Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 133

GOP Maine candidate who insulted Parkland survivors drops out of race

Republican Maine’s House of Representatives candidate Leslie Gibson has dropped out of the race for Maine’s House of Representatives, according to CNN. The move follows a backlash that ensued after he reportedly insulted two Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students, Emma González and David Hogg, who have become leaders in the movement for gun control reform amongst American teens.

“I am not walking away with my head hung low. I am walking away with my head held high,” Gibson told the Portland Press Herald. “It’s the best thing for everybody.”

While the tweets have since been deleted, and Gibson’s account is protected, CNN via Portland Press Herald says that tweets called González a “skinhead lesbian.” Maine’s Sun Journal corroborated the derogatory remarks.

“There is nothing about this skinhead lesbian that impresses me and there is nothing that she has to say unless you’re a frothing at the mouth moonbat,” Gibson tweeted, according to the Press Herald. He also reportedly called Hogg a “bald-faced liar.”

According to the Portland Press Herald, Gibson tweeted an apology to the students.

“I would like to extend to you my most sincere apology for how I addressed you. It was wrong and unacceptable. You are doing work that is important to you. I would like to extend my hand in friendship and understanding to you,” he said according to the Portland Press Herald.

This isn’t the first time a Republican has attacked on school shooting survivors.

Recall in February, opponents of gun control lied about Hogg, who became the center of a right-wing conspiracy theory, claiming that he was a “crisis actor” rather than a legitimate victim of the Feb. 14 shooting, according to The Washington Post. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, reportedly liked a tweet promoting a conspiracy theory about Hogg, too.

Hogg took to Twitter to ask anyone to run against Gibson following his comments–and a 28-year-old woman responded. Eryn Gilchrist announced that she’s running for Maine State House District 57 on March 15, and Gibson’s remarks inspired her to do so.

“I never thought I would run for office, and I was perfectly content with just remaining a member of the community, but after reading Mr. Gibson’s comments I thought that the people of Greene and Sabattus deserved a representative who will respect people and try to work through their differences to make our lives better,” said Gilchrist in a statement via Maine Democrats. “That’s what I pledge to do if I am lucky enough to be elected, and I look forward to working hard over the next several months to earn the trust and support of people throughout my community.”

Why people like to listen to music during sex

(Credit: Artem Furman via Shutterstock)

Some scientists think musicians behave a lot like birds. Charles Darwin was one of the first researchers to put that theory down on paper. In 1871, the famed naturalist penned The Descent of Man, where he spends 10 pages dissecting why songbirds sing their songs, and another six asking why humans do the same. The answer, he proposed, has everything to do with sexual selection. “Musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex,” he wrote.

In 2014, a psychologist named Benjamin Charlton decided to revisit Darwin’s theory. He recruited a pool of women and asked them to listen to a series of musical compositions. According to his investigation, ovulating women tend to gravitate toward more complex compositions. Women at less fertile points in their cycle didn’t seem to care so much. (Maybe that helps explain how any number of average-looking musicians land their beautiful bedmates?)

But what about those of us who aren’t songbirds? What about those of us who never learned to sing? How might music and sex interact for the non-musical majority?

 The answer is complicated. While there’s no proven collection of notes that will send us straight into the bedroom, some, like relationship expert Tracey Cox, believe music enhances our overall sexual experience.

Cox recently teamed up with music streaming service Deezer to survey some of our top turn-ons; music just happened to come out on top. “Music has a profound effect on sex in many different ways,” she says. “Our brains flood with dopamine, the pleasure hormone, when we listen to music.”

In 2017, a team of researchers from McGill University decided to scan the brains of a group of participants as they listened to music over the course of three sessions. The scans not only showed that listening to music helps release dopamine in the brain, but that anticipating the sounds of music helped prompt floods of the same “feel good” chemical. The findings also help explain why so many of us get chills when we turn on a top hit.

Other studies have found that listening to music can increase certain signs of arousal, including heart rate, breathing rate and skin conductance.

The most compelling part of Cox’s experiment relates back to how music impacts the way we move during sex. “Almost half of the people surveyed said rhythm was the key reason why music made sex better,” she revealed. Previous studies have already identified music as a movement-inducing medium. If you like to emphasize the bump and grind during sex, then music can help keep that going. The faster the beat, the more you commit to your performance. So even if the sex session starts to tire you out, it probably won’t hit you until after the deed is done.

Of course, there are other more intimate ways to combine music with sex. Suki Dunham is the founder of OhMiBod, the company credited with inventing the “iPod vibrator.” The idea originally occurred to Dunham after receiving two opportune stocking stuffers for Christmas from her husband: a vibrator and an iPod mini. “It made me wonder how great it would be to pair them together, to create a new product that would create a dual-sensory experience,” she said.

Two years later, the couple launched with the iPod vibrator, a device that uses music to create personalized sensations in the vibrator. “We knew that the tech was innovative at that time, and we felt that if we allowed users to feel the vibrations of their favorite music, as well as using it as a conventional pleasure device, we had created a pretty interesting product,” she explained.

Those who are really committed to music, sex and tech might be pleased to hear that other industries are also pivoting toward the trifecta. Today, Amazon Prime Music subscribers can ask Alexa to play “baby making jazz” or “hooking up music.” Even our sexbots are staying in key. Exdoll, a Chinese company pumping out lifelike sex dolls to help combat the country’s massive gender gap, is now looking to incorporate some smart technology in its designs. Soon, the dolls will be able to operate appliances, conduct conversations, and of course, play music.

“Music has such a powerful effect on human moods and emotions and is the perfect vehicle to transport someone into a different mental space,” says Dunham. “Music and sex have always been close companions.”

And to think, it may have all started with the songbirds.

Does cloud seeding work? Scientists watch ice crystals grow inside clouds to find out

This photo provided by the National Park Service shows dense clouds at the south rim of the Grand Canyon on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2014 in Arizona. A rare weather phenomenon on Thursday had visitors looking out to a sea of thick clouds. The total cloud inversion is expected to hang over the Grand Canyon just below the rim throughout the day. (AP Photo/National Park Service, Maci MacPherson) ----- (Credit: AP)

Water is a valuable resource that affects nearly all aspects of life on earth. It also is limited, so people use a variety of methods to ensure that supply meets demand.

One such technique is cloud seeding — adding particles to the atmosphere to promote formation of rain or snow. Today many entities across the West — including state and local goverment agencies, utilities and ski areas — seed clouds in an effort to boost winter snowfall in the mountains. More snowpack means more spring and summer runoff, which feeds local water supplies, irrigates crops and fuels dams that generate hydroelectric power.

Cloud seeding has also been used in efforts to disperse fog at airports, boost summer rainfall and reduce hail. In fact, cloud seeding occurs in more than 50 countries worldwide. Yet despite all of this activity, we still don’t know whether it works.

We are atmospheric scientists and recently conducted a field study to evaluate cloud seeding as a means of enhancing mountain snowpack from winter storms. Our results clearly demonstrate that, at least under certain conditions, it is possible to change the evolution and growth of cloud particles, leading to snowfall that otherwise would not have occurred. The next question is whether cloud seeding can be an effective tool for water managers in the western United States.

Creating crystals inside clouds

Clouds are made up of water droplets that are too small to fall as precipitation. These droplets often supercool to temperatures well below the freezing point — as low as 0 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 18 degrees Celsius) or colder. In many circumstances ice crystals (which can grow rapidly in the presence of supercooled liquid) must be present for a cloud to produce any significant amount of precipitation. For clouds that form as air is lifted over a mountain, if no ice crystals or too few of them are present, many of the water droplets that make up the cloud simply evaporate on the downwind side of the mountain.

Winter cloud seeding is based on a hypothesis that when supercooled water exists in a cloud, it can be modified by introducing particles that act as artificial ice nuclei. This process creates ice crystals that will utilize the supercooled water to grow large enough that they eventually fall to the surface as snow.

Cloud seeding was pioneered by atmospheric scientist Bernard Vonnegut, brother of famed novelist Kurt Vonnegut. In 1947 Vonnegut’s lab showed that silver iodide was an effective ice nucleus that could form ice at temperatures much warmer than naturally occurring ice nuclei.

Over the next 40 years, scientists studying cloud seeding made significant discoveries about nearly all aspects of cloud physics. Despite this, in 2003 the National Research Council concluded that “there still is no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modification efforts.” Nonetheless, states and communities pressed on with operational cloud seeding, while research on its effectiveness ground to a halt.

The path to SNOWIE

Why do these programs exist without scientific evidence that they work? The answer is simple: Western states need water, and many decision-makers believe that cloud seeding can be a cost-effective way to produce it.

In 2004 the state of Wyoming commissioned a pilot project, which came to the same conclusion as many previous studies: Cloud seeding might have increased precipitation, but the increase could also be explained by natural variability in storm systems. However, a sister project funded by the National Science Foundation demonstrated that new computer modeling tools and improved instrumentation could produce some new insights.

Meanwhile, Idaho Power Company was working with the National Center for Atmospheric Research to evaluate the company’s ongoing operational cloud seeding program. From this collaboration came the idea to use new computer modeling tools and improved instrumentation to assess the effectiveness of Idaho Power’s cloud seeding program. The ultimate result was our project, Seeded and Natural Orographic Wintertime clouds: the Idaho Experiment, or SNOWIE.

From silver iodide to snow

In the winter of 2017, we set out armed with sophisticated radars, such as the Doppler on Wheels (DOWs), which we positioned at mountaintop locations, and the Wyoming Cloud Radar (WCR), which we mounted on a research aircraft. These tools enabled us to peer into clouds in order to determine where and when precipitation was developing.

After clouds were seeded with silver iodide particles, we used imaging probes that hung from the wings of research aircraft to examine fine details of cloud particles as the plane passed in and out of the seeded regions. Just two weeks into our 10-week field project, our radar detected the first undeniable signal of precipitation resulting from cloud seeding.

We saw clear and unambiguous signals that releasing silver iodide particles was initiating ice crystal formation, and that these crystals were growing into snow and falling to the mountain’s surface. Inside areas affected by seeding, the ice crystal concentrations increased by the hundreds leading to the formation of snow. In contrast, just 1 kilometer away in nonseeded cloud regions the cloud remained composed mostly of small liquid droplets and largely devoid of ice.

How could we tell that what we saw was actually due to cloud seeding? In one case, an aircraft passed back and forth along a straight track that was perpendicular to the wind direction, releasing silver iodide. The silver iodide began to disperse downwind through the cloud in a zig-zag plume — a pattern that was created by the aircraft’s flight pattern and would not have occurred naturally. We saw radar echoes forming in a zig-zag pattern that matched our prediction based on when and where the silver iodide was released in the clouds.

Can cloud seeding make a difference?

Now that we know cloud seeding can lead to snowfall, we want to see whether it can change the balance of water over an entire mountain range. Data from SNOWIE will be used in computer models to test our ideas of how cloud seeding might influence seasonal snowfall and quantify its impact. Ultimately, water managers and public officials will want to know how much additional precipitation can be produced because of cloud seeding, and whether it is a cost-effective way to augment precipitation in local watersheds.

Robert M. Rauber of the University of Illinois, Katja Friedrich of the University of Colorado, Bart Geerts of the University of Wyoming, Roy Rasmussen and Lulin Xue of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Mel Kunkel and Derek Blestrud of Idaho Power Company also participated in the SNOWIE study discussed in this article.

Jeffrey French, Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Science, University of Wyoming and Sarah Tessendorf, Project Scientist, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

Andrew McCabe kept memos on Trump meetings: report

Andrew McCabe (Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin)

Memos are becoming a common theme in the Trump administration. The Associated Press reported on Saturday that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired on Friday by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, kept memos of his meetings with President Donald Trump that could be useful to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe and corroborate former FBI director James Comey’s account.

The AP reports it is not “immediately clear” if the memos are in Mueller’s hands yet – or if they have been requested by him.

The AP reports:

“McCabe’s memos include details of interactions with the president, among other topics, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation who wasn’t authorized to discuss the notes publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

“Though the precise contents are unknown, the memos possibly could help substantiate McCabe’s assertion that he was unfairly maligned by a White House he says had declared ‘war’ on the FBI and Mueller’s investigation. They almost certainly contain, as Comey’s memos did, previously undisclosed details about encounters between the Trump administration and FBI.”

The New York Times reports that the memos were left at the FBI, which would mean Mueller’s team would be able to access them and potentially corroborate Comey’s story. McCabe, according to the Times, has had at least three meetings with Trump. As the report explains:

“In one, he asked Mr. McCabe how he had voted in the presidential election. In each, he asked about Mr. McCabe’s wife, Jill, who ran a failed campaign as a Democrat for the Virginia State Senate. Mr. McCabe has identified as a lifelong Republican but did not vote in the 2016 presidential race.”

A source told CNN that Mueller’s team has already interviewed McCabe and asked him about Comey’s firing. Trump fired Comey in May 2017, claiming he was ousted over his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. However, news reports have countered the White House’s story, backing up the suggestion that Trump was motivated by anger at the FBI’s pursuit of an investigation into his Russia ties.

Comey later testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017. During his testimony, the former FBI director alleged Trump had tried to compel him to take a loyalty oath, and also directed him stop investigating the Russia scandal.

The war between Trump and Comey has hit the battlegrounds of Twitter. In response to McCabe’s firing on Saturday, Trump tweeted: “How many lies? How many leaks? Comey knew it all, and much more!”

The Fake News is beside themselves that McCabe was caught, called out and fired. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars was given to wife’s campaign by Crooked H friend, Terry M, who was also under investigation? How many lies? How many leaks? Comey knew it all, and much more!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2018

Comey then tweeted: “Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.”

Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.

— James Comey (@Comey) March 17, 2018

“The Gargoyle Hunters” is a love letter to New York City

The Gargoyle Hunters by John Freeman Gill (Credit: Penguin Random House)

Excerpted from “The Gargoyle Hunters“ by John Freeman Gill. Copyright © 2017 by John Freeman Gill. Excerpted by permission of Vintage. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

New York puts you in your place. It’s bigger than you, and more important. It’s older than you, and newer too. It’s more than you: more towering, more gutter-level; more striving, more complacent; more hurried, more arrived; more refined, more depraved; more timeless, more late for dinner reservations. It has a lot of moving parts, and countless immovable ones. And it doesn’t care if you have a relationship with it or not.

But the street walls, the miles of buildings rearing up on either side of you on any major avenue, could be reassuring too. Something you could count on. Without giving it any thought, I’d learned to take these miles of masonry for granted, to feel them holding and even guiding me on my passage through the city, the way a river runner feels embraced by the certainty of canyon walls. Trundling up Amsterdam Avenue in my father’s repurposed old Good Humor truck, the Upper West Side asnooze around us, I felt at ease in the brick-and-brownstone-flanked corridor, block after block of familiar tenement New Yorkness scrolling across my window frame.

And then it ended. Without warning, without transition, the street wall, the buildings, simply vanished, replaced by a moonscape of devastation that made me do an actual double-take of disbelief. The blocks along Amsterdam were the same size as before, but instead of tenements and storefronts, instead of windows and stoops and lives, there were only sprawling expanses of rubble. A neighborhood leveled.

The only exceptions were the side streets, where a few brownstones still stood, huddled together for safety.

“Jesus,” I said. “What happened here?”

“Urban renewal. Twenty square blocks, something like 540 buildings — the city’s knocking it all down.”

“Why?”

“They’re planning a slew of hideous, boxy, brick towers,” Dad said. “What else do they do anymore?”

We hopped a chain-link fence and walked the graveyard of the neighborhood. The crushed, shardy remains, for all their hazardous shifting underfoot, seemed oddly undifferentiated. Wreckage is wreckage, I supposed. In the crunch and stumble of our exploration, eyes fixed cautiously on my next step, I could see no evidence that the acres of jumbled rubble had ever taken the form of anything as solid and reassuring as homes. We were treading an aftermath.

“I never get used to it, no matter how often I come to one of these sites,” Dad said. “It’s like a firebombed city, Dresden or something. Only this time we did it to ourselves.”

There was an archaeological thoroughness to the way he eyeballed the ruins, a forensic sensitivity. As I stood there blinking dumbly at the rubble, he took two unhesitating steps to his right and toe-nudged an unarticulated brown block of rock with his work boot. It flipped onto its back, revealing a carved keystone portrait, the head of a squirrel-cheeked lady wearing a crooked smile and a necklace of inelegant bulbous beads. Aside from her missing nose, she was in pretty good shape.

“Will you look at that!” Dad cried. “Look how transcendently ordinary she is.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she’s a regular person. She’s not Athena or Diana or the Queen of Spades.”

“So what?” I asked, and I said it in a challenging, almost pissy voice, trying to get a rise out of him, to get him to notice me. He didn’t.

“Well, the carvers who came over here from Italy and Germany clearly got tired of doing the same old idealized classical or historical figures, so they started sculpting people they knew, barkeeps and cops and dock workers.” He regarded the woman’s face closely. “This gal is way too funny-looking to be a goddess. She’s probably the carver’s sweetheart, or maybe a barmaid he’s got a crush on. And he honored her, you know? He did a really loving portrait. She’s got a good smile, I think: skeptical but generous. Here, help me get her back to the truck.”

 

It was a bit of a schlep to our next destination. Up on 95th, near Columbus, a brownstone had had the bad luck to share a wall with a tenement demolished by the wrecking ball. The vibrations had destabilized the house, which was now slouching toward the rubble heap to its west, as if seeking to join it. The house’s listing brick side wall had been braced by a cluster of wooden emergency supports, nine pale, upflung arms pushing back diagonally against its will to fall.

“Lucky for us,” Dad said, “they evacuated the family that lives here. They won’t let them back home till the place passes inspection.”

“Will it collapse?”

Dad shrugged. “Who knows? I doubt it.”

Part of the troubled wall was protected by some kind of tarp or tar paper. Sensing weakness, Dad peeled back one of its lower corners and found a slanty crack and a small, street-level hole near the back of the building, where a bunch of bricks had fallen away.

He sent me through the hole with a flashlight, which I immediately trained on the inside of the wall I’d just come through. A fierce crack, an inch wide, zigged down its plaster from the ceiling to about the height of my chest. But if you ignored that one menacing detail, it looked to be a fairly ordinary old brownstone, with a crooked spine of staircase twisting up its center and a pair of small, worn-out Pumas left on its bottom step by some sighing mom who probably wanted them brought upstairs, for God’s sake, how many times do I have to ask you?

Dad was waiting at the back door when I opened it, his leather-edged canvas plumber’s bag in one hand.

“Do come in,” I said with a low bow. “Make yourself at home.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” He stepped in and stomped his boots on the Welcome mat, a Dad-shaped aura of dust puffing from his body. “Lovely place you’ve got here.”

We were standing in a drab, old-fashioned kitchen right out of The Honeymooners. Dad handed me a chair to carry and led me up the stairs with his flashlight into the second-floor room facing 95th Street. It looked like some kid’s bedroom, probably a little boy’s. It had a bunk bed with no sheets on the top bunk, a Snuffleupagus comforter on the bottom, and a pink-plastic Big Wheel parked at its foot. A few feet away, the side wall had a long, vicious crack in its plaster, a lot like the one downstairs.

Dad found a bedside lamp and switched it on.

“There’s something here we want?” I asked.

“Sure is. Intact and everything. But first we’ve got to build a form exactly the shape of that window frame. To support the arch.” He nodded toward the window on the left, whose enframement was a tall rectangle with a gentle curve at the top.

What Dad nailed together next was something of a domestic collage. He cut up the kitchen chair with his circular saw, but he needed lumber of other sizes and shapes too, so he kept sending me around the house to find whatever wood I could: bureau drawers, the footboard from the master bedroom, a pair of sink-cabinet doors from the hallway bathroom. The stroke of genius, the scavenged wood I could see made him most proud of me, was the base of the boy’s rocking horse. I pointed out that it had almost the exact same curvature as the top of the window frame (upside-down, of course). Dad laughed with pleasure, amputated it with his circular saw, and nailed it atop the form.

“Perfect fit,” he said, when we’d hoisted our mongrel creation into the window opening. “Now that’s what I call an arch support.”

We slid the kid’s bunk bed lengthwise in front of the window to use as a scaffold. Dad climbed to the top bunk with a red Magic Marker and drew a horizontal rectangle on the plaster directly above the window. I handed up his tool bag and joined him. We sat on the top bunk side by side with our legs hanging over, chipping away at the wall with hammers and chisels. When all the plaster was removed from within the red Magic Marker rectangle, we started in on the brickwork behind it.

“What we’re after, of course, is the keystone, in the center of the arch,” Dad told me. “But to get to it, we’ve kind of gotta take the wall apart around it. Most of these brownstones were built in layers, see? Their structural walls were made of three wythes of brick.”

“When you say three widths, you mean the bricks are back-to-back-to-back?”

“Wythes, not widths: W-Y-T-H-E-S. It just means layers. And yeah, they’re back-to-back-to-back, with the keystone set into the face of the building usually just two wythes deep. You and I are gonna focus right now just on the innermost wythe.”

The mortar was really crumbly, freeing up the bricks pretty easily. One by one, they fell away, landing with muffled thumps on the kid’s green carpet.

He told me to keep at it, and he headed downstairs.

It was messy work chiseling away the bricks, but not too difficult. In less than half an hour I’d chipped away the first brick layer from the Magic Marker rectangle above the window. Behind it waited another layer of bricks — except in the center, where I had exposed the back of a rough-hewn, chocolate-brown wedge of rock. A thin metal strap protruded horizontally from its top, where it had been embedded for something like 90 years in the mortar layer I’d just chipped away.

“There’s your keystone!” Dad said when he came back. He handed up a pair of pry bars. “Now to free it up.”

He joined me on the top bunk, and the two of us went to work on the remaining two layers of brick on either side of the keystone, using the pry bars to chip away the mortar and prize out the bricks. Before long, we had both poked through to the outside world, creating a pair of ragged windows through which you could make out the hunkered shapes of two undemolished brownstones across the street. Their own keystone gargoyles scowled back at us.

All that remained to liberate the gargoyle keystone was to chisel away a couple rows of brick directly above it, along with the line of mortar just beneath it. When we’d done that, the keystone was all but freestanding, its bottom supported by the jury-rigged wooden form. Together we pushed the bunk bed right up snug against the window and then, kneeling on the top bunk, put our arms around the gargoyle and hugged it roughly into the room.

What it must have looked like had anyone been watching us from the street, I can only guess: the silhouette of a single unnamable mythological monster, maybe, with a wedge-shaped brown head, two man arms and two boy arms, gripping its own face in the middle of a ruptured wall.

When the keystone finally broke loose, it tipped backward and fell onto the bunk bed, gently cratering the mattress between us. It was oddly intimate, the three of us so close together after all that struggle, and the roguish character staring up at me from the keystone made me laugh. He was a smirking, blunt-nosed man whose cauliflower-shaped head was elaborately turbaned with bandages, as if some well-meaning friends had swaddled his poor noggin in dish rags after a barroom beat-down.

“Ha!” Dad exclaimed. “Just look at that irreverent spark in the pugilist’s eye, that undimmed commitment to mischief. Is it just me or — yes! His eyes are popping, Griffin!” He cupped the stone chin in his hand, looking into the gargoyle’s pupils. “That’s extraordinary! The carver put lumps in his eyes to make them more expressive.”

He met the carved face’s gaze with his own. He did not blink. A minute passed.

“The bridge of time is very poignant,” he told me. “I think about the immigrant carvers who came over here in the 19th century and did this work on people’s homes — itinerant nobodies, many of them, with no stable homes of their own — and I meet them across time.”

The day Johnny Cash’s voice walked in the door

(Credit: Getty/Bloomsbury Publishing/Salon)

Cash built his mythic self to fit his actual voice, behaving as if it had arrived from somewhere else, as if the voice (like a flame) had traveled a great distance to get here. This was correct. As the story goes, Cash’s voice presented itself to him late in his adolescence. It just showed up one day, unannounced, there to be misunderstood and wasted, like any other blessing. His mother was a simple woman but she referred to his voice as The Gift.

Its snarl, however full of bombast and sanctimony it might have been, also had a lazy cruelness to it, a sense of malignant power held in reserve. It was like an ink drawn from some prior place. Cash would always imply that his voice did not come from his own earthly person but from a spectral elsewhere, outside of him, coming on like the Holy Ghost, selecting him and then commencing its ravishing. There was no way he could have prepared himself for its arrival. He had been working when he received it, simply doing his chores, adding his blood and sweat to the family engine, keeping on keeping on. “When I was 17,” he wrote, “I had been cutting wood all day with my father and I came in and I was singing a gospel song, ‘Everybody’s gonna have a wonderful time up there, Glory hallelujah.’”

This was what life was like for Cash, work and song entwined, just the toilsome rituals of another day. When he opened his mouth this time, however, a deep, otherworldly sound burst through. His voice broke into something new, or, to take his own perspective, a different voice broke into him. Things changed. Scratching the lower registers of his new voice, enjoying its strange thick texture, he became for a moment unrecognizable to those who thought they knew and loved him, including his adoring mother Carrie. “I was singing as I walked in the back door,” Cash later wrote, “and she wheeled around from the stove in shock and said, ‘Who was that?’” It seems she thought the sound might be her own father, returned from the beyond.

For Cash, it was an intoxication, a first hint at the life to come: for him to perceive his mother perceiving him and growing confounded in doing so was to realize that he had become, if just for an instant, something unanticipated and strange. He had to have been a stranger to himself in that moment as well, an unfamiliar (this is among the addictions of art). This was the felt strength of The Gift, its vortex and promise, as well as its threat: the possibility that Cash could birth a second self through it, to not just be JR, wayward son of country trash, but to eventually become Johnny Cash, musician and artist, historical and spiritual vessel, consummate American.

Cash decided that he should learn to master this new voice. He went to a local singing teacher, hoping to refine The Gift, but after the first lesson his teacher told him that his voice should not be polished or tamed. Not only was it bigger than he was, it seemed as if his voice had its own ideas about itself, distinct from professional norms. “Don’t ever take voice lessons again,” the teacher told Cash. “Don’t let me or anyone change how you sing.”

In Cash’s version of the story, the voice precedes the man and, in its way, becomes the prophet of his very thoughts. Cash had to expand himself after the voice arrived, burrowing deeper and reaching further, simply to match it. The Gift was always there, driving Cash to bring it proper material. Simply looking inward was not enough. Cash found himself attracted to historical as well as spiritual songs, recurring coordinates of his search for truths that, like his voice, originated from somewhere beyond him, either higher or lower than the topology to which he had been born. The Gift desired truths of a more cosmic quality. “My soul wasn’t born in the cotton patch,” Cash once said. “I think I was just passing through.” Later in his life, Cash recorded his voice declaiming the entire New Testament, unabridged, which is both an unusual way to spend nineteen hours and an acknowledgement of how the holy and the historical came most readily to Cash: in the guise of his own voice.

For Cash to feel or understand a truth, he had to voice it. Instances of this are everywhere. Cash became an advocate for prison reform after the prison albums, as the American Indian ballads that led to Bitter Tears sharpened his sense of political justice. In his first autobiography, “Man in Black,” Cash wrote about being present at the personal spiritual testimonies documented in Kris Kristofferson’s “Why Me”–written in response to his own “The Gospel Road” project and Kristofferson’s experiences at Cash’s church–and Larry Gatlin’s “Help Me,” which was debuted at that same Tennessee church Cash and his family attended. When Cash ended up covering these songs in his “American” series, it revealed his voice not only wrapping itself in each song’s pleading devotion but also returning and attending to the moments that produced them, pivots in Cash’s own spiritual development, consecrating them.

Like the Holy Ghost, The Gift had its own itinerary–Cash would follow it. His was a voice that called for mythic histories to buttress it, that petitioned for deep pains to feed and trouble it, that needed great, distant heights for it to call toward. Reading across Cash’s own recollections, it is striking how often he places himself at foundational moments of American musical history, not only providing the opportunity for Kristofferson’s and Gatlin’s songs, but also supplying an anecdote to Carl Perkins about a black airman back in Germany with an inordinate fondness for his own blue suede shoes, inspiring Perkins’ classic recording. In his second autobiography, Cash recalled a desert drive he took with Roger Miller. “Out in the middle of the desert,” wrote Cash, “he told me to pull over, then jumped out, and ran off behind a Joshua tree with a paper and pencil.” When Miller came back, he had the lyrics to “Dang Me” with him, a song that would become one of his biggest hits. “He had to bring it into the world all by himself,” Cash wrote, “like an Apache woman giving birth.” This was how the world revealed itself to Cash. He was one of those who needed to be astonished by first things; to judge them, and to be judged by them in turn.

 

 

Excerpted from “Johnny Cash’s American Recordings” by Tony Tost (Continuum, 2011). Reprinted with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing.

 

 

People are stranded in “transit deserts” in dozens of US cities

(Credit: Getty/Pavlina2510)

Less than two months after President Donald Trump pledged in his State of the Union Address to “rebuild our crumbling infrastructure,” prospects look dim. The Trump administration is asking Congress for ideas about how to fund trillions of dollars in improvements that experts say are needed. Some Democrats want to reverse newly enacted tax cuts to fund repairs — an unlikely strategy as long as Republicans control Congress.

Deciding how to fund investments on this scale is primarily a job for elected officials, but research can help set priorities. Our current work focuses on transit, which is critical to health and economic development, since it connects people with jobs, services and recreational opportunities.

Along with other colleagues at the Urban Information Lab at the University of Texas, we have developed a website showing which areas in major U.S. cities do not have sufficient alternatives to car ownership. Using these methods, we have determined that lack of transit access is a widespread problem. In some of the most severely affected cities, 1 in 8 residents lives in what we refer to as transit deserts.

Deserts and oases

Using GIS-based mapping technology, we recently assessed 52 U.S. cities, from large metropolises like New York City and Los Angeles to smaller cities such as Wichita. We systematically analyzed transportation and demand at the block group level — essentially, by neighborhoods. Then we classified block groups as “transit deserts,” with inadequate transportation services compared to demand; “transit oases,” with more transportation services than demand; and areas where transit supply meets demand.

To calculate the supply, we mapped out cities’ transportation systems using publicly available data sets, including General Transit Feed Specification data. GTFS data sets are published by transit service companies and provide detailed information about their transit systems, such as route information, frequency of service and locations of stops.

We calculated demand for transit using American Community Survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Transportation demand is difficult to quantify, so we used the number of transit-dependent people in each city as a proxy. A transit-dependent person is someone over the age of 12 who may need access to transportation but cannot or does not drive because he or she is too young, is disabled, is too poor to own a vehicle or chooses not to own a car.

Transportation deserts were present to varying degrees in all 52 cities in our study. In transit desert block groups, on average, about 43 percent of residents were transit dependent. But surprisingly, even in block groups that have enough transit service to meet demand, 38 percent of the population was transit dependent. This tells us that there is broad need for alternatives to individual car ownership.

For example, we found that 22 percent of block groups in San Francisco were transit deserts. This does not mean that transit supply is weak within San Francisco. Rather, transit demand is high because many residents do not own cars or cannot drive, and in some neighborhoods, this demand is not being met.

In contrast, the city of San Jose, California, has a high rate of car ownership and consequently a low rate of transit demand. And the city’s transit supply is relatively good, so we only found 2 percent of block groups that were transit deserts.

Who do transit agencies serve?

Traditional transit planning is primarily focused on easing commute times into central business districts, not on providing adequate transportation within residential areas. Our preliminary analysis showed that lack of transit access was correlated with living in denser areas. For example, in New York City there are transit deserts along the the Upper West and Upper East sides, which are high-density residential areas but do not have enough transit options to meet residents’ needs.

Our finding that denser areas tend to be underserved suggests that cities will be increasingly challenged to provide transit access in the coming decades. The United Nations estimates that two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, which will mean growing demand for transit. Moreover, fewer Americans, particularly millennials, are choosing to own vehicles or even get driver’s licenses.

This dual challenge underlines the urgency of investing in transportation infrastructure. The problem of transportation access is only likely to grow more acute in the coming years, and new infrastructure projects take many years to plan, finance and complete.

Transit deserts reinforce inequality

We also found that relatively well-off neighborhoods have better transport services. This is not surprising: Wealthier people tend to have higher access to cars, and thus rely less on public transit.

Lower access to transportation for poorer Americans creates a kind of negative economic feedback loop. People need access to high-quality transportation in order to find and retain better jobs. Indeed, several studies have shown that transit access is one the most critical factors in determining upward mobility. Poor Americans are likely to have lower-than-average access to transit, but often are unable to move out of poverty because of this lack of transit. Investing in infrastructure thus is a way of increasing social and economic equality.

What state and city governments can do

Shrinking transit deserts does not necessarily require wholesale construction of new transit infrastructure. Some solutions can be implemented relatively cheaply and easily.

New and emerging technologies can provide flexible alternatives to traditional public transportation or even enhance regular public transit. Examples include services from transit network companies, such as Uber’s Pool and Express Pool and Lyft’s Line; traditional or dockless bike sharing services, such as Mobike and Ofo; and microtransit services like Didi Bus and Ford’s Chariot. However, cities will have to work with private companies that offer these services to ensure they are accessible to all residents.

Cities also can take steps to ensure their current transit systems are well-balanced and shift some resources from overserved areas to neighborhoods that are underserved. And modest investments can make a difference. For example, adjusting transit signals to give buses preference at intersections can make bus service more reliable by helping them stay on schedule.

Ultimately federal, state and city agencies must work together to ensure an equitable distribution of transportation so that all citizens can fully participate in civil society. Identifying transit gaps is a first step toward solving this issue.

Junfeng Jiao, Assistant Professor of Community and Regional Planning and Director, Urban Information Lab, University of Texas at Austin and Chris Bischak, Masters of Community and Regional Planning Candidate, University of Texas at Austin

Trump lawyer calls for end to Robert Mueller probe

Robert Mueller (Credit: Getty/Andrew Burton)

President Donald Trump’s attorney John Dowd says it is time to “bring an end” to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The call, which was made Saturday to CNN, follows the firing of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe one day prior.

“I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt dossier,” Dowd said in a statement reacting to McCabe’s firing.

While Dowd told CNN he was speaking on his own behalf, he reportedly told The Daily Beast he was speaking on behalf of President Donald Trump. Betsy Woodruff, a reporter from the outlet, wrote on Twitter, “I asked if he gave me the statement on POTUS’ behalf. His reply: “Yes, as his counsel.”

“He later emailed me to walk that back,” she tweeted.

When I first emailed with Dowd, I asked if he gave me the statement on POTUS' behalf. His reply: "Yes, as his counsel"

He later emailed me to walk that back.

Story is updated: https://t.co/69c7JNZDQC

— Betsy Woodruff (@woodruffbets) March 17, 2018

On Friday night, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe, rejecting an appeal for him to retire that would have granted the department veteran pension rights. Trump later praised his firing on Twitter.

Sessions released a statement following the firing saying, “The FBI expects every employee to adhere to the highest standards of honesty, integrity and accountability.”

McCabe told the New York Times that the claim he was dishonest is “just wrong.” “This is part of an effort to discredit me as a witness,” he added.

Trump alleged in a tweet on Saturday that the “Fake News” is “beside themselves” that “McCabe was caught.”

The Fake News is beside themselves that McCabe was caught, called out and fired. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars was given to wife’s campaign by Crooked H friend, Terry M, who was also under investigation? How many lies? How many leaks? Comey knew it all, and much more!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2018

Comey responded to Trump’s tweet writing, “Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.”

Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.

— James Comey (@Comey) March 17, 2018

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Dowd’s comment is yet “another indication” that Trump’s first instinct is to not cooperate with Mueller.

“Mr. Dowd’s comments are yet another indication that the first instinct of [President Trump] and his legal team is not to cooperate with Special Counsel Mueller, but to undermine him at every turn,” Schumer wrote on Twitter. “The president, the administration and his legal team must not take any steps to curtail, interfere with or end the special counsel’s investigation or there will be severe consequences from both Democrats and Republicans.”

CNN is also reporting that Mueller has reviewed memos written by McCabe, who allegedly documented his conversations with the president.

Mr. Dowd's comments are yet another indication that the first instinct of @realDonaldTrump and his legal team is not to cooperate with Special Counsel Mueller, but to undermine him at every turn. 1/2

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) March 17, 2018

David Letterman, Van Jones, Sarah Silverman and our empathy gap

Sarah Silverman; Van Jones; David Letterman (Credit: AP/Jordan Strauss/Evan Agostini/Getty/Leigh Vogel)

During the March 10 edition of CNN’s “The Van Jones Show,” its host lamented that his “love army” approach keeps getting smacked down by people on his own team — folks who are tired of “going high,” to paraphrase Michelle Obama’s famous advice.

“I’m tired, I’m frustrated, I’m even scared about what’s happening with our political system,” Jones admitted to his audience as the episode opened. “The overall vibe around politics is just so negative and so nasty. I’m staying involved and I’m still in the fight. But honestly, I’m looking elsewhere for wisdom and for insight and understanding.”

But what he said next speaks to where shows like his should be seeking to cultivate an audience. Jones explained that his love of bringing cultural icons to his series, and taking his conversation beyond the city limits of Washington, D.C., is because he finds that people who aren’t politicians can be more honest, more real and truthful sometimes than the politicians.

“On the ground, the personal stakes of these issues are a lot higher, but the circles are smaller,” he explains. Because of this, he continues, “the conversations feel a lot different. Like you can actually get someplace eventually.”

Jones opened the episode that way to introduce his very famous not-a-politician guest Oprah Winfrey, who’s been popping up on a lot of talk shows these days. There’s a good reason for this: She’s making the rounds to promote the recently released “A Wrinkle in Time.” Before that, calls for #Oprah2020 achieved liftoff in reaction to her Golden Globes speech. Even though she insists she has no intention of running, they keep ringing out.

But this speaks to what Jones is saying, albeit on an extraordinary level. Oprah has the capacity to bridge our nation’s empathy gap. She’s monetized that trait many times over and continues to do so in a variety of ways, the most front-facing being as a “60 Minutes” correspondent.

Possessing such an ability to connect with the other side is rare, but not unique. A number of famous people have it. But only a few are using it in ways that serve the cause of starting conversations we need to have as a nation as opposed to preaching to the choir.

One such star is David Letterman, who returned with great fanfare with his monthly Netflix series “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.” Letterman’s iconic status as a late-night host and America’s cranky uncle doesn’t require much of an introduction either. But in this series he presents one interview per month as opposed to four or five per week, and as such, dives deep with one gigantic celebrity each time.

His first get was President Barack Obama, who surprised a number of critics with his comedic agility, although he’d already demonstrated his prowess at delivering good-natured comebacks in Jerry Seinfeld’s web series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” February brought us George Clooney. On International Women’s Day, March 8, viewers were treated to the debut of his hour chatting up Malala Yousafzai, an activist and Oxford student devoted to attaining universal education for girls around the world.

Much of the larger discussion about speaking across America’s yawning political divide has involved an assurance that we’re really not as far apart as we think we are when it comes to some issues. Talking to our neighbors, spending time in our communities, is all it takes to find the truth in this statement. As a people, we also love the distraction of entertainment, and we find our entertainers endlessly fascinating. Thus when Jones admitted he was looking more toward the artists, poets and mystics for conversations on his series, his bosses likely gave him a thumbs up. Distraction from the unrelenting distress created in part by CNN’s news cycle is a smart sales pitch. Dialing it back is healthy; tuning out entirely is not. Presenting topical context wrapped in celebrity packaging allows the audience to remain connected to matters impacting our democracy and life on this planet in whatever ways we can stomach.

This is where Letterman uses his star power and his skills as a conversationalist to sneak in portraits of America that speak to who its citizens are as opposed to the vaunted position very few of them hold in our society — or, in the case of Yousafzai, what they symbolize to us.

His interview with Obama was the first to demonstrate that strategy, mixing live onstage banter with the former president about life after the presidency and his goals moving forward with the acknowledgement that his eight years in office came as the result of decades of gains by the Civil Rights movement. This scene was interspersed with a filmed interview with Congressman John Lewis, which was in part filmed on location as he and Letterman strolled over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

The Clooney interview proved even more stealthily purposeful by using one of America’s classic crushes to slide in a portrait that speaks to the heart of the nation’s legacy in offering refuge to immigrants. One minute Clooney is flashing his megawatt smile at Letterman and joking about his retirement beard (Obama called it “biblical”), and the next we’re meeting Hazim Avdal, an Iraqi refugee sponsored by Clooney’s parents Nick and Nina and living in their Kentucky hometown.

Avdal evenly tells Letterman about his harrowing life, starting with the Iraq war in 2003, when he was 9 years old. He learned English from his cousin, who was a translator for the United States military and was killed by al Qaeda for that very reason. Later ISIS would wipe out his entire town; he and his family made it out about 10 minutes before members of the terrorist group arrived.

“Living through that is imponderable,” Letterman observes. But a few scenes later, the whole family is strolling down the sort of tree-lined street evocative of small-town America as Letterman remarks upon the fact that although they’re in a red state, the Clooneys have encountered no resistance to having adopted an Iraqi refugee. “On a one-on-one [basis],” Nick says, “this is a very generous community.”

Letterman is merely the latest to this arena, of course. The entire reason for Sarah Silverman’s “I Love You, America” to exist on Hulu is to allow the comedian to explore and portray all the ways that it’s possible for Americans to live in harmony and accept one another’s differences. She did this by venturing into deep red state territory as well as by hitching rides with families driving across midtown Manhattan, all with a smile and an air of innocent curiosity.

When she holds forth on a topic, she does so with the same soft kindness — for example, when she explains why “America First” jingoism is not in alignment with loving the country.

“The difference between loving America and ‘U.S.A. Is Number One!’ is like the difference between a desire for progress and change versus ‘we’re perfect and we’ll never change,’ which is crazy because change is how you stay number one. If you don’t change with the times, you die,” she says in one monologue. “. . .We criticize the things we love because we want them to be better. In some ways, to criticize is to love.”

The people to whom Silverman’s words are directed won’t tune in to hear them, mind you. Indeed, Letterman’s series faces the same limitations. Viewers predisposed to detest any left-leaning entertainer probably aren’t going to bother with “My Next Guest,” and probably crossed it off their lists the moment that Barry “Secret Muslim” Obama was revealed as the show’s first sit-down.

It’s also telling that these shows are on streaming platforms as opposed to broadcast or cable outlets, where appealing to the widest audience possible is any show’s main selling point. (This means that we should not expect, say,  ABC’s “Sundays with Alec Baldwin” to speak to the opposition in any fashion that does not relate somehow to the greatness and mystery of Alec Baldwin.) Video on demand services are built to serve the fragmented audience; viewers can opt in to any type of entertainment experience they want on these services, and each service’s algorithms further personalize the individual customer’s experience. They move with the problem as opposed to offering a solution. Therefore, the likelihood of “My Next Guest” or “I Love You, America” shifting the tenor of the conversation in a major way is slim to nonexistent.

But the fact that the Silvermans and Lettermans of the world have serialized platforms to make their cases for healing at all is an important offering to the smaller circles to which Jones refers.

And all is not lost in the cable realm; Jones may be confronting pushback for his efforts, but seeking out conversations with “the other side” won W. Kamau Bell an Emmy for his series “United Shades of America.” As part of that series, returning to CNN for a third season on April 29, Bell has walked into an alt-right convention and taken cameras to a local Klan rally. He’s ventured deep into Appalachia, spoken to protestors at Standing Rock and examined the segregation that exists on the South Side of Chicago.

He allows the opposing side to speak, and when and if they’re willing to listen he engages in dialogue. This is micro-level connecting as opposed to Oprah’s macro-impact. But it’s an incremental step toward that new place Jones is hoping we’ll arrive at soon. Even if we’re not specifically trying to get there, that’s fine. Letterman is chatting up Jay-Z next, which is bound to be entertaining above all and, purely by accident, could leave us with a few ideas to ponder.

Senator who votes with Trump 85% of time disses Trump

U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake (Credit: Getty/Alex Wong)

Soon-to-be-retired Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., took his anti-Trump propaganda to New Hampshire on Friday. While there, Flake issued a plaintive cry for a GOP candidate to challenge President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, saying that conservatives are “yearning” for a “traditional conservative message.”

“I hope somebody runs, like I said, as a Republican, ’cause I think Republicans are yearning to hear a conservative message, traditional conservative message,” Flake said via NBC.

“Right now, this is the president’s party,” Flake continued. “Republican primary voters in Arizona and elsewhere are firmly with the president — by large majorities. But I do think that will change. And as that changes, we’ll see.”

Flake continued to hone in on Trump’s impulsiveness and habit of spewing out false facts in public.

“Perhaps what will be most remembered from this period will be the president’s war on objective reality and the reflexive impulse to speak falsely,” Flake said.

“The time a notion takes to tickle the cerebellum, send a signal to your fingers to pick up your phone and thumb type a tweet is not a comparable process” to crafting policy, he continued. “We should know by now there is no strategic brilliance to marvel at here.”

Flake also said Republicans “have a long road to whole to recover as a party.”

Flake has been on a NeverTrump tour for a while now. On Thursday. Flake spoke gave a speech at the National Press Club and said his party “might not deserve to lead.”

“If we are going to cloister ourselves in the alternative truth of an erratic leader, if we are going to refuse to live in a world that everyone else lives in … then my party might not deserve to lead,” he said.

While he continues to seek validation and support for his so-called anti-Trump agenda, he seems to agree with Trump on nearly every issue.

Flake “votes in line with Trump’s position” 85.9 percent of the time, according to a FiveThirtyEight tracker. He sided with Trump’s tax plan — and even voted “no” on a bill that would have provided disaster relief for Puerto Rico and other areas in October 2017. To be fair, Flake has not supported the White House’s immigration proposal. While the Arizona senator’s condemnations certainly don’t go unappreciated, he’s not exactly a Republican saint.

On Friday, Flake also reportedly didn’t rule out the possibility of he himself seeking to run in the 2020 primaries, but said “odds are long.”