My Lai: 50 years after, American soldiers' shocking crimes must be remembered

Dead from the My Lai massacre. Peers Inquiry, v.3/Ron Haeberle

Sa Thi Quy was 43 years old on the morning of March 16, 1968, when Americans came to her hamlet near the coast of the South China Sea in what was then South Vietnam.

“The first time the Americans came, the children followed them. They gave the children sweets to eat. Then they smiled and left. We don’t know their language – they smiled and said OK and so we learned the word OK.”

“The second time they came, we poured them water to drink. They didn’t say anything.”
“The third time they killed everyone.”

The name of her hamlet was My Lai.

Dim memories of a horrific crime

If Americans remember that name at all, they most likely remember that something dark and awful happened there. They are probably fuzzy on the details. Maybe they remember some grainy color photographs of Vietnamese bodies piled in a ditch. Or a lieutenant named Calley.

But on this 50th anniversary of what happened in that Vietnamese hamlet, it is worth recalling the grotesque details, in the hope that doing so will help prevent a future My Lai.

It is still an unsettled question about what, exactly, the troops of the Americal Division were ordered to do and who, exactly, issued the orders. What is settled is that for four hours that morning, American young men went on a rampage of killing and rape.

When they finally broke for lunch, the Americans had butchered 504 Vietnamese old men, women, children and babies. No military-aged men were killed. Only one weapon belonging to the Vietnamese was found.

Sometimes, the soldiers shot Vietnamese one at a time. Sometimes they herded them into ditches and machine-gunned them down in groups.

Sometimes it seemed as if the Americans were making a sport out of it.

One soldier threw a wounded elderly man down a well then dropped a grenade in after him. A soldier bayoneted an old man to death.

Another soldier was armed with an M-79 grenade launcher. Other soldiers testified at Army hearings that the man was frustrated that he hadn’t been able to use his weapon, so he herded some women and children together, backed off and fired several explosive rounds into them. Other soldiers with pistols killed those who were only wounded.

In a better-disciplined outfit, the officers in the field would have stopped such violence.
But in this outfit, officers took part in the killing.

‘Blew her brains out’

According to testimony from his men, one company commander, Capt. Ernest Medina, shot and killed a wounded and helpless woman. Lt. William Calley grabbed one woman by the hair and blew her brains out with his .45-caliber pistol. Then he shot to death an infant she’d been carrying. In total, Calley is thought to have killed or ordered killed more than 100 civilians.

Lt. William S. Calley, shown on Nov. 21, 1969, with newsmen at Ft. Benning, Georgia, where he was charged with premeditated murder of approximately 100 Vietnamese civilians. AP

It is worth noting that the massacre may never have come to light if it weren’t for a soldier who was an aspiring journalist. Ronald Ridenhour served in the Americal Division in Vietnam at the time of the massacre but was not present at My Lai. Ridenhour got wind of it, interviewed men who had been there and wrote his findings in a letter to 30 members of Congress and the Pentagon.

As the story started to break – mostly due to the efforts of young investigative reporter Seymour Hersh – another soldier who had been in My Lai published the color photos that are the best documentation of the horror at My Lai.

I covered Vietnam for two years as a photojournalist and was in Vietnam when the My Lai story broke. I remember that I was stunned. I’d seen villages burned and Vietnamese pushed around, but nothing even approaching My Lai.

In the wake of all that bad publicity, the Army appointed a highly decorated and well regarded three-star general, Lt. Gen. William R. Peers, to investigate the cover-up. Over four months, he and his staff took sworn testimony from about 400 witnesses. The transcript runs to 20,000 pages.

Ten years ago a sharp producer in London, Celina Dunlop, found out that the testimony had been tape-recorded. I worked on a two-part BBC radio documentary about My Lai, using those tapes. It was the first time I’d heard the voices of the men who took part, describing what they had done and seen.

Their voices haunt me. I used voices to write a play about the massacre – called simply enough, “My Lai” – and in doing so, read all 20,000 pages of their testimony. No writer could do better than their simple, direct description of the horror they let loose on that village.

Heroes amid the carnage

There were really only three Americans who behaved heroically that day. Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson was flying a small scout helicopter with two crewmen, Glenn Andreotti and Lawrence Colburn. They witnessed the massacre from above. When they saw American troops advancing toward a group of old men, women and children, Thompson landed his helicopter between the soldiers and the civilians and ordered his crewmen to shoot the Americans if they opened fire on the civilians. He called other choppers to evacuate the civilians. For that, Thompson was shunned by fellow officers for years afterward.

What isn’t usually written about at My Lai are the rapes.

While the exact number may never be known, the Americans raped at least several dozen women and girls, some as young as 12. And then murdered and mutilated many of them.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nov. 20, 1969.

One soldier, Dennis Bunning of Raymond, California, testified that a sergeant “took one girl there, and drug her into a compartment, like in a hootch there, you know, and hootches don’t have doors or nothing, and you could see, and he raped one girl inside there. And then there was three other guys and one girl all at one time. … A guy would just grab one of the girls there and in one or two incidents they shot the girls when they got done.”

Pham Thi Tuan, who lived in My Lai, told a documentary filmmaker, “Over there a naked woman who had been raped and a virgin girl with her vagina slit open. We don’t know why they behaved liked that.”

‘Failure of leadership’

And that, finally, is the question that is most vexing.

How could American boys behave like that? How could they behave like Nazi and Japanese soldiers in World War II?

One excuse frequently offered is that the unit had been hard hit and was in some sort of shock. In fact, the unit had only been in Vietnam for three months and had never been in a firefight. Before My Lai, only five men from the unit had been killed, all by mines or snipers, at a time when Americans were losing 15-20 men per day.

Another excuse is that the men were subpar, draftees, the bottom of a rapidly emptying barrel. But that’s not true either, according to an Army investigation. By every measure – intelligence, education, physical fitness – they were typical of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who never engaged in such behavior.

In the end, Peers, who headed the investigation, concluded that the massacre was a failure of leadership, from the commanding general on down. He concluded that 28 officers and enlisted men had committed war crimes – murder and rape – or conspired to cover up the crimes.

But in the end, only 14 officers were charged. And only Calley was convicted. President Richard Nixon, bowing to public pressure from those who believed Calley was a scapegoat, commuted his life sentence. He spent three and half years confined, most of that time under house arrest.
Nixon wouldn’t even allow Peers to call it a massacre. The massacre became, instead, “a tragedy of major proportions.”

The darkest side of American exceptionalism is the belief that somehow we are more moral than others and that our troops would never slaughter innocents civilians. Americans need to understand that in every war in the history of humankind, soldiers commit hideous acts. Even our troops. It is inevitable.

Americans need to be prepared to share the moral responsibility for those crimes when we send our young men and women off to fight wars on our behalf.

This article has been updated to correct producer Celina Dunlop’s name and work title.
Robert Hodierne, Chair and Professor of Journalism, University of Richmond
This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Black holes aren't totally black, and other insights from Stephen Hawking's groundbreaking work

What goes in doesn’t go out? NASA Goddard, CC BY

Mathematical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking was best known for his work exploring the relationship between black holes and quantum physics. A black hole is the remnant of a dying supermassive star that’s fallen into itself; these remnants contract to such a small size that gravity is so strong even light cannot escape from them. Black holes loom large in the popular imagination – schoolchildren ponder why the whole universe doesn’t collapse into one. But Hawking’s careful theoretical work filled in some of the holes in physicists’ knowledge about black holes.

Why do black holes exist?

The short answer is: Because gravity exists, and the speed of light is not infinite.

Imagine you stand on Earth’s surface, and fire a bullet into the air at an angle. Your standard bullet will come back down, someplace farther away. Suppose you have a very powerful rifle. Then you may be able to shoot the bullet at such a speed that, rather than coming down far away, it will instead “miss” the Earth. Continually falling, and continually missing the surface, the bullet will actually be in an orbit around Earth. If your rifle is even stronger, the bullet may be so fast that it leaves Earth’s gravity altogether. This is essentially what happens when we send rockets to Mars, for example.

Now imagine that gravity is much, much stronger. No rifle could accelerate bullets enough to leave that planet, so instead you decide to shoot light. While photons (the particles of light) do not have mass, they are still influenced by gravity, bending their path just as a bullet’s trajectory is bent by gravity. Even the heaviest of planets won’t have gravity strong enough to bend the photon’s path enough to prevent it from escaping.

But black holes are not like planets or stars, they are the remnants of stars, packed into the smallest of spheres, say, just a few kilometers in radius. Imagine you could stand on the surface of a black hole, armed with your ray gun. You shoot upwards at an angle and notice that the light ray instead curves, comes down and misses the surface! Now the ray is in an “orbit” around the black hole, at a distance roughly what cosmologists call the Schwarzschild radius, the “point of no return.”

Thus, as not even light can escape from where you stand, the object you inhabit (if you could) would look completely black to someone looking at it from far away: a black hole.

Hawking worked to popularize his cosmological insights. AP Photo/Keystone, Salvatore Di Nolfi

But Hawking discovered that black holes aren’t completely black?

The short answer is: Yes.

My previous description of black holes used the language of classical physics – basically, Newton’s theory applied to light. But the laws of physics are actually more complicated because the universe is more complicated.

In classical physics, the word “vacuum” means the total and complete absence of any form of matter or radiation. But in quantum physics, the vacuum is much more interesting, in particular when it is near a black hole. Rather than being empty, the vacuum is teeming with particle-antiparticle pairs that are created fleetingly by the vacuum’s energy, but must annihilate each other shortly thereafter and return their energy to the vacuum.

You will find all kinds of particle-antiparticle pairs produced, but the heavier ones occur much more rarely. It’s easiest to produce photon pairs because they have no mass. The photons must always be produced in pairs so they’re moving away from each other and don’t violate the law of momentum conservation.

No light can be seen coming from a black hole outside the Schwarzschild radius. SubstituteR, CC BY-SA

Now imagine that a pair is created just at that distance from the center of the black hole where the “last light ray” is circulating: the Schwarzschild radius. This distance could be far from the surface or close, depending on how much mass the black hole has. And imagine that the photon pair is created so that one of the two is pointing inward – toward you, at the center of the black hole, holding your ray gun. The other photon is pointing outward. (By the way, you’d likely be crushed by gravity if you tried this maneuver, but let’s assume you’re superhuman.)

A pair of photons that annihilate each other is labeled A. In a second pair of photons, labeled B, one enters the black hole while the other heads outward, setting up an energy debt that is paid by the black hole. Christoph Adami, CC BY-ND

Now there’s a problem: The one photon that moved inside the black hole cannot come back out, because it’s already moving at the speed of light. The photon pair cannot annihilate each other again and pay back their energy to the vacuum that surrounds the black hole. But somebody must pay the piper and this will have to be the black hole itself. After it has welcomed the photon into its land of no return, the black hole must return some of its mass back to the universe: the exact same amount of mass as the energy the pair of photons “borrowed,” according to Einstein’s famous equality E=mc².

This is essentially what Hawking showed mathematically. The photon that is leaving the black hole horizon will make it look as if the black hole had a faint glow: the Hawking radiation named after him. At the same time he reasoned that if this happens a lot, for a long time, the black hole might lose so much mass that it could disappear altogether (or more precisely, become visible again).

Do black holes make information disappear forever?

Short answer: No, that would be against the law.

Many physicists began worrying about this question shortly after Hawking’s discovery of the glow. The concern is this: The fundamental laws of physics guarantee that every process that happens “forward in time,” can also happen “backwards in time.”

This seems counter to our intuition, where a melon that splattered on the floor would never magically reassemble itself. But what happens to big objects like melons is really dictated by the laws of statistics. For the melon to reassemble itself, many gazillions of atomic particles would have to do the same thing backwards, and the likelihood of that is essentially zero. But for a single particle this is no problem at all. So for atomic things, everything you observe forwards could just as likely occur backwards.

Now imagine that you shoot one of two photons into the black hole. They only differ by a marker that we can measure, but that does not affect the energy of the photon (this is called a “polarization”). Let’s call these “left photons” or “right photons.” After the left or right photon crosses the horizon, the black hole changes (it now has more energy), but it changes in the same way whether the left or right photon was absorbed.

Two different histories now have become one future, and such a future cannot be reversed: How would the laws of physics know which of the two pasts to choose? Left or right? That is the violation of time-reversal invariance. The law requires that every past must have exactly one future, and every future exactly one past.

Some physicists thought that maybe the Hawking radiation carries an imprint of left/right so as to give an outside observer a hint at what the past was, but no. The Hawking radiation comes from that flickering vacuum surrounding the black hole, and has nothing to do with what you throw in. All seems lost, but not so fast.

In 1917, Albert Einstein showed that matter (even the vacuum next to matter) actually does react to incoming stuff, in a very peculiar way. The vacuum next to that matter is “tickled” to produce a particle-antiparticle pair that looks like an exact copy of what just came in. In a very real sense, the incoming particle stimulates the matter to create a pair of copies of itself – actually a copy and an anti-copy. Remember, random pairs of particle and antiparticle are created in the vacuum all the time, but the tickled-pairs are not random at all: They look just like the tickler.

This copy process is known as the “stimulated emission” effect and is at the origin of all lasers. The Hawking glow of black holes, on the other hand, is just what Einstein called the “spontaneous emission” effect, taking place near a black hole.

Now imagine that the tickling creates this copy, so that the left photon tickles a left photon pair, and a right photon gives a right photon pair. Since one partner of the tickled pairs must stay outside the black hole (again from momentum conservation), that particle creates the “memory” that is needed so that information is preserved: One past has only one future, time can be reversed, and the laws of physics are safe.

In a cosmic accident, Hawking died on Einstein’s birthday, whose theory of light – it just so happens – saves Hawking’s theory of black holes.

Christoph Adami, Professor of Physics and Astronomy & Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University
This article was originally published on The Conversation.

What do we know about marijuana's medical benefits? Two experts explain the evidence

Currently 25 states and the District of Columbia have medical cannabis programs. On Nov. 8, Arkansas, Florida and North Dakota will vote on medical cannabis ballot initiatives, while Montana will vote on repealing limitations in its existing law.

We have no political position on cannabis legalization. We study the cannabis plant, also known as marijuana, and its related chemical compounds. Despite claims that cannabis or its extracts relieve all sorts of maladies, the research has been sparse and the results mixed. At the moment, we just don’t know enough about cannabis or its elements to judge how effective it is as a medicine.

What does the available research suggest about medical cannabis, and why do we know so little about it?

The jury is still out on marijuana’s medical benefits. Thomas Hawk/Flickr, CC BY-NC

What are researchers studying?

While some researchers are investigating smoked or vaporized cannabis most are looking at specific cannabis compounds, called cannabinoids.

From a research standpoint, cannabis is considered a “dirty” drug because it contains hundreds of compounds with poorly understood effects. That’s why researchers tend to focus on just one cannabinoid at a time. Only two plant-based cannabinoids, THC and cannabidiol, have been studied extensively, but there could be others with medical benefits that we don’t know about yet.

THC is the main active component of cannabis. It activates cannabinoid receptors in the brain, causing the “high” associated with cannabis, as well as in the liver, and other parts of the body. The only FDA-approved cannabinoids that doctors can legally prescribe are both lab produced drugs similar to THC. They are prescribed to increase appetite and prevent wasting caused by cancer or AIDS.

Cannabidiol (also called CBD), on the other hand, doesn’t interact with cannabinoid receptors. It doesn’t cause a high. Seventeen states have passed laws allowing access to CBD for people with certain medical conditions.

Our bodies also produce cannabinoids, called endocannabinoids. Researchers are creating new drugs that alter their function, to better understand how cannabinoid receptors work. The goal of these studies is to discover treatments that can use the body’s own cannabinoids to treat conditions such as chronic pain and epilepsy, instead of using cannabis itself.

Cannabis is promoted as a treatment for many medical conditions. We’ll take a look at two, chronic pain and epilepsy, to illustrate what we actually know about its medical benefits.

Is it a chronic pain treatment?

Research suggests that some people with chronic pain self-medicate with cannabis. However, there is limited human research on whether cannabis or cannabinoids effectively reduce chronic pain.

Research in people suggest that certain conditions, such as chronic pain caused by nerve injury, may respond to smoked or vaporized cannabis, as well as an FDA-approved THC drug. But, most of these studies rely on subjective self-reported pain ratings, a significant limitation. Only a few controlled clinical trials have been run, so we can’t yet conclude whether cannabis is an effective pain treatment.
An alternative research approach focuses on drug combination therapies, where an experimental cannabinoid drug is combined with an existing drug. For instance, a recent study in mice combined a low dose of a THC-like drug with an aspirin-like drug. The combination blocked nerve-related pain better than either drug alone.

In theory, the advantage to combination drug therapies is that less of each drug is needed, and side effects are reduced. In addition, some people may respond better to one drug ingredient than the other, so the drug combination may work for more people. Similar studies have not yet been run in people.

Well-designed epilepsy studies are badly needed

Despite some sensational news stories and widespread speculation on the internet, the use of cannabis to reduce epileptic seizures is supported more by research in rodents than in people.

In people the evidence is much less clear. There are many anecdotes and surveys about the positive effects of cannabis flowers or extracts for treating epilepsy. But these aren’t the same thing as well-controlled clinical trials, which can tell us which types of seizure, if any, respond positively to cannabinoids and give us stronger predictions about how most people respond.

While CBD has gained interest as a potential treatment for seizures in people, the physiological link between the two is unknown. As with chronic pain, the few clinical studies have been done included very few patients. Studies of larger groups of people can tell us whether only some patients respond positively to CBD.

We also need to know more about the cannabinoid receptors in the brain and body, what systems they regulate, and how they could be influenced by CBD. For instance, CBD may interact with anti-epileptic drugs in ways we are still learning about. It may also have different effects in a developing brain than in an adult brain. Caution is particularly urged when seeking to medicate children with CBD or cannabis products.

Cannabis research is hard

Well-designed studies are the most effective way for us to understand what medical benefits cannabis may have. But research on cannabis or cannabinoids is particularly difficult.

Cannabis and its related compounds, THC and CBD, are on Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, which is for drugs with “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse” and includes Ecstasy and heroin.

In order to study cannabis, a researcher must first request permission at the state and federal level. This is followed by a lengthy federal review process involving inspections to ensure high security and detailed record-keeping.

In our labs, even the very small amounts of cannabinoids we need to conduct research in mice are highly scrutinized. This regulatory burden discourages many researchers.

Designing studies can also be a challenge. Many are based on users’ memories of their symptoms and how much cannabis they use. Bias is a limitation of any study that includes self-reports. Furthermore, laboratory-based studies usually include only moderate to heavy users, who are likely to have formed some tolerance to marijuana’s effects and may not reflect the general population. These studies are also limited by using whole cannabis, which contains many cannabinoids, most of which are poorly understood.

Placebo trials can be a challenge because the euphoria associated with cannabis makes it easy to identify, especially at high THC doses. People know when they are high.

Another type of bias, called expectancy bias, is a particular issue with cannabis research. This is the idea that we tend to experience what we expect, based on our previous knowledge. For example, people report feeling more alert after drinking what they are told is regular coffee, even if it is actually decaffeinated. Similarly, research participants may report pain relief after ingesting cannabis, because they believe that cannabis relieves pain.

The best way to overcome expectancy effects is with a balanced placebo design, in which participants are told that they are taking a placebo or varying cannabis dose, regardless of what they actually receive.

Studies should also include objective, biological measures, such as blood levels of THC or CBD, or physiological and sensory measures routinely used in other areas of biomedical research. At the moment, few do this, prioritizing self-reported measures instead.

Cannabis isn’t without risks

Abuse potential is a concern with any drug that affects the brain, and cannabinoids are no exception. Cannabis is somewhat similar to tobacco, in that some people have great difficulty quitting. And like tobacco, cannabis is a natural product that has been selectively bred to have strong effects on the brain and is not without risk.

Although many cannabis users are able to stop using the drug without problem, 2-6 percent of users have difficulty quitting. Repeated use, despite the desire to decrease or stop using, is known as cannabis use disorder.

As more states more states pass medical cannabis or recreational cannabis laws, the number of people with some degree of cannabis use disorder is also likely to increase.

It is too soon to say for certain that the potential benefits of cannabis outweigh the risks. But with restrictions to cannabis (and cannabidiol) loosening at the state level, research is badly needed to get the facts in order.

Steven Kinsey, Assistant Professor of Psychology, West Virginia University and Divya Ramesh, Research Associate, University of Connecticut
This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Why is sarcasm so difficult to detect in texts and emails?

Because you’ve never seen it before, right? Heather, CC BY

This sentence begins the best article you will ever read.

Chances are you thought that last statement might be sarcasm. Sarcasm, as linguist Robert Gibbs noted, includes “words used to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning of a sentence.” A form of irony, it also tends to be directed toward a specific individual.

However, it’s not always easy to figure out if a writer is being sarcastic – particularly as we march ahead in a digital age that has transformed the way we communicate, with texting, emailing and online commentary replacing face-to-face chats or phone conversations.

In writing, the signal of sarcasm can be muddied. For example, say you’re texting with a friend about meeting at the movies:

Friend: I’m waiting at the front. Movie starts in 5.
You: I’m on my way now. Should be there in 10.
Friend: I’m glad you were watching the clock today.

Was the friend being sarcastic or sincere? The later you are, the more upset they’ll likely be, and the higher the probability their response is a sarcastic jab. But if your friend knows you’re usually much later, they could be sincere.

So there’s one thing to look for: How well does the attitude the writer is conveying agree with the situation and the person?

Nonetheless, the struggle to interpret written sarcasm is real.

Studies have shown that people realize that they have a tough time interpreting sarcasm in writing. Studying the use of email, researchers found writers who think they’re being obviously sarcastic still confuse readers.

Sarcasm thrives in ambiguous situations – and that’s the main issue.

When delivered in person, sarcasm tends to assume a cutting, bitter tone. But written messages don’t always get that attitude across or give you much else to go on. We still need more information.

Signals that go missing in texts

Studies have examined the use of sarcasm in a variety of everyday situations, whether it’s at work to give criticism or praise, or in situations where social norms get violated. (Be on time to movies, people!)

The problem is that a lot of previous studies of sarcasm have been done on spoken sarcasm, which tends to give listeners cues.

When you have a conversation with someone face-to-face (or FaceTime-to-FaceTime) and they say something sarcastic, you’ll see their facial expression, and they may look slightly bemused or tense. Equally or more helpful, the tone of their voice will likely change, too – they may sound more intense or draw out certain phrases.

You’ll also be firmly grounded in the real-time context of the situation, so when they say, “Man, nice job ironing your clothes,” you can look down – and see your wrinkled shirt.

All of these cues have been researched, and we know enough about them that we have the ability to artificially make a sincerely spoken statement sound sarcastic.

And yet when we text, a lot of that information goes missing.

There are no facial cues, no vocal tones and maybe even a delayed response if a person can’t text you back immediately. And if you don’t know the person all that well, there goes your last potential cue: history.

Emojis to the rescue?

So after what you thought was an unexceptional first date – exactly how do you interpret the following flurry of texts?

Date: I had a great time. (12:03 a.m.)
Date: That was the most fun I’ve had in years. (12:05 a.m.)
Date: Really, it could not have gone better. (12:30 a.m.)

Was the date really that good? Did they really seem like they had that much fun? Or are they just a jerk lamenting the wasted time? All valid questions. And the recipient could come to a lot of conclusions.

Fear not. The digital age has developed some ways to mitigate some of the tortuous ambiguity. You can probably include an emoji to make it clearer to a reader something was meant sarcastically.

Date: I had a great time. (12:03 a.m.)

Date: That was the most fun I’ve had in years. 😂 (12:05 a.m.)
Date: It really, could not have gone better. 😑 (12:30 a.m.)

Ambiguity reduced, and facial expression taken care of. Probably not headed for date #2.
If we’re talking about email, we also have modifications that that can be made to text. We can italicize or bold words to change the way that a reader interprets the message.

‘Oh great – salad with no dressing. My favorite!’ Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Lastly, social media platforms like Twitter have given writers even more tools to allow people to communicate their intent. A study that included sarcastic tweets found that tweeters who include the hashtag #sarcasm tend to use more interjections (wow!) and positive wording for negative situations in their sarcastic tweets.

Algorithms have actually been built to determine the presence of sarcasm and rudeness in tweets, user reviews and online conversations. The formulas were able to identify language that’s outright rude pretty easily. But in order to correctly detect sarcasm, researchers found that algorithms need both linguistic (language) and semantic (meaning) information built in.

In other words, sarcasm’s subtlety means that the algorithms require more specification in their coding – unless you #sarcasm, of course.

With so many options to choose from, it’s time to make sure that text you send at 2:30 a.m. really gets your point across 😉.
Sara Peters, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Newberry College
This article was originally published on The Conversation.