Science gets a grip on wrinkly fingers

By Samantha R. Selman

Scientists think that they have the answer to why the skin on human fingers and toes shrivels up like an old prune when we soak in the bath. Laboratory tests confirmed a theory that wrinkly fingers improve our grip on wet or submerged objects, working to channel away the water like the rain treads in car tires.

People often assume that wrinkling is the result of water passing into the outer layer of the skin and making it swell up. But researchers have known since the 1930s that the effect does not occur when there is nerve damage in the fingers. This points to the change being an involuntary reaction by the body’s autonomic nervous system — the system that also controls breathing, heart rate and perspiration. In fact, the distinctive wrinkling is caused by blood vessels constricting below the skin.

In 2011, Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist at 2AI Labs in Boise, Idaho, and his colleagues, suggested¹ that wrinkling, being an active process, must have an evolutionary function. The team also showed that the pattern of wrinkling appeared to be optimized for providing a drainage network that improved grip. But until now, there was no proof that wrinkly fingers did in fact offer an advantage.

In the latest study, participants picked up wet or dry objects including marbles of different sizes with normal hands or with fingers wrinkled after soaking in warm water for 30 minutes. The subjects were faster at picking up wet marbles with wrinkled fingers than with dry ones, but wrinkles made no difference for moving dry objects. The results are published today in Biology Letters².

“We have shown that wrinkled fingers give a better grip in wet conditions — it could be working like treads on your car tyres, which allow more of the tyre to be in contact with the road and gives you a better grip,” says Tom Smulders, an evolutionary biologist at Newcastle University, UK, and a co-author of the paper.

Hold tight

Wrinkled fingers could have helped our ancestors to gather food from wet vegetation or streams, Smulders adds. The analogous effect in the toes could help us to get a better footing in the rain.

Changizi says that the results provide behavioural evidence “that pruney fingers are rain treads”, which are consistent with his own team’s morphological findings. What remains to be done, he adds, is to check that similar wrinkling occurs in other animals for which it would provide the same advantages. “At this point we just don’t know who has them, besides us and macaques.”

Given that wrinkles confer an advantage with wet objects but apparently no disadvantage with dry ones, it’s not clear why our fingers are not permanently wrinkled, says Smulders. But he has some ideas. “Our initial thoughts are that this could diminish the sensitivity in our fingertips or could increase the risk of damage through catching on objects.”

 

References

1. Changizi, M., Weber, R., Kotecha, R. & Palazzo, J. Brain Behav. Evol. 77, 286–290 (2011).
2. Kareklas, K., Nettle, D. & Smulders, T. V. Biol. Lett. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2012.0999(2013).

Richard Engel freed, but news blackout debate remains

In this image made from video, NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel shakes hands with an unidentified person after crossing back into Turkey, after Engel and his team were freed unharmed following a firefight at a checkpoint after five days of captivity inside Syria, in Cilvegozu, Turkey, Tuesday, Dec. 18.

By Richard Best

Richard Engel, NBC‘s chief foreign correspondent, and at least two colleagues, were released from five days as captives in Syria yesterday in what appears to have been a rescue operation by a Syrian rebel unit. Their escape followed an extended news blackout participated in by most of the Western press.

Mr. Engel, cameraman John Kooistra, and producer Ghazi Balkiz were abducted after an ambush near the village of Ma’arrat Misreen, just north of Idlib, while traveling with a group of Syrian rebels.

“We were driving in Syria about five days ago in what we thought was a rebel controlled area, we were with some of the rebels and as we were moving down the road a group of gunmen just literally jumped out of the trees and bushes on the side of the road,” Engel told NBC News this morning in an interview from Turkey. “There were probably about 15 gunmen wearing ski masks. They were heavily armed, they dragged us out of the car, they had a container truck positioned waiting by the side of the road. They put us into that container truck … with some gunmen, some rebels who were escorting us, they executed one of them on the spot.”

Engel said the group was moved from safe house to safe house during their captivity, and endured threats of murder, mock executions, and taunting from their captors that they should pick among themselves who would die first. At around 11 p.m. last night in Syria, as they were being moved again not far from the initial abduction, their captors ran into a rebel road block, and two of the captors were killed in the ensuing firefight. Others may have been freed in that gun battle, but NBC and other participants are being tight lipped for now.

Engel said the captors were shabiha, Syrian civilian militias loyal to the government of Bashar al-Assad, and his description of what he takes to be their loyalties and background is as good a capsule description of the complexities at play in the Syrian civil war as you’ll find.

“These are people who are loyal to president Bashar al-Assad, they are Shiite, they were talking openly about their loyalty to the government, openly expressing their Shia faith, they are trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guard, they are allied with Hezbollah,” he said. “We were told that they wanted to exchange us for four Iranian agents and two Lebanese people who were from the Amal Movement and these were other shabiha members who were captured by the rebels, they captured us in order to carry out this exchange, and that’s what they were hoping to do, they were going to bring us to a Hezbollah stronghold inside Syria.”

Amal, like Hezbollah, is a Lebanese Shiite political movement and militia. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are in many ways the shock troops of that country’s Islamic revolution. They are interested to see Mr. Assad, a member of the tiny Alawite sect, a long-ago offshoot of Shiite Islam, retain power in the face of his country’s majority Sunni Arab population, since a victory for Sunnis in Syria would deprive Iran of an ally, and provide the Sunnis of Lebanon a potentially powerful new friend.

News of the abduction was kept quiet by dozens of news outlets over the weekend, both at the urging of NBC and as part of evolving ethos among press outlets over how to handle the abduction of colleagues. A number of news operations in Turkey reported that Engel and a Turkish journalist were missing in Syria, and that story was picked up by the UK’s Daily Mail and websites like Gawker. But, for the most part, NBC and an informal group of reporters and aid workers jaw-boned most of their colleagues into not following the story, arguing that reporting could put them in danger.

Attempting to maintain a news blackout after an abduction has long been a common practice, both for journalists and other people working in war zones. The idea is generally that a frenzy of questions and attention can make a quick negotiation for release tougher, either by spooking captors, or by raising their perception of the financial or propaganda value of their captive.

In some cases too much silence can be dangerous. If kidnappers know they’ve got someone high profile, like Engel, and then there’s no news, they can get to wondering if their captive is actually a spy working under journalist cover. In others, obviously, publicity can be very dangerous. Every situation has its different particulars. In this instance it appears that people working with the situation on the ground were seeking to buy time for rebels to find the group before they were moved to a part of Syria under government control.

But as always is in these cases, expect a robust media ethics debate, and discussion of possible double standards from the press. Does the media do more to protect its own than other people? Consider how some US press carried pictures of a man they identified, wrongly, as the Sandy Hook Elementary School murderer on Dec. 14.

And while the safety of Engel and others today can be taken as evidence the blackout “worked,” that doesn’t prove they wouldn’t have been freed if more outlets had reported on events yesterday. When Jill Carroll, then a reporter for this paper, was kidnapped in Iraq in 2006, the Monitor tried to keep a lid on the news, though only managed to keep a hold on it for about 24 hours. With newspapers like The New York Times insisting that they couldn’t sit on a major international story for much longer, the Monitor was forced to go public more quickly than it would have liked.

But as that situation evolved, a high-profile strategy within the Iraqi press was adopted to present Ms. Carroll as a sympathetic, honest person who cared deeply about that country and its people. She was eventually released unharmed after three months of terrifying captivity in the hands of an Iraqi group close to that country’s offshoot of Al Qaeda. Did the media strategy help secure her eventual release? I’d like to think so. But it’s hard to prove. Likewise in the case of David Rohde, a New York Times reporter whose seven-month abduction in Afghanistan was kept mostly quiet by the world’s press because the Times was worried heavy attention would lead to higher ransom demands for Rohde. The Times said Rohde eventually escaped his captivity, and expressed satisfaction with the blackout.

In this case, some of the blackout efforts had the feeling of closing the barn doors after the horses had bolted.

For instance, The Atlantic website had a story up for hours yesterday afternoon titled “If Richard Engel is missing in Syria, nobody kept it a secret” but pulled it down upon request in the early evening. Reporting on war often brings up ethical conflicts between protecting lives and informing the public, but is vanishing a story down a memory hole after it has probably been viewed tens of thousands of times (it was on the top of The Atlantic’s most viewed list at the time it was deleted) the right thing? (For what it’s worth, the headline was wrong. Literally dozens of people had kept a lid on this story for days, astonishing in a community whose jobs and personal compulsions are to share information).

In online forums, reporters who cover conflict have been debating the ethics of all this for days, with the majority of opinion coming down on the side of suppressing information if there’s any hope it can save lives. But some, including me, have misgivings. Do such practices erode already low public trust in journalists? Are they sometimes potentially counterproductive, if captors are desperate for publicity and enraged when they don’t get it?

For now, this story has a happy ending for Kooistra, Balkiz, and Engel. But it’s a partial one. Austin Tice, an American freelancer, has been missing and presumed captive in Syria since August. There are others who are missing whose cases have been kept more quiet. And the bloody Syrian civil war, with tens of thousands of civilian Syrians dead already, has also been rough on journalists. In a report out today, the Committee to Protect Journalists says 23 journalists were killed in combat situations this year, the highest number since 1992. Syria, and the proliferation of citizen journalists there, were responsible for that number.

“NBC was fantastic in informing our families and keeping everyone up to date, keeping the story quiet. Obviously there are many people who are still not at liberty to do this kind of thing. There are still hostages, there are still people who don’t have their freedom inside Syria and we wish them well,” Engel said.

His colleague Balkiz summed up: “When we first got captured for me at least it was a moment of disbelief … there were fumes of despair, at least for me, thinking of my family, my brother, my parents, my wife and I was feeling bad about what I’ve been putting them through … and I must say that when we were freed yesterday by the rebels it was one of the happiest moments of my life.”

Mr. Engel, cameraman John Kooistra, and producer Ghazi Balkiz were abducted after an ambush near the village of Ma’arrat Misreen, just north of Idlib, while traveling with a group of Syrian rebels.

“We were driving in Syria about five days ago in what we thought was a rebel controlled area, we were with some of the rebels and as we were moving down the road a group of gunmen just literally jumped out of the trees and bushes on the side of the road,” Engel told NBC News this morning in an interview from Turkey. “There were probably about 15 gunmen wearing ski masks. They were heavily armed, they dragged us out of the car, they had a container truck positioned waiting by the side of the road. They put us into that container truck … with some gunmen, some rebels who were escorting us, they executed one of them on the spot.”

Think you know the Middle East? Take our geography quiz.

Engel said the group was moved from safe house to safe house during their captivity, and endured threats of murder, mock executions, and taunting from their captors that they should pick among themselves who would die first. At around 11 p.m. last night in Syria, as they were being moved again not far from the initial abduction, their captors ran into a rebel road block, and two of the captors were killed in the ensuing firefight. Others may have been freed in that gun battle, but NBC and other participants are being tight lipped for now.

Engel: captors loyal to Assad

Engel said the captors were shabiha, Syrian civilian militias loyal to the government of Bashar al-Assad, and his description of what he takes to be their loyalties and background is as good a capsule description of the complexities at play in the Syrian civil war as you’ll find.

“These are people who are loyal to president Bashar al-Assad, they are Shiite, they were talking openly about their loyalty to the government, openly expressing their Shia faith, they are trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guard, they are allied with Hezbollah,” he said. “We were told that they wanted to exchange us for four Iranian agents and two Lebanese people who were from the Amal Movement and these were other shabiha members who were captured by the rebels, they captured us in order to carry out this exchange, and that’s what they were hoping to do, they were going to bring us to a Hezbollah stronghold inside Syria.”

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Amal, like Hezbollah, is a Lebanese Shiite political movement and militia. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are in many ways the shock troops of that country’s Islamic revolution. They are interested to see Mr. Assad, a member of the tiny Alawite sect, a long-ago offshoot of Shiite Islam, retain power in the face of his country’s majority Sunni Arab population, since a victory for Sunnis in Syria would deprive Iran of an ally, and provide the Sunnis of Lebanon a potentially powerful new friend.

News of the abduction was kept quiet by dozens of news outlets over the weekend, both at the urging of NBC and as part of evolving ethos among press outlets over how to handle the abduction of colleagues. A number of news operations in Turkey reported that Engel and a Turkish journalist were missing in Syria, and that story was picked up by the UK’s Daily Mail and websites like Gawker. But, for the most part, NBC and an informal group of reporters and aid workers jaw-boned most of their colleagues into not following the story, arguing that reporting could put them in danger.

Roots of blackouts

Attempting to maintain a news blackout after an abduction has long been a common practice, both for journalists and other people working in war zones. The idea is generally that a frenzy of questions and attention can make a quick negotiation for release tougher, either by spooking captors, or by raising their perception of the financial or propaganda value of their captive.

In some cases too much silence can be dangerous. If kidnappers know they’ve got someone high profile, like Engel, and then there’s no news, they can get to wondering if their captive is actually a spy working under journalist cover. In others, obviously, publicity can be very dangerous. Every situation has its different particulars. In this instance it appears that people working with the situation on the ground were seeking to buy time for rebels to find the group before they were moved to a part of Syria under government control.

Double standard?

But as always is in these cases, expect a robust media ethics debate, and discussion of possible double standards from the press. Does the media do more to protect its own than other people? Consider how some US press carried pictures of a man they identified, wrongly, as the Sandy Hook Elementary School murderer on Dec. 14.

And while the safety of Engel and others today can be taken as evidence the blackout “worked,” that doesn’t prove they wouldn’t have been freed if more outlets had reported on events yesterday. When Jill Carroll, then a reporter for this paper, was kidnapped in Iraq in 2006, the Monitor tried to keep a lid on the news, though only managed to keep a hold on it for about 24 hours. With newspapers like The New York Times insisting that they couldn’t sit on a major international story for much longer, the Monitor was forced to go public more quickly than it would have liked.

But as that situation evolved, a high-profile strategy within the Iraqi press was adopted to present Ms. Carroll as a sympathetic, honest person who cared deeply about that country and its people. She was eventually released unharmed after three months of terrifying captivity in the hands of an Iraqi group close to that country’s offshoot of Al Qaeda. Did the media strategy help secure her eventual release? I’d like to think so. But it’s hard to prove. Likewise in the case of David Rohde, a New York Times reporter whose seven-month abduction in Afghanistan was kept mostly quiet by the world’s press because the Times was worried heavy attention would lead to higher ransom demands for Rohde. The Times said Rohde eventually escaped his captivity, and expressed satisfaction with the blackout.

Not so blacked out

In this case, some of the blackout efforts had the feeling of closing the barn doors after the horses had bolted.

For instance, The Atlantic website had a story up for hours yesterday afternoon titled “If Richard Engel is missing in Syria, nobody kept it a secret” but pulled it down upon request in the early evening. Reporting on war often brings up ethical conflicts between protecting lives and informing the public, but is vanishing a story down a memory hole after it has probably been viewed tens of thousands of times (it was on the top of The Atlantic’s most viewed list at the time it was deleted) the right thing? (For what it’s worth, the headline was wrong. Literally dozens of people had kept a lid on this story for days, astonishing in a community whose jobs and personal compulsions are to share information).

In online forums, reporters who cover conflict have been debating the ethics of all this for days, with the majority of opinion coming down on the side of suppressing information if there’s any hope it can save lives. But some, including me, have misgivings. Do such practices erode already low public trust in journalists? Are they sometimes potentially counterproductive, if captors are desperate for publicity and enraged when they don’t get it?

Austin Tice remains missing

For now, this story has a happy ending for Kooistra, Balkiz, and Engel. But it’s a partial one. Austin Tice, an American freelancer, has been missing and presumed captive in Syria since August. There are others who are missing whose cases have been kept more quiet. And the bloody Syrian civil war, with tens of thousands of civilian Syrians dead already, has also been rough on journalists. In a report out today, the Committee to Protect Journalists says 23 journalists were killed in combat situations this year, the highest number since 1992. Syria, and the proliferation of citizen journalists there, were responsible for that number.

“NBC was fantastic in informing our families and keeping everyone up to date, keeping the story quiet. Obviously there are many people who are still not at liberty to do this kind of thing. There are still hostages, there are still people who don’t have their freedom inside Syria and we wish them well,” Engel said.

His colleague Balkiz summed up: “When we first got captured for me at least it was a moment of disbelief … there were fumes of despair, at least for me, thinking of my family, my brother, my parents, my wife and I was feeling bad about what I’ve been putting them through … and I must say that when we were freed yesterday by the rebels it was one of the happiest moments of my life.”

Sumerian Language & Climate: Long Drought Killed Off Ancient Tongue, Research Suggests

A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says.

Because no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for the Sumerian demise, the conclusions rely on indirect clues. But several pieces of archaeological and geological evidence tie the gradual decline of the Sumerian civilization to a drought.

The findings, which were presented Monday (Dec. 3) here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, show how vulnerable human society may be to climate change, including human-caused change.

“This was not a single summer or winter, this was 200 to 300 years of drought,” said Matt Konfirst, a geologist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.

Beginning about 3500 B.C., the Sumerian culture flourished in ancient Mesopotamia, which was located in present-day Iraq. Ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing, built the world’s first wheel and arch, and wrote the first epic poem, “Gilgamesh.”

But after 200 to 300 years of upheaval, the Sumerian culture disappeared around 4,000 years ago, and the Sumerian language went extinct soon after that.

Konfirst wanted to see if a drought that spanned about 200 years may have caused the decline. Several geological records point to a long period of drier weather in the Middle East around 4,200 years ago, Konfirst said. The Red Sea and the Dead Sea had increased evaporation; water levels dropped at Lake Van in Turkey, and cores from marine sediments around that period indicate increased dust in the environment.

“As we go into the 4,200-year-ago climate anomaly, we actually see that estimated rainfall decreases substantially in this region and the number of sites that are populated at this time period reduce substantially,” he said.

Around the same time, 74 percent of the ancient Mesopotamian settlements were abandoned, according to a 2006 study of an archaeological site called Tell Leilan in Syria. The populated area also shrank by 93 percent, he said.

“People still live in this region. It’s not that the collapse of a civilization means that an area is completely abandoned,” he said. “But that there’s a sharp change in the population.”

During the great drought, two waves of marauding nomads descended upon the region, sacking the capital city of Ur. After around 2000 B.C., ancient Sumerian gradually died off as a spoken language in the region. For the next 2,000 years, the tongue lingered on as a dead written language, similar to Latin in the Middle Ages, but has been completely extinct since then, Konfirst said.

The coincidence of the social upheaval, depopulation in the area and the geologic record of drought suggests climate change might have played a role in the loss of the Sumerian language, Konfirst said.

The findings also suggest that modern-day civilizations may be vulnerable to climate change, he said.

Bradley Manning Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

Bradley Manning, the US army private first class accused of linking information to WikiLeaks, has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the group The Movement of the Icelandic Parliament.

Manning is faced with charges that include aiding the enemy, wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the internet, theft of public property or records, transmitting defense information and fraud and related activity in connection with computers, CNN reported. The former Army private could face life in prison if convicted of these charges.

Despite his long list of charges, the parliamentary group The Movement of the Icelandic Parliament submitted a letter to the Nobel Peace Prize committee for the 2012 prize for his “individual effort to have an impact for peace in our world,” the letter stated.

“The revelations – including video documentation of an incident in which American soldiers gunned down Reuters journalists in Iraq – have helped to fuel a worldwide discussion about America’s overseas engagements, civilian casualties of war, imperialistic manipulations, and rules of engagement,” the letter stated. “Citizens worldwide owe a great debt to the WikiLeaks whistleblower for shedding light on these issues, and so I urge the Committee to award this prestigious prize to accused whistleblower Bradley Manning.”

Manning, 24, served the US military in Baghdad in late 2009 to early 2010 and allegedly leaked more than 700,000 secret government documents from Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and a combat video that shows an Army helicopter attack in 2007, the Associated Press reported. His defense has said Manning had access to the computers with others in the workplace and was emotionally distressed since he was a gay soldier and homosexuals were barred from serving openly in the US military at the time.

The letter nominating him for a Nobel Peace Prize states the former soldier deserves it since he brought to light “a long history of corruption, war crimes, and imperialism by the United States government in international dealings,” which they believe fueled the Arab Spring uprising and contributed to the withdrawal of troops in Iraq in 2011.

Manning has been in prison for over a year and was court martialed on all charges last Friday, the military said in a statement, CNN reported. A military judge will be appointed to provide the date for the date for his arraignment, motion hearings and trial.

100Feed: Who Coined the Phrase, “United States of America”?

By Anderson Cooper

It may seem surprising, but nobody is really sure who came up with the phrase, “United States of America.”

Speculation generally swirls around a familiar cast of characters – the two Toms (Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson), Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin, and even a gentleman named Oliver Ellsworth (a delegate from the Constitutional Convention of 1787). But every instance of those gentlemen using the name “United States of America” is predated by a recently discovered example of the phrase in the Revolutionary-era Virginia Gazette.

So who was perhaps the first person ever to write the words “United States of America”? A PLANTER.

That was how the author of an essay in the Gazette signed the anonymous letter. During that time, it was common practice for essays and polemics to be published anonymously in an attempt to avoid future charges of treason – only later has history identified some of these authors.

The discovery adds a new twist – as well as the mystery of the Planter’s identity – to the search for the origin of a national name that has now become iconic.

Several references mistakenly credit Paine with formulating the name in January 1776. Paine’s popular and persuasive book, “Common Sense,” uses “United Colonies,” “American states,” and “FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES OF AMERICA,” but he never uses the final form.

The National Archives, meanwhile, cite the first known use of the “formal term United States of America” as being the Declaration of Independence, which would recognize Jefferson as the originator. Written in June 1776, Jefferson’s “original Rough draught” placed the new name at the head of the business – “A Declaration by the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA in General Congress assembled.”

Jefferson clearly had an idea as to what would sound good by presenting the national moniker in capitalized letters. But in the final edit, the line was changed to read, “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.” The fact that “United States of America” appears in both versions of the Declaration may have been enough evidence to credit Jefferson with coining the phrase, but there is another example published three months earlier.

Beginning in March 1776, a series of anonymously written articles began appearing in The Virginia Gazette – one of three different Virginia Gazettes being published in Williamsburg at that time. Addressed to the “Inhabitants of Virginia,” the essays present an economic set of arguments promoting independence versus reconciliation with Great Britain. The author estimates total Colonial losses at $24 million and laments the possibility of truce without full reparation – and then voices for the first time what would become the name of our nation.

“What a prodigious sum for the united states of America to give up for the sake of a peace, that, very probably, itself would be one of the greatest misfortunes!” – A PLANTER

So who is A PLANTER?

Likely candidates could be well-known Virginians, like Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, or even Jefferson. Some of the essay’s phrasing can be found in the writings of Jefferson. For example, “to bind us by their laws in all cases whatsoever,” appears in both the essay and Jefferson’s autobiography.

A Planter could be the nomme de plume of an intrepid New Englander, like John Adams, attempting to rally support for independence in the South, a similar motive for why he charged Jefferson, a Southerner, to pen the Declaration.
A Planter could be Benjamin Franklin, who was well-known for his hoaxes and journalistic sleight-of-hand. Or maybe, A Planter is exactly whom the letters portray, an industrious, logistics-minded landowner, evangelizing about the promise of increased prosperity should the “united states of America” ever become an independent nation.
There is a possibility the author was aware of the historical significance of introducing the new name for the first time, as he or she observes:

“Many to whom this language is new, may, at first, be startled at the name of an independent Republick, [and think that] the expenses of maintaining a long and important war will exceed the disadvantages of submitting to some partial and mutilated accommodation. But let these persons point out to you any other alternative than independence or submission. For it is impossible for us to make any other concessions without yielding to the whole of their demands.”
So, the mystery continues.

Our anonymous author, A Planter, certainly did plant a few seeds in the spring of 1776. Those seeds came to fruition as the first documentary evidence of the phrase “United States of America” – an experiment in self-government that quickly became one of the most powerful and influential nations in the world.

100Feed Special Report: My First Days in Zuccotti Park by Jane Zuckerberg

On September 18, 2011 I arrived in New York City at approximately 4:00 P.M. The initial purpose of my trip was to visit my parents at their apartment near Zuccotti Park. As I walked up the narrow steps of the building, a large group of people caught my attention. I had seen them as I drove up to the building, but they didn’t seem as numerous at first glance. These people, who were wielding nothing but signs and were chanting, seemed harmless. They reminded me of something I had seen a few months earlier – namely the conservative “Tea Partiers”.

Whilst observing these “ninety-nine percenters” as they called themselves, a young woman, about my age and height, approached me. Her sign was a smallish piece of cardboard with a marijuana leaf printed with black marker and the words “Tax Hemp” scrawled across it with red marker. She smiled at me and set her sign down so she could speak to me without distraction.
“Are you with the protesters?” she asked, still bearing a friendly smile.
“No. I was just passing by. What are they protesting?”
“Pretty much everything. Some of them are teachers, some are homeless. They’ve just come here to make a difference.”
This girl’s name was Natalie.

At first they didn’t seem reasonable. As I have learned, I have been very fortunate to come from a wealthy family and had never been one to miss a meal. I was a pious Conservative and I watched Fox news religiously. In short, I was blind. I was unaware of all the problems we were facing in this country; and the problems that I knew of, I merely blamed on the president. What did I know? My father had home schooled me and taught me to be Conservative and Christian with all my heart. Glenn Beck? An American hero! Mitt Romney? A patriot! Sure, they’ve never been homeless. They’ve never lived in poverty; but then again, neither have I, and I’m a fairly good person. I have donated to the NCCS (National Children’s Cancer Society) and I frequently give blood. However, the poor live off government cheese and welfare. As a friend quoted one of her Republican aunts, “they have three children with three different baby daddies!” In short, I was bigoted and everything Natalie said went through one ear and out the other.

That night I had dinner with my parents. Both of them are in their late fifties and are retired. As we ate a Sunday chicken dinner, Bill O’Reilly buzzed on the living room television. However, the protestors outside were becoming increasingly louder. At one point it became impossible to hear the television. My dad angrily turned up the volume on the television as he muttered random obscenities. My mom looked out the windows at the growing crowd of protestors. As she closed the blinds, she too muttered random insults.

I went to bed that night thinking about my boyfriend in back in Los Angeles. I had appeared on two hit television shows that year, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, and I had been going steady with one of the actors in the former. I thought about my home in L.A. Everything in my life was perfect. I had everything anyone could ever want: wealth, love, a nice home. As they say, ignorance is bliss. Little did I know that everything I believed would change almost instantaneously.

The next morning, I awoke to the sound of screaming. I got dressed and went outside to find policemen arresting several of the protestors. One of the men did not take to being arrested and so fought back. I watched as two policemen beat him viciously with clubs. Ambulances swarmed the street. Suddenly, I saw Natalie.

I approached her and found her sitting on the sidewalk, crying uncontrollably. I sat next to her as the policemen continued to arrest the protestors and the EMT’s carried two people out in body bags. This reminded me of something you would see in a war; this was exactly that – a war. Natalie attempted to tell me something, but she was so shaken that I could hardly understand her.
“They killed my boyfriend.” she cried.
“Who?”
“The cops beat him to death in his tent. He didn’t do anything wrong.”
I sat with Natalie as the police cleared the area. It should be noted that the very next day, the news reported that a homeless man was found dead in a tent near Zuccotti park. Natalie recognized this man immediately as her boyfriend, who was clearly not homeless.

I spent that day in Zuccotti park with Natalie. After the police left the park, the protestors picked up their signs and began chanting once again. Natalie had several friends who introduced themselves to me that day. One of the people was no older than seventeen; I will refer to him only as Chris. Chris was a bright looking young man with long blond hair and hazel eyes. He was about six inches taller than I. The other two were women, who I will refer to as Shauna and Priscilla. Shauna was a tall, stout woman in her late twenties. She had an Asian appearance as well as an accent. Apparently Shauna was an immigrant who had come to the states with her brother and had met her husband in New York; her husband was of Cuban descent and was named Miguel. Her brother’s name was Chang. Priscilla was about nineteen and had long red hair that she usually hid under a cap. We called her Red, merely because of her hair color, and she admitted immigrating here from Canada.

That night, I didn’t go to my parent’s condo. I stayed with Priscilla and Natalie, who provided me with my own bright green tent. Sleeping in the tent was something entirely new to me. I had never gone camping in my life and I had an aversion to sleeping on the ground; however, I did it for Natalie’s sake. On my first day back to New York, Natalie had been kind to me. Unless you have been to New York, you have no idea how rude the citizens can be. All of these other people were so compassionate and accepting, even to me, who completely despised their politics. Although I objected at first, Nat was worried for her own safety because of the nightly police raids. Being with her in her time of need was the least I could do.

The protestors awakened me the next morning before sunrise. Shauna had bought coffee for all the people in her “group”, including me. I watched as Chang downed his coffee whilst working on a new sign. It was slightly larger than the other ones I had seen. It was a white canvas with “I am an immigrant. I came to take your job but you don’t have one” written on it with black and red paint. He then looked at me and said “you come with us?”. “No” I said as I sipped my coffee from the warm cup. It had been a cold night, and the coffee warmed my body instantly. “Oh, come on, Zucky! It is fun!” Shauna said. She then leaned forward and whispered, “Plus there are many cute guys.” She giggled as she leaned up against Miguel, who looked at her with a smirk.
“I don’t fit in here. I’ll probably go back to parents’ place. It just wouldn’t work out.”
“Why not?” Miguel said. “It’s easy. You just hold a sign and sing.”
“I’m a Republican and it just wouldn’t work out.”

As everyone else in the group looked at me and each other with smirks. It was like they knew something that I didn’t. Chang convinced me to go with them just as the sun came through the trees in the park. It was settled – one day and then I could leave. “They just needed a little support”.

I marched through Time Square that day with nearly two thousand people, protestors and regular citizens close around me. We walked for six hours before resting. As we rested near the park, Priscilla appeared and waved at us. My calves were sore, my legs were burning and my throat was sore from dehydration. As she approached us, I could not stand up. She offered me and the rest of my group a bottle of water. Wait a second: my group? It was getting a little confusing. These people were so kind. They were almost like distant relatives.

We rested for about an hour before a newscaster from CNN appeared on scene. He approached Shauna with a microphone as he asked a question, “What is Occupy Wall Street and what is their goal?” Shauna hesitated before grabbing my arm. “You know, I think Jane would like to answer your question.” I was a little surprised. The first thought going through my mind was my parents, looking at the television and seeing me with this group of people. My dad would have a heart attack, as well as my mom. Then I thought about Natalie. Her boyfriend had been murdered by the policemen for no good reason. If I had not met Natalie and known how sweet and innocent she was, I would’ve been on the side of the policemen. I knew my mom and dad would be on the cops’ side. However, no one deserves to be murdered like that. Then something dawned on me: screw it. You only get one life, and I’m on Natalie’s side. I’m on the ninety-nine percenters’ side. So I spoke into the microphone.
“This country has a lot of problems. We know we can’t fix everything but, we’ve just come here to… make a difference.”

I felt like a traitor. This was Jane S. Zuckerberg protesting the very same people who had raised me. This was me protesting my own brother – the billionaire who founded one of the most widely used social networking sites in the world. This was me being bad. But, oh Lord, did it feel good!

After another hour or so of walking, we arrived at Zuccotti park around dinnertime and found Natalie sitting with Priscilla’s sister and boyfriend. Priscilla’s sister was a sweet fourteen year old girl named Tasha. News anchors for every station surrounded the park and interviewed the protestors. One thing I noticed was Fox news, in large numbers, cornering citizens and asking them about OWS. These were not protestors, but the people willingly answered as if they were “fighting for the cause”. For the first time in twenty years, I felt uncomfortable in my own skin. These people, these cops, these interviewers were playing dirty and trying to make the protestors look bad.

Time square looked so beautiful that night. I walked downtown and looked at all the protestors crowding the streets. The police were putting up more barricades to keep the protestors away from certain streets, but they did not work. Occupy Wall Street had taken over the city; in fact, I had no idea how far it had gone. Protests were springing up across the country, and in places such as Syria, Egypt and Libya. Times were changing, and I had changed along with it. I dreaded the moment I walked into my parents’ apartment. I imagined my dad, who had beaten me throughout my teenage years for lesser offenses than this. I imagined walking in and my dad telling me to get out of his house, or he would perhaps call the police. I tried to imagine them seeing me on television and throwing the TV out the window. All I knew was something bad was about to happen.

I walked through the door and dropped my bag on the floor, only to see my parents in the dining room eating their dinner. In fact, my mom even acted happy to see me. They did not even know where I had been and they were not about to suspect I had been in Zuccotti. They had apparently not seen the interview on CNN. Then, as my mom wrapped her arms around me and hugged me, I remembered something: my parents watch Fox news.

100Feed: The Real Hatfields and McCoys

The History Channel made its own history with “Hatfields & McCoys.” The miniseries drew the biggest audience ever for a nonsports event—twice.
More than a century later, the storied feud is as much about American mythology as it is a tale of Appalachian blood vengeance. The saga came on the heels of the divisive Civil War, which killed more Americans than any other military engagement and led West Virginia to secede from Confederate Virginia. The hostilities were never just one incident, but escalating grievances that included pig theft, turf arguments, broken romances and murder. Sometimes, Americans just like to take sides in a feud.

Historians and educators were also brought in to vet the story, according to the show’s producers, though writers “took such traditional liberties as compressing characters and the timing of events.” (May 29, Christian Science Monitor)

Then again, the real story will probably never be known: Among other things, talking about oneself wasn’t as popular back then as it is now. The Hatfields, headed by timber merchant William Anderson (aka Devil Anse), and the McCoys, whose patriarch Randolph “Old Randall” McCoy owned land and livestock, lived in Tug Valley within Kentucky and West Virginia. The two families shared kin, which made tracking who was on whose side difficult.

A rough timeline of the blood feud, according to the History Channel, Biography and other sources:

1865: The militia group Logan Wildcats, which include Devil Anse, his uncle Jim Vance and other Hatfields, kills Asa Harmon McCoy, Randolph McCoy’s brother. Since Asa served on the “wrong side” of the Civil War, his death doesn’t start the feud, but animosities may be kindled.

1878: If there’s a beginning, this would be it: Randolph McCoy accuses Devil Anse’s cousin, Floyd Hatfield, of porcine theft. Stealing valuable pigs was a pretty rare and therefore grievous offense in the farming valley. Favorable testimony by Bill Staton—a McCoy married to a Hatfield—clears Floyd.

1880: Two McCoys kill Staton a couple years later. One successfully claims self-defense in a murder trial. The same year, Johnse Hatfield, son of Devil Anse, gets it on with Roseanna McCoy, daughter of Randolph. She stays with the Hatfields, but Johnse dumps the pregnant girlfriend and marries her cousin, Nancy McCoy. (The baby died and a descendant claims Roseanna died of a broken heart before she was 30.)

1882: In August, Randolph McCoy’s three sons fight with Devil Anse’s two brothers and inflict heavy injury on Ellison. The Hatfields take the sons from the authorities. When Ellison Hatfield, stabbed and shot in the back, dies from his wounds, all three brothers, tied to pawpaw bushes, are shot in a hail of bullets. The Hatfields are indicted, but not arrested.

1887: Lawyer Perry Cline convinces the Kentucky governor to get a bounty on the Hatfields’ heads. He also hires bounty hunter “Bad” Frank Phillips. Newspapers cover the feud, publicizing the bounty on their heads. (The University of Kentucky has digitized coverage here.)
New Year’s massacre, 1888: Devil Anse’s son Cap and friend Jim Vance ambush the McCoy’s home. Randolph McCoy hides in a pigpen, but son Calvin and daughter Alifair are killed, and wife Sarah is beaten. Within days, bounty hunter Phillips kills Jim Vance and captures nine Hatfields.

1889: The Supreme Court rules that the Hatfields can be tried, and the trial ends with eight Hatfields and friends sentenced to life in prison. One man is hanged.

1892: A railroad comes through Tug Valley, changing the mountainous culture forever into a coal-mining community.

1914: Randolph McCoy, a ferry operator, dies at age 88 from cooking fire injuries. He had lost five out of 16 children to the feud.

1922: Devin Anse Hatfield, 11 years after being baptized, dies of pneumonia at age 73.

June 13, 2003: The Hatfields and the McCoys sign a peace agreement.

American law and the Supreme Court: The acrimony wasn’t as lawless as contemporary accounts made it out to be: The clans also battled in court, be it over theft or murder—although they were inclined to disagree with the verdicts with gunfire. Lawyer Cline, a distant cousin to Randolph McCoy, had lost 5,000 acres to his neighbor Devil Anse in court battles over the years. Plans to build a railroad now made that lost Tug Valley property even more valuable, so Cline’s motives for rounding up the Hatfields have been suspected as more a financial grudge than a real penchant for justice. Litigiousness went to the highest court in the land in Mahon v. Justice (1888), when the Hatfields protested their arrest-by-posse, which dragged them across state lines into Kentucky. The case was really about state sovereignty and symbolized a battle between Kentucky and West Virginia.

The Hatfields vs. the McCoys, in social media: Before Team Edward and Team Jacob, there were #teamhatfield and #teammccoy. While some tweets side with the “underdog,” some couldn’t help admire the Hatfield’s “Murder Inc. Style.” Then again, some dismiss a pig as a legitimate instigator—even though in 19th century America, a pig is your livelihood.