more dynamic home life that helps with navigating relationships later in life.

As I watch my kids’ interactions, those sibling fights I was once so curious about, I can see how the back-and-forths, the negotiations, the reconciliations can prepare children for adulthood. When I grew up, I almost never had to face uncomfortable disagreements. And, at the beginning of my marriage, I needed coaching from a couples therapist even when my husband, the middle child of two sisters, was far more equipped to handle our early conflicts.

What exactly am I missing out on? Money? A few more hours of sleep? A more peaceful meal?

More hair?” He concluded that the case against more children always seemed, well, superficial.

W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, told me that as family size shrinks in America, he can appreciate the passion among the minority who choose the opposite route.

Wilcox himself is a father of nine and explained how his kids push him into the community with all of their various activities, exposing him to different parts of the world through the lens of their talents and interests. “In a world that is increasingly atomized, kids make us more social animals,” he remarked.

Wilcox also highlighted an unexpected benefit of growing up in a large family: a lower

A few months ago, I decided to bring my kids to our local bakery to get a treat. My kids ordered a few chocolate danishes to split and I got a fruit tart, and we all migrated toward outdoor benches to eat our desserts.

As we sat there, I told them about the last time I had such a fruit tart: back when I lived in Belgium my junior year of high school. I used to save my allowance and splurge once a week at the fanciest bakery in town and buy the same tart every single time. It was exciting to find the tart at our local kosher bakery, and after I told my kids the story, they all asked to have a taste.

My incredibly perceptive eldest daughter asked me, “Isn’t it annoying to have to share this special treat with your four kids instead of having it all to yourself?”

I told her the truth: The second half of that year in Belgium, I was drowning a lot of sorrows in those fruit tarts. My mother passed away midyear, and I had no relationship with my estranged father, grandparents or extended family. I had no siblings. I was alone. And sitting there eating that tart, it would have been my greatest wish to know that someday I’d have four kids and together we would sit, and I could share with them. Now that we’ve learned our fifth is on its way, we may need to start buying more than one tart.

MARCH 2021 19

MODERN FAMILY

WHAT I’VE LEARNED: VANESSA QUIGLEY

BY ERICA EVA N S

B

efore she parachuted into the tech world, Vanessa Quigley was absorbed in mom world, raising seven kids. In 2014, she and her husband founded Chatbooks, which transforms social media posts into physical photo books, preserving treasured family memories in analog form. Her role as a mother, she quickly discovered, was an asset — one that leveraged maternal experience as a formidable tool in a male-dominated industry; the company recently surpassed 10 million photo albums sold. Nowhere is Quigley’s nimble, childrearer-turned-executive acumen more evident than on her podcast, “Momforce,” where the 48-year-old dishes advice that bolsters the company’s mission: strengthening families. She’s also the author of “Real Moms, Real Hacks: 107 Parent-Tested Tips + Tricks to Save You Time, Money, and Sanity.” Her knack for adaptation is on display on Instagram — where she effortlessly switches from sharing recipes to behind-the-scenes looks at how Chatbooks are printed, and where she posts about her kids. Her youngest became a teenager this year; another is learning to drive.

Here’s how she’s learned to manage it all: Working with her husband: “It’s wonderful and difficult, and it’s personal. It’s a giant benefit because we’re used to talking about hard things and working through problems, but it can also be challenging. We’ve had to learn to up the professionalism in our working relationship and set boundaries instead of taking each other for granted.”

Time management: “It’s a lot of nitty-gritty list-making and scheduling. I literally slot in every 30-minute chunk of my upcoming workweek on Fridays. It doesn’t always flow that way, but at least I have a plan. I do the same thing with our family life on Sundays, penciling in meal plans, driving lessons with my daughter and dates with my husband.”

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Women in tech: “It’s been frustrating as an executive realizing how hard

it is to find women for technical roles. We need more women getting a technical education, and then we need workplace cultures that prioritize family. I never considered a technical degree. Now I wish someone had said, ‘You should also broaden your education.’ On the other hand, my husband has worked in software his whole career. At the time, I was a stayat-home mom and he was never home. He was lucky he had me to always be there for the family.”

The transition from kid to teen: “It is dramatic. There’s a massive change. Before I had teenagers, I was terrified. But I really love the teenage phase. It’s a fabulous time of life where they are maturing into independent adults. Celebrating my youngest’s 13th birthday, I thought I might be sad about it because now we are officially, you know, old parents. But it is actually exciting. I’m not mourning that phase.”

Making the most of family time: “I make sure I am done working at 3:30 p.m. when the kids are home. I try not to open my laptop or Slack after that.”

Taking (or ignoring) advice: “If I tried to implement all the advice I’ve gotten on motherhood and business, I would have lost my mind. You have to learn to say, ‘That’s not for me,’ if it doesn’t resonate.”

Can motherhood be hacked? “Parts of it, yeah. Most of the hacks in my book are about helping moms make the most of their time with little shortcuts. But some parts of motherhood, you don’t want to hack.

You want to savor them and stretch them out. I love hanging out around the table, doing puzzles and talking with my kids. There’s nothing hacky about that.”

P O RT RAI T BY COURTNEY MCOMBER

MARCH 2021 21

MODERN FAMILY

STILL IN THIS TOGETHER DESPITE A FLOOD OF HARDSHIPS FOR FAMILIES, SOME TEENS HAVE FOUND A SILVER LINING A YEAR AFTER THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC BEGAN

BY LO IS M. CO LLIN S

L

ike a lot of siblings who are close in age, Kelsie and Taylor Wakefield, 16 and 17, have butted heads often. Over the years, feuds regarding who got the blue cup evolved into disputes over who got to drive the car. Unsurprisingly, their mom — Heather Wakefield — wasn’t sure how things would go when COVID-19 shut down their school and forced them to spend more time together.

But instead of bickering more, Kelsie and Taylor bonded over an unlikely shared project: a 1979 RV. Their younger brother, Adam, 14, found it in a classified ad for $300. In a time when school, dance classes, soccer games and basically everything else was put on hold, the Wakefield teens spent their time gutting an old house on wheels. They slathered on coats of paint, wired up an entertainment center and transformed the old RV into a grown-up clubhouse. Days spent sanding floors and reupholstering furniture turned into evenings streaming movies and telling each other stories.

Through it all, the Wakefields discovered what has proven to be a silver lining in a very cloudy year: closer relationships between themselves and their parents.

Kelsie said she’s both surprised and pleased that she and Taylor get on each other’s nerves less since they started spending time together.

“We’re better able to actually communicate and … take time to know one another.”

What used to look like discord and torment now looks more like encouragement and honest fun. In candid family photos, Kelsie and Adam are often side by side, grinning and making silly faces.

The family — who moved from Utah to Kissimmee, Florida, last year — spend their days hanging out on the beach, choreographing dances and making dinner together. But are they an example of pandemic-induced family dynamics or simply an exception to the rules of bonding during this past year of social distancing and staying home?

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Jeffrey Arnett, an expert on emerging adulthood and senior research scholar at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, says families that have enjoyed stronger relationships amid the pandemic are lucky. That result is not a given.

The coronavirus pandemic and its resultant challenges only inflamed another public health crisis. Teen anxiety and depression had reached well-documented, epidemic proportions even before the pandemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 6.3 million children ages 3-17 have been diagnosed with depression or anxiety. When the National 4-H Council commissioned the Harris Poll to investigate adolescent well-being last May, the vast majority of teens expressed fear that the pandemic’s impact on their generation’s mental health would linger.

It’s been tough for kids who aren’t dealing with a diagnosis as well. One collaborative international study published in the journal Psychiatry Research found clinginess, difficulty in attention and being irritable as common psychological conditions shown by all minors during the pandemic.

It took more than buying an RV and fixing it up with her brothers to make the coronavirus’ challenges bearable for Kelsie Wakefield.

She said she’s battled depression since before COVID-19, which only made it worse. When school first closed, she spent most of her time in her bedroom — feeling withdrawn — until her parents took her to a doctor to address her mental health needs and find the right medication for her.

The strain to make the most out of a “new normal” has been a struggle for both younger and older family members. Over the past year, parents have been challenged to take on all roles, all the time, and meet their kids’ needs — no small feat by any stretch of the mind. But according to Salt Lake City psychologist and therapist Jenny Howe, “teens and their individ-

ual growth deserve much of the credit for forging stronger relationships.” Despite everything stacked against them, teens still found ways to connect with others and grow.

Research published by Stanford in 2020 found that teenagers who showed greater connectivity, or interconnectedness, in a set of particular brain regions were less likely to experience pandemic-related depression and anxiety.

The results highlight the importance of the so-called executive control network, or ECN, in dealing with stress and adapting to new challenges. In short, more connectedness means better adaptations for dealing with stress. Despite the trauma of the past year, many teens — like the Wakefields — took “the opportunity to challenge themselves to take control of what they can, despite the circumstances, which has proven to be very powerful,” Howe says.

Individuals and families have developed coping skills that meet their own set of circumstances in a very strange time — and Heather Wakefield has been moved by the remarkable growth she’s seen in her children.

She was especially worried that without the physical outlet of dance and sports, life for her high-energy children would devolve into chaos. Instead, Heather has seen Kelsie quell her conflicts with Taylor, tuck Adam under her wing, get in touch with her older sister Korde, and build stronger-than-ever bonds with her younger siblings Xande and Adam. For a mother, these are joys that take the sting out of challenges like moving during a pandemic and adding roles like “teacher” to her already task-filled life.

Maybe in a version of 2020 without a pandemic her children would have gone their separate ways more. She counts herself lucky that, despite it all, they aren’t only a stronger family now, but good friends, too, the sort who crowd into a clubhouse they created from a rusty RV. ILLU STR ATI ON BY BR I AN CR ONI N

MARCH 2021 23

HOW TO LEAD

A DARK HORSE HOW A HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT CRACKED THE CODE TO SUCCESS

BY LAU REN ST EELE

T

cated his now wildly successful career to is proving that while these paths odd Rose was no stranger to school suspensions by the time he are indeed irreplicable, individual success is not. got to the seventh grade at Sand Ridge Junior High School. Stink After working nearly a dozen minimum wage jobs in just a couple years bombs, at the time, were much more interesting than anything Mr. Peabody after dropping out of Layton High School (the last of them requiring him was teaching during art class. By his senior year in high school, it was evident to give enemas to people) and being on welfare with two kids relying on that very little — including stink bombs — could interest Rose anymore. him, Rose went back to school in 1995. At the age of 22, he enrolled in The Hooper, Utah, native was kicked out of Layton High School with night classes at Weber State University, wore fake glasses to appear smarta 0.9 GPA. “My principal told my parents, ‘There is literally no chance er, and did his best to play by the rules of due dates and good attendance. he can graduate,’ so my parents were like, ‘OK fine, you got to get a job But even with his back against the wall and all of his responsibilities to somewhere.’” He got a job stocking shelves at a department store for $4.25 keep his family afloat breathing down his neck, he still felt like traditional per hour. Shortly thereafter, his then-girlfriend (and now wife) found out classes were a bad fit. It wasn’t until he heard about the college honors she was pregnant. program at Weber State and the critical-thinking, debate-centric classes Most people wouldn’t be surprised if the next chapter in Rose’s story within it that he thought that this whole “going back included a stint (or two) in jail before concluding to school” thing was going to work. in a lackluster, melancholy dénouement. Instead, “It was after my first year there and I was sitting in he ended up on faculty at Harvard University. He’s a large boring lecture hall when my friend sitting next authored three books (two of them bestsellers) and to me said, ‘Let me tell you, I got into the honors profounded the Laboratory for the Science of Individgram and it’s terrible, there are just debates. You can’t uality at Harvard as well as a nonprofit think tank A GOOD DARK hide, there are no tests, you write and talk. There arcalled Populace. And he’s dedicated his life’s work HORSE STORYLINE en’t even right answers,’” Rose recalls. “And I thought, to revealing how important individuality is to sucIS IRRESISTIBLE BECAUSE IT ‘Are you kidding me, that sounds perfect.’ So I beecess and how we need to restructure societal sysSEEMS JUST AS lined to the top of the hill where the honors program tems to allow for individual opportunity instead of IRREPLICABLE building was and asked for the director.” focusing on an “average” that doesn’t exist. Turns AS IT DOES Upon seeing Rose’s unfinished high school diploma, out, we all can have a chance to find success even IMPROBABLE. in the most unlikely of situations. Rose believes we ACT score of 19 (a score of 24 is considered “good”), can all be dark horses, or someone who on paper and current average grades, the director said there shouldn’t succeed, but beats the odds and does. was no way Rose could be in the honors program. But Rose will tell you that there was no “aha!” moRose countered — by sitting in the honors building ment that turned his life around. No touching lobby all day after Marilyn Diamond, the honor’s colmade-for-television conversation with a menlege secretary, told him, “If you want this, don’t take tor or teacher. No stint at a wilderness therapy program or a boarding no for an answer.” By the end of the day, the director let him in on a proschool that “scared him straight.” There was no morning that he woke bationary trial period. up and decided to change it all for the better. Instead, his change of fate “I appreciated the idea of finally having a good fit,” Rose says. “We are “emerged from a series of at first seemingly random, yet always interreall distinct and there aren’t smart people and dumb people — we are just lated events.”It’s paying attention to these random events — and figuring stuck with the rules of a standardized system that says there are. On paper out what makes them not so random — that allows a person to find a disI should have been in remedial classes but if I would have just played along tinct pathway to success.

I don’t think I would have even gotten through remedial math. Instead, I A good dark horse storyline is irresistible because it seems just as irrepgraduated as honors student of the year in 2000 and got into Harvard for licable as it does improbable: Oprah Winfrey being fired from one of her graduate school with a 3.97 GPA.” first jobs in television, Bob Dylan losing a high school talent show, Walt Upon landing at Harvard, Rose kept meeting people who had the most Disney being fired from The Kansas City Star for lacking “imagination” unbelievable backgrounds — “and that encouraged my path,” he says. and having “no good ideas” — the list goes on. And what Rose has dediAfter graduating from Harvard with both a master’s degree and a Ph.D.,

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ILLU STR ATI ON BY BR I AN CR ONI N

MARCH 2021 25

HOW TO LEAD

ROSE BELIEVES WE CAN ALL BE DARK HORSES, OR SOMEONE WHO ON PAPER SHOULDN’T SUCCEED, BUT BEATS THE ODDS AND DOES.

“They prioritized personal fulfillment over society’s definition of success.

Rose partnered with his longtime mentor Kurt Fischer in the Mind, We all chase this view, like, ‘OK just be really great at what society valBrain, and Education Program at the Graduate School of Education as a ues,’ but these people thought about who they were and what mattered researcher and professor. His desire? To finally get to study individuality to them instead. They knew what made them tick and what motivated and figure out just how he — and many of the people he had met along the them from a very individual perspective. It proves that there’s something way — found unlikely success. to knowing who you are and then finding the right fit.”

And thus, many years later, in 2012, the Laboratory for the Science of “People who know me best would agree that I’m happier now than with Individuality at Harvard was founded. And soon behind it was Rose’s first anything else I have done with my career,” Saul Shapiro says in “Dark Horse,” big project studying unlikely folks who found success — the Dark Horse the book Rose and his research partner, Dr. Ogi Ogas, published after conProject — in 2016. Rose decided it was time to figure out how people the cluding their study. “I enjoy what I do almost every day and I’m financially world deems average — like him — flip a 180 and become exceptional. He secure. In the end, I figured out how to align my livelihood to my nature.” hosted focus groups with plumbers, business owners, engineers, presiden Rose says he never learned more from any project in his life than he did tial campaign directors and a slew of others who were successful in their from Dark Horse. “It changed my mind,” he says. In fact, it changed his respective fields. He recorded countless hours of interviews. He input data, mind enough to leave Harvard behind. “I don’t believe in the structure studied charts and partnered with neuroscientists. of our educational institutions — they operate on a zero-sum model and But Rose’s research didn’t go as he expected it would. “When we startcreate scarcity to breed competition and create ‘success.’ It was the exact ed the Dark Horse Project I thought I totally knew what we were going to opposite of what my research — which Harvard was find. Nope,” he says with a laugh. “Do each of these funding — was finding about the true nature of sucsuccessful people have something in common? A cess.” Rose deemed it hypocritical enough to leave it personality trait? No. Most of them weren’t rebelall behind. “I needed to practice what I preached,” he lious — their personalities were all over the place.” says. “This required me to get out of academia.”

“What kept emerging was how fulfillment and purSo, again, Rose is out connecting those seemingly pose was the most important value for each of these random events of his life and his true nature to figpeople,” he says. “I thought, ‘That can’t be the answer, “IT’S RISKY AND SCARY TO ure out what’s next. First, it was individuality. Now, this is too squishy.’ I was a quantitative researcher my PURSUE WHAT it’s how we can create new societal systems (like edwhole career, but this was qualitative. Turns out, you MATTERS TO ucation) that allow for and encourage that individcan learn a lot from listening to people.”

YOU. BUT uality. He is currently working as the president and At first, each dark horse story seemed random and IT’S RISKIER co-founder of Populace, a nonprofit think tank that fantastical. There was a high school dropout named NOT TO.” works to find solutions to redistribute opportunity, Jennie who hated math — but she was curious, paso all people have the chance to live fulfilling lives in tient, detail-focused, methodical and endlessly curia thriving society. Rose is also finishing up his fourth ous about what she could see in the sky. When she book, “Collective Illusions,” which will be available was 36, she built herself a telescope on her back patio, later this year. The book details how collective socibecame a self-taught astronomer, and discovered a etal illusions become self-fulfilling prophecies. “It’s previously undetected asteroid. For her work, Jennie shocking that no matter what the topic is we are was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit for spectacularly wrong about the majority of America,” Rose says. “Big maher contributions to astronomy. There was an MIT Sloan School of Manjorities are convinced they are the minority. For instance, almost 70% of agement graduate who struggled to get hired at age 50 after an unsuccessAmericans want criminal justice to be rehabilitative but think that the ful string of tech management jobs. His name is Saul, and he knew that he majority favors punitive criminal justice because that’s the model we have. enjoyed precision, alignment and working to solve problems just as much The whole point of the book isn’t to answer, ‘Are we being lied to?’ It’s as he disliked managing other people. So at age 57, he bought a brick and more about us how we’re prone to conformity.” mortar storefront with his tech career savings and opened his own Fibrenew His work at Populace and the research he is taking on for his “CollecUpholstery Repair franchise and was named the best leather couch repairtive Illusions” project is something Rose says will occupy the rest of his man by New York Magazine. Soon, Rose and his research partners began to life’s work. Based on what he knows about himself, it’s where all of these catch on as patterns emerged. random events have led him. So, he’ll follow. “It’s risky and scary to pursue “There were a handful of things that led to a path in life that allowed a what matters to you,” he muses. “But it’s riskier not to.” person to become successful in their own distinct definition,” Rose says.

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The Canyon art installation by Gordon Huether

WE’RE READY TO FLY WHEN YOU ARE. Now that the new Salt Lake City International Airport is open, there’s a lot for you to enjoy — the views, the technology, the efficiency, the variety of shops and restaurants. And one of the things we think you’ll also like is our commitment to your safety — employing the absolute best practices in sanitization throughout the airport. As the world re-opens to travel, it’s not going to be the same. But when it comes to flying in and out of The New SLC, we think it will be even better.

HOW TO LEAD

WORDS OF WISDOM GREG MCKEOWN THE AUTHOR OF ‘ESSENTIALISM’ WANTS YOU TO CUT THE WORD ‘PRIORITIES’ OUT OF YOUR LIFE AS TO LD TO J EN N IFER GRA HA M

G

reg McKeown’s daughter was only a few hours old when he had to decide whether to stay at the hospital with his wife and newborn or go to a meeting with a business client. He went to the meeting — and came to regret his decision. “I made a fool’s bargain,” he says.

“What I learned from that experience was that if you don’t prioritize your own life, someone else will.”

That lesson and the soul-searching it prompted set McKeown on a path to a bestselling book. “Essentialism” established him as an internationally recognized expert on time management and acquired him clients that include Apple, Google and Pixar.

Now, he also has a podcast called “What’s Essential” and a new book in the works. “Effortless,” his latest title, is coming out next month.

Here, McKeown, a father of four who lives in Calabasas, California, explains why most people misuse the word “priority” and why using it correctly — every day — can diminish stress and regret in your life.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

“

The day my daughter was born set me off on a journey to really understand prioritization deeper. In my research, I found that when “priority” came into the English language in the 1400s, it was singular. What did it

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mean? The very first thing — before all other things. By definition, you cannot have more than one priority. And for 500 years, the word meant a singular idea, and then it evolved and now we talk about “priorities” all the time.

Of course, you can have more than one important thing in your life — we all do. But we have to ask ourselves, every day, “What is the most important thing I need to do today?” We ought to keep coming back to the question.

If the answer to that question isn’t obvious, you can ask yourself a series of questions to figure it out. If I can only do one thing today or this week, what would it be? What is the one thing that will leave me the most satisfied? What will I care about a week, a month or 100 years from now?

What one thing will make everything else easier?

I don’t do this perfectly. And the days I don’t do it have a feeling: It’s frantic, it’s frenetic. The vibe of your day feels reactive.

Somebody once said to me, “I wish I’d read your book 50 years ago.”

They meant it as a compliment, but it made me a little sad when I heard this. Think of what he was saying. If your habit is to just live without ever asking yourself what matters to you, you can get off track without meaning to.

Everyone gets off track. Everyone gets distracted. But an essentialist gets back on track much faster.”

PORTR AI T BY KYLE HI LTON

Q

What is BPH?

Dr. O’Hara: “Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) occurs when the prostate gland increases in size. As it gets larger, it leads to symptoms include difficulty urinating, a feeling of urgency, and getting up frequently at night to go to the bathroom.

It’s not just a nuisance, it’s a serious medical issue.”

Q

How is BPH Treated?

Dr. O’Hara: “Prostate artery embolism (PAE) is one of the most exciting breakthroughs for treating enlarged prostates. Over the past 20 years it has been refined for the expressed purpose of shrinking the prostate, and 2017, the FDA approved its use for BPH. “

Q

Why PAE?

Dr. O’Hara: “One of the big benefits of PAE is that it is not known to create complications like impotence or incontinence comparable to traditional surgery. It’s a minimally invasive procedure, done in the office, and patients go home the same day.”

Is breakthrough BPH treatment for you?

Q

Who is a Candidate?

Dr. O’Hara: “Men shouldn’t have to live with these symptoms that can interfere with their lives.

If medication does not provide relief, PAE may be an option. It’s very appealing to those who don’t want surgery or who are not candidates for surgery.”

Dr. O’Hara is a board certified Interventional Radiologist with Comprehensive Integrated Care utahcic.com | 801-810-2999

ciccenters.com

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY HANGS IN THE BALANCE THIS SUMMER WILL THE SUPREME COURT DELIVER?

BY J OSH HA MMER

T

his summer, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to decide the most consequential religious freedom case in a generation. The case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, has the potential to gut First Amendment precedent that has stood for over 30 years. It will also signal how the new conservative majority will rule on religious freedom protections.

Last year, the court held in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York v. Cuomo that houses of worship were unjustly placed under stricter COVID-19 orders than, say, local liquor stores. Some speculated that the opinion offered a glimpse into the court’s future philosophy on the First Amendment. But now social conservatives are eager for Fulton to unveil the full picture.

The facts of the case are straightforward: Three years ago, the city of Philadelphia ended its contract with Catholic Social Services for foster care placement because Catholic Social Services wouldn’t place children with same-sex couples. To do so, Catholic Social Services said, would violate the group’s religious beliefs regarding traditional marriage.

After the city took action against the organization, Catholic Social Services then sued. The Constitution, they argue, protects a religious organization’s ability to carry out its social work efforts in accordance with sincerely held religious beliefs.

But the city hasn’t backed down, pointing to the three-decade-old precedent in a case called Employment Division v. Smith.

In Smith, two members of the Native American Church — Galen Black and Alfred Leo Smith — were fired from their jobs for ingesting peyote as part of a traditional religious ceremony. The state of Oregon subsequently denied them unemployment benefits, reasoning that their own “misconduct” led to the terminations.

The men believed the state’s actions violated their free exercise of religion. The case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and, in 1990, the court’s majority ruled in favor of the state of Oregon. Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia penned the opinion. It was a crisis moment for religious freedom.

Certainly no one believes faith should be a “get out of jail free” card.

But what happens when state laws violate an individual’s constitutionally protected practice of religion? The Smith ruling seemed to leave religious petitioners little in the way of legal recourse.

But now, by placing Smith in its crosshairs, the Fulton decision could change that.

Given the current composition of the court, you’d think conservatives would feel confident about the case’s outcome. After all, with the addition of Justice Amy Coney Barrett last year, the balance on the bench now sits at a 6-3 conservative majority. But at least some have concluded that the “conservative” side of the judiciary is often far less reliable in delivering clear-cut victories for conservatives than many red-state voters might hope.

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Last term, for example, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch issued the Bostock v.

Clayton County ruling, which interpreted the word “sex,” as written in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to include concepts like sexual orientation and gender identity. For those who believe statutory interpretation should be based on the original public meaning of statutory language, the Bostock decision transgressed the most basic work of judicial interpretation.

It was enough to cause the freshman Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri to declare “the end of the conservative legal movement, or the conservative legal project, as we know it.”

Certainly, the Bostock decision is a travesty for conservatives who hope judges stick to interpreting laws rather than rewriting them. But Bostock shouldn’t be weighed in isolation. A more nuanced assessment of the court’s recent religious liberty decisions reveals reasons for cautious optimism within conservative quarters. For starters, in last term’s Espinoza v.

Montana Department of Revenue, the court took pains to undermine the legitimacy of the so-called “Blaine amendments” — state constitutional provisions of a distinctly anti-Catholic origin that prohibited government funding of private religious education.

And in Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, the court expanded the “ministerial exception,” exempting religious institutions from certain anti-discrimination laws so they can hire staff and clergy in accordance with their distinct religious missions and teachings.

All of this, however, may simply be prelude to Fulton — the case provides the court with its cleanest opportunity yet to overturn that pesky peyote precedent. As Stanford Law professor Michael W. McConnell has argued, Smith is inconsistent with the Framers’ deliberate linguistic choice to protect not merely worship, but the “free exercise” of religion, from government interference. And as my former boss, Judge James C. Ho, has pointed out, “Under Smith, government may regulate religious activity, without having to satisfy strict scrutiny, so long as the regulation is a ‘neutral law of general applicability.’” In other words, Smith makes it too easy for government to interfere with the right to live one’s religion.

Barrett’s vote could play a major role. It was decisive in last term’s Cuomo case, and her questions at the Fulton oral arguments in November suggest a strong sympathy for the plight of Philadelphia’s Catholic Social Services. Maybe the relevant question is not whether Catholic Social Services will prevail under the new conservative court, but rather how it might prevail; in other words, will the court issue a narrow ruling, or will it formally overrule Smith? For me, and many others, the answer to that question will determine whether Hawley’s statement about the end of “the conservative legal project” proves premature or prophetic.

Josh Hammer is the opinion editor at Newsweek.

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NATIONAL AFFAIRS

THE CULTURE WAR COMPROMISE IN THE BATTLE OVER LGBTQ RIGHTS AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, CAN BOTH SIDES WIN?

BY MI K E LE AV I T T

I

t sounds counterintuitive, but America’s current political divide may actually provide the right environment for compromise, especially on some of the thorniest aspects of the nation’s simmering culture war. The key is mutual vulnerability.

As I learned when I was governor of Utah, and later as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, opposing political parties rarely reason together voluntarily. But when majority control is closely divided — as it is now — both parties have strong incentives to move to the middle. Standoffs can be tamed in the shared quest to win moderates.

The U.S. Senate is currently split 50-50, with the vice president breaking the tie in favor of the Democrats. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is controlled by Democrats but is vulnerable to a midterm shift in power.

Both sides, in other words, are looking for ways to win on the margins. Brokering a compromise on the cultural wars may do the trick.

And there is one area in particular where compromise is possible, and urgent: finding a balance between LGBTQ rights and religious freedom.

To date, the conflict has been framed as a binary choice. LGBTQ-rights advocates argue religious freedom is merely a license to discriminate; people of faith assert laws that force them to violate their conscience are unconstitutional.

It’s zero-sum.

In partisan politics, we call these “wedge issues” — they force people to pick sides. But it’s a false dichotomy. There are ways to share space. It’s ultimately mutual vulnerability that pulls both ideological extremes away from their insistence on political purity and back toward sustainable solutions.

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Right now, the Equality Act represents an unyielding position on LGBTQ rights from Democrats. The bill would amend the Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing, public accommodations, public education, federal funding and other aspects of life.

It has been a fixture in Democratic campaigns, and President Joe Biden touted his plan to enact it in his first 100 days.

Republicans have opposed the Equality Act because it nullifies many of the religious freedom protections afforded under U.S. law. The act, for example, eliminates Religious Freedom Restoration Act protections passed in 1993, representing a grave threat to religious expression for many believers.

Last Congress, the Equality Act passed in the House of Representatives. It was never taken up by the Republican Senate majority.

The outcome of the 2020 election, however, left Democrats in control of both chambers of Congress and the White House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has symbolically numbered the bill HB5, which connotes its high priority. It will most certainly pass the House once again, and Biden has restated his commitment to pursue passage of the bill early in his term.

Only one obstacle stands in the way: the Senate.

Under current Senate rules, the Equality Act must gain the support of 60 senators to pass.

There are only 50 Democrats. At least 10 Republican votes are required for passage. Given the negative implications for religious freedom currently part of the Equality Act, Republican support seems unlikely.

The political stalemate continues. And yet mutual vulnerability hovers in the future for both

political parties, meaning this could be the moment when historic progress is made that supports people of faith and LGBTQ Americans.

The midterm elections are already on the horizon. Historically speaking, the party of the incumbent president rarely does well. During a time of economic turmoil and a pandemic, if Democrats aren’t careful, a loss of control of the House of Representatives is a realistic scenario.

But Republicans, too, have vulnerabilities.

There are more Republicans up for election in 2022 than Democrats. And Republican senators feel worry radiating from churches, faithbased schools and universities and social service providers in their states who verbalize the devastating impact the Equality Act would have on their basic religious missions.

Mutual vulnerability is present. An environment conducive to a shared space solution exists right now.

Democrats know that the Equality Act must become a genuinely bipartisan undertaking, one that values the freedoms of all Americans.

Then, and only then, could the Equality Act become a stable long-term legislative achievement of the same noble caliber as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, of which it aspires to form a part.

This could occur if 10 Republican senators are willing to support passage of the Equality Act in exchange for robust amendments ensuring core religious freedoms alongside the new protections for LGBTQ people. Democrats, in turn, must be willing to compromise. The question history awaits is whether this generation of lawmakers will have the wisdom and nobility to seize this moment to solve our culture war standstill.

Mike Leavitt is the former governor of Utah.

THE WEST

CITY OF ANGELS, CITY OF GRIEF LA HAS BEEN HIT AS HARD AS ANY AMERICAN CITY BY THE PANDEMIC. ONE OF ITS MOST BELOVED WRITERS EXPLORES LIFE IN A CITY GRIPPED BY LOSS

BY J ESSE KATZ P HOTO ESSAY BY PASCA L SHIRLEY PI LOT E D BY A LEX FREIDIN /HA N GA R 21 HELICO P T ERS

A

march ago, as the light faded on a clear and brisk Wednesday evening, I hailed a ride to Guelaguetza, the landmark Oaxacan restaurant in the heart of Koreatown, for dinner with my dear friend, filmmaker Eric Nazarian.

As we worked our way through a kaleidoscope of moles, from the piquant rojo to the earthy mole negro, we shared our creative preoccupations — Eric’s afternoon of scouting locations at the Mar Vista housing project where he’d be shooting his next movie, my interview that morning with the survivor of a MacArthur Park gang attack I’d spent months trying to locate. There’s a cellphone picture of us that night, grinning in the dining room’s golden neon glow: sated, flushed, unaware.

By the time we’d paid the check, we’d learned that the NBA had halted play, that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson had tested positive, and that this strange new virus that had been inching closer was officially here, altering life in ways we were only beginning to grasp. It would prove to be a last supper of sorts, my final night out in what has now been a year of limits and losses.

The Los Angeles I love is the LA others scorn: the city too vast and disjointed, too carved up by freeways and riddled with wrong turns to wrap your arms around, much less embrace. Ever since arriving 35 years ago — a sheltered Oregonian by way of an experimental Vermont college — I’ve delighted in taking the boulevard less traveled. I’ve tested myself and trusted the city, endorsing uncertainty, ignoring boundaries. Like stepping into Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrors” (which has mesmerized crowds at The Broad), LA is where Thai Town meets Little Armenia, which abuts Little Bangladesh, which spills into the El Salvador Community Corridor, which overlaps with the Byzantine Latino Quarter. You can hear live jazz in Little Tokyo, grab falafel in a 34 DESERET MAGAZINE

century-old food hall downtown, sip sazeracs at a British chophouse-turned-Korean lounge, nibble rice cracker-encrusted asparagus in a West Hollywood izakaya, or bob to the mariachis in a 24-hour Montebello diner.

Or you used to — I did — and now you can’t.

The pandemic has hobbled LA in heartbreaking ways: upended livelihoods, swamped hospitals, shrunken our world. As the late Jonathan Gold, LA’s Pulitzer-winning omnivore, put it after the uprising of 1992, “the intricate framework” of our grand yet teetering city has again collapsed.

The virus is our termite, exposing a fragile

THE PANDEMIC HAS HOBBLED LA IN HEARTBREAKING WAYS: UPENDED LIVELIHOODS, SWAMPED HOSPITALS, SHRUNKEN OUR WORLD. OUR GRAND YET TEETERING CITY HAS AGAIN COLLAPSED.

structure and years of deferred maintenance.

Despite some of the nation’s earliest and most stringent stay-at-home orders, we’ve managed to shutter our haunts and ravage our service industry only to emerge after months of self-abnegation as America’s latest COVID-19 epicenter. By the time LA reached its one-millionth positive case in early 2021, someone was dying here from the virus every five or six min-

utes. So overwhelming was the toll, the coroner had to request that air-quality regulations be suspended — to allow crematoriums to incinerate more bodies.

There was a perception, back when LA was avoiding the worst of it, that our sprawl and car dependence made us exceptional. But that’s a privileged swath. Nearly a million of LA’s 10 million people are undocumented, most without health insurance or sick leave, many doubled- and tripled-up in frayed tenements and bootleg garages in communities as dense as Manhattan. We have some 60,000 people experiencing homelessness, the tents lining our parks and underpasses a humanitarian disaster that belies our image as 2028 Olympics host.

And if you scroll the public health department’s log of COVID-19 outbreaks, you’ll see what amounts to a map of working-class LA, from a carpet manufacturer in the City of Industry to a tortilla factory in the City of Commerce.

To have the flexibility to retreat, to remain solvent with only a keyboard and Wi-Fi connection, is a luxury. Still, it doesn’t change how weird and disorienting LA has become for those who have spent this past year sheltering and distancing, growing shaggy and adding pounds. We feel woozy on our rare outings, as if we’re all blinking away the fog from our screen-addled eyes. We’re unmoored on the emptier roads, trying to recall familiar routes and decipher new traffic patterns. And we’re unprepared for the sensory dissonance: malls jammed, skyscrapers desolate, drive-thru lines endless, storefronts still boarded from a summer of racial reckoning and an autumn of political apprehension.

The stupefying effects of life in a city on hold finally caught up with me on a warm, clear, glorious December day: time to get out of the house. I proposed a hike in the San Gabriel

c itad e l o u t l et ma l l , s o u t h e a st l a

Mountains, where Altadena meets the forest.

It was a moderate 5-mile loop I’d trekked the previous holiday season with my son. This year he was homebound in New Orleans, so I guided my girlfriend’s son and his girlfriend — super fit young adults — up the trail, taking off at a brisk pace to show them I wasn’t as sluggish as I might have appeared.

About an hour in, the trail no longer recognizable, we came across a treacherously delicate chute of loose stone and parched earth that looked to be the only way forward. I can’t explain why we didn’t turn back from that rockslide — except that after living with so many barriers, I was loath to allow an obstacle to stymie our great

escape. Scrambling like goats, gripping fistfuls of needle-nosed agaves to hoist ourselves several hundred feet up the crumbling slope, we eventually made it to a steadier but steeper outcrop.

And there we remained frozen, hearts pounding and legs trembling, unable to go up or down.

I’d made a series of bad decisions, so it was time to make a good one. With the bit of cell service we could conjure, we called 911. A Los Angeles County Fire Department helicopter spent an hour probing the crags and arroyos before our heroic first responders spotted us waving like castaways on an escarpment. To my dismay, our predicament required a “hoist extraction” — the technical term for the shudder

of fear that comes from seeing a dude rappel from a chopper hovering maybe 40 feet overhead with plans to scoop you up and launch you skyward. As the blades engulfed us in a cyclone of debris, we were strapped one by one into a harness (appropriately labeled a “screamer suit”) and cinched to the dangling cable.

When my turn came, I couldn’t even look. I just told myself that it’d be over soon, that no matter how long I remained suspended midair, no matter how visceral my dread, this too shall pass. Maybe that is everyone right now — in ways less dramatic for some, more perilous for others — each of us waiting to exhale, hoping to get our footing back.

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THE

FOREVER FAMILY HOW THE NEW SCIENCE OF GENEALOGY IS HELPING THE LOST BECOME FOUND

BY LIBBY COPELAND

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W

hen i met Jason, he was in his late 40s and living in the Midwest. If it were up to him, his full name would be printed here; he is done with secrets. But this is his mother’s story, too, and Jason wants to respect her privacy.

Growing up, Jason was raised mostly by his grandparents, with his mom and a stepfather in and out of his life. His mom wouldn’t talk about who his biological father was — not when she came to his high school graduation, nor when he was getting married. He was too young to understand, she’d say, or now wasn’t a good time.

Jason was in his 30s, a father with two young kids, when he decided to ask again.

A relative had recently died, and it occurred to him his mother might pass away without ever revealing the mystery of his paternity. In the pre-genomic age, he was at the mercy of what she and any other secret-keepers were willing to tell him. So, he wrote his mom a letter and put some teeth to his request: He told her that if he did not hear back, he’d start asking around; he’d heard some cousins might know some things.

It worked.

His mother wrote back with a name but little else. “Here is what you wanted, sorry it took so long,” she wrote. “I would just as soon leave as is.”

But Jason could not leave as is. He wanted to know his father.

News outlets try to one-up each other in quantifying the hugeness of Ancestry’s database of genetic data.

It’s “the world’s largest collection of human spittle,” a news organization observed back when the company had a mere 9 million people in its database. Now some 19 million people have taken an AncestryDNA test — more than half of the 37 million spit-kits sold by the five major DNA testing companies put together.

The pace of the company’s growth is fairly astonishing: It debuted its autosomal DNA test in 2012, several years after 23andMe. Yet it long ago outpaced 23andMe in tests sold, and this last summer, the private equity giant Blackstone announced plans to acquire a majority stake in Ancestry in a deal worth a hefty $4.7 billion. Twenty years after the emergence of DNA testing for genealogical purposes, we have become a nation of seekers — people who spit and scour their results for meaning, trying to understand ourselves better by knowing who we came from. Ancestry, with its compelling ads promising to “unlock your past,” is leading the way.

More than a suite of services or products, however, in an age of estrangement Ancestry seems to be selling us a hope that we can fill our collective yearning to find our way home.

Meanwhile, Ancestry’s growing size and mission can’t help but draw 46 DESERET MAGAZINE

scrutiny, especially as it pivots toward offering genetic testing for disease risks, eyeing a lucrative, long-term plan for what it calls “personalized, preventive health.” A few months before I visited the company’s headquarters in Lehi, Utah, during the summer of 2018, the McClatchy newspaper chain ran a multipart series on AncestryDNA. One article was headlined “Ancestry wants your spit, your DNA and your trust. Should you give them all three?” The company’s entire operation — the DNA testing, the family trees, the incredible treasure trove of genealogical records — is built upon reams and reams of intimate data — information that tells the stories of people’s ancestral backgrounds and genetic traits, not to mention the sacrifices, triumphs and scandals of their ancestors.

There’s a tension inherent in being such a big company managing the genetic information of millions of people. There is a tension between the truth that we are all from the same human family, 99.5% genetically identical to one another, and the idea that our differences can be parsed into pie charts. There’s a tension between my right to spit into a vial and have its contents analyzed by a private company and the right of my brother or aunt or first cousin not to have their DNA information known. And, as I’ve seen in interviews and correspondence with hundreds of consumers over the last three years, there’s a tension, too, between the idea that we can send in our saliva to find connection with family even as the results that come back can cause serious family turmoil.

To understand these tensions, it helps to trace the family tree of how we got here. Ancestry, as we know it today, began with two companies coming together.

John Sittner founded a genealogical publishing company called Ancestry in Utah in 1983; it produced genealogical reference books, as well as the Ancestry newsletter, which later became a magazine. Meanwhile, in 1990, two entrepreneurs from Utah named Paul B. Allen and Daniel Taggart founded a company called Infobases to sell religious and educational texts, first on floppy disks and then on CD-ROM. In 1995, Allen and Taggart moved into genealogy, licensing some of Sittner’s reference books and packaging them with family tree software and other resources into something called the LDS Family History Suite (LDS stands for Latter-day Saint, as in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

More on that later).

The company made a million dollars in less than half a year.

Allen told me that this was a breakthrough moment for him: To be sure, Latter-day Saints were more interested in genealogy than the average American, but still, they made up just a tiny fraction of the U.S. population. What was the potential for the genealogy market if he could broaden his audience? Realizing they needed a genealogically oriented brand, Allen and Taggart started buying into Sittner’s company, eventually coming to own it outright.

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They launched Ancestry.com in 1996, offering genealogy hobbyists free access to the Social Security death index for their research needs. Allen started surveying online visitors to the site, asking them questions about what they’d spent on various genealogical endeavors over the course of a year. How much on reference books, family tree software, genealogical magazines, travel?

What about on postage and photocopies? When he crunched the numbers, he realized his average visitor was spending more than $500 a year on this hobby. “This is a multibillion-dollar industry and nobody’s noticed it yet,” Allen realized. “Why don’t we digitize everything they’re spending money on and make it possible to do it all through one subscription?”

And so they did.

Jason told himself he was acting out of a desire to know about his dad’s medical history. But there was more to it. What he wanted, he knows now, was something deeper. He felt a hole inside himself.

“Like a yearning,” he says.

He wrote a letter to the guy named in his mother’s letter, who lived a few hours away, and the man responded. They forged an arm’s-length father-son relationship.

The man told him he’d dated Jason’s mother in college and he knew she’d gotten pregnant, but she’d told him the baby wasn’t his. The man was kind and polite, but he did not welcome Jason into his life, nor tell his adult children that Jason existed. Instead, once or twice a year, they went golfing together.

Once or twice a year for over a decade.

Trying to fit this stranger into the role of genetic father, Jason looked for likenesses. He seized on the fact that they were both the same height, both even-tempered and reserved. But the man did not offer Jason the sense of warmth or belonging that he was longing for, and Jason could not help but feel a mixture of gratitude and loss.

Ancestry’s headquarters can’t be missed. When I visited it in 2018, the huge, gleaming, modern structure of two connecting buildings had only recently been completed at a cost of $35 million. It housed about half of the company’s 1,600 employees. The lobby windows looked out on two majestic mountain ranges. It had been difficult to get permission to tour.

Access to the building was tightly controlled, and visitors had to sign confidentiality agreements just to get past the lobby. To a visitor, Ancestry can seem almost omnipresent in the area. In addition to the headquarters, its customer service operation was 20 minutes away in Orem, while its team of professional genealogists, available for hire, were located 40 minutes away in Salt Lake City.

Once I was inside, I was met by Jennifer Utley, the company’s director of research and its longest tenured employee, who had been at Ancestry for over 20 years. When she started, the company had just established an internet presence, and Utley’s work was editing genealogy reference books and Ancestry magazine. Now, clocks on omnipresent video screens throughout the head48 DESERET MAGAZINE

quarters showed the current time in the company’s many offices throughout the world, including in San Francisco, Dublin, Munich and Sydney.

About 80 paid interns were eating in the cafeteria, just off the lobby, getting ready to do “speed dating” with executives so they could learn what it was like to work there. Utley took me upstairs, showing off artwork with a genomic theme: hanging pendant lamps inspired by the double strands of the DNA helix, and a massive, colorful bar graph representing the 15 principal biogeographical ancestries of 84 human populations.

Utley introduced me to two members of the content acquisitions team, who told me they travel all over North America to work with archival facilities, mainly at the state level, digitizing and indexing old records. In exchange for this, the company is given permission to place the records on its website so that its millions of paying subscribers can access them.

Allen, who left the company in the early 2000s, told me that one way to think about the brilliance of Ancestry’s model is to frame its genealogical product as the opposite of breaking news. “The value of the records increases over time; they don’t decrease over time,” he said. “Every year that goes by, more people are entering middle age, where they start to be interested in genealogy, and then they have children and grandchildren.” This means the birth record of a single ancestor from 1850, for instance, “is of interest to more people every year just because of aging and population growth.”

Utley showed me a cubicle where several different versions of the company’s DNA kit were displayed, customized for the more than 30 countries in which they were being sold. DNA testing at Ancestry works hand in hand with the rest of its business. If you spit into a tube, you’ll get your ethnicity estimate and relative matches, but only with a subscription will you gain access to most of your matches’ public family trees, or to genealogical records that might help you figure out where your mysterious Italian heritage is coming from.

And what’s more, sales beget sales.

AncestryDNA becomes a more appealing place to test as its database of customers grows, because people are more likely to find close genetic relatives there. We walked over to the area housing Utley’s own unit, which was responsible for researching and publicizing the genealogical discoveries made possible by the company’s resources. It was Utley’s team that uncovered that Emma Watson, who played the witch Hermione in the “Harry Potter” films, was in real life distantly connected to a woman convicted of witchcraft in 1592, and that Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Sherlock Holmes on TV, was very-very-slightly related to the author of the “Holmes” series, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. If you’re willing to extend the definition of “relative” far enough, the world of genealogy is full of kismet like this.

As we walked, Utley pointed out people who’d worked at the company for a decade or more. She told me she loved her work for the sense of mission it gave her. She said she felt like she was doing more than selling a mere product; she was changing people’s lives.

The idea of genealogy as a grander mission was a theme I heard a lot when I was in Utah, particularly when I drove to Salt Lake City, half an hour north of Ancestry’s headquarters, to examine one of the other major forces

behind the rise of our national obsession with family history. I went where so many modern-day seekers go in their quest to make sense of the present by examining the past. I went to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Family History Library.

“The greatest responsibility in this world that God has laid upon us is to seek after our own dead,” Joseph Smith, the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said shortly before his own death in 1844. The prophet experienced his first religious vision at the age of 14 on his family’s farm in western New York and founded a faith that eventually immigrated to Utah.

Smith was aware that the young religion had a problem when it came to the souls of loved ones who’d died before it was established: How could these people (including Smith’s own deceased older brother) be saved if they’d never had the chance to accept Jesus Christ’s restored gospel?

Smith had a vision in which the Lord told him that death was no barrier to salvation for the soul of a person who would have received it while alive.

After that, he preached the doctrine of vicarious baptism for the dead (being baptized in place of one’s ancestor). In fact, church members came to believe that a series of practices were necessary for the fullness of salvation, and that it was a sacred duty to perform them on behalf of their ancestors.

By extension, then, genealogy became a kind of religious rite.

This helps explain the enormous resources The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has poured into the gathering and dissemination of old family records. In more recent decades, the personal computer and the internet, of course, made family history research easier and far more accessible to the average American, as well as an increasingly big business.

But FamilySearch is not a business. It’s the church’s massive nonprofit genealogical arm — free to everyone and dedicated to the idea that we’re all better off if we know our ancestors. Across the world, it maintains more than 5,000 family history centers, what journalist Christine Kenneally calls a “sacred municipal library system.”

In the Bible, there’s a line stating that before the “great and dreadful day of the Lord” God will turn “the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers,” lest the earth be smitten “with a curse.” In one of Joseph Smith’s early visions, he said an angel recited those lines, but instead of mentioning the curse, the messenger ended: “if it were not so, the whole earth would be utterly wasted.”

Church members are not shy about citing this story, and its website FamilySearch.org aims to help you and me search more than 5 billion records to help turn our hearts. But there are some things you can find only in person at the church’s Family History Library, which is the biggest genealogical research facility in the world.

The place is astonishing. Inside, different floors house regions of the world. There are records from more than 120 countries, in more than 170 languages, including the largest collection of Chinese genealogies outside mainland China. There are hand-drawn pedigree charts from the Polynesian state of Tonga, and old and historical books with names like “Rural Cemeteries, New Canaan, Connecticut.”

Prior to COVID-19, seekers would line up outside before the Family History Library opens at 8 a.m. They had dolly carts and heavy bags filled with family photographs and document files. Paul Nauta, the library’s PR

director, calls these the homesteaders, for the way they set up camp at particular computers and squat all day. They may be hobbyists or pros; they may travel as groups of genealogical societies, the better to swap stories and resources. Like modern pilgrims, they may come from far away — Canada, France, England, New Zealand, all over the United States — and park at the library for a full week. Sometimes, people planning to do just a little research stay far longer than they meant to, as if they fall into some kind of wormhole that alters time.

This place can do that to you.

It’s no coincidence that the church’s Family History wing and Ancestry are located in the same state. Even though the organizations have different motives — one pursues profits, whereas the other sees its work as a godly endeavor — they often team up, though they have no official financial relationship. Nauta described this as a necessity to collect and catalog the countless bits of information we human beings are forever churning out about ourselves — an effort without end. “Even collectively, we can’t do it all,” he said.

This revolution of information about the dead is breathtaking and makes you think about all the ways we’re giving up our privacy not only in this life but in the hereafter. Nauta told me he was bullish on the amount of information we citizens of the internet share online — he figured it would make the lives of future genealogists so much easier. “Can you imagine having just a week’s worth of Pinterest posts from your grandma?” he asked. I shuddered inwardly, thinking of all the things I’d posted on social media over the years.

But the concept of privacy has radically changed for all of us, even over the last decade, from what we share online to how faithfully our movements and shopping habits are tracked by corporations, to, yes, the very secrets of the genetic material curled into chromosomes in the center of our cells.

Why should the privacy of the dead be any different?

Members of the church I spoke with at the library had a profound sense of connectedness to the past. The 19th-century notion of knowing one’s ancestors as a moral endeavor was alive in them. But that yearning isn’t unique to Latter-day Saints, especially these days, when technology has made the lives of our forebears so much more accessible. Nauta observed that DNA testing has lowered the age of people interested in family research and has brought in new seekers through a different door — people who tested first and then became interested in genealogy.

That was the case for me. I’d tested at 23andMe in 2017, after my dad gave me a kit for the holidays, as so many Americans do these days. The test made the past — previously a kind of black box to me — seem closer and more relevant than it ever had before. In short order, my family was connecting to relatives we’d never known existed, relatives who, in a few cases, held the keys to better understanding some of my forebears three and four generations back. We wound up taking a trip to Sweden to meet some of my newly discovered relatives, see the place where my dad’s grandmother had grown up, and understand the poverty and familial instability that no doubt contributed to her decision to emigrate to America at the age of 16. This decision led, of course, to the existence of all of us.

This context for her life and mine was like a gift.

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Jason’s questions about the past were far more pressing than the casual curiosity that prompted me to take a DNA test. His understanding of his father’s identity was deeply meaningful to his own. He told me later that his tepid relationship rooted in an occasional golf outing was what eventually drove him to do a DNA test, in hopes that scientific proof would actually help improve his relationship with his dad. He wanted to be claimed by this man; he wanted to stop feeling like a secret.

So, at the urging of a genealogist friend, Jason bought an AncestryDNA test.

That’s how Jason discovered he had the wrong guy all along.

His purported father wasn’t in the database, but that didn’t matter.

Jason’s genealogist friend came over and, looking at Jason’s list of genetic relatives, swiftly traced Jason into a totally different family, as the likely son of one of three brothers. In my reporting, I encountered a number of stories like Jason’s, stories in which mothers would not or could not talk to their children about how they’d come into the world.

Perhaps they did not know who the father was — and how could they tell their children that?

Perhaps the circumstances surrounding the conception had been traumatic, had involved coercion or violence. The questions brought back shame or anger or an experience too private to share. They brought back a world in which a pregnant teenager was whispered about and shunned.

DNA testing brings old taboos to the fore, secrets that are like the proverbial snowball rolling down the hill, getting bigger and heavier with each passing day. They often pit an adult child’s desires to know the truth about his or her genetic origins against the privacy interests of parents, prompting fraught conversations and, sometimes, rifts within families. These are either the costs of undoing a secret or they are the costs of the secret itself.

DNA testing is the messenger about truths long obscured.

Only later did Jason look back and see how, in his long relationship with the man who was not his father, he’d been forcing the facts to fit a narrative. He had searched for resemblances between them. It was a testament, he realized later, to how badly he wanted this kinship.

“You’re going to find commonalities with anybody,” he says. In one sense, then, Jason’s account is a rebuttal to those who believe that DNA testing emphasizes genetic ties over other family bonds. After all, Jason found value in what he thought was a biological bond long before he could prove it with a test. Consumer genomics simply told him he was wrong.

When Jason handed the man a letter at their next golfing session, 12 years into the relationship, he watched his would-be father’s face move through shock and confusion. The man looked up. He told Jason that he was relieved. For 12 years he’d carried the guilt of believing he’d unknowingly abandoned a child. Now he knew he had not. And he said he was sad — “Anyone would be proud to have you as a kid,” he told Jason, who cried when he repeated these words to me.

The man’s words were balm to the sense of shame Jason had felt since he was a child. Jason went home and once again wrote a letter, with three copies for three brothers, informing them that one of them was his father. The letter had ripple effects — one brother said his wife had learned about it, and it was causing problems in his marriage — but it turned out to be a different brother who claimed Jason.

When, at last, Jason met this man at a restaurant, he did not need to search for resemblances.

The man’s eyes were “like looking into a mirror.” The man was warm, gregarious, funny. They sat and talked for hours. The man had asked Jason for an old photo of his mom, and he recalled knowing her briefly. He told Jason he already knew they were father and son, though he agreed to do the paternity test Jason picked up at Walgreens. They sat in an SUV outside a post office and swabbed their cheeks together, then sent it off.

Within a week, the test confirmed their relationship. Suddenly, Jason had a whole brood of brothers and sisters, several of whom lived nearby, and they all got in touch to tell him how happy they were to meet him.

That first Christmas, Jason’s new family insisted he and his wife and kids join them, and it was the beginning of holidays together, and summer weekends, and talking on the phone, and visits to see one another’s kids’ in their plays and recitals.

Jason’s wife told me Jason had changed in the years since finding his father. He had become a more confident person. The hole was filled.

Jason’s story isn’t necessarily typical — revelations about old family secrets can just as often lead to family fissures, rejections and fraught relationships. One man I know of deleted his genetic information from a database rather than acknowledge his relationship to a biological daughter; another involved his attorney in telling his adult child to cease contacting him. But Jason’s experience is a hopeful example of what can happen when things go right, and it is what seekers looking for their genetic kin dream of. It is the dream of being accepted, of belonging, of being able to incorporate into one’s life both kinds of family — the relatives a person was raised with and the relatives a person discovers well into adulthood because of a DNA test.

In the hundreds of interviews and conversations I’ve had with people who discovered something unexpected about themselves through a test, the overwhelming majority were grateful for that truth, even when the circumstances were painful, simply because they had the truth at last. And this search for self through better understanding of the past, of one’s genetic inheritance and one’s living kin, is a large part of what powers the industry of recreational genomics, not to mention the seekers who line up early outside the Family History Library, or subscribe to Ancestry’s vast stores of genealogical archives. Privacy concerns can seem far off and abstract compared to the immediate reward that knowledge about one’s biological origins can give.

“My wife said it was a dream come true, and it was — being welcomed,” Jason told me, thinking back to that first Christmas and starting to cry again. “And nobody was ashamed, and everybody was happy, and it was a great thing. note: Portions of this essay were adapted from Libby Copeland’s book “The Lost Family: How DNA Testing is Upending Who We Are,” which is released in paperback this month.

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BY ETHAN BAUER PHOTOGRAPHY BY WESTON COLTON

STANDING IN THE SHADOW OF

ZION RANCHING, RODEO AND A GENERATIONAL FAMILY’S STRUGGLE TO MAINTAIN ITS WESTERN WAY OF LIFE

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RIGHT: BILL WRIGHT, 66, IS PART OF A FAMILY THAT HAS GRAZED CATTLE ON SMITH MESA FOR SEVEN GENERATIONS. NOW, THE FAMILY IS TURNING TO TOURISM, TOO.

ALONG A STEEP, DUSTY PATH, Bill Wright reaches a flat enclave

of red dirt and scattered rock. In the distance, soaring sandstone walls jut into the glowing evening sky. Up here, among the pinyon pines and sage, it’s quiet. Serene. Almost eerily so.

On a clear day, the horizon stretches some 60 miles south, all the way into Arizona. Bill’s pretty proud of that — and rarely misses a chance to say so. “I still love the scenery and the beauty,” he says, looking out into the arid Eden stretched before him. “I get more attached to it the older I get.”

Bill, now 66, calls this the best view in Utah. It draws him back again and again. He often comes up here with tourists on horseback. And when time allows, he comes up alone. It’s this spot — among the thousands of acres he grazes cattle on Smith Mesa, along the western border of Zion National Park — where he hopes, one faraway day, to be buried.

What gives this place its siren song, even though he’s been up here hundreds of times before? “Oh, I don’t know,” he says. That’s his preferred way to start any answer to any question, his voice deep and syrupy. “Some people don’t understand why I love to be alone out here so much.” But the peace, the silence — he’s known them since he was a boy, since he started coming out here with his dad.

The view from here doesn’t change. At least it hasn’t yet. The Pine Valley Mountains tower above 10,000 feet to the west. In the east, the jagged cliffs of Zion rise over a grassy, golden valley, as they always have. Bill’s dad, Cal, homesteaded just southeast of here. His grandpa Wright homesteaded to the northwest. And his great-great-grandpa, Joseph Wright, homesteaded 10 miles away in what’s now called the Wright Meadows in the 1800s. He was the first of Bill’s pioneer ancestors to call this area, tucked under the sheer 2,000-foot red-rock formations of the Kolob Canyons, home. Six generations later, the family is still here. Bill quietly hopes that his grandkids will be the seventh.

If they choose to be, that is. And if a whirlwind of evolving legislation, a transforming economy and a changing culture allows them to be. Like many families across the rural West, the Wrights are trying to hold on to an increasingly rare way of life — and a family ranch — as American progress presses on.

Smith Mesa might not stay in the family much longer. Developers and conservationists make regular offers. Signs crowd the winding road from the I-15 exit at Toquerville to nearby Virgin, advertising hundreds of acres for sale. And tourism seems poised to replace agriculture as the area’s dominant financial force, if it hasn’t already. “When I was a kid, you’d come up here for six weeks and wouldn’t see anybody,” Bill says. “Now, you can probably see 30 to 100 outfits per day in late spring.”

Bill has the best view of Utah and of these clashing forces. The ceaseless tide of development and the traditions of his family ranch battle and tug at him from beneath his brown boots. To think, just 50 years ago, he flirted with going a different direction.

THE FIRST FAMILY OF RODEO Back in the ’70s, Bill nearly pursued a career as a rodeo cowboy. He won a few local contests in his teenage years. In fact, a belt buckle he still wears every day came from an all-around title he won at a high school competition. Right around the time that he and his wife, Evelyn, lifelong Latter-day Saints, were sealed in the Manti temple in 1973, he had saved $4,000 to pursue a full-time rodeo life. Then Evelyn came down with appendicitis, and he spent half of it on her treatment. With his savings drained, he had to choose ranching or rodeo. Ranching was what he knew, and what he chose — even if it contributed to the bills more than it paid them.

Since then, he’s supplemented ranching by breaking horses and pouring concrete, among other odd jobs, while Evelyn, now 64, works as an elementary school teacher. Her job has given their large family access to insurance — which they’ve needed since their sons picked up the sport that Bill left behind. Evelyn and Bill’s oldest son, Cody, discovered Bill’s old rodeo saddles and inherited his fascination, starting with Little Britches Rodeo in the mid-’80s. Cody stuck with it and became the first in a long line of Wrights to make careers of competitive cowboying.

Inside Bill and Evelyn’s home, framed newspaper and magazine clippings exploit every pun of the family name imaginable — “Wright Stuff,” “Wright Place and Time,” “Wrighteous Win” — and posters of all the boys in their chap-covered denim decorate the hallway. It feels more like a shrine than a dwelling. Bill even has a practice arena out back, an oval of chain-link fence held up by rusted white poles.

The practice arena is mere steps from the local hospital, for good reason.

Cody now has metal rods in both his legs.

His youngest brother, Stuart, has been airlifted to the hospital twice. And Cody’s oldest son, Rusty, can hardly choose his worst injury. He recalls the bull that stomped on his chest as a high school freshman, the collapsed lung, the punctured lung, the broken sternum, and the “bunch of ” fractured limbs before finally settling on the compound fracture he suffered in 2016. That one happened when his foot got caught between his butt and his saddle, and his lower left leg snapped and folded over, foot-to-knee. That one hurt his wallet just as much as his leg. To make a living, rodeo cowboys need to compete. There are no salaries in pro rodeo — only prize money.

The goal for any rodeo cowboy is to make enough money over the course of the season to rank among the top 15 in a given event, which earns them an invite to the annual National Finals Rodeo. The NFR is a 10-day event with a high-paying rodeo each night. If a cowboy makes it there, he can multiply his yearly winnings several times over with a few good rides.

For example, the 15th-ranked saddle bronc rider entered the 2020 NFR with $52,303 in regular-season earnings. One first-place finish at the NFR would earn him $26,231. The cowboy who ends the year with the most money in each event wins a gold buckle.

Prize money is what the Wrights do best. Cody won his first saddle

THE VIEW FROM HERE

DOESN’T CHANGE.

AT LEAST IT HASN’T YET.

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PREVIOUS PAGE LEFT: FROM THE ZION WRIGHT FAMILY RANCH, THE CLIFFS OF ZION JUT INTO VIEW IN THE WEST. THE RANCH IS LOCATED JUST EAST OF THE PARK. PREVIOUS PAGE RIGHT: CODY WRIGHT, 43, WAS THE FIRST WRIGHT TO WIN THE WORLD SADDLE BRONC TITLE. HE’S USED HIS RODEO WINNINGS TO INVEST IN THE HERD, OF WHICH HE OWNS HALF. RIGHT: BILL WRIGHT TRAVELS DOWN THE DRY WASH ROAD ABOUT ONCE A WEEK, USUALLY BY HORSE, BUT SOMETIMES BY TRUCK.

bronc gold in 2008, then again in 2010. His success allowed him to invest in the ranch. He now owns about half of the herd. That’s taken some pressure off Bill, who’d endured some rough years on the ranch before Cody came on board. Another of Bill’s sons, Jesse, won in 2012, and another — Spencer — won in 2014. Bill’s grandson, Ryder, catapulted the next generation of Wrights into the spotlight by winning in 2017, and Ryder’s brother, Stetson, followed him by winning the 2019 all-around cowboy award — rodeo’s top prize — given to the cowboy with the most earnings across multiple events. But so far, they’ve invested their earnings elsewhere.

Today, the Wrights are the most decorated saddle bronc-riding family in the world. Their triumphs have landed them an appearance on “60 Minutes,” a book by Pultizer-winning New York Times writer John Branch, and more prizes and buckles than they could possibly count. That success makes the Wrights better situated than most family ranches in the West, but better is relative.

Bill still worries about losing what has long kept his family rooted here to forces he can’t control.

Family farms are dying, and have been dying for a long time. American agricultural infrastructure has shifted toward commercial, large-scale farms, which drive down prices for consumers while driving smaller operations like Bill’s out of business. The economics just don’t add up as they once did, leaving families scrambling to hold onto whatever pieces of their careers, their cultures and their sense of self they can grab. Rodeo, as a competitive mirror of ranching tasks, is one option. And for the Wrights, it’s been a lifeline. “Rodeo’s been important,” Bill says, “for them guys to keep up that lifestyle.” The 2020 NFR illustrates just how important.

to place it and secure it just tight enough. All three wear the same blue snap-button shirts they always compete in. Perhaps the blue snap-button shirts are a result of Wright family superstition. It’s more likely that they are simply — like much else — tradition.

Stetson opens with a 91 out of 100 in saddle bronc. He’d already had the all-around title just about locked up, but his score punctuates his dominance. Bill, still at his spot along the fence, hardly moves. Rusty finishes with an 86.5, good for fourth in the world saddle bronc standings. Ryder’s up last. He just needs to stay on, avoid disqualification, and he’ll cruise to another saddle bronc title. With his left hand on the chute and his blue eyes tucked under the brim of his hat, he mouths the go-ahead and completes a masterful eight-second ride. His 91-point score ties with Stetson as the round winner, and he’s still panting to catch his breath during his postride interview. His final earnings total $320,984.16, good for the saddle bronc title. Down the rightfield line, Bill uncrosses, then recrosses his legs.

About an hour later, Stetson mounts his bull.

Eight second later, he hits the clay, stumbles, pops right back up, stretches his arms wide, and points toward the crowd. His 89 squeaks out the win in bull riding by just over $12,000, giving him two gold buckles and prompting the Cowboy Channel announcers to call him the brightest young star in pro rodeo. Bill watches the awards with Rusty. Finally, he claps.

Down in the right-field bullpen, the contestants gather for photos with their winning buckles and saddles. Most of the crowd is gone, save for a handful tossing programs and hats at the competitors for autographs. The official photographer requests a family photo of the Wrights, so all 28 of them crowd into the camera’s lens. They spill outside the pair of gray sheets that are hanging as a background, jostling for position and trying to make sure everyone can crowd in without spilling over the sides of the makeshift background. They can’t. “We’ll just get three backgrounds next time,” the photographer jokes.

It’s moments like these when it all seems to work, when it feels like their Western lifestyle will endure forever. But even the family’s rodeo success isn’t an antidote to the larger forces working against them — and families like them — in the rural West. Few are as elite as the Wrights, and top-level success is difficult to sustain in a decidedly unforgiving sport.

Yes, rodeo helps preserve the culture, but what good is that if the culture it’s preserving vanishes into nothing but a Western trope? “By embracing rodeo without embracing the realities of ranching, we’re printing the legend,” Paul Starrs, distinguished professor of geography emeritus at the University of Nevada, Reno, says. “And we’re not paying attention to the day-in and day-out, year-in and year-out, decade-in, decade-out ups and downs of livestock ranching.”

“IT’D BE TOUGH TO

LEAVE. THE ONLY CONSOLING THING WOULD BE WE’D

FEEL LIKE WE’RE

BETTERIN’

OURSELVES.”

BULLS ON A BASEBALL DIAMOND Dust fills Globe Life Field and fogs the lights as Stetson Wright emerges from the locker room. He’s one among three of Bill’s grandkids competing tonight. Because of the pandemic, the 2020 NFR relocated from Las Vegas to Arlington, Texas, at the home of MLB’s Texas Rangers. Stetson’s spurs jingle as he stomps through the curdled orange clay in what would normally be left field, his eyes invisible beneath the brim of his black hat.

Tonight, he could win his second all-around cowboy award as well as his first bull riding title. His brother, Ryder, is on the verge of his second saddle bronc world title. And their brother Rusty is also competing; he can’t win a buckle, but a good ride could mean another $26,231. Here to watch is their grandpa Bill, who stands along the right field line, where he’s stationed as a gate attendant. His pose — legs crossed, arms crossed, leaning on the fence — rarely changes, and he almost never claps. “You’ve gotta smile out one side of your face,” he says. “And cry out the other.” Translation: No matter what happens, you can’t get too high or too low.

With their eight-second opportunities approaching, the three Wright boys begin working on their saddles. Their teams resemble NASCAR pit crews. They secure the “flank rope” — a strap that runs under the horse’s abdomen and makes the horse uncomfortable, causing it to buck more vigorously. All three adjust buckles and tweak the saddle location, trying 58 DESERET MAGAZINE

BIG GOVERNMENT, SMALL RANCHES A few days later, back at Smith Mesa, Bill’s white GMC truck hums down a graded ribbon of uneven dirt that cuts through brush and rock. He calls it the dry wash road. Part of the reason Bill hasn’t seriously considered selling

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PREVIOUS PAGE: CODY WRIGHT, 43, IS SEMIRETIRED FROM RODEO AND SPENDS HIS DAYS WORKING THE RANCH OR TRAINING CATTLE DOGS. THREE OF HIS FIVE KIDS COMPETE IN RODEO PROFESSIONALLY. HIS SON RYDER IS A TWO-TIME SADDLE BRONC WORLD CHAMPION, AND HIS SON STETSON HAS TWICE WON THE ALL-AROUND COWBOY TITLE, THE HIGHEST HONOR IN RODEO.

they allowed livestock ranchers, at the very start of the 20th century, to is because he’s worried, given the land’s proximity to a national park and use public lands,” Starrs says. “A lot of those public lands were pretty badly various conservation agreements, that he’d unwittingly get dragged into a abused by ranching. They basically grazed it to the nub.” Which is why lawsuit and lose whatever money he’d gain in the sale. He’s always said he’d nowadays, the federal government only allows a certain amount of grazing only sell if the family would be better off in the aftermath, but that’s more on a certain amount of land — to prevent complete environmental desubjective than he’d like it to be. How does one weigh the memories of the struction. But this creates a fundamental tension, Starrs says. If we know past against the promise of the future? “It’d be tough (to leave),” he admits. grazing is a bad use for the land, why does it continue? On the other hand, “The only consoling thing would be we’d feel like we’re betterin’ ourselves.” how can you take away land given to ranchers more than 100 years ago?

Some of the family’s operation has already shifted away from Smith And where does giving land back to Native American tribes fit into all of it?

Mesa. Branding day — a de-facto family reunion held every Memorial Bears Ears, an undeveloped swath of public lands in southeastern Utah Day — used to take place at Smith Mesa. Now it happens up in Beaver, surrounding a towering pair of buttes that resemble bear ears, was deswhere the herd of 200 to 270, depending on the time of year, spends the ignated as Bears Ears National Monument by former President Barack summer. Traditions, lifestyles, cultures — better to preserve them than Obama in 2016. The designation pleased environmental groups by offerland, Bill says. But that doesn’t make the prospect of leaving any easier. ing extra protection for the land, but it worried local ranchers. The desigThe truck bounces and bobs along the bumpy road, the chassis nation of a national monument under the 1906 Antiquities Act gives the squeaking as the front dips into a small hole. “Oooh-wee,” Bill says. His president the power to ban grazing. It rarely happens (grazing remained in great-great-grandfather, he explains, ranched cattle along this very same place at Bears Ears), but more federal oversight is a non-starter for ranchroad. The herd is spread across 20,000 acres in this area. But only about ers who’ve grazed the land for decades, and they fought back. Less than 1,200 acres actually belong to the Wrights. Everything else is public lands, a year later, former President Donald Trump loaned to Bill for grazing via a mix of federal and reduced the size of the national monument state leases. This kind of arrangement is comby 85%. And President Joe Biden, on his first mon for Western ranchers, and government day in office, began the process of reassessing lease prices are generally fair. But the land isn’t the boundaries of Bears Ears once more. The theirs, so ranchers live with the possibility of the ongoing controversy raises the heart of the degovernment refusing to renew their leases, or debate: Who should control public lands? Ranchcreasing their allowed herd numbers because of ers, on one hand, can’t sustain their livelihoods drought or conflict with an endangered species. without them since the West is largely federal “One of the things ranchers hate, more than anyproperty. On the other hand, public lands are thing else,” Starrs says, “is unexpected change.” supposed to belong to everyone and reflect The federal government owns large swaths what Wallace Stegner called the “geography of Western states. In fact, the government owns RANCHING DOESN’T of hope” — the unspoiled condition through more than half of all the land in Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Alaska and Oregon. The idea of westPAY FOR RANCHING.” which wilderness rejuvenates and inspires.

“Laws have reflected the values of all Amerward expansion became ingrained in the time of icans — not just those few Americans whose Thomas Jefferson. Conquest, Native American great-great grandfather happened to have settled here,” says Tom Butine, displacement and — eventually — agreements like the Louisiana Purboard president of Conserve southwest Utah, “and taken the land away chase and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo created a “new frontier” that from Native Americans.” the government enticed white Americans to settle under the banner of The push to make Bears Ears into a national monument started with Manifest Destiny. The Homestead Act, passed in 1862, offered 160 acres Native American tribal leaders seeking to protect their ancestral homeof government land to anyone who promised to either settle or cultivate land, rich in archaeology and history, from damage by settlers. Bill’s ancesit. But in the arid, mountainous West, a lot of land isn’t suitable for farmtors homesteaded on land most recently occupied by the Southern Paiute ing or settlement — which left it unclaimed and under federal control. tribe, which was nearly wiped out by 1880 due in large part to interaction Some, however, made use of it by grazing their cattle in the wide-open with pioneer settlers. The tribe has regained a foothold in recent years, spaces. But despite its reputation as a ranching paradise, the American though, and perhaps someday its leaders will stake a similar claim to the West actually isn’t very suitable for grazing, either. “The land is so marginland around Zion. Or perhaps the federal government will decide to exal,” says Starrs, who adds that the Southeast actually has the best climate pand the borders of Zion National Park and push Bill out. for ranching. “In Florida, you can graze a dozen cows and calves on an acre of land, pretty much year-round. In eastern Nevada, it’s not uncommon ZION WRIGHT FAMILY RANCH, OPEN FOR BUSINESS to need 640 acres to graze one cow and one calf year-round. So the ratio Bill continues down the dry wash road. He approaches a cliff ’s edge and of productivity in Florida versus eastern Nevada is tremendous.” peers out the window toward the canyon below. “We gotta get some rain Despite the delicate ecosystem’s natural inability to support livestock, or snow,” he mutters. It’s the driest stretch he can remember. Less water these canyons and desert plains were once a rancher’s paradise — in terms means Bill must spend money to supplement his cattle’s consumption. It of lagging oversight. “They were pretty profligate about the ways in which

“THERE’S A LOT THAT COMES WITH BEING A RANCHER TODAY AND YOU’VE GOT TO HAVE

MONEY FOR IT.

MARCH 2021 63

RIGHT: BY ADDING HORSEBACK TOURS AND CAMPSITE RENTALS, BILL’S NEARLY DOUBLED HIS INCOME. “IT’S CHANGED THINGS,” HE SAYS. “I’VE PROBABLY DONE AS WELL ON THAT AS I HAVE ON MY COWS.”

also throws off birth rates, making the herd’s numbers less predictable.

And that’s on top of the economic forces already squeezing him out. “The number of livestock ranchers — whether it’s cattle, sheep or whatever — is down,” Starrs says. “The third son and the fourth daughter are not interested in ranching, and neither are the first and second and third.”

Indeed, small family farms — those that make less than $350,000 in yearly revenue — accounted for 89.6% of all American farms in 2019, per the USDA, but only 21.5% of production. Large family farms — those that make over $1 million annually — and commercial farms, meanwhile, accounted for only 5.1% of farms, yet 57.4% of production. As farming and agriculture have modernized and moved toward new technology and increased efficiency, smaller operations can’t keep up. Cattle ranchers also have more competition from cheap foreign beef flooding the market largely unabated, leading to (fruitless, so far) campaigns to require country-of-origin labeling. And with financial opportunity beckoning elsewhere, the kids of the Wright family have followed the money.

Running the family ranch once offered a chance to make a stable living using skills passed down from parents to children. But now, the economics no longer make sense — especially for a small-scale operation like the Wrights’ combined with their large family.

Bill and Evelyn have 13 kids, 42 grandkids and 15 great grandkids. Their oldest, Selinda, was a prison guard with a criminal justice degree who planned to become a lawyer until health problems sent her off course. Cody did rodeo, invested in the ranch, and trains competitive cattle dogs. Laurelee is a dental hygienist in St. George. Calvin shoes and breaks horses as a ranch hand for families all over southwest Utah. Monica is a custodian. Michaela teaches kindergarten. Alex used to ride broncs and pour concrete but now works for his wife’s family’s ranch up in Oregon. Jake recently bought a hog farm near Milford.

Jesse worked on an oil rig; now he rides broncs and does construction for his father-in-law. Spencer rides broncs, pours concrete and does leatherwork. Kathryn, who lives in Montana, is also a dental hygienist. Becca is into photography and works at a day care. And their youngest, Stuart, is on his way to becoming a nurse. Twelve out of the 13 went to college in search of economic opportunity and independence that can’t be found working the family ranch. “I didn’t really feel that our family’s ranch is gonna be a long-sustaining thing,” Stuart says. “With as many people as we have, there’s not enough room for everybody.”

Heck, hardly for anybody. Which is why Stuart thinks his best path to preserve his Western way of life — an important goal to him — is through a nurse’s salary. “I do wanna have my own property where I can have my own horses and a little bit of cattle,” he says. “Me and my wife decided we wanted to go into nursing because it pays for the lifestyle. ... There’s just a lot that is entailed with being a rancher now, and you’ve gotta have money for it. Ranching honestly doesn’t pay for ranching.”

Stuart is a bit of a trailblazer in the family. Not only did he look to ed-

ucation over rodeo or ranching; he was also the only of Bill and Evelyn’s children to serve a mission — two years in Ghana. “I knew school had to come first,” he says, “and the same with my service to the Lord.” Bill also serves a mission of sorts. A recovering alcoholic, he’s a group leader for a 12-step recovery program at his ward. Been doing that for three years. He admits he’s strayed from his godly obligations at times during his life, but he’s proud to say he’s found his way back thanks to his family. They’re always around to help, he says, with religion, ranching or anything else. “It’s kinda like having Christ in your life,” his son Calvin observes. “There’s always someone right there.”

For now, though, finding a Wright willing to take on the next generation of the ranching responsibilities hasn’t been a problem. Yes, many have left in search of making their own way, and yes, some aren’t interested. But enough are to keep things humming as Bill tries to usher the ranch into the future.

“The Wright family is … just a perfect example of this: They’ve diversified,” Starrs says. “They realized that just raising cattle would work for some really big operations, but very few of them.”

In 2018, Bill opened Smith Mesa as a tourism business venture. At Zion Wright Family Ranch, $35 buys a night of camping in the grassy meadows and $99 gets you two hours of horseback riding guided by Bill himself. It’s a somewhat crude addition — the signs welcoming visitors are hand-painted in white on plywood, with Bill’s personal cell number sketched onto the sign just outside the horse corral. But out here, the crudeness adds to the charm, and the new venture has been a major boost. “It’s changed things,” Bill says. “I’ve probably done as well on that as I have on my cows.”

Due to the pandemic, 2020 in particular was a boon. Business tripled. But many of Bill’s clients come from California, and when California locked down, business nearly collapsed.

That’s one reason why he’s not eager to turn Smith Mesa into a dude ranch. Cattle, he’s long believed, are more reliable than people.

“BY EMBRACING RODEO WITHOUT EMBRACING THE REALITIES OF RANCHING,WE’RE

PRINTING THE

LEGEND.”

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WHERE TO NEXT? Not far from the “best view in Utah” is a place Bill calls Lee’s Lookout.

Legend has it that John D. Lee, of Mountain Meadows Massacre infamy, hid out nearby while authorities searched for him. He’d climb up to this lookout every day, Bill explains, to scan the horizon for the law’s approach.

Bill loves to talk about the legends of his Latter-day Saint heritage, of “Ol’ Porter” and “Ol’ Brigham.” He hopes future generations of Wrights will, too. The question is whether tradition alone will be enough to weather the forces of development, conservation, tourism and finance converging at Smith Mesa.

Bill’s no prophet. He can’t say what’ll happen next. He can’t say what’ll become of this breathtaking landscape. And he surely can’t say if the family ranch will live on past him, though he surely hopes it does. There’s a reason he often answers questions by starting with “I don’t know” — he doesn’t.

No one does.

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IDEAS

THE SILENCED MAJORITY IN RED AMERICA AND BLUE AMERICA, AN EPIDEMIC OF SELF-CENSORSHIP IS THREATENING DEMOCRACY

BY B A RI W EISS

I

“Self-censorship is the norm, not the exception,” a student at one of know a lot of people who live in fear of saying what they really think. the top law schools in the country wrote from his personal email beIn red America and in blue America — and, perhaps more so, on the cause he was worried about sending it from his official school account. red internet and the blue internet — we are in the grip of an epidemic of “I self-censor even when talking to some of my best friends for fear of self-silencing. What you censor, of course, depends on where you sit. word getting around.” Practically all of the faculty subscribe to the same My liberal friends who live in red America confess to avoiding discusideology, the student went on. And so, he confessed, “I try to write exam sions of masks, Dominion, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, the 2020 election and answers that mirror their world view rather than presenting the best Donald Trump, to name just a few. When those who disagree with the surarguments I see.” rounding majority speak their mind, they suffer the consequences. I think We live in the freest society in the history of the world. There is no guof my friend, the conservative writer David French, who for four years lag here, as there was in the Soviet Union. There is no formal social credit endured an avalanche of horrific attacks against himself and his family for system, as there is today in China. And yet the words that we associate criticizing the Trump administration that ultimately required the interwith closed societies — dissidents, double thinkers, vention of the FBI. blacklists — are exactly the ones that come to mind But there are two illiberal cultures swallowing up when I read the notes above. the country. I know because I live in blue America, The liberal worldview that we took for granted in in a world awash in NPR tote bags and front lawn the West from the end of the Cold War until only a few signs proclaiming the social justice bonafides of the AFTER I RESIGNED FROM years ago is under siege. It is under siege on the right family inside.

THE NEW YORK TIMES by the rapid spread of internet cults and conspiracy In my America, the people who keep quiet don’t FOR THEIR HOSTILITY theories. One need look no further than Rep. Majorie fear the wrath of Trump supporters. They fear the TO FREE SPEECH, I BEGAN TO HEAR Taylor Greene, an unabashed QAnon believer just illiberal left.

FROM SUCH PEOPLE. THEIR elected to Congress.

They are feminists who believe there are biologiNOTES SOUND LIKE On the left, liberalism is under siege by a new, illibcal differences between men and women. Journalists MISSIVES SMUGGLED eral orthodoxy that has taken root all around, includwho believe their job is to tell the truth about the OUT OF A ing in the very institutions meant to uphold the liberal world, even when it’s inconvenient. Doctors whose TOTALITARIAN SOCIETY. order. And cancellation is this ideology’s most effective only creed is science. Lawyers who will not comproweapon. It uses cancellation the way ancient societies mise on the principle of equal treatment under the used witch burnings: to strike fear into the hearts of law. Professors who seek the freedom to write and everyone watching. The point is the assertion of powresearch without fear of being smeared. In short, er. By showing the rest of us that we could be next, it they are centrists, libertarians, liberals and progrescompels us to conform and obey, either by remaining silent, or, perhaps, sives who do not ascribe to every single aspect of the new far-left orthodoxy. offering up our own kindling.

After I resigned from The New York Times over the summer for their Maybe you are among this self-silencing majority. There is a good hostility to free speech and open inquiry, I began to hear almost daily from chance that you are if the biologist Bret Weinstein is right when he obsuch people. Their notes to me sound like missives smuggled out of a totalserves that the population is composed of four groups: the few who acitarian society. tually hunt witches, a large group that goes along, and a larger group that I realize that may sound hysterical. So I’d ask you to consider a few reremains silent. There’s also a tiny group that opposes the hunt. And that cent examples from my inbox: “final group — as if by magic — become witches.”

“I never thought I’d practice the kind of self-censorship I now do when I speak on behalf of this latter category. In this essay, allow me the oppitching editors, but these days I have almost no power to do otherwise,” portunity to try to convince you that everything that makes America exa young journalist writes. “For woke-skeptical young writers, banishment ceptional, everything that makes civilization worthy of that name, depends and rejection awaits if you attempt to depart, even in minor ways, from the on your willingness to pick up a broomstick. sacred ideology of wokeness.”

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• I I • San Francisco School Board just voted to rename 44 schools, including I was born in 1984, which puts me among the last generation born into ones named for George Washington, Paul Revere and Dianne Feinstein — America before the phrase “cancel culture” existed. That world I was born you read that right — for various sins. into was liberal. I don’t mean that in the partisan sense, but in the classical In this ideology, if you do not tweet the right tweet or share the right and therefore the most capacious sense of that word. It was a liberal conslogan or post the right motto and visual on Instagram, your whole life can sensus shared by liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. be ruined. If you think I’m exaggerating, you might look up Tiffany Riley, The consensus view relied on a few foundational truths that seemed as the Vermont public school principal fired this fall because she said she supobvious as the blue of the sky: the belief that everyone is created in the imports Black lives but not the organization Black Lives Matter. age of God; the belief that everyone is equal because of it; the presumption In this ideology, intent doesn’t matter a whit. Just ask Greg Patton. of innocence; a revulsion to mob justice; a commitment to pluralism and This fall, the professor of business communication at USC was teaching a free speech, and to liberty of thought and of faith.

As I’ve observed elsewhere, this worldview recognized that there were class on “filler words” — like “um” and “like” and so forth — for his maswhole realms of human life located outside the provter’s-level course. In China, he noted, “the common ince of politics, like friendships, art, music, family and pause word is ‘that that that.’ So in China it might love. It was possible for Supreme Court justices Anbe …” he then went on to pronounce a Chinese word tonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be the best that sounded like an English racial slur. of friends, because, as Scalia once said, some things Some students were offended and they wrote a letare more important than votes. ter to the dean of the business school accusing their Most importantly, this worldview insisted that professor of “negligence and disregard.” They addVICTIMHOOD, IN THIS what bound us together was not blood or soil, but a ed: “We should not be made to fight for our sense of IDEOLOGY, CONFERS commitment to a shared set of ideas. Even with all of peace and mental well-being” at school.

MORALITY. “I THINK THEREFORE I AM” IS its failings, the thing that makes America exceptional Rather than telling them that their assertions REPLACED WITH: is that it is a departure from the notion, still prevalent were lunacy, the dean of the school capitulated to the “I AM THEREFORE in so many other places, that biology, birthplace, class, madness: “It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use I KNOW,” AND rank, gender, race are destiny. Our second founding words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the “I KNOW THEREFORE fathers, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, were psychological safety of our students.” Patton was let I AM RIGHT.” living testimonies to that truth. go — and the increasingly elastic notion of “safety” This old consensus — every single aspect of it — was wielded, once again, into a powerful weapon. has been run over by the new illiberal orthodoxy.

Victimhood, in this ideology, confers morality. “I Because this ideology cloaks itself in the language of think therefore I am” is replaced with: “I am thereprogress, many understandably fall for its self-brandfore I know,” and “I know therefore I am right.” ing. Don’t. It promises revolutionary justice, but it In this ideology, you are guilty for the sins of your threatens to drag us back into the mean of history, in father. In other words: you are not you. You are only which we are pitted against one another according to tribe. a mere avatar of your race or your religion. And racism is no longer about The primary mode of this ideological movement is not building or rediscrimination based on the color of someone’s skin. Racism is any system newing or reforming, but tearing down. Persuasion is replaced with public that allows for disparate outcomes between racial groups. That is why the shaming. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Mercy is replaced with cities of Seattle and San Francisco have recast algebra as racist. Or why a vengeance. Pluralism with conformity; debate with de-platforming; facts Smithsonian institution this summer declared that hard work, individualwith feelings; ideas with identity. ism and the nuclear family are “white” characteristics.

According to the new illiberalism, the past cannot be understood on In this totalizing ideology, you can be guilty by proximity. A Palestinian its own terms, but must be judged through the morals and mores of the business owner in Milwaukee, Majdi Wadi, was nearly wiped out this sumpresent. Education, according to this ideology, is not about teaching peomer because of racist and anti-Semitic tweets his daughter wrote as a teenple how to think, it’s about telling them what to think. All of this is why ager. A professional soccer player was fired because of the posts of his wife.

William Peris, a UCLA lecturer and an Air Force veteran, was investigated There are hundreds of similar examples. The enlightenment, as the critic Ed Rothstein has put it, has been replaced by the exorcism. because he read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” out Perhaps most importantly, in this ideology, speech — the way that we loud in class. It is why statues of Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln were resolve conflict in a civilized society — can be violence, yet violence, when torn down last summer. It is why a school district in California has banned carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all.

Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Mark Twain’s “The Adventures That is how, in June, more than 800 of my former colleagues at The of Huckleberry Finn,” and John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” It’s why the 68 DESERET MAGAZINE

conservative a group is, the more likely they are to hide their views: 52% of New York Times claimed that an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton put them Democrats confess to self-censoring compared with 77% of Republicans. in “danger,” while the most celebrated journalist at the paper — the most And of course they are afraid. In an era when people are smeared for recent winner of a Pulitzer Prize — publicly insisted that looting and ripetty things, small grievances and differences of opinion in a supposedly oting are “not violence.” That journalist, the creator of the 1619 project, liberal and tolerant environment, who would dare share that they voted for continues to be lionized. In the meantime, the editors who published the a Republican? op-ed were publicly humiliated and then pushed out of the paper.

One can disagree with the argument waged by Tom Cotton — he advocated for the National Guard to put down violent rioting over the summer — and believe, as I do, that you cannot call yourself the paper of record and ignore the views of half of the country.

I resigned a few weeks after that shameful episode, convinced that it No one joins things to make themselves feel bad. People join things that wasn’t possible to take intellectual risks at a newspaper that folded like a make them feel good, that give them meaning, that provide them with a tent in the face of a mob. As I wrote in my resignation letter, “All this bodes sense of belonging. Which is why so many people of my generation and ill, especially for independent-minded young writers younger have been drawn to this ideology. I do not and editors paying close attention to what they’ll have believe it is because they lack intellect or because they to do to advance in their careers. Rule One: Speak are snowflakes. your mind at your own peril. Rule Two: Never risk The rise of this movement has taken place against commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. the backdrop of major changes in American life — Rule Three: Never believe an editor or publisher who the tearing apart of our social fabric; the loss of reliTHE CATO INSTITUTE FOUND urges you to go against the grain. Eventually, the pubgion and the decline of civic organizations; the opioid THAT 62% OF lisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or crisis; the collapse of American industries; the rise of AMERICANS SAY reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.” big tech; the loss of faith in meritocracy; the arroTHEY SELF-CENSOR. gance of our elites; successive financial crises; a toxic THE MORE CONSERVATIVE public discourse; crushing student debt; the death A GROUP IS, THE MORE LIKELY THEY of trust. It has taken place against the backdrop in ARE TO HIDE which the American dream has felt like a punchline, THEIR VIEWS. the inequalities of our supposedly fair, liberal merThe skeptical reader will rightly point out that culitocracy clearly rigged in favor of some people and tures have always had taboos. That there have always against others. been behaviors or words that put people beyond the “I became converted because I was ripe for it and pale. Ostracism has been with us since the Hebrew Bilived in a disintegrating society thirsting for faith.” ble, and public shaming has long been a way for tribes That was Arthur Koestler writing in 1949 about his and cultures to maintain important social mores. love affair with communism. The same can be said of this new, revolution All true. But what we call cancel culture is a departure from traditional ary faith. taboos in two ways.

If we want our bright young minds to reject this worldview, we must The first is technology. Sins once confined to the public square or the face these problems because without these maladies we would have had town hall are now available for the entire world for eternity. In our era of neither Donald Trump nor the cultural revolutionaries now transforming Big Tech there is no possibility of moving to a new town and starting fresh America’s most important institutions from within. because the cloud of all of your posts and likes hangs over your head forever.

But we must start somewhere, and the only place we can start is an ap The second is that in the past, societal taboos were generally reached peal to courage and duty. through a cultural consensus. Today’s taboos, on the other hand, are often It is our duty to resist the crowd in this age of mob thinking. It is our fringe ideas pushed by a zealous cabal trying to redefine what is acceptduty to speak truth in an age of lies. It is our duty to think freely in an age able and what should be shunned. It is a group that has control of nearly of conformity. all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life: Or, as the great American judge Learned Hand once put it so perfectly, media, to be sure, but also higher education, museums, publishing houses, “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constimarketing and advertising outfits, Hollywood, K-12 education, technology tution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.” companies and, increasingly, corporate human resource departments.

Keeping the spirit of liberty alive in an age of creeping illiberalism is Thus, it should come as no surprise that a recent national study from the nothing less than our moral obligation. Everything depends on it.

Cato Institute found that 62% of Americans say they self-censor. The more

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THE SOUL OF SOCIETY CANNOT BE OUTSOURCED “WE THE PEOPLE” MUST “BE THE PEOPLE”

BY B OY D M AT H E S O N

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n my years of international business consulting work, I came to recognize that superior systems, while crucial, aren’t enough to sustain any organization. Many companies have spent millions of dollars on outsourced operational consultants and systems experts only to find the entity lacked spirit, substance, strategy and sustainability. Hyperfocusing on outsourcing creates a motion of activity that temporarily covers the lack of forward movement on mission and vision while also obscuring the holes in the soul of the institution. What is true for the heart of an organization is also true for the soul of society — outsourcing isn’t the answer.

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth in the United Kingdom, said, “When morality is outsourced to either the market or the state, society has no substance, only systems. And systems are not enough.”

Society is currently subcontracting a long laundry list of activities along with many moral, ethical and virtuous behaviors vital to the soul of the nation. Congress is outsourcing lawmaking to the executive branch, communities are outsourcing caring for the poor and needy to government agencies, parents are outsourcing teaching morals and values to schools and individuals are outsourcing critical thinking to selfmade social media bubbles.

“A free society is a moral achievement, and it is made by us and our habits of thought, speech, and deed,” Rabbi Sacks wrote. “Morality cannot be outsourced because it depends on each of us.

Without self-restraint, without the capacity to defer the gratification of instinct, and without the habits of heart and deed that we call virtues, we will eventually lose our freedom.”

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Describing the downward societal trends and current moral culture, Rabbi Sacks concluded, “When there is no shared morality, there is no society. Instead, there are subgroups, and hence identity politics. In the absence of shared ideals, many conclude that the best way of campaigning is to damage your opponent by ad hominem attacks. The result is division, cynicism, and a breakdown of trust. The world is divided into the people like us and the people not like us, and what is lost is the notion of the common good.

When the “I” takes precedence over the “We,” the result is weakened relationships, marriages, families, communities, neighborhoods, congregations, charities, regions, and entire societies.”

One practical area where the soul of society needs strengthening is in the realm of racial unrest. The answers to racism, prejudice, discrim-

ination and hate cannot be subcontracted to government, law enforcement or special interest groups. We the people can be the people to create real, lasting solutions through open hearts, true friendship and a brotherhood and sisterhood built on compassion, understanding and common values.

“We the people” must “be the people.” We must be the truth. We must be the good. We must be the change. We must be humble. We must be authentic. We must be grateful. We must be compassionate.

America’s success has never been based solely upon our system of government, but rather on the power of the moral soul of the nation — which simply cannot be outsourced. Truly, we the people must commit to be the people to make the soul of society strong.

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CULTURE

KING OF THE KNOW-IT-ALLS I ONCE REGARDED MY ODDBALL COMMAND OF FACTS A USELESS, SUPERFLUOUS SKILL. THEN WE ALL MET KEN JENNINGS.

BY MICHA EL J. MO O N EY ILLU ST RAT IO N S BY MICHA EL MA B RY

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earned him millions of dollars and a career as the game show guy. e was first introduced to the world as “a software engineer from As I type this, he’s the guest host of “Jeopardy!,” the first person to stand Salt Lake City.” He wore a modest navy jacket, a wide maroon at that lectern since the longtime beloved host, Alex Trebek, died in Nonecktie, and a nervous, unassuming smile. His first name appeared in his vember, after a public battle with cancer. Sony, which owns “Jeopardy!” is own all-caps handwriting at the front of his podium: KEN. When that epiexpected to name the new permanent host sometime this year. In a field sode of “Jeopardy!” first aired, on June 2, 2004, nobody could have known that includes former news anchor Katie Couric and actor LeVar Burton, the ride Ken Jennings was about to take America on — or the joy he would Jennings is the odds-on favorite. provide factoid lovers.

Whether or not he’s the new face of “Jeopardy!,” though, Jennings is Jennings won that day. He had a slight lead entering the Final Jeopardy already an icon for a certain percentage of the population. Because he’s round, and he knew the name of the first female track and field athlete to not just the greatest game show contestant of all time. Ken Jennings is an win medals in five different events at a single Olympics (Marion Jones), uncommon inspiration for factoid lovers everywhere. so he ended that first episode with $37,201 in winnings. Jennings won the next day, too — knowing things like who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987 (Rita Dove) and the name of the New Mexico governor who offered to pardon Billy the JENNINGS HAS Kid (Lew Wallace) — bringing his total winnings rowing up in the ’80s and ’90s, I watched “JeopBECOME MORE THAN to $59,201. He also won the day after that. And the ardy!” just about every day. I inherited my affinity for A QUIZMASTER. HE day after that. And the day after that. game shows from my mom. She’d say she likes the brain HAS BECOME THE It went on for weeks. Then months. Every weekpuzzles because they keep her mind sharp, but the RAREST KIND OF CELEBRITY: RICH day, for half an hour, millions of people across the truth is in our home, intelligence was the highest virAND FAMOUS country tuned in to watch this mild-mannered tue. Not necessarily the solving-global-problems type FOR JUST, LIKE, 30-year-old married father from Utah absolutely of intelligence. We didn’t spend a ton of time discussing KNOWING STUFF. obliterate his fellow contestants on America’s most canonical literature or classical music or modern polithallowed game show. Jennings seemed to have a ical theory. No, our family specializes in useless, obbottomless pit of knowledge, and could recall it all scure factoids. I may not have been able to spell the instantaneously. He also had a gently sarcastic air word restaurant until sometime in high school, but as about him, a wry grin that hinted he knew somefar back as I can remember, I savored the chance to thing he couldn’t wait to say. He’d answer questions prove that I knew things like the name of the larg— or, more accurately, because on “Jeopardy!” contestants must answer est glacier in the world (the Lambert-Fischer Glacier in Antarctica) in the form of a question, Jennings questioned the answers — with such or the year the Titanic sunk (1912) or the speed of sound (some 767 speed and ease that it felt like watching performance art. miles per hour).

“What is Halifax?” “Who is Humpty Dumpty?” “What are the Arabian As you might guess, this did not make me the most popular kid in school.

Nights?”

It didn’t take long to understand that most of society doesn’t care much for During his streak, and in the years since, ’Jennings has become more the know-it-all type. If you want to make friends and attract a love interest, than a quizmaster. Through his books, his Twitter presence, and his apobnoxiously reciting trivial knowledge is not the way to do it. But, in the pearances on subsequent “Jeopardy!” tournaments (and a few other game privacy of a living room, a game show provides the perfect safe space for shows), Jennings has become the rarest kind of celebrity: rich and famous just this type of know-it-all-ism. for just, like, knowing stuff. Not stuff about successful investment strat On sick days or school holidays, I basically marked the time by the egies. Not stuff about how to cure a crippling disease or engineer a safer game show on TV. No matter how bad I felt, I knew I had “The Price Is vehicle. Just random stuff. His capacity to remember and recall factoids has Right” to look forward to. Then “Hollywood Squares,” “Family Feud,”

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Carpenter became the first person to win $1 million on “Who Wants to Be “Supermarket Sweep,” “$100,000 Pyramid” — you get the idea. I loved a Millionaire,” coolly using his “phone a friend” to call his dad on the final strategizing how I would approach each clue, spin, puzzle, or final round. I question — just to say he was about to take home the big prize. In 1980, relished knowing the answer, especially when the contestant didn’t. I even a Navy officer named Thom McKee appeared on 46 straight episodes of liked seeing how fast people could buzz in — sometimes imagining my own “Tic-Tac-Dough,” winning $312,700 worth of prizes, including eight cars, hand hovering over one of those big red buttons so many game shows use. three sailboats and 16 vacations.

Sick or not, “Jeopardy!” was always appointment television. It was often But the “Jeopardy!” winning streak that Jennings started in the summer what my mom and I would watch while eating dinner, sometimes paired with of 2004 is easily the single-greatest achievement in the history of game “Wheel of Fortune.” The Rolls Royce of game shows, “Jeopardy!” has long shows. Because Ken Jennings transcended the world of traditional game been a fixture in our culture. Even the theme music is iconic, one of the most show fans. He made arcane knowledge a daily topic of conversation. recognizable tunes in television history. It didn’t happen much, but once in In all my years watching game shows, I’d never seen anyone like Ken a while I knew an answer my mom didn’t — and I treasured the chance to Jennings. He was polite but confident. He was funny, too, in smart, subtle impress her. One time, I remember, when I was 12 or 13, I somehow named ways. He once buzzed in on a clue about the Oscar-winning Tom Cruisethe movie that won the 1990 Oscar for Best Picture (“Driving Miss Daisy”), Dustin Hoffman movie, for example, and answered in the style of the titular and my mom tilted her head and looked at me, genuinely surprised. character: “What is ‘Rain Man’? Definitely. Definitely.”

Part of the appeal came down to the show’s host, And day after day he dominated his opponents in Alex Trebek. Every day, viewers could count on that a way that had never been done. He’d sweep through warm voice, the gentle way he’d banter with contesentire categories of questions like he was playing tants, his perfectly placed quips. A lot of game show alone, leaving his fellow contestants — and all of us hosts emit a used-car salesman sleaziness. But that was at home — absolutely stunned. never Trebek. He always displayed a sweet, respectful Within a week, he won more than $100,000. After decency with everyone he encountered, no matter the I HAD NO IDEA WHAT I WANTED 16-straight games, he was over $500,000. The streak score — something we don’t get a lot of in life.

TO DO WITH MY LIFE. became something people talked about at work, at The other appeal of “Jeopardy!” is the sheer knowlBUT EVERY school, over dinner. Jennings was a regular topic on edge base required to compete. Even the worst contesAFTERNOON, I sports-talk shows: How long can he go? Can anyone tants on the show are among the crème de la crème of COULD WATCH A beat him? In his 30th game, he broke the $1 million trivia geeks. The best “Jeopardy!” players can buzz in, MAN WHO SEEMED TO HAVE ALL mark. In game 59, he went over $2 million. answer, and pick the next clue faster than most of us THE ANSWERS. During his streak, the show’s ratings went up a recan process the words coming out of the host’s mouth. ported 22%. Jennings has said the streak made him The entire thing can be dizzying, almost hypnotic. a “TV folk hero.” Slate magazine dubbed him “the At home, answering even two or three questions Michael Jordan of trivia.” He was a guest on “The in a row always felt like a grand accomplishment.

Tonight Show” and “The Late Show with David Each clue requires not just some understanding of Letterman” and “Live with Regis and Kelly.” Tom history or science or culture or sports, but also the Hanks sent him a vintage typewriter. Barbara Walters ability to quickly unravel a word puzzle. And “Jeopnamed him one of the 10 most fascinating people of the year. He was getardy!” doesn’t reward partially right answers. In the world of “Jeoparting recognized on the street, in grocery stores. Excited old ladies would dy!” something is either correct or incorrect. grip his arm so tight they’d leave bruises.

For years, whether I was with my mom or alone, watching “Jeopardy!”

The more we learned about Jennings, the more delightfully geeky he was all about those questions, the challenge, the factoids, the mild drama seemed. He was born outside Seattle but grew up in South Korea and of who would have the most money at the end of any given episode. But Singapore, watching “Jeopardy!” on the Armed Forces Network every day. because they never stayed too long, it was never about the contestants He’d driven with a friend from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles to try out themselves. for the show. He made flash cards to brush up on world capitals and U.S. Then the world met Ken Jennings. presidents. A devout Latter-day Saint, Jennings didn’t drink alcohol but we learned that he prepared for the regular “Jeopardy!” category “Potent Potables” by studying cocktail recipes.

See, you didn’t have to be a serious “Jeopardy!” fan to recognize how special Ken Jennings was. And it wasn’t just his insane trivia knowledge. He here have been some truly incredible moments in game-show history. A was lightning fast on the buzzer, ringing in before either of his two oppoman named Terry Kniess once memorized the prices of every item on “The nents more than 60% of the time.

Price Is Right” and bid the exact right amount in the Showcase Showdown, He also played with a clear, distinct strategy. When Jennings uncovered winning $56,437 in prizes. An Ohio man named Michael Larson memoa Daily Double — rare opportunities when a contestant can wager up to all rized the light patterns on the “Press Your Luck” game board, figured out the money he or she has made to that point — he eschewed the traditional, how to avoid the dreaded “Whammies” and won $110,237. In 1999, John

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conservative approach, often betting enough to put his score out of reach of his opponents long before the final question.

Jennings wasn’t always right, but he was right more than 80% of the time. Watching him was almost like watching a superhero show. You knew he’d win in the end, it was just a matter of seeing how.

As Ken Jennings was captivating America with his knowledge, I had just graduated from college with an English degree. I got a soulless job doing research for a law firm — and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Every day felt like a small existential crisis. But every afternoon, from summer through fall and into that winter, I could watch a man who seemed to have all the answers.

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is 75th game started like most of his other games. Jennings jumped out to a fast, large lead. By the end of the first round, he had more than double the scores of his two opponents combined. He knew the George W. Bush Cabinet member who lost his 2000 Senate race to a man who died a month before the election (John Ashcroft) and the only state Walter Mondale won in the 1984 presidential election (Minnesota) and the monarch who, in 1936, said, “A few hours ago I discharged my last duty as king” (Edward VIII).

In the second round, Jennings started to pile on, correctly answering seven of the first 14 questions before hitting a Daily Double — which he got wrong. He didn’t know the town in Belgium that Patton’s forces relieved on Dec. 26, 1944 (Bastogne). Then a few questions later Jennings found another Daily Double — and got that one wrong, too, something that almost never happened. This time he didn’t know the name of the brimless hat popular in the 1920s (a cloche).

Jennings still had a $4,000 lead going into Final Jeopardy. The clue was: “Most of this firm’s 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year.” His opponent, Nancy Zerg, wrote down the correct response: “H&R Block.”

In video of that episode, you can tell that Jennings knows it’s over before anyone else in the room. He’d written down “FedEx.” As his answer was revealed, the audience gasped. Nancy Zerg looked shocked, confused.

Jennings turned to shake her hand. In true Ken Jennings form, he’d answered 29 questions correctly to Zerg’s 10, but “Jeopardy!” is “Jeopardy!”

In the 74 games he won, Jennings took home $2.52 million, smashing the record for total game show winnings. At the end of that episode, Trebek took a moment to honor Jennings. The audience gave a standing ovation.

Jennings smiled politely.

I still feel a twist in my chest when I see clips from that day.

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ennings didn’t go away. He returned for the show’s Tournament of Champions. Then he came back to battle the IBM supercomputer Watson — which did to Ken Jennings what Ken Jennings had done to so many other people. This, of course, is the future of factoids. You might save time

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by knowing the first King of Iceland (Haakon IV), but that knowledge is available to anyone, thanks to the supercomputers we hold in our hands.

Unless you’re a game show contestant or avid crossword enthusiast, these facts have always been useless, the skill always superfluous. Now though, they’re even more so.

Since Jennings, the show has had a few other memorable champions, many of whom followed and expanded on the strategies Jennings employed during his run. His single-day earnings record was broken, as was his overall earnings record, but nobody has even come close to his 74-straight wins.

The next best is 32.

Jennings started writing books. “Brainiac” is part memoir, recounting his journey from anonymous computer programmer to know-it-all icon, and part exploration of trivia itself: the inane factoid’s history and place in our society. Life is full of complicated decisions, he reasons, all of which require the mastery of a lot of facts. Even if anyone can look those facts up, the people with a broad foundation of knowledge have a head start.

In addition to his books and lectures, he’s built a large, dedicated following on Twitter, delivering wry observations and geeky jokes. As Jennings became the temporary replacement for Trebek, his social media history started getting more scrutiny. Before his first show as host aired, Jennings apologized for offensive tweets from his past, including one that disparaged people with disabilities.

“Sometimes I said dumb things in a dumb way and I want to apologize to people who were (rightfully!) offended,” he tweeted. “I screwed up, and I’m truly sorry.”

The first time he took the stage as guest host, he started the show with a tribute to Trebek.

“Sharing this stage with Alex Trebek was one of the greatest honors in my life,” he said. “Like all ‘Jeopardy!’ fans, I miss Alex, very much. And I thank him for everything he did for all of us. Let’s be totally clear, nobody will ever replace the great Alex Trebek, but we can honor him by playing the game he loved.”

Jennings, the man who grew up obsessed with “Jeopardy!” and later became the game’s greatest player, turned out to be a good host of the show, too. He mostly mimics the style and mannerisms of Trebek, someone he had studied up close, from the same stage, for longer than anyone else.

Judging by the comments on social media, other fans of “Jeopardy!” like Jennings, too.

I’ve been a full-time journalist for more than a decade now, still trying to impress my mother by attempting to answer questions and recite facts.

I don’t get to watch “Jeopardy!” as much as I’d like, but I still tune in whenever I get a chance. I noticed that at the end of every episode, Jennings turns to the camera and says solemnly: “Thank you, Alex.”

Jennings has become more than a trivia king, more than a game show celebrity. Over the last two decades, he’s become an advocate for facts, the face of a part of the universe where something is either right or wrong, correct or incorrect — at a time when that’s not always such a simple thing.

As someone who deals with facts for a living, I truly appreciate it.

And one day, Ken Jennings himself will be the answer to a trivia question. Or maybe he’ll be the question: This former software engineer turned his love of trivia into a career and became a hero to factoid lovers everywhere.

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CULTURE

IN TUNE HOW POP STAR TIFFANY HOUGHTON’S DECISION TO LEAVE IT ALL BEHIND ALLOWED HER TO GAIN WHAT SHE NEVER THOUGHT POSSIBLE.

BY ERICA EVA N S P HOTO GRA P HS BY FREDRIK B RO DEN

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got into music to be a voice for women and hopefully empower young girls,” Tiffany Houghton says, video chatting while lounging on the bed in her Dallas home — with her highheeled boots perched on the plush cream bedding and her platinum blond hair framed by a pile of blue pillows. “How could I be that voice if I wasn’t in a good place? … I don’t think you can touch the hearts of others when you are not speaking from your own.”

In 2017, Houghton — a Latter-day Saint singer-songwriter with a bubbly personality and a wardrobe that would make Barbie envious — was seeing more success than ever. She had completed a tour with former pop duo MKTO during the rise of its award-nominated hit song, “Classic,” and opened for One Direction outside the Rose Bowl. She wore designer-everything — from fur coats to red-bottomed stilettos. Her original song, “Catch Me if You Can,” had recently reached the No. 1 spot on Radio Disney. It was the kind of success young musicians dream about.

But it wasn’t the fairy tale Houghton, then 24, thought it would be. After she left her childhood home in Texas to move to the big music cities of LA and Nashville, the industry took hold of every part of her. She felt like more of a product than a person. Managers, publicists and executives tried to dictate her appearance, diet and dating life. They took advantage of her — a New York radio executive demanded she come over for a “sleepover” before he would play her song on his station. She refused him, but the entire experience was enough to break the spirit of a woman whose brand was based on her upbeat jams and exuberant energy. “It was a really dark time,” she says. “I knew I needed to get out of the situation.”

Houghton says she felt like she couldn’t move 78 DESERET MAGAZINE

forward without losing herself or her career. It was an impossible choice. Until she realized that she didn’t have to choose.

Motivated by her Latter-day Saint faith, Houghton left the Los Angeles music scene behind. She took her talent and drive with her, determined to make music she believes in. “My faith and the way that I lived protected me in so many situations throughout the years,” Houghton says. “My faith has been something that has led me my whole life. It’s always something I come back to and find value and worth in, as well as direction and guidance.”

And it’s faith that gave Houghton the courage to become a self-managed artist.

Historically, independent and self-managed artists haven’t seen the same record-breaking fame that artists signed to big labels have.

Managers help shape a musician’s image and career. Record labels control the production, distribution and marketing of music. It’s a complex system that’s hard to break out of and still see success. But social media and platforms like Spotify — where artists can share their own music and reach a wide audience — have opened up a new era of opportunities. Merchant bank Raine Group projected the independent music market would reach $2 billion in 2020, a 32% increase from the year before, thanks to the rapid growth of do-it-yourself uploads. Now, independent artists like Chance the Rapper are able to achieve massive success while being able to directly speak to their fans and put out music on their own terms.

And that’s exactly the creative freedom Houghton wants. Her new self-titled album is the labor of nearly three years of self-reflection.

The songs were inspired by her pile of journals and composed spending countless hours at the piano. Houghton worked with producer friends

to mix the tracks and give the music life — going over melodies, rewriting lyrics and tweaking sounds while wearing matching fuzzy unicorn socks from Forever 21. In between sessions, they chatted about their love lives. The studio finally felt like home. “It was a lot more of a conducive environment for creativity and to be able to speak my truth,” Houghton says.

After years of writing and discarding songs that music industry heads said were not good enough, Houghton chose the song lineup for this album based on her own artistic discretion and feedback from fans. Rather than leaving the album artwork up to stylists, she thought deeply about how she wanted to visually portray this music — which she sees as an expression of herself — and hired a photographer.

Next, she’ll work with a distribution company to get her music onto Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal and all the other digital streaming platforms or “DSPs.” Her marketing plan, as she puts it, is “by the bootstraps.” Houghton will personally reach out to her fans and everyone she knows in blogs, magazines, radio and music to get her new work into the mainstream.

In the end, Houghton’s debut album as a self-managed artist is exactly what she wants it to be — not what anyone else told her it had to be. It includes already-released songs like “Pretty Pretty,” about a woman’s worth beyond her physical looks, and “Spectrum,” about the diversity of experiences and emotions that make us human. And her new song “Sleepover” tells the story of her saying “no” to that demand from the radio executive in New York.

“It took me this long to put out this album because I did not want to share,” Houghton says. “It’s hard for me to talk about all this stuff, but I am a 360, full human.”

Even though she is temporarily stationed with

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her husband at her childhood home in Dallas due to the pandemic, Houghton is still focusing on music-making. She has her piano in the family workout room and microphone and midi keyboard in her dad’s office. She finally has time to pursue a bachelor’s degree at the Berklee College of Music and is already making music with classmates.

Houghton loves that she can connect with her fans on social media and be authentic, no longer caught up with being a “mysterious” pop star or protecting her image. With her in-yourface enthusiasm for everything from makeup to inspirational quotes, Houghton is anything but

elusive. And she’s not afraid of letting her fans in on the ups and downs of life. But that’s what followers find contagious.

It’s a big change from the period of time when Houghton was just as critical of herself as others were. But by stepping away from the conventional path to success, the now 27-yearold has more fans than ever, and in an unexpected way, she has achieved her goal of being a positive voice for young women.

Now, on a typical day in the life of the singersongwriter, Houghton posts videos of herself bounding into Hobby Lobby with her mom

or teaching a virtual voice lesson and sweetly singing “Part of Your World” from “The Little Mermaid” while a little girl on the other end repeats the lines in her best princess voice.

Houghton talks to her Instagram followers while eating a quesadilla and tells them where to buy the affordable clothes she’s wearing — a pink velour jumpsuit (from Walmart) and gold hoop earrings (Cartier look-alikes). It may not be the picture of the pop star lifestyle she imagined for herself a decade ago when she graduated high school early and left home at 17. But it’s the one she wants.

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THE LAST WORD

THE TIGER MOM LOOKS BACK A CONVERSATION WITH AMY CHUA

BY LO IS M. CO LLIN S

W

hen Amy Chua applied to teach law, she was rejected by 40 schools. And yet today Chua is not only a professor at Yale, she’s one of the most widely recognized legal experts in the country.

Chua’s grit and determination is a thread through most of her work, which first burst into the national consciousness with her international bestseller, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” That book, in which Chua refuses to let her daughter go to the bathroom until she masters a difficult piano composition, attracted both ire and fame for Chua, but she says her fiercest critics missed the central message: The most important thing for children is unconditional love. Her most recent book, “Political Tribes,” offers an unlikely solution to America’s partisan polarization.

“Enough false slogans of unity, which are just another form of divisiveness.

It is time for a more difficult unity that acknowledges the reality of group differences and fights the deep inequities that divide us.” Chua spoke to Deseret Magazine from her office in New Haven, Connecticut. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You took some heat for “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.’’ As you look back , would you change how you parent, then or now?

Of course, like any parent, there are many little things that I would change.

But maybe I’m just stubborn. I would probably do more or less the same thing. I’m incredibly proud of my daughters, who are now 25 and 28. I’m 82 DESERET MAGAZINE

very close to them, I love it that they always want to come home. They’re very, very family-oriented. They claim they want to raise their kids the same way. So I think that’s a good sign. I made a lot of mistakes. But I’m ultimately very, very proud of the young women they’ve become — and a lot of it has nothing to do with me.

It feels like some people glossed over the warmth you emphasized in the tiger mom book.

I could not agree more. It’s about striking a balance, and knowing that unconditional love and warmth is ultimately the most important thing.

Everything else is just icing on the cake.

I had all kinds of very kind, warm, funny responses from people who said, “I parented the exact opposite way, but I kind of related to this part,” or, “That part, I got it.” And the angriest, most brutal emails and responses I got were actually from people who often had very, very bad relationships with their own children, whether they were strict or lenient. It was almost more of a reflection of that.

After “Tiger Mother” you wrote “The Triple Package,” which focused on why certain groups are successful. What led you to write that book , and to write about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

For “Triple Package” we took a snapshot of 15 “of the most successful” PORTR AI T BY R ANDY GLASS

parents were Chinese immigrants or because my mother was a devout groups in America. I was very clear to define success in a certain way: edCatholic. When I was younger, I couldn’t wear certain kinds of clothing, ucational achievement, and per capita income and corporate dominance.

I had to wear flat shoes. We couldn’t swear. So I just felt a lot of comAnd I said, this is not at all to be equated with a deeper form of success or monality in the way that I was raised. I was always subject as a kid to so happiness or joy. But given that there’s all this talk in America, that there many rules — more rules than everybody else. It turns out that’s exactly is no longer any upward mobility, let’s look at some of the groups that are how Latter-day Saints feel. Other kids are going to the shopping mall doing really well and who they are. and drinking and dating at a young age. And you see the Latter-day Saint We came up with a very interesting list that included people of all races teenagers living very differently. And that’s exactly how I was raised and — Nigerian Americans, Cuban Americans, Iranian Americans, Latter-day how I wanted to raise my own children.

Saints and Jews, and I think Taiwanese Americans.

We noticed all of these groups share three things: First, a sense of alYour most recent book , “Political Tribes,” seems especially relevant today. What most like exceptionalism. We call it a superiority complex to be a little does it say about American politics? bit provocative. Being special. That feeling gives you confidence in a way I wanted to step back like I do with all of my academic books and try to many people know is necessary for success. That was the first prong, this rise above the fray and instead of taking sides and becoming part of the sense of exceptionality. Coming from a Chinese American family, I was tribal problems, asking: “How do we diagnose the problem?” How do we always told we come from the oldest, most magnificent civilization in huget to this moment in the United States, where basically, we have two poman history. That gives you a sense of pride. litical parties and each side views the other side not as fellow Americans The second feature was almost the exact opposite, which is a sense of that they want to disagree with, but basically as people who are the eneinsecurity. That is what fascinated me, that these groups were all kind of my, people who are not real Americans, who are evil. It’s a very dangerous outsiders, out of the mainstream in some way. And I was trying to make situation when you have that kind of feeling because it is bordering on a sense of that when somebody said, look at Steve Jobs, who was still alive. recipe for civil war.

He’s a perfect incarnation of that combination: He I wrote it to understand this political moment in thought he could do anything. He also had this deep the United States. sense that he just wasn’t being recognized.

One of the main thrusts of this book is that the I found lots of studies that showed that’s a very “I USED TO United States is, for the first time, starting to exhibit motivating factor when you have that chip-on-theBE IN A RUSH FOR destructive political dynamics that historically have shoulder feeling. Many Latter-day Saint leaders EVERYTHING, CONSTANTLY been much more typical of developing countries, like have actually used that exact phrase, these business WONDERING WHY lurches towards authoritarianism, ethno-nationalist leaders, like I have a bit of a chip on the shoulder and PEOPLE WERE movements, the erosion of trust in electoral outcomes this sense of being a little bit on the outs.

DRIVING and institutions, which is what we’ve been seeing.

The third prong is what we call impulse control.

SO SLOW. NOW I Immigrant families have this in spades: You’ve got DRIVE MUCH, MUCH MORE SLOWLY. I understand that you recently had a health scare. What to work hard. I had all these statistics that were I HAVE RETAINED did you learn from that? just anecdotal in the tiger mom book that I actually THIS FEELING OF, In late August of 2018, I taught my first class. And found; it was fascinating. It was something like, the “WHAT ARE YOU I hadn’t been feeling well for a week. I had a high average amount of time a Western mother makes RUSHING FOR? fever. I was kind of dizzy and nauseous and had tertheir toddler spend in a focused activity, like doing YOU’RE RUSHING TO NOWHERE.” rible stomach pains. But being the tiger mom and a puzzle, was something like 25 seconds compared to being raised with a lot of grit, I downed Advil and a Chinese American child’s hour and a half. So there thought, “I can push through.” The next morning, were the statistical differences. And once again, you I was rushed to the emergency room. Within 24 know, the Latter-day Saint community fit perfectly hours, I had eight tubes stuck in me. I was in the into that model — enormous impulse control and self-discipline instilled at an early age, including certain things that you ICU, all my organs failing. Nobody knew what was happening. When can’t consume, and no alcohol. they finally opened me up, they discovered a 2-centimeter hole in my colon, just a freak medical thing. I was so lucky. In the end, it was not You have been to Utah many times. Why do you think your work resonates cancer, just diverticulitis. I was in the hospital for three weeks, I came out out here? in a wheelchair, I lost all my hair. I was out for a whole year.

I think it’s that we have a lot in common. I put the family first. I was I almost wish I could get back to that. I started seeing the beauty in the raised Catholic, and I’m not as deeply religious, although I think I am world and nature. I’ve always been this person that was too busy for that. deeply spiritual. I think it’s very unusual among Americans to see the I would look at trees and flowers, and oh my gosh, it did give me a deeper respect that Latter-day Saints instill in their children for their elders. sense of what’s important. It affected me profoundly. I now just enjoy what That feels very Chinese. The Confucian way is you always respect your I think previously I would have considered a waste of time. I used to be in a elders, you respect your parents, you respect your teachers. There’s this rush for everything, constantly wondering why people were driving so slow.

American individualism — my husband, who is brilliant and wonderNow I drive much, much more slowly. I have retained this feeling of, “What ful — was raised to question authority constantly. I see advantages to are you rushing for? You’re rushing to nowhere.” I remember giving some that, too. But the way that Latter-day Saint parents raise their children tips when I gave the BYU law school commencement speech — things to do is something that has always impressed me and resonated with me. Simas you go forward. Reject bitterness and pettiness. Just be generous. That ilarly, I was raised a little bit clean-cut. I don’t know if that’s because my will always lift your spirits, and it will always make everything better.

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