“We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity… But if it takes not place in me, what avails it? Everything lies in this, that it should take place in me.”
“The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred… Unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.”
J.W. Goethe (1749-1832) German Poet, Playwright, Philosopher
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
“To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” poet and philosopher David Whyte wrote in his reckoning with the depths of life. “Forgiving,” Hannah Arendt offered a generation earlier in her splendid antidote to the irreversibility of life, “is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.”
And yet our culture holds up forgiveness as a moral virtue in too binary a way, placing the brunt of repair on the wounded, making little demand of the wounder. We need more nuance than this, and such nuance is what rabbi Danya Ruttenberg offers in On Repentance And Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World (public library) — a field guide to the rewards and nuances of forgiveness, drawing on the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides’s classic Laws of Repentance, using their ancient wisdom to calibrate our cultural reflexes and modernizing their teachings to account for our hard-earned evolution as a species conscious of its own blind spots.
She writes:
The word “forgive,” in English, comes the Old English forgyfan, which translates primarily as “to give, grant, or bestow.” One Old English dictionary connects it to the Hebrew word for “gift.” It’s a present that is offered, something that is granted to someone freely, without, necessarily, a conversation about whether or not they have earned it. It’s an offering, of sorts.
And yet, Ruttenberg observes, such a conception of forgiveness makes repair a wholly one-sided process, tasking the person wounded with the whole of it. The Hebrew language itself offers a vital remedy of greater subtlety:
In Hebrew, two different words, each with its own shade of meaning and weight, are used in the context of forgiveness. The first is mechila, which might be better translated as “pardon.” It has the connotation of relinquishing a claim against an offender; it’s transactional. It’s not a warm, fuzzy embrace but rather the victim’s acknowledgment that the perpetrator no longer owes them, that they have done the repair work necessary to settle the situation. You stole from me? OK, you acknowledged that you did so in a self-aware way, you’re in therapy to work on why you stole, you paid me back, and you apologized in a way that I felt reflected an understanding of the impact your actions had on me — it seems that you’re not going to do this to anyone else. Fine. It doesn’t mean that we pretend that the theft never happened, and it doesn’t (necessarily) mean that our relationship will return to how it was before or even that we return to any kind of ongoing relationship. With mechila, whatever else I may feel or not feel about you, I can consider this chapter closed. Those pages are still written upon, but we’re done here.
Slicha, on the other hand, may be better translated as “forgiveness”; it includes more emotion. It looks with a compassionate eye at the penitent perpetrator and sees their humanity and vulnerability, recognizes that, even if they have caused great harm, they are worthy of empathy and mercy. Like mechila, it does not denote a restored relationship between the perpetrator and the victim (neither does the English word, actually; “reconciliation” carries that meaning), nor does slicha include a requirement that the victim act like nothing happened. But it has more of the softness, that letting-go quality associated with “forgiveness” in English.
At the core of this ancient distinction is a central concern with what is needed for closure. (Here, we must remember that closure itself is largely a myth.) Maimonides offers a fascinating and very precise prescription: The wounder should make three earnest attempts at apology, showing both repentance and transformation — evidence that they are no longer the type of person who, in the same situation, would err in the same way; if after the third attempt they are still rebuffed by the wounded, then — and this is Maimonides’s brutal twist — the sin now belongs to the wounded for withholding forgiveness. The intimation is that a person who, in the face of genuine remorse and evidence of change, remains embittered is too small of spirit and too cut off from their own noblest nature. Mic-drop.
Maimonides wrote:
It is forbidden for a person to be cruel and not appeased; instead, a person should be satisfied easily and get angry slowly. And at the moment when the sinner asks for pardon — pardon with a whole heart and a desirous soul. And even if they caused them suffering and sinned against them greatly, [the victim] should not take revenge or hold a grudge.
While Ruttenberg acknowledges that no one is obligated to grant forgiveness at all costs, she considers how withholding forgiveness harms not only the repentant but the withholder:
Maimonides’ concern about the victim being unforgiving was likely at least in part a concern for their own emotional and spiritual development. I suspect that he thought holding on to grudges was bad for the victim and their wholeness. That is, even if we’re hurt, we must work on our own natural tendencies toward vengefulness, toward turning our woundedness into a power play that we can lord over the penitent, or toward wanting to stay forever in the narrative of our own hurt, for whatever reason. And perhaps he believed that the granting of mechila can be profoundly liberating in ways we don’t always recognize before it happens.
[…]
If you are still so resolutely attached to the narrative that you were forever wronged, you are harming yourself and putting a kind of harm into the world. Try to respond to those who approach you sincerely — and who are sincerely doing the work — with a whole heart, not with cruelty.
Still, at the heart of the book is not the responsibility of the forgiver but the responsibility of the repentant, and the complex question of what repentance even looks like in order to be effective toward repair, doubly complicated by the fact that, in many situations, one can be both wrongdoer and wronged.
With an eye to the myriad causes that might drive even the best-intentioned people to do harm — our blind spots, our unexamined beliefs, our own tender places and past traumas, our despair — Ruttenberg considers the necessity of letting go of our attachment to a particular self-image as a person who means well and therefore could not possibly have caused harm:
Addressing harm is possible only when we bravely face the gap between the story we tell about ourselves — the one in which we’re the hero, fighting the good fight, doing our best, behaving responsibly and appropriately in every context — and the reality of our actions. We need to summon the courage to cross the bridge over that cognitively dissonant gulf and face who we are, who we have been — even if it threatens our story of ourselves. It’s the only way we can even begin to undertake any possible repair of the harm we’ve done and become the kind of person who might do better next time. (And that, in my opinion, is what’s truly heroic.)
[…]
This work is challenging enough when facing the smaller failings in our lives — how much more difficult is it when our closest relationships or our professional reputation is at stake, or even the possibility of facing significant consequences? And yet this is the brave work we have to do. All of us. We are each, in a thousand different ways, both harmdoer and victim. Sometimes we are hurt. Sometimes we hurt others, whether intentionally or not. The path of repentance is one that can help us not only to repair what we have broken, to the fullest extent possible, but to grow in the process of doing so.
‘We haven’t quite made it to the promised land. We’re getting close.’
Tom Perrault, right, a longtime SF resident and activist, took part in a novel HIV study from UCSF.Courtesy of Tom Perrault
By Gillian Mohney, News Editor April 15, 2026 (SFGate.com)
Tom Perrault distinctly remembers the time he received an electric shock in the name of science.
“I have a pretty high threshold for pain,” he told SFGATE. But he had never experienced electroporation before, a procedure in which an electric current is used to disrupt cell membranes and make them more permeable to medical treatments.
The treatment was one of the first interventions in a recent medical trial based out of UC San Francisco. Researchers were trying to retrain Perrault’s immune system to track down and hunt a hidden viral invader: HIV.
The disease may no longer be a death sentence, but it isn’t yet a medical relic. There were nearly 39,000 HIV infections in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Globally, 1.3 million people contracted HIV in 2024, according to data from the World Health Organization, and 630,000 people died due to HIV-related disease.
And so, Perrault is part of a cohort of 10 study individuals who took part in a novel medical trial at UCSF that used three different therapies to treat people with HIV. Perrault recalled the warning from his medical team about the electroporation: “It’s gonna be like somebody punched your arm.”
“So I go in, I’m a little cavalier about it,” he told SFGATE. The medical team held him down on the exam table, startling him, before giving him an electric jolt and a type of vaccine called a DNA vaccine simultaneously.
“I screamed,” Perrault recounted. “I’m like, ‘That was not a punch, that was an electric shock, people!’”
Unfortunately for Perrault, the procedure had to be immediately repeated in his other arm.
“I started trembling. I’m like, ‘That was bad, that was scary,’” he recalled. The researchers warned Perrault he would need another round of electroporation in a few weeks.
Many people might give up before voluntarily subjecting themselves to pain like that again, especially with no promise of a cure. But Perrault, a former board chair for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, had longed for this type of study for years. At the end of all these treatments, he would finally be able to pause his HIV medication for the first time in years and see firsthand how close the world is to a cure.
“Gay men in the ’80s and the early ’90s would have crawled over glass on their hands and knees to get to a pill or a vaccine, “ he said. “… Anything I can do to advance the idea that science is important.”
‘Dark days’
In 1981, the CDC published a report of five sick young men who showed up in Los Angeles hospitals dying from a type of pneumonia commonly associated with older adults. Physicians realized their immune systems had essentially stopped working, but they didn’t know why. It was the first ever time the condition known as (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) AIDS was documented as a disease.
For years, there was little the medical community could do for AIDS patients. In the beginning, those with the disease were only expected to live one to two years after diagnosis. Not only was the new disease extremely deadly, but research, funding and treatment access were stalled because of the stigma of a sexually transmitted infection most commonly associated with gay and bisexual men. President Ronald Reagan didn’t even publicly mention the word AIDS until 1985, a full four years after it was discovered.
In San Francisco, the disease took a devastating toll on the queer community, although the city was also a model for care and opened the first outpatient AIDS clinic in the country in 1983.
In the decades since, HIV treatment has come a long way. Early antiretroviral treatment discovered in the late 1980s was toxic and much more fragile; a single missed dose could allow the virus to return. Today the modern form of ART, discovered in 1996, is much more effective and durable, effectively tamping down viral levels until they are undetectable in most people. If viral levels are undetectable, then people living with HIV cannot spread the infection to others.
Dr. Steven Deeks, a professor of medicine and an HIV expert at UCSF, designed and led the study Perrault took part in. He says while the current regimen of ART treatment is good, it still isn’t good enough to solve a global problem like HIV.
“The big fundamental problem with treatment is that it has to be taken daily for life,” he told SFGATE. “That means you have to find a regimen that you can tolerate, you can afford, that works and that’s available. And that just doesn’t happen for a large number of people globally, and even some people in San Francisco.”
Deeks completed his training in San Francisco in the late 1980s, a time he calls the “dark days.” He said the current success in treating HIV and stopping its spread remains tenuous and subject to political whims; in 2025, the Trump administration cut key funding for HIV treatment abroad. This year, the Trump administration moved to cut $600 million in public health funding for multiple states — including California — that was earmarked for initiatives including HIV and sexually transmitted infection prevention and treatment.
‘Unprecedented’ results
Human immunodeficiency virus, aka HIV, is an insidious disease that attacks cells key to the immune system. Without a properly working immune system, a person with untreated HIV is vulnerable to even minor infection. The disease can grow for years before causing symptoms, hiding in cell DNA in tissue so the immune system doesn’t know it’s there. If left untreated, HIV evolves into acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, aka AIDS.
By stopping the virus from replicating, antiretrovirals can keep HIV in check, but they require a patient to take the meds for life.
Deeks has been researching HIV for decades and is the principal investigator of the Institute for HIV Cure Research under the American Foundation for AIDS Research, or amfAR. The trial Perrault took part in got its start in 2016 when amfAR launched a $20 million, five-year partnership with UCSF to find a cure for HIV.
Deeks and his team began enrolling patients in their study in 2020. They created a three-pronged approach to the immunotherapy treatment after being inspired by three different primate studies. Normally, when a person with HIV stops taking their ART medication, the virus rebounds in a matter of weeks. The researchers hoped to retrain the immune system of HIV patients to keep the virus at bay without medications for a longer period of time.
In 2020, the 10 patients in the trial received the DNA vaccine, along with the electroporation, to train their T cells, a white blood cell that’s a key component of the immune system, to find and destroy HIV cells. Then the individuals received two different types of antibodies, called broadly neutralizing antibodies. These proteins, which are a key part of the immune system, bind to foreign invaders like viruses or bacteria to destroy them. The antibodies used in the study can prevent HIV from entering healthy cells as well as prime key immune cells to identify and destroy the virus.
Researchers combined this first antibody treatment with another drug designed to force HIV out of hidden reservoirs in the body when it’s in the latent stage. By forcing the HIV to be visible, the retrained immune system could, in theory, find and destroy the virus on its own.
After eight months, study participants were asked to stop taking their regular ART medication. Forty-eight hours before they stopped taking their medications, they received a dose of different broadly neutralizing antibodies in the hopes of drastically reducing any trace amounts of virus in their body and preventing the disease from returning as strongly as before.
The entire process took 34 weeks and included dozens of appointments and treatments. Perrault remembers the first day he woke up and didn’t take his medication. It had been a decade straight of daily pills.
“I remember it feeling very momentous,” he said. “It was like, ‘Wow, I’m like, literally stopping my meds and I’m going to see what my body can do.’”
For weeks, and then months, after, Perrault and the other study participants had their viral levels checked periodically to see if the virus had rebounded. At no time did the UCSF team promise a cure; it was always expected the patients would have to go back on their medications.
But as Perrault went one, then two, then five months without the virus reappearing, his initially wary attitude became hopeful.
“End of October, the virus still hasn’t come back and I’m thinking, ‘Wait a minute, what magic is going on here people?’” he said.
Then on a trip home to Washington, D.C., for Thanksgiving, he got a call from the team at UCSF. The virus had returned. It had been five months without meds.
“I just go up into my room, and all of a sudden I start sobbing,” he said. “Because I didn’t realize, really, the enormity of it. Like f—k, you know? We were so close.”
Still, the study results, which published in December, were significant. Six of the 10 individuals in the study went months without medication before the virus returned to levels that required treatment. One individual never saw a return of measurable HIV levels during the 18-month study period.
Most importantly, the viral burden remained lower in those seven individuals overall compared with before the trial began, a result that Deeks called “shocking.” A lower viral burden can mean less strain on the body from the infection. (The other three patients did not experience the same pause in viral levels and had to resume medication much sooner.)
“To keep seven out of 10 people to show some degree of control, that was unprecedented,” he said.
Passing the torch
Medical researchers as a rule do not like to overpromise. Whether a single-shot cure for HIV is possible remains to be seen. But Deeks says this research shows a viable path forward.
“We haven’t quite made it to the promised land. We’re getting close, but we need to make it better,” he said of treatments. “And to make it better, we need to understand the mechanism.”
There are already signs the UCSF team’s approach is an effective one. In a new study presented in February in London, researchers from multiple institutions including Oxford University found similar results to UCSF’s trial in a study of 34 participants.
Perrault said he’s happy he got to be part of the study, even if he’s now back on his HIV medications. At 60, he’s spent over half his life in San Francisco after arriving in the Castro in 1991 after he followed his partner at the time west from Washington, D.C.
“I came of age and came out at a time where the generations of men above me were all dying,” he told SFGATE. “A friend of mine, who also turned 60 this year, said, ‘Hey, you know, Tom, we’re the first generation of out gay men to come of age to make it to 60.’”
Perrault says he took part in the study to make things even better for the next generation.
“I want them to avoid ever having to go through what the older generation of gay men went through,” he said. “We can do better as a country, we can do better as the world. And we should all be doing everything we can to absolutely get a cure.”
Gillian Mohney is a breaking news editor at SFGATE. Previously, she worked at Healthline and ABC News, where she covered health, science and national news. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has lived in the Bay Area for nearly a decade.
9/8/1985-Delano, California- United Farm Workers president Cesar Chavez declares war on pesticides at a rally marking the 20th anniversary of the Delano grape strike and the founding of the UFW. Photo via Getty Images
This story originally appeared in Labor Notes on April 6, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
Bardacke starts the book with an epigraph, a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “O what a fall was there, my countrymen! Then I, and you, and all of us fell down…”
Bardacke was a farmworker in the fields of the Salinas Valley for six seasons in the 1970s. When he decided to write his book years later, he went back to his carpool co-workers, finding them still at work in the fields. In 1994, the union had been thoroughly defeated for nearly 10 years—but his old friends were afraid even to mention its name where the foreman might hear.
I interviewed Frank Bardacke after a New York Times investigation revealed evidence that Chavez had sexually abused young girls who were volunteering with the union, and the allegation that he had also assaulted union co-founder Dolores Huerta. –Jane Slaughter
Jane Slaughter: The revelations about Cesar Chavez as a sexual predator: many people have said they were “surprised but not shocked” or “shocked but not surprised.” How did you react?
Frank Bardacke: The abuse of Ana Murguia was rumored at the time among UFW staff, primarily at the La Paz headquarters. Many of the rumors originated with Ana’s stepmother, Kathy Murguia. But people just didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t want to look into it very deeply because Cesar was one of these powerful men who could do anything he damn well pleased; he was immune from investigation.
It puts him in the category that seems to be so prevalent these days, or at least more known about: powerful men who can do whatever they want to do, including groom children and abuse women, and they don’t have to answer for it.
Where did that power come from?
For the men we know about, it comes from money or political connections or celebrity. Where did Cesar’s power come from?
The first answer is that he had just turned a losing 1965 grape strike into the most successful boycott in American history, at the conclusion of which, in 1970, farmworkers won the most substantial contracts they’d ever had: a hiring hall, grievance procedures, seniority lists. They’d never had those before.
That’s the first reason he had power. Through that he became a celebrity. He was the organizer, the architect, and the main energy behind that boycott, a hero and a celebrity with the kind of immunity that modern celebrities have.
But the second reason was an internal reason within the UFW. Everybody within the organization owed their job to Cesar. He appointed everybody, he could discharge anybody at his will, which he often did. That wasn’t just theoretical power; periodic purges pulsed through the organization. So you didn’t disagree with Cesar except at the peril of losing your job.
Those were the two reasons that no one wanted to follow up on the rumors of abuse. He was an authentic hero who had led and directed that boycott, and everybody in his organization owed their job to him.
Tell us more about the structure of the UFW.
That’s a crucial part of this. From the beginning, say in the early 1960s, the structure was basically volunteer organizers appointed by Chavez who earned $5 a week, plus expenses if on some kind of assignment.
That structure lasted even when the UFW Organizing Committee (UFWOC) became an actual union. They continued this organizational structure of volunteers. They did not set up union locals. The union constitution did not have provision for union locals. There was no way that an ordinary farmworker could elect anybody; everybody served at Chavez’s pleasure. That included the field offices in local places where there were farmworker contracts.
Then in 1970 there was a victorious farmworker strike in the Salinas Valley. There was a provision in the agreement that allowed for farmworkers to elect their own reps, called field reps, who would help enforce the contract in the local areas.
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Field reps were in place in addition to the field offices, where everyone owed their jobs to Chavez. But the paid reps owed their jobs to their crews. They got the pay equivalent to what their former crews were making. They were highly skilled, high-paid crews, earning as much as $500 a week back in the day.
This was an entirely new situation in the UFW and Chavez had tremendous trouble from the outset with the field reps—who could disagree with him. People hadn’t successfully disagreed with Chavez for nearly 15 years. There was no tradition of arguing and debating and voting as in other unions.
The paid reps became quite independent and collectively they decided that the big problem in Salinas was that they only had half of the valley organized, and for the union to survive, they had to organize the nonunion companies.
So they started organizing the nonunion companies and had some success. But Chavez was never comfortable with the Salinas contracts. There were lots of contract disputes and Chavez had never dealt with contract disputes. He was sick of the complaints, he thought contracts were a pain in the ass. He was busy with the boycott, which he thought was the most important tool the union had.
But what was the boycott for if not to win more contracts?
The reality of contracts was different from the idea of getting more contracts. Contracts brought problems, especially in 1970 in Salinas after a victorious strike. The workers were testing the extent of their victory. They were filing grievances and fighting for seniority rights.
It was the year I went into the fields and I was astounded by the militancy. I was on a crew that was told to thin the lettuce, and people wouldn’t leave the bus because they said the fields had been fumigated too recently—this was a right which was in the contract. The foreman was furious. He ordered us to go into the fields and somebody went to the union office and somebody came out and argued with the boss and we never went to work that day.
Chavez was primarily a boycott leader by this time. He was not really interested in rank-and-file problems on the ground. Moreover, he could see the reps were expanding their constituency and he thought they would become even more powerful. He ordered them to stop organizing, and when they didn’t, he fired them. Even though he didn’t have a legal right to do so.
There was a big battle and it all came out at the UFW convention—and the growers knew about it. They knew the union was divided, and in 1980 they went on the offensive and basically defeated the union. This story in all its gory details can be found in my book.
Is there a lesson here for unionists about how their unions should be run?
Yes. Democratic unionism is essential to union strength. Open discussion and debate is essential to building the kind of unity that you need. The lack of democratic organization is what caused the downfall of the UFW. The lack of democratic organization not only gave Chavez immunity in his abuse of girls and women, but is also what caused the downfall of the UFW.
Is there a lesson about making it all about one leader?
I’m not against leaders. Good leaders are essential to a movement. The main lesson I see is that the good leader has got to emerge out of a democratic tradition and democratic discussion and shouldn’t serve for life.
What about the rumors that the union was opposed to undocumented workers?
That is another long, sad story. At various periods the union was actively opposed to the undocumented. They even set up their own border patrol line in the Imperial Valley, called the “wet line.” The UFW had an anti-illegals campaign in the early ’70s in which they actually fingered undocumented people to the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] . UFW loyalists would provide a list to the local INS office of the undocumented people working in the fields.
These were their co-workers.
Yes. Close to half the workers in the fields were undocumented by this time. Why would an organization that was trying to organize field workers set one half of field workers against the other half?
Chavez’s answer was, “We have to explain to the boycotters why we are losing contracts. Illegals is the answer. The undocumented are taking the contracts away from us.” Which points to the fact that the best way to understand Chavez in the mid-1970s was as a boycott leader, not a farmworker leader. He sacrificed the organizing of farmworkers to strengthen his boycott organizing.
What now?
I’m for taking down the statues and renaming the schools and the streets. I’m not for replacing them with the name of Dolores Huerta, who was a loyal lieutenant and very often the point person in the various purges of people who had elicited Chavez’s displeasure.
If you want to give them a name of a farmworker, give them the name of one of the reps who are still known in the fields. Cleofas Guzman. Mario Bustamante.
A dismal job market has given rise to a grim new cottage industry: a buzzy San Francisco-based AI company called Mercor is hiring desperate job-seekers to train AI models to do the work they can’t get hired for anymore.
The company has been recruiting educated and underemployed experts while keeping them fully in the dark about whose AI they’re even training. As New York Magazine reported last month, shifts are also crushingly long, the vast majority of managers are young and inexperienced, and contracts often end abruptly without any prior warning.
Now, companies that hired Mercor — which include OpenAI and Anthropic, according to NYMag‘s reporting — have learned a rude lesson: Mercor revealed late last month that it had been hacked, again shedding light on Silicon Valley’s extremely fragile and contractor-dependent AI supply chain.
The startup told TechCrunch that it was affected by an exploit linked to an open source project called LiteLLM. A sample of data allegedly stolen from Mercor reviewed by the publication included material referencing Slack data and videos purportedly showing conversations between Mercor’s AI systems and its hired workers — meaning that the theft very likely exposed sensitive information from the companies that hired Mercor to train their AI systems.
“We are conducting a thorough investigation supported by leading third-party forensics experts,” a Mercor spokesperson told TC. “We will continue to communicate with our customers and contractors directly as appropriate and devote the resources necessary to resolving the matter as soon as possible.”
The situation is looking bleak. Contractors have since filed five lawsuits against the startup, as Business Insider reported last week, accusing it of violating data privacy and consumer protection laws. The suits allege Mercor could’ve leaked highly sensitive data, including Social Security numbers or addresses, to bad actors.
While it’s not uncommon for companies to be sued following major data leaks, the latest development once again highlights the dangers of relying on an army of underpaid and overworked contractors to train extremely valuable AI models.
Mercor’s corporate clients are clearly nervous as well. Meta has officially pausing all work with Mercor during its own investigation into the security incident, as Wired reported earlier this month.
However, it’s likely not for any concerns over the wellbeing of the gig workers who are being exploited. The biggest worry for companies like Meta or Mercor is losing their competitive edge by exposing the ways they train their AI models to other AI labs.
It’s far from the first time Mercor has fallen foul with the extensive line of highly educated workers it relies on. Even before the latest hack, Mercor was hit with three class-action lawsuits over the past seven months, per NYMag, with plaintiffs accusing it of relying on independent contractors, who have little to no agency at the company, let alone insight into the work they do.
I’m a senior editor at Futurism, where I edit and write about NASA and the private space sector, as well as topics ranging from SETI and artificial intelligence to tech and medical policy.
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Apr 15, 2026 Biological Systems, Health and Healing Emmy Vadnais, OTR/L, is an occupational therapist and integrative medicine practitioner based in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of Intuitive Development: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing for Guidance With Relationships, Health, and Spirituality. Her website is https://emmyvadnais.com/ In this video, rebooted from 2020, she describes how the practice of energy medicine helped her through a serious crisis, overcoming both personal and professional obstacles. She acknowledges that it can be very hard for individuals to trust their own inner guidance when they are under stress and in pain. She offers a number of practical, long and short term strategies for viewers who may be in the throes of similar dilemmas. An awareness of subtle energies enables us to realize that we are much larger beings than we normally take ourselves to be. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on November 9, 2020)
The word “forgive,” in English, comes the Old English forgyfan, which translates primarily as “to give, grant, or bestow.” One Old English dictionary connects it to the Hebrew word for “gift.” It’s a present that is offered, something that is granted to someone freely, without, necessarily, a conversation about whether or not they have earned it. It’s an offering, of sorts.
