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Why gender matters so much in policy making

The 2018 U.S. elections changed many things, including, most notably, the gender composition of elected representatives in Washington and throughout the country. Both the Senate and House of Representatives are now nearly 25% female, a record high and more than double the percentage of 20 years ago. Nine women are currently serving as governors (tying the record), including five newly-elected this year, and countless more women were elected to state legislatures and other local offices.

This change in gender composition is potentially a big deal, especially considering what many would call the “female-hostile” approach of the Trump administration and conservative Republicans. Even though the women elected to office are not necessarily your typical women, it is interesting to examine what research in economics suggests about what may happen in the future.

So, what policy changes do we expect to see?

First of all, female politicians are likely to focus on new policies. Evidence suggests that greater representation of women results in a stronger focus on children’s needs, women’s health, and family policy. More women in leadership positions could also mean increased efforts to make the workplace more family friendly and help reduce the U.S. gender wage gap, which is still 20% and shrinking very slowly. Research by economists suggests that the responsibilities for family that women shoulder disproportionately compared to men and the value that women place on flexible jobs are an important part of the explanation for that persistent gap. With children under age one now allowed on the floor of the House of Representatives, we are sure to see a broader and better integration of family and work that will help both men and women thrive.

Lived experience matters, too. One well-known economics study showed that having a daughter increased a U.S. congressperson’s likelihood of voting more liberally, especially on reproductive rights.

Does gender also matter in a broader and perhaps deeper sense? Do women make decisions differently in ways that might affect how government acts in the future? A substantial research literature in economics shows that women and men do have different preferences regarding the work environment and how they make decisions. This research from the field of experimental economics documents systematic ways in which men and woman differ in terms of competitiveness, their risk-taking, and their interest in collaborative decision-making. These differences have been observed so consistently over and over and across countries and cultures that we can now regard them as well-established pieces of our understanding of gender differences.

Female politicians are likely to focus on new policies. Evidence suggests that greater representation of women results in a stronger focus on children’s needs, women’s health, and family policy.

We know, for example, that men are often overconfident about their skills and are more likely to be risk takers. In experiments in which subjects perform simple computational tasks and are rewarded based on performance, male subjects consistently opt more frequently for “winner-take-all” compensation systems in which the best performer gets all or most of the purse—like a golf or tennis tournament—even though they perform no better than the women and are unlikely to benefit from that kind of reward system. Some evidence indicates that women experience more stress in situations that involve the risk of a negative outcome; this may explain their greater risk aversion.

Overconfident and risk-loving? Does that sound like an ideal elected official?

It’s also reasonable to expect increased cooperation among female policymakers. There is overwhelming evidence that men are more attracted to competitive environments, while women prefer a more cooperative team environment in which compensation is based on group, rather than individual, performance. In the political arena, increased collaboration and risk aversion may have tangible outcomes. Recent evidence suggests that the average female legislator enacts 50% more bills than the average male legislator.

There will also likely be a change in leadership style. Research suggests that policies that increase the representation of women leaders in the business world make a difference. Norway is the most famous example, where a 2005 law mandated that at least 40 percent of directors of public companies must be female. Similar policies have been adopted in Germany, France, Belgium, Iceland, and Italy.  A recent research study compared the behavior of the Norwegian firms with similar firms in other Nordic countries. The verdict? It appears that women are more altruistic (if somewhat less profit-oriented); the likelihood of large layoffs was 20 percent lower in the Norwegian firms with greater female representation.

And, finally, these women will undoubtedly serve as role models for future women. There is evidence that the proportion of women candidates increases significantly in areas represented by women in elected positions (even if, as in some countries, women were initially elected to meet required gender quotas). The current increase in female representation bodes well for changing policy and improving gender balance in the near future.

The economics research literature speaks loudly and clearly: Gender matters for policy-making.

Featured image credit: Kavanaugh Protest in Boston by rlubbock. Public Domain via Flickr.

 

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Frederick Douglass’ family and the roots of social justice

Frederick Douglass. Just the name alone is enough to inspire us to think of a life lived in activism and an unceasing fight for social justice. But there are other names in the life story of Frederick Douglass that are far more unknown to us, those of his daughters and sons: Rosetta, Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr., Charles Remond and Annie Douglass.

The Douglass family worked tirelessly as civil rights activists, radical reformers, public educators, typographers, printers, proof-readers, business correspondents, officer managers, seamstresses, political campaigners, domestic carers and family archivists. All five children contributed to Douglass’s public career as a freedom-fighter, newspaper editor, orator, statesman, diplomat and author. Living and working for social justice over 150 years ago, the Douglass family have much to inspire today’s activists. Just as women, children and men working for equal rights in 2018 work in collectives and as part of worldwide movements devoted to the freedom struggle, so Frederick Douglass was no lone freedom-fighter. He not only worked as part of official reform organizations but he took inspiration from the activist campaigns led by his children.

Anon., Rosetta Douglass Sprague, n.d. (National Park Service: Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, Washington, DC.) Used with permission.

Rosetta Douglass Sprague (1839-1906)

Rosetta played a key role in her father’s life as a proof-reader and editor of his newspapers, speeches, and book manuscripts. As not only an antislavery campaigner and social justice reformer but a woman’s rights activist in her own right, she insisted, “The destiny of the race must be decided with the aid of the women of the race.”

Anon., Rosetta Douglass Sprague, n.d. (National Park Service: Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, Washington, DC.) Used with permission.

Lewis Henry Douglass (1841-1908)

Born in New Bedford in 1841, Lewis Henry Douglass was a printer, typesetter, essayist, orator, historian, civil rights protester, anti-lynching crusader, and Civil War veteran. When Frederick Douglass issued his rallying cry, “Men of Color, To Arms!” in 1863, Lewis Henry joined the 54th Massachusetts combat regiment. He was immediately promoted to the rank of Sergeant-Major and he served a distinguished military career. Writing the love of his life, Helen Amelia Loguen (1843-1936) from the front lines, he was jubilant: “Remember if I die I die in a good cause. I wish we had a hundred thousand colored troops we would put an end to this war. Should I fall in the next fight killed or wounded I hope to fall with my face to the foe.”

Frederick Douglass Jr. (1842-1892)

Born in New Bedford in 1842, Frederick Jr. had multiple careers as an antislavery reformer, a Civil War recruiter, a printer, a newspaper editor, a civil rights campaigner, an electoral reform advocate, an educational reformer, and a political correspondent. Writing his autobiography, Frederick Douglass Jr. in brief from 1842-1890, Frederick Jr. bore witness to a life lived in terrible hardship. Across his published essays, he refused to succumb to the injustices of white racist hate by denouncing “Southern terrorism.”

Anon., Rosetta Douglass Sprague, n.d. (National Park Service: Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, Washington, DC.) Used with permission.

Charles Remond Douglass (1844-1920)

Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1844 Charles Remond Douglass lived many lives in one. He was a printer, editor, essayist, orator, government employee, Civil War soldier, civil rights campaigner, historian, and political activist. Charles Remond served a distinguished military career in the 54th Massachusetts regiment, with Lewis Henry, and later in the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry. From the frontlines, Charles Remond revealed that Frederick Douglass’s promise that Black soldiers will “receive the same wages, the same rations, the same equipments” as was “secured to the white soldiers” had not yet become a reality. Instead, he told his father harrowing stories of men suffering from starvation: “It don’t seem to you that are home true that this can be but upon honor it is the truth and to day there are men dying out to camp.” Frederick Douglass listened to his son. From that point onward, he refused to recruit Black men to suffer these body-and-soul destroying conditions at the hands of white persecutory authorities.

Annie Douglass (1849-1860)

Born in Rochester in 1849, Annie Douglass was Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass’s youngest daughter. From a very young age, she was an impassioned antislavery activist and social justice campaigner. On December 7, 1859, Annie wrote a letter to her father in which she protested against the execution of John Brown, the white freedom fighter who had led the unsuccessful campaign to arm enslaved people and capture the arsenal at Harpers Ferry in Virginia in October. Here she lamented: “Poor Mr. Brown is dead. That hard hearted man said he must die and they took him in an open field and about half a mile from the jail and hung him.”

Working together and against a changing backdrop of US slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction, the Douglass family fought for a new dawn of freedom. In 2019 and during a Black Lives Matter era, it becomes even more urgent to recognize that Frederick Douglass’s reform work was made possible not from his own solitary heroism but from his collaborative work with his family.

Featured Image Credit: Untitled (Envelope addressed to Lewis Henry Douglass), n.d. (Walter O. Evans Collection, Savannah, GA.). Used with permission.

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The birth of exoplanetary science

The University of Geneva’s Michel Mayor and his graduate student Didier Queloz were the first to discover a planet orbiting a distant star much like our own Sun. Meticulously ruling out, one after the other, alternative interpretations of their measurements, in October 1995 they announced the discovery of the planet designated 51 Pegasi b, now known as Dimidium, orbiting the star 51 Pegasi, since named Helvetia. Michel Mayor presented the discovery to an international assembly of astrophysicists in Florence, Italy.

The hunt for these exoplanets was inspired by advances in understanding of the formation of stars: it was becoming clear that the gases that were contracting to form new stars were somehow shedding the bulk of their energy of rotation, while new observations were revealing disks full of gas and dust, spinning around such forming stars, and containing a lot of energy of rotation. That dust could in principle coagulate to make planets whose orbiting motions could relieve the rotation problem of forming stars. But did it?

Several teams around the world convinced their sponsors of the need for more sensitive instruments, not to see the tiny, faint exoplanets directly, but to study their effects on the stars that they orbit. The mutual gravitational tug between a star and an exoplanet would cause the star to move back and forth just enough that its light should alternate measurably in colour from red to blue and back as the exoplanet moved around it. Measuring that swing required unprecedented precision, a lot of observing time to cover enough of a planet’s orbital period, a large sample of stars (because no one knew how common exoplanets were), and a great deal of commitment of the team members to stick with it. Only a few groups pulled that off.

Image Credit: “Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor at La Silla” by European Southern Observatory. CC by 2.0 via Flicker.

Mayor and Queloz from the Observatory of Geneva in Switzerland had joined forces with colleagues in France to develop a new advanced spectrograph, an instrument that unravels starlight into its constituent colors. They had as primary goal to look for the smallest stars in orbit around Sun-like stars. The potential to discover exoplanets was on their mind also, but they were not hopeful. They expected they could find only large, heavy exoplanets and these were thought to be on orbits that would take many years to complete, and therefore they would need to observe similarly long to discover them.

But once the spectrograph was connected to a telescope at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence in France, they were lucky. Among the 142 Sun-like stars that they were monitoring, they found the exoplanet known as 51 Peg b. By the ideas of the time, it should not have been there – and that is why their colleagues were skeptical at first. It is a heavy planet at half the size of the giant Jupiter, but so close to its star that its orbit lasts only 4.2 days. The theory of the day held no planet like that could form where it was.

The discovery was quickly confirmed by another team, however, and scientists subsequently found many other such “hot Jupiters”. We now estimate that there are over 100 billion planetary systems in our Galaxy alone. Our new understanding of the formation of such systems tells us how Dimidium most likely got to be where it is: it formed much further out from its star, but then its orbit contracted to end up close to its star.

Queloz checked his observations and computations many times over before the 1995 announcement. Then just entering the field of astrophysics, he realized that an erroneous discovery claim would abruptly end his career. Mayor was confident, however. His announcement in the meeting was met with a mix of skepticism and enthusiasm, but when he returned to his hotel room that same day, there was a pile of faxes already waiting for him from journalists around the world. Queloz and Mayor’s lives changed in that discovery, and the field of exoplanetary science rapidly took off. These discoveries help us understand how planetary systems form and evolve. In doing so, they also reveal what happened a long, long time ago when our own solar system formed, when the giant planets roamed around to find their final orbits, and how that affected everything else in the solar system, including Earth.

Featured image credit: “Artist impression of the exoplanet 51 Pegasi b” by European Southern Observatory. CC by 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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In Coventry and elsewhere

Last week (February 20, 2019), we spent some time in Bath. There is no reason why we should not continue our journey and go to Coventry, a town in Warwickshire, 94 miles away from London. The name was widely known to those who lived through World War II because of the devastating bombing raid on Coventry in November 1940. In Great Britain, that terrible night has never been forgotten, and the ruins of the destroyed abbey (now standing close to a new one) are a permanent reminder of the raid. Coventry was an important industrial town, but hardly important enough for Luftwaffe (Air Force) to attack it with such ferocity. I wonder: Is it possible that some wit in the German headquarters chose Coventry because he knew the phrase send to Coventry “to ostracize” and wanted it to live up to this grim association? Surely, I am not the only one to think so.

Send to Coventry appeared in print in 1647 (OED), which means that it had been known for at least some time before the middle of the seventeenth century. The origin of the phrase is “matter of conjecture,” as another major dictionary puts it. A few hypotheses have been repeated multiple times, but repetition did not make them more convincing. A correspondent to the once popular periodical Long Ago wrote in1874: “It has struck me that it [the idiom] might have originated thus. When Margaret of Anjou had made herself obnoxious to the citizens of London… she retired to Coventry. The Londoners’ contemptuous remark that they had sent the Anjouites to Coventry might have given rise to this saying.” Queen Margaret, the wife of Henry VI, lived in the fifteenth century, and at one time she did retire to Coventry (not much to base a good etymology on). I would not have mentioned this baseless hypothesis, but for one reason. It is not too difficult to find an event that supposedly gave rise to a saying with a name in it.

School for Scandal? Image credit: Dorothy Gulliver & Kenneth Harlan in Under Montana Skies – publicity still (cropped) by Unknown. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The other explanations can be found in numerous reference books, on the Internet, and in Wikipedia. They usually have the same basis as the one quoted above: hearsay and a seemingly convincing event. Let us first look at hearsay. According to the most popular old hypothesis, the inhabitants of Coventry were at some time [!] so averse to any contacts with the military quartered in the town that any woman who dared speak to a man in a scarlet coat became an object of scandal. The soldiers and officers were thus “ostracized,” and such are the circumstances under which to send to Coventry “to shut someone from society” originated. This etymology is pure folklore, even though, like many legends, it may be based on the echoes of some historical fact. Other than that, why should the women of Coventry (just of Coventry) have been so hostile to all “who bore his Majesty’s military commission”?  Novels paint a different picture. And where is the evidence? But this explanation found its way into E. Cobham’s Brewer’s Book of Phrase and Fable and has often been repeated.

A much better-known legend connects the phrase with the Civil War in England (1642-1649). I quote: “The day after Charles I left Birmingham, on this march from Shrewsbury, in 1642, the parliamentary party seized his carriages, containing royal plate and furniture, which they conveyed for security to Warwick Castle. They apprehended all messengers and suspected persons and frequently attacked and reduced small parties of the Royalists, whom they sent prisoners to Coventry. Hence the expression respecting the refractory person, ‘send him to Coventry’.” In Coventry, the Royalists were received, as we are given to understand, with hostility.

A different approach to our idiom concentrates on the form of the place name Coventry. Rather probably, –try goes back to a word for “tree,” and a legend has it that this terrible tree once served as gallows. A few other attempts to solve the riddle take us away from the town. As early as October 1878, a correspondent to Notes and Queries wrote: “The form ‘send to Coventry’ is also used, but certainly not more frequently than ‘put in Coventry’. [This, I am afraid, will be news to some.] Now a boy ‘put in Coventry’ by his schoolfellows is exactly in the position of a person ‘put in quarantine’. Why, then, may not the former phrase be a corruption of the latter? It must be borne in mind that the word Coventry was formerly sometimes pronounced, and indeed written Cointrei.” According to this idea, Coventry in the idiom is a folk etymological reshaping (in the past, they always said “corruption”) of quarantine. Fifty years later, Logan Pearson Smith, an excellent scholar, whose books on English words are of the same caliber as Ernest Weekley’s, repeated this hypothesis. Still other people thought that convent had been changed to Coventry.

There is no way of verifying such guesses, but the scenario is not improbable. For example, many people may have heard the idiom Scarborough warning “something falling without giving warning to those below; no warning at all.” Historical events have been cited that seem to account for its origin. But Skyrebarn warning (Galloway) competes with it, and one begins to wonder whether both places were made to fit some forgotten and misunderstood phrase. Variation of the Scarborough ~ Skyrebarn type is a typical feature of idioms, and place names are often substituted for less memorable words. In the 1860s, a recalcitrant (refractory) child could be told that it would be sent to Putney on a pig. The alliteration is obvious, by why just to Putney? Because it bears a distant resemblance to punish? Has any of our British readers heard this terrible threat? To conclude, Coventry in the idiom may be a late guest.

Until next week. Image credit: Sultan Pardons Scheherazade by Arthur Boyd Houghton. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.Falstaff: he won’t let himself be sent to Coventry. Image credit: Falstaff, Prince Henry and Poins at the Boar’s Head Tavern (Shakespeare, King Henry the Fourth, Part 1, Act 2, Scene 4) by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain via Picryl.

Finally, it will be remembered that Falstaff (I Henry IV, scene 2) makes a great speech about his soldiers, all jailbirds, scoundrels, and (perhaps more important) cowards (“a commodity of warm slaves, as has as lief hear the devil as a drum”). He is sending this uniformed rabble to Coventry but adds: “I’ll not march through Coventry with them, that’s flat.” Was there a tradition to send all kinds of undesired people to Coventry, a tradition that had nothing to do with the royalists, gallows, or any other historical event? Was Coventry indeed a “corrupted” form of some other word? Shakespeare’s play was written (such is the consensus) around 1597. On this note, Scheherazade-like, I’ll stop, at least for a week.

Featured image credit: Landscape of England through a tunnel by Eryk Fudala. CC0 Public Domain via GoodFreePhotos.

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How six elements came together to form life on Earth

How did life begin? We will never know with certainty what the Earth was like four billion years ago, or the kinds of reactions that led to the emergence of life at that time, but there is another way to pose the question. If we ask “how can life begin?” instead of “how did life begin,” that simple change of verbs offers hope. It does seem possible we can demonstrate a series of obvious steps toward the origin of life, perhaps leading to a synthetic version of life in the laboratory. We will then be able to provide a satisfactory answer to the second question: How can life begin on the Earth and other habitable planets?

The first step toward life involves a fundamental question we can answer: Where did the elements of life come from? Take a look at the simplified periodic table below. See the six elements in green? Those are called the biogenic elements.

Image Credit: Periodic Table by David W. Deamer. Used with permission.

If you add up all the atoms composing a living cell, those six represent close to 99% of the elemental composition of proteins, nucleic acids, and cell membranes. Life does need these six elements, but it only works if the elements have combined into molecules.

Let’s consider what happens if we put two or more of the elements together in a compound. Carbon and hydrogen, for instance, become hydrocarbons, and the hydrocarbon chains in cell membranes are an essential component of life. If we let three elements combine, such as carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, we get carbohydrates like sugar and cellulose. Five elements—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur—form the amino acids of proteins, and if we exchange phosphorus for sulfur five elements also compose nucleic acids like DNA. Even though we know the ultimate source of biogenic elements, we also need to know how they become compounds, and then how the compounds became sufficiently complex for life to emerge on the sterile Earth four billion years ago.

Now we can return to the source of the biogenic elements. With one exception, the biogenic elements in all life on Earth, including elemental silicon and iron (which compose the Earth itself) were synthesized in stars. The exception is hydrogen, and the only reason it is present on Earth as one of the biogenic elements is that the hydrogen in water–H2O–had the good fortune not to be caught up in the sun when our solar system formed. In fact, in terms of numbers of atoms, hydrogen makes up about 70 percent of all the atoms in life on the Earth.

How could the elements of life possibly come from stars? In 1946, Fred Hoyle, a young British astronomer, had an idea. Hoyle was full of ideas, and boldly published most of them, but only one has survived experimental and theoretical testing. To understand his idea, we need to recall a little high school chemistry. All matter is composed of atoms, and all atoms have a tiny nucleus composed of particles called protons and neutrons, which are surrounded by orbital clouds of much lighter electrons. But in stars, the temperature is so high that the electrons fall off, so stars like our sun are composed of a gas of naked atomic nuclei, mostly hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen is the lightest element, with a single proton in its nucleus, and helium is the second lightest element, with two protons and two neutrons in its nucleus. When the temperature is high enough, around 10 million degrees, hydrogens combine to form helium and release an enormous amount of energy. This is the energy that make stars shine.

Hoyle’s brilliant insight was that a second fusion reaction begins when a star approaches the end of its life and its temperature approaches 100 million degrees. At that point two helium nuclei fuse to form beryllium, the lightest metallic element, which then can fuse with another helium nucleus to produce carbon. Earlier theoretical models had already shown that if carbon is available in a star, nitrogen and oxygen can form in a process called the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle, which is the primary source of fusion energy in large, hot stars on their way to becoming novas and supernovas. Those models did not include a source of carbon, and this is where Hoyle filled in a gap.

To sum up, the atoms of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus that comprise all life on the Earth were forged in stars at temperatures hotter than any hydrogen bomb. As living organisms, we are not in any way separate from the rest of the universe. Instead we borrow a tiny fraction of its atoms for a few years and incorporate them into the transient molecular structures of cells that are the living unit of all life on Earth.

Featured image credit: “Butterfly Nebula in narrow band of Sulfur, Hydrogen and Oxygen” by Stephan Hamel. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia. 

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Letters from the Antebellum

While tensions continued to boil in the United States with the outbreak of the civil war in 1861 on the horizon, those aiming to assist slaves in securing their freedom often used letter correspondences to plan escape routes and share elated stories of their successes. Such correspondences between abolitionists and members of the Underground Railroad provide contemporary researchers with incredibly detailed accounts of the escapes of fugitive slaves and the challenges facing them before, during, and after reaching freedom. The following letters, dated from 1850-1857, describe the various firsthand accounts of abolitionists William Still, Joseph Bustill and Thomas Garrett and their time with the Underground Railroad, including Still’s reunion with his long lost brother who was raised in slavery and a narrow escape by Garret with a group of fugitive slaves that led directly to Harriet Tubman’s parents’ rescue. Here are some of the correspondences from that time.

Featured image credit: Photo, ink, pen and string HD photo by Joanna Kosinska. CC0 Public Domain via Unsplash.

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Five ways to help musicians think like entrepreneurs

Aspiring entrepreneurs often struggle with how to get started – especially if their training is in a field like music. “I don’t see myself as an entrepreneur…I’m not even sure what that means!” Entrepreneurship for musicians need not be mysterious. It’s really just a different way of looking at your world and capitalizing on opportunities. How do you develop that kind of mindset? Here are five things you can start doing that may help you think like an entrepreneur.

Keep a bug list
One of my early mentors told me most of his entrepreneurial ideas come out of things that annoy him. “What ticks you off?” Chances are you’re not the only one who feels that way. These are what entrepreneurs call “pain points”: either an unsatisfactory aspect of an existing product/service or something missing from it altogether. Often, this is where great opportunities reside. Start keeping a list of your observations: you don’t need to come up with solutions. And these observations need not be limited to your musical practice; this exercise is about developing your observational skills in general. As you get better, you’ll start seeing entrepreneurial ideas all around you, and you’ll be ready to apply your powers of observation to your musical world.Read your local newspaper
A great way to both fund and publicize musical projects is by making them part of something larger going on in your community. Anniversaries, commemorations, activism, or awareness-building events can be potent ways to connect your music with an audience. One good way to keep aware of such opportunities is to keep up with your home-town media. There’s an incredible place to find opportunities going on locally, but if you’re unaware of them you’ll miss them.Look for bridges
This is related to the previous item, but can be much broader than your local community. Music has great power to bring people together, to provoke conversation, to cultivate community. And that means that its power can operate in many settings. What issues are you passionate about? Are you wishing you could address climate change? Seek out environmental groups and see what sorts of programming they undertake. Might there be a way to incorporate music? Everybody loves centennials. What is coming up in the next few years? Use your imagination, get creative, and don’t underestimate music’s power to play a role in almost anything.

Entrepreneurial thinking is not something in the genes; it’s a specific way of looking at the world around you, and it can be learned and developed.

Turn your obstacle into an opportunity
One of the interesting things that can come out of your “bug list” is this list may may you wonder why someone hasn’t solved these problems before. Sometimes it’s because there’s some technical or physical limitation that makes a solution difficult. But what if, rather than looking at that limitation as something to get around, we could figure out a way to make that limitation into a feature? It’s often difficult to find parking for major musical events. Rather than looking at the issue of access as an intractable barrier for an audience, musicians could turn this into an opportunity. What about an “art bus” that combines transportation with a fun pre-concert activity? Turning obstacles into opportunities not only solves a problem, but they tend to be just interesting enough that they garner attention and stimulate a buzz.Ask what you can do for your audience
Classical musicians and organizations have traditionally promoted themselves through simple awareness marketing: “Come to our concert on Saturday!” And while awareness is necessary for an established entity to bring in an audience (you’re going to miss Saturday’s concert if you don’t know about it), awareness alone will do little to support – much less help launch – an entrepreneurial endeavor. In order for people to pay attention to something new, the event has to deliver something of value, something that meets peoples’ needs in a new or improved way.
Coming up with such a thing requires a paradigm shift, however. It requires the classical musician or organization to stop assuming that the value of the product is self-evident to the public and that the public simply needs to be convinced of their desire to come and listen. Instead, they have to invert their thinking to ask the question, “How can I use music to meet the needs and sensibilities of my audience? What can I do for them?” This can be difficult for some. Our entire musical training is grounded in a kind of veneration of our field. Shifting to an audience-focused world view requires recognizing that our veneration is not universal. Perhaps it’s even counterproductive.

As I talk with early-career musicians about creating an entrepreneurial career for themselves, there’s often the misperception that an entrepreneurial mindset is some sort of mysterious, inborn trait. But entrepreneurial thinking is not something in the genes; it’s a specific way of looking at the world around you, and it can be learned and developed.

So keep your bug list. Be aware of what’s going on around you. Look to build bridges. And don’t let the established barriers shut you down. Do these things, and you’ll start seeing how your music can serve others – and that’s where value resides.

Featured image credit: “Man Playing Guitar” by Alexandre St-Louis. Public Domain via Unsplash

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There are no aliens… at least officially

“There are no aliens, officially, at least….” Elon Musk, writing on his Twitter account, is one of a number of smart technopreneurs who considers that if there is extraterrestrial life, it would most likely already be observing us, and, it will be technological. Artist and singer David Bowie came to a similar conclusion years ago, stating that the internet is an alien life form, and technology is not something we just use, but something with which we are intricately connected. Philosopher Susan Schneider spoke to NASA about her essay “Alien Minds,” and told them that alien minds would most likely resemble our best technology. As Musk says, “Digital Super Intelligence will be like an alien.”

My own research among the technopreneurs of Silicon Valley reveals a similar way of understanding possible alien life. The idea is that since humans are already being spliced with technology, that is, we are already cyborg-like, a more advanced civilization will likely be completely technological, or technological in a way we don’t yet understand. Gaming expert Rizwan Virk at MIT notes that media technologies, particularly immersive realities, generate “memories within the minds of consumers. Neuroscience confirms this, too, that the more we interface with our media technologies, the more our worlds become co-implicated. If human-technology interfaces are shaping what people remember and what they believe, they are also shaping culture, history, and the future. Contemporary humans are cyborg-like techno-beings, immersed within a sea of invisible technology in the form of frequencies, waves, and radiation. Dreams of going off the grid are just that, dreams. The idea of these scientists is that as humans advance they merge more and more with their technologies. If there were a very advanced civilization, its members may very well be a form of technology.

Where, then, are the aliens? Virk suggests we aren’t looking in the right places. Technopreneurs from Jacques Vallee to Virk suggest that we should use our own understanding of technology, which arguably is the apex of human knowledge, to try to understand how alien communication or contact would work. Virk states, “Another explanation is that we don’t have the right tools to see them or aren’t scanning the right frequencies. A recent article in MIT Technology Review went over the parameters that a search for extraterrestrial intelligence would need and found that there were 8 dimensions that need to be searched, and the searches to date have been done on only one fraction of one of these dimensions. Among the biotechnologists I interviewed recently, several believed that humans possessed a biological sensor to contact possible alien, or even future, civilizations. Not surprisingly, these scientists prefer to remain anonymous with respect to this belief, but told me that their data reveals that human beings, and our internal worlds, might provide answers to possible extraterrestrial worlds. “Our human bodies and DNA are naturally designed to be a human receiver and transmitter, and strangely run at similar frequencies as communication technology we’ve put into outer space,” said one.

Technological advancement naturally influences beliefs in transcendence, including possible contact with other worlds.

Featured image credit: Cold future photo by Alessio Ferretti. Public domain via  Unsplash . 

 

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The ongoing significance of racism in American medicine

America’s healthcare system is considered by many the finest in the world, and the symbol of what America can achieve combining science and service. It’s also true that we spend 1/5 of our nation’s resources funding healthcare, so it’s certainly an institution that all Americans are deeply invested in. And still, the reality is that American medicine has never invested equally for black Americans and white Americans. Further, the medical system has always been fraught with outright abuse, experimentation, and neglect. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of scholars Harriet Washington and Susan Reverby, (among others) the long history of mistreatment of black, and other vulnerable, people in American hospitals and doctor’s offices is not a secret.

Consider Alex McNabb, an EMT who boasted about harming a pediatric patient, proclaiming on a podcast he hosts “So, guess who volunteered to take (his) blood?’ Dr. Narcan enjoyed great, immense satisfaction as he terrorized this youngster with a needle and stabbed him thusly in the arm with a large-gauge IV catheter.” His account of purposefully trying to hurt a black is remarkable in its cruelty and wanton disregard for black people’s humanity. For some women encountering someone like McNabb was not just a passing fear. Rather, for Tammy (pseudonym), a 37 year old accountant in Chicago, people like McNabb represented a very real threat.

According to Tammy, she was taught from a young age that she could not receive medical treatment from a white person under any circumstances. She recalled,

“You can’t get a shot. I’ve never gotten a shot by a white person ever . . . they had me terrified [of being treated by a white doctor].” Her family’s concerns stemmed from their understanding that their great-grandfather died as a result of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The US Public Health Service began the “Study of Syphilis in the Untreated Negro Male” in 1932. Approximately 600 black men, primarily poor sharecroppers in Macon County, Alabama, were enrolled in the study. The men were told they would be treated for syphilis when in fact the purpose of the study was to learn whether syphilis progressed differently in blacks than whites. Although penicillin was available by 1943, the US Public Health Service never intended to provide treatment to the study respondents. The men were not treated and hundreds went on to infect their wives and children through congenital exposure. Although the record keeping was inconsistent, as many as 30% of the men may have died directly from untreated syphilis. The experiment continued for 40 years and ended in 1972.

Image credit: “Doctor drawing blood from a patient as part of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study” by National Archives. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Although the details are fuzzy, Tammy’s family believed their great-grandfather died of a “broken back” possibly due to a botched spinal tap, a procedure commonly used to stage the progression of syphilis among men in the study. Her great-grandmother and grandmother were deeply affected by his death and absence of financial support he provided for the family. This is one of the implications of tragedies like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study that are all but overlooked: the wrongful death of a family member ripples across multiple generations. The families live with the dread of being mistreated when they are most vulnerable. Being sick or injured is scary enough without the suspicion you may not get what you need, or even worse, that your healthcare provider may hurt you on purpose.

To try to protect the family, Tammy’s grandmother, and later her own mother, insisted the children avoid care from white doctors believing the doctors would purposefully harm them. Tammy was so deeply affected by what happened to her that even as recently as 2011, she refused emergency care for her school age daughter until the hospital could find a black doctor to perform an appendectomy. Although her daughter’s life was in danger if she did not have the surgery, Tammy was paralyzed with the fear that a white doctor could not be trusted to save her child’s life. This is a profoundly painful predicament for any parent and Tammy’s agony should be thought of as a direct consequence of the syphilis study itself.

Although Tammy does not represent all black women and McNabb does not represent all healthcare providers, their stories illustrate deeply entrenched racism in the American healthcare system. Healthcare for black people seems to hover somewhere between willful neglect and overt malfeasance. We need only look to the ongoing lead poisoning disaster in Flint, Michigan, or the black maternal mortality crisis as examples.

Among all these tragedies, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study stands out as an archetype of racism in medicine. It functions as a collective rearview mirror: a guidepost to suggest we have turned the corner and are no longer capable of carrying out such cruelty under the guise of science. Yet, the conditions that gave rise to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study are the same ones that lead to the world’s McNabbs. Black people have always been viewed as less worthy of care and fundamentally less human than white people. This is an enduring or timeless condition of American life rather than a historic one. Only when we truly confront this reality can we begin to redress these historic and contemporary harms. To do so would ensure black children purposefully stabbed with big needles and made to drink poisoned water get the care they rightfully deserve.

Lastly, it is time to stop pretending that the “objective” training in the scientific method required in medical schools somehow cleanses would-be providers of racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. This was not true in 1932 when the Tuskegee Syphilis Study began nor was it true in 2017 when an EMT decided to use a big needle on a little kid. Let’s stop telling ourselves lies about our past so we can get on with the work of cleaning up the future of American medicine.

Feature image credit: “white and red first aid case on wall” from Rawpixel. Public Domain via Unsplash.

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The state of black cinema in 2019

This year’s Academy Awards presentation takes places at the end of Black History Month. The congruence of this fact with the increased profile of heretofore minority cinema is more than felicitous. Since the Twitter campaign #Oscarsowhite following the announcement of the 2015 nominations, both the Academy and the motion picture industry have made visible efforts to promote work by Asian, Latino, and African-American directors, writers, actors, and musicians.

The question is not whether the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences or the broader public accept that films by and about people of color are engaging and worth of support. The questions we might more profitably consider are the way in which black cinema in particular is viewed by a shrinking majority audience and how the Academy or others make judgments about race and film.

The success of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight in the Best Picture category two years ago is among the most notable occasions in the Academy and the industry’s history. Written by two African Americans (Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney) and directed by one, the film received eight Oscar nominations. The film’s story about a neglected young boy taken in by a drug dealer and its three-part structure as the main character Chiron works though a stunted, then fully realized gay identity presented black experience – and black masculinity – in ways that had never been seen in U.S. cinema before. Jenkins announces his determination to encompass a fully dimensional and multifaceted view (literally) of urban black experience with the film’s opening, extended tracking shot of Juan interacting with locals, rendered through widescreen Cinemascope and an encircling 360° camera movement.

The film’s remarkably lush chromatic palette and evocative, expressionist lighting, evident in both its indoor and outdoor sequences and poetically expressed in both its title and lines in the script (e.g. “black boys’ skin looks blue in moonlight”), appeared as new in the history of racial representation.

While most commentators agree that these aspects of the film distinguish it, some take a different view. Racquel Gates refers to red and pink in the shot of Paula, Chiron’s mother, above, and she points out that “the television and film industries have typically prioritized the beautification of white skin on screen,” but not black skin. She avers that, while Moonlight offers a notable exception to this pattern, to emphasize its aesthetic accomplishment is to “adher[e…] to a visual standards of ‘quality’ cinema” that heretofore excluded African American films.

This is the conundrum that African American cinema and/or its reception faces today. As the recent spate of awards nominees make clear, Hollywood’s taste-makers are reticent to fully endorse films about black experience that is not extreme or spectacular. Ava DuVernay’s 2014 historical drama Selma, about the Voting Rights Act, included lurid elements of Dr. Martin Luther King’s marital infidelities and the violence of Civil Rights. But much of its dramatic tension (and greater interest) was manifest in intra-black individual and group conflict or King and his wife’s domestic trials. Selma’s director was not nominated for an Oscar in the Best Director category. Though the film did receive a nomination for Best Picture, the Academy’s passing over of DuVernay for Best Director almost assured that the film would not win the Best Picture award. (It went to Birdman.)

This year might seem to offer a different scenario. Black, Latina, and Persian (or part Iranian) characters appear in five of the eight films nominated for Best Picture. Black Panther, Green Book, and BlacKkKlansman place black performers, history, experience, and identity on full display. Several of the actors in these films have received nominations for their performances. And Spike Lee, who instigated the New Black Cinema in 1989 with Do the Right Thing, has received his first-ever nomination for Best Director.

This is clearly a different circumstance than in 2015. And it would seem to herald a kind of progress in the ongoing wake of Black Lives Matter.

Yet these films also offer versions of what the Academy and, arguably, many white viewers find interesting. Black Panther does a wonderful job installing a black hero in the Marvel template and franchise. Green Book has been derided for celebrating a cross-racial friendship of the sort that US culture and film has relied on tiresomely (e.g. Twain’s Huck and Jim, Natty Bumpo and Chingachcook [in both Fenimore Cooper’s novels and myriad film adaptations of The Last of the Mohicans]; Tony Curtis’s “Joker” and Sidney Poitier’s Cullen in The Defiant Ones [1958], Poitier [again] as Tibbs with Rod Steiger’s Gillespie in In the Heat of the Night [1967], the Mel Gibson-Danny Glover partners of the Lethal Weapon series, Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy–the list could go on). As many critics have written, BlacKkKlansman is a finely executed work of film art, one that only further affirms Lee’s auteur status and his position as one of American cinema’s most prolific and accomplished directors.

As director Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You) pointed out in a Twitter article, however, BlacKkKlansman deliberately embellishes both the historical actions of its main character, John Stallworth, and the Colorado Springs Police Department. Its incendiary ending and its overt linking of events from 1979 to the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA are decidedly dramatic. (The irony of Spike Lee venerating the police department of Colorado Springs is not lost on Riley, who rightly points to Lee’s prescient and damning account of police choke-holding an innocent black man to death–Radio Raheem–in his earlier, more audacious picture). These endings to the film, along with its Manichean race politics, offer the Academy a typically blunt, schematic way of depicting conflict and, in an unlikely way for Lee, its reconciliation. These are among the reasons for the Oscar nod.

Jenkins’ follow-up to Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk, received three Oscar nominations: Best Score, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress. It garnered nominations for neither Best Picture nor Best Director. These might not count as “snubs,” necessarily. But the movie’s modest subject matter seems to have won no recognition for its quiet but beautiful story and complicated narrative technique. Its love story of Tish and Fonny and its preservation beyond the film’s optimistic ending, its exquisite period detail, its restrained performances, its account of family devotion and sacrifice, its presentation of a humble but solid black middle class, are not standard-issue Hollywood representations of blackness. Jenkins has spoken in interviews about wishing to preserve the essence of James Baldwin’s prose from the source novel. The film’s literariness might also include its convoluted temporal structure, in which events unfold synchronically, often without full disclosure of their causes or outcomes.

Beale Street thus issues two unusual challenges to viewers or, at least, to the members of the Academy. With no overt politicizing or historical statement, and deprived of the high drama (or melodrama) of most any Hollywood depiction of race, the film does not clearly place its viewer within a political camp. The real challenge, indeed the most radical assertion the film makes is what may well account for its lack of full recognition this awards season. And that is the well-nigh radical notion indeed that African Americans, when let to “be” or be represented by other artists of color, are no different–no more nor less dramatic, sensational, pitiable, or heroic–than anyone else.

Featured Image credit: Barry Jenkins speaks alongside the cast of Moonlight after his film’s surprise win at the 89th Academy Awards in February 2017. Disney | ABC Television Group, CC BY-ND 2.0 via flickr.com.

 

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