Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 1018

August 15, 2015

Chris Christie’s budget fiasco: Billions blown on an aborted tunnel

When we wrote in April about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s budget “sins,” one of the biggest was the money shuffle he engineered after his 2010 decision to kill an $8.7 billion commuter rail tunnel from New Jersey to New York City. That decision, which boosted him to national prominence, was a major bragging point for years. But now he’s playing tunnel defense rather than his customary offense amid a torrent of terrible tunnel news: lengthy delays in the century-old rail tunnel commuters are stuck with now; jockeying among New Jersey, New York and Amtrak over how to pay for a new $14 billion tunnel; and warnings of chronic failures and shutdowns if something isn’t done soon to add rail capacity. Had Christie not spiked the so-called ARC tunnel, it would be coming online in about three years. But now, as Christie runs for president on his claim of having been a prudent and competent guardian of New Jersey’s finances, the tunnel problems have inspired a spate of news reports, including one by The Record newspaper in New Jersey’s Bergen County saying the cancellation wasted $1.2 billion that had been spent on engineering. Why did Christie kill the tunnel, and what did he do with the money afterward? As we reported back in April, Christie diverted a total of $3 billion of highway toll increases and Port Authority of New York and New Jersey money originally earmarked for the tunnel to bail out Jersey’s finances – the biggest one-time budget fix of his administration. The upside: Christie was able to keep a campaign pledge and avoid raising taxes, including New Jersey’s gas tax, which at 14.5 cents a gallon is lower than any state but Alaska. The downside: No salvation in sight for the estimated 87,000 New Jersey Transit rail commuters who cross the Hudson River to Manhattan each weekday in tubes dug when Theodore Roosevelt was president. (Read more about the controversial legacy behind Christie’s budget claims.) Since Superstorm Sandy flooded the tunnel with saltwater and caused extensive damage, the need for additional rail capacity has only become more acute. Time is running out before one of the two rail tubes within the tunnel has to be shut down for repairs, Amtrak executive Stephen Gardner warned at a hearing on Monday. That would bring the daily commute to a crawl. “We would be left with having to handle 24 trains’ worth of demand across six slots spread between Amtrak and New Jersey Transit,” Gardner said, noting that Amtrak needs four of the slots, leaving just two for commuter trains. Christie has defended his decision to kill the ARC tunnel, saying New Jersey would have been stuck paying for billions in potential cost overruns. A spokeswoman added that “the completion of ARC would have done nothing to resolve the issues we’re still facing with Amtrak’s tunnels today.” Gardner said at the hearing that Amtrak’s tunnel problems would exist even if the ARC were on schedule, but he also answered yes when asked if the tunnel would have provided a “safe haven” to New Jersey commuters by giving them a backup. There is no consensus about how to pay for Amtrak’s proposed new tunnel project, known as the Gateway Program. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., this week proposed creating a new nonprofit agency to raise money for the effort. Amtrak supports an 80 percent federal, 20 percent local funding split, but its influence in Washington is extremely limited. It’s not clear when, if ever, the Gateway Program, which would cost billions more than the canceled ARC tunnel, will get under way. Christie recently said New York should shoulder a portion of the cost. “The reason I killed the ARC tunnel was the federal government was contributing to it, the state of New Jersey was contributing to it and the state or city of New York was contributing nothing,” he told WABC. Earlier this week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said money should come from anywhere but his state. “It’s not my tunnel,” Cuomo told reporters. “It is an Amtrak tunnel that is used by Amtrak and by New Jersey Transit.” However, if the federal government steps in to pay for the project, Cuomo suggested he may chip in: “If they’re serious, I’ll come to the table,” he told The New York Times. The ARC tunnel was expected to be completed in 2018. The earliest a Gateway tunnel could open is 2025, Gardner said at the hearing. “Every day that we defer is a day of extending, frankly, our risk,” he said.

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Published on August 15, 2015 08:00

“This is about money. Who got it, and who don’t”: A Hotlanta housing crisis boils over

Across the Southeast, this summer was among the hottest in recorded history, with several cities shattering heat records. This has been particularly painful for the residents of so-called Friendship Tower, an apartment for senior citizens in downtown Atlanta, which has been without functioning air conditioning for nearly three months. Friendship Tower was built with funding from the Housing and Urban Development department's Section 202 program, which provides subsidies for housing seniors ages 62 and older. Yet it has a private owner: Friendship Baptist Church, Atlanta's “first black Baptist autonomous congregation,” which independently organized itself shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War. When the apartment complex's air conditioning abruptly malfunctioned in late April, residents hoped FBC would quickly spring into action to fix the system and protect the senior citizens, many of whom have disabilities such as asthma, from the harsh Georgia summer. A protestor with his family. But three weeks passed and the system remained in disrepair. Temperatures in some apartments reach higher than 90 degrees, according to readings taken by a local news station. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, a pro-business Democrat who recently helped FBC sell part of its property to the Atlanta Falcons for its new stadium for $19.5 million, appeared at the site and promised he would do “everything that I can to make sure those good people have air right away.” Weeks passed, and the temporary small air conditioning units Friendship Tower placed into individual apartments did little to cool down residents. Federal officials from HUD inspected the units and deemed they were sufficient for cooling. The residents disagreed. Eventually, residents filed a lawsuit against FBC, leading to a late May ruling by a local judge that the complex was failing to care for the welfare of its citizens, ordering the complex to provide an additional air conditioner for each unit. The judge was likely impacted by the emotional testimony from residents, one of whom described passing out from heat; another outright collapsed. “The residences are in a livable condition; not ideal but livable,” protested attorney Robert Bozeman, hired by FBC to represent its case. Those were odd words coming from a lawyer whose professional webpage boasts about “providing strong and effective representation to those injured as a result of wrong or negligent acts of others.” In mid-June, the tower installed a new comprehensive air conditioning system, but it failed to properly cool the units. Some units still reached a hot 87 degrees. The facility attempted to evict some of the tenants, but was blocked by the courts. By the end of July, tenants took their grievances directly to FBC, marching into one of its Sunday services while singing and praying. Perhaps this direct action finally spurred the church leadership to take a more direct interest; the church's minister visited the complex shortly after the protest. The city of Atlanta moved to allow a group of residents to stay at a hotel while Friendship Tower was still in disrepair; in the first week of August, FBC lawyers told a dozen of these residents that they must vacate their hotel rooms and return to the sweltering heat of their apartments. Residents also began to receive letters demanding rent for the month by August 10, even though the complex had previously told them they would not have to pay rent for July and August. Some of the tenants have filed a motion to recuse the judge presiding over their case, citing communications between the judge and management outside the courtroom. On August 5, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed returned to Friendship Tower. He inspected five different apartments and met with residents, citing improvements. The local news claimed this visit showed the problems were “nearly resolved,” but the residents disagreed. The next day, they held a rally outside the apartment complex, calling attention to FBC's continued refusal either to fix the air conditioning or move all residents to a more humane location. The rally, which I attended, brought together around three dozen people and was organized by Derrick Boazman, a local radio host with roots in the community. Boazman introduced a number of activists and concerned individuals who had come out to support the struggling seniors. Bobby Heard, who is head of the tenants association at Friendship, described the mayor's visit as a sort of whitewashing of the problem. “The mayor came down here and inspected five units,” he explained. “But there's a hundred units.” Another resident, who had temporarily moved out due to the unbearable heat, explained that his thermostat that day read 87 degrees. He is temporarily staying in a hotel, and he said a police officer in the building told him he wasn't even welcome in his own apartment. Another resident, Lynda Brooks, got a reading of 80 degrees on her thermostat. Many of those who attended the rally had heard about the situation in the media over the summer. “I've been hearing about this on the radio too long,” explained one woman, who said she left work after a 10-hour shift to “do something about this.” Many demonstrators carried signs adorned with variations of Black Lives Matter hashtags. One prominent attendee was State Senator Vincent Fort, the Democratic majority whip and a staple of the state's progressive community. Fort has long been an ally of the grassroots left in the state, even going so far as getting arrested in Medicaid protests last year. Fort, as well as numerous other speakers at the event, spoke to the religious commitments of the demonstrators, as opposed to the overt religiosity but poor ethics of FBC. “Anytime you stand up for people who can't stand up for themselves, you're doing God's work,” he said. Boazman, Fort and the others standing with the residents that day plan to escalate their actions. Their next target is Glass Ratner, the property management firm that is in charge of day-to-day operations at Friendship Tower. Fort and others said they are prepared to be arrested on the premises to draw attention to the plight of the senior residents. The senator explained that the fundamental issue goes far beyond air conditioning: “This is not about A/C. You need to know that. This is about money. Who got it, and who don't.” This speaks to the dynamics at play at Friendship Tower. At one point, a speaker affiliated with the Nation of Islam told the audience, “This isn't the Caucasian holdin' us back here today. It's people who look like us.” What's happening at Friendship Tower is what the class war looks like in the 21st century. Race, gender and religious background are not the dividing lines between the senior citizens in this apartment complex and the prominent church that owns their property. The divide is over raw access to money, and the power it brings. As Senator Fort noted, FBC, having just received nearly $20 million to sell its property, is awash in cash. The church has played its role in the South's African American history, but has also hosted the well-to-do of the community, such as its former pastor Reverend William Guy, whose daughter Jasmine Guy is a TV star. There are no television stars or prominent political donors living at Friendship Tower, just low-income seniors, struggling against a political and economic system that doesn't value their lives because they simply don't have the dollars to make them care. As debates over things like race, gender and sexual orientation dominate national media discussion, cases like Friendship Tower are swept under the rug. Talking about raw power among different economic classes is a sort of irreverence you rarely find on cable television or in the major newspapers, but it is a power differential that increasingly defines America's greatest and most persistent form of inequality. Rest assured, the seniors at Friendship Tower won't be the last ones who suffer from it; if we ignore their plight, the rest of us will be next.

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Published on August 15, 2015 07:00

The week Fox News got Trumped: Roger Ailes sold out, Megyn Kelly took off & the Donald won very, very big

The past week has been very confusing for anybody trying to figure out what is going on in the saga of Donald Trump and Fox News.

There was the report that had Roger Ailes bowing to Trump after his attacks on Megyn Kelly during and after last week's GOP debate gained unexpected traction with the Fox News audience. (And after Kelly started receiving death threats for the crime of asking Donald Trump about his sexism.) Then there was a different report that portrayed Ailes as "livid" over Trump's behavior, even threatening to go to "war" with him unless the Kelly situation was resolved. Then Kelly went on a long vacation, and there was disagreement about whether she was taking time off in response to the whole mess or not.

All in all, not the easiest thing to decipher, especially when we're talking about a news organization whose secrecy and insularity would make the NSA jealous.

So what are we to make of this welter of conflicting messages, leaks and takes? Well, for one thing, everyone who confidently predicted that Fox News had made headway in its quest to box Trump out of the Republican presidential race—a group that includes yours truly—has to admit how wrong they were.

We will likely never know whether Roger Ailes sternly put Trump in his place or whether he prostrated himself before the (sigh) current GOP frontrunner, but it's clear that he has been put on the back foot by everything that happened after Trump began his campaign of harassment against Kelly. In Trump, he has met his match, another master of bombastic right-wing populist rhetoric. Looking back, he should have anticipated that he wouldn't be able to control Trump. After all, Fox News has spent years boosting Trump, especially during his weekly appearances on "Fox and Friends," the rabidly partisan morning talk show that's always been the clearest reflection of Ailes' personal politics. Why was its audience suddenly supposed to turn on him for some pesky thing like rancid misogyny?

Ailes also had to contend with the fact that, unlike a lot of the other people in the GOP field, Trump has the entire rest of the media salivating to book him. They are so desperate to have him, and the ratings he brings, that they let him lazily phone in to their programs instead of turning up in person--a luxury not granted to almost anyone else. (A rare exception to this? "Fox News Sunday.") CNN or "Morning Joe" will literally never stop wanting Donald Trump as a guest, and Trump will never not agree to yammer on TV. Ailes couldn't afford to cede all of that turf to the competition; some solution had to be found.

So it's clear that, on the whole, Ailes lost this round. But we shouldn't expect that this is the end of the story. This is a temporary ceasefire, not a peace treaty. Ailes must be thoroughly pissed off that Trump is still directing traffic even after Fox News tried to kneecap him. Trump never shuts his mouth, so we know that he's still simmering about Kelly's questions. This Sunday, he's giving an on-camera interview to "Meet the Press," not "Fox News Sunday." (Trump does this so rarely that "MTP" had to emphasize the "face to face" nature of the interview.) It's likely that Ailes is now trying to figure out how to land a blow on Trump without inciting the kind of insanity that burst forth after the debate. Nothing has been resolved.

Really, though, the person who should be the most incensed is Megyn Kelly. She did her job, endured the worst kind of thuggish attacks from Trump and his followers, and in return, watched her boss cut a deal with her tormentor. Kelly is certainly tough enough to withstand everything that's been thrown at her, but she might have expected more from Roger Ailes. She can only hope that, when her network's uneasy detente with Trump comes to an end, Ailes will choose her over the Donald.

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Published on August 15, 2015 06:30

Black Lives Matter joins a long line of protest movements that have shifted public opinion — most recently, Occupy Wall Street

Throughout American history, advocates for racial justice and economic justice have sometimes been at odds, but they’ve also found common ground. In recent weeks we’ve watched this tension play out in a surprising way, when Black Lives Matters (BLM) activists disrupted Bernie Sanders rallies to demand that the socialist senator from Vermont focus more attention on racial inequities. Since the BLM movement emerged a year ago -- in reaction to the killing of an unarmed teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri – it has stirred controversy, particularly on the right. Many conservative commentators considered the young BLM activists too angry, unruly, confrontational and divisive. But BLM's attack on Sanders split progressives. Many progressive activists cheered the BLM’s protest, but others criticized them for going after Sanders rather than targeting more conservative candidates. In a short period of time, BLM has proved to be amazingly effective and influential. Despite having little funding and relatively few activists, the movement has helped inject the issue of police misconduct and the broader racial bias of our criminal justice system into the political debate. There’s been no sudden upsurge of racial profiling, arrests, beatings and killings of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement officers. Instead – thanks in part to BLM -- Americans have simply become more aware of the problem. The names of the victims of police abuse – Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland and others -- have been seared into the national consciousness. By introducing the phrase “black lives matters” into our culture – primarily through the use of social media but also by engaging in protest and civil disobedience – BLM has shifted public opinion. A new Pew Research Center poll discovered that the number of Americans who believe that changes are needed to give African-Americans equal rights has swelled from 46 percent to 59 percent just in the past year. Among white Americans, the number has increased from 39 percent to 53 percent. Among Republicans, it spiked from 27 percent to 42 percent. This growing awareness has triggered calls for reform of police practices by politicians from President Barack Obama to local mayors. That BLM met with initial skepticism and criticism should come as no surprise. This happens to all protest movements when they first appear. When four black college students organized a sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960 to protest Jim Crow racial segregation, even many black and white liberals thought that they were too radical. But their actions galvanized a new wave of civil rights protest. Within a few months, the sit-in movement spread to dozens of cities throughout the South and the activists started a new organization called the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Its growing base of supporters played key roles in the freedom rides, marches and voter registration drives that eventually led Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Many SNCC activists became key leaders in subsequent battles for social justice, including congressman John Lewis and Marion Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. The same dynamic occurred when feminist groups in the 1960s and 1970s began protesting against male-dominated institutions, when environmental activists sought to shut down nuclear power plants, and when ACT-UP organized “die-ins,” rallies and other disruptions to raise awareness about the AIDS epidemic. Ideas that were once considered “radical” moved from the margins to the mainstream, changing both the culture and public policy. The most recent counterpart to BLM is the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. In September 2011, a handful of activists took over Zuccotti Park in New York City to draw attention to the nation’s widening wealth and income gap. The protests quickly spread to cities and towns around the country and changed our national conversation. At kitchen tables, in coffee shops, in offices and factories, and in newsrooms, Americans began talking about economic inequality, corporate greed, and how America’s super-rich have damaged our economy and our democracy. Occupy Wall Street provided Americans with a language—the “1 percent” and the “99 percent”—to explain the nation’s widening economic divide, the undue political influence of the super-rich, and the damage triggered by Wall Street’s reckless behavior that crashed the economy and caused enormous suffering and hardship. Although many Americans disagreed with its disruptive tactics, the OWS movement nevertheless helped change public opinion. About three-quarters (74 percent) of Americans—including 84 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of independents, and 62 percent of Republicans—believe that corporations have too much influence on American life and politics today, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll. A Pew Research Center survey found that 60 percent of Americans believe that "the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy." Eighty-four percent of Americans think that money has too much influence in politics. Slightly more Americans (85 percent) want an overhaul of our campaign finance system. Seventy-three percent of Americans favor tougher rules for Wall Street financial companies and 58 percent of Americans support breaking up “big banks like Citigroup.” Sixty-nine percent of Americans—including 90 percent of Democrats, 69 percent of independents, and 45 percent of Republicans—believe that the government should help reduce the gap between the rich and everyone else. Eighty-two percent of Americans—including 94 percent of Democrats, 83 percent of independents, and 64 percent of Republicans—think the government should help reduce poverty. A recent poll by Hart Research Associates found that 75 percent of Americans (including 53 percent of Republicans) support an increase in the federal minimum wage to $12.50 an hour by 2020. Sixty-three percent support an even greater increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020. Even after local officials had pushed Occupy protesters out of parks and public spaces, the movement’s excitement and energy were soon harnessed and co-opted by labor unions and community activists. The past two years have seen an explosion of worker unrest, especially among Wal-Mart employees, workers at fast-food chains, janitors, and hospital workers. In response, a growing number of cities – including Seattle, Kansas City and Los Angeles – have adopted municipal wages significantly above the federal standard of $7.25 an hour. Even Wal-Mart and McDonald's reluctantly agreed to boost their starting pay. Perhaps the most telling sign of OWS’s success is an action taken Aug. 5 by the staid federal Securities and Exchange Commission. Beginning in 2018, the SEC will require publicly traded corporations to disclose the pay gap between their chief executives and their workers. Soon after OWS started, politicians began echoing its concern about widening inequality. President Obama delivered several major speeches on the topic. But nowhere can the impact of the Occupy insurgency be better seen than in the fumbling efforts of some Republicans candidates – in 2012 and this year -- to tap into the national mood without sounding too anti-business and offending their corporate sponsors. No politician has captured the spirit of OWS as well as Bernie Sanders. Indeed, the Sanders surge – inspired by his relentless attacks on the political influence of the “billionaire class” and Wall Street banks, widening inequality, the declining living standards of the middle class, persistent poverty, and the rising cost of higher education -- is the political expression of the OWS movement. He’s called for raising the federal minimum wage to $15, breaking up big banks, providing tuition-free higher education, and nominating Supreme Court justices who will overturn the Citizens United ruling that equates money with free speech. Whether or not he captures the Democratic nomination, his campaign’s growing momentum has already shifted the public debate, pushing other candidates, including Hillary Clinton, to adopt more progressive positions. Sanders’ call for a “grass-roots political revolution” has inspired tens of thousands of Americans, including many young people, to participate in electoral politics, some for the first time. At the progressive Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix in July, BLM activists interrupted a town hall meeting with Sanders and Martin O’Malley, another Democratic presidential aspirant, demanding that they present "concrete actions" for addressing racial injustice. "Your 'progressive' is not enough," said Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter. "We need more." On Aug. 8, BLM protesters disrupted a Seattle rally defending Social Security to which Sanders had been invited. Seconds after he took the stage, BLM protesters grabbed the microphone from Sanders. Many in the audience booed while one of the protesters addressed the crowd: "My name is Marissa Janae Johnson, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Seattle. I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, filled with its progressives, but you already did it for me.” Johnson led a four-minute moment of silence in honor of Michael Brown and demanded that Sanders release his plans to reform policing. When it appeared that Johnson would not give back the microphone to Sanders, the organizers decided to shut down the rally. Sanders never got a chance to speak. Sanders was taken aback by the criticism and the tactics. Some of his supporters were angry that the BLMers would attack and embarrass the Democrats’ most progressive candidate, arguing that his economic policy agenda would disproportionately help African-Americans. Why not focus their anger on the Republican candidates or on Hillary Clinton? In effect, the BLM activists were holding Sanders to a higher standard. They expected more of him – and of his liberal and progressive (and mostly white) supporters. They countered that his focus on economic issues was insufficient. They insisted that he specifically address the racism of the criminal justice system and the problem of police abuse in the black community. And they knew that disrupting Sanders rallies would generate lots of media publicity for BLM. BLM’s spat with Sanders reflects the persistent tension between “outsiders” and “insiders” in American politics. Outsiders engage in confrontation in order to get their voices heard and put new issues on the public agenda. Politicians have to decide whether to embrace or vilify the protesters and their issues. In this case, BLM’s protests may have actually strengthened Sanders’ growing movement. Sanders -- who began his activist career in the 1960s civil rights movement when he was arrested for demonstrating against segregated public schools in Chicago, and who, from the start of his campaign, has focused attention on the shockingly high unemployment rate among black youth -- moved quickly to address the BLM’s concerns. A week after BLM disrupted the Phoenix gathering, Sanders spoke to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights group founded by Martin Luther King Jr., where he said “black lives matter” and outlined a detailed set of initiatives to deal with racial inequality, which he posted on his campaign website. Then he hired an African-American woman -- Symone Sanders, the national youth chair of the Coalition on Juvenile Justice – as his press secretary. A well-respected activist, Symone Sanders has spoken at recent Sanders rallies and helped the Vermont senator sharpen his message on racial issues. His most recent stump speeches at huge rallies in Portland, Oregon, Oakland, California, and Los Angeles have included specific references to police misconduct, mass incarceration, the GOP’s efforts to suppress voting rights, and “institutional racism.” His comments about racism have gotten some of the loudest and most sustained cheers from the crowd at these rallies. Whether Sanders’ increasing emphasis on racial issues will attract more African-American voters and help him win his party’s nomination isn’t clear, but it was probably no coincidence that BLM did not disrupt Sanders’ rally in Los Angeles Monday night, and that the number of blacks among the 27,000 people in the crowd was considerably larger than in his other large events. On Tuesday, BLM protesters showed up at a Hillary Clinton event in New Hampshire and the following day the group interrupted a Jeb Bush rally in Las Vegas. Because BLM is highly decentralized, people with different political views, using different tactics, can claim to represent the movement, so it isn’t clear if BLM’s turn toward these other candidates is part of a national strategy, but it appears that BLM has made peace with the Sanders campaign. By fusing the concerns of both BLM and OWS, Sanders is echoing Martin Luther King’s concerns with both racial and economic justice. “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter," he asked, "if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?" He believed that America needed a "radical redistribution of economic and political power" as well as a dismantling of America’s racial caste system. It is often forgotten that the August 1963 protest rally at the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and was funded primarily by donations from labor unions. King was committed to building bridges between the civil rights and labor movements. Speaking to a meeting of Teamsters union shop stewards in 1967, King said, "Negroes are not the only poor in the nation. There are nearly twice as many white poor as Negro, and therefore the struggle against poverty is not involved solely with color or racial discrimination but with elementary economic justice." He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a strike of African-American sanitation workers. Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter reflect two parallel, overlapping, but distinct branches of progressive politics. Their commonalities are greater than their differences. Like OWS and other major protest movements, Black Lives Matters seemed to come out of nowhere, but was in reality a response to long-simmering concerns. Like OWS, it has attracted significant media coverage and galvanized public opinion. Like OWS, it emerged as a loosely structured, bottom-up movement without much funding, with little mainstream support, and with young and relatively inexperienced leaders. But within a year, Black Lives Matter has helped catalyze a national conversation about racial injustice and cajoled the major Democratic Party candidates for president – and other offices – to focus more attention on these issues. Even if, like OWS, the BLM movement falls by the wayside, its impact, like OWS’s, will endure.Throughout American history, advocates for racial justice and economic justice have sometimes been at odds, but they’ve also found common ground. In recent weeks we’ve watched this tension play out in a surprising way, when Black Lives Matters (BLM) activists disrupted Bernie Sanders rallies to demand that the socialist senator from Vermont focus more attention on racial inequities. Since the BLM movement emerged a year ago -- in reaction to the killing of an unarmed teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri – it has stirred controversy, particularly on the right. Many conservative commentators considered the young BLM activists too angry, unruly, confrontational and divisive. But BLM's attack on Sanders split progressives. Many progressive activists cheered the BLM’s protest, but others criticized them for going after Sanders rather than targeting more conservative candidates. In a short period of time, BLM has proved to be amazingly effective and influential. Despite having little funding and relatively few activists, the movement has helped inject the issue of police misconduct and the broader racial bias of our criminal justice system into the political debate. There’s been no sudden upsurge of racial profiling, arrests, beatings and killings of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement officers. Instead – thanks in part to BLM -- Americans have simply become more aware of the problem. The names of the victims of police abuse – Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland and others -- have been seared into the national consciousness. By introducing the phrase “black lives matters” into our culture – primarily through the use of social media but also by engaging in protest and civil disobedience – BLM has shifted public opinion. A new Pew Research Center poll discovered that the number of Americans who believe that changes are needed to give African-Americans equal rights has swelled from 46 percent to 59 percent just in the past year. Among white Americans, the number has increased from 39 percent to 53 percent. Among Republicans, it spiked from 27 percent to 42 percent. This growing awareness has triggered calls for reform of police practices by politicians from President Barack Obama to local mayors. That BLM met with initial skepticism and criticism should come as no surprise. This happens to all protest movements when they first appear. When four black college students organized a sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960 to protest Jim Crow racial segregation, even many black and white liberals thought that they were too radical. But their actions galvanized a new wave of civil rights protest. Within a few months, the sit-in movement spread to dozens of cities throughout the South and the activists started a new organization called the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Its growing base of supporters played key roles in the freedom rides, marches and voter registration drives that eventually led Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Many SNCC activists became key leaders in subsequent battles for social justice, including congressman John Lewis and Marion Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. The same dynamic occurred when feminist groups in the 1960s and 1970s began protesting against male-dominated institutions, when environmental activists sought to shut down nuclear power plants, and when ACT-UP organized “die-ins,” rallies and other disruptions to raise awareness about the AIDS epidemic. Ideas that were once considered “radical” moved from the margins to the mainstream, changing both the culture and public policy. The most recent counterpart to BLM is the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. In September 2011, a handful of activists took over Zuccotti Park in New York City to draw attention to the nation’s widening wealth and income gap. The protests quickly spread to cities and towns around the country and changed our national conversation. At kitchen tables, in coffee shops, in offices and factories, and in newsrooms, Americans began talking about economic inequality, corporate greed, and how America’s super-rich have damaged our economy and our democracy. Occupy Wall Street provided Americans with a language—the “1 percent” and the “99 percent”—to explain the nation’s widening economic divide, the undue political influence of the super-rich, and the damage triggered by Wall Street’s reckless behavior that crashed the economy and caused enormous suffering and hardship. Although many Americans disagreed with its disruptive tactics, the OWS movement nevertheless helped change public opinion. About three-quarters (74 percent) of Americans—including 84 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of independents, and 62 percent of Republicans—believe that corporations have too much influence on American life and politics today, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll. A Pew Research Center survey found that 60 percent of Americans believe that "the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy." Eighty-four percent of Americans think that money has too much influence in politics. Slightly more Americans (85 percent) want an overhaul of our campaign finance system. Seventy-three percent of Americans favor tougher rules for Wall Street financial companies and 58 percent of Americans support breaking up “big banks like Citigroup.” Sixty-nine percent of Americans—including 90 percent of Democrats, 69 percent of independents, and 45 percent of Republicans—believe that the government should help reduce the gap between the rich and everyone else. Eighty-two percent of Americans—including 94 percent of Democrats, 83 percent of independents, and 64 percent of Republicans—think the government should help reduce poverty. A recent poll by Hart Research Associates found that 75 percent of Americans (including 53 percent of Republicans) support an increase in the federal minimum wage to $12.50 an hour by 2020. Sixty-three percent support an even greater increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020. Even after local officials had pushed Occupy protesters out of parks and public spaces, the movement’s excitement and energy were soon harnessed and co-opted by labor unions and community activists. The past two years have seen an explosion of worker unrest, especially among Wal-Mart employees, workers at fast-food chains, janitors, and hospital workers. In response, a growing number of cities – including Seattle, Kansas City and Los Angeles – have adopted municipal wages significantly above the federal standard of $7.25 an hour. Even Wal-Mart and McDonald's reluctantly agreed to boost their starting pay. Perhaps the most telling sign of OWS’s success is an action taken Aug. 5 by the staid federal Securities and Exchange Commission. Beginning in 2018, the SEC will require publicly traded corporations to disclose the pay gap between their chief executives and their workers. Soon after OWS started, politicians began echoing its concern about widening inequality. President Obama delivered several major speeches on the topic. But nowhere can the impact of the Occupy insurgency be better seen than in the fumbling efforts of some Republicans candidates – in 2012 and this year -- to tap into the national mood without sounding too anti-business and offending their corporate sponsors. No politician has captured the spirit of OWS as well as Bernie Sanders. Indeed, the Sanders surge – inspired by his relentless attacks on the political influence of the “billionaire class” and Wall Street banks, widening inequality, the declining living standards of the middle class, persistent poverty, and the rising cost of higher education -- is the political expression of the OWS movement. He’s called for raising the federal minimum wage to $15, breaking up big banks, providing tuition-free higher education, and nominating Supreme Court justices who will overturn the Citizens United ruling that equates money with free speech. Whether or not he captures the Democratic nomination, his campaign’s growing momentum has already shifted the public debate, pushing other candidates, including Hillary Clinton, to adopt more progressive positions. Sanders’ call for a “grass-roots political revolution” has inspired tens of thousands of Americans, including many young people, to participate in electoral politics, some for the first time. At the progressive Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix in July, BLM activists interrupted a town hall meeting with Sanders and Martin O’Malley, another Democratic presidential aspirant, demanding that they present "concrete actions" for addressing racial injustice. "Your 'progressive' is not enough," said Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter. "We need more." On Aug. 8, BLM protesters disrupted a Seattle rally defending Social Security to which Sanders had been invited. Seconds after he took the stage, BLM protesters grabbed the microphone from Sanders. Many in the audience booed while one of the protesters addressed the crowd: "My name is Marissa Janae Johnson, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Seattle. I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, filled with its progressives, but you already did it for me.” Johnson led a four-minute moment of silence in honor of Michael Brown and demanded that Sanders release his plans to reform policing. When it appeared that Johnson would not give back the microphone to Sanders, the organizers decided to shut down the rally. Sanders never got a chance to speak. Sanders was taken aback by the criticism and the tactics. Some of his supporters were angry that the BLMers would attack and embarrass the Democrats’ most progressive candidate, arguing that his economic policy agenda would disproportionately help African-Americans. Why not focus their anger on the Republican candidates or on Hillary Clinton? In effect, the BLM activists were holding Sanders to a higher standard. They expected more of him – and of his liberal and progressive (and mostly white) supporters. They countered that his focus on economic issues was insufficient. They insisted that he specifically address the racism of the criminal justice system and the problem of police abuse in the black community. And they knew that disrupting Sanders rallies would generate lots of media publicity for BLM. BLM’s spat with Sanders reflects the persistent tension between “outsiders” and “insiders” in American politics. Outsiders engage in confrontation in order to get their voices heard and put new issues on the public agenda. Politicians have to decide whether to embrace or vilify the protesters and their issues. In this case, BLM’s protests may have actually strengthened Sanders’ growing movement. Sanders -- who began his activist career in the 1960s civil rights movement when he was arrested for demonstrating against segregated public schools in Chicago, and who, from the start of his campaign, has focused attention on the shockingly high unemployment rate among black youth -- moved quickly to address the BLM’s concerns. A week after BLM disrupted the Phoenix gathering, Sanders spoke to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights group founded by Martin Luther King Jr., where he said “black lives matter” and outlined a detailed set of initiatives to deal with racial inequality, which he posted on his campaign website. Then he hired an African-American woman -- Symone Sanders, the national youth chair of the Coalition on Juvenile Justice – as his press secretary. A well-respected activist, Symone Sanders has spoken at recent Sanders rallies and helped the Vermont senator sharpen his message on racial issues. His most recent stump speeches at huge rallies in Portland, Oregon, Oakland, California, and Los Angeles have included specific references to police misconduct, mass incarceration, the GOP’s efforts to suppress voting rights, and “institutional racism.” His comments about racism have gotten some of the loudest and most sustained cheers from the crowd at these rallies. Whether Sanders’ increasing emphasis on racial issues will attract more African-American voters and help him win his party’s nomination isn’t clear, but it was probably no coincidence that BLM did not disrupt Sanders’ rally in Los Angeles Monday night, and that the number of blacks among the 27,000 people in the crowd was considerably larger than in his other large events. On Tuesday, BLM protesters showed up at a Hillary Clinton event in New Hampshire and the following day the group interrupted a Jeb Bush rally in Las Vegas. Because BLM is highly decentralized, people with different political views, using different tactics, can claim to represent the movement, so it isn’t clear if BLM’s turn toward these other candidates is part of a national strategy, but it appears that BLM has made peace with the Sanders campaign. By fusing the concerns of both BLM and OWS, Sanders is echoing Martin Luther King’s concerns with both racial and economic justice. “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter," he asked, "if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?" He believed that America needed a "radical redistribution of economic and political power" as well as a dismantling of America’s racial caste system. It is often forgotten that the August 1963 protest rally at the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and was funded primarily by donations from labor unions. King was committed to building bridges between the civil rights and labor movements. Speaking to a meeting of Teamsters union shop stewards in 1967, King said, "Negroes are not the only poor in the nation. There are nearly twice as many white poor as Negro, and therefore the struggle against poverty is not involved solely with color or racial discrimination but with elementary economic justice." He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a strike of African-American sanitation workers. Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter reflect two parallel, overlapping, but distinct branches of progressive politics. Their commonalities are greater than their differences. Like OWS and other major protest movements, Black Lives Matters seemed to come out of nowhere, but was in reality a response to long-simmering concerns. Like OWS, it has attracted significant media coverage and galvanized public opinion. Like OWS, it emerged as a loosely structured, bottom-up movement without much funding, with little mainstream support, and with young and relatively inexperienced leaders. But within a year, Black Lives Matter has helped catalyze a national conversation about racial injustice and cajoled the major Democratic Party candidates for president – and other offices – to focus more attention on these issues. Even if, like OWS, the BLM movement falls by the wayside, its impact, like OWS’s, will endure.

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Published on August 15, 2015 06:29

G Love: “I was good at dishwashing”

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Published on August 15, 2015 06:00

What stress does to your brain

Stress can be a dangerous enemy for the brain. In fact, it can have serious effects on your brain's ability to operate properly. While stress appears to have originated from our instinctual "fight or flight" response, which is the instinct that decides if an animal should fight something trying to kill it or run away, we don't have to deal with that much anymore in everyday life, so it has adapted in different ways. "Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out," Robert Sapolsky, a famous Stanford University neuroscientist, said during an interview in 2007. "But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you're going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we've evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick." The way stress affects the brain directly and how that changes over time is complicated, but there is a growing body of research aimed at understanding just that. A Yale study from 2012 found stress can shrink the brain in the areas that control emotions and metabolism. The researchers believe prolonged stress is actually more effective at causing this shrinking than specific traumatic events. They believe prolonged stress can cause a person's ability to avoid things like substance abuse and risky behavior to decrease. Another study from the University of California, Berkeley found that chronic stress, even at relatively low levels, can make a person prone to mental illness later in life. Specifically, stress damages the integrity of the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that deals with memory and emotions. Hormones like cortisol and other biological reactions created by stress essentially disrupt the balance of how much white and grey matter the brain is creating, which affects how the brain operates. The hippocampus is believed to be strongly connected with emotional disorders and sometimes serious psychological problems. A lot of the stress people deal with today is completely different from stresses people dealt with in the past, which can make it difficult to keep up with how we're morphing our brains. Bruce McEwen, a leading neuroscientist at Rockefeller University, told ATTN: that "pace of life for some, 24/7 email ... financial concerns, job instability, worry about health and access to healthcare, being a caregiver [possibly] for an autistic child or an Alzheimer patient, commuting and jet lag, poor sleep, lack of physical activity, social isolation, social media (especially among young people) causing anxiety, sleep disruption, noise and pollution, [and] living in a dangerous neighborhood" can ALL be causes of serious stress in the modern world. He said it's important to note that there is a difference between a traumatic event and being consistently or very regularly stressed, as those two things affect the brain differently. Traumatic events can obviously cause forms of lifelong stress, and acute and/or chronic stress can negatively effect the brain, depending on what kind of stress it is. "The healthy brain can handle acute and chronic stress,"McEwen said. "There is positive stress, like going for a job interview or giving a talk with good outcomes, and tolerable stress—job loss, ending a relationship—where one has good self-esteem and a helpful social network and financial resources, and then there is 'toxic stress', where one lacks these things and cannot cope." Stress that has to do with things that are outside of your control and causes negative thinking, which, for an extended periods of time is typically not healthy. People can combat these harmful effects with various treatments, from meditation to therapy. That being said, there are also times when a little stress gets you motivated to do things you're unfamiliar with. More from Attn: How your partner's personallity affects your workplace success What negative thinking does to your brain Here's the reason you're always late

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Published on August 15, 2015 05:00

Richard Dawkins’ moralizing atheism: Science, self-righteousness and militant belief — and disbelief

I have chosen to dally on this graveyard pathway by St Stephen’s Church on my way to the Chapelfield shopping centre, where I have business at the Apple Store. I reckon it is a good place to observe the reaction of passers-by confronted by reminders of mortality. But it’s not. They are oblivious, or if not, they are unfazed by the headstones, entirely focused on their mission of retail therapy. Unusually the church has all its doors flung wide. It is busy with excessively cheerful young men and women who purport to be running a cafe. It is a pilot project of an evangelical organization calling itself Norwich Youth for Christ. They plan to be there for a few days each week throughout the summer. It is a perfect pitch. They estimate that 50,000 people pass by in a week, 50,000 potential soldiers for Christ. They want me too. ‘I’m pretty much an atheist,’ I hear myself explaining, trying to inject the regretful tone that will tell them both that they are wasting their time and that I do not wish to be impolite. It sounds like an apology. Afterwards, I wonder why I did not simply say I am an atheist and leave it at that. I realize it is because it might seem confrontational, aggressive, dogmatic. Would an adjective have softened the blow? It would not have occurred to me to say, as some do, that I am a ‘committed atheist’. I have experienced no process of committal. I just am an atheist, and that’s all. It’s part of me that doesn’t take up much space.There is no ongoing dedication on my part. It’s not that I am wavering; I am committed. It’s just that I’m not committed in the way that Richard Dawkins is committed, in terms of devoting vast amounts of energy to an atheist project. I don’t believe in God or a god. Yet I am uncomfortable with declared atheism. Why is this? Am I in fact agnostic – that weasel word of English compromise for someone who isn’t sure? Am I? No: I actually disbelieve. Round here, I am not alone. The national census of England and Wales conducted in 2011 showed Norwich to be, as newspapers gleefully reported a few days before Christmas, the most godless city in the country. Norwich Youth against Christ, anybody? Just 44.9 per cent of people in the local authority area put Christian as their religion, while 42.5 per cent ticked the box for ‘No religion’. The national averages were 59.3 per cent and 25.2 per cent respectively. Nationally, the number of people giving Christianity as their religion fell by more than 10 per cent from the previous census in 2001 (the first time it was thought interesting to include a question on religion). The numbers saying they have no religion rose by a similar percentage. Inevitably called upon for his comment, the Bishop of Norwich suggested that the census made it easier to say no than yes to the religion question (‘No religion’ was the first option on the checklist), and complained, oddly, I thought, for a faith leader, that there was no provision for people to position themselves where they felt they belonged on a spectrum of interest in religion. I have other atheist credentials, too. Scientists and science writers are some of the most militant atheists around. From time to time, members of science academies are polled about their religious beliefs. According to one recent American study, about a third claim some form of belief in a higher power. A 1998 study published in Nature, cited by Richard Dawkins, found that the proportion of believers is dramatically less among more senior scientists. Among those elected to the National Academy of Sciences, only 7 per cent believed in a personal god. Though he might wonder about God’s bottom – ‘we are ignorant of the backparts, or lower side of his Divinity’ – Browne knows that scientific enquiry must have a stop. ‘How shall the dead arise, is no question of my faith; to beleeve onely possibilities, is not faith, but meere Philosophy; many things are true in Divinity, which are neither inducible by reason, nor confirmable by sense.’ The popular perception that science and religion are at war is as old as modernity, but it was given its present character by the Oxford evolution debate in 1860, a few months after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. On this now famous occasion, Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, took on ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, Thomas Huxley. Was it from his grandfather or his grandmother that Huxley claimed his descent from an ape, the bishop wanted to know. Huxley struggled to be heard amid the hilarity and it seems that Wilberforce had the best of it on the night. The debate is back in the spotlight more than a century later, prompted by who knows what – the advent of space travel, the ecological crisis, sectarian conflicts, a rise in Christian fundamentalism? This time it seems the boot is on the other foot, with religion finding no coherent answer to the trenchant arguments of scientific atheists such as Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins. To follow their logic, it would seem that there should be neither religious scientists nor believers who value the principles of science. In fact, the ‘war’ is greatly exaggerated. Scientists and religionists seldom cross paths, let alone swords. Many believers are also scientific rationalists and many scientists are also believers. But it will not rest there. For some scientists who are also atheists, other scientists who have a religious belief are something that needs to be explained. When these scientists investigate religion, they do so, naturally, in their usual scientific way, approaching religion as a social construct (although they seldom concede that science is also one). They may discover, through magnetic resonance imaging scans, for example, that there is nothing to be seen in a believing subject’s brain that is any different from ordinary human emotion. Or they may argue that religious belief needs to be understood in terms of evolutionary biology. These endeavours might one day lay bare religious belief in terms of biology, and therefore ultimately in the materialist terms of chemistry and physics. But what would we really understand the better for having gone down this road? You get more straightforward answers if you simply ask the scientists themselves. Some turn to religion because they believe science has shown the universe – through the numerical values of the fundamental constants of physics, the position of our planet, and so on – to be ideally suited for our existence. More interesting are those scientists, who often start out as religious sceptics, but who find that science offers no adequate explanation of phenomena such as beauty, truth and love. Theirs is not a choice for faith, against reason, but an attempt to reconcile the two. For influential figures such as the Hungarian chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi or John Polkinghorne, a theoretical physicist later ordained as an Anglican priest, science and religion reveal different facets of the same reality. What we know is inevitably personal to us, they argue. This is the case even for scientific theories and mathematical axioms, since our conviction that they are true because they are seen to work is also personally apprehended. Scientific belief therefore finds itself on level terms with religious belief. The Islamic fundamentalist attacks of 11 September 2001 helped to create a new audience for atheism. Books by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens as well as Dawkins (they have been dubbed the ‘four horsemen of the non-apocalypse’) argued that religious faith could or should be brought to an end. Dawkins made himself the cheerleader of the ‘new atheists’ when he set up the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science to hasten the day. His book The God Delusion makes the argument at length, but it is his frequent sulphurous outbursts on Twitter that better illustrate the furious tenor to which the spat (at this level it certainly cannot be called a debate) between religion and science has risen. Sample Tweet: ‘If one person claimed that a wafer was literally the body of a 1st century Jew,you’d certify him.That’s what Catholics officially believe.’ First of all, if a person claimed this, you wouldn’t actually certify him (or her) for this harmless delusion under any reasonable mental health legislation; which means this is a gratuitous insult. Second, it’s not quite what Catholics believe in any case: the bread and wine remain bread and wine (if one were rude enough to interpose a chemical analysis, say), but in the act of consecration their substance is changed into the substance of the body of Christ; according to the Catechism, it is a mode of His presence. Scientists may well have trouble with this, but semioticians will have less. Third, if it is what Catholics believe, then it is what they truly believe, not what they ‘officially believe’, a phrase that unreasonably projects Dawkins’s own distrust into the minds of these believers. Because of his combative language, and because his religiose scientism is so curiously like the fundamentalism he is attacking, Dawkins himself has become a target for abuse, although his supporters claim this is only because the believers can find no answer to his logic. Dawkins’s bracing asperities are now routinely met in kind: ‘Puffed up, self-regarding, vain, prickly and militant’ was one columnist’s string of adjectives for him. My problem is that I agree more often with Richard Dawkins than with the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope, yet it is Dawkins who irritates me more. I am not looking for a middle ground – on the Bishop of Norwich’s spectrum of interest in religion I am still at the not-interested end – but I wonder if a more civil accommodation can be reached between religion and science. The signs are not good. Consider what happened when the geneticist Steve Jones published his recent book The Serpent’s Promise: The Bible Retold as Science. Jones dares to look at the Bible as a kind of record of early attempts to understand the world, in other words as a work of science, in which Genesis is a story of the origin of the universe and Leviticus reflects sensible dietary precaution. For this, he was treated to some vituperative criticism from Christians unhappy at seeing stories they were used to regarding as allegory or metaphor treated as if they might actually have had a basis in physical fact. At the end of his trek through ‘Dawkins’s Canyon’ – his name for the chasm between science and religion – Jones was forced to the odd conclusion that he in fact believes more of the Bible than many Christians do. * Thomas Browne’s footprints also run through Dawkins’s Canyon, for in Religio Medici and Pseudodoxia Epidemica he similarly considers possible natural origins of many biblical phenomena. Unlike Jones, Browne usually leans in the end towards the standard supernatural interpretation, even though he is fully aware of a plausible physical explanation. For example, he entertains the notion that the fire that consumes the altar of Elijah (i Kings 18) might be a geological eruption of flammable naphtha or bitumen, which he has seen used in experiments. But he swiftly rejects the idea as the suggestion of the devil, and affirms the Bible story conclusion. Thomas Browne’s best-known statement of his faith is made at the very beginning of Religio Medici:

For my Religion, though there be severall circumstances that might perswade the world that I have none at all, as the generall scandall of my profession, the naturall course of my studies, the indifferency of my behaviour, and discourse in matters of Religion, neither violently defending one, nor with that common ardour and contention opposing another; yet in despight hereof I dare, without usurpation, assume the honorable stile of a Christian.

It is a superb sentence first of all, with each phrase patiently shaped and placed in sequence in such a way as to postpone the end so that, when it comes, it has the requisite drama of confession. We are given the time to admire the way each part is carved, to feel how it weighs against the next part, before we draw back and gain the depth of perspective to see it assembled as a whole composition. Yet Browne’s construction is still more artful than this. The sentence has not in fact been assembled in this way, for no part can now be removed without causing the whole thing to collapse. It has instead been organically hewn. Perhaps we experience something of the same disbelief before a wood carving by Grinling Gibbons when we realize that each exquisite detail has not been made separately and then added in, but rather its negative has been painstakingly chipped away to leave us with the final illusion of piled-up riches. It is in Religio Medici, according to Rose Macaulay, that Browne made ‘in the most exquisite and splendid prose of the century, the best and most agreeable confession of the Anglican religion ever, before or since, published’. In this affirmation, it is perhaps surprising that Browne considers it is not only his medicine – seen as suspect long before the seventeenth century began anatomizing the soul – but also his scientific hobby (‘the naturall course of my studies’) that leaves him open to charges of atheism. For the pursuit of scientific knowledge, to Browne, has the moral force almost of an article of faith. Browne does not immediately say what form of Christianity he follows – a crucial matter for a young man widely travelled in Europe, and recently returned to an England where the king had asserted divine right and was fighting Catholic rebellion in Ireland and Presbyterian resistance in Scotland. But a few pages later he daringly comes out with this: ‘I borrow not the rules of my Religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my own reason.’ For this, Religio Medici soon found itself on the papal index.* In short, his faith was supple as it had to be, firmly based in a conservative Anglicanism, yet adaptable to the requirements of the Commonwealth. It is impossible to doubt his basic loyalty to the Church of England when he deadpans that he has submitted all Churches to reasonable analysis and has found this is the one that comes out on top. * The first book of Pseudodoxia Epidemica itemizes the many sources of error that lead people to believe foolish things. The final cause Browne gives – after unreliable authors and credulous auditors – is the devil himself, who niggles at our mental weakness in numerous ways: ‘he would make us believe, That there is no God, That there are many, That he himself is God, That he is less then angels or Men, That he is nothing at all’. Satan is not only the direct progenitor of error, but also the automatic supporter of those who promote errors of their own. Pseudoscience is the devil’s work for Browne far more literally than it is for Dawkins or Simon Singh, today’s scourge of homoeopaths and chiropractors. And God and science find themselves allies. Elsewhere, Browne’s Christian faith leads him towards a moral philosophy that would surely be acceptable to persons of any religion – or none. Christian Morals, a late work not published until long after Browne’s death, might be expected to be a summation of his religion. And in a way it is, as the Christian message quickly gives way to a characteristic humanism, mingled with advice on how to go about things if, as it happens, you are a person a bit like Browne. The first few of seventy-nine numbered paragraphs begin with admonishments against the seven deadly sins – ‘Let Age not Envy draw wrinkles on thy cheeks’ for example. But soon, Browne is blandly recommending moderation in all things and telling us how to handle wealth and flattery. Much of it is completely secular advice on how to live that anybody might wish to follow: be your own master, be generous, try to see the good in everybody, don’t listen to gossip, be grateful for small mercies. It is all highly uncontroversial, an anodyne bookend to the protean Religio Medici. For a modern equivalent, I recommend the philosophical works of Alain de Botton and his School of Life. A few of the aphorisms contained in Christian Morals have a startling modern air: one might now be paraphrased as ‘respect difference’; another as ‘be yourself ’. But of course Browne says it all uncommonly well. He offers the tritest of marriage advice – don’t go to bed angry – as follows: ‘Let not the Sun in Capricorn go down upon thy wrath, but write thy wrongs in Ashes. Draw the Curtain of night upon injuries, shut them up in the Tower of Oblivion and let them be as though they had not been.’ He counsels us not to blame the stars; to study history, not predictions; and to act our age. One especially fine paragraph exhorts us not to waste time:

Since thou hast an Alarum in thy Breast, which tells thee thou hast a Living Spirit in thee above two thousand times in an hour; dull not away thy Days in sloathful supinity & the tediousness of doing nothing.To strenuous Minds there is an inquietude in overquietness, and no laboriousness in labour; and to tread a mile after the slow pace of a Snail, or the heavy measures of the Lazy of Brazilia [the sloth], were a most tiring Pennance, and worse than a Race of some furlongs at the Olympicks.

And in the midst of all, he throws in some invaluable advice to scholars and writers: avoid academicism; don’t be too harsh on other people’s mistakes; risk being wrong for the sake of bringing new knowledge to the world; don’t sweat the small stuff, or rather: ‘if the substantial subject be well forged out, we need not examine the sparks, which irregularly fly from it’. With his humanistic ethics and his dangerous medicine and science, would Browne be an atheist today? He offers the occasional hint that it is not inconceivable. He sometimes writes of Christians with a critical distance, as if he is not one himself. He writes about those ‘such as hope to rise again’, implying perhaps that he does not expect a Christian resurrection for himself. He even confesses in Urne-Buriall to a sneaking admiration for men ‘such as consider none hereafter’; for these – whether believers in other religions, pre-Christians or non-believers – ‘it must be more than death to dye, which makes us amazed at those audacities, that durst be nothing, and return into their Chaos again’. But when he tackles the matter directly, he says there can be no such thing as atheism, or at least there can be no ‘positive atheists’. For some philosophers who might be thought atheists, Browne goes to some lengths to find a reason why they were not. Epicurus was no atheist when he denied there was a beneficent god, for example; it is simply that the God of Christians was ‘too sublime’ to make himself known to him. The Stoics were also subject, without their knowing it, to God’s will, and so are no atheists either. Besides, it is the devil, as we have seen, who plants atheistic thoughts. It is hard now to recreate a sense of the almost complete impossibility of not being a religious believer in seventeenth-century England. But as I enter the Apple Store, symmetrically laid out with its central entrance door and an attractively illuminated high table at the far end, a parallel comes to mind. Digital technology seems to fill a large part of the mental space we reserve for faith. (Art, which is often put up as a candidate, is the opium only of a minority.) We depend on technology for the smooth running of our daily lives, if not for our salvation. We make obeisance to it, we feel obliged to buy into the whole package, rather than selecting and rejecting individual technologies. There is the familiar choice between minutely differentiated sects (Apple or Microsoft), but all must share the same basic creed. Upgrades are like revisions of dogma in which we have no say, but which we are bound to go along with anyway. To reject the technological is to declare oneself a heretic, a position as inconceivable now as declaring oneself an atheist in the 1600s. To be an atheist now seems almost too easy. I have nothing against church architecture or decent sacred music. The aesthetic is fine. My problem with the Christian faith comes when my ear snags on something the preacher has just said, and I make the mistake of thinking about what it might actually mean. On the radio, I take exception to the simpering neediness of English vicars (‘O Lord, make speed to save us’ – Yes, Lord, look sharp). ‘Thought for the Day’ on the radio morning news is usually a good moment to run a bit more hot water into the bath. Knowing how I feel, my wife gave me Dawkins’s The God Delusion for Christmas when it came out in 2006, but it soon found its way to the bedside table where it languishes still (like a hotel-room Gideon’s Bible?). A marker indicates that I got as far as page seventy-eight. I have not felt the urge to attend the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, a Christmas-time theatrical event hosted by the comedian Robin Ince, and organized by New Humanist magazine. Nor the Sunday Assembly, ‘a godless congregation that celebrates life’, a strange initiative apparently desperate to keep all the non-liturgical bits of church services – the getting together, enjoying a singalong, hearing some words to make you think, everything, in fact, except actual belief in a god. The Sunday Assembly’s slogan is warm and vague: ‘live better, help often, wonder more’. Of course, it sounds a bit religious. But the sentiments are secular, too. Who does not want to live better? And why should the religious have the monopoly when it comes to being charitable (a monopoly some believers are keen to retain, to judge by recent reports of atheists being barred from helping in food banks)? What about ‘wonder more’? What is wonder? Is it admiration of the intricacy and complexity of nature, and the potential for it to be understood; or is it throwing in the towel, admitting there are things that cannot be understood at which we can only wonder? What bothers me most, though, is the air of superiority hanging about the slogan. I can imagine that people who self-consciously go around living better, helping often and wondering more might be just as self-righteous as the worst sort of Christian moralist. Excerpted from "In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the 17th Century's Most Inquiring Mind" by Hugh Aldersey-Williams. Published by W.W. Norton & Co. Copyright © 2015 by Hugh Aldersey-Williams. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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Published on August 15, 2015 05:00

The religious right isn’t going away: Why proclamations of its decline are a dangerous myth

Because non-politicians like Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson have garnered the most attention during the GOP presidential primary thus far, another distinctive feature of this cycle's batch of candidates has gone relatively unnoticed. For all the talk and hype about the GOP modernizing and learning the lessons of the George W. Bush era — and for all the breathless speculation about the millennial generation and how it demands of politicians a different approach — the religious right's presence within the party remains formidable. The aforementioned Carson, for example, is in the habit of crediting God as inspiration for his tax reform proposals. And if he's not explaining public policy through religion, competitors like Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee can be relied on to step in for him. The unbroken influence of the religious right over one of America's two major political parties is just one of the many reasons why "God & Government: Twenty-Five Years of Fighting for Equality, Secularism, and Freedom of Conscience," the latest book from the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, is so valuable. For a quarter-decade, Lynn has been struggling with the forces that propel figures like Huckabee to the national stage and allow them to come so close to the reins of power. And while the recent, epochal successes of the gay rights movement, as well as the continued ascendance of pop feminism, may lead you to think that Mike Huckabee's America is coming to an end, Lynn reminds us that keeping religious fundamentalism out of public policy requires constant vigilance. Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Lynn about his work, the recent Supreme Court rulings on religious liberty and marriage equality, and why it's a mistake to laugh off people like Santorum and Huckabee, regardless of how silly they may seem. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length. In the book's introduction, you say you're optimistic about the country's future regarding the separation of church and state. But you also say vigilance will be required to make sure the gains of the last two generations or so are not lost. What would it mean to "lose" in this sense? One of the way you lose is if you're not vigilant about the issues that are essentially over as a matter of judicial inquiry. Prayer in schools, for example, is virtually on no one's radar anymore — except we find case after case where individual schools or school districts are trying to evade what is essentially settled law. Similarly, creationism and its white-coated friend "intelligent design" have been to court over and over again, even though it's pretty much a resolved legal question. The other way we could lose big is if certain practices that are completely inconsistent with the separation of church and state become seen as routine or normative. Such as? Funding ministries, for example, used to be unthinkable; even in the 1930s and '40s, governments did not believe they should pay for religious schools or hunger programs held in churches. But today, seven years into the Obama administration — and with two full terms of George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" — we find it routine for organizations that are religious to believe they deserve government funding and that they deserve to have taxpayers pay for all of the things that they can't convince their own members to support voluntarily. Another that's become routine is the endorsement of candidates from the pulpit. Even the late Jerry Falwell used to say, Do not talk about politics from the pulpit. Then, of course, Jerry got a better offer — to run the Moral Majority — and he became obsessed with the idea of gaining political power. But now, thanks to the inaction of the Obama administration, there are no complaints being followed up about deliberate and obvious and over-the-line endorsements and opposition to candidates by religious institutions. Why do you think the Obama administration has been so hands-off? I think the administration is very nervous about religion, perhaps because of the large percentage of people who believe that a) Obama is secretly a Muslim; and b) that ought to matter. Also, I believe that he has been convinced by people on his staff as well as outside organizations that he cannot do anything that will be perceived as anti-religion. This president has been falsely accused of being anti-religion so many times that it's become a pattern; and were he to do one thing he promised to do during his first campaign — and has still not followed-up on — [which is to] stop permitting the hiring of people, with government money, in religiously related programs, on the basis of religion. That's currently ongoing? What the Catholic Conference and big charities like World Vision have essentially said is, We must be able to hire people like ourselves to do this work. Well, some of us think that if it's so important for that thing to happen, why don't [these groups] use their own money to find people who are just like yourself? Comfort level is not a constitutional criterion. We have heard this over and over again: We don't mind eating with African-Americans, said white people in the South in the '50s, but we just don't feel comfortable if they're next to us at the lunch counter. When there was an effort to bring men on as flight attendants in the '70s, there were airlines who said, Men, our principal business travelers, feel more comfortable being served by women in skirts. All that kind of thinking should be rejected when it comes to hiring, with government money, for religious institutions. Would you extend your criticism of the administration's timidity to the progressive community in general? I think the progressive community cares about the separation of church and state. But sometimes progressives look at religion too narrowly. I have to say, though, that in the last couple of years, they've been seeing it in a broader context. And not only regarding reproductive justice or the Hobby Lobby ruling. Speaking of Hobby Lobby and the Supreme Court, which ruling do you think will be seen as more significant? That one or Obgerfell? Well, the most significant in a positive way was, of course, the marriage equality ruling because it finally announced as a fundamental right that people have a right to be married to the person they love, even if that person is of the same gender. Hobby Lobby, to me, was a disgraceful case. One of the worst rulings in modern history. Because to define as exercise of religion the kind of conduct that Hobby Lobby was engaged in — and therefore to consider that it was "protected" religious activity under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — was unthinkable during the discussion [surrounding] the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. How so? I played a role in writing [that bill] and never, never was there a discussion during that whole debate about whether corporations would be covered. It was never mentioned. People on the right, like Sen. Orrin Hatch, and people on the left, like Sen. Edward Kennedy, would never have agreed to co-sponsor a bill — and have all this marvelous, "Kumbaya" combination of [left-wing and right-wing] organizations — if people had ... mentioned anything outside of Muslim firefighters being allowed to grow a beard, prisoners being allowed to grow their hair longer than some states insist because he's Native American, etc. So [the ruling] was a big stretch into a principle that remains problematic, and that is, if you claim a religious objection to a law you don't like, even if you're a corporation, you have a colorable claim that you will be exempt from the law as it applies to everyone else. Do you worry that the Hobby Lobby ruling wasn't a big, long-sought victory for the religious right so much as the start of a more sweeping effort? Yeah. The only things we learned from Hobby Lobby that you can't use the practice of religion as an excuse for are: race discrimination and not paying your taxes. And, believe me, in the past, religious arguments were made against both. But in regard to any LGBTQ issues or other matters, Hobby Lobby was silent. As I noted at the beginning of our chat, you say in the book that you're optimistic about the future. Does that optimism extend to the future of the Republican Party? What I mean is, some observers think the power of the religious right within the GOP is waning. Do you? No, I don't. I think the religious right is just about as strong now as it was during Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. In polling, it looks like about 21 percent of the electorate considers itself to be part of the religious right; that's bad news; that's the biggest pressure group in the country. It dwarfs union votes or the votes of any other identifiable group. The good news is, when you break [those numbers] down further, the beliefs of millennials — including evangelical millennials — you find that they have a very different view of these social issues and of church/state separation issues from their fathers' or their grandfathers'. But the millennial vote in 2014 was pathetic. So there's something fundamentally wrong — a disconnect that has to be corrected in order to gain the optimism that I guardedly have. But the fact that these [religious right] folks appear to be silly doesn't mean they have lost their power. And to those who think they have lost their power, I recommend that they go to one of the big religious right conferences (which I go to almost every year) and listen to what is being said and watch the reaction of those people — 21 percent of the electorate — when a Sen. Ted Cruz says he's going to bring prayer back to public schools. Your point about the silliness being a distraction reminds me of Mike Huckabee, who recently hinted that he'd use the FBI to shut down Planned Parenthood. People laughed; but he wasn't kidding. And he's a popular guy right now in the Republican Party. Mike Huckabee is a popular guy, and he's particularly dangerous because he has views like that and believes the civil law of the country can be trumped by religious doctrine, as he understands it. And he's not alone in that. If you had a debate between him and Rick Santorum, Santorum would say the same thing; he'd say, Law is one thing but God's law is more important — which we hear a lot from [radicals] in Islamic states as well. So they are silly statements, but that shouldn't delude people into thinking there isn't something behind them and there isn't a large number of people who don't think it's funny at all. They think it's the right answer finally being spoken by major political candidates. That's what's frightening.

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Published on August 15, 2015 03:30

August 14, 2015

The 10 best movies that take place in one day

What a difference a day makes. In 24 hours, someone’s entire life can change—either incrementally, or in extreme ways. While films often provide a crucible for examining human nature, there is something heightened when characters face incredible pressure under a same-day deadline. Films that unfold over the course of a single day can take viewers on an intense, emotional journey, but they can also be extremely funny; see “Tangerine," last month's much-buzzed-about film, or “Grandma” when it opens this month. Opening this weekend is the droll comedy “Fort Tilden.” One night, Harper (Bridey Elliott) and Allie (Clare McNulty) befriend two guys a party, and agree to meet at the titular beach the next day. While Allie should be preparing for her stint with the Peace Corps (she’s leaving for Liberia), she takes the day off because she “deserves one day of happiness before shitting malaria blood.” The resourceful BFFs plan to bike to Fort Tilden but their efforts are met with setbacks, like trying to get an iced coffee, and distractions ranging from shopping sales to finding abandoned kittens. Their so-called “insane journey” is full of deadpan humor stemming from the young women’s awkward encounters with friends and strangers to a truth-telling session that arises after a series of bad decisions. “Fort Tilden” benefits from the rapport of its two leads, who make their friendship and frustrations believable as their day makes them reconsider their goals in life. While there are many “real time” examples (like the recent “Locke” or the classic “Cleo from 5 to 7”), here are 10 great films that portray characters having extreme transformations as they deal with issues ranging from adultery, abortion and anxiety to murder, love, death and maturation, all over the course of a single day. 1. “Do the Right Thing” Spike Lee’s incisive, incendiary masterpiece, set in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the hottest day of the year, remains a landmark film for its cogent depiction of race relations. After establishing the rhythms of the neighborhood, the film culminates with shocking violence that turns into a riot. Sal’s Pizza Parlor, a white-owned establishment in an almost entirely African-American neighborhood, becomes the epicenter of an attack that leaves a man dead and a neighborhood in crisis after simmering tensions explode. The strength of Lee’s work is not just that viewers come to understand each character—from the righteous Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) to the racist Pino (John Turturro)—but also care about them. What happens that day deeply affects each of them, prompting the characters (and the viewer) to confront truths within themselves. “Do the Right Thing” remains as potent today as it was when it was made. 2. “Rope” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 “experiment” to shoot an entire movie in a single take yielded this nifty (albeit stagy) thriller that takes place on a single set on a single day. Two students (John Dahl and Farley Granger) murder their friend David (Dick Hogan) and hide his body in a chest that they use to serve dinner to the victim’s friends, family and their clever former headmaster (Jimmy Stewart). Using eight 10-minute rolls of film, Hitchcock created a “single tracking shot” for “Rope,” using the backs of characters’ sports jackets to change reels, mark the passage of time, and ratchet up the suspense. 3. “Groundhog Day” Harold Ramis’ classic comedy has Phil Connors (Bill Murray), a weatherman, stuck in a time loop as he reports on Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who ritually foretells the end of winter by seeing (or not seeing) his shadow. After realizing his situation—and that he can change his actions and thereby affect other people’s seemingly unalterable routines—Phil becomes emboldened. He eventually learns how to seduce his producer (Andie McDowell) and improve his life by getting out of the rut he has been stuck in. “Groundhog Day” amusingly asks the existential question: “What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.” 4. “The Swimmer” Frank Perry’s canny adaptation of John Cheever’s short story has Ned Merrill (a very fit Burt Lancaster) “swim” his way home, pool by pool—“they form a river all the way to our house” he says—after attending a neighbor’s party. The experience provides an allegory for Ned’s life: every pool “reflects” something about his personal and professional disillusionments and dissatisfactions. His “brilliant or crazy” journey comes to define his suburban alienation and malaise and—if one sees the film as an arch comedy of manners—provides a commentary on propriety. Ned’s determination is noble, and Lancaster makes this “tragic antihero” empathetic as the film’s tone becomes increasingly somber and sobering. 5. “A Single Man” Based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel, Tom Ford’s stylish film portrays George (Colin Firth), a depressed gay man in 1962 Los Angeles still mourning the death of his partner, Jim (Matthew Goode). George proceeds to say some goodbyes, empties his bank account, and plans to put a bullet in his head using the gun he has been carrying around. As he goes about his day, teaching a class and talking with a student, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), or meeting an old friend (Julianne Moore) for drinks, George remembers Jim and knows he is making the right decision to end his life. But then Kenny reappears at a bar, and their encounter that night might just be his salvation. Ford’s outstanding direction combined with Firth’s interior performance conveys George’s quiet, palpable despair. By the end of the day, he will not be the same. 6. “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days” This astonishing Romanian drama, set during the Ceausescu regime, is a harrowing, unforgettable experience. Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) is 4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days pregnant. She asks her roommate Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) to help her procure an illegal abortion. The film, directed by Cristian Mungiu, uses a series of artfully composed scenes to capture the emotional and physical suffocation these two young women experience over the course of that single, fateful day. Throughout the day, Otilia must negotiate with doctors and even cajole Gabita. One of the most striking scenes has Otilia solemnly attending a birthday party where everyone but her is celebrating, a powerful metaphor. This astonishing film builds slowly to its remarkable climax, which suggests Otilia is likely more visibly affected by the devastating events of the day than even Gabita is. 7. “American Graffiti” George Lucas’ ensemble film, about a group of high school students in 1962 Modesto, California, spending one last night together before many of them head off to college, was a touchstone of 1970s American cinema. The film’s nostalgia factor and its fantastic soundtrack made it a hit, and it inspired many imitators. Four friends hang out at the drive-in, cruise around in their cars, and make decisions about their future. Steve (Ron Howard) tells his younger girlfriend (Cindy Williams) he wants to see other people when he’s off at college and they argue all night; Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) is having second thoughts about attending college, and gets distracted trying to find a woman driver (Suzanne Somers) who may have mouthed “I love you” to him; Terry (Charles Martin Smith) befriends Debbie (Candy Clark) and tries to get some alcohol and connect romantically; and John (Paul LeMat), a drag racer, spends the night driving around with Carol (Mackenzie Phillips), a 13-year-old, much to his chagrin. Each storyline is engaging and the characters are all funny and charming in their own ways; they are all (save 22-year-old John) teenagers. But by the end of the film and the end of the night, they have lost some of their innocence and found a sense of maturity that prepares them for adulthood. 8. “Before Sunrise” French Céline (Julie Delpy) and American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meet on a train in Austria and spend the day together, getting to know one another while walking and talking in Vienna. While it could be a prelude to a one-night stand, something about the way Céline and Jesse interact suggests that they really are falling in love. And viewers will fall in love with them. Director Richard Linklater keeps the sexual tension between the characters percolating throughout “Before Sunrise.” And he shrewdly creates a certain ambiguity about “did they or didn’t they” sleep together. While “Before Sunrise” is magical because of the chemistry of the enchanting leads, their 24 hours together wasn’t enough. This lovely film spawned two sequels, “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight,” both of which—remarkably—captured the same lightning in a bottle. 9. “The Daytrippers” Greg Mottola’s funny/angst-y comedy takes the idea of the road movie and synthesizes it into one city over the course of one day. When Eliza (Hope Davis) suspects her husband Louis (Stanley Tucci) of having an affair, she asks her dysfunctional family to escort her from Long Island to New York City to confront him. What transpires is a dark comedy in which the characters’ behavior shows them for who they are. As secrets are revealed, they expose who they really are. The humor comes from the abrasive personalities all ricocheting off one another in situations ranging from Eliza’s marital crisis to her mother Rita’s (Anne Meara) health crisis. By the end of the hectic day, everyone’s life has changed—but is that for the better? 10. “Clerks” Kevin Smith’s outrageous and hilarious low-budget/high-concept comedy, filmed in grainy black and white, chronicles a day in the life of two guys in their dead-end jobs. When Quick Stop convenience store clerk Dante (Brian O’Halloran) has to take a shift on his day off—“I’m not even supposed to be here today!” he moans—he ends up having quite a day. From dealing with irritating customers, to juggling a girlfriend and an ex-girlfriend, and getting into some legal trouble (not his fault!), he needs relief. His best friend Randal (Jeff Anderson), a bonafide shit-stirrer, works at the video store next door, and coaxes him to misbehave by playing hockey on the roof, or taking off to attend a funeral where Randal causes a commotion. “Clerks” mines its laughs from the interplay between the uptight Dante and the reckless Randal, but also from the events that unfold during the day that prompt Dante to re-evaluate his life. If the men are no better off at the end of their shifts, they certainly are more self-aware, losing their delusions of importance and finding a modicum of self-worth.What a difference a day makes. In 24 hours, someone’s entire life can change—either incrementally, or in extreme ways. While films often provide a crucible for examining human nature, there is something heightened when characters face incredible pressure under a same-day deadline. Films that unfold over the course of a single day can take viewers on an intense, emotional journey, but they can also be extremely funny; see “Tangerine," last month's much-buzzed-about film, or “Grandma” when it opens this month. Opening this weekend is the droll comedy “Fort Tilden.” One night, Harper (Bridey Elliott) and Allie (Clare McNulty) befriend two guys a party, and agree to meet at the titular beach the next day. While Allie should be preparing for her stint with the Peace Corps (she’s leaving for Liberia), she takes the day off because she “deserves one day of happiness before shitting malaria blood.” The resourceful BFFs plan to bike to Fort Tilden but their efforts are met with setbacks, like trying to get an iced coffee, and distractions ranging from shopping sales to finding abandoned kittens. Their so-called “insane journey” is full of deadpan humor stemming from the young women’s awkward encounters with friends and strangers to a truth-telling session that arises after a series of bad decisions. “Fort Tilden” benefits from the rapport of its two leads, who make their friendship and frustrations believable as their day makes them reconsider their goals in life. While there are many “real time” examples (like the recent “Locke” or the classic “Cleo from 5 to 7”), here are 10 great films that portray characters having extreme transformations as they deal with issues ranging from adultery, abortion and anxiety to murder, love, death and maturation, all over the course of a single day. 1. “Do the Right Thing” Spike Lee’s incisive, incendiary masterpiece, set in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the hottest day of the year, remains a landmark film for its cogent depiction of race relations. After establishing the rhythms of the neighborhood, the film culminates with shocking violence that turns into a riot. Sal’s Pizza Parlor, a white-owned establishment in an almost entirely African-American neighborhood, becomes the epicenter of an attack that leaves a man dead and a neighborhood in crisis after simmering tensions explode. The strength of Lee’s work is not just that viewers come to understand each character—from the righteous Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) to the racist Pino (John Turturro)—but also care about them. What happens that day deeply affects each of them, prompting the characters (and the viewer) to confront truths within themselves. “Do the Right Thing” remains as potent today as it was when it was made. 2. “Rope” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 “experiment” to shoot an entire movie in a single take yielded this nifty (albeit stagy) thriller that takes place on a single set on a single day. Two students (John Dahl and Farley Granger) murder their friend David (Dick Hogan) and hide his body in a chest that they use to serve dinner to the victim’s friends, family and their clever former headmaster (Jimmy Stewart). Using eight 10-minute rolls of film, Hitchcock created a “single tracking shot” for “Rope,” using the backs of characters’ sports jackets to change reels, mark the passage of time, and ratchet up the suspense. 3. “Groundhog Day” Harold Ramis’ classic comedy has Phil Connors (Bill Murray), a weatherman, stuck in a time loop as he reports on Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who ritually foretells the end of winter by seeing (or not seeing) his shadow. After realizing his situation—and that he can change his actions and thereby affect other people’s seemingly unalterable routines—Phil becomes emboldened. He eventually learns how to seduce his producer (Andie McDowell) and improve his life by getting out of the rut he has been stuck in. “Groundhog Day” amusingly asks the existential question: “What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.” 4. “The Swimmer” Frank Perry’s canny adaptation of John Cheever’s short story has Ned Merrill (a very fit Burt Lancaster) “swim” his way home, pool by pool—“they form a river all the way to our house” he says—after attending a neighbor’s party. The experience provides an allegory for Ned’s life: every pool “reflects” something about his personal and professional disillusionments and dissatisfactions. His “brilliant or crazy” journey comes to define his suburban alienation and malaise and—if one sees the film as an arch comedy of manners—provides a commentary on propriety. Ned’s determination is noble, and Lancaster makes this “tragic antihero” empathetic as the film’s tone becomes increasingly somber and sobering. 5. “A Single Man” Based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel, Tom Ford’s stylish film portrays George (Colin Firth), a depressed gay man in 1962 Los Angeles still mourning the death of his partner, Jim (Matthew Goode). George proceeds to say some goodbyes, empties his bank account, and plans to put a bullet in his head using the gun he has been carrying around. As he goes about his day, teaching a class and talking with a student, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), or meeting an old friend (Julianne Moore) for drinks, George remembers Jim and knows he is making the right decision to end his life. But then Kenny reappears at a bar, and their encounter that night might just be his salvation. Ford’s outstanding direction combined with Firth’s interior performance conveys George’s quiet, palpable despair. By the end of the day, he will not be the same. 6. “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days” This astonishing Romanian drama, set during the Ceausescu regime, is a harrowing, unforgettable experience. Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) is 4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 days pregnant. She asks her roommate Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) to help her procure an illegal abortion. The film, directed by Cristian Mungiu, uses a series of artfully composed scenes to capture the emotional and physical suffocation these two young women experience over the course of that single, fateful day. Throughout the day, Otilia must negotiate with doctors and even cajole Gabita. One of the most striking scenes has Otilia solemnly attending a birthday party where everyone but her is celebrating, a powerful metaphor. This astonishing film builds slowly to its remarkable climax, which suggests Otilia is likely more visibly affected by the devastating events of the day than even Gabita is. 7. “American Graffiti” George Lucas’ ensemble film, about a group of high school students in 1962 Modesto, California, spending one last night together before many of them head off to college, was a touchstone of 1970s American cinema. The film’s nostalgia factor and its fantastic soundtrack made it a hit, and it inspired many imitators. Four friends hang out at the drive-in, cruise around in their cars, and make decisions about their future. Steve (Ron Howard) tells his younger girlfriend (Cindy Williams) he wants to see other people when he’s off at college and they argue all night; Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) is having second thoughts about attending college, and gets distracted trying to find a woman driver (Suzanne Somers) who may have mouthed “I love you” to him; Terry (Charles Martin Smith) befriends Debbie (Candy Clark) and tries to get some alcohol and connect romantically; and John (Paul LeMat), a drag racer, spends the night driving around with Carol (Mackenzie Phillips), a 13-year-old, much to his chagrin. Each storyline is engaging and the characters are all funny and charming in their own ways; they are all (save 22-year-old John) teenagers. But by the end of the film and the end of the night, they have lost some of their innocence and found a sense of maturity that prepares them for adulthood. 8. “Before Sunrise” French Céline (Julie Delpy) and American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meet on a train in Austria and spend the day together, getting to know one another while walking and talking in Vienna. While it could be a prelude to a one-night stand, something about the way Céline and Jesse interact suggests that they really are falling in love. And viewers will fall in love with them. Director Richard Linklater keeps the sexual tension between the characters percolating throughout “Before Sunrise.” And he shrewdly creates a certain ambiguity about “did they or didn’t they” sleep together. While “Before Sunrise” is magical because of the chemistry of the enchanting leads, their 24 hours together wasn’t enough. This lovely film spawned two sequels, “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight,” both of which—remarkably—captured the same lightning in a bottle. 9. “The Daytrippers” Greg Mottola’s funny/angst-y comedy takes the idea of the road movie and synthesizes it into one city over the course of one day. When Eliza (Hope Davis) suspects her husband Louis (Stanley Tucci) of having an affair, she asks her dysfunctional family to escort her from Long Island to New York City to confront him. What transpires is a dark comedy in which the characters’ behavior shows them for who they are. As secrets are revealed, they expose who they really are. The humor comes from the abrasive personalities all ricocheting off one another in situations ranging from Eliza’s marital crisis to her mother Rita’s (Anne Meara) health crisis. By the end of the hectic day, everyone’s life has changed—but is that for the better? 10. “Clerks” Kevin Smith’s outrageous and hilarious low-budget/high-concept comedy, filmed in grainy black and white, chronicles a day in the life of two guys in their dead-end jobs. When Quick Stop convenience store clerk Dante (Brian O’Halloran) has to take a shift on his day off—“I’m not even supposed to be here today!” he moans—he ends up having quite a day. From dealing with irritating customers, to juggling a girlfriend and an ex-girlfriend, and getting into some legal trouble (not his fault!), he needs relief. His best friend Randal (Jeff Anderson), a bonafide shit-stirrer, works at the video store next door, and coaxes him to misbehave by playing hockey on the roof, or taking off to attend a funeral where Randal causes a commotion. “Clerks” mines its laughs from the interplay between the uptight Dante and the reckless Randal, but also from the events that unfold during the day that prompt Dante to re-evaluate his life. If the men are no better off at the end of their shifts, they certainly are more self-aware, losing their delusions of importance and finding a modicum of self-worth.

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Published on August 14, 2015 16:00

Decoded octopus genome reveals secrets to complex intelligence

The elusive octopus genome has finally been untangled, which should allow scientists to discover answers to long-mysterious questions about the animal's alienlike physiology: How does it camouflage itself so expertly? How does it control—and regenerate—those eight flexible arms and thousands of suckers? And, most vexing: How did a relative of the snail get to be so incredibly smart—able to learn quickly, solve puzzles and even use tools? The findings, published today in Nature, reveal a vast, unexplored landscape full of novel genes, unlikely rearrangements—and some evolutionary solutions that look remarkably similar to those found in humans. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) With the largest-known genome in the invertebrate world—similar in size to that of a house cat (2.7 billion base pairs) and with more genes (33,000) than humans (20,000 to 25,000)—the octopus sequence has long been known to be large and confusing. Even without a genetic map, these animals and their cephalopod cousins (squids, cuttlefishes and nautiluses) have been common subjects for neurobiology and pharmacology research. But a sequence for this group of mollusks has been "sorely needed," says Annie Lindgren, a cephalopod researcher at Portland State University who was not involved in the new research. "Think about trying to assemble a puzzle, picture side down," she says of octopus research to date. "A genome gives us a picture to work with." Among the biggest surprises contained within the genome—eliciting exclamation point–ridden e-mails from cephalopod researchers—is that octopuses possess a large group of familiar genes that are involved in developing a complex neural network and have been found to be enriched in other animals, such as mammals, with substantial processing power. Known as protocadherin genes, they "were previously thought to be expanded only in vertebrates," says Clifton Ragsdale, an associate professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the new paper. Such genes join the list of independently evolved features we share with octopuses—including camera-type eyes (with a lens, iris and retina), closed circulatory systems and large brains. Having followed such a vastly different evolutionary path to intelligence, however, the octopus nervous system is an especially rich subject for study. "For neurobiologists, it's intriguing to understand how a completely distinct group has developed big, complex brains," says Joshua Rosenthal of the University of Puerto Rico's Institute of Neurobiology. "Now with this paper, we can better understand the molecular underpinnings." Part of octopuses' sophisticated wiring system—which extends beyond the brain and is largely distributed throughout the body—controls their blink-of-an-eye camouflage. Researchers have been unsure how octopuses orchestrate their chromatophores, the pigment-filled sacs that expand and contract in milliseconds to alter their overall color and patterning. But with the sequenced genome in hand, scientists can now learn more about how this flashy system works—an enticing insight for neuroscientists and engineers alike. Also contained in the octopus genome (represented by the California two-spot octopus, Octopus bimaculoides) are numerous previously unknown genes—including novel ones that help the octopus "taste" with its suckers. Researchers can also now peer deeper into the past of this rarely fossilized animal's evolutionary history—even beyond their divergence with squid some 270 million years ago. In all of that time octopuses have become adept at tweaking their own genetic codes (known as RNA editing, which occurs in humans and other animals but at an extreme rate in octopuses), helping them keep nerves firing on cue at extreme temperatures. The new genetic analysis also found genes that can move around on the genome (known as transposons), which might play a role in boosting learning and memory. One thing not found in the octopus genome, however, is evidence that its code had undergone wholesale duplication (as the genome of vertebrates had, which allowed the extra genes to acquire new functions). This was a surprise to researchers who had long marveled at the octopus's complexity—and repeatedly stumbled over large amounts of repeated genetic code in earlier research. The size of the octopus genome, combined with the large number of repeating sequences and, as Ragsdale describes, a "bizarre lack of interest from many genomicists," made the task a challenging one. He was among the dozens of researchers who banded together in early 2012 to form the Cephalopod Sequencing Consortium, "to address the pressing need for genome sequencing of cephalopod mollusks," as they noted in a white paper published later that year in Standards in Genomic Sciences. The full octopus genome promises to make a splash in fields stretching from neurobiology to evolution to engineering. "This is such an exciting paper and a really significant step forward," says Lindgren, who studies relationships among octopuses, which have evolved to inhabit all of the world's oceans—from warm tidal shallows to the freezing Antarctic depths. For her and other cephalopod scientists, "having a whole genome is like suddenly getting a key to the biggest library in the world that previously you could only look into by peeking through partially blocked windows."