#the-smythes

#the-smythes

When I was 4 years old, my parents divorced, and my father moved away. I grew up thinking that my biological father was "John," but recently discovered that my mother had an affair with another man, "Allen." Allen is my biological father. This was a surprise and filled with a lot of drama, but it's gotten weirder than you'd imagine.

The Stasi, the secret police, were legendary for their data files. Their work was based on instilling fear, and they induced stunningly amazing numbers of East Germans into informing on their neighbors. Something along the lines of 1 in 6 East Germans were informants, whether out of fear or out of approval of what the East German government was doing.

Targeting genetic screening for the condition to priority areas could help identify at-risk individuals earlier and avoid future health complications, experts say. Haemochromatosis symptoms can evolve over decades as high iron levels in the body cause damage to organs. Early diagnosis and treatment - such as regular blood donation to reduce iron levels - is key to prevent liver damage, liver cancer and arthritis.

The librarian sat me in front of a microfilm reader and brought out roll after roll of film. I stayed there for hours, squinting to decipher the archaic handwriting in the Free Negro Book, which was published annually in South Carolina before the Civil War. The names in each year's edition were alphabetized, but only roughly-all of the surnames starting with A came before all of the surnames starting with B, but Agee might come before Anderson, or it might come after.

It was long ago that poly­the­ism, as the sto­ry comes down to us, gave way to monothe­ism. Human­i­ty used to have many gods, and now almost every reli­gious believ­er acknowl­edges just one - though which god, exact­ly, does vary. Some pop­u­lar the­o­ries of "big his­to­ry" hold that, as the scale of a soci­ety grows larg­er, the num­ber of deities pro­posed by its faiths gets small­er.