#source : verbatim // mother mother

[ciitedexcerpt]

Did you ever really think you'd love a guy like me?

#lyrics #source : verbatim // mother mother #verbatim #mother mother #touch up

[poeticallyprofound]

Moth & Butterfly

When I'm stuck in the mirror

When I'm circling the drain

It has never been any clearer

The source of all my pain

Leaves fall, Autumn's call

A far frontier from home

Burning my wings away

The beauty of your flame

Mother of Mars, alone

Hold me in your arms again

Let me exclaim your name

Into the cold tombstone

Until I slurp sloppily

In a second hand Jalopy

Trust me, sure isn't a Janis Joplin

They weren't playing, chopsticks

Don't know how to use them

Turtle blues maudlin

All kinds of toxic

I hid in the cockpit

As we flew over Jerusalem

May have misheard the witches when they said

You would rue Salem

Guess it happens when you refuse to date them

And a hex isn't meant verbatim

Cross the line backwards

Horns instead of antlers

The sound they make, answered

Candles and lanterns

I saw faces in the smoke

Before we spoke

This is where the second wind begins

Where bated breath ends

Where my angels coalesce to sing

Where everything that used to make sense descends

Down there where I'll meet her

Unfurl broken wings

Isn't that right, Demeter?

#poetry #poeticallyprofound #spilled ink

[emmersreads]

Emma by Jane Austen | 2.5/5

I have been sitting on this negative review of Emma for over a year so pls pretend I am charmingly tortured by my mixed feelings for this beloved classic rather than just a little hater.

I decided to read Emma because the Austen girlies are unstoppable. Every day I wake up for my twelve hour shift in the content mines of tumblr.fuck (for the purpose of this sentence we are both grizzled elderly men sitting on a porch just go with it) and find another post about how Jane Austen is the best thing since before sliced bread. Eat your heart out Shakespeare; if only you’d done all your plays about falling in love. These posts are a bit of a mindfuck for me because as much as I love a costume drama, Austen’s actual novels have always been underwhelming. One of my best friends is an Austen girlie. She loves the things. I dunno man, these books do not spark joy. But maybe I was just young dumb and a hater. Emma (2020) is my favourite Austen movie, so when I decided to reinvestigate the author I thought I’d start there.

The movie is better than the book. Shocked gasps; questions asked at parliament.

Emma (2020) is a great adaptation in part because it’s well positioned to keep the best parts of the book. My favourite part of the novel was the dialogue, which the film is able to lift often ad verbatim (“Mother, you simply must sample the tart!”). The patter of conversation is excellent and Austen’s sense of humor comes across just as effectively on the page as it does when spoken aloud. To this the visual medium can add the incredible set design, including the beautiful Regency wallpapers, Emma’s many jackets and little hats, Anya Taylor Joy’s eyes that look like they’re exes trying awkwardly to avoid each other in the grocery store, Johnny Flynn as Mr. Knightley having a romantic tantrum so intense he has to take his pants off and lie on the floor. Relatable. These elements couldn’t be in the book even if Ms. Austen had wanted to describe Mr. Knightley’s buttock-baring emotion.

Unfortunately that paragraph has been my way of damning with faint praise. The inverse proposition of an adaptation that adds a lot of things I liked is the source material without much to like about it. This is a bit of a misrepresentation. I found most of the book to be funny and enjoyable in much the same vein of the movie: a gorgeously decorated vanilla sponge cake. I just hated the ending so much it retroactively ruined all 500 previous pages.

I don’t begrudge Ms. Austen’s choice to hew to the Georgian standards of propriety (hence no ass shots), but this is a safe space for us to admit that those standards have not all aged particularly well, or particularly sexily. I feel like I’ve been infected with terminal bookstagram brainworms. I also don’t want to be here arguing that a book published two hundred years ago is too old-fashioned for me. But at the same time so much of the narrative about Austen is a revisionist history of how all her work was secretly not only meaningful (this is true, Austen’s work is about capturing the atmosphere and concerns of a particular social milieu, which she does effectively; it’s not less worthy of capture because it’s a space exclusive to women), but progressive.

People love Austen. They love romance and they love period drama. They don’t love when that genre is criticized for being dated or regressive. I understand that people do not read these books for the 21st century social commentary or the politics. And I understand that a 21st century moral critique is ahistorical and in poor faith. Trust me, I feel the ‘just let people have fun’ brigade hanging over my head like the sword of fucking Damocles.

But here’s the thing folks, my largely pretty enjoyable read of Emma was soured by just that: important parts of it are dated and regressive and it ruined my day.

The premise of Emma is that the titular protagonist is a rich and witty young woman intent on meddling in the romantic lives of others, at their expense. At the conclusion of the film, Emma realizes she has behaved badly to her lower class friend Harriet by leading Harriet to overlook the farmer Robert Martin (Harriet’s social equal) in order to pursue the richer Mr. Erlton (her social superior). Emma apologizes to Harriet and tells her to reconsider her feelings for Robert Martin, which turn out to be genuine. Finally, when Harriet discovers that her father is a lower class merchant rather than a secret aristocrat, Emma says she will welcome Harriet into Hartfield anyway. It indicates that Emma has outgrown her judgemental nature and preoccupation with appropriate matches to see Harriet as a friend in spite of her being Emma’s social inferior. And they all live happily ever after.

In the novel, this resolution takes much much longer. Emma’s flaw is not that she toyed with her friend’s emotions to arrange a match that amused her, but that she encouraged Harriet to have uppity opinions and to seek to rise above her station. The story resolves with Emma and Harriet returning to their proper social classes, Emma with Mr. Knightley and Harriet with Robert Martin. Emma and Mr. Knightley commiserate over how foolish Emma was to befriend Harriet and how unpleasant Harriet has become now that she is a social climber, and Harriet is revealed to have been naturally ungrateful and grasping and unworthy of a young lady such as Emma’s friendship.

I’m not going to waste my time on whether this sort of thing was just as bad then as it is now or whether it was simple a different time. Austen’s writing is a reflection of genuinely (though not universally) held societal beliefs and she’s not going to rise from the grave to change it now. It is, however, a deeply unpleasant ending. Emma’s problem isn’t that she toys with the people around her for entertainment, but that she doesn’t participate appropriately in the class system. Technically both of these are about becoming more self-reflective and more thoughtful of others, but the devil is in the details. It’s hard to enjoy that as the conclusion to a romantic comedy. I don’t come to Austen for a window into the uncomfortable realities of the past, or really any particular connection to the past. I’m here for the fluffy romance.

Part of the reason talking about not enjoying Austen because of these novels’ dated elements is so frustrating is that the common narrative about Austen is super revisionist. Austen has endured a lot of lumps and I do think it’s stupid to claim that she was a poor writer and was incapable of writing incisive social commentary just because she was a woman writing about the recency woman’s interests and concerns. I also think it’s reductive to claim that the social dynamics of Austen’s world often get misinterpreted due to the modern reflex to see every society preceding our own as nasty, brutish, and short. But this isn’t a critique of Austen, this is a critique of reading Austen in 2023. It’s not just about hating to see a grilboss winning.

On the other hand, why do I feel like I’m trying to placate the ‘just let people enjoy things’ brigade again?

One of the most frustrating things about being generally a romance disliker is the climate of toxic positivity that surrounds any genre that is more about having fun than any ostensibly higher purposes. There is a sense that since the audience of these genres is primarily women and they are often targeted by bad faith misogynistic criticisms, that any criticism of them is inherently misogynistic. I’ve been tying myself up in knots because my observation is that a book from 1815 has some nineteenth century ass ideas about class. This should be self-evident. ‘Just enjoying things’ in not actually my goal when reading, and ‘just letting people enjoy things’ isn’t my goal as a critic either.

Here’s the rub: Emma is a fun and sweet romantic comedy with some of the English language’s best dialogue until the conclusion reminds us that there hasn’t ever been a romantic utopia with the sexy historical codes of practise but not the bad ones. Romance in Austen’s time was a function of the class system, not separate from it. And I don’t know, maybe I’m the patron saint of it really being that deep, but I had a hard time seeing the lighthearted romance in that.

#read in 2023 #emma #jane austen #book review #bookblr #bookstagram #book blogging #classics #romance #books #also its been so long i cant find any of the pics i took of the book so behold my lemon cake

[aitchnkay]

Jiang Gunian Made A Change Part 6

Jiang YanLi also had information for Nie HuaiSang. “Your brother has a trusted advisor by the name of Meng Yao?”

“Yes.” The younger boy flipped open his fan, and looked at the stylized trees drawn on it as if it was the most fascinating object.

“You can’t trust him. Every move he makes is for himself. To improve his standing in life.”

“Stems from being a bastard son of a prostitute, I suppose. Or it’s a trait he inherited from his bastard of a father. One would think the son of a prostitute would have thicker skin.”

“Even if he stabs himself in an apparent suicide attempt, you can be sure he knows exactly where his blade will go. It will look, and be, painful, but not a death sentence for even a non-cultivator.”

Nie HuaiSang’s eyes narrowed. “That sounds oddly specific. Your source told you he will pretend to kill himself? Why would he do such a thing?”

Jiang YanLi nodded ‘yes’ to the first question, but didn’t know how to answer the second. “A crafty man will take opportunities to remove obstacles in his path. A needy man will go to great lengths to protect those who protect him.”

“Interesting,” Nie HuaiSang fanned his face slowly. “I will pass on your advice and knowledge. The Nie are grateful for your wisdom and the forewarning.”

Jiang watched the Nie heir leave, and sighed. Her next conversation was not going to go as easily. “May I have a word, please?” she asked the Jin heir.

“Do we have things to discuss?” Jin ZiXuan looked perplexed and unsure of himself.

“You have a few half siblings you don’t know about.” He stiffened, eyes widening in shock that she would bring up such a delicate subject. “I know of three, but I’m sure there are more. Qin Su is your sister. She doesn’t know, and doesn’t need to know that her mother was raped. Or maybe she does. A girl should know who her parents are. What kind of people they are. 

“There is an infant in Mo Village. His mother is ill and will die without proper care. Care your father will not provide, and neither will her family since her child was born outside of any formal arrangements. The boy has the potential to be a good cultivator, but not if he’s starved and beaten because of the circumstances of his birth.”

“How exactly am I responsible for these people?” Jin ZiXuan hissed. “If I bring them to Koi Tower as my siblings? What will that do to my mother? My father’s... tendencies... are hurtful enough without shoving his progeny in her face.”

“They are your siblings whether you claim them or not. You have the money to care for them properly, with or without embarrassing your esteemed mother.”

“You said there were three?”

“At least three. The third is named Meng Yao, currently an aide to Nie ZongZhu.”

“I know of him... his mother worked in a... one of those houses.”

“Yes, his mother was a prostitute. Because your father is who he is, Meng Yao does not have a favorable opinion of the man. He will take your father down when given the slightest of chances.”

“So I should kill him.”

“Murder? No? Maybe? He is loyal to himself first and to those who protect him second. You can either embrace him as a brother and protect him from his antagonists knowing he is a viper who will bite you at his convenience, or treat him as the venomous snake he is.”

“That’s not a choice, Jiang Guniang.”

“Those are the choices you have, Jin Gongzi. Just know that Meng Yao is extremely intelligent and can remember conversations and books verbatim as well as connect random pieces of information to see the larger picture. Under the right circumstances, he would be your greatest asset. Under other circumstances... he will remove his perceived enemies and anyone in his way. Choose wisely.”

Jin ZiXuan bowed, as was proper, but looked at her as he had never looked at her before.

Previously, he had looked through her, pretended she wasn’t really there. But now? He was looking at her, and listening as if she had something important to say. Was this the beginning of a genuine relationship?

#wangxian #jiang yanli #chen qing ling #cql #wei wuxian #wei ying #lan wangji #lan zhan #grandmaster of demonic cultivation #mo dau zu shi #mdzs #nie huaisang #jin zixuan #the untamed

[zikadraws]

Alright there we go ! This new oc is based in DC Universe. Long post ahead. (Tdlr included at the end. Enjoy.)

This is Taylor Serils (last name up to debate), a tailor owning a small suit shop in the low quarters of Gotham. Uses he/they/it pronouns, is definitely neither cis nor straight but he really doesn't care. (Basically the incarnation of that one meme about the pronouns.)

He is autistic and the son of a tailor (from who he inherited the shop) and a chemist. He didn't get to know his father too much since his parents were separated, and he was killed in a villain incident when he was still a child ; but his mother never accepted the fact her son was autistic and that medication wouldn't change it so she tried to alter his brain chemistry herself by submitting him to experimental treatment.

Said treatment did predictably nothing against his autism, but got him really sick, and fucked up his neural network, so now he can not feel physical pain (sense of touch still operational though), and his feelings and reaction time are a bit deafened. She went to jail after he absent-mindedly ratted her out at school though (still in there btw, for child abuse and illegal practice of medicine), and he was taken in by his dad's side of the family, from who he picked up the tailoring ways which put him to calm, even though they were a bit put off by him, his disabilities and his... destructive stimming habits.

Taylor uses its body as stress/boredom relief, and so tears out his eyebrows, bites off his nails, and bites off his skin. But the thing is, since he can't feel pain, he takes that to the next level, to the point he has no eyebrows, no nails anymore, and his fingers are bitten almost to the bone. They had to bring him to the doctor about this. They tried everything to get him to stop tearing his hand's skin off, eventually resorting to long gloves. Barely sufficient though.

Despite all this, he contently followed a tailor apprenticeship at his family tailor shop with great application, and actually helped the family business thanks to the chemistry hobby he picked up from his mother (subconsciously wanted to please her somehow then found it relatively smooth, so kept investing themselves into chemistry, and then snuck her chemistry material at his new home), by treating the fabrics himself and making them last longer, which his family was thankful for, albeit taken off.

It's through some customer interactions that he found his calling in life. Some guys would complain to the little family shop about comfort and fit, using, verbatim, the expression "my suit should feel like a second skin". Which sparked something within Taylor.

He began experimenting with fabrics and bits of his own skin, until the fabric he ended up developing could blend in smoothly with his epiderm, as a greffe, and even serve the basic functions of skin, which is to touch, and even, eventually, through trial and error, grow.

He didn't even have vitiligo originally ! His skin turned like that due to his experiments on himself, and since it didn't bother him, he just let his skin like that. The spots have a tendency to shift in shapes from day to day.

He invented a fabric that he could just wrap around his damaged skin and it would just fill in the spot in less than a minute, and since his favourite colour is blue, he used this colour for the fabric. Thus why the blue fabric forearms. He never stopped experimenting in this new specific interest, and crafted really interesting suits with those, praised for how astonishingly comfortable they were. (Also made skin cultures, and obtained skin samples from... various sources.)

By this time, he was an adult and inherited the shop when yet another villain incident took the rest of his family, leaving him alone to handle the shop. It was pretty lonely, but he did end up making friends with a Gotham support group, and especially a young boy (that I'm calling Miles out of pure lack of imagination) and his big brother, runaways living together because of family issues.

His career took a turn when Miles' big brother was murdered by a cop for being black. The cop got away with it, but Miles who was understandably devastated mourned his lost brother at Taylor's, who decided to find out who was the bastard, and realised it was one of his current customers, who came for a suit for a special event.

...So Taylor got to work. And made him a suit. The cop found it very fitting. 25 cents tipped.

The day of the council party the cop was supposed to be a bodyguard for a big head, the suit he was wearing started getting... *very* tight. Skin tight, despite still being incredibly bendy. The cop was annoyed, and embarrassed because it was obvious, but didn't try to take it off... Until the end of the day, where he realized with horror that he just couldn't take it off, because the clothes had fused with his skin. He tried to bolt to Taylor's, who conveniently closed their shop for a week leave.

And then the fabric started getting progressively itchy. Really itchy. Extremely itchy. PAINFUL itchy. Like last stage hives, but even worse.

They couldn't do anything except give him painkillers at the hospital, because hormonal treatments worked for like five minutes before the tissue grew tolerance and came back stronger, and to remove the suit they would have had to remove his skin entirely, which he was starting to do on his own anyway because of how unbearable the pain and itchiness were. So they could do nothing but bind his hands and watch him slowly die of advanced gangrene, as Taylor's suit eventually hit its "necrosis" finale. A genuinely awful way to die.

Taylor did a real masterpiece of this suit, but he wasn't really good at covering his path. The police got him pretty easily, and found his back shop lab with all the skin works. They freaked their minds out, and Taylor was immediately sent to Arkham. He promised Miles, who was pretty much on his own otherwise, that he would be out as soon as possible, though.

Taylor wasn't going into Arkham unprepared. The suit wasn't the last project he got done before the cops got to him, after all.

(Taylor's last project allows him to bend its own skin, which he uses to pick the locks, break out a few other residents as a distraction, steal a few guards' skins, and break out of Arkham. His stay in there lasted 8 days tops.)

(This absolutely kickstarted his reputation amongst Arkham residents. Which may be good, because after getting arrested, he needs a new clientele. Guys gotta eat, yaknow.)

Batman is not on his case just yet, but he will be sooner rather than later.

[TDLR :]

This is my DC Comics OC, Taylor Serils ;

He is about 25 y/o ; he never went to high school ; he is a great formed tailor, and an entirely self-taught chemist ; he owns a tailor shop that happens to have a DIY chemical lab in the back area ; he (they/it) pronouns ; he is disabled (his pain receptors don't work) and autistic ; he has self-damaging coping mechanisms ; his parents were a tailor and a chemist, the first dead and the second in jail (for abusing him) ; his favourite colour is blue ; his specific interests revolve around the frontiers between skin tissues and fabrics, for better or for worse, all because he took an expression too literally that one time ; (he also likes animals, TV cartoons and to knit and crochet) ; he can craft clothes and fabrics that act as epiderm, that he uses to heal, or to steal his enemies' skin, that he grows to be able to bend ; he gave himself vitiligo after his own experiments ; his best friend is a teenager ; he cruelly murdered a cop once ; he got locked up at Arkham and broke out after a few days only ; his criminal case is legally stamped (literally btw) as "supervillain" ; he is morally neutral and has absolutely zero big-scale ambition whatsoever, but more and more villains (and, thus, heroes) are getting to whisper about him.

He Gets Subjected To Trouble.

And yes, this was a summary. I got a bit carried away. I hope it's all somewhat coherent (:

Honestly sounds like the kind of OC that doesn't necessarily needs to be in a specific universe, but any either way, I like the guy. And will likely post some about him. Hope you enjoy him as well ^^

If you got any questions about, or for, him, I'll be happy to respond. Thanks for reading ! 🤗

#long post #oc #new oc #original character #oc introduction #oc lore #disabled oc #autistic oc #dc comics #cw abuse mention #cw death mention #cw skin picking #<- didn't even know that one tag was a thing tbh #taylor serils #my oc #hope you like them^^ #open if questions #cw angst #cw police brutality #watercolor

[ludinusdaleth]

on a similar note, i do think that there's a lot of people that are just outright evil towards the female characters moreso in this campaign than ever before, with people literally demonizing imogen for so much as breathing in laudna's direction as being an evil, toxic, heartless abuser and "worse than delilah". and people notably didn't care at all about ashton until they realized they could ship them with laudna and further make out imogen to be a monster.

i cant say that this is the worst it's been, historically. the way keyleth/marisha was treated for years was probably the most notable, gruesome, & well known example of misogyny in the fanbase, something that affected marisha ray personally and still does - iirc, part of beau directly spun from her willingness to spite her detractors. many a reddit incel would not shut up about every detail of marisha's rp as the druid. i appreciate that cr responded to that over the years narratively as spitefully as possible.

but, yeah, i think, especially on tumblr, there are some odd attitudes at work. imogen, fearne, & deanna are taking the full brunts of it -

deanna is called evil or disappointing for not being a shining cleric of holy goodness praising the gods bluntly to the screen, and is dehumanized by fans by being put into the mammy stereotype whenever she talks to imogen, even when her plotline is literally centered on realizing she's more than a nurturer (and aabria has liked my tweets on this subject, so maybe, we can assume she shares bitterness at this?). almost no one ever wants to acknowledge her beyond the trait of being motherly, or being lovers with chetney, and dont get me started on how people said she was feral because she killed a goat and made imogen cry?

fearne is treated as a ditzy kooky bimbo fae, with many people ive seen refusing to acknowledge any of her character development - folk get angry when ive mentioned her doing anything, saying shes just a selfish bitch and only that, that she needs to be "put in her place" by any character witnessing her mischief.

and for imogen - i know people dont want to woobify her, but in the process, holy fuck does cr tumblr become judgemental. i have seen, verbatim: "sorry she isnt your girlboss and her actions will hurt others when she turns evil", said pre-solstice, and then, she wasnt. her tendency toward her darker powers and her considering ludinus's pov (yknow. like many a protagonist tries to see the antagonist's pov. thats normal in narratives) because her mother joined him has damned her into the fandom thinking she's a beast to be put down. frankly, even if she did turn evil? id support that narratively, that's fantastic. but she didn't and there is a smugness to the fact that she is now the most clear headed against ludinus when people were sure she would turn, and wanted blood on that assumption.

as for ashton, yeah. i.... have a lot of thoughts on how fandom treats them - they definitely were treaded around til shipping began and only then they were considered palateable, and then were noticeably only called he/him pronouns by the terfs of the marisha/laura-ship brigade. if im being honest, i have not seen them directly used against imogen, and i dont think im the person to discuss imodna or shipping wars with you. but i do think every other bells member is utilized as some kind of cudgel against her (namely, in my experience, orym). to this fanbase, imogen is not allowed to have her traumas in the literal face of ruidis, the source of it.

i know this harsh simpleminded view on the ladies of cr has always existed. i could go into it in every campaign thoroughly. but i do think c3 is unique in how tumblr is treating it. do you know how badly you have to screw up for cr twitter to be calmer & more rational on the topic of women existing in a narrative?

#van speaks #asks #long post #critical role #campaign 3 #misogynoir #misogyny #racism #deanna leimert #imogen temult #fearne calloway #ashton greymoore #transphobia #critical role meta

[imjustli]

so ive been thinking a lot about God and like my christianity and everything and i've decided perhaps it'll do me good to get the perspective of someone else who's also christian ?

yeah . so there's no doubt in my mind that God exists honestly. i really do think he's up there. it's just that im not sure about a couple of stuff

like with job in the old testament. that dude was like the Ultimate follower of God. sooooo good at following all the commandments and everything. he loved God with everything he had

and then as a test God decides to allow the devil take it all away. just to see what job does. & satan takes all his money his animals his health. he even kills off his kids (all of which God authorized)

and yeah job is faithful to the very fucking end and gets everything back (twofold ? tenfold ? can't remember which)

he even gets new children. which is where my main problem is with the story tbh

what about his old children ? did God not consider the fact that job might miss them a whole fucking lot ? that he might not want new children just his old ones ? and they died all because of a test of job's unwavering faithfulness . which God only engaged in to prove the devil wrong

why'd he do that anyway ? he's God . he knows the devil was wrong he coulda just ignored him ?? instead of letting him kill some innocent children for the sake of a test he already knew job was going to pass with flying fucking colors

like with abraham and isaac the kid was never gonna die and that was a test of Abraham's faith and like obedience but with job there was no hesitation

i feel dirty even questioning this rn bc im not supposed to have questions or opinions im just supposed to take everything as it is but i don't think i can do that

& i can ask this and people go "it's the old testament it doesn't matter" but then you have ananias and sapphira who died the fucking minute they lied and that's in the new testament . and that isn't exactly rampant in like present day but it is kinda scary

plus my mother's church always brings up 2 timothy 3:15-17 so like All scripture is still useful and applicable even the fucked up parts of the old testament that say to kill people for the littlest fucking things (not that they go through with it but y'know)

im not 100% sure what im asking here . i guess job's story (plus a million more in the bible) unnerve me. if someone as god-fearing as he was still gets subjected to all the shit he did just for a fucking test then what about the rest of us ? if i follow God's word to a T and he decides to test me by taking away people that matter so fucking much to me then am i supposed to be okay with that ??

all this stuff just makes it kinda hard for me to pray the way i used to y'know ? or to pray at all. it fucking sucks

I'll give this a go, but I was raised mostly atheist, and aside from choir and confirmation, my current university bible study group is the only christian stuff I've actually been involved in. So full disclosure, I have no idea what I'm doing. But I feel God's presence and i know Him about as well as I can as of now.

So first of all, there's 4 things I try to keep in mind when reading the bible:

The bible wasn't written by God, it was written by humans about their experiences with God

That was a really fucking long time ago

As such, the way my university priest put it, each passage should be read as part of the whole, rather than each sentance as exactly, verbatim, the word of God

Also, christianity/the bible/any at some point popular faith really, has often been used by powerful people as a tool to maintain/gain power, and that has caused alteration to the bible

I don't personally think that just going along with everything that happens to you as "God's plan" and never questioning it, is sustainable. Like yeah sure the bible says not to test God, but like. As stated previously, the bible has been used to keep people submitting to authority, so from an earthly source critical perspective, it should probably be questioned how much of this actually was in there from the beginning. And just in general being completely trusting can be dangerous, and sure God would have some understanding of that. He created us after all.

Not to mention, everyone probably has a very different relationship with God (like we've had an insane amount of wars over what relationship is the right one, but the answer is probably most of them), and those are deeply personal and connected to the specific circumstances of each person's experiences and understanding of themselves.

I doubt that was the reason Job got what happened to him, but I guess being a little to easy could be an option lol.

To be honest, there also are parts of the bible I just don't agree with politically, and the way children are often seen as accessories to the "main character" of a certain part is definitely one of them. I'm not sure there is any positive interpretation of this honestly, aside that it might just be a testament of the time. Though it's often still like that now, so idk.

Another option for why all of this happened to him, is that he simply deserved it. Like yeah sure, he is To be honest, there also are parts of the bible I just don't agree with politically, and the way children are often seen as accessories to the "main character" of a certain part is definitely one of them. I'm not sure there is any positive interpretation of this honestly, aside that it might just be a testament of the time. Though it's often still like that now, so idk.

Another option for why all of this happened to him, is that he simply deserved it. Like yeah sure, he is supposedly God's most loyal follower, but we never actually see that. It is written that he sacrifices a lamb for his children, etc, does all these rituals. But it's not really written why he actually deserves to have his prayers answered (full disclosure, while I was aware of the story, I've never actually read it. So I had a lot of homework to do for this post. I'll get to some of it further down, but I might've missed some).

I'm not sure I fully believe you need to earn God's love, or even His protection, but that is definitely an option. But what that means is that it's possible that the reason Job was tested, was to see if he would still be loyal if he didn't have everything he could want.

Also (NIV) Job 11:4, Zophar says to Job: "You say to God, 'My beliefs are flawless and I am pure to your sight'" [my swedish bible (B2000) says moreso something like: "You think you bring the truth, and that you are flawless in front of God". Which is another reason why each Bible verse can't be read verbatim. Since although those two says similar things, they are not synonymous]. And NIV Job 11:6: "and disclose to you the secrets of wisdom, for true wisdom has two sides. Know this: God has even forgotten some of your sin." [B2000: "He could reveal the hidden depth of wisdom -- there is wisdom in double measurements. Then you'd understand God doesn't demand all your debt."] These are both indicative of Job not actually being as good as he is portrayed, suggesting he kinda brought all his misery on himself (or at least some of it). Elihu also says something similar in chapters 33-37.

In Job 31, he talks a lot about why he doesn't deserve everything the devil did to him, but it feels kinda... idk. Less? Considering he starts of chapter 30 by talking about the people he disregards. Like he clearly truly believes he is in the right, but there's several chapters explaining why he's not.

I'm not sure where I heard this, but I remeber being told that the devil was originally just a personification of the greed and selfishness humans experience. But if that's who the devil is, it further suggests he let his greed (or judging by Job 38-39, it was moreso his hubris and self-centerdness) control him, and that's why he lost everything.

Yeah, the ending doesn't really sit right with me either. I guess he realised his mistakes and passed the test, and therefor deserved it all back. But like you said, the thing about his kids dying and him getting new ones doesn't really feel right. Human connection can be recreated but it will not be fully the same. I really don't have an answer for why this happened, other than that it's a really old story. I also wish we'd actually find out he'd learned.

I don't know if this makes sense, or if it's even what you were asking. I'm still learning what it actually means to be christian, at the moment i just have a vague feeling of a higher presence and a barely read bible, so I have a lot left to figure out.

To my followers and mutuals that have done the entire christian-thing for longer: do you have anything you'd like to add? Feel free to disagree with me completely

#i actually did quite enjoy the reading and thinking. even though im not entirely sure what im doing #and im in the process of changing how i read and interpret the bible. because how i used to do it was not very good #like i might not have a very good interpretation but it was fun to try to work it out #also might i suggest you listen to some mysic by semler? they are very good at depicting complicated feelings about christianity #and also their music is just very good

[whitetigerdemoness]

The more I argue with pro life (aka forced birth) people the more I run into the fact that they sincerely do not know (and refuse to be corrected) that MISSCARRIGE is legally considered abortion. Especially if it is late term and surgical removal of the (dead) fetus is necessary. They also (stupidly) often believe that the only way to get pregnant is by choice. I VERBATIM had someone tell me yesterday "no one is forcing you to get pregnant". It blew my damn mind, and not in a good way. I reminded them that RAPE exists and they back peddled quickly with "well obviously that's different" but buddy, pal, friend, not to the law. The law doesn't care if you have a "legitimate" reason for an abortion, the law states that ANY abortion is illegal. Saving someone's life via abortion is ILLEGAL. Inducing one to save your own will get you put in JAIL for MURDER. There's women in jail RIGHT NOW for that shit. Don't believe me? Look it up.

This isn't the 60's or even early 90's anymore where your only source of information was a tiny local library that had only "approved" books on sensitive topics. You have all the education in the world at your finger tips. Educate yourself. Listen to the stories of women who have had abortions, or needed one and *couldn't* get one.

Listen to people speak about their dead mother, sister, wife because they couldn't get an abortion. Because the pregnancy was entropic. Because the miscarriage happened late term and they died of sepsis from the rotting CORPSE inside them doctors refused to remove. From husbands and boyfriends who decided that if she wouldn't do it, he would. From starving to death because having a child ruined their ability to get education and employment. From their own hand due to post partum depression.

Abortion is a human right, and if you deny people that right you are inhuman.

#pro life #abortion rights #pro choice

[thelonesomequeen]

DM definitely doesn't have insiders or so. I 100% think she takes information from "fans" and I'll tell you why. Sebastian Stan is currently in Portugal, he was there to attend the wedding of Annabelle Wallis' (his gf) brother. Now, we saw that his mom was there too, she was invited to the wedding too, a clear sign that they're very serious with their relationship, this is the most serious he's been with someone since margarita levieva in 2016. However, what do you think she said? 😏😂 that Seb only took his mom because they're very close and doesn't necessarily mean that he and Annabelle, are anything serious 💀

like I want you to keep in mind that this was the wedding of Annabelle's brother. Sebastian was her plus one and he sat with her whole family. Seb absolutely couldn't take his mother with him just because. His mother had to be invited by the bride and groom.

That's why I think DM's "sources" are people on these blogs, because with the Seb situation she sounds exactly like some delulu people in the seb fandom sound.

Most of her sources are definitely fans that run to share what they’ve learned with her. I’ve seen her make statements that were almost verbatim of tumblr posts before🦎

[charliethomascoxuniverse]

Interview with Charlie Cox and Wes Bentley

by Nobuhiro Hosoki - 01 February 2012 (X)

Story : London-based investigative journalist Robert Torres (Dougray Scott) visits Spain to research a book about Josemaría Escrivá (Cox), the controversial founder of Opus Dei. But Robert hits a wall, both professionally and personally, when his most promising source—his own father, Manolo Torres (Bentley), turns out to be his least cooperative one.

(Q): We were asking them before a little bit about your background and experience to the characters and what kind of research you did. (Q): I heard that your father is the minister, right? So you had the background that you had some of that relationship with your parents. Wes Bentley: Both my parents are Methodist preachers. In fact, in my extended family are quite a few preachers. My mother is remarried to a former Catholic priest, my brother's a preacher, my grandfather's an Evangelist; so I'm surrounded. Charlie Cox: They've got you cornered. Wes Bentley: Yeah, I'm cornered. (Q): Here you are a heathen. Wes Bentley: Obviously I've not just had them to fall back on and to ask questions, but I knew a lot just from my youth and growing up in church. My mom actually when they offered it to me she read the script as well. My parents are great because they're not only preachers they're both historians of everything they study, including the church, so they know a lot about it and have a lot to say. Charlie Cox: I was raised Catholic. (Q): So then you really have roots in this. What did this show you or enlighten you or not? Charlie Cox: Yeah, I was raised Catholic and I spent the best part of my school years trying to find ways and means of getting out of going to services, as all of us did. I've had kind of a funny journey since then. I've always been curious. I have a lot friends who kind of finished school and then never went to church ever again, and that wasn't quite my experience. I always kind of went back. I've also been very interested and read a lot about other religions as well and found that fascinating.

And my journey, of which the making of this movie has been a massive part of, has been revealing in many ways. It's a hard thing to talk about because it is so personal, and also because it's one of those things that you're so aware of how much it changes and has changed in the course of a week, let alone a year or a month. So it's something that I don't feel incredibly comfortable talking about because I know that that then goes into print and suddenly that's your opinion and view, and a week down the line I have a very different opinion and view. (Q): How'd you both get cast in the film? What was it about your character that made you say yes? Charlie Cox: I needed a job. I'll be honest with you. I really needed a job at the time. (Q): You weren't on the street begging. Charlie Cox: I wasn't on the street begging, no. I said yes primarily because of Roland. I had met with him, "The Mission" was one of my favorite films, and I loved "The Killing Fields" as well. I met with him, the audition process was to this day the greatest audition experience I've had. I remember ringing up my agent and saying "Okay, the script is currently a bit iffy and a bit all over the place, and I'm not sure what it wants to be, but I'll go wherever he is if he wants me to." (Q): And yourself? Wes Bentley: Basically the same thing verbatim. Same thing; I needed a job and I needed a good job. Or I needed a job and I wanted it to be a good job, please god. And then I get this script and to meet with Roland and I thought that can't be right, but I went and it was Roland.

And "The Mission" was huge for me as a kid too. It took a while because they were getting their money together, so I thought it may have disappeared, and then I was just so thankful when I got the phone call. And it was at a time when nobody was really working, so to have not only a film that you're in and getting to work, but a film with a good budget like this, it felt like a miracle. Charlie Cox: It really did actually, it really did. I'd forgotten that, but that's exactly right, it was at that time when no one was working. That was the only kind of redeeming factor of that period of that year was that no one was working. (Q): Did either of you feel a little bit cautious or intimidated by the fact that there was a faith component to this film, that the Catholic church is a big part of the theme, that perhaps that was something that would be a turn off to somebody?

Wes Bentley: Yeah, naturally. The thing about it is you can't please everybody, that's the nature of anything, including film. The fact that Josemaria was so controversial, and I don't know much about that. I only know now what I learned from the film about the beginnings of Opus Dei and a bit about stuff after that. Since it didn't affect my life personally I don't know it in detail.

But the film's not really like that. Like I said, the film is really just about the beginnings of Opus Dei. I think some people were actually frustrated by that; they wanted to see more about the controversy, when in fact the focus isn't even there. It's more about Josemaria's passion and calling as far as this aspect of the film goes, and how he maintained that passion and calling through a way, a very violent war. (Q): The whole work ethic, what Opus Dei stands for; is that something that you got something from? Did you take something from the movie that you're able to apply to your own life or that maybe reminded you of something that you've already done in your life? Or did it reinforce something or not? Charlie Cox: Yeah, I think that's true of most jobs. You learn something, whether it be a skill or something. But yeah, learning about Josemaria and the reading I did around his life and the little things he would do. Not the major events in his life that he's known for, but the little ticks that are most interesting for an actor who's preparing to play the role have taught me a huge amount, a great deal, and some of them have stayed with me today. (Q): Can you give me an example? Wes Bentley : One of the things is this idea, he had a word for it, but it was this idea, and it sounds quite abstract, and it was explained to me in a way by an Opus Dei priest, who was on the set with us who's to this day the most open minded man I've ever met in my entire life, which is ironic, considering he's an Opus Dei priest. We would sit down and tell him dirty jokes and try and shock him and he would howl with laughter. (Q): He probably could drink you under the table. Charlie Cox: I don't know if he could do that. We traveled through Spain together on this retreat when I was preparing for the role, and we had a few nights where we'd stay up late talking. Josemaria used to do this thing where he would offer up, it wasn't penance, but he would offer up discomfort or forms of discomfort and offer it up to god. But when it was explained to me he would do it not just for god, but he would do it to condition and to help himself wean himself off the grips of desire. And it's a practice, so for example every Thursday night he wouldn't sleep in his bed. In fact, every Thursday night he wouldn't sleep.

He would stay up all night on a Thursday night. And again, I know I'm not going to be able to explain it in the way it was explained to me, and it can sound a bit wacky, but little things, tiny things. If you're making a meal for you and your friend or you and your girlfriend and you can't help but notice one of them has more than the other plate, it's just worked out that way, and you know for damn sure which one you're getting.

Just a little thing like that. And what I'll do now is I'll notice that in the moment and I'll flip it, and I won't say anything. It's a tiny thing, but if you practice that all through your day it becomes other things like when you go to the loo in a club and the loo is gross, and so you think well why should I do anything about it because it was gross when I came in. And you think you know what, I'll do my bit. It's little things like that that you don't necessarily talk about except in press apparently. (Q): So you've been cleaning up the loos. Charlie Cox: Charlie Cox enjoys cleaning loos in New York clubs. (Q): Could you talk about how you guys tapped into the accent and how you played an old man? Wes Bentley: The accent was very tricky and much discussed because we had so many different actors from all over the world; Argentinean, Spanish, English, American. I can't count Olga because she was doing a Hungarian accent, but Rodrigo, Brazilian. We were all trying to match up a Spanish accent that was somewhat similar and it was very tricky. We had one dialect coach between all of us for her to run around and try to keep us all together. We debated whether there would be an accent or not and finally decided there would be one, but it was a lot of work. Charlie Cox: We're also not doing an accent that exists, which is tricky. If an English person speaks Spanish they stumble over words, but we're speaking English in a Spanish accent as if we're speaking in our native tongue. And it's been done before; famously they did it recently in "Valkyrie," and they did it in "Schindler's List."

But interesting enough they didn't do it in "The Mission." I was against it actually early on. The problem was with the Argentinean and Spanish actors, because they can't do an English or an American accent, and if you've got them sounding Spanish. In many ways why "Valkyrie" didn't work for me was because the accents were all over the place.

Wes Bentley: And the makeup was very difficult, a lot of work, a lot of physical work, a lot of emotional work. And I stayed in it all day and I don't do that as an actor, I don't stay in character in all day, but for this old man I had to. It was the most difficult thing I've ever done.

(Q): Did you two figure out a way of working together? In other words, some people keep themselves separate, some people work together, some people discuss their character, some people don't in terms of developing your parts that are complementing each other and interacting with each other at different points.

Wes Bentley: Did we rehearse with each other? (Q): Yeah I mean how did you talk to each other about your characters? Did you discuss it, did you keep it separate? Charlie Cox: We just became friends really. I know what you mean. I don't really buy into that thing as an actor where there's certain information you shouldn’t have because the character wouldn't have it. That's not acting to me really. I respect people who do that, it's fine, but often you'll find it's people who haven't done much theater work.

I've worked with actors who don't like to rehearse, they want to turn up and they want to just say it, and often you'll get a really good performance. But the trick with acting is to be able to do that and then do it again and then do it again, and do it twice a day on a Wednesday and twice a day on a Saturday, and it 250 times over the course of four months and keep it fresh each time. That's the real trick. (Q): What's next for both of you? Wes Bentley: We worked intensely together with Roland in fact. And Roland was great because we had a lot of childhood history that we had to build and it's difficult in a week and a half, but Roland was great because he had a lot in stock and he would kind of feed it to us in these sessions where we'd turn the lights off and turn on music and just start talking about history between us, and that worked.

And then we worked on scenes intensely. And I agree with Charlie, everything he said about acting. I think you have to kind of be open and talk about the whole thing. It's not just you and your character, it's the whole project. The movie's called "Gone" and it's with Amanda Seyfried. And then I'm doing something else I don't know if I can say yet. (Q): Who directed "Gone"?

Wes Bentley: A Brazilian director named Heitor Dhalia. Charlie Cox: I'm currently doing "Boardwalk Empire." It's great fun and it's interesting because I've only ever done theater and film before, so you get a script, you know what scenes you're in, you know what's required of you, I can tear up the script and make an arc and choose which moments I'm going to lose it. You can construct a performance. But on this show I got given two audition scenes and I had a brief conversation with one of the writers and he was like "This is what we're thinking."

And then as the show's gone on just every two weeks I'll get sides for the next episode and I'll be like "Oh okay, so this is what my character's like." I'm having to piece it together as we film it and it's actually in some ways very freeing, but in other ways it's like "Ooh, well if I'd have known that when I filmed episode two I wonder if I'd have done the same."

~End.

#some interesting stuff in here 👀✨ #Charlie talking about his theatre experience and the way its shaped him as an actor #reminds me of how the director of Stone of Destiny commented that Charlie never gives the same performance twice #and it makes SO much sense considering his theatre background and all the additional skills he learned through it #and of course there's also something to be said for the difference classical training in Britain makes vs acting in America #where so many American actors simply don't have the same level of technical skills...and it shows tbh most of the time #my random ramblings #charlie cox #josemaria escriva #wes bentley #there be dragons #interview

[reallunargift]

if you ever wonder about how I see county!Port and early kingdom!Port and his bratty ways, look no further than the first king

ok so i knew afonso henriques was excommunicated, but i needed to get a source for it and so i was reading this chronicle and not only did he get himself excommunicated twice in a row, he got the entire kingdom excommunicated, but he also chased (CHASED) the cardinal who had been sent by the pope, and gave him 4 months to get him a letter from the pope taking back the excommunication or else

also he robbed the cardinal of all his gold and silver and said it was his payment for all the fighting he was doing in the reconquista, and honestly? good for him. i mean yeah he kinda needed the pope’s acknowledgement for portugal to be a legitimate sovereign kingdom but also how dare the pope try to tell him what to do??

now, you might be wondering why he was excommunicated in the first place? and even if you’re not, I’m still gonna write it bc it’s funny and it’s interesting and

it’s because after defeating his mother in battle, Afonso imprisoned her and wouldn’t let her go, so she complained to the pope. and the pope was like “uhm that’s not very filial piety of this guy” and sent the bishop of Coimbra to tell Afonso to let his mum go. And Afonso was like “what does the pope have to do with me and my mother?” and refused to do it regardless of who told him to, and the bishop of Coimbra gathered all the clergymen in the town and excommunicated Afonso before leaving.

So Afonso, who was VERY offended by this, told the clergymen to find a new bishop. But they wouldn’t, so he told them fine I’ll do it myself!!! 

And he just found some guy and was like what’s your name? And the guy was called Martins, and his father was a Suleiman, so he’s probably of Moorish descent (in fact this is known as the legend of the black bishop), and Afonso was like are you a good clergyman? And Martins said yeah you won’t find a better one in all of the peninsula. So Afonso told him he was the Bishop now and to get ready to do mass. And Martins was like “but I’m not ordained as bishop” and Afonso was like “I’m ordaining you, now either do it or I’ll cut your head off.”

Anyway when the pope heard that Afonso had done this he thought he was a heretic and sent that cardinal above to teach him the faith. And when people heard this cardinal was coming, the nobles told Afonso, and his reply was, and this is verbatim from the chronic: “I still don’t regret it.”  

Afterwards the nobles informed him that every king whose land the cardinal had passed through had come out to kiss his hand. And Afonso, because he’s Afonso, said, and I am once again quoting this verbatim: “I don’t know of a Cardinal or a Pope who would come to Coimbra, and reach his hand out for me to kiss in my own house, whose arm I would not cut from the elbow with this sword, and from this he could not escape.”

The Cardinal was told about this, and then Afonso refused to come meet him, so already things were off to a bad start. Anyway the Cardinal went to meet Afonso instead, and Afonso asked him if he was bringing him anything? And if he wasn’t, then he could go on his way. 

So the Cardinal tells him he’s here to teach him the Faith, and Afonso is like “we know the faith as well here as in Rome, so we don’t need your services.” And then told him they could talk more tomorrow. Well the Cardinal didn’t wanna talk more, he got all his stuff ready for the trip back and at around midnight gathered all the clergymen and excommunicated Afonso again, and the entire land too this time, and then left. Brilliant.

(As an aside, the first dynasty had eight kings and five were excommunicated, and that is just... so funny to me.)

Well when Afonso found out the next morning he was pissed off, and immediately rode out after the Cardinal while everyone else rushed to follow lest he do Something Stupid. When he caught up with the Cardinal he was about to behead him right then and there when four of his men asked him not to do it because holy hell afonso this is literally a papal representative bro. And Afonso was like ok you’re right and let the Cardinal go but took his gold and silver and also his nephew until the letter from the pope arrived. And if the letter didn’t arrive in 4 months, he would cut the guy’s head off (there is a pattern here). Also the letter should say that neither Afonso nor Portugal would be excommunicated again while he lived (clearly it didn’t cover his descendants, as mentioned above)

Then Afonso sent a squire off to Rome to spy and keep him up to date, and the guy told him that the Cardinal did indeed tell the Pope, who was very pissed off about it, but anyway the papal letter arrived in the end and Afonso released the man’s nephew so

it worked out ok in the end

anyway, this was written in the 15th century, some 400 years after Afonso lived, so i have no idea which details are true, but it paints a very clear portrait of the man and his famous temper

#lunie blabbers #afonso henriques was the leader Port had been waiting for all his life and damn did he live up to expectations

[ciitedexcerpt]

All I need is a heart attack.

#lyrics #source : verbatim // mother mother #verbatim #mother mother #touch up

[annabolinas]

Hey y'all! So I'm currently revising my Taylor Swift Henry VIII jukebox musical (the first draft of which I posted here) and I was looking for some feedback from Tudorblr. Most of my feedback so far has came from people who don't know much about the period, so I was wondering what fans of the six wives think of the musical! The script, the playlist of the songs, a list of the liberties I took, and a feedback form to fill out are all linked below. Thanks so much, and I'd greatly appreciate your feedback!

#tudor era #henry viii #catherine of aragon #anne boleyn #jane seymour #anne of cleves #catherine howard #catherine parr #taylor swift #TS/H8 musical

[30-th-century-man]

hey logistically since i the one writing this post who doesn't normally post am an introject and my source has an irl drag mother do i have a drag mother by verbatim

[anendoandfriendo]

God damnit Shado.

(This was about, uh, April 21 in 2023 based on the screenshot data here.)

[Shado: The mother visited us today, mentioned the sister. So what did we do?

Of course, we sent way too many links and too.mhch reading. Which is funny. She says she'll read through all of it, so, we sent LB Lee's pages too since they do a good job sourcing.

We will make an academic ourlt (meant to be the word out) of the body's mother, apparently, by the end of this weekend.

But what we basically did was send a shitton of articles and papers and stuff to the body's mother. And then we vented about having to deal with a parent that tolerates ableism because she doesn't understand what "accepting everyone who they are," actually means.]

[Hailey_Idol: Yeah lol sksksks we literally just apologized to her because , I'm not kidding:

"I'm not trying to make you an academic but that's almost what's required at this point."

We're fine but we won't shit (meant to be the word shut) up until the sister either changes her mind or the mother understands what the intolerance of intolerance paradox actually means. XD]

It's like, she has her heart in the correct place but, you know, we did absolutely say, verbatim, "maybe of you're lucky...but chances are there will be a point where this comes to a head, and you will either have to tell the sister to fuck off or you will have to tell us to fuck off. We would think long and hard about which choice you will make," before promptly falling asleep.

[xtruss]

Joe Biden, Sr., revealed little about his tumultuous personal and business dealings with his cousin Bill Sheene, Jr.Photograph by Jamie Chung for The New Yorker / Source photograph courtesy Sheene family

The Untold History of the Biden Family

Relatively little has been known about the President’s father, whose story reveals a family’s fraught relationship with money, class, and alcohol.

— By Adam Entous | August 15, 2022 | A Reporter at Large, August 22, 2022 Issue

In 2019, I wrote a piece for this magazine about Hunter Biden, the younger son of the current President, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. Hunter, describing his childhood in Wilmington, Delaware, told me that after church his father would sometimes drive him and his brother, Beau, through wealthy neighborhoods, where they would sneak onto empty estates that were either abandoned or on the market. If the front door was locked, the boys’ father would hoist them through a second-floor window, and they would run downstairs and let him in. If a real-estate agent arrived when they were there, Biden, who at this point was a senator, would charm the agent into giving them a tour.

Hunter insisted that he grew up middle class, but his family lived on an estate of their own—a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion with a ballroom. (His father, on a tight budget, would close off large sections with drywall to save on heating costs.) “Even as a kid in high school I’d been seduced by real estate,” Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir, “Promises to Keep.” The fixation seemed anomalous, almost self-defeating, for someone who wanted to be known as Middle-Class Joe.

One of Biden’s skills as a politician is his ability to connect with working-class and middle-class Americans. In speeches, he often emphasizes his modest upbringing. “I grew up in a family where, if the price of food went up, you felt it,” he said in his 2022 State of the Union address.“I remember when my dad had to leave our home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to find work.” And yet the anecdotes I heard about Biden’s father, Joseph Robinette Biden, Sr., told a different story. He was working at a car dealership when his son was elected to the Senate, in 1972, but according to Jimmy Biden, one of the President’s younger brothers, his father’s idea of casual attire was a sport coat and an ascot. Biden, in his memoir, wrote about opening a closet and finding his father’s polo mallet, equestrian boots, riding breeches, and hunting pinks—items that suggested a past life of privilege. At one point, Biden, Sr., had a lot of money, but he lost it all, for reasons that went mostly unexplained. “I never asked him much about his life, and he didn’t offer,” Biden wrote.

On top of the family’s fraught relationship with class is a tragic history with alcohol. Hunter has had issues with drinking and substance abuse, which, along with his controversial business dealings, have been weaponized by his father’s political opponents. If Republicans take over the House of Representatives in November, they plan to hold more hearings focussed on Hunter.

The President considers alcoholism a kind of family curse. After growing up around hard-drinking relatives, he chose to abstain from alcohol. He also urged his siblings, and, later, his children, not to drink, although all of them eventually did—some in moderation, others to the point of addiction.

Relatively little has been written about the life of Biden, Sr., or about the Biden family’s history. The earliest and most detailed study is in Richard Ben Cramer’s 1992 book, “What It Takes,” a lengthy, character-driven account of the 1988 Presidential campaign. But Biden, Sr., wouldn’t speak with Cramer, and the journalist relied mostly on interviews with Jimmy Biden—who shared family stories he’d heard—and with Jean Biden, the President’s mother. When Joe Biden published “Promises to Keep,” he repeated many of the stories from Cramer’s book, some of them almost verbatim, with similar gaps.

Biden’s parents are no longer alive, and the President declined to speak with me for this article. I talked with his siblings, but they didn’t have much to share about the family’s past beyond what had already been published. “Dad wasn’t a big talker,” the President’s sister, Valerie, told me. When I asked Jimmy why their father hadn’t been more forthcoming, he said, “I think it’s akin to somebody who served in World War Two or Korea, and then came back and saw the atrocities. He was embarrassed.”

Cramer and Biden wrote that Biden, Sr., was close to a cousin—a man on his mother’s side of the family—who is identified in both books as Bill Sheen, Jr. The cousins were the best men at each other’s weddings, and they were in business together during the Second World War. I tried to track down the Sheens but was unsuccessful. I finally understood why after I visited Loudon Park Funeral Home and Cemetery, in Baltimore, to see the graves of the President’s grandparents Joseph Harry and Mary Elizabeth Biden. At the family plot, I noticed a grave marker: “William E. Sheene, Jr., 1914-1969.” Cramer and Biden had both misspelled the Sheene family’s last name, and subsequent authors had repeated the mistake. Using the correct spelling, I was able to find Bill Sheene III, Sheene, Jr.,’s son, who was living at an R.V. park in Fort Myers, Florida. He told me that I was the first reporter to contact him about the Bidens.

“I can visualize everything,” he said in the fall of 2020, describing his father’s Long Island mansion, where Biden’s parents were a constant presence. He provided details that helped me piece together a more complete story of the Bidens’ financial rise and collapse. He said that his parents had hinted at business improprieties—his mother would make references to the family’s wartime “blood money,” and his father was paranoid about being followed by the I.R.S. He also talked about his father and grandfather’s mobbed-up business partner, Arthur Briscoe, who worked closely with Biden, Sr.

With the help of genealogists, I found more information in documents stored at various institutions, including state and federal archives, courthouses, universities, and a mental hospital. Ultimately, I discovered that the story the Bidens had told the public was woefully incomplete, possibly because Biden, Sr., had never shared the full version with his children. “They just want to forget everything,” Sheene III told me. “New chapter.”

Joseph Robinette Biden, Sr., was born in Baltimore in 1915. As a child, he contracted Sydenham’s chorea, a neurological disorder that causes muscle spasms, which kept him out of school for many months. His father, Joseph Harry Biden, unwilling to leave his son at home, began taking him to work every day, and the two became very close. Joseph Harry worked at the American Oil Company, which later became known as Amoco. He was one of the first three employees hired by Amoco’s founder, Louis Blaustein. In its early days, the company delivered kerosene, transporting it in a steel tank that was mounted on a horse-drawn wagon. Joseph Harry was photographed next to the wagon, and Amoco used the image in its advertisements. Internally, employees would reference the “Joe Biden tank wagon,” and Joseph Harry became Amoco’s poster child. After starting out as a low-paid plant clerk, he moved to a sales job, and in the nineteen-twenties he was tapped to manage a new branch in Wilmington. Amoco’s in-house magazine touted him as a model employee: “Mr. Biden’s record of seventeen years offers a perfect example of a man who has grown with his company.”

In 1930, when Biden, Sr., was fourteen, his father was at the peak of his career. After receiving another promotion, Joseph Harry bought a duplex, the Biden family’s first house. But he soon fell into debt: in 1934, after he failed to keep up with tax payments, the house was sold at a public auction. That same year, he was demoted and sent to a branch in Scranton.

“My father used to have an expression,” Joe Biden said at an event earlier this year. “He’d say, ‘Joey, a job is a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about your place in your community.’ ” In Scranton, the President’s grandfather went from being Amoco’s poster child to feeling like he was unwanted at the company. According to Amoco’s internal memos, one of Joseph Harry’s bosses told him that the Scranton branch “would never amount to anything,” and another complained that he was overpaid. According to a colleague, Joseph Harry felt like “his check is always handed to him in a way that makes [him] feel he is stealing it.” He was in “constant worry” of being relocated again or getting fired altogether.

In the thirties, Amoco’s magazine published a photograph of Joseph Harry. He is wearing a straw-brimmed hat, which casts a shadow over his eyes, and his face is gaunt, his lips narrow. He looks a lot like his great-grandson Hunter, when Hunter was in the throes of his addictions. (I showed the photograph to Hunter, who had never seen a picture of Joseph Harry, and he was taken aback by the resemblance.) According to Jimmy, who recounted stories that he’d heard from Biden, Sr., Joseph Harry began drinking heavily after his career took a turn for the worse. When Biden, Sr., was a teen-ager, his mother, Mary, would send him to the local gin mill to retrieve his intoxicated father. I couldn’t find concrete evidence of Joseph Harry having a drinking problem, but divorce records describe his father, George T. Biden, drunkenly abusing Joseph Harry’s mother and sister before walking out on them, in 1912.

When Biden, Sr., got to Scranton, he met Catherine Eugenia (Jean) Finnegan, his future wife. He graduated from high school and took a job at Amoco, despite his father’s troubles there. In 1937, Louis Blaustein died. After that, Joseph Harry said, there was “no warmth in the organization.” He later went with Biden, Sr., to the office of Louis’s son, Jacob, who had co-founded Amoco with his father. Jacob was away, but his secretary recorded a memorandum of what the Bidens said. Joseph Harry, she wrote, had “gotten to a point where he cannot stand it any longer.” He wanted to leave his job in Scranton and go into business with his sons—Biden, Sr., and Frank—selling Amoco products on commission. The Bidens would still be tied to the company, but they would be their own bosses. “By having the boys with him, he can train them in the work and leave them a heritage,” the secretary wrote. Joseph Harry wanted Jacob Blaustein’s blessing. He pleaded with the secretary to find time on her boss’s schedule—“just for fifteen minutes to talk it over.” But she was noncommittal, explaining that Jacob was “busier than ever these days.”

Joseph Harry never went into business with his sons. He was still working at Amoco in 1941, when he had a cerebral hemorrhage and died, at the age of forty-eight. Amoco, in recognition of his long career and the company’s use of his image “in all sorts of advertising,” decided to pay his widow a year’s worth of his salary—about four thousand dollars—in monthly installments, spaced out over three years. (The payments stopped after Mary died, in 1943.) It was clearer than ever that there was no future for the Bidens at Amoco. Biden, Sr., needed to find a new job. Frank had joined the Army, and, with him away and Joseph Harry dead, there was only one person in the family Biden, Sr., could turn to.

One of the most influential figures in Biden, Sr.,’s life was Bill Sheene, Sr., his uncle and godfather, who was married to Mary’s sister, Alice. The Sheenes lived in Baltimore, and they had a son, Bill Sheene, Jr., who was about a year older than Biden, Sr. The cousins were inseparable, and Sheene, Sr., treated his nephew like another son. Sheene, Sr., was intelligent and ambitious. He was also stubborn and sensitive to slights. At fifteen, he sued a music hall that kicked him out of a vaudeville performance for showing up underdressed. He sought a thousand dollars in damages, citing the “public indignity, insult, and humiliation” that he’d endured, but the music hall was ordered to pay him just twenty-six cents: the price of the original twenty-five-cent ticket, plus a penny for his trouble.

Over the years, Sheene, Sr., became a successful businessman. When the United States entered the First World War, he was working in roofing, and he won war contracts—as one newspaper put it, a “$1,000,000 job from Uncle Sam.” He got two big contracts to lay asphalt roofs on Army supply warehouses in Norfolk, Virginia. The Army wanted the roofs finished quickly, to expedite the delivery of critical supplies to American troops in Europe. But Sheene, Sr., resisted pressure from Army officers to “do everything that he possibly could to hurry his work,” knowing that he would make less money on the contracts if he expended more resources to fulfill them. The job wasn’t completed until the summer of 1919—more than six months after the signing of the Armistice. Later, at a hearing with a contract review board, Sheene, Sr., was unapologetic.“In executing a roofing contract, the incentive for doing it, in the first place, is to make a profit,” he said. The board slammed him for “looking at what was more profitable than what was proper.”

Not long after the war, Sheene, Sr.,’s mother died. He came up with a business idea after attending her funeral. Instead of building waterproof roofs, as he’d done in the past, he would build waterproof grave vaults, using a mixture of asphalt and materials such as sand and limestone dust. One day, when travelling on a steamboat between Baltimore and Norfolk, he met a purser named Arthur Briscoe. According to interviews that Briscoe gave years later, the two men got to talking, and Sheene, Sr., described his business idea. Unbeknownst to Sheene, Sr., Briscoe was a bootlegger who bought cases of whiskey in “wet” Maryland and sold them for double the price in “dry” Virginia. Briscoe also came from an old-money family with a history of alcoholism and mental illness. When Briscoe was a teen-ager, his father was temporarily committed to the Springfield State Hospital for the Insane, in Maryland. Briscoe himself would later spend time there, receiving a diagnosis of “psychopathic personality.”

A few days after the conversation on the ship, Briscoe said, he showed up at the Sheenes’ home in Baltimore with thousands of dollars in cash. “Where the hell did you get this kind of money?” Sheene, Sr., asked.

“Don’t ask questions,” Briscoe replied. “Now, when do we go into business?”

Soon the Asphalt Grave Vault Company was born. An advertisement from 1924 claimed that the company’s vaults remained “absolutely waterproof, air-tight and moisture-proof for hundreds of years.” Sheene, Sr., and Briscoe later said that they sold more than eighteen thousand grave vaults in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Two of those vaults, they said, were used to inter Presidents William Howard Taft and Warren G. Harding. The company brought in as much as a hundred thousand dollars a year, the equivalent of nearly two million dollars today.

The Sheenes began to live lavishly, and Biden, Sr., benefitted from their newfound wealth. After his family left Baltimore, he returned during the summer months to stay with the Sheenes. He began leading something of a double life: in Wilmington and, later, in Scranton, he lived modestly—the purse strings drawn tight by his bitter, cash-strapped father—but in Baltimore he lived large, bankrolled by his spendthrift uncle. Every few years, Biden wrote, Sheene, Sr., bought new Cadillacs for himself and his son, and for Biden, Sr., he bought a Buick roadster. There were also horses, airplanes, and yachts. According to Sheene III, Biden, Sr., and Sheene, Jr., were allowed to participate in fox hunts in Maryland’s countryside because of their lineage. (The Robinettes traced their roots from England to the Pennsylvania Colony.) “We were aristocrats,” Sheene III told me.

Biden, Sr.,’s country-squire tastes caused tension with his soon-to-be in-laws, the Finnegans, a well-educated family of modest means. Jean’s father had a “bit of a chip on his Irish shoulder about the Scranton elite,” Biden wrote. Jean’s brothers ridiculed Biden, Sr., who, Cramer wrote, “talked about golf, shooting skeet, jumping horses, and racing cars that no one had ever seen.” One brother, Biden wrote, would tell him that the “Bidens have money,” but the “Finnegans have education.” Despite her family’s reservations, Jean married Biden, Sr., in 1941, a few months before Joseph Harry died.

Joseph Harry’s drinking problems were only whispered about within the family, but there was nothing subtle or private about Sheene, Sr.,’s erratic behavior, which was the subject of court hearings and newspaper headlines. He was a philanderer, a gambler, and an alcoholic whose binges could last for two or three weeks. In alimony proceedings, his wife alleged that when he was drunk he would treat her “with great harshness and brutality,” and that on one occasion he beat her “severely.” And his grave-vault business wasn’t what it seemed. By early 1941, the Federal Trade Commission had accused him of deceiving customers with false claims: the vaults were, in fact, neither “waterproof” nor “air-tight.” Some of them didn’t even contain asphalt.

By the end of that year, Sheene, Sr., had his sights set on his next big project. America’s entry into the Second World War was fast approaching, and he had plans to get back into the war-contracting business, this time with Briscoe and Sheene, Jr., as his partners. Biden, Sr., would be their No. 1 employee.

This next big project was “plastic armor.” During the war, steel was in short supply, and the Navy began protecting its cargo ships with an asphalt-like substance. (When hot, the substance was pliable, like plastic—hence the name.) The Navy needed contractors to make plastic armor, and Sheene, Sr., and Briscoe jumped at the opportunity. “We have the largest Asphalt Plant for this kind of work in this part of the country and are qualified to handle any size contracts,” Briscoe wrote, in a letter to the Navy Department’s Bureau of Ships, in March of 1942.

But the guidelines for how to make plastic armor were classified, and contractors had to undergo a background check. The Office of Naval Intelligence launched an investigation into Sheene, Sr.,’s company, looking for “any additional information” that would help it determine “the advisability of turning over classified specifications to this firm.” There was plenty of disqualifying information to be found: Army records and hearing transcripts related to Sheene, Sr.,’s First World War contracts; the Asphalt Grave Vault Company’s settlement with the F.T.C.; and evidence of Sheene, Sr.,’s and Briscoe’s volatility, including an arrest report from 1935, after Sheene, Sr., assaulted two police officers, and patient records from Briscoe’s time at the mental hospital. But there was a war on, and the Navy told its investigators to complete their research “as soon as practicable.” Shortly afterward, the Sheenes received permission to manufacture plastic armor.

The business operated out of Baltimore and Brooklyn. Sheene, Sr., stayed in Baltimore to run a factory that manufactured plastic armor and shipped the slabs to Brooklyn. Briscoe and Sheene, Jr., set up shop in a warehouse near the Brooklyn Army base, where they oversaw a crew of men who attached the armor to ships. There were initially only four employees, including Biden, Sr. At least two of the men he worked with had attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with Briscoe in Baltimore. In June of 1942, Biden, Sr., helped equip three vessels with plastic armor. The work was time-consuming, difficult, and sometimes dangerous, in part because the armor needed to be applied at an extremely hot temperature. By August, Biden, Sr.,’s salary was a hundred dollars a week. At twenty-six, after working for the Sheenes for barely two months, he was earning more than his father had after twenty-nine years at Amoco.

In the company’s first seven months of operation, it netted more than five hundred and sixty thousand dollars (more than nine million dollars today). But in early 1943, when Briscoe surveyed the ships that still needed plastic armor, he realized that “there was very little work on them to be done,” and that it might be time to find a new revenue stream. The men started another venture, which would offer welding and repair services at shipyards, using many of their plastic-armor employees. They also opened a division in Boston and put Biden, Sr., in charge of it.

Biden, Sr., was someone the partners could rely on to deal with thorny legal and labor problems. (In at least one lawsuit, the Sheenes and Briscoe gave him power of attorney.) He worked closely with Briscoe, who helped manage the operations of both the plastic-armor and the welding-and-repair outfits. Biden, Sr., had known Briscoe since childhood—Briscoe and his uncle were close, and his uncle had been the best man at Briscoe’s first wedding—but working under Briscoe couldn’t have been easy. Briscoe’s relatives said that he was charismatic; Sheene III said, “He was a scary guy.” Briscoe’s first wife divorced him for impotence, and he later married a woman in Baltimore named Alpha. He then began a relationship with an actress in New York named Marie Gaffney, who had connections to the Mob. During Briscoe’s tryst with Gaffney, Alpha was scalded to death in a bathtub. There was no autopsy, and the death was declared an accident. (“They couldn’t pin anything on him,” Sheene III said.) Three months later, Briscoe married Gaffney.

The new venture, called the Maritime Welding & Repair Company, grew to hundreds of employees, and Briscoe and Biden, Sr., faced frequent pressure from the maritime unions, which wanted to organize their workforce. Early on, Biden, Sr., had represented management in a unionization vote, which failed. But the efforts didn’t stop there. In interviews, Briscoe said he’d learned that Albert Anastasia, one of the notorious racketeers of Murder, Inc., had attempted to unionize Maritime’s workers. Briscoe, on Gaffney’s recommendation, contacted Frank Costello, the so-called Prime Minister of the Underworld, after employees started picketing. “Frank, what’ll it take to break this strike?” Briscoe recalled asking Costello. According to Briscoe, Costello replied, “Well, we might have to break a few heads.” Briscoe later said that he paid Costello to keep the unions in line, and that, to keep his men happy, he paid them “more than the union help was making.” Within a few days, the picket lines were gone, although the company’s troubles were only beginning.

Financially, the businesses were thriving. Sheene III said his father told him that the partners kept between three hundred thousand and four hundred thousand dollars of petty cash in the Brooklyn safe alone. Briscoe and the Sheenes used their profits to buy estates and to hire chauffeurs to drive them around in Cadillac and Rolls-Royce limousines. Biden, Sr., didn’t have nearly as much money as the Sheenes or Briscoe did. But, as Valerie Biden wrote in her recent memoir, the family “had more money than ever before.” In Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, they bought a Dutch Colonial house—the grandest home they’d ever own. They also splurged on fur coats and fine china. Biden, Sr.,’s status as a war contractor gave him clout with the nation’s airlines, and, according to Cramer, “that meant he could bump a general, if Jean fancied a weekend in Scranton”—assuming the Bidens were flying commercial. Biden wrote in his memoir about the joyrides that his father and Sheene, Jr., would take in the Sheenes’ planes, piloting them “up and down the eastern seaboard” and then “over to the Adirondacks to hunt elk.”

Documents link Biden, Sr., to an excursion on his cousin’s thirty-nine-foot yacht, which later became the subject of an insurance-fraud case. During his deposition, Sheene, Jr., was asked to confirm that Biden, Sr., and two unmarried women were with him on the boat, and his lawyer advised him not to answer. Sheene, Jr., said the yacht had caught fire soon after he took it out. “I tried to put it out,” he said. “I saw other boats, and tried to hail them for help, but they wouldn’t come near.” He turned toward Jones Beach and abandoned ship. “The only thing I could do was stand on the shore and watch it burn up,” he said.

The Sheenes and Briscoe were initially in good standing with the government, which, in February of 1943, had deemed the company’s billing rates for the plastic-armor operation “equitable” and its financial condition “satisfactory.” Then the partners opened Maritime. President Roosevelt had capped prices and wages during the war, in order to prevent inflation. But Maritime padded its welders’ pay by factoring in extra hours. As a result, the company’s welders made roughly twenty per cent more per hour than welders at competing contractors did.

On at least two occasions, Briscoe was approached by managers at the shipyards, who asked him to lower his workers’ salaries in order to keep the peace. But he refused—possibly because his higher pay rates were slowing down unionization efforts. The pay disparity became a major source of tension, and the Navy got wind of it. “A critical situation has developed in the shipyards,” a representative from the National War Labor Board wrote in the summer of 1943, ordering an investigation. Briscoe refused to hand over Maritime’s payroll records, but investigators determined that the company had paid at least four hundred thousand dollars in illegal salaries (more than seven million dollars today). The partners, faced with devastating fines, reached a settlement with the board. They agreed to pay a much smaller penalty fee in exchange for abiding by the wage rules moving forward and lobbying other welding contractors to do the same. But the board, which wanted to make an example of Maritime, still issued a damning press release, stating that Maritime’s “tardy cooperation could not completely offset the evils which the Company’s past wage practices created.” The partners emerged with their fortunes mostly intact but their reputations in shambles.

The stage was set for another investigation. War contractors were expected to limit their profits, and in the middle of the war the average profit on a naval contract was about eight per cent. The Maritime Commission began looking into whether the Sheenes and Briscoe might have taken a larger cut, and it found that, on average, the men’s businesses made a twenty-three-per-cent profit. In the case of the Asphalt Grave Vault Company, which was part of the plastic-armor outfit, the pretax profit was an egregious forty-eight per cent.

Briscoe argued that the partners were entitled to the profits—on top of their salaries—because they had stopped selling grave vaults in order to manufacture plastic armor in the country’s time of need. Back when the men were selling vaults, they’d taken a forty-per-cent profit. But the commission was unmoved. The partners were asked to return two-thirds of their profits to the government—about half a million dollars, the equivalent of some eight million dollars today.

Biden, Sr., had been the second-highest-paid employee at the plastic-armor outfit, and he was a division manager at Maritime, but he wasn’t a partner in either business. The documents I found didn’t indicate that the government tried to rescind his earnings, although some of the records from this period were impossible to obtain, including a lawsuit with depositions, which was destroyed in a courthouse fire.

Still, after the war, Biden’s parents “lost everything they had built,” as the President later put it. Biden, Sr., told his children that he’d tried to go into business with a friend in Boston, but the friend ran off with the money and Biden, Sr., declined to press charges. I couldn’t find records of any such partnership, however, and it’s unclear whether the story is simply family lore.

In November, 1945, shortly before the birth of Valerie, their second child, Biden, Sr., and Jean sold the house in Newton. The family ended up in Old Westbury, Long Island, where Sheene, Jr., owned a mansion that, according to a 1945 item in the Times, had twenty rooms, a garage with chauffeur’s quarters, stables, a squash court, and a tennis court. Sheene III said that his father continued to live like Jay Gatsby, even as billing notices from the government arrived. If he wasn’t out drinking on his new yacht, then he was hosting boozy gatherings at home, where he would play the piano or the banjo for his guests. “The Bidens were the life of the party,” Sheene III recalled. “Everybody liked Joe,” he added, referring to Biden, Sr. “He was always smiling, laughing, a jokester.” In the morning, while the adults were sleeping off their hangovers, the children would go downstairs and taste the leftover alcohol. “We’d go around draining the glasses,” Sheene III told me. “I was just a baby, four or five.”

At one party, Sheene III was introduced to a stunt pilot named Ken Tyler, who was good friends with both Sheene, Jr., and Biden, Sr. “He was a character,” Sheene III recalled. Tyler, a Canadian Royal Air Force instructor during the Second World War, had been court-martialled for reckless flying. He ran a crop-dusting service that operated out of Fitzmaurice Field, an airstrip on Long Island, and Sheene, Jr., and Biden, Sr., went into business with him. (According to Cramer, they received some financial help from Sheene, Sr., who, like his son, was dodging bills from the government.) In newspaper articles, Biden, Sr., is described alternately as Tyler Flight Service’s general manager and as its vice-president; an airport directory lists him as the manager of Fitzmaurice Field. At the New York Aviation Show, Biden, Sr., announced that Tyler Flight Service handled more contracts for mosquito control than any other aviation company in the country did.

In the fall of 1946, the Biden family moved to a two-story house in Garden City, close to Old Westbury. Jean began to sour on the family’s life in Long Island. According to Cramer, she had been opposed to the crop-dusting business, and she resented Sheene, Jr., for “drinking the company dry” while Biden, Sr., “humped all over the Island, drumming the farmers for jobs.” Jimmy said that his mother was worried about the influence that Sheene, Jr., had on his father: “She thought that the Sheenes would draw out every negative impulse that Dad had.” For many years, Sheene, Jr., had been cheating on his wife, Marie, a close friend of Jean’s. Marie finally left him, taking the kids with her, and in the summer of 1947 Sheene, Jr., sold the Old Westbury estate. Then he temporarily moved in with his cousin.

One evening, as a drunken prank, Sheene, Jr., set off a fire alarm near the Bidens’ home, causing a commotion. Newsday published an article about the incident, which described Sheene, Jr., as “the owner of an airplane or two, a yacht and sundry other playthings,” and gave the Bidens’ address as his residence. Later, Sheene, Jr., told his son that Biden, Sr., had been part of the prank. “When they were together, they were drinking all the time,” Sheene III said. “Jean was probably worried that her husband would end up in jail.” (According to Cramer, Jean went to live with her family in Scranton during this period.)

The crop-dusting business was short-lived. There are varying accounts of what led to its demise: Sheene III said that his father bought an airport in Buffalo, where planes were grounded in a snowstorm, preventing the company from fulfilling its contracts; Sheene III’s stepsister said she’d heard that a drought killed all the crops. Regardless, the Bidens were left with nothing. They sold the house in Garden City, and had no option but to move in with Jean’s family. “By the time I was ready to start school,” Biden wrote in his memoir, “we were back in Scranton—and broke.”

It was a humiliating arrangement for Biden, Sr. “The Finnegan boys used to be pretty hard on him when he was making money, but they didn’t let up when he’d lost it,” Biden wrote. And yet there may have been another reason that Biden, Sr., was so uncomfortable in the Finnegans’ home. In May, 1944, the month that the National War Labor Board went after the Sheenes, Jean’s brother Ambrose Finnegan, Jr., a second lieutenant in the Army Air Force, died in a plane crash in the Bismarck Sea, en route to a village that the Allies had seized from Japan. As the Finnegan side of the family made the ultimate sacrifice, the Biden side was making money from a business that was later called “an unstabilizing influence in one of our country’s most vital war industries.”

Biden, Sr., struggled to find work in Scranton. His brother suggested that he look for a job in Wilmington, a place that they knew well. Biden, Sr., took his advice, and got work cleaning boilers for a heating-and-cooling company. To make extra money, he worked at a weekend farmers’ market selling pennants and other knickknacks. This was hard for him to stomach—a few years earlier, he had been running an entire division of a war-contracting company, with many employees answering to him. But, even though it was a meagre living, the Bidens no longer had to depend on the Sheenes. In a story that Biden later recounted, one day Jean visited the farmers’ market and told her husband, “I’ve never been more proud of you.”

Not that her husband had disavowed the Sheenes. Even though Jean clearly detested Sheene, Jr., in November of 1953, she and Biden, Sr., named their fourth child in part after him. “I didn’t know Uncle Bill very well, but they gave me his name for my middle name—I’m Francis William Biden,” Frank said. “That’s how close my father was to Bill Sheene.”

Biden, Sr., eventually got a job at a car dealership, and the family moved to Mayfield, a suburb of Wilmington. “I always had a sense my dad didn’t quite fit in Mayfield,” Biden wrote in his memoir. At the dealership, Biden, Sr., was the only employee who wore a suit, a silk tie, and a pocket square—folded to four crisp points. Slowly, his children learned more about his past. “We each had our individual journey to understanding our father,” Frank said.

Of the four siblings, Jimmy knew the most about his father; he asked more questions than the others. One day, he said, when he was a boy, his father drove him to a small airport near Wilmington, pointed to a Piper Cub airplane on the tarmac, and told his son to climb into the passenger seat. To Jimmy’s surprise, his father took the controls, and soon they were airborne. After circling the family’s house in Mayfield, Biden, Sr., landed the plane. “This is between me and you,” Jimmy recalled his father saying. “Never tell anyone about this.”

Frank said that his epiphany about his father’s “background as a patrician” came later. For years, a picture of a horse had hung behind Biden, Sr.,’s recliner. One day, Frank asked about it, and his father replied, “That’s Obe.” Biden, Sr., proceeded to tell him about the horse—a jumper named Obadiah—which he had kept in the stables of his cousin’s estate in Old Westbury.

Sometimes Biden, Sr., would take his family on drives through wealthier neighborhoods, and he seemed to admire the estates they passed. “He felt that we should have been in there, and that what he was doing was something less than he wanted to do for us,” Jimmy said. “We never felt poor,” Jimmy went on. “We never felt like we were deprived.” And yet their father seemed ashamed of their comfortable middle-class existence. Later, when Biden became a senator, his father insisted on leaving the car dealership. “This is an embarrassment,” Jimmy recalled Biden, Sr., saying. “I can’t be in the car business.” He became a real-estate broker.

As Biden, Sr., tried to adjust to a middle-class life style, the Sheenes spent the late nineteen-forties and early fifties trying to restore their fortune. After the war, Briscoe, on the other hand, still had his estate, a chauffeur, and a housekeeper. (Years later, he would brag about how he had outsmarted the I.R.S. by buying his estate in his mother’s name.) The Sheenes sued Briscoe, alleging that he had siphoned money off their partnership. “He is the only one who made out like a bandit,” Sheene III told me. But Briscoe and his wife, Marie Gaffney, failed to show up in court. The local sheriff visited their estate and found Briscoe lying down, “inebriated.” A bedroom was locked from the inside, and when the sheriff forced it open he found Gaffney, who had been dead for about a week. According to the medical examiner, her body was “so decomposed that it was impossible to determine an anatomical cause of death.” Afterward, Briscoe filed a motion to dismiss the Sheenes’ lawsuit, claiming that it was “impossible to produce material witnesses because of death.” The suit went nowhere.

In 1950, Sheene, Jr.,’s mother, Alice, took Sheene, Sr., to court. The two had long been separated, and Alice accused Sheene, Sr., of failing to provide her with financial support. On the day of his deposition, Sheene, Sr., was unemployed and living with his sister. He claimed to have only two dollars to his name. Over the years, he’d given his son a hundred and fifty thousand dollars (roughly two million dollars today), for numerous ventures. Asked in court if he expected to be paid back, Sheene, Sr., said, “You can’t get blood out of a turnip. He hasn’t got a dime.”

“How do you expect your wife to live?” Alice’s lawyer asked. There was a long silence. “Did you hear the question?”

“I am trying to think of an answer,” Sheene, Sr., said. “I don’t know.”

After the deposition, the I.R.S. went after Sheene, Sr., Sheene, Jr., and Briscoe for back taxes. (Together, they owed the modern equivalent of some three million dollars.) Unable to rely on her ex-husband or her son, Alice moved close to Biden, Sr., her nephew and godson. She rented a room in a house a couple of miles away. Jean put up with the arrangement, knowing that Alice was like a second mother to Biden, Sr. “My mother would pick her up every morning and take her to our house, where she sat on the left-hand side of the couch all day,” Valerie recalled. “Then, after dinner, my mom brought her home.” Eventually, Alice began helping Jean with household chores, ironing the white shirts that the Biden children wore to school. Joe Biden and his siblings called her Aunt Al.

For several months, Sheene, Jr., lived at the Bidens’ house in Mayfield, Valerie said. This was harder for Jean to accept. (“I wasn’t crazy about him either,” Valerie said, of Sheene, Jr.) His drinking had got worse—as Sheene III said, “He couldn’t get up in the morning and go to work without a shot.” After he moved out, he regularly returned to Mayfield to go out drinking with Biden, Sr., and, on occasion, to attend Biden family gatherings.

Toward the end of Sheene, Jr.,’s life, Biden, Sr., would visit him in Maryland. “My father would basically go down and minister to him, to let him know that he’s not alone in the world,” Frank said. In the spring of 1969, Biden, Sr., Sheene, Jr., and Sheene III spent the day fishing on the Chesapeake. Sheene III said that his father told him that Biden would be joining them. But Biden—whose wife, Neilia, had recently given birth to their first son—didn’t show up, Sheene III said, so the men set off without him.

Sheene, Jr.,’s doctor had told him that if he didn’t cut back on his drinking he would die. But the warning didn’t stop him that day. Sheene III remembered his father polishing off two or three bottles of wine by himself. When they ran out of wine, they switched to beer, and when they were done fishing Sheene, Jr., took them to a bar in Annapolis, where the men drank whiskey deep into the night. “Joe kept saying to him, ‘Slow down, Bill, slow down,’ ” Sheene III recalled. It was the last time that Sheene III saw his father alive. That April, at the age of fifty-four, Sheene, Jr., died, of cirrhosis of the liver. He was buried in Loudon Park Cemetery, a few feet from Joseph Harry and Mary Biden.

Sheene, Jr., left behind a few possessions, including a collection of old polo mallets, which Sheene III and Biden, Sr., divided between the two of them. One treasured item—an Omega watch, bearing Sheene, Jr.,’s initials, which he had received as a gift from Alice—went to Sheene III, but Biden, Sr., said that he wanted it. “I had never gotten anything from the man my whole life, so I told Joe, No. I was going to keep the watch,” Sheene III said. “I don’t know if he was offended by that. If he was, tough.”

Alice lived for another three years, remaining close to the Bidens until her death. The last family Thanksgiving she attended was at Biden’s house outside Wilmington. “We have a new baby up here; just a little over 2 weeks old; Neilia’s + Joey’s little girl, now they have two boys and this angel,” she wrote in a letter to her granddaughter Mary Jane, in 1971. The following July, she died, at the age of eighty-five.

Sheene III told me that Alice had a large, distinctive Bible with a big inlaid cross on it. When I showed him photographs of the Bible that Biden has used at all his swearing-in ceremonies—from when he first became a senator, in 1973, four months after Alice’s death, to his Presidential Inauguration, in 2021—Sheene III said, “Yeah. That’s it.”

On September 2, 2002, Biden, Sr., died, at the age of eighty-six. Later that day, his four children gathered at Biden’s house in Delaware, and Biden, being the eldest, was chosen to deliver the eulogy. But what would he say? There was still so much he didn’t know about his father. “It is beyond my power to sum up such a man, even when I have known him all of my life,” Biden said in the eulogy. He spoke about his father’s “magic smile” and “special touch,” describing him as “quintessentially Dad.” There were cryptic references to “polo ponies” and a “beautiful home,” and to Biden, Sr., returning, “penniless,” to Wilmington, where he lived a life “overcoming pain with grace, dignity, pride, and style—always style!”

All children are shaped by their parents. Joe Biden draws much of his public persona—his emphasis on his Irish roots and his middle-class background, his interest in politics and in public service—from the Finnegans. In “Promises to Keep,” Biden wrote that he partly modelled himself after his late uncle Ambrose Finnegan, Jr.: “I had a picture in my head of the sort of man I wanted to become, a picture filled in by my mom and dad, by the teachings of the Catholic schools I attended, by stories I heard about our family hero, Uncle Bosie, a pilot who was shot down in World War II.”

In other ways, Biden has been shaped by his father—a man he described, in his eulogy, as “a dreamer burdened with reality.” By the time Biden was twenty-eight, he was juggling three mortgages and a loan from his father-in-law. He eventually bought a former du Pont mansion—much like the ones that Biden, Sr., had coveted. Jimmy went even further, purchasing a sprawling Jacobean-style home, to which he later added an indoor basketball court, that gave the Sheene mansion in Old Westbury a run for its money. “Even if it was a stretch, they were going to do it,” Frank told me, of his brothers’ real-estate purchases. “It’s personal. It’s not a matter of show. It’s not how people on the outside look at me. It’s how I look at me.”

Hunter and Beau grew up conflicted about wealth—the old Biden-Finnegan divide. Beau dated Lilly Phipps, an heir to the Phipps family fortune. (Biden, Sr., who was still alive at the time, would sometimes ask about her great uncle, a polo champion with whom he had once played.) Meanwhile, Hunter dated Sissy Dent, a du Pont heir. But the boys were never comfortable with the idea of marrying rich—like their father, they took pride in being able to say that they were middle class—and the relationships didn’t last. Hunter later married Kathleen Buhle, who came from a working-class background. In a recent memoir, Buhle wrote about first seeing where Hunter lived. “A kid from a middle-class family does not have a ballroom,” she recalled telling him. (Hunter and Buhle divorced in 2017.)

If Biden got his love of mansions from his father, then it might have been his encounters with Sheene, Jr., and stories he heard about him, and about other alcoholic relatives, that turned him off alcohol. Even though Biden, Sr., and Jean watched alcoholism destroy the lives of the Sheenes, Arthur Briscoe, Joseph Harry, and one of Jean’s brothers, they didn’t discuss the dangers of drinking with their children. The only member of the family who talked about alcoholism was Biden. He told his siblings that he would give them each a hundred dollars if they didn’t drink before they turned twenty-one. “Joe, I believe, saw the ravages of alcoholism and what it had done in the extended family, and he didn’t want any of that visited upon us,” Frank told me. “Alcoholism is a genetic disease, but what has to happen is you have to trigger it, you have to light the kindling, you’ve got to fuel the flame to get that gene activated. I think Joe understood that.”

Valerie didn’t drink socially until after her twenty-first birthday: “I thought, Who needs this stuff? We weren’t righteous. I just didn’t want to deal with it.” Jimmy had his first drink when he was twenty-two. Years later, he noticed something: one day, he might have ten drinks and nothing would happen. Another day, he might have two sips and get drunk. Eventually, his mother noticed that he looked jaundiced. He went to the hospital, where he was given an I.V. to clear the alcohol out of his system. He said a doctor told him that he was allergic to alcohol, and that drinking could kill him. He hasn’t had a drink since.

Frank started drinking when he was in high school. Jean would call Jimmy at 2 a.m. and tell him to find his younger brother and bring him home. By the time Frank was in law school, he had become an alcoholic. For the next decade, he fought what he called a “horrific battle” to stay sober. He would relapse, go to rehab to dry out, and then the cycle would begin anew. At one point, he suffered delirium tremens, the most severe form of alcohol withdrawal. “I have lived and died my recovery,” he told me. “I mean, I have suffered the vagaries of fucking hell and come out the other side.”

In 1972, Biden’s first wife, Neilia, was driving with their three children when she got into an accident with a tractor trailer. Both Neilia and her infant daughter, Naomi, were killed. In the wake of the tragedy, Biden seized on rumors that the other driver was drunk, saying that he’d supposedly “drank his lunch” that day instead of eating it. But investigators determined that the tractor-trailer driver was sober, and years later Biden apologized to one of the driver’s daughters for repeating the false story.

Beau and Hunter were both hospitalized after the crash, though they made full recoveries. Later, their father encouraged them to abstain from drinking, and Beau took these warnings to heart. When he was young, his nickname was the Sheriff, because he followed the rules and was always in control. He didn’t touch alcohol until he turned twenty-one. He joined a fraternity at the University of Pennsylvania, but told his frat brothers that he wouldn’t drink. (He told at least one of them that he avoided drinking because his mother and sister had been killed by a drunk driver.) When he was in law school, he began to drink in moderation, but only in secret, because he didn’t want his father to know.

Beau drank more heavily in the winter of 2001, when he was based in Pristina, Kosovo, for the Justice Department. He was a regular at the Boom Boom Room, where the d.j.s mainly played American pop songs, and he would drink Jack Daniels with Coke. He developed an inflammatory disease known as ankylosing spondylitis when he was abroad, which made it difficult for him to walk, and after he left Pristina he cut back on his drinking.

Hunter was more rebellious than Beau, and he started drinking as a teen-ager, although he never drank in front of his father, either. His drinking worsened in 2002, when he was commuting between Wilmington and Washington for a lobbying job. He’d spend most afternoons at the Bombay Club, across the street from his office, where the bartender knew his name and had his favorite drink and a cigarette at the ready. He went to rehab for the first time in 2003, and when he got out Beau picked him up at the airport and took him to his first A.A. meeting. Over the years, he has had frequent relapses. In 2015, Beau died, and Hunter says that the following year he developed an addiction to crack cocaine. He has been sober since 2019.

After Biden was elected to the Senate, in 1972, Sheene III’s ex-wife, Trudy, and their daughter, Amy, would occasionally run into him in the Wilmington area. “I’d say, ‘Joe, it’s Trudy,’ ” she recalled. “He’d say, ‘Yeah, I know who you are.’ And that would sort of be it. There was no warmth at all.” She added, “The Bidens disowned the Sheenes.”

Like the Bidens, the Sheenes struggled with alcoholism through the generations. Mary Jane, Sheene, Jr.,’s daughter—and Biden, Sr.,’s goddaughter—drank herself to death. Sheene III also had a drinking problem for a time, though he cut back after getting into a drunken brawl at a family wedding. At one point, Sheene III had a modestly successful construction business. When a legal dispute with a larger company threatened to bankrupt him, he called Biden’s office and left a message with a staffer, asking his cousin to call him back. Sheene III wanted help, but Biden never returned the call. “I had a lot of respect for Joe,” he told me. “I didn’t hate him.” Although, he added, “I didn’t care for his politics, because I thought he was a wimp, and I still do.”

When “Promises to Keep,” was published, Amy Sheene photocopied the sections about the Sheenes and sent them to her father, Sheene III. “Some of that stuff isn’t even true,” he told her, after reading the passages. One of the more significant inaccuracies involved Sheene, Sr., whom Biden believed had died either during the Second World War or shortly afterward. When the crop-dusting business went bust, “Dad had nowhere to turn,” Biden wrote. “His own father and mother had both died. His uncle Bill Sheen was dead also.” When Alice died, her obituary noted that her husband had died in 1952. In fact, Sheene, Sr., lived for nearly two more decades. After the war, his drinking worsened, and he was committed to the Springfield State Hospital—the same institution that the Briscoes had been sent to decades earlier. According to Sheene, Sr.,’s confidential case file, when he arrived “he was confused, angry, delusional, and quickly lost his temper.” After being discharged and then recommitted, he died there in 1967. There was no funeral.

Biden probably didn’t know the details of Sheene, Sr.,’s death. Family stories get passed down from one generation to the next, like a game of telephone. Over time, the narrative is refined: heroes are made, shameful details are edited out, fables become facts. Biden, in his memoir, wrote that his uncle Bosie had been “shot down.” (The same phrasing was used in Valerie’s memoir.) But, according to another man, who was in the airplane at the time—the sole survivor of the accident—the plane got lost, ran out of fuel, and then crashed into the sea. The President’s uncle died in a tragic accident, not in combat.

Other people have been cut out of the story entirely. Arthur Briscoe didn’t make it into “Promises to Keep,” but Biden likely knew who he was; in 1978, Briscoe showed up at one of the senator’s events, and Biden signed a photograph for him, writing, “To Dad’s old friend Arthur. With best wishes.” There was also the misspelling of the Sheenes’ last name, a mistake that the Sheenes assumed had been made in bad faith. “That really pissed me off,” Sheene III told me. I asked him and Amy whether it was possible that the President didn’t know the correct spelling. “No,” Sheene III said, noting that Alice had practically lived with the Bidens for seventeen years. Amy agreed. “It has to be intentional,” she said. “For the families to be so close like that, how can you not know how to spell the name?”

Last fall, Sheene III stopped answering his phone. I flew to Florida and knocked on the door of his R.V., but he was too weak to let me in. I called 911, and an ambulance took him to a hospital, where doctors found a tumor on his pancreas. He declined treatment and instead went back home, where he waited for his life to end. Sheene III had told me, “I used to stop and think a lot, What in the world ever happened to all the money? And there was never anybody to explain it to me.” Our last conversation was on January 12, 2022. “I have found out more through you than anybody else,” he said. Five days later, he died. Trudy told me, “I’m so glad that Bill died of pancreatic cancer and not alcoholism. I feel like the chain was broken.”

Sheene III expected to be buried in the Robinette family plot at Loudon Park Cemetery. But when Amy discovered that it would cost more than thirty-five hundred dollars to inter his ashes there, she decided to make less costly arrangements. On June 6th, Amy and Trudy drove to the cemetery, where, in the back of Amy’s black S.U.V., Trudy used a measuring cup to transfer some of Sheene III’s ashes into a ziplock bag. The women carried the bag over to the Robinette plot. The grave of Joseph Harry and Mary Biden was in decent shape, but there was a deep hole under Sheene, Jr.,’s grave marker, which appeared to have been dug by a rodent.

“Do you think there are cameras around here?” Amy asked, wondering whether the impromptu ceremony might violate the cemetery’s rules.

“Well, that’s what you get for charging thirty-five hundred dollars,” Trudy replied.

“I’m just going to put it down the hole,” Amy said.

“Oh, God, if that thing comes running out,” Trudy said.

Amy began pouring out the ashes. “Be with your dad, Dad,” she said. Afterward, Trudy read a short poem, and then the women headed back to the car. Trudy wondered aloud whether the Bidens knew that Sheene III had died.

Amy shrugged. “They ended up in the White House,” she said. “We ended up in the trailer park.” ♦

— Published in the print edition of the August 22, 2022, The New Yorker Issue, with the headline “The Biden Inheritance.”