Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1053

Every Tornado in Moore Since 1893, Mapped

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Tornadoes in Moore, Oklahoma, are neither new nor uncommon. Monday's massive twister may be the worst the city has seen, but it's also the 22nd recorded by the National Weather Service since 1890.

We put the data for all 22 on the map below, including estimates for Monday's size and toll. All paths are approximate, but each is the correct length in miles. Markers indicate no known path.

Tornadoes that have hit Moore, OK

Here's how to read it.

The color of the line or marker indicates the time period in which the tornado struck. Lavender is prior to 1900. Red is from 1900 to 1990. Green is from 1990 to 2000. Blue is from 2000 onward. A black line indicates that the tornado resulted in fatalities. (Monday's tornado is the large swath beginning in the southwest of town; the confirmed death toll was lowered to 24 on Tuesday.) The width of the line correlates to its strength. The heaviest lines denote F5 or EF5 tornadoes. The thinnest lines are either F0 or predate the Fujita scale. Clicking on any line or marker will provide more information about its size, strength, width, and toll.

There are a number of small, short tornadoes that did little damage. Zoom in to see them.

The overall impression one gets is clear. Moore, Oklahoma, is in the heart of tornado alley. About 120 years ago, the first recorded tornadoes struck. Since 1937, the longest the city has gone without a tornado is 16 years — but since 1991, it's averaged one every two-and-a-half.

       

Since When Did It Get So Easy to Pass Immigration Reform?

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he wouldn't block the bipartisan immigration overhaul on Tuesday, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Patrik Leahy said he will hold off — "with a heavy heart" — on a controversial amendment offering green cards to spouses of gay couples, even as Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol came out against the bill, and 150 conservatives signed a letter demanding senators reject it. "I think the Gang of Eight has made a substantial contribution in moving the issue forward," McConnell said, saying he was "hopeful" a bill could pass. "The status quo is not good." But the path to passage is surprisingly clear.

The three Obama administration scandals could make immigration reform easier to pass, The Washington Post's Ezra Klein argues, because Republicans could use it to show they care about fixing problems as much as they care about holding hearings investigating the White House. Several key compromises have been made. The "gang of eight" has brought in Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch by agreeing to a mandate that 30 airports collect immigrants' biometric data to track when they exit the country, The New York Times' Ashley Parker reports. Two years after the bill passed, the 10 biggest airports would start collecting fingerprints. The next 20 airports would follow over six years. On Monday, the judiciary committee accepted South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham's amendment to end an immigrants' asylum status if they go back to the country they fled. And on Tuesday, the committee reached an agreement making it easier for employers to hire high-skilled workers — immediately almost doubling the cap on H1-B visas to 110,000, and eventually increasing it to 180,000. And the committee rejected Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's amendment to spike a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already here. The bill is expected to be sent to the Senate floor for full debate early next month, with Tuesday night's approval by the judiciary committee.

Update, 8:25 p.m. Eastern: In a statement, President Obama congratulated the committee on passing along the bill, calling the legislative process "open and inclusive." He was also realistic: "None of the Committee members got everything they wanted, and neither did I, but in the end, we all owe it to the American people to get the best possible result over the finish line."

       

Tumblr's Recently Fired Editorial Team Just Missed Out on a $371,000 Payday

Every single one of Tumblr's 178 employees will get money from the $1.1 billion Yahoo deal, which means that if the site hadn't let go of its three editorial team members last month, they too would have received $371,00 — each. That's the minimum Tumblr employees will receive from the deal because of stock options, according to Crain's New York. The first 30 employees will get an average of $3.3 million, and the first 10 are due an average of $6.6 million. But the edit team, which came on board in a splashy arrival last May but didn't make their presence felt enough to survive until the Yahoo deal, wouldn't have fallen into those higher brackets for a site that launched way back in 2007.

There's also a slight chance that the three editors may not have made the cut-off for stock options since their Storyboard project only launched a year ago. But CEO David Karp did hire former editor-in-chief Chris Mohney and executive editor Jessica Bennet in February of 2012, giving them more than enough time to receive the full benefits, with stocks. Maybe the timing of the firing had something to do with the deal? According to whispers about the Tumblr-Yahoo deal, talks started a "few weeks ago," which could fall right around the timeframe of the editors' April 12th firing. 

In any case, it's certainly a bitter day for those former staffers fired in a horrible memo written by Mahoney, but the HR person at Tumblr is probably thrilled with his or her six figures. The very first Tumblr employee, Marco Arment, who left the company and founded Instapaper, says that his seven figures won't make him "yacht and helicopter rich," but will make his life comfortable enough. "As long as I manage investments properly and don’t spend recklessly, Tumblr has given my family a strong safety net and given me the freedom to work on whatever I want," he wrote on his blog.  

       

Reese Witherspoon Is Really Going to Space

Today in entertainment news: Reese Witherspoon's first sci-fi movie seems to be a go, Leo DiCaprio reteams with an old friend, and Steven Spielberg is adapting a video game.

Harvey Weinstein is currently charging around southern France buying up movies left and right, his latest Cannes acquisition being the sci-fi romance Passengers. That's the one that will star Keanu Reeves and Reese Witherspoon as people falling in love in space. Now that distribution is locked down, it looks like this thing is actually happening! Reese Witherspoon is doing a sci-fi movie, with Keanu Reeves. And Keanu Reeves is playing a huge jerk, a guy who wakes up from cryo-sleep and doesn't want to wait out the rest of his life alone so he wakes up Reese Witherspoon too. What a jerk, right? Can't wait to see Space Jerk so I can yell at the jerk. Thanks, Harvey. [Deadline]

Leonardo DiCaprio is heading back into the world of Dennis Lehane. The Shutter Island author is writing a movie for DiCaprio to star in, an adaptation of the 1964 John D. MacDonald novel The Deep Blue Good-by. It's a crime story about a man who lives on a houseboat in Florida, a man Wikipedia describes as "a bachelor, a man who can be friends with ladies as well as have a passion for them." That sounds just like Leo! Except for the houseboat part, of course. Unless he has a houseboat that I don't know about. Does Leonardo DiCaprio have a houseboat? Someone look into that for me. But yeah, anyway, another DiCaprio/Lehane movie. Have we had enough or what? [The Hollywood Reporter]

Steven Spielberg has seen fit to turn the uber-popular video game series Halo into a television show, so go alert your 16-year-old sons or brothers — knock first!! — and make their day. The story of the games involves a war with aliens, just like that other Steven Spielberg-produced TV series, Smash. I mean Falling Skies, the one with Noah Wyle. Who knows if this will be good, but you can bet there will be lots of viewing parties in college dorms whenever it premieres. Though, hm, do college boys have viewing parties? I mean, I did for Project Runway, but that seems different. [Vulture]

Here is a trailer for Byzantium, a Neil Jordan-directed vampire flick starring Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton. Having directed Interview with the Vampire, Jordan knows his way around a bloodsucking fiend, so this could be promising. And who doesn't like that Saoirse Ronan? Sure she was most recently in that bizarre Stephenie Meyer movie The Host (which I didn't get a chance to review, but man was it hilarious and a little insane), but pretty much everything else she's done has been good. Her section of Atonement worked well, I thought. So why not watch her in a vampire movie? I say yes to this. Though I keep getting it confused with Elysium. Two very, very different movies.

And here is a trailer for a Sienna Miller drama about belly dancing. And friendship. Through belly dancing. In the American Southwest. Here is a trailer for a dramatic movie about friendship and belly dancing in the Southwest starring Sienna Miller. How about that.

       

Try to Spot Spoilers in These 'Arrested Development' Set Photos

Arrested Development Day is fast approaching, and, aside from their structure, we still don't know much about Netflix's 15 new episodes. But a new interview with the show's set decorator—and photos from the scene—published in House Beautiful today give us some tiny spoilers. Perfect for over-analysis. 

Set decorator Jennifer Lukehart clearly had her work cut out for her, not only trying to recreate decade-old sets for the return of the show—but also finding ways to work inside jokes into the background, for full superfan satisfaction. One example she gives includes a seal sculpture in Lucille Austero's apartment—a nod to the joke that's a confusion between the name "Lucille" and "loose seal." (Buster Bluth lost his hand in a seal attack.) But aside from cool reminders like these, her House Beautiful interview also gives us a bit of actual catch-up information ahead of Sunday's big reveal, like the fact that George Michael has a map on his dorm room wall and that Lindsay and Tobias "were somehow approved for a home loan for a very large house" before the financial collapse. Of course it's unfurnished, since they run out of money. 

The set photos, however, also yield some interesting (albeit vague) details. One, for instance, is labeled: "Spain Apartment." Who goes to Spain? And who wants to live—in the words of Lukehart—with an "eclectic bohemian vibe"? G.O.B.? Tobias? None of the above? 

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We're also treated to an image of the bedroom of somebody named "Rebel." There are guest stars a-plenty, so we bet Rebel's someone famous. Maybe Isla Fisher? Or not. Who knows?

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We also get the sitting room of the Ealing Club, "a private members-only club, kind of like the Soho House," which does sound like someplace the Bluths would have frequented in more financially stable times. 

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And finally, someplace a little familiar. Here's Lucille Austero's apartment. "Nothing had been saved" from the original series, Lukehart explained, so she had to rebuild it. 

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So there you go. There are more photos over at House Beautiful Less than five days and counting, people. . 

       

Backpacks, Human Shields, Above and Beyond: The Oklahoma Teacher Heroes

Roughly 1,500 miles separate the elementary schools in Moore, Oklahoma, and Newtown, Connecticut. Six months separate their tragedies. And while there are marked differences between the devastating violence in these two towns brought so quickly and emotionally to the American spotlight, there is at least one uplifting constant: the courage of teachers who tried everything in their power to save the children. Because that's what teachers do.

"Among the victims were young children trying to take shelter in the safest place they knew: their school," President Obama said during his press conference addressing the Oklahoma tornado Tuesday. As of Tuesday evening, all students at Briarwood Elementary School and AgapeLand Learning Center have been accounted for; police said seven of nine children confirmed to have died in the storm's path went to Plaza Towers Elementary. 

Of course the terror at Sandy Hook Elementary is not the same as that of the three schools hit by the tornado. And, yes, the death of such young children is a horrifying connection. But as the recovery efforts continue, know that there are men and women in Oklahoma, not unlike the guardians of Sandy Hook, who were there when America's kids needed them most. These are their stories:

Plaza Towers Elementary The Woman of Steel "We had to pull a car out of the front hall off a teacher and I don't know what her name is, but she had three little kids underneath her," a rescuer is quoted as saying in a story from CNN's LZ Granderson. Yes, you read that right, rescuers pulled a car off a teacher who was shielding students from harm. And she seemed to survive, as the rescue worker told KFOR, via Today: "'

Good job, teach,' he said, breaking into tears."

The determined Rhonda Crosswhite A sixth-grade teacher at Plaza Towers, Crosswhite threw herself over students who were hiding in the school bathroom as the tornado ripped it to shreds. "I was in a stall with some kids and it just started coming down, so I laid on top of them," Crosswhite told Savannah Guthrie this morning. "One of my little boys just kept saying, 'I love you, I love you, please don't die with me.'" The children Crosswhite protected are now safe.  The first responders "They literally were lifting walls up and kids were coming out," Oklahoma State Police Sergeant Jeremy Lewis, is quoted as saying in The Chicago Tribune. Briarwood Elementary Sherry Bittle and Cindy Lowe, livesavers Bittle and Lowe, along with teachers at the now-obliterated Briarwood, also shielded students with their own bodies. "I had them take their backpacks and put them over their head as another safety precaution if they were down in the corner in the center of our room — in the center of our building," Bittle told ABC News. Lowe added that as the walls were coming down — and in spite of it — she, too, tried to protect as many kids as she could: "Just like Sherry said, getting them covered up, you know, we practice tornado drills and things like this and I had to tell them, this is not a drill, and we need to be safe and just laying my body on top of as many kids as I could to help out." All the students at Briarwood were accounted for as of Tuesday.  Julie Simon, human shield "She saved their lives by putting them in a closet and holding their heads down," the father of one of Simon's 8-year-old students tells the Associated Press, which adds that Simon had ushered her students into a closet instead of the hallway, as a kind of tornado drill, but very much improvised on the fly: "David Wheeler says the teacher at Briarwood Elementary in Oklahoma City took students into a closet and shielded them with her arms as the tornado collapsed the roof and starting lifting children upward." Briarwood was also the site where these photos of dusty, bloodied teachers holding kids and comforting them emerged: 

These are teachers with their students after the tornado today. Starting salary of a teacher in Oklahoma is $31, ... twitter.com/RadioHarrison/…

— Harrison Weinhold (@RadioHarrison) May 21, 2013

Pic of the Day: A teacher hugs a child after tornado destroyed school in south Oklahoma City #prayforoklahoma twitter.com/Discoverypics/…

— Discovery Pics(@Discoverypics) May 21, 2013

AgapeLand Learning Center Calm during the storm. According to a report from The New York Times, the staff at AgapeLand Learning Center, a daycare facility, was watching over some 15 children when the tornado struck. Staffers began "draping them with a protective covering and singing songs with them to keep them calm," Times reporters Nick Oxford and Michael Schwirtz write. And "as the wind ripped the roof off one of the bathrooms, and debris rained down on the children, they remained calm, singing 'You Are My Sunshine,'" the Times team reports, adding that although the daycare facility was smashed to pieces, not one child was harmed. 

"Their profession fuels all others, and on a normal day that is amazing enough in and of itself," CNN's Granderson writes. Thankfully, on Monday and on that awful December day, the teachers we trust so much went above and beyond amazing.

       

'SNL' Replacements So Crazy They Might Just Work

Now that Fred Armisen and Bill Hader have left Saturday Night Live, with Seth Meyers and likely Jason Sudeikis soon following, the show is facing an uncertain future. Yesterday we looked at what Armisen and Hader are taking with them, so now let's look forward to think about how they can be replaced. Given the crowdedness but odd insularity of the comedy scenes here in New York and in Chicago and Los Angeles — and given that SNL often plucks people from relative obscurity — this is not the easiest task. Still, there are some people we're aware of who could fit right in for standing out. To be sure, they are odd choices, but that might be a good thing.

[image error]Cole Escola: Though he's not been terribly active of late, Escola, who had a lo-fi, homemade sketch show on Logo (where Kate McKinnon was on a show too), is weird enough to help make up for Armisen's absence. He'd also provide the show with an interesting dash of queerness — he does a lot of gay-themed comedy, and lot of his characters are middle-aged women — to the cast, which has had very few openly gay cast members in its history. (McKinnon was the first out woman.) I could see Escola doing good desk bits, which is where Armisen and Hader most frequently shined.

[image error]Charlyne Yi: Let's just make all these suggestions weird, huh? Yi is usually seen doing a particular brand of non-acting, seeming stoned or zonked or whatever, but I think she's got more range than that. An acolyte of the Judd Apatow crew, Yi might not seem like the best fit for a show that demands lots of characters and impressions and all that, but maybe it's so crazy it could work? I don't know, I just want to see her do her thing on a bigger stage. Maybe she could do Weekend Update?

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Chris Kendall: A British YouTube sensation, Kendall made a name for himself filming funny, strange sketches all by his lonesome in his bedroom. He's gotten big enough to appear on several British television shows, but I'm pretty confident he could still be poached. He does accents and impressions and has a general air of Haderiness about him. Plus, how often does SNL have British cast members? It'd be something new!

[image error]Jamie Denbo and Jessica Chaffin: The duo behind the riotously funny Ronna & Beverly podcast, Denbo and Chaffin, who had a TV show in the UK, are likely too established at this point, but it would probably be worth at least making the offer, right? If Ronna and Beverly are any indication, Denbo and Chaffin are brilliant at character work, and I'd be curious to see how their improv-y style would gel with the sketch format. It certainly worked well for Amy Poehler and many, many others! If they can't be on the show, maybe they could at least host sometime?

[image error]Keegan-Michael Key: This is probably the longest shot, but Key was so consistently funny on Reno 911 back in the day and does so well on his own Comedy Central show, Key & Peele, that it seems odd his name hasn't come up much in the past. But, uh, yeah, he does have his own show, which is often pretty great, so he might not be too eager to leave that behind. But this is SNL! They could get him, right?

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Maria Bamford: Again we may have a problem of Bamford, a favorite of Adult Swim-types like Tim & Eric, being a bit too established to join the SNL repertory, but if she did agree to it I think she'd be a good addition. She has an odd, idiosyncratic standup style full of strange voices and does sketch work with a similar offbeat style. With an air of the Kristen Wiig about her, Bamford could be a nice, off-center complement to McKinnon and Cecily Strong.

       

Get Ready for the Solar Energy Boom

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The Week on the coming solar energy boom John Aziz assesses what the declining prices of solar panels mean for the future of sustainable energy. "If the trend stays on track for another eight to 10 years, solar generated electricity in the U.S. will descend to a level of $120 per MW/h — competitive with coal and nuclear — by 2020, or even 2015 for the sunniest parts of America," he writes. "If prices continue to fall over the next 20 years, solar costs will be half that of coal." This will benefit everyone, he argues. "Lower costs and better storage capacity would mean cheap, decentralized, plentiful, sustainable energy production — and massive relief to global markets that have been squeezed in recent years by the rising cost of fossil fuel extraction."

Time on the Oklahoma tornado and climate change Was the tornado that devastated Moore, Oklahoma yesterday exacerbated by climate change? Bryan Walsh is skeptical: "When it comes to the connection between climate change and tornadoes, the connection is cloudy at best," he notes. "First our historical data on the frequency and strength of the tornadoes is sketchy, especially as we go back further in the past. That’s partially a matter of numbers. A couple dozen tropical storms might hit the U.S. per year, but hundreds of tornadoes touch down annually, some for just a few moments. As a result, there’s little discernable trend in the number and strength of tornadoes over the past 60 years."

The Daily Beast on Chris Christie's take on Sandy New Jersey Governor Chris Christie doesn't think Hurricane Sandy, which struck the Jersey coast in 2012, was accelerated by climate change. Michael Tomasky tries to explain why: "It's the only position, when you think about it, that can make up for the Obama embrace, as far as the base is concerned. It can be rationalized thus: he did what he needed to do to get the federal flood cash, but at least he doesn’t buy that socialistic drivel about climate change." Tomasky fears Christie is losing his sense of independence: "This would hardly be worth remarking on if this were your standard-issue Republican presidential aspirant ... But Christie has shown occasional flashes of having an independent mind. It would seem they’re going to be fewer and farther between."

Grist on why utilities need to evolve David Roberts hopes to renew the debate about how public utilities should operate. It's an unsexy topic — "the subject is excruciatingly boring, a thicket of obscure institutions and processes, opaque jargon, and acronyms out the wazoo" — the answer to which will prove vital to human society. Roberts continues: "This is going to be the century of electricity. Everything that can be electrified will be." After explaining the state of affairs in details, he writes, "We need to do more than fiddle with rate structures or mandate arbitrary levels of efficiency or renewable energy. We need a ground-up rethink of how utilities work, how they are structured, and how they can be reformed in a way that enables and accelerates long-overdue innovation in the electricity space."

Reuters on where the shale boom lags behind Kristen Hays and Jonathan Leff visit oil shales in Ohio and Colorado, where deep, dependable oil reserves have been difficult to come by. "Together they offered a sign that the flush of enthusiasm and rush of investment that piled into shale fields from one coast to the other has hit a curve," the pair write. "While the basic technologies of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling was enough to coax an unexpected gusher of oil from shale rock in many regions, these more challenging seams may require incremental innovation to unlock." Technology — and a little luck — could help out, though. One analyst told the reporters that "the bottom line is that this stuff is down there, it's just figuring out the sweet spot of where to get it and the right conditions to get it out."

       

Apple's Massive Tax Avoidance Scheme Was Probably Legal

Apple used an impressively complex network of subsidiaries to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes in a scheme that will pit the company against congressional investigators on Tuesday. But guess what? Lawmakers haven't found anything actually illegal in Apple's activities. 

Essentially, Apple's scheme was an offshore web of subsidiaries on steroids. Here's how the New York Times explained it: 

"Congressional investigators found that some of Apple’s subsidiaries had no employees and were largely run by top officials from the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. But by officially locating them in places like Ireland, Apple was able to, in effect, make them stateless — exempt from taxes, record-keeping laws and the need for the subsidiaries to even file tax returns anywhere in the world."

The U.S., they explain, determines the residency of companies based on their incorporation location, but Ireland uses their actual base of operations. So for tax purposes, for example, Apple's Apple Operations International — officially located in Ireland — exists nowhere. AOI accounts for about 30 percent of the company's total net profits worldwide from 2009-2011, according to USA Today. 

Apple, who had $102.3 billion of $145 billion in cash overseas as of the end of March, has said that their offshore income reflects their international sales base, and that they already pay a ton of taxes: Apple says it paid $6 billion in taxes last year. They have at least $74 billion untaxed income offshore, according to the Times, which will remain untaxed unless the company moves the cash back to the U.S.  

But that's all legal, thanks to a series of loopholes in U.S. tax code. So it seems that lawmakers, led by Senator John McCain and Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations chair Carl Levin, are accusing Apple of breaking the spirit, but not the letter, of the law. It's part of a larger look at the tax avoidance practices of many major American companies, which seems aimed at finding a way to update what many see as an outdated tax code that allows for these shenanigans. The Times, again: 

Investigators have not accused Apple of breaking any laws and the company is hardly the only American multinational to face scrutiny for using complex corporate structures and tax havens to sidestep taxes...Still, the findings about Apple were remarkable both for the enormous amount of money involved and the audaciousness of the company’s assertion that its subsidiaries are beyond the reach of any taxing authority.

“There is a technical term economists like to use for behavior like this,” said Edward Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and a former staff director at the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. “Unbelievable chutzpah.”

Here's what Apple CEO Tim Cook will say tomorrow  in prepared testimony, arguing that the company's tax procedures are “authorized by US law” and comply “with all US tax regulations.”: 

Apple does not use tax gimmicks. Apple does not move its intellectual property into offshore tax havens and use it to sell products back into the US in order to avoid US tax; it does not use revolving loans from foreign subsidiaries to fund its domestic operations; it does not hold money on a Caribbean island; and it does not have a bank account in the Cayman Islands.

After acknowledging that the company has avoided some of the biggest corporate offshoring cliches, Cook will ask Congress to consider tax reform that would reduce the 35 percent corporate tax rate and encourage companies to bring their foreign holdings back to the U.S. 

       

Rescues, Grim Recoveries at Elementary School After the Oklahoma Tornado

There's a reason that many eyes were on Plaza Towers Elementary as Moore, Oklahoma began to assess the damage from a deadly, devastating tornado that blasted through the town Monday evening and killed at least 51 people: the school was leveled, with dozens of children still inside. And so far, some of the most emotionally charged news has emerged from the story unfolding there. 

While children from the 4th, 5th, and 6th grades in the school were evacuated before the storm, students in kindergarten through third grade sheltered in place. Seventy five children and staff were reportedly in the school when the tornado hit. To try and make it through the storm, children told KFOR that they held on to the walls of the school's hallways, with teachers trying to shelter as many as they could. 

Here's NBC News, describing the scene just after the storm: 

"The tornado tore the roof off the school about 3 p.m., and authorities kept hysterical parents back because it was too loud to hear screams for help. A teacher told NBC affiliate KFOR that she draped herself on top of six children in a bathroom to shelter them."

Here's a view of the school just after the storm:

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Some escaped. Some were pulled from the rubble alive: 

Child pulled from the rubble of the Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla. (AP) twitter.com/passantino/sta…

— Jon Passantino (@passantino) May 20, 2013

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Photo: AP

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Photo: AP

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Photo: AP

But as night approached, the news got worse: at least seven bodies, all children, have been pulled from the rubble so far. Officials, according to KFOR, believe that up to 30 additional children may have been trapped inside, but have no hope of finding any additional survivors. Work at Plaza Towers Elementary is now in recovery mode.