Category: Letterhead

If there’s anything we’ve learned from mythology, it’s don’t mess with the gods. In The Games Gods Play by Abigail Owen, one cursed soul gets tangled up in divine distraction when she’s selected as Hades’ champion. Read on to learn more about this spicy, new romantasy, out September 3rd, through an excerpt and artwork from the deluxe limited edition, available for preorder.

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Excerpt – Chapter 4

Hades’ barely-there smile turns condescending. “Was that so hard?”

It’s too…deliberate. Like he’s decided to play this a different way. Only that makes no sense.

But gods don’t have to make sense, I guess.

Drawing the notice of any of them is a bad idea. They are capricious beings who might curse you rather than bless you depending on their mood and the way the breeze is blowing. Especially this one.

“Now, let’s talk about what you think you were doing,” Hades says.

I frown, confused. “I thought you already—”

“And with the Crucible starting tonight, even,” he continues in a disappointed voice, as if I hadn’t spoken.

I sigh. “Do you want an apology before you smite me or something?”

“Most would fall to their knees before me. Beg for my mercy.”

He’s toying with me now. I’m a mouse. He’s a cat. And I’m his dinner.

I swallow hard, trying to force my heart back down my throat. “I’m pretty sure I’m dead either way.” Of course I am. Let’s not heap even more humiliation on my early end. “Would kneeling help?”

His silvery eyes—not dark like I thought at first, but like mercury—swirl with cold amusement. Did I say something funny?

“Is that why you’re here?” I ask. “The Crucible?”

Hades has never participated, and Zeus is hardly his favorite sibling, so why is he at this temple, really?

“I have my own reasons for being here tonight.”

In other words, Don’t ask gods questions, reckless mortal.

“Why did you stop me?” I glance at the temple, ignoring his tone entirely.

Instead of answering, Hades taps his thumb against his chin. “The question is, what do I do with you now?”

Is he enjoying my predicament? I’ve never thought much about the god of death—I’m a little busy with surviving mortality first—but I’m starting to really not like him. If Boone acted more like this, I’d have gotten over him ages ago. “I assume you’re going to send me to the Underworld.”

Seriously, stop talking, Lyra.

Hades hums. “I can do worse than that.”

Just like with Chance, backing down now isn’t an option. “Oh?” I tip my head, pretending like I don’t already know. “I do hear you are creative with your punishments.”

“I’m flattered.” He gives a tiny, mocking bow. “I could make you roll a rock up a hill and never make it to the top, only to start back over every single day for the rest of eternity.”

That already happened to Sisyphus ages ago. “I’m pretty sure Zeus came up with that.”

His lips flatten. “Were you there?”

I shrug. “Either way, it sounds like a vacation. Peaceful, undisturbed labor. When do I start?”

My mouth is going to get me permanently dead.

I’m waiting to end up in the Underworld any second, or maybe for Hades’ famous bident to appear in his hand for him to skewer me with.

Instead, he shakes his head. “I’m not going to kill you. Yet.”

Really? Do I trust him?

He must see the wariness in my eyes, because a muscle tightens in his jaw like he’s irritated I would doubt his word. “Relax, my star.”

I hesitate at the endearment. It clearly means nothing to him. When he doesn’t immediately talk, I manage not to as well, and instead I take in more details about the god standing before me.

He’s not exactly what I expected. I mean, beyond the obvious dark and brooding thing. It’s his clothes. He’s wearing worn boots and jeans, for Elysium’s sake. The jeans sit low on his narrow hips and are paired with a sky-blue button-down shirt rolled up at the sleeves to reveal forearms a deeper tan than I would expect from someone who lives in the Underworld. Who knew forearms could be sexy?

Over the shirt, he wears vintage leather suspenders that I suspect meet in the back at the top of his shoulder blades, side holster–style. The metal rings on the suspenders look like they have a purpose that he’s not using them for right now. Are they for weapons? Or does he have a bad back?

“Do I pass inspection?” he drawls.

I jerk my gaze back up to his face. “You look different than I thought.”

Both eyebrows twitch up. “And what did you expect? All-black clothing? Perhaps a full leather getup?”

Heat flares up my neck. Something like that, actually. “Don’t forget the horns. And maybe a tail.”

“That’s a different god of death.” He makes an exasperated sound, then mutters something about abhorring expectations.

Meeting those expectations, I think he means. Strange that I have something in common with a god. I may be cursed, but damned if I’m going to let it dictate who I am.

“Your home in the Underworld is Erebus,” I say pointedly.

“And?”

“It’s called… Wait for it.” I hold up a hand. “The Land of Shadows.”

Someone should duct tape my mouth shut.

Hades slips his hands in his pockets, casually relaxed in a leashed predator sort of way. “I always thought that naming was unoriginal. It’s the Underworld. Of course there are shadows.”

This conversation seems to be going off the rails a bit. “I guess.” And then, because my brain can’t help itself, I actually consider what he said. “I mean, technically, you’re not the god of shadows or even the goddess of night.” Now I’m on a roll. “And if the fire-and-brimstone thing is true, then it seems like it would be quite well lit down there.”

His eyes glint at me like sharpened knives.

I can’t tell if he’s offended or surprised by my running commentary.

Unfortunately for both of us, I have a good imagination—and a lot of opinions. “You have a perception issue, if you think about it.”

“I have a perception issue,” he repeats.

“Yes, you do. If they can’t see for themselves, mortals will believe what they are told. I was always told that Hades is shrouded in darkness, smells of fire, and is covered in tattoos that can come alive at his will.”

His gaze trails down my body with such slow deliberation, it sends the heat from earlier crawling farther up my neck and into my cheeks. “And yet you’re the one dressed in black and with tattoos, my star,” he points out.

I follow his gaze to my black fitted shirt paired with jeans—so it’s not all black. One sleeve has ridden up slightly to expose the pale skin of my wrist where the black ink tattoo peeks out. Two stars. A third star is on my other wrist, and when I put my arms together, they form Orion’s Belt.

One of the few things I remember before being taken in by the Order is watching Orion move across the sky outside my bedroom window. The constellation is an unchanging, ever-fixed mark in the night.

Is that why he called me his star twice now? I tug the sleeve down.

“So…” He comes out of his casual leaning to step closer. Close enough that I can breathe him in, which is when I learn that the god of death smells like the darkest, most sinful, bitter chocolate.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

I definitely do not want a god knowing my name. “Felix Argos.”

Hades doesn’t call me on the lie. Just watches me, gaze assessing like he’s debating something. A creative new punishment for me, probably.

“So…” I mimic his earlier phrasing and glance to the side of the temple and the way down the mountain. Escape is so close. Just out of reach, like the open door of a birdcage with a cat sitting outside. “What happens now?”

“What did you mean about being cursed?”

Ugh. I don’t want to talk about that. I hedge instead. “You don’t know?”

“Tell me like I don’t.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

He lifts a single eyebrow, and I get the message. Trying not to clench my teeth, I refuse to think about how Hades is only the second person I’ve ever shared this with.

After taking a deep breath, I say in a rush, “Twenty-three years ago, when I was still in my mother’s womb, she and my father came here to make an offering and pray for blessings on the birth. Her water broke, and your brother apparently took offense at her defiling his sacred sanctuary. As punishment, he cursed her baby—me, as it happens—that no one would ever love me. There. End of story.”

His gaze turns colder, so calculating that I take a step back.

“He made you unlovable?” he asks as though he isn’t quite sure he believes me.
I give a jerking nod.

That curse is why my parents gave me up. They said it was the debt, but I know otherwise. It landed me in the Order of Thieves at three years old. It’s why I have no ride-or-die friends. It’s why Boone…

Up until tonight, I’ve tried to convince myself that things could have been worse. I mean, I could have ended up as kraken fodder or with snakes for hair and stone statues as my friends.

But it led me to this moment. Facing a different god. A worse god.

One who obviously finds my curse interesting. Why? Because Zeus gave it to me? The current King of the Gods is a dick. That’s one thing

Hades also agrees with me on. The question is, what is he going to do with me now?

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Artwork From the Deluxe Edition of The Games Gods Play

Tour the dark corners and dangerous underbelly of a magical Shanghai with Jingwen, a showgirl determined to root out what or who is behind a gruesome series of thefts.

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Chapter Two

My grandma’s clinic lies in the attic of a piano bar on Blood Alley, in the bowels that lie between the groomed, sleeping towers of the International Settlement and the French Concession.

In the hellish blue alleys that run under the Bund’s distinguished consulates and banks, neon lamps illuminate the faces of courtesans and gangsters, who are smoking cigarettes in the shadows. Outside a dive bar, a group of boys in white uniforms—sailors in the American navy—nudge each other and whisper behind their hands, nodding at me. But on the other side of the street, a group of silver-handed gangsters from the Blue Dawn are keeping watch, steel sabres ready to be drawn at any second, making the sailors think twice about going after a Chinese woman.

Inside the Cabaret Volieré, merriment and abandon overflow like the foam atop a mug of beer. The Texan pianist is playing honky-tonk with his callused fingers on a peeling, out-of-tune grand piano, occasionally missing notes due to the broken keys. Knockoff absinthe, made in some British swindler’s bathtub, makes its rounds on brass trays. Everybody is drunk. The dresses are falling off the shoulders of the taxi dancers, who are lying across the laps of their patrons, their makeup smudged.

I run up the stairs behind the piano, past the couples tangled in each other’s skin on the second-floor lounge, to the closed door at the very top of the stairs.

The clinic, with its steel sink and gleaming operating table, is empty. Tendrils of warm sandalwood incense dance through the air like souls, rising from a small shrine in a corner of the room. A pile of offerings—oranges, apples, and a small pineapple—lay heaped before a nuo opera mask, a lacquered ebony face twisted into a grimace, with flaming red brows and a tiger’s whiskers.

As I approach the shrine, incense crawls after me like a summer insect, creating a halo around my head, and I bat the smoke away with my hand. “Go away,” I say, although it’s just smoke.

Near the clinic’s window, a steaming kettle of black coffee rests on a low sandalwood table beside diagrams of musculature and anatomy. The window is wide open, silk curtains fluttering in the breeze.

I arrange my high heels neatly under the windowsill and climb outside, onto the rusted fire escape. Down below, a couple of gangsters look up, cigarettes between their teeth. I smooth my dress down to conceal my underwear.

Yue Liqing is standing on the roof, leaning over the parapet, wearing a flowing blouse made of patterned silk. A strand of her curled, white hair dances in the night air.

“Waipo!” I yell from the fire escape. “What are you doing?”

She holds her hand up to silence me. “Breathing,” she says. “Jingwen, don’t you feel like the night air is haunted sometimes? It’s beautiful.”

In the distance, nightclub signs twinkle like paper lanterns floating down a stream. Automobiles glide up the avenues like a school of goldfish. The fog I had noticed earlier that evening has lifted.

“Waipo, I brought the money.”

Liqing’s eyes open slowly. “You’re also late. You were caught up dancing with some new paramour, weren’t you? That’s why you’re wearing that ridiculous thing on your head. Your mother was exactly the same in her youth.”

I reach up and realize I’m still wearing the beaded headdress. “There was an attack at the cabaret.” I comb my fingers through the beads to untangle them from my hair. “Waipo, you always know everything that happens in Shanghai after nightfall. What’s going on?”

Liqing exhales one last time, the warmth of her breath lingering in the air, and she descends the fire escape, her surgeon’s hands steady on the rails. At odds with the rest of the urban decay, she is wearing black-and-white cloth slippers, a relic of her childhood in the countryside.

In her clinic, she pours a mug of coffee. We sit across from each other at the table, both of us kneeling. When the mug is nearly full, I reach for it, but Liqing slaps my hand away.

“The first cup is always for the spirits,” she responds, setting it between us.

I sigh audibly, but she ignores my exasperation. With a deep breath, I prepare to launch into a rant about Huahua and her missing lips, but I bite my tongue before I start. Liqing’s shoulders are relaxed, her eyes closed as she inhales the coffee steam. If I say anything now, she won’t hear it. So, I gesture to the shrine instead, trying to appease her obsession with ghosts and demons. “The mask is different from the one you had a few hours ago when I came for the bones.”

Liqing fills a second mug of coffee. “Ah yes, that mask was meant to ward off the spirits of my hateful, long-dead in-laws. This one is meant to repel the pig-faced ghost.”

The vines of smoke dance toward my outstretched finger, hissing like a viper, and I draw my hand away. Liqing nudges the coffee toward me, and I take it as my cue to start.

I suck in another deep breath. “Someone cut Huahua’s lips from her face. It happened like lightning. One second everyone was dancing, including her, and then she screamed and her lips were gone. I don’t know how to describe it—she wasn’t even bleeding that much. Her face became a sort of moving shadow.”

“That is gruesome,” Liqing agrees, “but hardly the strangest thing I’ve heard about this city.”

“Even now, I wonder if I imagined it. Maybe I’m just going mad.”

My beaded headdress lies discarded on the old carpet—crown jewels under the Paramount’s sparkling chandeliers, but cheap junk on the floor of my grandmother’s clinic.

The lines around Liqing’s mouth deepen. “Shanghai is a wild animal. Her cruelty lies in her capitalistic nature. If you choose to become a cabaret girl, then you should be prepared to deal with the consequences.”

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From Daughter of Calamity by Rosalie M. Lin. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Struggling to understand what’s happening in the world today? Consider yesterday with Annalee Newitz, author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Scatter and The Terraformers. Newitz is back with Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, an incisive and timely exploration of propaganda, manipulation, and disinformation.

Stories Are Weapons traces America’s deep roots in weaponizing stories through media and influence campaigns to take a critical look at the battles around identity, including school boards and LGBTQ+ students, race, and feminism, dividing Americans now.

In this excerpt from the first chapter, find out how Freud’s nephew used what he learned from his uncle manipulate the media and topple a government (to popularize bananas in the United States!), and what Cold War psyops have in common with advertising campaigns.

Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind is available June 4 wherever books are sold.

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The Mind Bomb

Modern psychological warfare began in the plush Vienna offices of an early twentieth-­century doctor named Sigmund Freud, who popularized a new scientific discipline called psychoanalysis. In his writing and lectures, Freud argued that psychoanalysis had identified “the unconscious,” a veiled part of the mind that motivates people even when they aren’t aware of it. For Freud, unconscious desires were the key to understanding why people developed mental health problems, or “neuroses,” as he liked to call them. With the help of a doctor like himself, trained in psychoanalysis, that desire could be made conscious and therefore controllable. He had some success with patients suffering from what therapists today would likely call depression and trauma. But many enthusiastic Freudians used his work in contexts that the doctor never intended, like advertising and wartime propaganda. No doubt he would have psychoanalyzed the hell out of these misappropriations, but he never got the chance. Freud died in 1939, shortly after Nazis drove him and his family out of Vienna.

Freud wanted to cure neuroses by helping people understand themselves—­especially the taboo desires hidden in their unconscious minds. His form of therapy involved asking patients about their dreams, early memories, and fantasies; it was his way of plumbing their unconscious minds, where desire can roam free. He called it the “talking cure.” Patients would narrate their own lives and analyze the arcane symbolism of their dreams, slowly piecing together all the events and feelings that had caused their troubles. Once the patient had a coherent story about themselves, Freud believed, they could work through whatever harmful thoughts or behaviors plagued them. If, however, they did not reengineer what Freud called the “mechanism” of their consciousness,¹ they were liable to be aggressive, depressed, self-­destructive, or delusional. It turned out this also made them easy targets for propaganda.

We know that because savvy advertising creatives in New York City conducted what amounted to mass psychological experiments in the 1920s, when they started using Freud’s ideas to sell products. The most prominent among them was Freud’s own nephew, Edward Bernays, often heralded as the creator of “public relations” as a field. Bernays grew up in New York City, though he spent summers with Freud’s family in the Alps—­the two families were close, perhaps because all the parents were related. Bernays’s mother was Freud’s sister, and Bernays’s father was the brother of Freud’s wife. In 1917, Bernays sent his uncle a box of the Havana cigars he loved, and the psychoanalyst returned the favor by sending his nephew a copy of his latest book, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-­Analysis. Though Freud’s previous books had made waves in the scientific community, this was his first mainstream hit. The short book popularized Freud’s conception of the unconscious and its connection to dreams. It also paved the way for Bernays’s own meditation on psychology in 1923 called Crystallizing Public Opinion, which was about how to persuade the public by using mass media like newspapers to appeal to their unconscious biases.

One of Bernays’s early career triumphs was an advertising campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes in 1929, aimed specifically at young women. Smoking had long been considered a male habit, and it was generally taboo for women to smoke publicly. Bernays wanted to change all that and open up a new market for cigarettes. Freud had taught Bernays that the dream logic of the unconscious mind included a kind of emotional free association, where desire for one thing could easily morph into desire for something completely different—­at least, if the two desires could be made to intertwine somehow. His only question was, what did women want, and how could Bernays convert it into a hankering for cigarettes? Young women in America at that time were still electrified by the success of the suffrage movement and were excited to pursue the newfound freedoms that came with the voting rights they had secured in 1920. So Bernays decided to create a campaign that could sublimate women’s love of freedom into a lust for cigarettes. All he needed was the perfect mass media vehicle—­one that fed women’s dreams. He worked his connections and got in touch with Vogue magazine. Somehow he convinced the fashion magazine to give him a list of New York’s hottest debutantes so that he could invite them to a “Torches of Freedom” demonstration. He pitched it as an event where the city’s wealthiest young women would light up cigarettes at the annual Easter Day Parade, flaunting their liberation.

It was the perfect spectacle for the photo-­hungry media, and the campaign was a roaring success. Women whose emotions were roused by thoughts of “freedom”—­and by the sight of so many female influencers—­started buying cigarettes and smoking them openly. As psychologist Lisa Held puts it, “Bernays was duly convinced that linking products to emotions could cause people to behave irrationally. In reality, of course, women were no freer for having taken up smoking, but linking smoking to women’s rights fostered a feeling of independence.”² In the wake of Bernays’s success with the Lucky Strike campaign, advertisers began to study psychology to figure out ways to manipulate the unconscious minds of consumers. They would lure consumers in with emotional appeals or by associating a product with some political ideal like freedom.

Bernays’s work was strongly influenced by progressive journalist Walter Lippmann, founder of the New Republic magazine, who had worked in the US propaganda office during World War I.³ After his wartime experiences, Lippmann published a polemic called Public Opinion, in which he argued that democracy was being eroded by media manipulation and propaganda. Bernays’s book Crystallizing Public Opinion was a sardonic tip of the hat to Lippmann’s, whose ideas he cited while drawing the opposite conclusions. Bernays was thrilled by the power of media, and explained in step-­by-­step detail how intrepid public relations managers could use it effectively for advertising, corporate messaging, and political persuasion. Bernays described PR work as the “engineering of consent,” and called it a new form of free speech. He wrote, “Freedom of speech . . . and [the] free press have tacitly expanded our Bill of Rights to include the right of persuasion.”⁴

The truly creepy part? Bernays had successfully turned his uncle’s project to promote mental health into a system for manipulating people into behaving irrationally. Instead of helping people understand what they truly desired in their unconscious minds, he invited them to displace those desires onto something else, something they could buy. His Lucky Strike campaign channeled women’s hopes for freedom into nicotine addiction. But Bernays always wanted to go beyond selling cigarettes. He believed that public relations campaigns could be done for countries just as easily as for corporations. Roughly twenty years after he got feminists hooked on smoking, Bernays used his media-­manipulation skills to topple a nation’s government.

Freud, again, provided an inspiration for Bernays’s foray into international politics. In 1921, the psychoanalyst published a monograph called Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in which he suggested that humans had a “herd instinct” and could easily be led into irrational behavior by influencers. Though Freud imagined those influencers to be patriarchs—­fathers, heads of state, religious leaders—­Bernays realized that they could be anyone, from a debutante to a grubby newspaperman. Freud thought that the herd mentality was dangerous and could lead to political catastrophe. Lippmann, who feared its power over the free press, agreed. But Bernays embraced it.

At the dawn of the Cold War, Bernays was hired to run a campaign for United Fruit to popularize bananas in the United States. Most were from Guatemala, where the government allowed United Fruit (now Chiquita) to own 42 percent of the country’s land, where it grew crops on vast plantations without paying local taxes. Bernays’s plans to make bananas the number one American snack hit a snag when Guatemalans elected Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (known popularly as Árbenz), a reformer who wanted to stop colonial-­style exploitation, in 1951. Árbenz began to confiscate uncultivated plantation lands, including 210,000 acres belonging to United Fruit. He divided the plantations up into one hundred thousand plots and handed them over to impoverished Guatemalans. Árbenz also demanded higher wages for agricultural laborers. Bernays was outraged. His campaign to gin up demand for bananas was reaching a fever pitch, but his client was losing both land and money. While the United Fruit PR team continued to regale Americans with stories about the wonders of bananas, Bernays worked with the CIA to get his clients’ plantations back.

Using his business connections, Bernays activated a network of spies in Guatemala to get intel on Árbenz’s background and any connections he might have to the Soviet Union. According to Larry Tye, author of The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations, Bernays claimed that a trustworthy source had told him that Guatemalan “Reds” were using weapons supplied by the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. He leaked intel like this to carefully selected journalists and soon the papers were full of rumors about Guatemalan communists plotting to take over the country. Colleagues in the United Fruit PR department found Bernays’s tactics distasteful. Tye writes, “Thomas McCann, who in the 1950s was a young public relations official with United Fruit, wrote in his memoir that ‘what the press would hear and see was carefully staged and regulated by the host. The plan represented a serious attempt to compromise objectivity.’ ” Still, Bernays’s plot worked: thanks in large part to what he called a “scientific approach” to “counter-­Communist propaganda,” many people in the United States came to believe that Guatemala was a threat. Few journalists questioned why a small group of anti-­Árbenz forces was able to stage a coup in 1954, overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected government, and hand thousands of small Guatemalan-­owned farms back to United Fruit. In 1997, declassified documents revealed that the CIA had aided the men behind the coup with training and supplies—­and their black ops were justified by stories about a communist threat, spread by a PR guy who wanted to sell bananas.⁵

To understand how psychological warfare developed in the United States, we need to keep in mind the bloody tale of Bernays and his banana propaganda.

The Bible of Psywar

When Paul Linebarger was writing Psychological Warfare for the US Army in the late 1940s, he was operating in the world that Bernays and Madison Avenue had made. Equally important, he benefited from a push within the Army to establish what became known as the Office of Psychological Warfare, headed by Brigadier General Robert McClure.⁶ Before 1951, the military had had no ongoing units devoted exclusively to psyops—­generally psywar units were brought together temporarily during periods of war, drawing personnel from different groups devoted to irregular warfare or information management. But as the Korean War heated up, Army leadership determined that these disparate efforts should be unified under McClure—­and that psywar units would no longer be disbanded during peacetime.

Unlike McClure, Linebarger does not usually appear front and center in histories of Cold War psyops, and he preferred it that way. He was an academic and operative who worked behind the scenes, as much an observer of psywar as a practitioner of it. Perhaps that’s why he was in the perfect position to write Psychological Warfare. It was one of the first military handbooks to codify a number of ad hoc practices for controlling large masses of people in order to win a war, using public relations and mass media. The book, originally a classified pamphlet made available to select Army personnel in 1948, became the first teaching manual for people working within McClure’s newly organized psywar units. The influence of Linebarger’s book during the Cold War spread outward from the Army and into the intelligence community at large. Journalist Scott Anderson, author of The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War,⁷ describes how much the book meant to a young CIA agent named Rufus Phillips III. Phillips had joined a dozen other operatives for a new initiative described by their commander, Edward Lansdale, as “whatever we can do to save South Vietnam.” It was 1954, and they had no idea what to do. But then Lansdale handed Phillips a copy of Linebarger’s Psychological Warfare, which Phillips called the “bible on the topic.” Reading that book was his only training. Within weeks, Phillips was designing crash courses in psyops for the South Vietnamese military.

Thanks in part to Linebarger’s work, Cold War psyops came to resemble an advertising campaign backed up by violence. It was an approach he had first seen implemented during World War II. “The war we have just won was a peculiar kind of advertising campaign, designed to make the Germans and Japanese like us and our way of doing things,” he wrote in Psychological Warfare. “They did not like us much, but we gave them alternatives far worse than liking us, so that they became peaceful.”⁸ Those “alternatives” included what his contemporaries called simply the Bomb.

The Bomb was the kinetic weapon that shaped the Cold War mindset. Everyone from American schoolkids to Soviet nuclear scientists had witnessed atomic bombs obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now humanity was living with the reality of a weapon that had never existed before: one that could actually wipe out our species. The world’s greatest nuclear powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, needed sneaky ways to attack each other without directly declaring a war that could cost them everything. Psyops were one way to do it. During this period, both nations established military and intelligence bureaucracies that waged an icy battle of ideologies. Their episodes of brinkmanship exploded into violence during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and many other proxy battles throughout the world. But the superpowers’ attacks on each other were counterbalanced by a profound fear of nuclear war. Cold War psychological warriors used that fear the way atomic weapons manufacturers used uranium.

Linebarger’s work depended on the idea that psyops campaigns would always be overshadowed by the threat of nuclear annihilation. Directly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the horrors of those attacks were still unfolding, he worked with the US Army to create one of the most important influence campaigns of the war: the United States leaked the Japanese government’s offer of surrender while the terms were still being negotiated. Linebarger described how the operation went down:

The Japanese government pondered [the conditions of surrender], but while it pondered, B-­29s carried leaflets to all parts of Japan, giving the text of the Japanese official offer to surrender. This act alone would have made it almost impossibly difficult for the Japanese government to whip its people back into frenzy for suicidal prolongation of war.⁹

Linebarger believed this campaign worked partly because “so many people [were] being given so decisive a message, all at the same time.” The mass dissemination of the message was as important as the message itself. To sway public opinion, US psywarriors needed the Japanese masses to understand that a surrender was in the works before the government could walk it back. As Linebarger wrote, the United States won largely because they “got in the last word.”

Linebarger added his own peculiar expertise to the mix of psychology and public relations that defined twentieth-­century propaganda. In his secret life as Cordwainer Smith, he was publishing some of the most acclaimed science fiction stories of the 1950s and ’60s. He was brilliant at building imaginary worlds that felt so real that some of his readers were convinced the secretive author was a covert agent from a distant future. Literary critic Gary Wolfe, who has written extensively about Linebarger’s fiction, told me that “so much is unexplained [in Smith’s stories] that readers assumed the writer had forgotten to fill in background because he knew it to be true. People thought he was an actual time traveler.”¹⁰ It turned out to be the perfect skill for a propagandist.

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Excerpted from Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. Copyright (c) 2024 by Annalee Newitz. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Opal Devlin’s life only got more complicated when she won the lottery. Unable to say no to the flood of people who showed up to ask her for money, she decides to remove herself from the situation. Opal finds her fresh start in the form of a failing flower farm in Asheville, North Carolina, which she buys with the intention of letting nature run its course while she starts a painting business.

But there’s a problem: a total knockout named Pepper Boden says she is the farm’s rightful owner, and she doesn’t intend to go anywhere. (Think: there’s only one bed, but make it a cozy cabin on a farm.) The two agree to try living together, and sparks fly in multiple sense of the word.

Mazey Eddings’s Late Bloomer is available April 16 wherever books are sold.

“I . . . I demand you tell me what’s happening.” Opal says, putting her hands on her softly curved hips and squaring her shoulders, standing her full height of what couldn’t be more than five foot two. I loom over her by a solid nine inches.

It’s a bit difficult to take Opal’s demand seriously, with her big scared eyes and messy hair and full, rosy cheeks. The woman is, unfortunately, rather cute. Which makes the massive upheaval she’s caused in my life all the more disarming. And annoying.

So very fucking annoying.

“Fine,” I say, slipping around her and trudging toward the porch. “You want to know what’s happening? I’ll tell you. Trish—the nice lady who sold you this place for a song?—she’s my mother. And a massive con artist. Tragically for me, this is apparently the one time she’s done something with the law on her side, which puts me in the super-fun position of being homeless. And I guess jobless since you want to turn this flower farm into some sort of shoe factory like a pink-haired Keebler elf. Does that paint a clear enough picture for you?” I turn on Opal, towering over her. I know I’m not supposed to shoot the messenger, but I’m certainly not above yelling at one.

Opal is silent for a moment, then swallows. “Don’t Keebler elves make cookies?” she whispers.

The anger that floods through me is hot enough to send this entire farm up in flames.

“Sorry. Sorry,” Opal rushes out. “I imagine now isn’t the right time for elf semantics.”

“How much did you pay for it?” I know—from endless studying of interactions between neurotypicals—that talking about money is rude. But I’m beyond forcing myself into social niceties when my entire world is falling apart.

Opal blinks those wide blue eyes. “I . . . uh . . . th-three. Three hundred. Thousand. Three hundred thousand dollars.”

That amount of money is so inconceivably large that I, not for the first time that evening, feel like I might collapse. My knees give out, and I plop down onto the top step of the porch.

“Let me get this straight,” I say through a rough throat. “You paid three hundred thousand dollars, in cash, for a flower farm on the verge of bankruptcy that you’ve never even set foot on before?”

“I . . . I paid with a check,” Opal whispers, like it makes any fucking difference to how absolutely bonkers the whole thing is.

What am I going to do?” I mumble to myself, voice cracking as overwhelming thoughts clog up my brain. “Like, seriously. If I lose this place, I have . . .” Nothing. If I lose the Thistle and Bloom, I have nothing. No purpose. No safe space. No shelter filled with the happiest moments of my life. I’d once again be a lost buoy in the endless ocean of life. Directionless. Untethered. Alone.

“Stay with me.” Opal’s words are loud. A bit startling. I’m coming to realize that everything about her is startling, though.

“What?” I say, turning to look at her.

Opal clears her throat, eyes fixed on my face. “Stay here with me. Or, uh, I stay with you. Or, um, I guess we stay together? In the cabin?” Opal’s hand flaps wildly toward the front door.

My mind goes blank. There is no way I can live with this strange woman with wild hair and an alarming amount of shoes who bought property off Facebook Marketplace without some sort of homicide situation.

“Inconceivable,” I eventually press out.

Opal giggles. Giggles. At a time like this? The woman is nothing but a compact, pink-haired monster.

“I’ve never heard someone say that word without doing the Princess Bride voice.” Opal giggles even harder. The homicide might come sooner than I anticipated. “But seriously,” Opal continues, trying and failing to gulp down her remaining laughs. “I think it’s the best solution to our problem.”

“Does it really solve anything?” I snap, looking at Opal, tracing the sincerity of her eyes, the kind softness to her dimpled smile.

She chews on the question, full lips puckering and a small furrow forming between her eyebrows. “I think . . .” she says slowly, carefully, “it solves enough for tonight. And tomorrow we can figure out the rest.”

I continue to stare at her, heart wary and exhausted, everything in me screaming that Opal can’t be trusted. No one can be trusted. Especially someone associated with Trish. But my oversaturated brain isn’t able to come up with any alternatives, and all I really want is to put on my softest pajamas, curl up under my quilts, and wake up tomorrow morning to find this was all an awful dream.

“Okay,” I say at last, standing up. “We’ll leave the rest for the morning.” I walk to the door, Opal’s boots clunking up the porch steps behind me. I hold open the screen door for her, but she hesitates.

“And, uh, just to like, confirm and stuff . . . you aren’t a serial killer or anything, right?”

My head jerks back. “Excuse me?”

“I’m not saying you give off that vibe,” Opal says, waving her hands frantically in front of her. “I just thought I should double-check. Since we’ll be like . . . in the same house and stuff. And like . . . I mean I guess I just don’t want to get . . . well. Murdered. Or anything.”

I scan this bizarre woman from the top of her head to the bottom of her cuffed jeans. Was she sent from my personal seventh circle of hell just to torture me here on earth?

“I’m not murdering anyone tonight,” I say with a sigh. “But now you have me super freaked out so I’ll be sleeping with my door locked and pepper spray close if it turns out you’re the actual murderer.”

“Let’s just agree on a mutual no-murder situation,” Opal says, stepping through the door and into the cabin’s warm kitchen. “See, another problem solved. We’re on a roll.”

“Right. I’m sure everything else we have to figure out will be as easily handled as agreeing not to kill each other.” I maneuver around Opal in the small kitchen, blowing out the candles on the table as I go.

“We’ll find a happy ending to all of this. Just you wait.”

Today has been filled with so many curveballs and upheavals, there’s one thing I know, beyond reasonable doubt, to be true: there is no happy ending that could ever, ever, come from this nightmare.

---

From LATE BLOOMER by Mazey Eddings. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group

After Nida, a young Muslim woman whose uncle was wrongfully imprisoned during the war on terror, is illegally searched while attending a political rally, she writes a blazing poem that goes viral during the run-up to the presidential election. Then she learns that she has won a poetry contest, which she never entered, and her life is turned upside down. As if that’s not enough, she then loses her ability to write poetry!

As Nida navigates the pressure of her family’s expectations and the pains of racism and Islamophobia, she finds her true identity and the magic of self-expression.

Hope Ablaze is Sarah Mughal Rana’s debut novel, available February 27, wherever books are sold.

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On my commute home from visiting Mamou, a massive crowd surged around Wirth Park for the evening political rally downtown. Police patrolled the perimeters assigns were pushed into the grass by the Democratic Party volunteers. I kept myself busy by swiping through my phone.

Amma messaged me, ranting how her client asked for a steep discount like every other customer. But we couldn’t comply when our landlord was pressing us for our late rent.

As I asked how the rest of the delivery went, my phone buzzed, the adhaan for Asr reminding me of the evening prayer. I hurried down the field toward the park. Cars swerved to a stop as a group of joggers cut across the street. My knees bounced to an R&B playlist humming through my earphones, my nose wrinkling at the scent of gasoline permeating the air.

On my right, hoopers were trading insults in a game of one-on-one. Their curses echoed through the quad alongside a stereo blaring Kendrick. As I passed, they rattled the fence before hooting and cheering, each friend gassing the other up.

In my distraction, my foot snagged on a yard sign, scuffing a poster of Mitchell Wilson.

There were dozens across the park. From what I recalled, Wil- son was a Democratic candidate in the upcoming Senate election, a war veteran of the Afghan invasion, and a liberal man who envisioned a better state that would reflect our changing values— or so claimed the evening news, according to Aunty Nadia.

The primaries of the US Senate election would determine which candidates would make the final ballot. Tonight was Mr. Wilson’s political rally.

Wilson seems like a decent enough man, Amma had once said. When I demanded why, she retorted, Jaanu, he took the time to visit our mosque more than once, he cares about the Muslim vote.

It would be my first time voting because my eighteenth birthday was in a matter of days.

My phone buzzed again with a second reminder to pray.

I gazed around. Police milled on the sidewalks, directing traffic on the blocked roads. At the far end of the park, the border of trees was bereft of people. After locating a spot, I laid out my silk pocket prayer mat from my bag. Every Muslim knew the ideal criteria to pray in public: in a park and under a tree. I pulled out my black abaya from my bag, buttoning it over my jeans before tightening my dark hijab. Then I raised my hands to begin the worship.

Suddenly, something gripped my shoulder, jerking me from prayer.

“Hands up. Hands up.”

“What?” I turned but the hand shook my body. Roughly.

Two men loomed above my mat, their shadows swallowing me. My tongue went dry when I took in their jet-black uniforms and the walkie-talkies looped around their hips blaring ear-shattering static. Their eyes scoured the length of me, lingering on my hijab.

They were cops. “Hands up.”

My hands lifted. Slow and visible, like I was taught.

Nida, this shouldn’t be new to you. The morbid thought didn’t ease my panic.

“Do you see that?” snapped the cop on the left, his dark hair swept under his cap. “She has one of those. Check it.” He jabbed a finger at my scarf.

I flinched.

“Hands up higher,” he barked.“I won’t repeat it again.”

“Yes, sir,” I said automatically. That’s another rule that my uncle had taught me. There were many rules. Make sure your mouth is shut, my Mamou’s warning thudded in my chest. Make sure you obey.

His words weren’t just fusses and fears, they were cynical prophecy.

Don’t move, Nida. Do. Not. Move.

The cop on the right suddenly tugged on my hijab. “We need to search you.”

“Search me?” “Yes, for security.”

My hands began shaking hard. The full reality of what was about to happen hit me at once.“Sir, but why?”

“Stay still!”

My lips opened, different words somersaulting over and over in my head. If I don’t say anything, they’ll remove my hijab.

“She could be hiding anything in there. Remember, we can’t take risks with Wilson’s rally,” his colleague said before pulling a walkie from his belt. “There could be others.” His gaze locked with mine.“Who else is with you?”

“No one!”

But he was already gazing around as if hunting for another hijabi. “No acquaintance? Collaborator? We had a security alert of a threat. And then we found you here.”

Collaborator?

At my hesitation, he nodded at his colleague before nudging my backpack.“Search it all.”

If I was hiding anything dangerous under a flimsy piece of cotton on my head, then what was I hiding under my shirt? Inside my pants? My socks? What about the rest of the visitors of the park playing behind me? What were they hiding?

Why was I singled out?

It didn’t matter that I was on public property outside the vicinity of the political rally that was scheduled to be held in several hours. I’d learned since Mamou’s arrest that the little details never mattered when it came to people like us.

One of their hands grasped my hijab and my desperation kicked in and I tried to keep my tone calm. “Sir, please, I could show my ID, and proof of my residence. I only came here to pray. I have to go back home.”

But the cops barely registered my words.

He yanked my hijab, unraveling the material—unraveling my dignity. Now I only wore a white headcap. I felt bare naked. Violated.

It was the equivalent to the cops forcing me to undress. I’d spent years covering my hair, only for the authorities to treat the decision like it was nothing.

“Please.” My voice caught.“I came to pray, on God I swear.”

His eyes were cold and a fathomless black. His feet were rooted to the ground. Nothing I said could’ve moved him.

Amma might’ve told me to comply, to forget Mamou, and oaths, and Ameens, but I had rights.“Please,” I tried one last time. “Not in front of everyone.”

He cocked his head.“Why wear it? You’re in America now.”

In any other circumstance, I’d have scoffed, As if I wasn’t born in this country, but at the moment, all I could think of was my exposed hair. My hands reached to cover tendrils of it. It was an instinct; I moved before my brain caught on to the action.

The officer’s hands shot out, wrenching my arms down, painfully.

“Elijah, what’s the delay?” a new voice interrupted from behind the cop.

It belonged to a man flanked by two security personnel. My jaw dropped. It was the same man I’d seen in those blue posters. Mitchell Wilson, the Democratic candidate. He was tall like my uncle, with a protruding gut, dressed in a checkered suit as charmingly gray as his hair, and a snug blue tie. If I were younger and asked to draw what an American politician looked like, it would be him.

My heart still raced, palms clammy, but I was less afraid. See- ing him brought me an awkward sort of relief. Didn’t Amma say he’d visited our mosque?

“Who’s this young girl?” Mr. Wilson’s sharp gaze assessed the situation, the cops poised above me. He appeared almost disinterested.

“A suspect who isn’t complying with security standards. We had an alert. Then we found her,” the cop in front of me reassured him.

If I wasn’t paralyzed by fear, I would’ve laughed. Security standards? I was a high school student. But my bravado dissipated as quickly as the wind.

Mr. Wilson’s brows pinched together as he studied my black abaya and hijab. His frown deepened.“That burka, it’s like she’s a bank robber,” he murmured to himself.

It took a moment for me to register his comment. I gaped at him. To make sure I wasn’t imagining this.

“Exactly, sir. She was making her way to the rally with her flag, sir.”

“Flag?” I shrieked.“What flag? This is my prayer mat!” But it was like I wasn’t there. One of the cops kicked the mat forward, his heel dragging it on the dirt, before tossing my scarf down as if they were weapons.

“There’s been a misunderstanding. That’s my hijab and mat!” Mr. Wilson waved his hand dismissively.“Oh, you poor thing.

I find it unacceptable that someone is wearing this burka in a country of human rights. This is a place of values, not a place to promote barbarism. There’s no need for your father to force you to wear it, you can come out of it now.” His words were calm, like he knew better, making it feel worse. He nodded at the cop. “I’ll meet you back at the rally, Elijah. Thank you for your work.”

His security personnel nudged him forward toward the rally’s setup. Mr. Wilson was nonchalant, with that grin of his, that confident tone, as if he hadn’t just shattered a girl’s worldview.

“I can’t stand Muslims,” his security guard remarked, and Mr.

Wilson casually smiled. My body was numb. What just happened?

---

From Hope Ablaze by Sarah Mughal Rana. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

The premise of B. A. Paris’s The Guest is one to which many of us can relate: an unwanted houseguest overstays her welcome. In this excerpt from chapter 15, Laure, who’s walked out on her husband, Pierre, over his confession of an affair and a secret child, has worn out her welcome in the home of Iris and Gabriel. And her presence (she’s been wearing Iris’s clothes, and sleeping in Iris’s and Gabriel’s bed) has become increasingly suffocating for Iris, in particular…

The Guest is available now wherever books are sold.

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Iris paused at the gate to catch her breath and stretch her calf muscles. For the first time, Laure hadn’t wanted to go with her on her run and it was amazing how free she’d felt as she’d run through the dappled shade of the woods.

Her first emotion on waking that morning had been one of relief. Laure was leaving on Saturday, which meant there were only two more days to get through before she got her life back. She’d immediately hated herself for being uncharitable. But the truth was, Laure was harder work than she’d thought.

She moved toward the house, bracing herself. But there was no sign of Laure hovering in the hall, or running down the stairs to meet her. Maybe she hadn’t heard her come in. Iris kicked off her trainers, peeled off her socks and tiptoed to the kitchen, desperate for a drink. She pulled the drawer to the right of the dishwasher open and reached for a glass. Her hand came to a stop in mid-air. There were no mugs or glasses, just packets of pasta and rice and other foodstuffs.

Frowning, she walked to the other side of the kitchen, to the row of cupboards near the cooker, where those foodstuffs should have been.

She opened the doors one by one and found not just glasses, but mugs, plates, bowls and other small dishes, all removed from the drawers near the dishwasher and rehomed into the cupboards.

“You’re back!”

Iris whipped around. Laure was standing in the doorway. “You rearranged the kitchen,” she said, unable to keep the accusing tone from her voice. But Laure seemed oblivious and nodded happily.

“Yes. I thought it was funny that you would keep cups and plates in a drawer. You never did before.”

“No, not until I realized that it was more practical to empty the dishwasher straight into the drawers next to it instead of having to cross over to the other side of the kitchen,” Iris said curtly. “Same with the food; near the cooker is more logical.”

“Oh.” Laure looked crestfallen. “Do you want me to put it back to how it was before?”

“Yes, please.”

“Okay. It’s just that I’ve made a decision about Paris.”

Iris put a smile on her face. That morning, she’d reminded Laure to book her Eurostar ticket.

“Great. Let’s go and sit in the garden and you can tell me about it.”

The terrace was almost too hot for Iris’s bare feet. She hopped over it quickly, jumped onto the grass and headed for the swing seat, Laure following behind.

“So, which train are you getting?” Iris asked, once they were settled.

Laure turned earnestly toward her. “I’m not. I’ve decided not to go to Paris this weekend. I’m not ready. Pierre hasn’t had the decency to phone, he’s only ever communicated by message. I asked him this morning if he’d come to a decision about his daughter and he said he hadn’t. So what’s the point of me going?”

“To talk,” Iris said desperately. “The two of you need to talk.” “Not until he comes to a decision,” Laure said stubbornly. “He knows where I stand, we’ve been messaging about it. It’s either me or his daughter. If Pierre chooses to be part of his daughter’s life, I won’t be in his. It’s as simple as that.”

Iris took a breath. “What about your job? Can you take more time off?”

“No, it’s not easy in the advertising industry at the moment. I spoke to my boss and he said they can’t carry me indefinitely. I don’t have any more holiday to take, and they don’t want me to take unpaid leave.”

“Then what are you going to do?” “I’ve already done it. I resigned.”

“Oh, wow. Right.” Iris reached up, took the elastic from her hair, then shook it out, trying to find something to say that wouldn’t sound like a criticism, because she couldn’t believe that Laure had given up the well-paid job which she’d always enjoyed, especially in the current economic climate. But she couldn’t find anything.

Laure reached over and placed her hand on her arm. “Don’t worry, I have savings, I won’t be a burden on you and Gabriel.” Iris did a double take, alarm shooting through her body. Laure intended on staying longer? “That is all right, isn’t it?” Laure continued.

Once again, Iris found herself searching for something to say. “I thought you’d be going to see your mum. She must be worried about you.”

“She’s not. She said she’s sure Pierre and I would work it out and that all couples go through bad patches.”

“Did you tell her Pierre has a child?”

“No. I’d only get an ‘I told you so’ lecture. She’s always said I’d regret giving up my chance to have children, pointing out that Pierre could have one anytime if he changed his mind.” She gave a bitter laugh. “She was right.”

“Have you told Pierre you’re not going back this weekend?” “Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“I think he was shocked, which was good. He asked when he would see me and I said I didn’t know. It was good to have the upper hand for once.”

Iris gave her a quick smile. “Do you mind if I jump in the shower?

I feel really sweaty after that run. We can talk again after.”

“Of course, go ahead. I’ll still be here when you come back.”

Iris walked quickly to the house, blinking back sudden tears. It’s okay, she told herself. It’s going to be okay.

In the bathroom, she turned on the shower, stripped off her clothes and let the water cascade onto her, needing to obliterate all thought, just for a few seconds. Her emotions were all over the place. Laure needed to go back to Paris. For three weeks now, apart from two days away, she’d barely had more than fifteen minutes to herself. She didn’t know if Laure had become needy because of what had happened with Pierre, or if she had always been needy, and the thought of Laure staying even a week longer was overwhelming.

She finished her shower and wrapped herself in a towel. In the bedroom, she dressed quickly in clean shorts and a T-shirt, and opened the bedroom door. Laure was hovering on the landing.

“I was going to make a smoothie,” she said. “Would you like one?” “I’ll make it and bring it to you in the garden, if you like,” Iris offered.

But Laure was already heading to the kitchen. “What shall we make for dinner tonight?” she called over her shoulder. “We can make a start on it.”

Her mood dipping further, Iris followed her downstairs and while Laure made smoothies, she began preparing dinner. By the time she heard Gabriel coming in from the garden, she was more than ready for him to take over. Laure, perched on the countertop while Iris peeled and sliced, hadn’t stopped asking what she would do in her situation. But whatever she said, Laure would challenge it, not because she was being argumentative but because she was challenging everything to do with Pierre, even her own thoughts, one minute hating him, the next loving him. She might have felt that she’d taken back some control of her life in resigning from her job, but to Iris, Laure seemed just as lost as ever.

“Gabriel’s here,” she said, hoping to stop the constant flow of agonizing.

“Oh good.” Laure slid elegantly from the countertop. “Maybe he’ll be able to tell me what to do. Sometimes I think he knows Pierre better than I do.”

Not anymore, Iris wanted to say.

Gabriel came in and looked at Iris over Laure’s shoulder—How has she been? Too late, Iris realized she should have gone to find him in the garden and warn him that Laure had decided not to go back to Paris. All she could do was give him a quick smile.

“You look better,” he said to Laure. “I have some news,” she announced.

Gabriel leaned back against the countertop. “Oh?” “I’ve handed in my notice.”

Iris, watching Gabriel carefully, saw him smother his surprise. “Right,” he said. “Great.” There was a pause. “So, what are your plans?” “I don’t really have any for the moment.” She looked at him, her eyes wide. “It is all right, isn’t it, me staying here a bit longer?”

“Yes, sure. Of course.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I need a drink. To celebrate,” he added hastily.

Iris threw him a murderous look. “In that case, let’s have champagne. I’ll get it.”

Gabriel caught her eye—I’m sorry.

“Here.” Iris smiled as she handed the bottle to Gabriel. “I’ll let you open it.”

Gabriel twisted the wire from around the cork and eased it from the bottle. There was an explosive pop, followed by a splintering sound, and three pairs of eyes swivelled to the large silver-edged mirror that hung on the wall above the fireplace.

“Damn,” Gabriel said, staring at the huge fissure running down the length of it.

Laure pressed a hand to her heart. “I’ve never seen that happen before.”

Iris stared at their reflections, Gabriel and Laure on one side of the crack, her on the other, like a photo torn down the middle. She gave a nervous laugh. “I hope it doesn’t mean we’ll have seven years’ bad luck.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be silly, it was an accident. I didn’t like that mirror much anyway.” Iris swooped to pick up a glass and handed it to Gabriel. “Come on, let’s drink.”

Except that nobody seemed to know what to drink to. Instead, they clinked their glasses together and smiled bright smiles.

---

From THE GUEST by B.A. Paris. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

The following is an excerpt from Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin.

Drawing on the argument that all of the most profound mechanisms of human suffering and oppression—racism, sexism, classism, etc.—are products of human imagination, Benjamin, a sociologist and professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, issues a call for us “to take imagination seriously as a site of struggle and a place of possibility for reshaping the future.” What if the things we dream of actually are possible, and our imaginations are the key to liberation?

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Cutting School

Once a week in fifth grade, I cut school. Or so it seemed. On Fridays, I jumped out of bed and threw on the clothes I had laid out the night before, then raced to the kitchen to pour a big bowl of Cheerios. Cereal devoured, I huffed and puffed, waiting for my mom to get my little brother, Jamal, ready and then open the front door, so I could race up the block to South Conway Elementary School.

Arriving just as the 8:00 a.m. bell rang, I didn’t scurry in after the other kids, their backpacks bouncing up and down in the crowded halls. Instead, I boarded a bus waiting just under the flagpole and, together with a handful of other students, almost all of whom were white, headed to a portable classroom trailer at the back of the nearby middle school.

There we entered another world—­no ringing bells telling us to move to another class, no sitting at desks lined up in rows, no stuffing ourselves with information to be regurgitated on tests. We cut school. Or so I thought.

I spent what I considered “Freedom Fridays” in the Pelican Program for students who, I would only later learn, were labeled “gifted and talented.” At the time, it seemed to me that adults had decided I could have fun once a week. Or perhaps they just wanted us out of their hair. This was, after all, fifth grade. I was the troublesome kid who got up in the middle of class to shush students making noise in the hallway, to the chagrin of the actual teacher.

The coolest part of cutting school was that my best friends, Qima and Mary, were in the Pelican Program too. We were the only Black students selected from our majority white school, where Black children made up about 30 percent. Everything else from those days is a blur. All I remember was the three of us floating together in a bubble of Black Girl Magic before it was a hashtag. We danced and sang and created poems and plays. Freedom Fridays were full of expressiveness, friendship, and play.

The scholar Imani Perry gives voice to what such mental freedom has meant for us: “Imagination has always been our gift. That is what makes formulations like ‘Black people are naturally good at dancing’ so offensive. Years of discipline that turn into improvisation, a mastery of grammar and an idea that turns into a movement that hadn’t been precisely like that before—­that is imagination, not instinct.”

Pelican was a weekly retreat from the usual strictures of schooling—­worksheets, homework, and tests were replaced by music, movement, and make-­believe. But who decided we could steal away? And from what were we escaping?

Visiting its website, I learned that there are three pathways into the Pelican program—­aptitude, achievement, and performance: “The State of South Carolina and the District declares by evaluation and eligibility standards that the gifted child has academic needs that must be met in a differentiated environment.” This begs the question: Who thrives in an undifferentiated environment?

“The mission of gifted education is to maximize the potential of gifted and talented students by providing programs and services that match the unique characteristics and needs of these students.” So, then, is the mission of standard education to minimize or hold at bay the potential of most students?

Yes, I think that is precisely what it does, especially if we consider the eugenicist roots of testing and ranking. In the 1920s the College Board commissioned psychologist and eugenicist Carl C. Brigham to develop the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Brigham, a Princeton alumnus who had recently authored A Study of American Intelligence (1923), hailed the superiority of the “Nordic race group” and warned that with the “promiscuous intermingling” of new immigrants, the education system was declining at “an accelerating rate as the racial mixture becomes more and more extensive.” Standardized testing has always been predicated on a racist, classist, sexist, and ableist standard.

A world that relies on social inequality to keep its machinery running can only afford for a handful of people to imagine themselves “gifted.” Gifted = destined leaders and bosses, visionaries and innovators who have the time and resources to design the future while the masses are trained to sit still, raise their hands, and take instruction.

Doesn’t the unbearable hubris and entitlement of many of society’s “leaders,” whether in industry or politics or even do-­gooding professions, stem from us being told all our lives that we are “special”? Or more precisely, of us being made special and treated by the law and culture as the chosen ones?

Meanwhile, the majority of “normals” (to borrow a term from the sci-­fi film Gattaca) are expected to take orders, complete tasks, stand in line, clock in and out . . . punctually, obediently, subserviently. No dancing in the halls, and certainly no daydreaming about a world put together differently.

Mary, Qima, and I were “gifted” alright . . . gifted time and space to imagine differently. Not because we were different but because we were given a chance to be different.

The fact is, “exceptional Negroes” have always been a staple of an apartheid-­like educational system that separates the “gifted” from the “normal,” and both from the “naughty” or “underachieving.” Sticks and stones will only break my bones, but words can lift or crush me. For some, the existence of “exceptional Negroes” suggests that the system is not racist. But doesn’t such tokenistic inclusion—­in which a few individuals are given provisional membership into an otherwise exclusive club—­maintain the status quo by making it seem more accessible than it really is?

Without a handful of Black and Brown unicorns in honors classes and gifted programs, we might see more clearly the broader patterns of exclusion. We might realize that school tracking perpetuates intraschool segregation, that even when schools are racially diverse, even when they are in the suburban “promised land,” they often remain deeply unequal. Indeed, the flip side of hoarding gifted, honors, and Advanced Placement classrooms for predominantly white students is the funneling of Black students into special education and remedial programs, what education researchers describe as de facto racial segregation.

One activity at Pelican that I remember vividly required us to invent new uses for ordinary objects like scissors, rubber bands, and erasers. Years later, I heard a talk by noted educator Sir Ken ­Robinson in which he described a study about how researchers measure genius-­level “divergent” thinking by assessing students’ ability to come up with lots of possible ways of interpreting and answering questions.

In the study, 1,500 kindergarteners were asked questions like “How many uses can you think of for a paper clip?” At that young age, 98 percent of the children scored at “genius level” for divergent thinking. But over the next ten years, this capacity was schooled out of them. “We all have this capacity,” insisted Robinson, but “it mostly deteriorates.” Yet “deteriorates” makes it seem like a natural process of decay, when really it is a concerted, organized process of squashing an otherwise widespread capacity to think, know, and imagine. As writer and activist adrienne maree brown reminds us, “We are in an imagination battle.”

The irony, of course, is that the very place where inventive thinking could be—­some would say should be—­cultivated is where it gets snuffed out. Except, of course, for the lucky few who get pulled out of school and given an opportunity to diverge, experiment, and make mistakes.

Otherwise, if you let your imagination run free, you’re likely to get into trouble. In 2013, sixteen-­year-­old Black teenager Kiera Wilmot did a science experiment mixing toilet bowl cleaner and aluminum foil in a water bottle. It caused a small explosion on school grounds, and she was automatically expelled. The Florida assistant state attorney charged her with two felonies filed in adult court. The charges were eventually dropped as part of a diversion program that allows people facing criminal conviction to meet certain service requirements instead.

However, rather than being allowed back into her honors classes, Kiera had to finish her junior year at an alternative high school—­a euphemism, in this case, for a school for “bad” kids. There, Kiera felt intellectually uninspired. As she shared with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU): “I’m not getting the challenge that I used to have. I don’t have homework. There is no German class, and there is no orchestra.” It is doubtful Kiera would have been treated with such contempt were she not Black, and because of the zero-tolerance disciplinary policies that uphold rigid rules and end up alienating and pushing out many young people.

The outsized response to Kiera’s science experiment explosion was also fueled by anti-terrorism fervor in the wake of 9/11 and the Boston marathon bombing—­her project came just eight days after the latter. Another outcome of these events was an increase in anti-­Muslim hatred, which has not waned. According to a 2016 Gallup poll, 38 percent of respondents backed “a new law that would prevent any Muslim from entering the U.S.” and 32 percent supported a “special ID” for Muslims, including those who are American citizens. These alarming statistics reflect a long-­standing racial imagination that infects social life and periodically erupts into the headlines, as it did in the case of Texas teenager Ahmed Mohamed.

In 2015, Ahmed was interrogated, suspended, and fingerprinted for constructing a clock inside his pencil case. He used a small circuit board, power supply, and digital display, inventively transforming the case. Dismayingly, his teacher and principal suspected the clock of being a bomb. Through the distorting fun-­house mirrors of white supremacy and anti-­Muslim hatred, he was deemed guilty instead of gifted, threatening instead of talented.

Kiera and Ahmed would eventually meet at the White House at an Astronomy Night, hosted by President Barack Obama. Yet Kiera’s invitation wasn’t extended until after online commentary circulated suggesting she should be bestowed the same honor as Ahmed. As Kiera shared, the White House had invited her not so much because of her science project but because of what she called “the arrest and all the hardships. I am a woman of color who was pushed out of school.” These hardships reveal that Kiera’s path to a White House visit is not the Cinderella story promised to many via the gifted and talented route. Kiera shared at a press conference during her visit to Washington, DC, “To this day, I still get people who harass me about it and call me a terrorist.” And she was haunted by a felony arrest, which she was told would take five years to clear from her record.

Unicorn status is a fickle prize that can be revoked as quickly as it is bestowed. Instead of rallying around individual exceptionalism, we need to see the bigger picture and imagine new systems of education that cultivate everyone’s creativity and curiosity. So what is there to do?

The most effective means to refute the prevailing ideologies is to do so collectively—­crafting new stories, images, ways of interacting, and investments in those who have been denigrated and discarded. To think about the collective also means being okay with less focus on exceptionalism and instead giving all students opportunities to stretch their imaginations.

I wrote this book for all the Kieras and Ahmeds of the world, and all those who cross their paths. It is for organizers and artists, students and educators, parents and professors, realists and romantics who are ready to take Toni Morrison’s instruction to heart: Dream a little before you think.

In these pages, I weave together a lifetime of observations about the centrality of imagination in all our lives; lively engagements with people from many different fields who have ruminated on the power of imagination; promiscuous encounters with pop culture and social media where collective imagination is woven and warped; and practical guidance on how we can exercise our imaginations.

I draw upon over a decade of teaching that aims to build students’ powers of speculation with projects that involve imagining tools, toolkits, and worlds that break with current social hierarchies. In the process, we will confront the little voice in our head whose job it has been to police our own imaginations: A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn’t grind us to the bone? Naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly.

We need to give the voice of the cynical, skeptical grouch that patrols the borders of our imagination a rest. After all, “Dangerous limits have been placed on the very possibility of imagining alternatives,” insists scholar and activist Angela Y. Davis. “These ideological limits have to be contested. We have to begin to think in different ways. Our future is at stake.” Imagination is a field of struggle, not an ephemeral afterthought that we have the luxury to dismiss or romanticize.

Imagination: A Manifesto is a proposal for exorcising our mental and social structures from the tyranny of dominant imaginaries. It is a field guide for seeding an imagination grounded in solidarity, in which our underlying interdependence as a species and with the rest of the planet is reflected back at us in our institutions and social relationships.

Look around: humanity is in the eye of multiple storms. Will we continue shutting off the power of the masses so that a minority of people can stay warm, or will we build the necessary infrastructure so that everyone can thrive? Like author Arundhati Roy, I believe “another world is not only possible, she is on her way. . . . On a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”

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Excerpted from Imagination: A Manifesto. Copyright (c) 2024 by Ruha Benjamin. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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