Good morning. President Biden's approach to his own stutter highlights the stigma that the condition still brings. |
 | | John Hendrickson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, in a Times video about stuttering. |
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About three million Americans — or almost 1 percent of the population — speak with a stutter. |
For some adults, the stutter is fairly mild and has receded since childhood; President Biden falls into this category. For others, the stutter remains severe; John Hendrickson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, is part of this group. |
Over the past few years, Hendrickson has been on something of a mission to educate people about the condition. The role does not come easily to him. He is a journalist, not an activist. Last week, on the night before The Times's Opinion section published a video about him, he told me he was feeling nervous about the response it would receive. |
The video is excellent, and I hope you can find the eight minutes to watch it. I also want to devote today's newsletter to some of the main points from Hendrickson's recent work. |
Stuttering is one of many disabilities that Americans once treated with disdain. But the disability-rights movement, which took off in the 1970s and '80s and more recently includes activists like Alice Wong, has helped change attitudes toward human diversity. Of course, not everything has changed. |
Discrimination against disabled people — sometimes unthinking, other times deliberate — remains common. For stutterers, it can take the form of assumptions that the condition stems from anxiety or intellectual weakness. It is neither. It is a genetically influenced neurological condition. |
 | | President Biden is one of about three million Americans who speak with a stutter.Amr Alfiky/The New York Times |
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If anything, this country may have made less progress accepting stuttering than some other conditions. In movies and television shows, characters who stutter are less likely to be the subject of mockery or fear than they once were. Today, though, stutterers are vanishingly rare in popular culture, almost as if they did not exist. |
I think Biden is another example of the stigma that stuttering can still bring. He has spoken openly about his struggle with it as a child, including in an Atlantic article by Hendrickson that changed how I think about Biden's speech patterns. But Biden treats it as something from the past that he has overcome. He does not identify himself as somebody who stutters, despite the evidence that he does. |
As Hendrickson wrote, "Whenever I asked Biden about what appeared to be his present-day stuttering, the notably verbose candidate became clipped, or said he didn't remember, or spun off to somewhere new." |
Biden seems to fear, perhaps correctly, that voters might view him as weak if he acknowledged his stuttering. As it is, his critics and political opponents mock his speaking style and claim it's a sign of his cluelessness or age. In truth, many of his tics — the blinks, repeated words and partial sentences — appear to be strategies for managing his stutter, as Hendrickson has written. |
How can non-stutterers be helpful? I asked Hendrickson that question, and I'll turn over the rest of this item to him: |
One of the hardest things about stuttering is that it's invisible until the moment it happens. Most people who stutter go to great lengths to hide their uneven speech patterns, from constant word switching to not talking at all, because we're taught at such a young age that 'fluency,' or smooth speech, is the key to success. As a kid, every time you stutter, you feel like you're letting people down. Then you're trapped in this vicious feedback loop of avoidance, shame, and low self esteem. Those feelings breed anxiety, which can make your stutter more pronounced, which can make you want to talk even less. We have to start breaking that toxic pattern during childhood. Both stutterers and non-stutterers are constantly trying to run from momentary discomfort, and what we lose is long-term acceptance. I hid from my disorder for decades, and it's still very new for me to openly stutter; I'm still trying to figure the whole thing out. I've spent the last several years working on a book about living with a stutter and I've been researching the latest science and speech therapy methods. I'm not at some perfectly Zen place with my stutter and not sure if I'll ever be. There are still situations I avoid because I'm still fighting my own shame. But I believe people are inherently good and mean well and we all just need to practice more patience. You may think you're helping a stutterer by finishing their sentence, but, from our perspective, it's infantilizing. Just know that stutterers are tough. We don't need hand-holding, or pity, or a little pat on the head when we finish speaking. Engage with us like you would any other person, look us in the eye, and approach the conversation knowing it may take a little longer, but we can still have a meaningful and substantive interaction. |
 | | Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump's Florida residence, was searched by the F.B.I. this month.Josh Ritchie for The New York Times |
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 | | New focus on the moon should provide scientists with a bonanza of data.NASA |
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Lives Lived: Jaimie Branch, an innovative jazz trumpet player and composer with punk-rock intensity and a relentless commitment to experimentation, died last week at 39. |
| SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC |
A new card is king: A 1952 Mickey Mantle trading card sold for a record $12.6 million, shattering previous records set by the T206 Honus Wagner card. The pair are considered to be the holy grails of baseball card collecting. |
How did the Buffalo Bills get here? The N.F.L. team cut punter Matt Araiza on Saturday, two days after he was accused in a civil lawsuit of gang-raping a 17-year-old high school student last year. But questions remain about how much one of the league's best front offices knew and why things got to this point. |
A fitting victory: Rory McIlroy wrapped up a tumultuous PGA Tour season with an epic comeback victory to win a record third FedEx Cup title. McIlroy, the face of the fight against LIV Golf, used his platform to sing the Tour's praises. |
 | | The Nike dress Serena Williams will wear today has a six-layer skirt, one for each of her U.S. Open titles.via Nike |
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Serena Williams begins her final U.S. Open tonight. Her impact was large: She dominated on the court and was called out inequality and sexism in sports. She was also a fashion icon. |
Williams understood the power of image, and her wardrobe was "as carefully honed and considered a part of her long game as any serve or forehand," writes Vanessa Friedman, The Times's fashion critic. It began when she and her sister Venus took to the court in their beads and braids, and continued through denim and studs, snakeskin and mesh, and a black catsuit at the 2018 French Open. "She smashed barriers of race, age and background," Vanessa writes, "and she smashed the old dress codes of tennis." |
 | | David Malosh for The New York Times |
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 | | NYT |
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The pangrams from yesterday's Spelling Bee were alphabet and phablet. Here is today's puzzle. |
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David |
P.S. Azmat Khan, whose reporting as a contributing writer for The Times about the civilian toll of U.S. airstrikes spurred reform, is joining the staff. |
"The Daily" is about an investigation into Trump's election interference. |
Matthew Cullen, Natasha Frost, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. |
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