“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both. ”
~ James A. Michener.
James Albert Michener was an American writer. He wrote more than 40 books, most of which were long, fictional family sagas covering the lives of many generations, set in particular geographic locales and incorporating detailed history. Many of his works were bestsellers and were chosen by the Book of the Month Club. Wikipedia
This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine.If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
At the age of 27, when Ida B. Wells first began editing and writing for the Free Speech and Headlight newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, she encountered a preacher whose rhetoric was less than pious. Wells detailed in her posthumous autobiography Crusade for Justice that the unnamed reverend had decided that “morally there were no virtuous southern girls.” He had specifically pointed to how Wells had recently been fired from her schoolteacher position. But this termination was not motivated by Wells’s inability to educate her students; rather it was the result of an editorial she had published detailing the dreadful conditions for Black children in the Memphis public school system.
When a family friend told Wells about the preacher’s comments, she immediately requested an audience. Wells traveled to Vicksburg, Mississippi, and confronted the reverend face-to-face. “He acknowledged that he had made the derogatory remarks, but added that he had only told it to my close friends. He realized his error and he begged pardon and stood ready to make amends,” Wells noted in Crusade for Justice. At Wells’s request, he apologized for his attempt to defame her from his pulpit the following Sunday, reading a statement that Wells herself penned.
“I could have denounced him in my paper and made him even more unpopular than he was. I could have sued him in the courts; but feeling that he had been taught his lesson, I let the matter drop,” Wells wrote. “I felt that I had vindicated the honor of the many southern girls who had been traduced by lying tongues.” Her decision to hold the preacher accountable for his sexist, defamatory remarks was reflective of her approach to life: One must act to defeat perceived injustice, no matter how difficult.
Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in July of 1862, three years before the end of the Civil War. Her mother was a skilled cook and her father was a respected carpenter; both involved themselves in Reconstruction politics after they were emancipated. They managed to ensure education for themselves and their children, encouraging Wells to read, write, and attend school. Tragically, both parents died in 1878 from yellow fever, leaving Wells orphaned and a guardian of her siblings at the age of 16.
Over the next few years, Wells cared for her siblings while focusing on professional and academic interests. She took on teaching work near her hometown and later moved her family to Memphis to pursue a similar position. There, she became one of the first to legally challenge Jim Crow laws, which had begun cropping up in the South during Reconstruction.
At the age of 21, Wells purchased a first-class ticket on the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwest Railroad from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee, and sat down in the respective ladies’ car. Instead of checking her ticket and moving on, the conductor ordered her to move to the second-class smoking car, which was mostly occupied by Black people. But Wells refused, and two additional railroad employees helped the conductor drag her into the smoking car, ripping her dress in the process. Instead of giving in, Wells opted to disembark, still holding on to her ticket. This was more than 70 years before Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott.
Credit: The New York Public Library Digital Collections; Science History Images/Alamy.
When Wells returned to Memphis, she retained a lawyer and sued the railroad. The court awarded her $500 in damages, and the verdict ensured that all railroads would have to offer first-class accommodations to Black passengers. The railroad appealed, and the Tennessee Supreme Court struck down the ruling, demonstrating that true racial equality in the post-Reconstruction period would be difficult to produce.
After this incident, Wells began writing for the Black-owned local publication The Living Way under the pseudonym “Iola,” mostly focusing on issues facing Black Americans. Her stories quickly gained attention in the U.S. and internationally, leading her to be referred to as the “Princess of the Press.” Soon after, in 1889, Wells became co-owner and editor of the Free Speech and Headlight. It was there that she first became involved in investigative reporting and pushback against it, especially as she turned her attention to covering lynching.
AS BLACK AMERICANS BEGAN to build economic and social mobility in the South after emancipation, white supremacists countered with racist violence. Between 1882 and 1968, nearly 5,000 lynchings occurred in the U.S., likely an undercount since these murders were not formally tracked or documented. Wells understood that terrorizing Black people was integral to the cultural fabric of the U.S., particularly in the South. Her commitment to reporting on the phenomenon was spurred on by the lynching of one of her close friends, Thomas Moss, in 1892.
A popular man in the local Black community, Moss, along with his partners Calvin McDowell and William “Henry” Stewart, owned a shop named People’s Grocery Company in the Curve, a neighborhood outside of Memphis. It was located in the same neighborhood as a white-owned grocery store, and was challenging its competitor’s long-standing monopoly in the local economy. What started as an immature fight between Black and white children in the area escalated into accusations that the People’s Grocery was a planning center for Black attacks against white residents.
After a shoot-out between Black men guarding the People’s Grocery from a white mob and a county sheriff backed by five deputized citizens, over a hundred Black people in the area were jailed, including Moss, McDowell, and Stewart. Not long after, they were dragged from their cells, brought to a railroad yard, and shot in cold blood. Local newspapers framed the lynchings as the natural result of Black people attempting to target white people. But Wells saw that portrayal as a farce, and set out to prove it.
So began her commitment to investigative reporting, and her status as one of the United States’ most important muckrakers. Armed with a pistol, Wells traveled the country, visiting sites of racialized violence and interviewing Black community members. Lynching, Wells concluded, was a systemic method of oppressing Black Americans in a post-slavery world. And false criminal accusations served to distract people from the deeper issues at hand.
“She understood that lynching was more than the product of racial hatred,” says Paula Giddings, professor emerita of Africana Studies at Smith College. “It was a means to publicly dishonor Blacks and thus exclude them from spheres of social, political, and especially economic influence.”
Indeed, Wells’s investigations highlighted a pattern in which lynchings helped to ensure that Black Americans would remain economically subordinate to white people. It was a bloody pattern that occurred again in 1898, this time in the thriving, majority-Black city of Wilmington, North Carolina, where most shops and restaurants were Black-owned. White supremacists noted this prosperity, and began a smear campaign to force Republicans out of positions of political power.
Ida B. Wells wears a pin she created to commemorate the court marshal and hanging of Black Soldiers in Texas. The pin reads, “In Memoriam Martyred Negro Soldiers Dec. 11, 1917.” Credit: Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center/University of Chicago Library.
After a white suffragist named Rebecca Latimer Felton claimed in a speech that Black male rapists were a major threat to white women’s safety, Alexander Manly, editor and owner of the Black-owned Wilmington Daily Record, published a rebuttal. A massive white mob, already emboldened by a monthslong local white supremacist campaign, stormed Wilmington, destroying the Daily Record’s offices and then murdering dozens of innocent Black people.
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Hundreds of other Black residents were cast out of their homes, and local elected leaders were forced to resign. After the massacre, white people filled the jobs that Black people had once had. It was a devastating blow to a community that was building economic mobility, sparked by a local journalist’s questioning of a racist conspiracy theory.
At every turn, Wells faced serious danger, particularly in her home base of Memphis. Months after publishing her report on Moss’s lynching in the Free Speech, in which she quoted his final words (“Tell my people to go west, there is no justice here”) and encouraged an economic boycott of white businesses, an angry white mob destroyed the publication’s offices. Wells had just released an article that disputed the common claim that Black men raped white women as a rationale for lynchings, saying it was a “threadbare lie.” Instead, she pointed to consensual relationships between white women and Black men as often being the true story. Fortunately, Wells was out of town at the time.
Wells’s life was threatened, and a price was put on her head. It would be 30 years before she could return to the South. Instead, Wells continued to travel, writing and speaking in both the U.S. and Europe about the unchecked horrors of lynching. She published two books, Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895), which employed statistics, interviews, and narratives as documentary evidence. Included in Southern Horrors is a letter sent to Wells by Frederick Douglass, whom she was close to, in which he called her a “brave woman” for her coverage of lynching.
“Let me give you thanks for your faithful paper on the lynch abomination now generally practiced against colored people in the South. There has been no word equal to it in convincing power. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison,” Douglass wrote. “You give us what you know and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves … you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured.”
IN 1893, WELLS SETTLED in Chicago. Soon after arriving, she met and married Ferdinand L. Barnett, an attorney and publisher of The Conservator, Chicago’s first Black newspaper. Their wedding was front-page news, as both Wells and Barnett were liked and respected figures in the civil rights community. They went on to have four children, but unlike other women of her age, Wells did not opt to become a homemaker; she continued her anti-lynching crusade and became more involved in the era’s Progressive movements.
Wells’s background in reporting racist violence and advocating for the empowerment of Black Americans motivated her interest in civil rights organizing. In 1898, she was elected secretary and national organizer of the National Afro-American Council, a precursor to the NAACP.
Ida B. Wells with her children Charles, Herman, Ida, and Alfreda, in 1909. Credit: Niday Picture Library/Alamy.
1908 saw the deadly Springfield, Illinois, race riot, in which thousands of white people attacked the city’s Black community, triggered by a false rape accusation of a Black man. At least nine, but likely dozens more, Black people were killed, and thousands were forced out of their homes. It was the catalyst for the formation the next year of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Wells worked tirelessly to draw up plans for the NAACP’s success. But compared to many of her peers, she was quite radical, which caused friction with people like Booker T. Washington, who advocated for racial accommodation rather than directly fighting against oppression. Despite W.E.B. Du Bois taking a more proactive approach to protesting injustice, Wells took issue with his belief that elite Black Americans should advance the race as a whole.
“Her belief in both the worthiness and political potential of the Black working class differed from many of her peers in the NAACP—who believed in leadership by the ‘talented tenth’—as well as the compliant conservatives led by Washington,” says Giddings. Wells also wanted anti-lynching to be a key area of focus for the new organization, but faced some skepticism from her peers.
When it came time for the “Founding Forty” NAACP members to be called at a 1909 conference, Wells’s name was not on the list. While a commotion broke out, with the NAACP’s more radical faction protesting the news, Wells left the building. From then onward, her relationship to the NAACP remained fraught. “I cannot resist the conclusion that, had I not been so hurt over the treatment I had received at the hands of the men of my own race … the NAACP would now be a live, active force in the lives of our people all over this country,” she detailed in Crusade for Justice. For most of her life, Wells would often experience marginalization at the hands of her male contemporaries, due to her identity as a Black woman and her willingness to transgress gender roles.
Despite this, Wells continued to forge her own path as an anti-racist feminist. As the suffragette movement took off in the early 1900s, she advocated for the rights of Black women. But this often put her at odds with white women in the movement, many of whom refused to take an intersectional approach to feminist organizing. Focusing on racial discrimination and recognizing Black women as integral to the struggle for suffrage was unpopular. This led Wells to call out her peers for their racism, and attempt to organize in ways that prioritized Black women’s interests.
In 1913, Wells and two of her white colleagues in the movement formed the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago. It aimed to inform working-class Black women of their civic duties and highlight paths toward electing Black candidates to political office. That March, the Club attended a national suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., at which they faced racial discrimination and were forced to march behind the white women. But Wells slipped out from the back and joined her white colleagues in leading the Illinois contingent, shocking onlookers.
BEYOND HER ACTIVISM, Wells was a probation officer, founded Chicago’s first Black kindergarten, and ran unsuccessfully for the Illinois state Senate as an independent candidate in 1930. By the late 1910s, the relatively new federal agency which would later be known as the FBI had opened up a file on Wells, labeling her as “one of the most dangerous negro agitators.”
Wells’s approach to bettering the world around her was multifaceted, organizing both locally and nationally, constantly pursuing avenues for change. But she was much more than the sum of her accomplishments: She was a mother, a devout Christian, and a person who lived through serious trauma. After decades of work, she died in 1931 at the age of 68.
Wells’s philosophy of action is vitally important to recognizing how we can combat oppression today. She exposed how lynchings and other acts of racialized violence often masked corruption. Today, the Trump administration has continued to cite undocumented immigrants as the biggest danger to the U.S., while siphoning off government funds to line the pockets of the president and his allies. Just as lynchings were often used as a cover-up of attempts to destroy Black economic and social mobility, attacking immigrants and other marginalized groups has pulled focus from the Trump administration’s own shady dealings.
As the nation recognizes its 250th anniversary, Wells should be seen as more than just a trailblazing figure, but also someone whom Americans can be inspired by. “She represents the promise of the country,” says Giddings. “As a Black woman who fought to make this country face the truth about itself and its citizens, she represents the real promise of America’s declaration 250 years hence.”
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Naomi Bethune is the John Lewis Writing Fellow at The American Prospect. During her time studying philosophy and public policy at UMass Boston, she edited the opinions section of The Mass Media. Prior to joining the Prospect, she interned for Boston Review and Beacon Press. More by Naomi Bethune
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jul 29, 2026 Don Lattin, a former journalist, is author of Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge; Following Our Bliss: How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixties Shape Our Lives Today; The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America; Changing Our Minds: Psychedelic Sacraments and the New Psychotherapy; and Distilled Spirits: Getting High, and then Sober, with a Famous Writer, a Forgotten Philosopher, and a Hopeless Drunk. His website is https://www.donlattin.com/. In this video, rebooted from 2021, he describes the extraordinary friendship of three seminal figures: Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception; Gerald Heard, author of The Five Ages of Man; and Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the early 1950s, these individuals were among the first to explore the potential of psychedelic drugs (mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD) as a tool for spiritual and psychological breakthroughs. 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 February 10, 2021)
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove July 28, 2026 Philosophy Robert Thurman, PhD, passed on June 16 of this year. He was a shining light of love and joy, and a friend to the New Thinking Allowed family. We are grateful to have known him and to be touched by his warmth and passion. He was professor emeritus at Columbia University where he was a teaching professor for 50 years on Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies. He was the first Westerner Tibetan Buddhist monk, ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He authored many books, including Why the Dalai Lama Matters: His Act of Truth as the Solution for China, Tibet, and the Whole World and Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within. His most recent book is Wisdom is Bliss: Four Friendly Fun Facts That Can Change Your Life. His website is bobthurman.com. In this video, rebooted from 2023, Robert describes how to become liberated from suffering through understanding in the between of death and rebirth, known as the bardo in the Tibetan language. He describes other in-betweens and how to attain instant liberation. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:36 Mistranslation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead 00:04:56 The betweens or bardos 00:10:42 Near-death and death experiences 00:23:31 Deathlessness 00:35:11 Stages of liberation 00:45:51 Attachment 00:57:07 Interconnection 01:19:24 Instant liberation 01:21:02 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed CoHost, Emmy Vadnais, OTR/L, is a licensed occupational therapist, intuitive healer and coach, and spiritual guide based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Emmy is the founder of the Intuitive Connections and Holistic OT communities. She is the author of Intuitive Development: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing for Guidance With Relationships, Health, and Spirituality. She offers intuitive coaching to help individuals access their inner guidance for clarity, healing, and meaningful decision-making. Her website is https://emmyvadnais.com (Recorded on November 15, 2023)
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Aries artist Vincent van Gogh lived in Arles, France, for fifteen months in 1888 and 1889. It was the most prolific time of his career. His buoyant genius overflowed, pouring out over 200 paintings, including the lavish “Sunflowers” series. I suspect you will enjoy your own surge of splashy productivity in the coming months. It may not be as manically generative as van Gogh, though. I think your creativity will be rather relaxed and deeply healing. Start planning now for how you want to channel all this imaginative exuberance.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): I invite you to clear out every fixed idea your mind carries about where you are “supposed” to be. Once you have made that inner space wide and uncluttered, begin a fresh inquiry into the nature of your real home. Use questions like these to navigate: 1. What’s the first place you think of when you come across the word “sanctuary”? 2. Which environments reliably bring out your brightest, truest qualities? 3. Do you have what you would call power spots? If so, how do they make you feel in your body and psyche? 4. Which locations on Earth fascinate you, even if you have never visited them? 5. Could there be a future dwelling that offers a more peak-level experience of home than the familiar place where tradition now soothes you?
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): The brain doesn’t literally multitask. It rapidly shifts attention between tasks, creating the illusion of simultaneity. For many people, each interchange costs mental energy and reduces efficiency. But some brains can switch faster with a lower energy cost, making them better at sustained task-switching. I’m sure you can guess the identity of the zodiac’s number one task-switcher: you, of course! And the good news is that in the coming weeks, you will be even more adept than usual in wielding your superpower. One implication is that you will know when not to overdo it and when not to use it trivially. You will be a master of seamless, effective and meaningful transitions.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): Astronomers know that many stars don’t travel alone. Binary stars orbit each other for eons, their mutual gravity shaping each partner’s destiny. I propose we make this your featured metaphor in the coming months. It will be a favorable time to de-emphasize the notion that strength and creative power require complete autonomy. I suspect that flexible, spirited interdependence will generate far better results than lonely self-sufficiency. Which alliances and relationships will expand your orbit rather than shrink it? Invest in them.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Neurologists say that when you vividly imagine performing an action like shooting a basketball or playing piano, your brain activates many of the same networks it uses in real practice. In other words, mental rehearsal can measurably improve your actual performance. Many athletes use this trick. But here’s an interesting twist: Such visualizations work for emotional and social skills too. We can enhance our resilience and better regulate our moods if we practice doing so in the privacy of our imaginations. I bring this to your attention, Leo, because you’re in a period when your fantasy life has extra-robust practical power. I invite you to rehearse being who you want to be in the theater of your mind.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Your assignment: Compose a vigorous prayer in which you ask life for something you fear you don’t deserve or are not supposed to want. What is the blessing, healing or freedom that feels “too much,” “too selfish,” “too late” or “too impossible” for you to yearn for? Name this prize and how you imagine it might allow you to give more, love more, or live more honestly. You could begin your appeal with these words: “Dear Great Mystery, I’m nervous about asking for this, but I will ask anyway,” and then let your heart speak without editing. Do this at least once every day for ten days.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In 1848, a Libra-born carpenter named James Marshall discovered a few glittering flakes of gold floating on the American River in California. His find ignited the Gold Rush, drawing hundreds of thousands of people westward. Alas, Marshall himself never became rich from the discovery, though many other people did. I’m hoping and predicting a different outcome when you locate treasure in the coming weeks, Libra. In this instance, you will share in the spoils.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): The lyrebird can imitate almost any sound, including chainsaws, car alarms, camera shutters and other birds’ songs. But they don’t just mimic sounds randomly. They compose elaborate performances, weaving a variety of imitations into complex acoustic tapestries. In a sense, they are remix artists. During the coming weeks, Scorpio, I hope you give yourself permission to resemble a lyrebird. Sample freely from everything you’ve absorbed. Weave your influences into new configurations. Express your imaginative concoctions of repurposed ideas and enchantments. The voice isn’t less yours because it borrows from other voices. Originality is in part about arrangement, not just source material.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Astronauts who have orbited Earth describe the “overview effect.” Viewing the entire globe from high above triggers rich epiphanies and cognitive shifts, providing a visceral sense of the planet’s fragility and unity. Borders dissolve. Conflicts seem absurd. I surmise you are ripe for a similar blessing, Sagittarius. You’ll be able to see your current dramas from expansive vantage points that make their true scale and significance obvious. Armed with these perspectives, you will naturally clarify your priorities and allow petty concerns to fade away.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): You are the result of an ancestral crowd: two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents. Without these fourteen lives weaving together in the precise ways they did, your unique destiny would never have taken shape. Their choices and challenges helped sculpt your gifts and your rough edges, your cravings and your turn-offs. The coming weeks will be a ripe astrological moment to get more intimate with this lineage. As you delve into your family’s stories, you may uncover vital clues for refreshing your views on dilemmas that have dragged on for a while. Are you daring enough to let your sense of “where I come from” evolve—and, with it, your sense of what kind of future you want to create?
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): According to my investigations, there’s a place you need to go, but fear or timidity is holding you back. Where is it? Is it a physical location, a creative risk, a complicated conversation or a spiritual threshold? Visualize it. Who would you be if you appeared there in your full glory? What do you worry might happen if you do? What interesting future might never bloom if you don’t? I hope you formulate a feisty plan. To begin, write these words: “If I decide to go there anyway, acknowledging my fear but not being controlled by it, what first step will I take and what help will I seek?”
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Professional athletes sometimes talk about “winning ugly.” That’s when they achieve a victory even though they haven’t played their very best. I foresee you using that phrase for yourself soon, after you notch a less-than-pretty but undeniably real success. There’s another expression you might also exemplify, too: “ugly ripe.” Officially, it’s the name of luscious heirloom tomatoes whose lumpy, offbeat forms contrast with the smooth, bland specimens stacked in most supermarket bins. In the coming weeks, it will describe the nonstandard yet succulent flavor of your life.
Swimmers filled the water Saturday afternoon at Seabright State Beach in Santa Cruz. Then, suddenly, the waves began to surge violently, hitting the shore with thunderous strength.
A rookie lifeguard in his first year on the job ran into the churning waters, while beachgoers fled the water and parents scrambled to find their children, according to Scott Vander Dussen, a Santa Cruz local who recorded a video of the beach rescue. In a roughly two-minute struggle with relentless, towering waves, the lifeguard — a teenager, according to Vander Dussen and media reports — helped pull the boy to safety.
“When those waves started crashing, the sound of them hitting kind of commanded everyone’s respect and attention,” Vander Dussen said. “When they saw the lifeguard run out, the whole beach began pointing. Everyone was staring. Let me tell you, I’ve never seen this. The whole water cleared out as if someone yelled ‘shark!’”
A rookie lifeguard rescued a young boy from intense waves at Seabright State Beach in Santa Cruz on Saturday.Scott Vander Dussen/Instagram @santacruznow
Aided by another lifeguard toward the end of the rescue, the lifeguard’s heroism — captured on video — was just one of 25 or so rescues Santa Cruz State lifeguards made along the coast that day, with three on Seabright State Beach alone, Vander Dussen said officials told him. Over the weekend, state parks lifeguards performed 34 rescues in the Santa Cruz district.
A beach hazards statement was in effect last weekend, and the National Weather Service has extended it through the evening of Saturday Aug. 1. Authorities warned of an increased chance of sneaker waves and strong rip current, with breaking waves as high as 10 feet. Seas can grow particularly topsy-turvy with storm activity in the ocean; in this case, the combination of wave energy following a storm near New Zealand, plus a hurricane near Hawaii, pushed up danger levels along the California coast.
About a dozen bystanders entered the surf to try and help the lifeguard save the boy, with one doubling back when he encountered the intensity of a crashing wave and another knocked down by the current before retreating, according to Vander Dussen.
“I don’t want to sound in any way unappreciative of the Good Samaritans who went out there to help, but I think most people didn’t understand what the lifeguard was doing,” Vander Dussen said. “Those waves are so intense. There’s only a brief window when you can make forward progress towards the shore, and the rest of the time, his job is simply to endure, hold ground.”
Bystanders should not attempt rescues themselves, California State Parks spokesperson Tyler Hersko said in a statement.
“Many cases have been made more dangerous by bystanders attempting rescues, putting themselves in a position beyond their abilities,” Hersko said.
The lifeguards ultimately pulled the boy, limp and exhausted, from the waters. First responders medically cleared the approximately 10-year-old boy, who was then able to sit up and talk, and he returned to his parent, Vander Dussen said.
Vander Dussen, who lives near the beach and has relationships with several lifeguards there, said the rescue prompted him to urge the community to support House Resolution 1188, which would express “support for the work of open water lifeguards as first responders and emergency response providers.”
The Pacific Ocean is very active right now, with unusual marine heat and an emerging El Niño providing extra fuel for storms.
Brooke Park is a Hearst Fellow covering breaking news and the climate and environment beat. She previously covered Bexar County government at the San Antonio Express-News and has worked at several major newsrooms across Texas, including the Texas Tribune, Texas Monthly, The Dallas Morning News and The Austin American-Statesman. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied journalism.
“A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.”
~ Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts was a British and American writer, speaker, and self-styled “philosophical entertainer”, known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience. Wikipedia
The Onion Premiered Jul 3, 2026 As the United States celebrates 250 years of American exceptionalism, The Onion looks back on the pivotal moments and enlightened fathers who gave birth to the greatest nation on Earth. Become an Onion member while it’s still optional: https://membership.theonion.com/?camp…
On July 29th, 2026, we have a Full Moon at 6° Aquarius. The Full Moon is conjunct Pluto, and it’s opposite Jupiter.
The Full Moon in Aquarius activates the Cradle “everything-at-4-degrees” configuration that peaked in July and got all astrologers excited about.
Although Jupiter has since moved to 6° Leo, the Cradle involving Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto is still very much active.
And it’s the actual Full Moon in Aquarius that adds the personal element to it.
Without the Sun and the Moon, without personal planets, the Cradle remains an abstract, collective dream.
Full Moon In Aquarius – When The Cradle Hits The Fan
The Full Moon in Aquarius takes the Cradle out of the ephemeris and brings it into our lives.
What makes it relatable – what makes someone say “ah – THIS is what this is about” is the Full Moon.
Because:
No personal planets = nothing is personal. Personal planets = things become personal.
The Moon is at 6° Aquarius – joining Pluto at 4° Aquarius. The Sun is at 6° Leo – joining Jupiter at 6° Leo.
Until now, the Cradle has been a pattern in the sky – promising, but difficult to grasp. At the Full Moon, it hits the fan – it enters our relationships, decisions, and circumstances. What was collective becomes personal.
What does this mean?
Of course, different things to different people. The same aspect hits our charts in different ways, depending on our natal houses, whether or not we have planets around the Full Moon degrees, and whatever else happens in our life.
For some, a change at home. For others, a career opportunity. Or a discussion that reveals an unconscious pattern running behind the scenes for decades. Whatever it is – it IS significant.
There’s a potency to this Full Moon that gets right in our faces. Something WILL show up. A thought, an event, a turning point – something will reveal what this Cradle – what’s going on at the collective level – has to do with us.
Full Moons have a way of illuminating things. At a Full Moon, what’s been dark and ungraspable becomes visible.
The Full Moon And The Leo-Aquarius Axis
Leo-Aquarius is the ‘what’s my place in the world?’ axis. What makes me unique, and what do I do with it?
I’m a good singer (the Leo talent). But how does that voice find its place in the world? Do I take my guitar to the local pub? Do I play in a band? In a choir? Do I join an orchestra? Do I teach others how to sing? Do I develop a music app?
In the context of the Cradle, theFull Moon in Aquarius will reveal the role we are being called to play in this new world that is emerging before our eyes.
Full Moon In Aquarius And The Air-Fire Era
The world is changing, and it’s changing fast. And while we might not see the full extent of it yet, the outer planets lining up tell us that the tectonic plates have already shifted.
Our lives still carry plenty of residue from the Yin-sign era – Pluto in Capricorn, Neptune in Pisces, Uranus in Taurus. The jobs we do, the structures we depend on, our ideas about who we are were shaped by that world.
But since the beginning of this year, the outer planets have crossed the threshold into a new world – and we have crossed with them. Pluto is now in Aquarius. Neptune, in Aries. Uranus, in Gemini.
We feel it in our bones – that there’s something out there, something else, that awaits. That the person we have been is no longer the person who can carry us into tomorrow.
And the more aware we become of this shift, the less we try to cling to the past, and the more say we have in what happens next.
Full Moons are the ultimaterevelationtransits. At the peak of the cycle, the Full Moon takes whatever has been developing and spells it out for us.
And our job is to see what is being revealed. To recognize it instead of deflecting or doubting. And then take that first step that sets us on a new trajectory.
Full Moon In Aquarius – A child Born Of An Eggshell
The Sabian symbol of the Full Moon couldn’t have been more revealing:
“A child born of an eggshell”
Not from a womb – from an egg. This child is not born into an existing lineage, with an inherited identity and a ready-made place in the world. It hatches as something unprecedented.
This is not about becoming a better-adjusted version of who we have been. It’s about breaking out of the shell of family scripts, social conditioning, and identities designed for a world that no longer exists.
The child is not here to continue the family business. It is born equipped for what comes next.
The Cradle has set things in a new direction. At the Full Moon, the egg cracks – and something new walks out.
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