Latest news with #Scribner
Yahoo
4 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
University High principal: Class of 2025 reached 99% graduation rate
University High School's 620 members of the Class of 2025 earned their diplomas at the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach May 31. Principal Amanda Wiles said University's Class of 2025 reached a graduation rate of greater than 99%. University students completed more than 36,000 community service hours. "This proves your generosity, compassion and willingness to make a positive impact on the world around you," Wiles said. More than 2 in 3 Titans earned scholar designations, while 172 received industry scholar designations. University students earned nearly $4.7 million in college scholarships, while 16 earned associate's degrees while in high school. Seven will enter the armed forces. Salutatorian Skye Scribner, who spoke to the class, completed her high school diploma in three years, while also earning an associate of arts degree from Daytona State College. So she spent the past year not in the halls of University, but at the campus of the University of Central Florida, completing her junior year of college. "I didn't get the chance to spend this final year of high school with you," Scribner said, admitting she felt scared standing before the large graduating class. "That's the message I want to leave you with today: Do it scared," she said. "Chances are you walked into high school and you were scared. You started your first job scared. You drove off alone for the first time scared. And yet you did it. "That courage, however small it felt at the time, is what carried you forward," Scribner said. "It is what got you to this moment and it's what will carry you into the next." Valedictorian Katie Blix admitted she's not good at many sports, but she kept trying and landed on running, which she said gave her confidence. She compared completing high school to crossing a finishing line. "Even though the race might have felt like 100 marathons, you still made it here," she said, "and you are stronger for it." This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: University High seniors graduate at the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach
CTV News
11-05-2025
- General
- CTV News
Trinity Church in Saint John, N.B., launches campaign to restore ‘irreplaceable' stained-glass window
Reverend Steven Scribner stands in front of the stained-glass window his church is raising money to restore.
Montreal Gazette
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Montreal Gazette
My parents never put their house in order. So the death cleaning fell to us
Entertainment And Life By Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable. – Leonard Cohen, in 2016 in The New Yorker Late one January afternoon in 2009, a reader called to comment on a column I'd written — and we got to talking. She told me how, once her children were launched, she'd sold the house in which she'd raised them and moved to a rented upper duplex. At 80, she had just moved again — this time to a one-bedroom apartment. With each move, she had divested herself of more of her possessions so that now, in her compact apartment, she had only essentials. She was adamant, she said, about not wanting to leave the contents of her life for her children — or anyone — to sort through after her death. Listening to her, I saw into the future: I envisioned my parents' gracious two-level condo, with its art and furniture and rugs, its many books and endless carousels of vacation slides, the massive dining table around which so many happy meals had been shared, the storage area with its Jenga towers of bridge chairs, ladders, old suitcases and boxes of random stuff. And I knew it would fall to my brother and me to sort through their belongings once they were gone and decide what to do with them — to me, mostly, since my brother doesn't live in Montreal. More than once as our parents aged we had suggested, gently, that they consider divesting themselves of some of what they had accumulated and moving to a smaller place on a single level, perhaps in a building with an elevator. They wouldn't hear of it. 'We'll be in a small enough space eventually,' my father would say. And that was that. When he died in 2014, two months before what would have been his 90th birthday, my parents had been married for nearly 64 years. My mother was 92 when she died, in 2021. And the future I had envisioned during my conversation with the 80-year-old caller a dozen years earlier was now. My parents had never put their house in order. And so it would fall to us. The reality, of course, is that we will all die. And the prospect of our eventual demise should be reason enough to clear out unnecessary belongings and simplify our lives, says Swedish author and artist Margareta Magnusson — to figure out what is important to us and what we want to give away or discard so as not to burden others with those decisions. Yet 'some people can't wrap their heads around death. And these people leave a mess after them,' she observed in The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter (Scribner, 2018). 'A loved one wishes to inherit nice things from you. Not all things from you.' Magnusson's slim and sage guide, which urges us to streamline our lives sooner rather than later, became a bestseller and the basis for a touching reality TV series of the same name developed and narrated by actor and comedian Amy Poehler. The eight episodes of its first season aired in 2023 on Peacock. The practice of death cleaning is popular across Scandinavian countries — but particularly in Sweden, where it is known as döstädning. 'In Swedish it is a term that means that you remove unnecessary things and make your home nice and orderly when you think the time is coming closer for you to leave the planet,' writes the mother of five. 'I have collected many things over the years, and it gives me such joy to go through them all. Sorting through everything is sad sometimes, too, but I really do not want to give my beloved children and their families too much trouble with my stuff after I am gone.' Death cleaning is a concept, like spring cleaning. It is about editing, about keeping what matters to you and getting rid of the rest. It is as much about clearing your mind as anything, and as much — or more — for you as for those who come after you, says Magnusson, who is 90. She figures 65 is a good age at which to start döstädning. 'One's own pleasure, and the chance to find meaning and memory, is the most important thing,' she writes. 'And if you don't remember why a thing has meaning or why you kept it, it has no worth, and it will be easier for you to part with.' For some, hiring a specialist to help with the task is a solution. Longtime professional organizer Samara Shapson of Sort it Out with Samara works with people wanting less clutter and those downsizing from homes to apartments or condos . 'It's emotional. It's a huge job: You are going through someone's life,' she said. 'When I go into a client's home as a professional organizer, I have no attachment to what is in the home. Clients need to realize that stuff is eventually going to have to go — if just for peace of mind, to feel light and free. We don't need a lot of stuff to live. We don't need 10 pots and 10 pans.' Ideally, Shapson has a year ahead of a move with a client to go through belongings so that only what will be used is moved and after the move she helps set up the new place, starting usually with the kitchen and bathrooms. The work can be tedious, but 'I love tedious work — and that is to my benefit,' she said. 'I love organizing kitchens and other spaces: It's like heaven to me. I get to meet amazing people and to help people. I love the feeling of being organized and clutter-free — and I want others to experience it. It's not easy. But once you are finally living in that less cluttered environment, it's priceless.' While some clients are prepared to declutter when they contact her, others are not. 'At the beginning, it's a challenge. But it's a process and, after a while, they see how liberating it is,' Shapson said. 'My ultimate goal is to make you feel better — about your space and about yourself. In a way, I am part therapist.' If possible, Magnusson advises, take your time with death cleaning and proceed, thoughtfully and methodically, at a pace that works for you: After all, it took a lifetime to accumulate your belongings. Often, sentimental attachment can come into play. One participant in the death cleaning TV series had lost both parents within 14 months and his basement was filled with their belongings. 'When I think about letting go of anything my parents have owned, I feel I am letting go of a piece of them,' Godfrey Riddle told the show's team of Swedish experts helping participants to pare down: a psychologist, an organizer and a stylist. They helped him realize that giving away his parents' things didn't mean giving away his love for them — that death cleaning was, rather, about finding a new home for them in which they'd be used. He donated 90 per cent of the basement's contents. 'What was stopping Godfrey from getting rid of his parents' things was his fear of losing them,' said psychologist Katarina Blom. 'What he didn't realize was that his parents live on in his memories and in the memories his friends have of them.' My parents were not the sum total of their belongings: I knew that. Still, dismantling the house and deciding what to keep, what to sell, what to give away and what to trash was daunting, exhausting and, at times, heartbreaking. An estate sale is an option for some, but not for me. If I had once found these events entertaining and even fun, I no longer did: Perhaps it was watching my parents age, but I came to see estate sales as sad and undignified. The old golf trophies, the beaded cardigans, the china teacups and saucers: Once these objects had had a place in people's lives; sifting through them made me feel somehow complicit in the dismantling of those lives. I didn't want that. It was important to me that virtually all my parents' belongings pass through my hands; by choice, I worked mostly alone. Going through my parents' papers and coming upon anniversary cards with messages intended only for each other, sorting through stacks of dishes and linens, emptying shelves, drawers and closets crammed with clothing and shoes no one had worn in ages, there were times I wondered: Could they not have done some of this themselves? My father's shirts, neatly folded, were stacked in piles. They looked new; some doubtless were. He had stopped wearing business suits years earlier except rarely and yet rows of them remained in his closet, still smelling faintly of his aftershave. I found the stunning chiffon gown my mother had had made for my brother's bar mitzvah party in 1970: She had looked so glamorous. Both my parents were from Poland originally and had arrived in Montreal from Europe after the Second World War — my mother came in 1948 as part of a group of war orphans brought over by Canadian Jewish Congress, my father in 1949 with his parents and two brothers — and met at the Jewish Public Library, in an English class. They were married in December of 1950. Looking through their passports at all the places they had visited together over the years brought to mind their vital younger selves and made me nostalgic. Other times, though, like when a stack of ceramic floor tiles tumbled from a high shelf in the storage area as I moved a box and a falling tile gashed my forehead, the task infuriated me. My sweet husband hauled bag after bag to the recycling and trash bins as we tossed dozens of empty jars and yogurt containers my parents had, for reasons known only to them, held onto (along with scores of chipped dishes and broken kitchen implements). I emptied drawers crammed with socks and underthings and bathroom cabinets of half-empty tubes and expired medication. My mother had started university once my brother and I were in school and gone on to earn a PhD in comparative literature; she taught literature at CEGEP for a time and, in cabinets in her study, I found enough foolscap to equip an entire school, if schools still used foolscap. In the freestanding unheated garage I came upon old suitcases packed with magazines and mouldering bank statements dating to the 1980s, when they had moved to the downtown condo. Did they ever throw anything out? Household goods in decent shape — dishes, pots and linens, along with furniture, winter coats, boots, hats and scarves — were given to organizations that support refugees and others in need, including the Welcome Collective and the MADA Community Centre; the collection of cut crystal glasses went to the Collectibles Art & Antique Shop at the Jewish General Hospital. Most of their clothing and many of their books were donated to the thrift shops of NOVA, an organization which provides community-based palliative care services free of charge. I particularly like the spacious layout of the Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue branch, which has a bookstore next door. Someone enormously helpful in the person of Patrick Lalonde, who helped to appraise collectibles and other items, contacted people he knew would be interested in, say, the mid-century teak or rosewood furniture, the small Chinese cloisonné pieces or the sword in a leather scabbard I have no idea how my parents acquired, and he dealt with them on my behalf. Although he also organizes and runs estate sales as part of his work, Lalonde respected my wish not to have one. My brother and I each selected some belongings with meaning for us, including paintings and decorative objects, rugs and books. My mother's favourite colour was blue and I held on to some of her blue glass bowls and vases. I kept her Hermes 2000 manual typewriter, with its mint-green keys, even though the fabric-lined case had grown mouldy with years in the unheated garage: I remember its busy clickety-clack as she typed her term papers. My father was a decorated Second World War soldier, a gunner in a Polish tank corps — and I have his medals. My brother kept a large oak cabinet housing a punch clock used for years in my father's millinery factory. He took my parents' slides and some of their photographs and I have the rest. We'll tackle organizing those next. Susan Schwartz montrealgazette 514-386-8794 Susan Schwartz, a native Montrealer, is a longtime reporter and feature writer at The Gazette.
Scroll.in
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘The East Indian' by Brinda Charry wins Society of American Historians Prize for Historical Fiction
The Society of American Historians Prize for Historical Fiction is awarded biennially in odd-numbered years for a book of historical fiction on an American subject. This year, the prize was awarded to Indian-origin writer Brinda Charry for her novel The East Indian. It was published by Scribner in the US and HarperCollins in the Indian subcontinent in 2023. She will receive a cash prize of $2000. In The East Indian, a young boy named Tony is compassionate and insatiably curious, with a unique perspective on every scene he encounters. Kidnapped and transported to the New World after travelling from the coast of India to the teeming streets of London, young Tony finds himself indentured on a Virginia tobacco plantation. Alone and afraid, Tony longs for home and envisions a life after servitude full of adventure and learning. His dream: to become a physician's assistant, an expert on roots and herbs, a dispenser of healing compounds. Tony's life is rich with oddities and hijinks, humour and tragedy. Set largely during the early days of English colonisation in Virginia, Brinda Charry's The East Indian gives an authentic voice to an otherwise unknown historical figure and brings his world to vivid life. A review on Scroll said: '[…]At its core, The East Indian is as much a bildungsroman as it is an attempt to trace the finer points of who built the foundations of the economic behemoth that America went on to become. Chronicling the coming-of-age story of an immigrant, and the first few lives of a society, it is a book meant for audiences that like a story made up of big strokes with many different shades.' In India, the novel was longlisted for the 2023 JCB Prize for Literature. The jury had said about the novel, '[…] We are all familiar with the NRI dream and modern aspirations of immigrants, but few of us know just how deeply entwined some Indian lives were with the building of America. Brinda Charry does a remarkable job of painting this world with finely observed brush strokes and individual stories to build an evocative global picture.' Born and raised in India, Brinda Charry came to the United States in 1999 to pursue a doctorate in English literature at Syracuse University. She currently teaches at Keene State College in New Hampshire.
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How American Bureaucrats Became Public Enemy No. 1
The following essay is based on Clay Risen's new book Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, out from Scribner on March 18. On April 28, 1948, a physicist named Edward U. Condon took the lectern at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington. If not as famous as his former boss at the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Condon was held in nearly equal esteem by his scientific colleagues: A pioneering figure in nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, and radar before World War II, he was now director of the Bureau of Standards, the forerunner to today's National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he was helping construct the federal government's sprawling research infrastructure, an astounding outpouring of public resources that would lead to everything from GPS and the internet to the COVID-19 vaccine. But Condon's speech that day was focused on a dark vision about America's future. 'There is growing in this country a wave of anti-intellectualism which is violently opposed to free speech and free expression,' he said. Thousands of government scientists, economists, and other experts were being investigated, and in many cases fired, in the name of anti-communism and national security—a campaign that Condon compared to ideological purges by the Nazis in the early days of the Third Reich. 'The last decade alone provides for us too many examples of nations where the people ignored the symptoms of totalitarianism until it was too late,' he warned. 'Anti-intellectualism precedes the totalitarian putsch, and anti-intellectualism is on the upswing here.' As his audience undoubtedly knew, Condon spoke from painful personal experience. A year earlier, Rep. J. Parnell Thomas, the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, had begun a sustained campaign against him, first in magazine articles, then in a March 1948 report that called him 'one of the weakest links in our atomic security' and accused him of 'knowingly or unknowingly' maintaining ties to Soviet spies. In Thomas' telling, Condon was part of a cabal of liberal, technocratic elites who ran the inner workings of the federal government and, out of naivete or treachery, were now fatally undermining their country in the face of the Soviet threat. Thomas' attacks were baseless, and both Condon and his boss, Secretary of Commerce W. Averell Harriman, resisted them. But the assault continued, and in 1951 Condon decided he had had enough. He quit the Bureau of Standards to take a job in the private sector. Still the attacks came: In 1954, when his employer, Corning Glass Works, submitted a bid for him to work on a sensitive military project, the Navy revoked his security clearance. (This also reportedly came at the urging of Vice President Richard Nixon, who wanted to undermine Harriman, who was running for governor of New York.) Rather than continue fighting, Condon left his job at Corning and spent the rest of his career teaching. The Condon Affair, as it was known, has been largely forgotten. But it bears all the hallmarks of the worst of the Red Scare era: knee-jerk anti-intellectualism; a baseless conviction that an elite, anti-American conspiracy was pulling the strings in Washington; and a willingness to abuse the levers of political power with little foresight about the unintended consequences. As Donald Trump and Elon Musk attempt to dismantle the federal government in the name of rooting out the so-called deep state and the supposed horrors of 'woke,' they are drawing on a line of thinking that has long animated the Republican hard right. It goes back to the founding of the modern federal bureaucracy in the 1930s. Far from being a new phenomenon, paranoid anti-elitism in America has a long and surprising pedigree. The Red Scare was about many things, but broadly speaking, it arose from the intersection of two powerful impulses that coursed through American society after World War II. One was a backlash to the massive federal intervention of the New Deal. The other was the sudden, terrifying onset of the Cold War, with its prospects for a nuclear-tipped global conflict. Together, these impulses unleashed an unprecedented period of political hysteria about the hidden motives of government officials—which led to the blacklists, loyalty tests, and witch hunts that defined the era, most famously under Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy. The Great Depression had shocked millions of Americans into action. Between 1929 and 1933, nearly 9,000 banks failed, manufacturing output dropped by 30 percent, and a quarter of all workers had been left unemployed. In response, a new spirit of political engagement swept across the country, much of it rallying to the vision of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His domestic agenda delivered hundreds of thousands of public jobs, billions of dollars in economic support, and above all, a 'New Deal' for the American people, asserting the power of the government to create guardrails around the economy. The combination of the Great Depression and the New Deal, wrote the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., had 'made men of intellectual ability available as never before; and the government had never been so eager to hire them.' The writer Sherwood Anderson, visiting the capital in 1933, encountered several old acquaintances at the Department of Agriculture: 'I stood there in the office a few minutes and at least ten of my old western friends came in, old radicals, young ones, newspaper men etc. … There is certainly a curious exhilarating feeling.' The bureaucratic influx was thick with graduates of the nation's best universities. Rexford Tugwell, Felix Frankfurter, Adolf Berle—acolytes of the brain trust that encircled the president—were plucked from schools like Columbia and Harvard. 'Unless an applicant can murder the broad A and present a Harvard sheepskin, he is definitely out,' complained one Michigan congressman, a bit of hyperbole about the new government elite that nevertheless revealed some truth about the high intellectual character of the expanding federal bureaucracy. Another called the New Deal a 'Phi Beta Kappa Tammany Hall.' Even as many Americans banded together around Roosevelt and the New Deal, anger was brewing. Employers resented Roosevelt's pro-labor stance, as well as his fighting words attacking 'economic royalists.' Farmers appreciated government support but hated being told when and what to plant. Southern politicians loved the outpouring of federal aid but detested the possibility that those funds might benefit Black neighborhoods. And all of them loathed the hundreds of thousands of government regulators brought in to operate an alphabet soup of new federal agencies. The impression that the New Deal was being run by the East Coast elite fed into conservative attacks on the Roosevelt administration as un-American. Later generations would call it the 'deep state,' but the suspicion was the same: that underneath the layers of elected officials and public figures who supposedly ran the government lay the real power, a vast cadre of anonymous bureaucrats. Conservatives accused these bureaucrats of answering to some foreign nation or ideology. One Republican congressman from Pennsylvania said the president's National Industrial Recovery Act 'Russianizes the business of America.' In 1934 Hamilton Fish, who represented Roosevelt's home district in New York's Hudson Valley, said, 'This administration has copied the autocratic tactics of fascism, Hitlerism and communism at their worst.' This conflict between New Deal progressives and anti-Roosevelt conservatives hummed on the edges of the 1930s and the war years of the early 1940s. But it took on a new, frightening resonance with the onset of the Cold War, as the Soviet Union replaced Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan as America's main enemy. The Cold War was an ideological battle; it would, many argued, necessitate an unblinking effort to root out domestic subversion and dissent. Spies were obviously a threat, but so too were those who advocated for, sympathized with, or even merely tolerated political beliefs that might offer an opening to communism at home. Sleepless diligence had been the watchword of the previous war; now that paranoia turned inward. In 1947 President Harry S. Truman instituted a loyalty program requiring every federal employee to be screened for possible 'membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association' with one of the more than two dozen organizations deemed 'subversive' by the attorney general. Affiliation could mean anything: a few dollars into a collection plate at a rally, a name absent-mindedly scribbled on a petition, an innocent friendship with the wrong sort of person—all were now considered in the worst possible light. There was every reason for the government to worry about Soviet espionage, and even Condon, in his speech to the American Physical Society, praised Truman's loyalty program. But as Condon also pointed out, the rush to absolute security was emboldening conspiracists and anti–New Deal Republicans who had spent the past decade shouting into the void about communist subversion. Suddenly they had a ready audience who may not have always believed their accusations but was now unwilling to stand in their way as they charged through liberal bastions—Hollywood, Washington, schools, civil rights groups, and unions—looking for evidence to support their allegations. Such hunts easily spilled over into attacks against everything Roosevelt had built. During his 1946 Senate campaign, McCarthy—then a small-time Wisconsin judge—ran an ad asking, 'Tired of being pushed around? Do you like to have some government bureaucrat tell you how to manage your life? … Who's to blame for all this? Nobody but the New Deal.' He won his race handily. By 1953 the Chicago Tribune, the largest-circulation newspaper in the Midwest and the country's leading voice of the right, was openly railing against the 'Communist-controlled New Deal.' Scientists, especially physicists, came in for particular attention. On the one hand, their contributions to stunning wartime technological breakthroughs—radar, sonar, rocketry, and above all the atomic bomb—had transformed them into an intellectual clerisy, holding the keys to the nation's future. On the other hand, many of them subscribed to the progressive politics of the New Deal era, contributing money and prestige to left-wing causes that, a decade later, made them suspect in the eyes of Red Scare vigilantes. Condon, who had stayed largely apolitical during the 1930s, was outspoken in his belief in civilian control over nuclear power; even this belief was treated like a prelude to subversion. In theory, there were legitimate concerns. Where to draw the line between security and intellectual freedom, between diversity of ideas and unity of purpose? In practice, the concerns became excuses for wholesale attacks on America's technocratic elite, at a time when the country needed strong intellectual leadership. Nebraska Sen. Hugh Butler, a close ally of McCarthy, summed up the attitude in a 1950 speech against Dean Acheson, Truman's patrician secretary of state: 'I look at that fellow, I watch his smart-aleck manner and his British clothes and that New Dealism in everything he says and does, and I want to shout, 'Get out! Get Out! You stand for everything that has been wrong in the United States for years!' ' In a 1964 article in Harper's, the historian Richard Hofstadter outlined what he called 'the paranoid style' in American politics. Witch hunts and conspiracy theories had a long history, he said, going back to 17th-century Salem and the 19th-century Know Nothings. 'But the modern right wing … feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind,' Hofstadter wrote. 'Their predecessors discovered foreign conspiracies; the modern radical right finds that conspiracy also embraces betrayal at home.' By the time Hofstadter wrote that, the Red Scare had subsided, its loudest voices pushed to the fringe of U.S. politics. But the animating spirit remained, ready to be exhumed by future generations of conspiracists and political opportunists. Now, 70 years later, we are seeing another frightening revival. This time the alleged enemy is not Soviet communism but 'woke' ideology and DEI policies. In both cases, the primary targets have been the rank and file of the vast federal workforce, especially the seasoned lawyers, scientists, and policy experts who make and direct critical decisions affecting everyone in this country. As was the case with Condon, they have been accused, often without evidence, of being beholden to an anti-American ideology—Trump calls it 'illegal' and 'evil.' It is too early to say which moment of empowered anti-government hysteria will have the more lasting impact. During the Red Scare, thousands of workers saw their lives pulled apart by FBI investigations; hundreds lost their jobs and even went to prison. But the nation also came to its senses, and by the mid-1950s the Red Scare had effectively ended. Today, two generations later, thousands have already lost their jobs, though the courts have yet to determine how extensive those cuts can be. That the Trump administration was voted into office to enact a reactionary agenda just a few years after a series of heroic but invasive governmental interventions halted the deadly spread of COVID-19 is not a coincidence. Though hundreds of millions of lives were saved by the fast-tracked vaccine and lockdowns, the implementation of various protocols was swift, alarming, and, to many thousands of people, overzealous. School closures caused students to fall behind in school. Unemployment rates spiked. Conspiracy theories, especially about vaccines, spread like wildfire. In other words, the backlash created an ideal political climate for anti-intellectual extremists like Musk and Trump to take power. The real question is how it ends, if at all. The centrist establishment—not just in politics, but in the media, business, and civil society—is much weaker today than it was in the 1950s. Anti-government sentiment remains widespread and visceral. Anti-intellectualism and a hostility toward federal bureaucracy pervade every corner of the Trump administration. The chances of one, two, many Edward Condons to come remains a frightening possibility. Condon himself did live to see a reemergence of trust in the federal government, at least for a time. After leaving Corning, he went to teach at Washington University, then the University of Colorado. In the mid-1960s he was put in charge of a comprehensive review of UFO sightings, funded by the U.S. Air Force, a sure sign that the government no longer considered him a dangerous figure. In 1968 he authored the project's final report. 'Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,' he wrote—in other words, that these sightings were complete bunk. So were allegations of government cover-ups: 'What has been miscalled secrecy has been no more than an intelligent policy of delay in releasing data so that the public does not become confused by premature publication of incomplete studies of reports.' It was, finally, one conspiracy theory that Condon was able to bring to an end—at least for the time being.
