Top 6 How To Lose A Tail The 139 Top Answers

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As you’re walking, stop and turn around 180 degrees and start walking towards the person you suspect is following you (only do this in a public and crowded space). If your suspected stalker also flips around and starts walking behind you again, you can confirm that you’re being tailed.The difference that is required for you to be the same. To become part of something beyond ourselves—the words to our letters—we must lose our tails.

How do u lose a tail?

How do you know if you’re being tailed?

As you’re walking, stop and turn around 180 degrees and start walking towards the person you suspect is following you (only do this in a public and crowded space). If your suspected stalker also flips around and starts walking behind you again, you can confirm that you’re being tailed.

What does it mean to lose your tail?

The difference that is required for you to be the same. To become part of something beyond ourselves—the words to our letters—we must lose our tails.

What to do if someone is chasing you in a car?

Can a human have a tail?

Human tails are a rare entity. The birth of a baby with a tail can cause tremendous psychological disturbance to the parents. They are usually classified as true and pseudo tails. [1] Tails are usually associated with occult spinal dysraphism.

Why do humans lose their tail?

The discovery suggests our ancestors lost their tails suddenly, rather than gradually, which aligns with what scientists have found in the fossil record. The study authors posit that the mutation randomly might have cropped up in a single ape around 20 million years ago, and was passed on to offspring.

What to do when someone is tailing you?

How do you get someone to stop following you in real life?

To remove one of your followers, fire up the Instagram app and head to your own profile. Tap on Followers to see everyone who is following you. Beside the Follow button there should be three little dots. Tap on that, then Remove to disallow that user from following you.

How do I stop being followed?

Can a lizard survive without a tail?

It is quite common to mistake a lizard that has just lost its tail for dead! While unfortunately the lizard is now tail-less, it isn’t dying, far from it actually. It is very much still alive. Lizards utilize caudal autotomy (tail dropping) as a survival strategy for predatory response!

Do lizards tails fall off when scared?

Lizards drop their tails as a defense mechanism when they feel threatened by a predator. The loss of the tail is intended to distract and confuse the predator, which in turn allows the lizard to escape the threat. Quite a few different lizard species are capable of caudal autotomy.

What is on your tail?

COMMON If someone is on your tail, they are following you closely or are chasing you and trying to catch you. He entered the finishing lap of the race with Piper right on his tail. He heard the wail of police sirens, loud and close by.

What to do if a car follows you home?

What do I do if someone follows my car Reddit?

TL;DR – DO NOT GO HOME IF YOU ARE BEING FOLLOWED – even if you think you are. Instead, continue driving and call the police immediately. Try to gather as much description as possible and do not attempt to confront the other person.

Can a mouse live without a tail?

Can a Mouse or Rat Survive Without a Tail? Without a tail, a rodent can survive, but it becomes more vulnerable to predators and less capable of climbing and traveling quickly. A tailless rat cannot regulate its body temperature effectively and is more vulnerable to infections and disease.

Can a rat live without a tail?

A rat without a tail will not survive long in the wild because it will become easily susceptible to predators due to its lack of balance. A rat may be able to live without a tail, but it will be prone to accidents. This is due to the lack of proper balance.

Do mouse tails fall off?

Can a mouse tail fall off? The skin of a mouse’s tail is extremely delicate and can easily come off or fall when pulled with little pressure. The tail can fall off either when you grab and pull it towards you or when you grab the mouse’s tail and the mouse pulls away in the other direction.

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Anti-surveillance techniques

Anti-surveillance techniques

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How to Lose a Tail! | Cartrack

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Being Followed? Here’s How to Lose a Tail – Gear Patrol

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What to Do If You’re Being Followed | The Art of Manliness

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Lose Your Tail – American Academy

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  The 2018 commencement speech to graduates of Bard College Berlin
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The Deuter Institute

World Literature

The Names

Left Alone

Fulfillment The Rise of the Hyper-Prosperous City

In the Red

The Startup Illusion

Capitularies

Kreuzberg 10963

Empathic Wit

Secular Sacred Groves

Little White Overcoats

Life Without Authority

Germany and the USA between Volk and Bevölkerung

Beat Knowledge

The Great Departure Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World

Impossible Proximity

The First Drag Queen

Pandemic Nostalgia

The Subject Shouldn’t Change

Truckstops on the Information Superhighway

Race to the Top

Good Soldiers

Red Famine Stalin’s War on Ukraine

Bigger Profits Slower Growth

The Laws of War

Revitalizing Public Discourse

Out of This World

No Refuge

Fresh Air

Someone’s Daughter

Democratic Degeneration Three Easy Paths to Regression

The Young Man Who Sells Antiques

The Flattening Kurve

To Stop the War

RIP The Postwar Order (1945-2017)

Berlin for Jews

The Mythology of the Sectarian Middle East

Ruination and Reconstruction

Remembering the Airlift

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How to lose a tail | Nature

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How to Lose a Tail!

Losing a tail.

Driving home is one of the small things in life that can make you happy but in your bliss be vigilant of suspicious cars. You never know who’s spotted you!

Be careful when you’re out and about.

A worrying trend is that criminals will sit at malls and wait for their ‘target’ usually a person by themselves, with shopping goods. These ‘markers’ give them the belief that you are wealthy and an easy target. They will even follow you home and not make a move but rather start canvassing the area as well as you, for as long as two weeks.

Tips and advice on how to lose a tail

If you spot a suspicious car following you, make a few turns that you normally wouldn’t and see if they still follow you. If they are, pick up your phone and call the nearest police station, describe the vehicle, your situation and whereabouts, and head straight there! Here is some other important things to remember in this situation.

1. Do not drive fast or recklessly, this will alert your followers. They probably have better driving skills than you, are used to this sort of drama and most importantly have weapons!

2. Do not attempt to make contact with them. Do not look at them directly, if you give any reason for these guys to feel threatened, they will react.

3. When rounding a blind corner, and is safe to do so, accelerate quickly and try open a gap between you and the followers.

4. When you get to the police station and if they’re still tailing you, make as much noise as possible to get the attention of any police officers. Scream, shout, blow your hooter, if a quick getaway is required, turn the ignition off and run inside.

5. Unfortunately a terrifying trend has appeared, where carjackers are dressing as policeman and pulling over unsuspecting victims. In this situation if you feel that these officers are not the real deal do not stop, drive straight to the nearest police station.

Be safe out there!

What to Do If You’re Being Followed

With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Friday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in October 2017.

You arrive at your favorite coffee shop in the ‘burbs and notice a guy in a green baseball cap standing behind you. You give him a friendly nod and go back to looking at the menu.

While you’re taking a bite from your Arby’s roast beef sandwich during your lunch break downtown, you notice that same guy in the green ball cap at a table outside. “Huh. Small world. What a coincidence,” you think to yourself.

Work is over, and you roll up to the gym to get your sweat on. While you’re walking to the entrance, you glance over and see Mr. Green Baseball Hat sitting in a car in the parking lot.

You get the sinking feeling that this third spotting isn’t a coincidence and that maybe this guy is following you.

What do you do?

Why Would Someone Follow You?

Unless you’re a criminal or suspect in some crime, you probably think you don’t have to worry about being followed.

But even if you’re a law-abiding citizen, there’s a chance you could be followed at some point in your life by people who’d like to do you harm: an angry employee that you had to fire; a crazy ex; friends and family of said crazy ex; an unstable person you unintentionally offended at church; a weirdo you met once at a party who is now obsessed with you; the guy you accidentally cut off in traffic three miles back; a thief who’s decided you’re a good mark. The list goes on.

There’s also a chance you might be followed by a private investigator due to a divorce, custody battle, or other litigation you’re involved in. If that’s the case, you want to provide as little information to the PI as possible to avoid inadvertently giving your legal opponent fodder that somehow helps their case.

The chances of these kinds of people following you are slim. But if you do find yourself in this situation, it’s good to have a plan on what to do.

An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure: How to Be Less Followable

If you don’t want someone following you, the best thing to do is to make yourself less “followable” in the first place. Stalkers, PIs, or people who want to do you harm count on the fact that you have a set routine that they can easily follow along with. You subtract that advantage, and make yourself less of an easy target, by making your schedule less predictable. If you can, mix up how you get to work throughout the week. Don’t go to the same places on the same days and at the same times.

Also, don’t broadcast your whereabouts on social media. Turn off location services that indicate where you’re posting from. Would-be stalkers will check this info so they can pinpoint your movements.

How Do You Know If Someone is Following You?

You’d be surprised how easy it is to tail someone without them knowing, as most people aren’t paying attention to their surroundings. So the first step to figuring out if you’re being followed is to start keying in on what’s going on around you. Maintain situational awareness while you’re out and about and establish baselines. What’s normal for the situation or environment you’re in?

Once you’ve established baselines, pay attention to possible anomalies. Is someone looking at you more than is normal and making an unusual amount of eye contact? Does a car you don’t recognize keep driving by your house? Has someone been showing up to your favorite coffee shop who doesn’t fit the typical crowd? These are anomalies and should put you on the alert that someone might be following you.

One anomaly to register is seeing the same person, in three different places. Ex-CIA officer Jason Hanson gives this rule of thumb used in the intelligence community:

One time=an accident

Two times=a coincidence

Three times=enemy action

In addition to noting anomalies, pay attention to your gut feelings. You’ll often intuitively know when something is wrong.

Then, if you experience those uncomfortable feelings, try to confirm them. How you do so will differ as to whether you’re in a car or on foot.

In a Car

If you suspect someone is tailing you in a car, you can confirm it by doing the following:

1. If you’re on city streets, make four right turns. If the car is still behind you after the fourth turn, they’re probably following you. Most people don’t travel in circles around city blocks.

2. If you’re on the freeway, get off and then immediately get back on. If you can still see the car in your review mirror, you’re probably being followed. Just as most people don’t travel in circles on city streets, most people don’t get off and then right back on a freeway.

You can also get over to the right lane of the highway, and slow down to 15 miles or so below the speed limit. All the cars behind you will soon pass by. If the one you’ve had your eye on doesn’t, it’s almost assuredly following you.

On Foot

1. Mix up your routine. If you’ve got a daily routine, you likely see the same people at the same time at the same places. For example, if you go to the gym every day at 6 PM, you’re probably going to see the same people there. Thus, it’s hard to tell if someone you always see some place is following you, or just has a similar routine to yours.

So if you suspect someone has been following you, you can further confirm it by mixing up your routine. Instead of going to the coffee shop at 7 AM like you usually do, go to a convenience store. If you see your potential pursuant at the convenience store too, there’s a good chance they’re following you. You can increase your certainty of being followed by going to different places at different times. If you see the same person no matter the time and no matter the place, you can be pretty sure they’re following you.

2. Mix up your walking pace. If someone is tracking you, he’ll likely match your walking pace. If you speed up, he’ll speed up. If you slow down, he’ll slow down. If you pause, he’ll pause. So mix up your pace and observe how your suspected stalker responds. If he matches your pace, there’s a good chance he’s following you.

3. Pause and turn. Hanson suggests this effective tactic for determining if someone is following you:

While you are walking, simply pause, turn around, and pretend to do something — like check your phone, tie a shoe, or turn around as if you were looking for someone. Then look directly at the person you think is following you. Your typical amateur who is following you is going to get flustered and give herself away. She’s likely to freeze or act unnatural because you have caught her by surprise. In other words, someone who is following you will not exhibit the same natural behavior as someone who is simply walking down the street.

4. Change direction. As you’re walking, stop and turn around 180 degrees and start walking towards the person you suspect is following you (only do this in a public and crowded space). If your suspected stalker also flips around and starts walking behind you again, you can confirm that you’re being tailed.

What to Do If Someone Is Following You

So you’ve confirmed that you’re being followed. Now what? If possible, you want to avoid a confrontation, which all self-defense experts agree is better than needlessly getting into a violent encounter.

To do this, follow these two general rules, as well as guidelines that pertain specifically to whether you’re driving or on foot.

Rule #1: Don’t go home. Whether you’re walking or driving, don’t go to your house. It’s natural to want to get home and lock the doors, but if your tail doesn’t know where you live, you don’t want to reveal that information by taking him there.

Rule #2: Stay in public, well-lit, and well-populated areas. Don’t go anywhere that will put you by yourself with your pursuant. If you’re in your car, stay on main roads that are well-lit and don’t go down country roads or secluded streets. If you’re on foot, stay in public areas where there are lots of people. You don’t want to go down isolated alleyways where you can be cornered. If someone seems to be following you in a store, you also don’t want to go out to your car; the stalker could ambush you in the parking lot or follow you home.

In a Car

Gather info. If you’ve confirmed you’re being followed in your car, start getting information on the tailing vehicle to potentially look into yourself or pass along to the police. Get the vehicle’s make and model. And if you can score the license plate number, even better.

Call the police. If you feel threatened, call the police to let them know what’s going on. Or simply drive to your local police precinct, and tell them you believe you’re being followed. Give an officer the information on the car that’s following you and let them take it from there.

Use well-trafficked roads with lots of stoplights and stop signs. Your pursuant might get stuck at a light or behind more traffic, giving you the chance to shake him off.

Be ready for evasive maneuvering. While on the roads and at stoplights, maintain enough distance between you and the car in front of you that you can make an escape maneuver if needed. If you can see the tires of the car in front of you, you’re good.

Only return home once you feel sure you’re no longer being followed by your tail.

On Foot

Call the police. If you believe you’re being followed on foot by someone with ill intentions, call the police and give them a description of your pursuant. Keep the police on the phone for as long as possible. If your pursuant is nearby, talk loudly so he or she can hear what you’re saying. If there’s a police precinct nearby, go to it.

Use public transportation to shake your tail. If you know the public transportation departure times, you can hop on a bus or subway at the very last minute to lose whoever’s following you.

Acknowledge your follower. One tactic Hanson recommends using in public areas is to simply let your follower know that you know they’re following you. Turn around and look right at them. If you’re feeling brave, ask “Can I help you?” Or “What do you want?”

Most bad guys are criminals of opportunity. They’ll only go after you if they think you’re a “soft target” — that they have some sort of tactical advantage over you. Following you without you knowing is one such advantage. By acknowledging their presence, you take it away. Once they realize you’re alert to their tail and they’ve been spotted, they’ll often get flustered and immediately disengage. You’d be surprised how often a show of assertiveness will cause a would-be criminal to back down (at least if their behavior is of the social aggression rather than asocial type; if the latter, you should be prepared to fight back).

Again, you generally only want to use this tactic if you’re in a well-lit and well-populated area, in case the stalker advances instead of retreats. You want witnesses.

But What If I’m On the Lam, Jason Bourne Style?

If for some reason you find yourself in an international, high-stakes espionage manhunt like Jason Bourne, the tactics above aren’t going to work. In fact, you’re pretty much hosed. First, it’s going to be very difficult to even determine that you’re being followed. Highly skilled, professional trackers will use teams of people to co-ordinate surveillance on you. Instead of a single person following you everywhere you go, they’ll throw you off by having one person follow you in one area and another person follow you when you arrive somewhere else. They can even swap those people out to avoid you getting suspicious.

Even if you do figure out you’re being followed, because professional investigators work as a team, it’s hard to shake them. You might be able to delay their finding you, but they’ll almost assuredly get you in the end.

Long story short: try not to get into a Jason Bourne-style manhunt.

But if you’re being pursued by a more garden-variety stalker, the tips above will help.

Tags: Self-Defense & Fighting

Lose Your Tail

The following is the commencement speech delivered by American Academy fellow Josh Kun to Bard College Berlin’s graduating class of 2018.

What an honor to be here with you all, to be entrusted with offering words in connection with your commencement. I won’t lie, I’m nervous. It’s high pressure. Not just because this is such a special occasion, and that I think of commencement speakers as vaunted figures who are really wise and know how to impart that wisdom with uplifting aphorisms, but I am nervous because you are ending this important time in your lives and are on the brink of a commencement: a beginning, an opening-up into something new, a new identity, a new daily schedule with no classes, a new job, a new city, a new country, or for those lucky enough who want to be lucky enough, a return to a home, but a home that will inevitably feel new.

When the first commencement ceremonies began in universities and colleges, in the 1800s, commencement was chosen as a term because of this original etymological root in beginning—commencements were the ceremonies that marked the day that students “begin to be”—the day you are “made” as a Bachelor or a Master or the like. Today you begin to be this new you. Today you are made, made anew.

You are forever changed today.

But today is not over yet, the commencement is still commencing, you are not there yet—this is a threshold day, a liminal day, a transition day. You are standing at what the poet Stanley Plumley once called an “abrupt edge,” a term he borrows from ornithologists:

The border between two zones of vegetation…The advantage of the edge is that it allows the bird to live in two worlds at once, and the more abrupt the more intense the advantage. From a position of height or secrecy, the bird can spy for danger or prey; it can come and go quickly, like a thief. Here the vegetation is more varied, the shade and cover thicker; the insect life rising, the tanager can sweep down from its treetop, the thrush can fly out from the gloom, and the redwing can sit on the fence post all day in the summer sun. The edge is a concept of a doorway, shadow and light, inside and outside, room and world’s room, where the density and variety of the plants that love the sun and the open air yield to the darker, greener, cooler interior world, at the margin. It is no surprise, then, that the greatest number of species as well as individuals live at the edge and fly the pathways and corridors and trails at the joining of the juxtaposition. That is where the richness is, the thick, deep vegetable life—a wall of life, where the trees turn to meadows, the meadows to columnar, watchtower trees. A man of sense, coming to a clearing, a great open space, will always wait among the trees, in the doorway until the coast is clear.

Now, you are all people of great sense, and you have come to a clearing, a great open space. I urge you to wait among the trees. Stand in the doorway whenever you can. Take in the thickness, the richness of this deep vegetable life of the threshold, where your room meets the room of the world.

I came to Berlin in January at my own threshold, my own commencement, my own beginning to be—a new book, a new city, a new language. I came to a new country I never thought I would spend time in, a country where my great uncle and aunt met in a displaced persons camp after World War II, after surviving the death camp of Auschwitz. I came to Berlin with my wife, who has lived most of her life in Tijuana, Mexico, blocks from the border wall that when we first met, in the 1990s, had graffiti on it that read, “If the Berlin Wall could fall, why not this one?” Still a good question. Just two weeks ago, members of the Central American caravana migrante finished their journey north, right there where that graffiti once was. Migrants gathered against the steel pillars, and one young man climbed on top to sit on the wall long enough to get his picture taken but not long enough to be detained.

I also came to Berlin with our six-year-old daughter, who has inherited this mix of histories, this mix of traumas and displacements, this mix of walls and camps. Within her first month here, in a bilingual Kita, the two songs she came home singing were “No Roots”—a song about moving between homes by the daughter of a mining consultant, a Frankfurt-born, Canada, US, and Munich-raised singer Alice Merton—and “Keine Maschine,” by Berlin-based singer Tim Bendzko. In the video for that song, the young white German escapes a mysterious factory where workers all dressed in white are all, robotically, making the same photocopies. He breaks out, and goes on the run, first through a dark, damp forest, and then into the swells of a sea—geographies we are meant to recognize—forests of refuge, seas of flight. “I am no machine!,” he sings, “I am a human being of flesh and blood.” As I immersed myself in my own research on the arrivals of asylum seekers and forced migrants to Berlin and in the history of guest workers from Turkey and beyond—not to mention histories I already knew well, of forced camp labor and work that will most certainly not set you free—these songs were perfect introductions to my commencement in this city that has brought you to this moment of your commencement, this threshold, this moment of making, of beginning to be.

In my own work, I’ve praised this threshold experience as the art of the crossfade, a DJ term for moving back and forth between two different songs without choosing one over the other, and finding a way to mix them together without erasing them, finding the single point of connection, however microscopic, that they share, and using that single point to move between them. Slide the crossfader left, and one channel opens; slide it right, the other opens. For the DJ, the edges of songs, the transitions between them, is where the mix begins; it’s where the very art of DJing, of musical production lives: in the cuts, in the fades, in the thresholds, in the commencements.

I believe in the power of thresholds, in the rewards of the doorway, its possible refuge, its promised sanctuary, its utopia of what lies on the other side. I’m drawn to borders as places where identities and nations and languages cross and get confused. Borders are dialectical spaces, and even before spending time here in Berlin, I’ve been drawn to the great legacy of dialectical thinking that German thinkers produced in the early part of the last century—the importance of “introducing a difference into a discourse,” as George Didi-Huberman has put it, a confrontation between divergent opinions with a view toward arriving at an agreement that is mutually accepted. Brecht, Benjamin, Bloch, others all came back to the power of “bringing different points of view into confrontation around the same question.” In 1940, in exile in Finland before eventually returning to East Berlin after the war, Brecht asked us to consider the power of thresholds, of borders, and their inevitable discomforts, their dislocations and irruptions:

The best school for dialectics is emigration. The most penetrating dialecticians are people in exile. It is changes that forced them into exile, and they are only interested in changes. From the tiniest signs they deduce, so long as they are capable of thinking, the most fantastic events. They have an eye for contradictions. Long live dialectics!

Long live dialectics, indeed. But we must answer Brecht this way: And long live the bodies and minds in exile who do that dialectical thinking. Long live those forced to flee, those on the run, the uprooted, the dislocated. Long live those who took their own lives at borders, long live those whose lives were—and are, and are, and are—taken at borders, through fences, beneath walls.

All of us in this room, all of us in this city, all of us in this Europe, all of us in this contemporary world, also know that the crossroads, the border crossing, the border between cities, nations, cultures, and worlds can offer no refuge at all, but can be zones of great risk and great vulnerability, places of death. Doorways and thresholds and borders—sites of openings and closings, commencements and endings—can be dangerous. Just last week, I visited the Berlin Wall memorial site at Bernauer Strasse, and, like most who visit, I was taken by the site’s commemoration of this deadly and traumatic era of the past: death zones, checkpoints, walls, homes and families split in two, a city defined by its thresholds and doorways and edges. But I also thought about what the Berlin-based artist Trevor Paglen, riffing on Mark Twain, recently said in an interview: history rhymes. I looked at the guard tower and saw Gaza. I looked at the drawings of multiple fences and checkpoints and I saw Tijuana, Nogales, and Juarez. I saw flowers next to the black-and- white photographs of Germans killed trying to jump the wall and make it across that liminal zone between east and west, and I thought of the thousands who die in the Mexican desert each year. I thought of the nearly 100 Palestinians killed already this year in Gaza. In his novel about the Berlin Wall, Peter Schneider described it this way: “What on the far side meant an end to freedom of movement, on the near side came to symbolize a detested social order…for Germans in the west, the wall became a mirror that told them, day by day, who was the fairest of all.”

And so it goes.

Mirror, mirror on the wall.

In Berlin, wall-thinking may technically be history, but it’s still alive and well in different forms. In Hungary, where Victor Orbán has rejected liberal democracy for a “secure” “Christian democracy,” home to “the traditional family model of one man and one woman,” and called for preventions against the “settlement of alien population.” It’s alive and well in the United States, where, just two weeks ago, Attonery General Jeff Sessions stood at that same Tijuana wall and declared all asylum seekers criminals and promised to separate parents from their children, in the tradition of slavery, in the tradition of the Nakba. Days later, White House chief of staff John Kelly declared most immigrants crossing the border as unable to assimilate because they don’t speak English and come from rural villages. The walling legacy, the legacy of camp thinking, of course is also alive and well here in Germany too, wall or no wall—welcome culture, integration culture, B1, B2, C1, C2, assimilate or else—walls live on without the walls themselves. Who is German? Who is allowed to be German? Can a Syrian who comes to Germany as a refugee ever be German? What if you are in line in a bakery ordering bread in “broken German?” If you are Christian Lindner of the FDP party, “You can’t discern whether he is a highly qualified artificial-intelligence engineer from India or a foreigner who is being tolerated here illegally.” There is welcome culture, and it has been mighty and amazing in many ways, but as we have all seen, welcome mats soon can be stepped on, trampled, revoked, or torn up, or set on fire if the hosts decide they don’t want broken German, or don’t want foreigners interested in crossing the doorway on their own terms.

I recently spent an afternoon with one of your fellow Bard classmates, Anas Al Maghrabi, who arrived in Berlin from Syria, via Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, and Croatia. When I visited his dorm room, I noticed he had too had a welcome mat, only it was on the ceiling not the floor, with a pair of shoes still attached. Sometimes welcome is not where you think it will be. Sometimes welcome is upside down, and we get stuck to it, never able to leave its bureaucracies and framings and classifications. Forever upside down.

I was struck when I arrived here to see that the Refugees Welcome stickers and posters all over Berlin and much of Europe included an image I know well from my home in Southern California: the silhouetted family of a father mother and pigtailed daughter running in mid-flight across borders and across the freeway. In Southern California, the image was not a welcome but a warning—it appeared alongside an interstate to warn drivers heading south to Mexico to not hit migrants who might be sprinting across the freeway in search of safety. The image was originally designed by a Native American Navajo artist, who was inspired by the 1864 deportation and attempted elimination of Navajos by the US government. The “Long Walk of the Navajo” took them away from their sacred land in Arizona and onto reservations in New Mexico.

History rhymes.

And so it goes.

Mirror, mirror on the wall.

To prepare for today, I went back to one of my favorite literary characters, Frankie Addams, the young girl who is the protagonist of Carson McCullers 1946 novel The Member of the Wedding. Frankie feels “unjoined”—she is an “I” person wondering what it means to belong to a “we”—wondering what it means to be a member of the world when the world is not a round globe that makes sense, but loose and wild and cracked, “and turning a thousand miles an hour. “All these people,” she thinks, “and you don’t know what joins them up. There’s bound to be some sort of reason and connection. Yet somehow I can’t seem to name it.”

I like the way Frankie thinks. That’s what I mean by thinking like a crossfader, thinking dialectically—in the face of ruptures, how do we work with the fragments of culture to produce new mixes, new montages, new orders of being, new kinds of commencement?

Since arriving in Berlin, I started the long process of learning Arabic. I wanted to take lessons to better understand the music I have been listening to and loving, and to better understand the musicians who make the music I have been listening to and loving. But in the process, I have also found the language to be full of lessons on connection and care across boundaries of self and other. For those in the audience who already speak in Arabic, this is not news to you, I know. When someone says “hello” to you in Arabic, it is not enough to respond with a “hello,” one should respond with two “hellos” back. If someone wishes you a “good morning,” a morning of well-being, sabah il-her, one responds not with a “good morning” back or even “good morning to you,” but with sabah in-nur, “morning of light.” When we connect, it is not enough to acknowledge or recognize, but to offer light where there was none. It is also there in the structure and rules of the language itself. In the formation of a word, only six Arabic letters do not change when they connect with letters to their left. All others change shape. As my teacher calls it, they “lose their tails.” In losing their tails, they are the same but different. To connect in order to become part of something bigger than a single letter, the letters must change. As you move through your own lives and move through your own work, this is an important lesson—as you connect, as you move outside yourself, you should want to lose your tails, change your shape. You will be the same but different, and you will be joined to something bigger than yourself. “Thinking,” Walter Benjamin once suggested (in a gloss by scholar Gerhard Richter) “a search for siblings…one who is related but different, related in difference.” But there is also thinking as a search for the unrelated, the stranger, the foreigner, unfamiliar, one who is different yet related—a letter that is not you, but a letter you need in order to make a new word. The difference that is required for you to be the same. To become part of something beyond ourselves—the words to our letters—we must lose our tails.

I realize that telling you to behave like Arabic letters might not be the rousing commencement-speech advice you were craving, so I’ll try one more in the spirit of connection, one I have already alluded to: think like DJs. When a DJ approaches a set or a mix, she is not thinking just about what songs she will play, she is thinking about what songs she wants to connect to each other and how she will do it. What musical moments connect Drake to Umm Kalthoum? When a DJ approaches a set or a mix, she is thinking, What story do I want to tell out of all these disparate elements? What narrative arc can be created out of these fragments? For the DJ, difference is the foundation of storytelling, the foundation of connection, the foundation of creating new spaces, new emotions, new movements. To think like a DJ is to think about the present and the future with the ear of a historian. To make a new mix, DJs need the past. They dig through the crates, they assemble sources, archives, citations. Know that the new work you will do will only be powerful, will only move you and move those around you, if it’s knowingly attuned to the past, if it is citational, if it has knowledge of history. To think like a DJ is also to think about what kind of new assemblies you hope to create. For a DJ, that assembly may be a dancing crowd, but for you it might be a circle of friends, a community you work with, an audience you hope to impact. As you think about your mixes, grounded in history but aimed for the present and the future, think about your publics, your audiences, the assemblies you hope to make possible.

To think like a DJ is of course to also think about emotions, feelings, about mood, and about movement—how will your work move others to move? How will it move into action? How will it move people into feeling differently or deeper about themselves? About the world around them? How will your mix bring a stranger joy? How will that joy connect you to someone you have never met before? How will that individual movement produce a collective movement that leads to a new horizon? In other words: make your own path through history and culture; put your own story on the fragments of life that are in front of you, the ruins of time, tell your own story against the backdrop of all those stories that have come before. The old songs will always be there. We need new songs that know the old songs well enough to keep loving them or leave them behind, new mixes that know that history rhymes and new publics, new assemblies, new friends, new dance partners—no matter how improbable or unexpected—are always possible if the music is right.

I realize this advice might already be obvious to you, a room full of young people from Denmark, Serbia, Spain, Germany, US, Georgia, Egypt, China, Norway, Czech Republic, and Palestine, who have all been living alongside one another, thinking alongside one another about everything from Ralph Waldo Emerson to musical dialectics, from climate change to historical monuments, from alternative Arab feminisms to Botticelli, Ovid, and NATO. You yourselves are a mixtape already in motion.

So put the needle on the record, cue up the next voice, the next beat, the next track of your lives. May it speak truth to power. May it posses what Gramsci famously called “optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect.” May it love your neighbor. May it welcome a stranger, but on the stranger’s terms. May it look out on a cracked and broken world, a precarious and often monstrous and heartless world, and seek to heal it.

Be healers.

Be connectors.

Make the music of your lives.

(With thanks to Adi Yassin, Ussama Makdisi, and Rasha Hilwi)

Josh Kun is Director of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, where he is Professor and Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication. He was a spring 2018 Bosch Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

(Photo: Vera Yung. Courtesy Bard College Berlin)

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