Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 162

How to eradicate the flu virus from your home

(Credit: Getty/ClaudioVentrella)

Homes are germy places. Microbes come from a variety of sources such as ventilation systems, plants, the outdoor environment and our own microbial cloud. Usually, they pose no threat to our health and you need not worry.

When someone contracts a respiratory virus, such as influenza, you might want to reevaluate the situation to keep others safe from illness.

So how do you evacuate those flu germs from your home and workplace?

The best way is to follow a process known as infection prevention and control. It’s been used for decades in health care to keep patients, visitors and staff safe. All that’s required is a change of mindset: You must view the home like a hospital.

Then, by following a few easy steps, you can reduce the chances of the infection spreading to everyone who lives in, or enters, your home.

Stop touching your face

The first step in the process is to determine how the pathogen of interest spreads. For influenza, there are two well-known routes. The first is direct transmission from one person to another via droplets and possibly through the air.

The other is indirect transmission in which people inadvertently infect themselves after touching contaminated surfaces, sometimes called “fomites.”

Which route is most likely to contribute to infection spread? Direct may seem the obvious choice. But research has shown indirect transmission may be a significant contributor to an outbreak.

That’s because humans have a habit of regularly touching their faces, increasing chances for the introduction of the virus.

Use steam to kill flu

The next stage involves figuring out methods to prevent and/or control the routes of infection.

The easiest option is to eliminate spread by keeping infected people away from areas where healthy ones tend to congregate. But, unlike in a hospital, isolation is not usually possible — or ethical — in the home.

The only option then is to reduce the likelihood of self-inoculation by killing the virus on surfaces, a practice known as disinfection.

Disinfection is different from general cleaning as it is designed to kill certain types of microbial species. In health care, disinfectants are regulated and approved by governments and offer specific killing claims. However, the same cannot be said for consumer products and they may not be as effective as needed.

Thankfully, killing influenza can be achieved by wiping with simple detergents, diluted bleach, or hydrogen peroxide.

If chemicals are not desired, flu also dies in the presence of steam, a fact known for well more than 100 years.

Disinfect the TV remote

After choosing a disinfectant, the final step involves identifying the surfaces to clean. Those of greatest concern are “high-touch surfaces” — those that are touched on a regular basis by many individuals.

In hospitals, these include bed rails, tables and carts. In the home, high-touch surfaces also exist such as refrigerator and microwave handles, faucets, light switches, door knobs, the toilet and, not surprisingly, the TV remote control and other electronic devices.

All of these are prime sources for virus contamination and need to be disinfected regularly.

Of course, regularly is an arbitrary term. To know how often to disinfect, you need to understand the pathogen’s ability to stay alive in the environment. Experiments with influenza reveal the virus can remain infectious on surfaces for up to 24 hours.

This means you should disinfect as often as possible while an individual is showing symptoms and, to be safe, for a few days after they subside.

Wash your hands regularly

As infection prevention and control has learned, such frequency is hard to maintain. That is why surface disinfection must be supplemented with constant hand hygiene.

After contact with a suspect surface, people should wash their hands. If there’s a sink available, wash with water and soap making sure to lather for at least 20 seconds and drying the hands fully. You can also use an alcohol-based hand rub, consisting of between 62 per cent and 70 per cent ethanol, as long as the hands stay wet for at least 15 seconds.

When executed properly, a combination of hand-washing and disinfection will help to prevent the unnecessary spread of flu and allow for a quicker return to normal.

This process can also help to stop the spread of other pathogens, such as colds, skin infections and the dreaded norovirus.

Though the process does require time and energy, making sure loved ones stay safe from the toll of these infections certainly makes the effort worthwhile.

Jason Tetro, Visiting Scientist, University of Guelph

Robert Mueller has not cleared Donald Trump’s campaign staff of colluding with Russians

Robert Mueller; Donald Trump (Credit: Getty/Salon)

Responding to Department of Justice special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russians and a secretive “troll farm” company for interfering in the 2016 election, President Donald Trump and his supporters have tried to frame the news as proof that neither Trump nor his former campaign staffers had deliberately worked with foreign actors.

In a public statement, the White House press office said that the president “has been fully briefed on this matter and is glad to see the Special Counsel’s investigation further indicates — that there was NO COLLUSION between the Trump campaign and Russia.”

Trump reiterated the claim in a tweet:

Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong – no collusion!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 16, 2018

Many of the president’s media fans made the point as well:

No collusion https://t.co/svKF4T3dOQ

— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) February 16, 2018

So big Mueller indictment of Russians confirms "unwitting" involvement of Trump campaign with disguised Russian operatives. No collusion. Shut it down.

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) February 16, 2018

Today's announcement is mostly good news/some bad news for POTUS.

Good news is no collusion was found. If there was collusion, it likely would have been revealed today.

Bad news is the President has never flat out said Russia interfered in our election. He should say so now.

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) February 16, 2018

YOU GET NO COLLUSION! AND YOU GET NO COLLUSION! AND OH YEAH YOU GET NO COLLUSION!

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) February 16, 2018

It is true that the indictments and a statement by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein indicate that prosecutors have no evidence that Americans knowingly worked with professional Russian trolls. But to claim that Mueller has somehow cleared Trump and his former campaign staffers of illegal conduct is simply untrue.

In the first place, collusion is not a crime. That’s almost certainly why the word has become the preferred term of Trump supporters eager to defend their president.

As the Washington Post’s Matt Zapotosky noted last October in a story that quotes a number of legal experts, it is not illegal for an American to work in a limited capacity to promote shared policy views with foreign individuals. Nor is it illegal for an American to exchange information about campaigns.

“There could be something out there that stinks to high heaven but it doesn’t make it a violation of the law,” Jacob Frenkel, a former attorney in a past federal independent counsel investigation told Zapotosky.

In terms of Trump officials having colluded with overt or covert Russian government agents, we already know that it happened. Donald Trump Jr. has already publicly revealed that he, indicted former campaign chief Paul Manafort, and future top presidential counselor Jared Kushner had met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, an attorney known to have close connections to the Russian government, for the express purpose of obtaining secret, negative information about Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

We already know that Trump’s former foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, has admitted to knowing about hacked emails stolen by Russians from Clinton’s campaign long before they became public information. And that Papadopoulos had been told about them by a Maltese foreign policy professor with ties to Russia. We also know that Papadopoulos’ former colleague, Carter Page, has admitted to having met with high-ranking Russian government officials during his time with the former Trump campaign and that he once described himself as “an informal adviser to the staff of the Kremlin,” the Russian government’s central seat of power.

We also know that Manafort worked for decades for various Eastern European politicians with strong ties to Russia, that he was millions of dollars in debt to several wealthy supporters of Putin, and that he had offered to provide “private briefings” to a Russian billionaire who is a close Putin ally.

There are plenty of other possible crimes that could have been committed by Trump or his former staffers during the course of their conversations with Russians or others working for them. One way would have been to encourage Russians to engage in criminal activity, such as by violating campaign finance laws by propagandizing Americans online as foreign nationals (the crime which Mueller on Friday accused the 13 Russians of doing).

Some of Trump’s critics have also charged that he may have committed a crime in July of 2016 when he urged Russian hackers to “find” some emails that FBI investigators said had been erased from an illegal private email server once used by Clinton during her time as secretary of state. Last June, the White House dismissed the remark as a joke.

Beyond the fact that collusion isn’t a crime in and of itself and that former Trump campaign workers have already admitted to dialoguing with Russians, the reality is that the latest indictments are only a small portion of the Mueller investigation. Bloomberg News confirmed this explicitly on Friday, citing an unnamed person “with knowledge of the probe” who said that the special prosecutor was continuing his work into former Trump staffers’ connections to Russians.

We still do not know the full extent of the special counsel’s case against Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. While he and his partner Rick Gates have been indicted on 12 separate counts of money laundering, conspiracy, and perjury, it’s almost a certitude that those charges are only the beginning of the ones that Mueller wishes to level against Manafort.

Instead of being a complete case, the indictments appear to be part of an attempt to coerce Gates into testifying against Manafort and whoever else Mueller may have in his cross-hairs. That Gates is rumored to be close to a plea deal signifies that this is almost certainly true.

Mueller might also have a surprise or two for Jared Kushner, who has his own web of connections to Russian interests that is almost as extensive as Manafort’s. We also know that he was the White House official who instructed former national security adviser Michael Flynn to engage in secret talks with the Russian government before Trump had become president.

There’s still a lot more to the Mueller investigation. We still don’t know just what the prosecutor and his team will try to prove in court or what they will say in their final report. The president and his supporters may be terribly surprised if they actually believe their spin that this thing is over.

Devil’s bargain

(Credit: AP Photo/Andy Wong, File)

A trope of sci-fi movies these days, from Snowpiercer to Geostorm, is that our failure to tackle climate change will eventually force us to deploy an arsenal of unproven technologies to save the planet. Think sun-deflecting space mirrors or chemically altered clouds. And because these are sci-fi movies, it’s assumed that these grand experiments in geoengineering will go horribly wrong.

The fiction, new evidence suggests, may be much closer to reality than we thought.

When most people hear “climate change,” they think of greenhouse gases overheating the planet. But there’s another product of industry changing the climate that has received scant public attention: aerosols. They’re microscopic particles of pollution that, on balance, reflect sunlight back to space and help cool the planet down, providing a crucial counterweight to greenhouse-powered global warming.

An effort to co-opt this natural cooling ability of aerosols has long been considered a potential last-ditch, desperate shot at slowing down global warming. The promise of planet-cooling technology has also been touted by techno-optimists, Silicon Valley types and politicians who aren’t keen on the government doing anything to curb emissions. “Geoengineering holds forth the promise of addressing global warming concerns for just a few billion dollars a year,” wrote Newt Gingrich in an attack on proposed cap-and-trade legislation back in 2008.

But there’s a catch. Our surplus of aerosols is a huge problem for those of us who like to breathe air. At high concentrations, these tiny particles are one of the deadliest substances in existence, burrowing deep into our bodies where they can damage hearts and lungs.

Air pollution from burning coal, driving cars, and using fire to clear land, among other activities, is the fourth-leading cause of death worldwide, killing about 5.5 million people each year. Nearly everybody is at risk, with roughly 92 percent of us living in places with dangerously polluted air. That alone makes reducing air pollution a necessary goal.

And yet we can’t live without aerosols, at least some of them. Natural aerosols — bits of dust, salt, smoke, and organic compounds emitted from plants — are an integral part of our planet’s atmosphere. Clouds probably wouldn’t be able to make rain without them. But as with greenhouse gases, human activity has resulted in too many aerosols (the excess is air pollution), with the bulk of the human-emitted aerosols lingering in the lower atmosphere, worsening their impact on our health. The result is a devil’s bargain: Aerosols are necessary for normal weather and help moderate rising temperatures, but they’re also killing us.

According to a new study, we might be locked in this deadly embrace. Research by an international team of scientists recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters says that the cooling effect of aerosols is so large that it has masked as much as half of the warming effect from greenhouse gases. So aerosols can’t be wiped out. Take them away and temperatures would soar overnight.

Turns out we have been unwittingly geoengineering for decades, and just like in the movies, it’s gone off the rails.

* * *

People have been aware of the influence of aerosols for centuries. In the 1200s, Londoners complained about the clouds of coal smoke. In 1783, Benjamin Franklin observed that tiny particles from volcanic eruptions tended to chill the weather. Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, dense smoke from coal blocked out daylight in Chicago, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and scores of other cities.

In 1990, the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a select group of the world’s top experts on climate science, said that “there is no doubt that aerosol particles influence the Earth’s climate.”

Mount Pinatubo in the Phillipines erupted the next year, providing a natural laboratory for studying aerosols’ impact. The resulting research gave scientists solid evidence that particles in the atmosphere tended to cool the planet.

In the decades that followed, scientists continued to puzzle over exactly how aerosols from tailpipes and smokestacks alter the weather, in part because the particles are incredibly difficult to study. Scientists have sought out remote corners of the globe far from industrial pollution, like the seas around Antarctica, to research them. Since aerosols are much bigger than air molecules, they tend to fall out of the sky within days or weeks after they’re released — a relatively short lifespan.

There’s also a 10,000-fold range in their sizes and a wide variety of sources, making their behavior relatively unpredictable. Black carbon aerosols from forest fires, for example, tend to suppress cloud formation by warming the air and making tiny water droplets evaporate. Sulfate aerosols from burning coal can make clouds grow bigger and rainstorms stronger. There’s documented evidence that thunderstorms in China vary on a weekly cycle, in tune with factory schedules.

What’s clear is that they’re cooling us off. If we magically transformed the global economy overnight, and air pollution fell to near zero, we’d get an immediate rise in global temperatures of between 0.5 and 1.1 degrees Celsius, according to the new study. (For reference: The climate has warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.) The warming would be concentrated over the major cities of the northern hemisphere, close to where most aerosols are emitted. In the hardest hit parts of highly-urbanized East Asia, for example, the complete removal of aerosols would likely have a bigger effect than all other sources of climate change combined. Temperatures in the Arctic could jump as much as 4 degrees Celsius — a catastrophe that would shove the region further toward a permanently ice-free state.

“It is well understood that [aerosols’] presence is masking a substantial amount of greenhouse gas warming,” says Cat Scott, a research fellow at the University of Leeds whose own work has helped scientists understand the cooling effect of aerosols.

This puts our increasingly interdependent global civilization in a tough bind. Get rid of carbon emissions to fight global warming and you get rid of aerosols, pushing temperatures back up.

* * *

So what do we do?

In this instance, Hollywood gets it right. Our reluctance to reduce carbon emissions fast enough makes the two goals of eliminating air pollution and limiting global warming mutually exclusive. On our current path, disaster is inevitable. The only choice might be to engage in a delicate and risky gamble. It would involve gradually eliminating pollution from factories and tailpipes; replacing them with artificial aerosols in the upper atmosphere where they’re much less likely to damage human health; and then hope nothing (else) goes seriously awry.

Instead of geoengineering being a last-ditch effort to avert the worst ravages of climate change, it’s going to have to be part of our toolkit to solve the problem.

The good news here is that previous attempts at removing harmful aerosols have proven largely successful, especially in the United States and Europe. The U.S. Clean Air Act, one of the most important fruits of the 1970s environmental movement, led to a sharp and nearly immediate fall in air pollution, likely saving millions of lives.

“This is known territory, at least compared to massively reducing CO2 emissions,” says Bjorn Samset, research director at Norway’s Center for International Climate Research and lead author of the study in Geophysical Research Letters.

Not coincidentally, global temperatures began climbing in the late 1970s after the Clean Air Act was passed, ending a relatively stable 30-year period of global temperatures. Those post-war years were marked by the country’s rapid, coal-fueled economic growth, which bathed the northern hemisphere in aerosols.

This pattern is now repeating itself in Asia. Coal-powered China’s rapid economic rise over recent decades, and the resulting aerosol emissions have blackened skies in Shanghai, Beijing and other megacities — and probably contributed to a brief slowdown in the rate of global warming. China has responded to public outrage over the country’s airpocalypse by putting pollution controls in place. And there’s initial evidence that they’re beginning to work.

Samset thinks the immediate health benefits of curbing air pollution mean that China will likely stick to these efforts, in spite of the potential warming effects. “It’s very plausible that Asian aerosol cleanup — which saves lives directly by reducing air pollution — can get prioritized over strong greenhouse gas cuts,” he explains.

If that happens, prepare for another surge in warming.

The second part of the film-inspired formula — pumping artificial aerosols into the upper atmosphere — should also work, in theory. Balloons and airplanes could spray benign aerosols like calcium carbonate (essentially crushed limestone), that would be carried by the wind throughout the upper atmosphere. One recent study estimated it would take 6,700 business jet flights per day — outfitted with spraying equipment — to keep enough aerosols in the stratosphere to cool the climate by one degree Celsius. The cost: $20 billion per year, more or less in-line with Gingrich’s estimate from a decade ago. It’s just that there’s plenty of uncertainty over what would happen next.

What was once the realm of scary science fiction and conspiracy theory is now entering the mainstream of atmospheric study — only those now conducting the experiments are clear about the risks.

Frank Keutsch, a chemist involved with the Harvard experiment told the Harvard Gazettethat “geoengineering is like taking painkillers.” They don’t fix the underlying cause and they may even make things worse.

“We really don’t know the effects of geoengineering,” he said. “That is why we’re doing this research.”

And if geoengineering with aerosols works to offset warming? That, too, could have disastrous side effects, according to another recent study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Embarking on a planetary-scale aerosol geoengineering project would produce “a wide range of unintended regional consequences,” Samset says. One of the biggest risks is that the cooling would work too well, producing shifts in ecosystems at “unprecedented speeds,” according to the Nature Ecology and Evolution study. That could be a fatal shock to animals and plants already stressed by decades of warming.

“I could imagine global conflicts breaking out over these type of actions,” says Susanne Bauer of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of Samset’s co-authors. “On the other hand, I do believe geoengineering must be studied, just to be aware and educated about the possibilities.”

The new findings on aerosols don’t change a simple fact: There’s overwhelming consensus among scientists and policy experts that humanity is not doing enough to address climate change. After 25 years of global negotiations, greenhouse gas emissions are still rising. Extreme weather is now considered the biggest risk to the world economy. And of course the leader of the world’s largest economy thinks the whole thing is a hoax.

Time is running short, but that doesn’t mean we should be reckless. We are fast entering a world in which there are no good options remaining to tackle climate change. Geoengineering is dangerous, but so are aerosols, and so is accelerating climate change. Absent a real-life Hollywood miracle, we’ll likely need to try some interventions that would have been better left to the movies.

It’s time to end the debate about video games and violence

FILE - This publicity photo released by Rockstar Games shows a screen shot from the video game, "Grand Theft Auto V." (AP Photo/Rockstar Games, File) (Credit: AP)

In the wake of the Valentine’s Day shooting at a Broward County, Florida high school, a familiar trope has reemerged: Often, when a young man is the shooter, people try to blame the tragedy on violent video games and other forms of media. Florida lawmaker Jared Moskowitz made the connection the day after the shooting, saying the gunman “was prepared to pick off students like it’s a video game.”

In January, after two students were killed and many others wounded by a 15-year-old shooter in Benton, Kentucky, the state’s governor criticized popular culture, telling reporters, “We can’t celebrate death in video games, celebrate death in TV shows, celebrate death in movies, celebrate death in musical lyrics and remove any sense of morality and sense of higher authority and then expect that things like this are not going to happen.”

But, speaking as a researcher who has studied violent video games for almost 15 years, I can state that there is no evidence to support these claims that violent media and real-world violence are connected. As far back as 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that research did not find a clear connection between violent video games and aggressive behavior. Criminologists who study mass shootings specifically refer to those sorts of connections as a “myth.” And in 2017, the Media Psychology and Technology division of the American Psychological Association released a statement I helped craft, suggesting reporters and policymakers cease linking mass shootings to violent media, given the lack of evidence for a link.

A history of a moral panic

So why are so many policymakers inclined to blame violent video games for violence? There are two main reasons.

The first is the psychological research community’s efforts to market itself as strictly scientific. This led to a replication crisis instead, with researchers often unable to repeat the results of their studies. Now, psychology researchers are reassessing their analyses of a wide range of issues — not just violent video games, but implicit racism, power poses and more.

The other part of the answer lies in the troubled history of violent video game research specifically. Beginning in the early 2000s, some scholars, anti-media advocates and professional groups like the APA began working to connect a methodologically messy and often contradictory set of results to public health concerns about violence. This echoed historical patterns of moral panic, such as 1950s concerns about comic books and Tipper Gore’s efforts to blame pop and rock music in the 1980s for violence, sex and satanism.

Particularly in the early 2000s, dubious evidence regarding violent video games was uncritically promoted. But over the years, confidence among scholars that violent video games influence aggression or violence has crumbled.

Reviewing all the scholarly literature

My own research has examined the degree to which violent video games can — or can’t — predict youth aggression and violence. In a 2015 meta-analysis, I examined 101 studies on the subject and found that violent video games had little impact on kids’ aggression, mood, helping behavior or grades.

Two years later, I found evidence that scholarly journals’ editorial biases had distorted the scientific record on violent video games. Experimental studies that found effects were more likely to be published than studies that had found none. This was consistent with others’ findings. As the Supreme Court noted, any impacts due to video games are nearly impossible to distinguish from the effects of other media, like cartoons and movies.

Any claims that there is consistent evidence that violent video games encourage aggression are simply false.

Spikes in violent video games’ popularity are well-known to correlate with substantial declines in youth violence — not increases. These correlations are very strong, stronger than most seen in behavioral research. More recent research suggests that the releases of highly popular violent video games are associated with immediate declines in violent crime, hinting that the releases may cause the drop-off.

The role of professional groups

With so little evidence, why are people like Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin still trying to blame violent video games for mass shootings by young men? Can groups like the National Rifle Association seriously blame imaginary guns for gun violence?

A key element of that problem is the willingness of professional guild organizations such as the APA to promote false beliefs about violent video games. (I’m a fellow of the APA.) These groups mainly exist to promote a profession among news media, the public and policymakers, influencing licensing and insurance laws. They also make it easier to get grants and newspaper headlines. Psychologists and psychology researchers like myself pay them yearly dues to increase the public profile of psychology. But there is a risk the general public may mistake promotional positions for objective science.

In 2005 the APA released its first policy statement linking violent video games to aggression. However, my recent analysis of internal APA documents with criminologist Allen Copenhaver found that the APA ignored inconsistencies and methodological problems in the research data.

The APA updated its statement in 2015, but that sparked controversy immediately: More than 230 scholars wrote to the group asking it to stop releasing policy statements altogether. I and others objected to perceived conflicts of interest and lack of transparency tainting the process.

It’s bad enough that these statements misrepresent the actual scholarly research and misinform the public. But it’s worse when those falsehoods give advocacy groups like the NRA cover to shift blame for violence onto nonissues like video games. The resulting misunderstandings delay efforts to address mental illness and other issues that are actually related to gun violence.

Christopher J. Ferguson, Professor of Psychology, Stetson University

Is “Black Panther” the first real “black science fiction film”?

Lupita Nyong'o, Chadwick Boseman, and Danai Gurira in "Black Panther" (Credit: Marvel Studios)

One of the most eagerly anticipated Hollywood movies of recent years, Marvel’s “Black Panther” turns out to be a fun, intelligent and politically provocative experience. It’s a welcome addition to the Marvel universe that pushes at the outer edges of the superhero genre and, more importantly, offers a humane and welcoming embrace of the complex identities that comprise the Black Atlantic.

Make no mistake, “Black Panther” is the product of a multibillion-dollar, corporate-culture juggernaut. But director and co-writer Ryan Coogler (previously the director of “Creed” and “Fruitvale Station“) still offers — albeit problematically — a symbolic intervention against the white supremacist politics that are now resurgent in America and much of Europe. Ultimately, celebrating the value of black people’s humanity, genius and dignity is still a radical act, in America and many other parts of the world. In that regard. “Black Panther” succeeds fabulously.

Effectively recognizing the deep tensions that exist between the various black ethnic groups and nationalities of the Black Diaspora, while remaining within the constraints of a Hollywood film, is not an easy task. Hopefully, “Black Panther” will spark serious discussions about the global color line that go beyond the limitations of a finely tuned commercial product that exists under the umbrella of the superhero film genre and neoliberal multiculturalism.

In an effort to explore these issues and the broader cultural politics of “Black Panther,” I spoke with Adilifu Nama. He is a professor of African American studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and author of the 2011 book “Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes.”

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. A longer version of this conversation can be heard on my podcast, which is always available on Salon’s Featured Audio page.

Did you ever think you’d see a Black Panther movie?

Actually, I did. It was almost inevitable given the popularity that comic book films are now enjoying. I thought Black Panther was probably more screen-ready than Luke Cage or Black Lightning.

Depending on a person’s age, this movie can be understood as being a revelation. But for younger people, who grew up in a neoliberal, multicultural era where “diversity” is marketed and sold, seeing a black superhero on screen may not be as much of a surprise.

Your comments about this generation living in a type of multicultural and multiracial environment are very astute. We should also include how there is now a generation of people who have a reference point for a black president of the United States. If we add to that the ubiquitous presence of hip-hop, blackness permeates American popular culture. Regardless of that type of recognition, this younger generation of folks — let’s say under 25 — have lived in an era where science fiction film as a genre is very dominant. For all intents and purposes, I would argue that the “Black Panther” film resonates more as science fiction than it does just as a comic book movie.

This film, I would argue, is the definitive black science fiction film and in many ways the first. There is something radical and revolutionary about the aesthetic being expressed through a science fiction film. Moreover, given America’s present political context and heightened tensions around race, when we talk about Black Lives Matter, “Black Panther” truly resonates.

How do you think Black Panther is going to play in red-state America? And how do you think Donald Trump will respond to it? Is this a film he’s going to screen at the White House?

No. For people who have a very constricted, narrow notion of what black people are and can be, this movie obliterates those types of racial restrictions. Now, what might occur is that white racial reactionaries may see “Black Panther” as being laughable, a fantasy state of an African nation that they want to argue does not exist and never will. It is very similar to what happened with [the original film] “Planet of the Apes” in 1968. That film became a recruiting tool for skinheads and neo-Nazis, who used it as a recruiting tool by saying that it depicted what would happen to whites if black people took political and cultural power. I don’t anticipate that “Black Panther” is going to be screened at the White House. But if it was, it wouldn’t necessarily mean for Trump and his inner circle what it means for us.

For people who are not familiar with Black Panther, who is the character, and why does he matter?

Black Panther is T’Challa, the prince-king of the African nation of Wakanda in the Marvel comic book universe. He emerges in 1966 as the Black Panther when he challenges the Fantastic Four to a series of battles in order to test his own skills and his own technology. These battles help him affirm his ability to go against his local nemesis, Ulysses Klaw, who has been a threat to the Wakandan nation because of its vibranium — its source of power and energy. Ta-Nehisi Coates is writing the [comic book] series today.

How was the character received at the time? Was he treated as a throwaway black character representing the Black Power and broader civil rights moments? Or was he treated with more respect?

The character was somewhat arrogant and was not a person to be underestimated. The weight and power of the Black Panther series and character is the backdrop of the civil rights and Black Power movement. This compelled two white men [Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the character’s original creators] to try to imagine and, most importantly, to reimagine blackness in a superhero fantasy world. This is a profound statement about the power of the black freedom movement. It not only changed policies, it forced segments of our population and America’s collective popular consciousness to reimagine how black people could be depicted. “Black Panther” is in many ways a manifestation of the black freedom movement on the screen.

There has been a predictable response by white supremacists and other conservatives that this movie is some kind of “black KKK” fantasy, that it is somehow unfair and “discriminates” against whites because black people are central to the story. How would you respond?

I think the deranged criticism expressed by those with that type of pathological racial sickness might be helped if they go see “Black Panther” and tell themselves that it is a foreign film. I think that will maybe alleviate some of the arguments that someone with that sickness would make. You don’t go to a Japanese film festival and complain about, “Hey, I don’t see any people speaking English.” You don’t go to a French film festival and complain, “Hey, there is no one over here speaking Japanese.” In other words, you expect to see what you see because that is the nature of it. The film is about Wakanda, its politics, trials and tribulations. In many ways it is a more international film than it is a black American film, or an African-American film.

You have seen the movie. Is “Black Panther” as good as the critics and other reviews are reporting?

I think so. “Black Panther’s” representation of black women is also really impressive. There’s a lot of black-girl magic in this film. Black women are funny, dynamic, interesting, sensitive and brave. The black women in the movie also have competing interests in how they’re going to achieve their goals and the types of decisions they will be forced to make.

“Back Talk”: The stories women tell each other behind closed doors

"Back Talk" author Danielle Lazarin (Credit: Sylvie Rosokoff)

It’s been a banner past few months for an oft-neglected genre: short stories. Short stories by women, even. First, there was Kristen Roupenian’s viral New Yorker piece, “Cat Person.” Now, there’s author Danielle Lazarin’s years-in-the-making and worth the wait, acclaimed debut collection “Back Talk.” 

With her tales of the intimate connections and disruptions of day to day life, Lazarin has created one of the most buzzed about books of the year. Salon spoke recently to the New York City native about her inspiration and about bringing literary domesticity back.

The fact that someone could sell a debut collection of short stories is mind boggling to me, Danielle. That’s an ambitious thing.

I had an undergrad degree in creative writing and a master’s, and when you’re in those programs, you cut your teeth on short stories. That’s what you’re doing, and for a good reason. Short stories are great places to experiment and try things out and put your hands in everything. But outside, you’re always told that you’d better have a novel.

I was working on a novel, and it just wasn’t quite coming together. I had that in my mind as, “This is what I need to.” Then I just had this moment where I was like, “But I want to work on these stories and I have a lot of them and they’re good. What is my work worth if it can’t do what I really want to be working on?” So then I just committed to being like, “This is the book I’m working on. This is the book I want to find an agent with. This is who I am, and I’ll cross that bridge when I come it,” which is how I approach a lot of things. All I can control is what I’m working on, and if I can make the best version of it, then it should be enough. If it’s not enough, then hopefully it’s not because of anything I’ve done and I’ll just move on to the next thing.

So I was cautiously optimistic, but I’d been on the receiving end of enough, “You’re never going to sell a short story collection.”

I think there are two kinds of artists. There are the kind who have an instinct for, “I know what people want and I know how to tailor my work to that,” and then there are the ones who are, “I literally can’t do anything but what I love and I have to figure out how to find the people who are on board.”

I know that my career is just having the privilege to keep writing and to keep making work and hoping it connects with enough people that I can keep making it. I’ve never thought, I’m going to sell a short story collection. I think if I had gone on thinking that way, I would have been seriously disappointed. That’s the advantage also of being older and not having the same expectations I might have had ten or 15 years ago, when many people do sell their first books.

You’ve lived within so many of these stories for a long time.

When I look at the collection — I don’t think this is something that other people can necessarily see — I can see where I was and what I was trying to figure out about what it means to exist in that phase in my life. I was clearly looking back on what it means to be a child or what it means to be a teenager. I wrote a lot of stories about being a mother before I was a mother. Those stories are so much a part of my thinking about these questions of a woman through different points in life, and they represent all that experience up to this point.

You’ve talked about reckoning with the idea of domestic stories and the domestic as a legitimate subject for fiction.

I spent so much time kind of putting that aside. One of the best things that’s been written on this is Claire Vaye Watkins’ essay on pandering. This idea that we all are like, “Well, I want to write more male-pleasing stories,” and you find yourself doing that. I wasn’t doing that, but there were stories where I thought, “I can’t write another story about teenage friendship. I cannot write a story about a mother who lives in the suburbs and who maybe doesn’t love her life.” It felt like I was going into the space that I knew people were dismissive of. As much as I have always considered myself a feminist and a bigmouth about it, there was this period in my 20s where I just started to buy into that in an internal way, and it was affecting my work. I was avoiding these stories that were important to me and important to women I knew and also, I should say, men as well.

I always say my stories wouldn’t pass the Bechdel test. They’re about relationships, often between men and women and families. I think the domestic sphere is also not just a sphere for women. One of my favorite domestic novels is James Salter’s “Light Years.” That’s one of the most domestic novels ever written, and I remember reading it and being like, “This is super domestic and it’s compelling and it’s beautiful. If he can do it, I can do it, goddamn it.” This was part of something I took into the book, that I had put aside my own experience. And we can’t do that. We can’t do that to ourselves. Then the stories I’d avoided writing, once I wrote them, were the ones that came out really quickly and the ones that other women were very responsive to. They felt it because I think I felt it.

You’re looking out at the world through a particularly female gaze and through the gaze of friendship and family at different stages of life. Why was that so important, to be so intentional about that?

I think we look to fiction for many things. We look to see ourselves sometimes, and sometimes we look for very different experiences — to learn more about experiences that we can’t access that take us out of our world. Or, I think, in a really great way, experiences we just don’t have access to because they’re not identities that we have.

I also think that sometimes we just need to write our own stories — not that these are literally my stories. They’re obviously fictionalized. I think there’s as much effort and work that goes into these stories of women’s lives as anything else that’s fictional.

There’s one story in particular that I had started writing, the one that takes place in New Jersey and a mother has three sons. It’s meant to be very mundane, and I kept putting it down and then I was just like, “This is the kind of thing women are afraid to write about.” They’re afraid to write about motherhood because the motherhood identity is meant to subsume everything else. It was really important for me in that story, and many other stories where there are mothers, to remind people that mothers are people. They’re not just a vessel for children. A mother won’t behave a certain way because she is a mother. That mother has a name. She has a character inside that experience of a kind of daily suffocation of having kids on a physical level. There’s a lot of blood in that story, which I’m very proud of. And then also being inside this woman’s head and all that’s going on, and trying to get those women out there as both mothers and people was really important to me.

It’s so funny because there’s this really absurd idea that the world of women is so pristine and neat and tidy and we have to have chips that don’t make too much noise. In reality, this private world of women, this world that men don’t necessarily always see, is incredibly visceral. 

Women’s bodies are always changing. Whether or not you choose to have children, from the time you’re in your early adolescence through the whole of it, every four weeks or so, your body goes through a physical change, and it’s never the same. If you do choose to try and have children yourself, then there’s also that that you’re dealing with. Sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn’t work. We have a tremendous body consciousness that we put aside to just get through the day. It’s not a big deal but it is a big deal. We deal with a lot physically, just in ourselves, and then if we end up being caretakers for other people, that just gets magnified and amplified and you just kind of plow through it.

One thing that always makes me crazy is, I don’t have to love it. It’s not fun cleaning up the nosebleeds or what’s in the diaper. There’s physical mess in all of it. I wanted to have that physicality in the book in as many places as possible and to normalize it. And, you know, women get together and talk about their periods or whatever. We talk about it.

We talk about all fluids. All of them.

Yes. We don’t talk about how crunchy our chips are. Do you?

No.

But there is the world that is the outside, and that is male. The world is male, and then these experiences that half the world have is somehow not the world. Periods and morning sickness and cleaning up other people’s poop and dealing with male body fluids and all that stuff that we deal with — the default is that we don’t necessarily talk about those things in public because then somehow that is not the world, that is not the culture. It’s just so secret. And that’s a big theme in your book — secrets.

I’ve been talking about this book as the stories women tell each other behind closed doors. The reason we do that is because on the internet, the office, wherever, having these conversations in any public sphere is exhausting. God forbid a woman has an opinion in public. Women are constantly told that what they think is wrong no matter what it is. You want to get married, you’re a bridezilla. You never want to get married, there must be something wrong with you; you’re a cold person. So no matter what we do, there’s this sense that we’re always being watched and judged. There have to be safe spaces to have these conversations, and they’re usually with other women and they’re usually off the internet, lest you risk the wrath of complete strangers. Even if you don’t get attacked, it’s annoying to be told that what you feel or think is wrong when it’s literally your experience, your life, your body, your choices.

And it’s not just from men. I think about the whole thing where it’s like, someone else has had experiences that aren’t my experience, ergo they must not really exist. They couldn’t possibly, because it’s never happened to me. 

I think this especially happens for marginalized groups. I’m a white straight woman. I don’t get a fraction of what people of color get that’s just like, “Oh, your experience is meant to be universal.” Clearly I’m not writing for all women. There’s so little space for these kinds of stories. It’s like the more marginalized you are, the louder the shouting is to make that voice go away.

Also, the idea that anything you write in fiction is an endorsement is fascinating to me. Sometimes you write things because they’re interesting, and not everything that my characters do I think is a great choice, personally. Sometimes you write stories because stories need to be told.

When you present your art to the world, there is this implication that you’re presenting yourself in an entirely confessional way.

And this idea of, “This is me, and don’t you approve of everything here?” Which takes out all the nuance. As a fiction writer, I think most of us just feel like we create characters and then we let them do what they’re going to do, which sounds very woo woo. But if you create somebody who’s real enough, they start to have their own volition. So many characters make bad choices. You have to create somebody and then put them in a situation that’s interesting. Then something comes out of that situation that is worth examining more closely, not because this is what it should mean to every person and there’s no other way to look at it.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Tehran Nocturne

"Tehran Taboo" directed by Ali Soozandeh

The animated feature “Tehran Taboo” depicts stories of transgressions and trapped lives in modern-day Iran. Writer-director Ali Soozandeh’s absorbing drama intertwines the lives of numerous characters living life beyond the law. Pari (Elmira Rafizadeh) is a prostitute with a young, mute son named Elias. In a scene before the opening credits, she performs oral sex on a taxi driver. Significantly, the driver stops his car and gets out because he spies his daughter walking hand in hand with a man down the street. He is outraged at the indecency of that, revealing just one of the many double standards that exist in Iranian society.

Another storyline involves Babak (Arash Marandi), a musician who has sex in a nightclub bathroom with Donya (Negar Mona Alizadeh). She later tells him he took her virginity, and now she needs an operation to replace her hymen so as not to incur shame and her fiancé’s wrath when she gets married the following week.

A third tale has a newly pregnant woman, Sara (Zara Amir Ebrahimi), hoping to get a job and feel useful. However, her husband Mohsen (Alireza Bayram), a banker, insists she stay at home. When Sara’s phone is used to make a prank call, the morality police search for her, bringing her no end of trouble.

“Tehran Taboo” makes each storyline engaging as it dares to present sex, drugs, divorce, abortion, blackmail and women’s rights (or lack thereof). Soozandeh also shows how folks barter for goods and services, skirting the law in the process, to try to live as well as they can in a restrictive society.

Given what transpires in the film, it seems unlikely that “Tehran Taboo” could have been filmed as a live-action feature, even if the Iranian-born filmmaker wasn’t a German citizen working outside his home country. The film’s use of rotoscope animation is engaging; the characters are all artfully realized, with expressive features that convey the weight of their predicaments. The use of animation heightens the film’s emotional impact.

Soozandeh spoke via Skype with Salon about “Tehran Taboo” and his depiction of forbidden behaviors.

As an Iranian, did you break taboos when you lived in Tehran? Are any of the stories in “Tehran Taboo” from your own life?

The film is partly from my own experience and partly things I heard about, read about, or talked to people about. I was born in Iran and lived there for 25 years. When you grow up in such a country, you have experience with restrictions. As a young man, you have a problem with sexual restrictions in particular. Two years ago, I interviewed Iranians, refugees and others and collected their info about the current situation in Iran.

The title of your film seems to be a challenge to censors and to audiences, daring them to peek into a forbidden world. What was your intention with the film?  

I carried a lot of questions in my head over the years. Why or how do so many restrictions — especially sexual restrictions — change the lives of millions of young people in Iran? Writing the script was trying to find answer to those questions.

You have lived in Germany as a citizen since 1995. What thoughts do you have about your homeland? Why do people remain Iranian citizens if life there is so restrictive?

My relationship to Iran is lovely. The people are lovely and friendly, and that’s why I think about these issues in Iran. It is very difficult now to talk about life in Iran, because half of my life I have lived in Germany, and I’m half German/half Iranian. When I watch films in Iran and talk to Iranian people, a lot of problems I had as a teenager come up again. I find we need to talk about it. Iranians try to push the problem to politics and religion, but the main problem is our own mindset. I think, like the first scene in the film with the taxi driver, it is something we need to think about and talk about to maybe solve the problems.

You use animation effectively to depict scenes that also would be hard to shoot on location in Iran. Can you describe your visual approach to the narrative?

We couldn’t shoot in Iran because you need permission from cultural ministries. We didn’t want to shoot in other, similar cities in place of Tehran. I come from a background in animation, and I think it has an advantage — the pictures are not so concrete — they leave room for the audience’s imagination, so we needed to use that. We tested techniques of animation — hand-drawn characters, 3-D and puppets, but none of them really worked. The story is not a fantasy, nor for children. We needed some elements that made the animation recognizable and acceptable for audiences, and rotoscoping did that. It worked better than the other animation styles.

You depict a blowjob, prostitution, and nudity, as well as have discussions of abortion and premarital loss of virginity. Sex is rarely presented in Iranian cinema. What decisions did you make in terms of presenting sex and nudity?

Sexual restriction is the main topic of the film. Pari, Sara and Babek all try to make their way around the sexual restrictions. In Iran, life involves finding a way around these sexual restrictions. Fighting against them informs your everyday life. Both women and men suffer, but women suffer more. In Iran, family is very important, so extramarital sex can bring dishonor and danger. Or the woman who has to teach these rules to the next generation [adheres to] the same rules that limit her. There is more pressure on women in Iran.

Sex is a normal need for everybody, and sexuality in Iran is a private part of life. You can go to a party, have alcohol, and have sex, but it is underground. You have an underground life and a public life. You need to create a different face for your friends, your family and your work; there is a double standard in Iranian society.

There is an interesting motif in the film in which all of the major characters sit for a photograph. The background changes based on why the photo is being taken. Can you talk about that?

As I said, we needed to create several faces for the different faces we have in life. If you want to take a photo for a public job, it should be a dark and serious picture. For a private photo, you need to make a beautiful picture. It’s a symbol for creating many faces. When Babek’s photo is taken, he has decided he doesn’t need a [specific] background or to smile. He doesn’t need “another face.”

I like the way the characters all need permission — for a divorce, for an operation, for a loan — and yet the characters also all find ways around the laws, bartering or even blackmailing. What observations do you have about this?

I think it is important to find out the background of each character and why they behave the ways they do. For example, the guy who kills the cats — once we see he has many problems because of his daughter, and because he needs money, you understand his behavior. He faces the same pressures from society as everyone else. He is not only an offender, but also a victim.

Each character needs to fight this system to solve his or her own problems, be they economic or otherwise. It is a fight that shapes each character’s life. After so many years, you have no neutral perspective. When I was in Iran, it was very normal for me to be corrupt and get money. After I was in Germany, I had some distance from this, and I realized being corrupt is negative. When you are a part of Iranian society, you accept these negative aspects in life as normal life.

There is a line in the film, “a little fart is all it takes to ruin a reputation,” which I think is a very apt way of saying one slip, and you can be shamed forever. All of the characters in the film tell lies to hide shameful things. How does society benefit from such restrictive laws?

I believe in the good of all the characters and in people, but if you need to fight and survive in this restrictive society, you can’t be a good person the whole time. It’s not only in Iran, it’s everywhere. You can find the same issues in Europe. There are virginity operations for Turkish girls in Germany who are under pressure in the society where they live.  

The characters are all trapped by their circumstances. Do you think your film sheds light that can help bring about change?

I think talking about the issues is a start for finding a solution. But it is trouble to talk about these things — especially the sexual issues. In theaters after the screenings, you see how divided Iranian society is. Some people agree with the film, and some people are against the film. There are two groups of Iranian audiences. Some arrange themselves with the system and are not interested in changing the system. If you have no problem with the system, you can have a good life. If you have money, you can have sex and drugs. If you are arrested, you can buy your freedom. But people like artists and writers, human rights activists and young people with no jobs and money don’t have such [privilege.] Both groups do not recognize each other. I feel they never discussed these issues together. After the screenings they started a dialogue.

Has “Tehran Taboo” played in Tehran?

The film may have screened underground in Tehran, but not officially.  

Tehran is a metropolis of 16 million people. Depending on where you are in society you can find a very different environment. The north is modern, rich and private. There are no checkpoints. Women don’t need to be a virgin to get married. But south Tehran, there are poor societies, and it is very religious. They have the problems and issues we see in the film. The countryside is completely different. We can’t describe Iranian society with one film. We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to show a slice of the society. I wanted to talk about it because a lot of people ask if the whole of Iran is like what we see in the film — and the answer is no.

Mother of Florida shooting victim accosts President Trump on live TV

(Credit: CNN)

Lori Alhadeff, a grieving mother who lost her 14-year-old daughter Alyssa in the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school on Wednesday, delivered a powerful and heartbreaking message in a CNN interview. In a live segment, Alhadeff addressed President Donald Trump directly, asking, “How? How do we allow a gunman to come into our children’s school?”

“There’s no metal detectors,” Alhadeff said via a live broadcast from Florida. “The gunman, a crazy person, just walks right into the school, knocks on the window of my child’s door and starts shooting, shooting her and killing her,” she continued.

She went on to respond to Trump’s statement on Feb. 15 in which he failed to mention gun control laws.

“President Trump, you say what can you do?” she asked, distraught. “You can stop the guns from getting into these children’s hands! Put metal detectors at every entrance to the schools. What can you do? You can do a lot! This is not fair to our families and our children go to school and have to get killed.”

In a particularly heartbreaking moment, Alhadeff says she had spent the previous two hours “putting the burial arrangements for my daughter’s funeral.”

“Who is fourteen! Fourteen,” she yells. “President Trump, please do something! Do something. action! We need it now! These kids need now!”

Understandably, CNN’s anchor Brooke Baldwin began to cry after the mother’s emotional speech.

The Florida Moms Demand Action chapter said they will keep pushing to pass a legislation that will keep guns out of children’s hands.

“My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. But thoughts and prayers aren’t enough, which is why Moms Demand Action volunteers will not rest until we pass strong legislation to keep guns out the hands of people with dangerous intentions,” said Kathryn Reeve, a volunteer for the Florida chapter. “We can and must demand our elected leaders do more to keep our communities safe from gun violence,” Reeve continued.

Trump tweeted today that he was headed to Florida. The President claimed in the same tweet that he was “working with Congress on many fronts.”

I will be leaving for Florida today to meet with some of the bravest people on earth – but people whose lives have been totally shattered. Am also working with Congress on many fronts.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 16, 2018

In Trump’s remarks to the nation about the shooting, the president explained that he would be taking steps towards tackling the “difficult issue of mental health.”

“We are committed to working with state and local leaders to help secure our schools and tackle the difficult issue of mental health,” Trump said. “It is not enough to simply take actions that make us feel like we are making a difference. We must actually make that difference,” he continued.

That response seems to imply that gun control laws will not be part of any governmental solution to the school shooting epidemic. Moreover, given Trump’s aversion to universal health care, his ability to tackle American mental health care policy via the mechanisms of government seems questionable.

The shooting on Feb. 14 claimed the lives of 17 people and marked the 18th school shooting in the U.S. in 2018.

You can watch the heart-wrenching CNN segment here:

Olympic clothing designers try to beat the cold with technology

Korea flag-bearer's Bora Lee and Jong-In Lee, carrying a unification flag, lead their teams into the stadium during the 2006 Winter Olympics opening ceremony. (Credit: AP/Amy Sancetta)

As athletes from around the globe converge on Pyeongchang, South Korea, for the 2018 Winter Olympics, they must steel themselves for winds that will whip in from the Manchurian Plain and Siberia and fan icy temperatures that are likely to drop to around 7 degrees Fahrenheit. Meteorologists say this year’s games will likely be the coldest Olympics since Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994 — a year when the opening ceremony was so frigid organizers had to cancel plans to release doves because they worried the birds would suffer.

For the designers and engineers who spend years crafting Team USA’s uniforms to offer both style and extraordinary aerodynamics, the need to keep athletes warm in these extreme temperatures posed an added dimension of difficulty. And Ralph Lauren, the brand outfitting the American team for the opening and closing ceremonies, was up against the most daunting challenge. Those two outdoor events take place at what will likely be the coldest location of the entire competition: the roofless, open-air Pyeongchang Olympic Stadium. In November six people attending a concert there reportedly developed hypothermia.

“We knew about the cold,” says David Lauren, chief innovation officer at Ralph Lauren, “and hit on the idea of using wearable technology to keep our athletes warm.” The result: bonded to the interior of the red, white and blue opening ceremony parkas are printed strips of electronic, heat-conducting metallic ink, made of silver and carbon (in the shape of an American flag, of course) — sort of like a stylish electric blanket, but with ink instead of wires.

Athletes will be able to activate their self-warming jackets by pushing a button on a slim lithium-ion battery pack. Once switched on, electrons will surge through the silver ink till they hit a resistive carbon pad, which will generate heat. The system is designed to provide up to 11 hours of warmth, and has three settings so athletes can control their own temperatures. The technology was adapted from heated car seats and made more stretchy and flexible for the Ralph Lauren Olympic apparel, according to the company. The white waterproof bomber jackets Team USA will wear for the closing ceremony are equipped with the same ink-based technology.

KEEPING WARM ON THE BOBSLED COURSE

Athletes on the U.S. bobsled team will also be outfitted with innovative suits that designers say will provide anywhere from two to four degrees Fahrenheit of extra warmth as they hurtle down the outdoor course at 90-plus miles per hour. The added heat comes from a novel fabric technology designed to lock in body warmth known as “ColdGear Infrared” — a proprietary blend of compounds including ceramic material, a common thermal insulator. The CGI will be embedded in the fabric’s fleece lining, the company says. “When you wear it against your skin it absorbs and retains your body heat,” says Mark Cumiskey, a textile engineer and senior director of materials innovation at Under Armour, the company that designed the U.S. bobsled and speed skating teams’ uniforms. (The makers of CGI fabric claim it retains heat longer than similar fabrics.) “The added warmth will be most important right before the race, when the athletes are standing on the top of a mountain in what amounts to a tight, stretchy base layer,” says Chris Laughman, Under Armour’s senior product manager for Olympic apparel. “They’ve already told us the new suits are warmer than the ones they’ve had in the past — and they’re pretty happy about it.”

Under Armour’s designers used a different state-of-the-art fabric on the suit’s shoulders, upper arms and back to provide better aerodynamics. “It’s easy to think that since athletes are tucked away in their bobsleds, the aerodynamics of the suit is meaningless,” Cumiskey says. “But in bobsled, an event where every hundredth of a second matters, the race can be won or lost from the moment the athletes start pushing the sled, and anything that creates drag, including the suit, can slow them down. Even inside the sled, their shoulders and backs are exposed to the passing air.” Decreasing drag, Cumiskey says, could make the difference between being on the podium or not.

To identify this more aerodynamic material, Cumiskey and others began testing new fabrics for the U.S. speed skating team in the wind tunnel at Specialized Bicycle Components in Morgan Hill, Calif., a couple of years ago. They did trials on mannequins that collectively wore 100 different fabrics. One candidate fabric, dubbed “H1,” was the clear winner. Made of nylon and spandex, it has a unique weave that helps reduce wind resistance. “What makes H1 so aerodynamically fast are the air channels — the spacing of the ridges and their depth — that are engineered into the fabric,” Cumiskey says. In addition, H1 has a barely perceptible jagged, shark skin–like texture when you run your hand over it in one direction. That sandpaper-like surface is enough to disturb the airflow over the athletes’ bodies, allowing it to wrap slightly around them. This phenomenon reduces drag by shrinking the size of their wakes, according to Cumiskey.

Chris Yu, an aerospace engineer and director of integrated technologies at Specialized who led the team conducting the wind tunnel trials, was impressed with its performance, too. “At the end of the day H1 gives athletes less aerodynamic drag and faster speeds for the same amount of exertion,” he says. For Olympic competitors trying to eke every last nanosecond of speed out of their finely tuned bodies — and uniforms — tiny tweaks to their suits’ software may help them bring home the gold.

Why security measures won’t stop school shootings

People are brought out of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after a shooting at the school on February 14, 2018 in Parkland, Florida. (Credit: Getty/Joe Raedle)

When school shootings take place in the United States, often they are followed by calls for more stringent security measures.

For instance, after the Jan. 23 case in which a 15-year-old student allegedly shot and killed two students and wounded 16 others at a small-town high school in Kentucky, some Kentucky lawmakers called for armed teachers and staff.

If anything, the response of the Kentucky lawmakers represents what has been called the “target-hardening” approach to school shootings. This approach attempts to fortify schools against gun violence through increased security measures. These measures may include metal detectors, lock-down policies, “run, hide, fight” training and surveillance cameras.

While some of these measures seem sensible, overall there is little empirical evidence that such security measures decrease the likelihood of school shootings. Surveillance cameras were powerless to stop the carnage in Columbine and school lock-down policies did not save the children at Sandy Hook.

As researchers who have collaboratively written about school shootings, we believe what is missing from the discussion is the idea of an educational response. Current policy responses do not address the fundamental question of why so many mass shootings take place in schools. To answer this question, we need to get to the heart of how students experience school and the meaning that schools have in American life.

An educational response is important because the “target hardening” approach might actually make things worse by changing students’ experience of schools in ways that suggest violence rather than prevent it.

How security measures can backfire

Filling schools with metal detectors, surveillance cameras, police officers and gun-wielding teachers tells students that schools are scary, dangerous and violent places — places where violence is expected to occur.

The “target hardening” approach also has the potential to change how teachers, students and administrators see one another. How teachers understand the children and youth they teach has important educational consequences. Are students budding citizens or future workers? Are they plants to nourish or clay to mold?

One of the most common recommendations for schools, for example, is that they should be engaged in threat assessment. Checklists are sometimes suggested to school personnel to determine when students should be considered as having the potential for harm. While such practices have their place, as a society we should be aware that these practices change how teachers think of students: not as budding learners, but potential shooters; not with the potential to grow and flourish, but with the potential to enact lethal harm.

Of course, society can think of students in different ways at different times. But the more teachers think of students as threats to be assessed, the less educators will think of students as individuals to nourish and cultivate.

As researchers, we have read the accounts of dozens of different school shootings, and we think educators, parents and others should begin to raise the following questions about schools.

Questions of status

To what extent does the school — through things like athletics, homecoming royalties, or dances and so forth — encourage what some political scientists have called the “status tournament of adolescence” that lurks behind the stories of many school shootings?

As one reads about such shootings, one often senses a feeling of social anxiety and betrayal on the part of perpetrator. Americans hold high expectations for schools as places of friendship and romance, yet too often students find alienation, humiliation and isolation. The frustration at these thwarted expectations at least sometimes seems to turn toward the school itself.

Force and control issues

To what extent does the force and coercion employed by many schools contribute to a “might makes right” mentality and associated violence?

It is true that bullying is often a part of some of the stories of school shooters. Students who are bullied or who are bullies themselves will quite naturally think of schools as places appropriate for violence. There is also sometimes a rage, however, against the day-to-day imposition of school discipline and punishment. Since schools are experienced as places of force and control, for some students, they also come to be seen as appropriate places for violence.

Identity and expression

In research on American high schools, one finds the idea that American schools are intertwined with notions of “expressive individualism” — the idea that human beings should find out and be true to who they really are on the inside. Might this also contribute to school shootings?

Suburban high schools, in particular, are seen by the middle class as places to accomplish expressive projects. Sociologist Robert Bulman points out, for example, how Hollywood films set in suburban settings focus on student journeys of self-discovery, while urban school films focus on heroic teachers and academic achievement. In the same vein, many suburban school shooters see what they are doing as acts of self-expression.

Reading stories of school shootings, one often finds moments in which the shooters claim that something inside, whether hatred or frustration, needed to find expression. An example of this is the manifesto left by Luke Woodham, who shot two students in 1997. “I am not spoiled or lazy,” he wrote, “for murder is not weak or slow-witted, murder is gutsy and daring.” The school became the place where Woodham thought he could express the gutsy and daring person he found on the inside.

What to do

Of course, it will be difficult to definitively answer the questions we have posed above. And, even if we are able to find answers, it is not clear what the proper educational response should be.

For example, self-expression might be a valuable task for schools, even if it is found to contribute in some way to school shootings. Our suggestion is simply that, instead of trying to find solutions to school shootings in the dubious arms of security technologies, or even solely through more promising public policy, society should ask deeper questions about the nature of education and schooling in American society.

It is time to think about school shootings not as a problem of security, but also as a problem of education.

Bryan Warnick, Professor of Education, The Ohio State University; Benjamin A. Johnson, Assistant Professor, Department of Student Leadership & Success Studies, Utah Valley University , and Sam Rocha, Assistant Professor of Education, University of British Columbia