Chapter Content
Okay, so, chapter three... or, uh, actually, chapter fourteen, called Poplar Grove. It kicks off with a quote that, uh, well, it's a little strong: "THE PARENTS ARE OUTTA THEIR F—ING MIND.”
So, yeah, this is about a town, and to kind of introduce it, there's this real estate agent, right? "Richard"—though that's not his real name, whatever. He's showing someone around his hometown, on like, a sunny fall day. He's tall, super friendly, knows everyone, waves to people, points out houses, knows who lives there, what they do, how many kids they got... the whole nine yards. He's clearly proud of his town. Says it has everything you'd want, you know? "A feeling of safety and security," he says. "A feeling of good neighbors. A feeling of—I can count on others around me." You know, that kind of thing.
The downtown area sounds really cute, like something out of the 1950s. Lots of red brick churches everywhere. They drive past the community center, the library, and then head up into this neighborhood, which is near the water. "We are on the water here," Richard points out. He explains how the waterfront property is the most expensive, obviously, and then there are "water-privileged" neighborhoods.
The streets are narrow, lined with oak trees, kinda hilly. The houses are close together, making it feel, like, really cozy. Richard's saying that you're definitely gonna know your neighbors there. If someone calls him wanting a waterfront property with, like, acres of land and total privacy, he's like, "Dude, that's just not what we have to offer." He compares it to calling a BMW dealership and asking for a minivan!
The town also has this massive park, with tons of sports fields, jogging trails, even a petting zoo! It's got a golf club for families, little beaches, you know, places for boats and kayaks. Apparently, it used to be just a regular bedroom community, but recently it's become, like, super desirable. And you can guess what that means, right? Prices have gone through the roof.
Richard calls his typical client "working-class affluent," which is kind of a funny way to put it. He's talking about doctors, lawyers, professionals, "people that have jobs and make a lot of money," but not, you know, "blue bloods." He makes a point of saying it's not like Palm Beach, where everyone's, like, fourth-generation wealthy and doesn't even know what to do with their day. "Everyone here goes to work," he says.
And get this, everyone has a family! He claims "100 percent" of the people he sells houses to, who are new to the town, have kids. It's definitely a family town. He remembers selling a house recently to a guy who works in IT from home, and his wife is a music teacher. They left the city because of the, uh, "deplorable public school system" there, and wanted a "safe area" to raise their family and send their kids to public school. Purchase price? $750,000.
And the sellers? Did they leave the town? Nope! They just wanted a bigger house nearby. Why would they leave the *perfect* community? There are no condos or rentals, just single-family homes. Richard guesses that way over 90 percent of homeowners actually live in their homes. So, no rentals or "lower-end dwellings that attract any type of diversity." Which, he says, has made it a "very homogeneous place to live," which is probably why there's this "shared value system" of good grades, good sports, going to the best college possible. This... this sort of...
He pauses, like he's searching for the right words, because even though he loves his town, something about it makes him a little uneasy. He finally settles on "collegial feeling."
Anyway, the place is called Poplar Grove. Well, not really. That's just what the researchers call it. The sociologist Seth Abrutyn, one of the researchers, said that he hadn’t even heard of it, that it wasn't on his radar.
And that makes sense, because Poplar Grove isn't the kind of place that makes headlines. If you drove by on the highway, you probably wouldn't even stop. That’s the way the people in Poplar Grove want it. But you almost certainly know of a town like Poplar Grove, some place with that myth of small-town America feel. Everything is focused on the school and sporting events. You know all your neighbors. It just sounds idyllic. A great place to raise kids.
Abrutyn and his colleague, Anna Mueller, studied the town. They were assistant professors at the University of Memphis when they started. They found out about Poplar Grove by accident. Mueller was on Facebook and got into a conversation with someone, who told her to talk to her mom. The mom lived in Poplar Grove. Mueller was so struck by the conversation that she hopped on a plane. Then she went back with Abrutyn, and they just kept going back, more and more engrossed in what was happening there.
Mueller said it's just beautiful, like a scenic community with a really, really strong sense of itself. People are really proud to be from Poplar Grove. The high school is one of the best in the state. They win championships in every sport. The theater productions are spectacular.
There's another town nearby that they call Annesdale. Annesdale is also beautiful, but there are a lot of apartment buildings and a lot of Black and Hispanic people. The houses are cheaper, and the high school isn't top-ranked. One parent told Mueller and Abrutyn, "I wasn’t going to send my kid there. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, but Poplar Grove...is Poplar Grove." If your kids grew up in Poplar Grove, there was little chance they would go off the path, that whole get good grades, be active, be popular, work hard thing that everyone in those kinds of towns seem to want for their kids, and then, of course, come home to Poplar Grove, you know? Mueller and Abrutyn actually wrote a book on it, called "Life Under Pressure."
It’s kind of uncanny how Poplar Grovians could name their shared values. It was all "we." “When we think of Poplar Grove," one mother said, “We think of achievement, we speak of scholastic achievement, and we speak of sports achievement.”
One teenager named Shannon said that the neighborhood is very intimate and she says hi to everybody that she knows. She said that there is a big network of support. Another woman named Isabel said that she knew that if she got hurt she could go to any street, and she could get what she needed. It didn’t have to be her parents. She could just walk in and crying with a busted knee and they would help. She said that she loved that sense of community that they feel.
But social epidemics attach themselves to places, and the power of places comes from the stories that communities tell themselves. So if epidemics are influenced by these stories, then in what sense is the community responsible for the fevers and contagions that plague us? That's kind of the puzzle here.
Okay, so to illustrate the problem, we need to talk about zoos. Stay with me, it'll make sense, hopefully! A generation before the crisis in Poplar Grove, there was another crisis in the world of zoos. Seems totally unrelated, right? And the cheetah. This began in the 1970s. Zookeepers started trying to breed animals in captivity. Makes sense, right? Why capture animals in the wild? Conservation movement supported it.
The breeding programs were really successful with almost everything, except one animal: the cheetah. “They seldom had offspring that survived, and many of them when put together couldn’t breed,” one geneticist said.
It didn’t make sense, because the cheetah is the fastest animal on Earth.
The zookeepers wondered if they were doing something wrong, or whether there was something about the psychology of the cheetah that they didn’t understand. They came up with theories and tried experiments, but nothing worked. In the end, they just decided that the animals must be “skittish.”
Finally, one person asked if there was somebody who knew anything about science to explain to the cheetah program in South Africa why their breeding program was not as successful as other animals. Scientists raised their hands and went to South Africa and took blood and sperm samples from cheetahs. What they found astonished them. The sperm counts of the cheetahs were low, and the spermatozoa themselves were badly malformed. That was why they had such trouble breeding. It wasn’t that they were “skittish.”
After testing the blood samples, it turns out that the cheetah’s genes were all the same. “I never saw a species that was so genetically uniform,” one of the scientists said. He and his team kept going, and he actually learned how to do skin grafts at a burn unit at the Children’s Hospital and then he did grafts on about eight cheetahs in South Africa, and another six or eight in Oregon.
If you graft a piece of skin from one animal onto another, the recipient’s body will reject it. But if you take a patch of skin from identical twins it works, because the donor’s immune system thinks that the skin is its own. First, the team gave some of the cheetahs a skin graft from a domestic cat, just to make sure the animals had an immune system. Sure enough, the cheetahs rejected the cat graft. Then the team grafted skin from other cheetahs. What happened? Nothing! They were accepted “as if they were identical twins.”
He realized that the cheetah population must have at some point been devastated. His best guess was that it happened during the great mammal die-off 12,000 years ago, when the saber-toothed cats, mastodons, mammoths, and other species were wiped out. Somehow the cheetah survived, but just barely.
The only way for those cheetahs to survive was incest. Sisters had to mate with brothers, first cousins with first cousins.
So the species eventually rebounded, but only through the endless replication of the same narrow set of genes. The cheetah was still magnificent, but now every cheetah represented the exact same kind of magnificence.
The word used by biologists to describe an environment where individual differences have been sanded down and every organism follows the same path of development is monoculture.
A monoculture typically emerges only when something happens to upset the natural order. For instance, when a group of affluent parents comes together to create a community that perfectly reflects their commitment to achievement and excellence. The parents of Poplar Grove wanted a monoculture, at least until it dawned on them that a monoculture comes with a cost.
Epidemics love monocultures.
One of the first things that struck the sociologists was how all the students at Poplar Grove High School sounded the same. It felt like there was only one kind of conversation, all about achievement. It's all about APs, what team you're joining, you know, all that.
Now, the researchers were used to high-pressure upper-middle-class culture. But there was usually a gap between what the parents wanted for their kids, and what the kids wanted for themselves. In Poplar Grove, there was no gap. There aren’t many alternatives for kids to be different. And the pressure was coming from everywhere. It was coming from the school, from parents, and from the kids themselves.
This idea, that there aren’t many alternatives for kids to be different, is strange because high school has traditionally been a place where young people discover all the ways that they can be different. There were groups of kids who really liked school and groups who hate school, groups who were loud and disruptive, and groups who were studious and quiet. Teenagers try to figure out who they are, and having a school with a wide range of crowds gives them the best possible chance to find peers with whom they feel comfortable.
Poplar Grove had crowds as well, of course. But the point was that there was no space between the crowds. If you’re a Skater, you have to be a high-achieving Skater. If you’re a Nerd, you have to be a socially popular Nerd. If you’re a Punk, you have to be the Punk who gets into your first choice of college.
In one of the most fascinating parts of their research, the researchers tried to find kids who had rejected Poplar Grove’s norms. It wasn’t easy. One of their discoveries was a kid named Scott, who identified himself as a rebel. But he can’t shake off the very Poplar Grovian idea that if he fails a test, he’ll end up homeless. Another one was Molly, who embodied many of those ideals. She told them academics were “very important” and she was determined to work hard and get good grades. She played high school sports and became close with girls in the popular crowd. After graduation, she headed off to a great university.
This is what rebellion looks like in a monoculture: a slight deviation from the general path. That lack of “crowd diversity” is what allowed Poplar Grove to score so highly in the state high school rankings. It’s also what reassured parents. Your child might be an outsider, but at least they will be a high-achieving outsider.
But what you give up in a world of uniformity is resilience. A monoculture offers no internal defenses against an outside threat. Once the infection is inside the walls, there is nothing to stop it.
The real estate agent knew this. That's why he chose to live in the neighboring town. It was more "real world" and there wasn't as much pressure. He said that the town is notorious for this high pressure to be extraordinary. Be the best in the band. Be the best basketball player. You’ve got to go to MIT. You’ve got to be the best.
He was talking about the same thing that the researchers had settled on: the pressure. He said that he hears it. And when he goes out on appointments, people say that it's a little too much pressure. His kid isn’t fitting in. And it’s well-known.
So, he knew the principal of the high school, and he said that she tells him, “The parents are outta their f—ing mind.”
In 1982, a few months before Stephen O’Brien began conducting his skin-graft experiments at the Wildlife Safari in Oregon, the Safari decided to add to its cheetah collection. One of the vets remembers driving down to Sacramento and picking up a couple of cheetahs. They seemed healthy enough.
She loved cheetahs and even raised two cheetah cubs herself, after their mother abandoned them.
But two months later, one of the cheetahs collapsed. They rushed him up to the clinic and found that he had renal failure.
But then, she noticed that other cheetahs in their colony were getting sick. They started having all kinds of nonspecific issues with diarrhea and weird gum disease. The cats became lethargic and started to lose weight. It turns out that they had Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP), which is a coronavirus. It’s rarely fatal in domestic cats. But for the cheetahs, it was devastating. The two California cats had started a mini-epidemic.
Animals started dying. The animals could not get rid of the virus.
Their immune system is trying and trying and trying to thwart it by creating antibodies and their antibody levels end up just rising to super-high level.
The disease manifestation in domestic cats might only present with a few symptoms, but the cheetahs had all of them.
It was all happening because the cheetahs were all the same. By sheer genetic chance, that lone pregnant female at the end of the Pleistocene Era happened to be a cheetah susceptible to feline coronavirus. An epidemic can’t wipe out an entire cheetah population in the wild, because cheetahs practice social distancing, but humans changed that. They brought large numbers of cheetahs together to live in enclosed spaces.
Then, she realized that there had been an outbreak in Canada somewhere, and that the zoo completely put a lid on it, and nobody was talking about it at all.
She and O’Brien went to a zoo meeting in Florida, and she decided to speak up. Afterward, a veterinarian from a zoo in California came up to her and said, “My boss is in Oregon right now picking up a cheetah.”
She warned her director that he should not bring home a cheetah from Wildlife Safari. When she got home, she was told she needed to find another job.
In Poplar Grove, the epidemic started when a young woman named Alice jumped off a bridge. Alice was the ideal Poplar Grove teen.
Her suicide attempt was shocking, and like all shocking events in tight-knit communities, it was much discussed. Why would a girl who seemed to have it all, who showed few signs of struggle, try to end her life?
Six months later, a classmate and teammate of Alice’s, a girl named Zoe, jumped from the same bridge. She did not survive. The community now had three attempts and two deaths. Then came two more suicides within a space of three weeks. Then a girl named Kate, who had been close to those two boys, jumped off the same bridge as Alice and Zoe. Less than a year after Kate’s death, another larger cluster emerged, and from that point on, at least one Poplar Grove youth or young adult died by suicide every year. Some years, the community weathered multiple suicide deaths. In the decade between 2005 and 2016, Poplar Grove High School lost four adolescent girls to suicide, two middle school students, and at least twelve recent graduates.
Statistically, a “normal” suicide rate would be one or two deaths every ten years. Poplar Grove was miles beyond that. Kids moved to Poplar Grove because they thought it was safe, but that’s why the suicide epidemic was so surprising.
It had become normalized.
“In at least three of the four clusters, there was a high-status student that was very visible, who very much embodied the ideal of Poplar Grove’s youth,” one of the sociologists said. “A lot of the youth who had died by suicide seemed like they were perfect, and then were just gone. So it was sort of like, ‘Well, if they can’t survive in this context, how can I?’”
One of the vets left Oregon to take up the cause of the Florida panther, because barely any panthers were left in Florida, and the state wanted to find a way to rebuild the population. They found the stress of trying to capture these panthers was just through the roof because they were so precious. They had to figure out how much drug to give the cat so she wouldn’t fall out of the tree, but she had to be groggy enough that she wouldn’t kill the climber.
What became obvious really early on is, these animals were ancient. There were no young. There were no cubs. The females were on the verge of reproductive senescence. The team soon realized, the panther had gone through not one bottleneck, like the cheetah, but multiple bottlenecks. The panther had no genetic diversity whatsoever.
They had males with no testicles and heart defects. Biologically, they’d just hit the wall, and it was the extinction happening in front of her eyes.
In 1992, everyone involved in the fight to save the Florida panther gathered at an old plantation house on the Georgia border. The conservation advocates argued for bringing in fresh blood and why not bring cougars to Florida.
In the end, eight female cougars would be shipped in from Texas and let loose in the Big Cypress Swamp. They grew stronger. The offspring of a Texas mother and a Florida father moved into an area occupied by only one other panther, and “He was outrageously fertile.”
The guy who trained the dogs said he noticed that the panthers that were intercrosses or hybrids were bigger and stronger. He said they looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The panther was saved, but in order to be saved, it had to become something else, a hybrid of Texas and Florida.
The monoculture of Poplar Grove was the creation of the parents of Poplar Grove. They could have sent their children to school in Annesdale, but they wanted a school where every student was in perfect alignment. If the Poplar Grove monoculture were broken up, the new version of Poplar Grove High would almost certainly not measure up to the old version.
Epidemics love monocultures, but so do we. Sometimes we create them, even though in doing so we put our own children at risk.
Iatrogenic epidemics have a cause and a culprit. Poplar Grove was iatrogenesis.
The researchers believed they had figured out why the epidemic was happening, but they couldn’t stop it. It’s just heartbreaking to see the pattern repeat itself. They went to schools, and they saw parents saying that they want increasing mental health to be important, but they want school resources for AP tests or more extracurriculars.
The school continued to emphasize achievement above all else. The principal’s message says that all students can and will learn and that it will provide a positive and challenging environment where all students will achieve academic, social, emotional and physical success. The principal also says that the school's teachers are “talented and hardworking.”
And that’s the message from one of the elementary schools! The monoculture starts early in Poplar Grove.