Category: Inspiration

The dictionary has multiple definitions of failure:

1. lack of success.
2. an unsuccessful person or thing.
3. the neglect or omission of expected or required action.
4. a lack or deficiency of a desirable quality.
5. the action or state of not functioning.
6. a sudden cessation of power.
7. the collapse of a business.

The definitions all deliver the impression of a finite conclusion rather than a step in a process. Failure equals being wrong. Being wrong equals death. As a result, failure has an obvious and deeply negative stigma associated with it. Hence most people fear failing.

In fact many people do not even attempt worthwhile projects for fear of failure. This has been commented upon by various motivational speakers as sad and lamentable but is a natural outcome of the way we are taught to think about failure – it is bad and to be avoided.

And it is a lot easier and very simple to say don’t fear failure than it is to spend the time necessary to change our thinking about it. So what is a better way to think of failure and how do we change our thinking about it?

I don’t know how true it is but I have heard that Edison failed 10,000 times to invent the light bulb before his success. Imagine if he took his first failure as an end point rather than a new starting point. In fact each failure could otherwise be described as a successful experiment to find out that a particular hypothesis did not work.

I was struck by this when I was doing some pullups in the park with 13 kg of weights on my back. I was doing my third set of 5 repetitions and on the last repetition I could not pull myself up more than 85% of my top range of motion. That was my point of failure. Despite my best effort, I could not pull my body up to get my nose over the bar. I “failed”.

Now, when you are exercising, this is something to aim for. Exercising with good form till you are close to failure (with some capacity left in reserve) builds strength and muscle mass.

At this point I realised every person doing resistance training “fails”. We all hit a point where we are at or close to where we can do no more. We are all “failures”, at different points. Some of us fail after 4 repetitions at 13 kg, as did I. Some of fail after 44 repetitions or with 50 kg. None of us stop training “because we failed”. We recognise it as a benchmark or a measure of progress rather than a destination. A “That’s where I am up to.” viewpoint rather than a “That is my end result.” viewpoint.

Which reminded me of a quote I heard about people who are successful marketers, “They fail fast and they fail often.” They try a lot of things, knowing that many ideas they try will fail and need to be abandoned quickly before wasting too much money on them. By doing that many times and quickly, they sooner or later and without too much wasted money, find that which works and can then do lots of that to huge success.

These top marketers know full well that a fear of failure will not lead to success.

They know that in marketing, as in exercising, it is very easy and natural to view failure as a marker, a peg in the board. A “This is where I am up to”.

What if we started doing that in other spheres of activity? What if every time we thought of something and got the negative thought come in about failing, we just looked at it and thought, “That’s only to be expected. Nothing unusual here. Any time I fail it is just another step toward the ultimate success.”

I heard the title of this article many moons ago now. In fact, about 50 years ago. That’s a half a century! Sheesh! Time flies when you’re having fun!

And that’s the trouble. We start out life thinking we have plenty of time. Which we do. But life is chock-a-block full of distractions and we get busy working to buy groceries and pay rent, going out socialising to have fun and to find a mate, then saving for a home, raising a family and before we know it, life is lived and we are looking at grown up grand children wondering, “Where did the time go?”

Well, it went on living. But was it the life we would have chosen if we knew then what we know now? Would we have done things differently if we could have known what was coming?

One way to know what will be the result of our actions is to be widely read, especially of people who research causes and effects, what causes generate what effects.

You may have heard the quote from Will Rogers, “Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”

IMHO you and I cannot live long enough to learn all we need to by our own observation and experience. School is supposed to be a shortcut so we can acquire the wisdom and good judgement from a lot of other people’s experience without having to go through a lot of pain from our own inexperienced poor judgement.

All too often, when school stops, so does many people’s intensive learning. Truthfully, many people’s intensive learning stops even prior to leaving school but the failings of the education system are a story for another post.

Probably the first skill that needs to be acquired in order to learn is the ability to face the subject without flinching away from it. In one subject I have studied extensively that ability is called the ability to confront – to face without flinching.

Most people do not want to be uncomfortable. I have read that most people would rather live a comfortable lie than live an uncomfortable truth.

I have also read people say, “Once you see something you cannot unsee it.”

So if seeing something makes a person uncomfortable then the fear of what one might see and learn has the effect of reducing their willingness to look.

Obviously the answer is to gradiently increase a person’s ability to comfortably confront what is really there until they arrive at a point where they can confront anything without flinching away from it. This is a high ability indeed!

If that interests you, contact me!

She could have lived a comfortable life.

Her father was a successful merchant. Her home in Rochester, New York was always full of books, music, and warmth. She had everything most people dreamed of.

But Lillian Wald walked away from all of it.

Not once. Not twice. Three times.

The first time, she was 16 years old – bright, determined, and full of ambition. She applied to Vassar College, one of the most respected women’s colleges in America. They rejected her. Not because she wasn’t smart enough. Simply because she was too young.

Most people would have taken that rejection personally. Lillian took it as extra time.

She spent six years traveling the world and even worked as a newspaper reporter. She was curious about everything. She was watching, learning, absorbing life.

Then, in 1889, she met a young nurse – and something shifted inside her. She enrolled at the New York Hospital Training School. She graduated in 1891. She was finally on her way.

The second time she walked away, it was from medical school.

After graduating as a nurse, she started teaching home nursing classes to poor immigrant families on New York’s Lower East Side – one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the entire world. Families of ten people crammed into apartments barely 325 square feet in size. Children sleeping in shifts. Parents working in dangerous conditions. Sickness everywhere.

One day, she was called to help a young girl’s sick mother living in a filthy, crumbling tenement. What she saw in that apartment changed her forever.

She left medical school the next day.

Not because she gave up. Because she couldn’t justify sitting in a classroom while real people were suffering just a few streets away.

She moved directly into the neighborhood.

In 1893, Lillian Wald did something no one had done before.

She created a new kind of healthcare worker – one who didn’t wait for the sick to come to a hospital. Instead, these nurses went into homes, into dark tenements, into the streets. She called them public health nurses. She literally invented that term.

And then, with her friend Mary Brewster and the support of generous donors, she founded the Visiting Nurse Service of New York – bringing affordable, dignified healthcare to people who had never received it before.

A year later, in 1894, she opened the Henry Street Settlement House – a place offering not just medical care, but education, community support, and belonging for thousands of immigrants trying to build a new life in America.

She helped establish some of the first playgrounds in New York City. She personally helped pay the salary of the first public school nurses in NYC history.

The third time Lillian walked away from comfort was perhaps the most powerful.

She could have run her Settlement House quietly – kept her head down, helped her neighbors, and stayed out of the bigger battles. But Lillian Wald understood something important,

Treating sickness wasn’t enough if the system creating the sickness was never changed.

So she fought.

She helped launch the United States Children’s Bureau, pushing for the rights and protection of children across the nation. She co-founded the National Child Labor Committee, working to end the cruel practice of sending young children to work in dangerous factories and mines. She helped build the National Women’s Trade Union League, giving working women a voice.

She marched for women’s right to vote. She advocated for women’s access to birth control. She fought for workplace safety laws that protected laborers from dangerous conditions.

And when the devastating Spanish Flu epidemic swept through America in 1918 – killing hundreds of thousands of people – Lillian Wald led the Red Cross campaign to fight it, coordinating care across the country.

By 1913, the Henry Street Settlement had grown to seven buildings. It had 3,000 active members in its classes and clubs. Ninety-two nurses were making approximately 200,000 home health visits every single year.

In 1922, the New York Times named Lillian Wald one of the 12 greatest living American women in the country.

She later received the Lincoln Medallion – awarded to outstanding citizens of New York – for a life poured entirely into others.

Lillian Wald retired in 1930 and passed away peacefully on September 1, 1940, at the age of 73.

At a memorial held at Carnegie Hall, 2,500 people gathered – including the Governor and the Mayor of New York – to speak about one woman who had refused to look the other way.

She never sought fame. She never asked for monuments. She simply saw people who were suffering, and she moved closer instead of further away.

The Henry Street Settlement still stands on the Lower East Side today – more than 130 years later. The Visiting Nurse Service of New York still operates, one of the largest home healthcare organizations in America.

All of it began because a young woman from Cincinnati looked into a dark, crowded tenement apartment and decided that what she saw there was her responsibility.

Not someone else’s. Hers.

That is the kind of person who actually changes the world. Not the loudest voice in the room. The one who quietly moves in, rolls up their sleeves, and stays.

We don’t need to be extraordinary to make a difference. We just need to refuse to look away.

Who in your life quietly shows up for others? Tag them below. They deserve to be seen.

“What day is it?” asked Pooh. “It’s today,” squeaked Piglet. “My favorite day,” said Pooh.” ― A.A. Milne

(Tom: Another story about a person who could look being ridiculed by “experts” who could not or would not look and the tough progress truth makes against stiff opposition.

Truth wins in the end.

You just need to be strong enough to outlast those who cannot or will not look.)

Lynn was born in 1938. Chicago Illinois. Jewish family. Smart kid. Really smart. Enters University of Chicago at 16. Younger than everyone. Doesn’t care.

Meets Carl Sagan. Future famous astronomer. Science nerds. Fall in love. Marry 1957. She’s 19. He’s 22.

Lynn gets masters 1960. Wisconsin. Then PhD 1965. Berkeley. Genetics. Cell biology. Has two kids with Carl. Dorion 1959. Jeremy 1960. Busy mom. Busy researcher.

Marriage falls apart 1964. Two brilliant scientists. Two big egos. Carl wants traditional wife. Lynn wants her own career. Doesn’t work.

1966 she gets first job. Boston University. Biology department. Age 28. Just starting out. Marries Nicholas Margulis. Takes his name.

She’s been thinking about cells for years. Something weird. Mitochondria especially. Little energy factories inside every cell. Keep us alive.

Mitochondria are weird. Have their own DNA. Separate from cell’s main DNA. Have their own ribosomes. Reproduce independently. Divide on their own schedule.

Mitochondria also look exactly like bacteria. Same shape. Same size. Same membranes. Same division method. Noticed since late 1800s. Nobody can explain it.

Russian biologist Konstantin Merezhkovsky wrote theory 1905. Maybe mitochondria used to BE bacteria. Got swallowed by ancient cells. Stuck around. Became part of cell. He got ridiculed. Theory forgotten 60 years.

Lynn rediscovered the idea. Takes it seriously. Connects the dots. Chloroplasts too. Green parts of plant cells. Also have own DNA. Also look exactly like bacteria.

She goes further. Proposes whole theory. Calls it endosymbiosis. Complex cells started simple. Then swallowed other cells. Some swallows became permanent. Those became organelles.

Every human cell contains descendants of ancient bacteria. Your mitochondria came from bacteria eaten billions of years ago. Still living inside you. Still making energy. Mind blowing.

Lynn writes it up. 1966. 50 page paper. “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells.”

Sends it to Science magazine. Biggest journal in America. Rejected. Too speculative. No direct evidence.

Sends it to Nature. Biggest journal in world. Rejected. Too weird. Too much theory.

Sends it to Cell. Rejected. Sends it to PNAS. Rejected. Sends it to Journal of Cell Biology. Rejected. Sends it everywhere. Rejected everywhere.

15 journals reject Lynn’s paper. Fifteen. Senior biologists think she’s crazy. Think she’s resurrecting debunked theory. Say mitochondria can’t be bacteria. Say evolution doesn’t work that way.

Lynn doesn’t stop. Keeps sending it. Keeps defending at conferences. Gets laughed at. Gets talked down to. Senior scientists lecture her about basic biology. Like she doesn’t know anything. Young woman. No credentials. Easy to dismiss.

Finally 1967 Journal of Theoretical Biology accepts it. Smaller journal. Less prestigious. But they publish it. Lynn is 29.

Response is devastating. Senior biologists mock the paper. Say she has no evidence. Say it’s pseudoscience. Say she’s embarrassing herself.

She goes to conferences. Gets heckled. Senior biologists interrupt her talks. Make fun of her ideas. Colleagues stop talking to her. Don’t want association with crazy theory lady.

Boston University almost denies tenure. She’s too controversial. Too unconventional. Department almost fires her. She nearly loses career over theory.

But Lynn keeps working. Keeps researching. Keeps pushing. Writes book 1970. “Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.” Expands theory. Yale University Press. Small print run.

Then things start changing. 1970s molecular biology advances fast. DNA analysis becomes possible. Scientists can compare genes. See how related they are.

Carl Woese at Illinois. Ford Doolittle at Dalhousie. Michael Gray. Several groups doing ribosomal RNA analysis.

What they find stuns everyone. Mitochondrial DNA is more similar to bacterial DNA than animal cell DNA. Chloroplast DNA almost identical to cyanobacteria DNA. Molecular evidence is unmistakable. These organelles really were bacteria.

1978 Robert Schwartz and Margaret Dayhoff do key experiment. First experimental proof. Prove mitochondria descended from specific bacteria. Alpha proteobacteria. Your mitochondria are domesticated typhus relatives.

By early 1980s endosymbiosis theory is widely accepted. Goes from crazy to mainstream in 15 years. Textbooks get rewritten. Biology courses change. Lynn was right all along.

Lynn is elected to National Academy of Sciences 1983. Age 45. Highest honor for American scientists. Vindication from peers.

She works with James Lovelock. He proposed Gaia Hypothesis. Earth is one living system. Lynn gives it biological credibility.

Moves to University of Massachusetts Amherst 1988. Distinguished Professor. Teaches until death. Students love her. Brilliant lecturer. Unconventional. Funny. Provocative.

1999 President Clinton gives her National Medal of Science. Highest science honor in America. Official recognition.

2008 Linnean Society gives her Darwin-Wallace Medal. Named after Darwin and Wallace. Lynn is in their company now.

Writes many books. Most with son Dorion Sagan. “Microcosmos” about bacterial history. “Five Kingdoms” about taxonomy. Millions of copies sold.

Argues with Richard Dawkins. Famous British biologist. Dawkins says genes compete. Lynn says cells cooperate. Different views of evolution. They debate for decades. Never agree.

November 22 2011. Age 73. Dies at home in Amherst Massachusetts. Hemorrhagic stroke. Five days in hospital. Surrounded by family. Peaceful. After most productive controversial career in modern biology.

Think about Lynn’s story. Young woman. Age 28. Just started career. Proposes theory contradicting 50 years of science. Says cells are built from swallowed bacteria. Science world laughs. 15 journals reject her.

One journal finally publishes. Senior scientists mock her at conferences. Colleagues stop talking. Nearly loses tenure. Career almost destroyed.

She keeps working. Keeps writing. Keeps teaching. Keeps fighting. Builds the case. Builds evidence. Refuses to give up.

Molecular biology catches up. DNA evidence confirms everything. By 1980s her theory is in every textbook. Every biology student learns endosymbiosis. Every human knows we have ancient bacteria in our cells.

Evolutionary biology changes completely. Before Margulis evolution was mainly competition. Mutation. Natural selection. Survival of fittest.

After Margulis people understand cooperation too. Different organisms can merge. Become new organisms. Symbiosis drives evolution.

Medical research changes too. Understanding mitochondrial DNA revolutionizes disease diagnosis. Mitochondrial diseases. Genetic testing. Ancestry testing. All possible because we understand mitochondrial heritage. All built on Margulis’s foundation.

Her papers still cited thousands of times yearly. 50 years after publication. That’s rare. Her landmark 1967 paper still foundational. Still required reading.

2017 biology community celebrates 50 year anniversary. Special journal issues. Conferences. Tributes. Scientists who rejected her now honor her.

She’s inducted into National Women’s Hall of Fame. Posthumously. Named in lists of greatest scientists. Her tenacity becomes legendary. Story told to young scientists. Shows them how to stand up for ideas.

Biologist proposes theory at 29. Says cells contain ancient bacteria. 15 journals reject her. Scientists call her crazy. Nearly loses job. Keeps fighting. DNA proves her right in 1980s. Now in every biology textbook. Changed evolutionary biology forever.

“Thus, the wise man looks into space, and does not regard the small as too little, nor the great as too much; for he knows that there is no limit to dimension.”
Chuang Tzu – Philosopher (369-286 BC)

She was 20 years old the day she watched a German soldier throw a baby into the air and shoot it.

She could have looked away. She could have decided that God did not exist, that the world was broken beyond repair, and that survival was the only thing left worth chasing.

Instead, Irena Gut made a decision.

People have a choice. Between good and evil — everyone has a choice. And I am going to make mine.

Irena had grown up in a Catholic family in Kozienice, Poland. She had been a nursing student when the war swallowed everything. By 1942, she had already survived things no person should survive — forced labor, physical collapse, conditions that stripped her to the bone. A German Wehrmacht major named Eduard Rügemer noticed her when she fell ill at a munitions factory. He spoke German. She spoke German. He moved her to lighter work in the kitchen of a hotel that served Nazi officers.

It wasn’t freedom. But it gave her access to food.

And the ghetto was nearby.

Irena began quietly taking food from the hotel and carrying it through streets where being caught meant execution — for her, and for anyone she was helping. She helped people slip out to hiding places in the forest. She moved through the occupation like a ghost with a purpose.

Then Rügemer told her he needed a housekeeper for a villa outside town. She accepted immediately.

She had 12 Jewish workers assigned to her laundry staff. She knew exactly what was coming for them. And when she walked through that villa preparing it for occupancy, she found something that stopped her cold — a mezuzah mark still pressed into the doorpost. This house had been built by a Jewish family. The basement connected to the laundry. There was a hidden space below.

Before Rügemer ever arrived, all 12 people were already living underneath his floor.

For months, they existed in two worlds — the world above, where a Nazi officer ran his household, and the world below, where 12 human beings breathed quietly in the dark. When Rügemer left, they came upstairs. They played piano. They sang. They played cards. When he returned, they disappeared again. Irena kept it all running — the food, the cover, the silence — on sheer will and nerve.

Then one of the women, Ida Haller, discovered she was pregnant.

A crying baby in a hidden basement was a risk of a completely different kind. Everyone understood this. No one said it out loud.

Irena told Ida to have the baby. She said she would find a way.

She found a way.

Then one evening Rügemer came home early.

He found them.

He stood in his own home, knowing everything — what had been happening beneath his roof, what the penalty was, what he now held in his hands. He looked at Irena. And then he made a decision of his own.

He would keep the secret. His condition: that she become his mistress.

Irena agreed.

She never fully explained to anyone what that cost her. Not what it was like to live in that house, manage that household, carry that arrangement alongside the daily weight of keeping 12 lives hidden below the floorboards. She carried it as a private wound for the rest of her life. The 12 people she was protecting never knew what she had given to keep them safe. They thought Rügemer had simply chosen decency. They never knew his price.

In the spring of 1944, as Soviet forces advanced and Rügemer prepared to flee west with the retreating Germans, Irena helped all 12 escape into the forest to join partisan groups.

In May 1944 — in a forest, with nothing overhead but trees and sky — Ida Haller gave birth to a boy. They named him Roman.

He was alive because of a decision made in a basement months before.

After the war, Rügemer returned to Nuremberg to find that his own family had thrown him out of the house — ashamed that he had sheltered Jews. The Haller family in Munich found him. They took him in. Roman grew up calling him Zeide — Yiddish for grandfather.

Irena ended up in a displaced persons camp, where she briefly met an American UN relief worker named William Opdyke. Years later she crossed paths with him again in New York. They married in 1956 and settled in California. She had a daughter, Jeannie, and told her nothing. She locked the war entirely away and built a quiet life on top of the rubble of it.

For decades, nobody knew.

Then one day a Holocaust denier called her home — a young man claiming the whole thing had never happened, that it was propaganda, that the history was a lie.

When she put the phone down, she was shaking.

She turned to Jeannie and said: “If people who know the truth stay silent, evil wins. I allowed that once. Never again.”

From that day she spoke. Schools, synagogues, rotary clubs, universities. She wrote her memoir, In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer, published in 1999. She gave testimony across the country until her body would not carry her any further. She died on May 17, 2003, at the age of 85.

In 1997, she traveled to Israel — and for the first time she met Roman Haller face to face. The baby born in a forest. The life that began because she told a terrified woman in a hidden basement: have your child, I will find a way. He was by then a grown man, working as director of the German office of the Claims Conference — helping Holocaust survivors seek restitution from Germany.

She said she had simply been the right person at the right time.

She said, “Courage is a whisper from above — when you listen with your heart, you will know what to do.”

She had listened. She had known. It had cost her something she never fully named.

All 12 survived.

Frank Serpico was 23 years old when he joined the New York City Police Department in 1959.

He was the son of Italian immigrants. He grew up in Brooklyn. He had served in the Army in Korea before signing up. He had idolized the cops on his block as a kid. He wanted, in the most uncomplicated possible sense of the phrase, to be one of the good guys.

He made it to plainclothes. Vice squad. Brooklyn. The Bronx. Manhattan.

That was where he found out.

Every officer in his unit was on the take. Bribes from gamblers. Payoffs from drug dealers. Protection money from pimps. Hundreds of dollars a month. Sometimes thousands. The system had a name. They called it “the pad.“ Every plainclothes officer got a share. You did not ask. The envelope just appeared.

Serpico refused.

His partners did not trust him. If he would not take the money, he could not be controlled. If he could not be controlled, he was dangerous.

They stopped backing him up. Stopped talking to him. Stopped eating with him. The blue wall went up around him.

In 1967, Serpico reported the corruption to his superiors. He gave names. Dates. Amounts.

Nothing happened. He went higher. The Police Commissioner’s office. The Mayor’s office. Still nothing.

Everyone knew. Nobody acted.

What changed the trajectory was another cop. *David Durk* was an Amherst College graduate who had quit law school to join the NYPD in 1963. Durk was as horrified by the corruption as Serpico was, and he knew people Serpico did not — people in city government, people in the press. The two of them, together, pushed for years against a wall that would not move.

In April 1970, after years of going through internal channels and getting nowhere, Serpico and Durk took everything they had to a New York Times investigative reporter named *David Burnham*. On April 25, 1970, the Times ran the story on its front page. Millions of dollars in police bribes. Corruption at every level of the NYPD.

Mayor John V. Lindsay, his hand finally forced, appointed a five-member panel to investigate. Chaired by federal judge Whitman Knapp, it became known as the Knapp Commission — the first serious investigation of NYPD corruption in the department’s history.

Serpico’s partners had figured out he was the source. The threats began.

“You know what happens to rats, Frank?“

He started carrying his service revolver everywhere. Off duty. On dates. To dinner.

On February 3, 1971, he walked into a building at 778 Driggs Avenue in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Four officers from the Brooklyn North command had a tip about a heroin deal. Serpico spoke Spanish, so he was sent to the apartment door first. Two of the four officers, Gary Roteman and Arthur Cesare, stayed outside. The third, Paul Halley, stood in front of the building.

Serpico was alone.

He knocked. The dealer, a man named Edgar Echevarria, opened the door a few inches. Serpico tried to wedge himself in.

Echevarria fired point-blank. The bullet hit Serpico in the face just below the left eye. Fragments lodged near his brain.

Serpico managed to draw his revolver and return fire, wounding Echevarria, before collapsing.

No “10-13“ call went out over the police radio. That is the NYPD’s call for an officer needing immediate assistance. It is the call that brings every cop within miles. Nobody made it.

An elderly Hispanic neighbor heard the gunshot, came out into the hallway, saw Serpico bleeding on the floor, and called an ambulance. The man on the phone with the ambulance dispatcher was the only person in that building who acted like a fellow human being mattered.

Serpico survived. Barely. He suffered permanent hearing loss in his left ear, chronic pain, and bullet fragments still lodged in his head today.

In December 1971, ten months after the shooting, he testified publicly before the Knapp Commission. The bullet was still in his head. His attorney, sitting beside him, was former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Serpico spoke calmly. He named names. He described the system. He delivered one sentence that would echo for fifty years.

“The atmosphere does not yet exist in which an honest police officer can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers.“

The country was stunned.

In May 1972, Serpico was awarded the NYPD Medal of Honor, the department’s highest commendation. There was no ceremony. No speech. No photographs. A clerk handed it to him over a desk. He later described it: *“like a pack of cigarettes.“* They did not even give him the certificate that was supposed to come with it.

He retired one month later, on June 15, 1972.

He left the country. He lived in Switzerland. He lived in the Netherlands. He came home after nearly a decade in Europe and settled quietly in Stuyvesant, in upstate New York. He raised chickens. He gave lectures on police ethics. He prefers the term “lamplighter“ to “whistleblower,“ because lamplighter is what they called Paul Revere.

In December 2021, Eric Adams, then mayor-elect of New York and a former NYPD officer himself, saw a Daily News article about the 50th anniversary of Serpico’s Knapp Commission testimony. Serpico had still never received the certificate. Adams tweeted: “Frank — we’re going to make sure you get your medal.“

On February 3, 2022, exactly 51 years to the day after he was shot at 778 Driggs Avenue, the certificate finally arrived at Serpico’s home in the mail. He was 85 years old.

He celebrated by popping bubble wrap on camera and calling it his 21-gun salute.

Asked once, at the age of 74, whether anything had really changed in the NYPD since the Knapp Commission, Serpico answered:

“An honest cop still can’t find a place to go and complain without fear of recrimination. The blue wall will always be there because the system supports it.“

He is still alive. He is 89 years old.

Diana Rigg had never even watched The Avengers when she auditioned for Emma Peel on a whim. Within a year, she was one of the most famous women in the world. Emma Peel was unlike anything British TV had seen — a spy in a catsuit who fought villains with martial arts and a sharper mind, who treated her male partner as an equal, who was almost always the smartest person in the room. The show became a global phenomenon. Diana became an icon.

Then she discovered the truth about her pay.

She was earning £90 a week. The cameraman was earning £120. She walked into the producers’ office and said, simply, that it was unfair. She did not stamp her foot. She did not shout. She just refused to keep quiet.

The press called her “a mercenary creature.“ Newspapers painted her as greedy, difficult, ungrateful. Not one woman in the industry stood beside her. Her co-star Patrick Macnee, whom she adored her whole life, looked the other way because he wanted a quiet life. She was completely alone.

She got her raise. Her salary roughly doubled. And then, in 1968, after 51 episodes, she walked away from the most famous role of her generation. She hated the loss of privacy. She hated being called a sex symbol. She had fought a fair fight and stood there, by herself, while the industry tried to shame her for it. She was done.

She never looked back.

She returned to the classical theatre that had trained her. She joined James Bond in 1969 as Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service — the only woman 007 ever married. She won the 1994 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for Medea on Broadway. Queen Elizabeth made her a Dame the same year.

And she never, in any interview across any decade, stopped saying exactly what she thought.

On aging in an industry obsessed with youth, she was honest: “I’m now invisible. I walk down the street and nobody sees me. The attention we get when we’re young and beautiful is not something to be respected.“ When journalists asked condescending questions, she gave them looks that could cut glass. She raised her daughter Rachael largely as a single mother. She aged publicly, without surgery, without apology, without performing a younger version of herself for anyone.

Then, at 74, came Olenna Tyrell.

Game of Thrones cast her in 2013 as the elderly, acid-tongued grandmother of House Tyrell. The role could have been a few scenes. Diana made Olenna one of the most beloved characters in the entire series. When Olenna was finally poisoned by Cersei Lannister, her last scene — confessing she had murdered Joffrey and telling Jaime to make sure Cersei knew — became one of the most celebrated moments in television history.

She was nearly 79. She was stealing scenes in the biggest show on Earth, playing a woman who got the last word on her own death.

A whole new generation discovered what fans had known for 50 years: she was incapable of giving a boring performance.

She once said, “I think being beautiful is overrated. I think being intelligent is beautiful.“ She lived that in every role, every interview, every decade.

Dame Diana Rigg died of lung cancer on 10 September 2020, at her daughter’s home in London. She was 82. Her final film, Last Night in Soho, was completed just before her death.

The tributes were enormous. What stood out was not just praise for her talent but celebration of her refusal to be managed, diminished, or made comfortable for anyone else’s benefit.

She was difficult. She was demanding. She was uncompromising. She was 79 years old getting the last word on Cersei Lannister.

She was exactly herself, from beginning to end.

They tried to pay her less than the cameraman.

She had the last word for 52 more years.