Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 213

The 7 best bets for the winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar

Tom of Finland; First They Killed My Father; A Fantastic Woman (Credit: Protagonist Pictures/Netflix/Sony Pictures Classics[)

The shortlist for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar will be released this month. This year has been the most competitive ever with 92 submissions. Six countries — Haiti, Honduras, Laos, Mozambique, Senegal, and Syria — each submitted a film for the first time.

While it’s always “an honor to be nominated,” in this particular Oscar category, a nomination can create visibility for a country’s national cinema. Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, of “The Lobster” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” fame, had a career boost after the surprise nomination of his 2009 film “Dogtooth.”

The process has been controversial over the years with disqualifications, ineligibilities, and boycotts. Each country has it’s own selection process. Most countries use juries or committees, but for more than 25 years, Israel’s submission is the winner of the Ophir Award for Best Film. Israel is the country that has the most nominations —10 — without ever winning. That statistic is likely to change this year, as Israel’s entry, “Foxtrot,” is considered by Oscar prognosticators to take home this year’s prize.

Once films are submitted, they are screened for four committees of voters who select a shortlist of six films. A recently formed executive committee adds three “titles of merit” to the list, generating the 9 semi-finalists in mid-December. That shortlist gets whittled down to the five nominees in January.

It’s a tricky category to guess what will get nominated. Crowd-pleasing fare usually does better than edgier films, but “exotic” entries often get nominated. “Name” directors, like Angelina Jolie, who helmed this year’s Cambodian entry, “First They Killed My Father,” often score shortlist/finalist berths. Likewise, support from Hollywood heavyweights can be influential. Martin Scorsese executive produced Jonas Carpignano’s Italian entry, “I Ciamba.” However, these films can also be notably snubbed.

There are also very exact regulations for campaigning. These are established to create fairness and transparency. They involve rules for screenings and Q&As before and after nominations are made. There are limits to receptions and refreshments, the number of weekly mailings and emails (which include format and content restrictions), what websites, advertisements, and screeners may or may not include, and more.

Campaigning for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar often involves countries needing to find money (up to $40,000 by some estimates) for screenings, dinners, and advertising to get the film on voters’ radar.

While this year’s bumper crop of talent has “name” filmmakers, such as Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel, getting her first chance at an Oscar nomination with the critical favorite, “Zama,” there are also filmmakers like Ecuador’s Ana Cristina Barragán, who was nominated for her feature debut, “Alba.”

Here are seven stories from the frontrunners of subtitled cinema:

1. “The Square” (Sweden) Ruben Ostlünd made quite an impression on the Academy with his famous viral meltdown after his 2014 film “Force Majeure” failed to secure one of the five nominations after making the shortlist. The video was dubbed “The Worst Man Cry Ever,” while some saw it as a hilarious publicity stunt. Ostlünd described it as “a way of dealing with our disappointment. We had fun discussions about making it.”

With Ostlünd is in the running again for his Cannes Palm d’Or winning film, “The Square” — a savage satire on the art world, inequality/privilege, and toxic masculinity — all eyes will be on his reaction.

“Of course, we should try to film ourselves again if shortlisted,” the writer/director said cheekily. “But we should have [actors] Claes Bang, Elizabeth Moss, and Dominic West and myself all in front of our computers and then cut something together — do a sequel to that video.”

“The Square” is a stinging commentary on art, money, disruption and distraction, manners, trust, and caring. The film features a hilarious condom tug-of-war. The challenging content may alienate voters, and the enfant terrible Ostlünd struggles with that. But he defends his work, “I use provocation to raise questions. That’s my style. Those are the directors I look up to. Those films change me as a person, so those are the films I want to make.”

He continued, “I hope [members] will see and relate to my film. It is hard to be satiric because our time is so satirized now it’s crazy. The film is trying to reflect on things in our society — we are lost when it comes to humanistic ideas. We don’t know how to live up to them now. We need to be more self-critical.”

Ostlünd hopes Academy members understand his film, and it will be an advantage for “The Square” if they “get it.” But the writer/director says he hopes that “the American’s sense of dramaturgy” will get his film nominated. “We lost out on the nomination last time. We love the ‘Cinderella’ story, so we want to see us rise from the bottom to the top. And I promise I will do primal scream of happiness on stage if I win the Oscar. I don’t want to miss out on that!”



2. “First They Killed My Father” (Cambodia) Director and humanitarian Angelina Jolie used her star power and Cambodian citizenship to bring Loung Ung’s memoir vividly to the screen. The story, an inspiring account of a child’s survival under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, is given sensorial treatment in Jolie’s heartrending film. Viewers can smell the corpses, taste the beetles and gruel, feel the aching feet from the long marches, and hold their breath during a tense sequences set in a mine field.

Jolie qualified for the Foreign Language Film Oscar as the director of “First They Killed My Father” because she has been a Cambodian citizen since 2005. (In contrast, Jolie was ineligible for the Foreign Language Film Oscar for directing the 2011 Bosnian war film, “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” because she wasn’t a citizen of the country).

Jolie’s dual citizenship is unique in the category, and important to her. “I made the film with Cambodian people. It’s not that I made the film as a dual citizen. I was the one dual citizen. The majority of everyone else [working on the film] was born there. We made this with a Cambodian crew, and Rithy Pahn [Oscar nominated himself for “The Missing Picture” in 2013] was my producing partner. He is a great Cambodian director. I am small and humble next to him as a director representing Cambodia. It was very much a partnership.”

She continued, “It means so much to me to have Cambodia be a part of my life — to become a citizen and be allowed to and make the film. For the country to select the film [for the Oscar] — considering what the film is about — is acknowledging Cambodian history and what that means within the country. That is so important.”

But Jolie’s celebrity can act as a double-edged sword. She admitted, “The idea of bringing celebrity to this makes it more difficult, but I see the positive is that more people will watch the movie. The negative is that people don’t see the movie as it’s intended to be seen.”

Nevertheless, Jolie is demure when it comes to the awards. “One of the reasons I make films in foreign languages is because I love and respect people from other cultures. A people’s history should be shot in their own language, if possible, historically, and in the actual voice[s] of the people.”

She concludes, “I’m so happy to be in this category with filmmakers that I am also rooting for. It’s about being a part of it — that is the great thing. I don’t like being in competition with people I admire so much. My focus isn’t to win, but to represent Cambodia and be a part of global cinema.”



3. “In the Fade” (Germany) Fatih Akin’s intense, exceptional drama is one of the favorites in this year’s Oscar race. When German citizen Katja’s (Diane Kruger) Kurdish husband and son are killed in a hate crime, she wants justice. Kruger deservedly won the Best Actress award at Cannes earlier this year, and that has bolstered this topical drama about racism.

Akin said his film “hit nerves of xenophobia and racism all over the world, not just in Germany. I was in an angry state with all the racism in Germany and I had to respond. I responded with what I can do best.  There is a need for such a film.”

Nine jury members selected “In the Fade” as Germany’s Oscar submission. This pleased Akin, who observed, “I’m happy to live in a country where you can point out certain issues and you don’t get banned or criticized or attacked for that, as is the case in other countries. My film is part of [German] culture, reflecting the ghosts of the past and the ghosts of today.”

As for the campaigning, he believes that Kruger’s win at Cannes made “In the Fade” a must-see film. That positive attention has helped its Oscar chances. But when asked about being a frontrunner, Akin describes the experience as “Like playing a computer game. You just try to get to the next level.”



4. “BPM” (France) Also a big winner in Cannes — it took four top prizes — director/co-writer Robin Campillo’s French drama about members of Paris’ ACT UP is expected to make the shortlist and go on to the top five.

Campillo is pleasantly surprised by all the awards attention his film has received. “I couldn’t imagine the film would be a success in France or be the French nominee for Oscars. The film can be problematic — it’s long, it’s heavy, it’s erotic — but it has touched so many people. I think it has good chances, but I can see people being reluctant. What’s important to me is that this film about ACT UP is going back to the United States, because ACT UP New York and San Francisco inspired it.”

Campillo believes awards are important because they allow filmmakers to access money and tell stories about minorities. But he doesn’t expect them. “If things happen that’s good, but if they don’t that’s not a problem for me.”

In France, “BPM,” has been a big success, which also pleasantly surprises Campillo. “25 years ago, the members of ACT UP Paris were considered outcasts. So it’s weird to see that we’re recognized by French society now. But at the same time, there’s an important [focus] in the world about resistance. With Trump as a President, Americans think Macron is better — and he is better on some points — but he’s not doing so well. There’s a feeling now that we need to get back to action and resistance. People are interested in that, and the people who chose this film to represent France are very aware of that. There’s a nostalgia for the resistance from 25 years ago.”

As for campaigning, Campillo has met people, done interviews and attended dinners. He describes the process as “being like an electoral campaign,” stating that, “It’s frustrating, because you meet people and don’t have time to connect with them.”

But if his film gets nominated or even wins, he hopes that it will help him realize his next dream as a filmmaker. “I would like to work with American actors. The [award] would be a key to opening that door.”



5. “A Fantastic Woman” (Chile) Sebastiá Lelio’s film, about a trans woman (trans actress Daniela Vega), grappling with the aftermath of the death of her boyfriend, won three big prizes at Berlin. It started generating Oscar buzz after screenings in Telluride this year. Lelio’s earlier film, “Gloria” was Chile’s submission in 2013. Chile has only once been in the top five nominees, with “No” in 2012. “Woman” looks likely to make the shortlist and become a finalist. 

However, Juan de Dios Larrain, the producer of “A Fantastic Woman,” admits it’s hard to read the Academy tea leaves, “I’ve been doing these campaigns for years, and have been through this process many times in the past, with ‘Gloria,’ ‘The Club,’ ‘No,’ and ‘Neruda.’ I work hard to get it, but I want to keep my feet on the ground and be realistic. I create a conversation around the film. There are great movies and talent surrounding us — “The Square,” for example — so being part of that is amazing.”

“A Fantastic Woman” had a one-week Oscar-qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles in November, not only to raise awareness for the film but also to support Daniela Vega as a Best Actress contender.

De Dios Larrain describes this new-to-him strategy as “a warm up situation. In previous years, we have not had qualifying runs. With this, we get a sense from the audience. We’ll see how it goes.”

Director Lelio has a slightly different point of view. He said, “Films are not horses that you turn into a competition. There is something slightly unnatural about the process. My job is to make films resonate and touch people. The greatest award for a filmmaker is to have a film that is seen and appreciated, and loved.”

The response from audiences who have seen “A Fantastic Woman” has been positive and encouraging. Still Lelio is cautious. He said, “I was surprised to see how much the world changes since the film was written and made. Trump got elected. Brexit happened. European countries are turning right wing. The whole world started to move backwards, and this film was moving to look forward. So I was surprised to see what a strong zeitgeist the film suddenly had. But I am not a politician, and I don’t operate by calculating benefits. I am following my intuition and what moves me. It has been amazing and sadly, surprising, to see how timely the film is. What I’m interested in is timelessness.”

Nevertheless, if “A Fantastic Woman” ends up a frontrunner, Lelio will be there to promote it. He said, “I will follow the film wherever it goes.”



6. “The Divine Order” (Switzerland) Petra Volpe’s crowd-pleaser has a good shot at the shortlist. Her film depicts a handful of women in a small village in 1971 Switzerland who become empowered by feminism and helped secure women the right to vote. The film received three award at the Tribeca Film Festival, and earned three Swiss Film Prizes as well as audience awards at numerous other film festivals.

It was the awards, the film’s impressive box office in Switzerland — Volpe calls it “our ‘Wonder Woman,’” — plus sales to 25 countries, that prompted the Swiss jury to submit “The Divine Order” for the Oscar.

The filmmaker thinks, “It’s cool they chose our movie, especially since it presents a shameful chapter in our history — that women didn’t get the right to vote [until 1971]. But it’s an extremely timely film, and in America, it hits close to home. We used humor to seduce people to watch a feminist film about gender equality, and we got a lot of attention for that.”

Moreover, Volpe’s campaigning has involved lengthy post-screening Q&As, which speak to the film’s urgency. “Courageous women are standing up against oppression and an unjust system. The time is right for a radical change in the culture, not just in the film industry,” she indicated. “Our culture is deeply infused with sexism and this is a moment in time where this change can actually happen.”

She continued, to address the opportunity for women to make movies in this era where the male-run Hollywood system is in crisis, “Women are raising their voices and organizing women’s groups in America and Europe and you can see the efforts of that. I am happy about this. It’s finally starting to have the possibility for women to make films like our male peers. But there is still a long way to go especially in Hollywood.”

Perhaps an Oscar nomination, if not the award itself, will change that.



7. Perhaps the longshot among the frontrunners is “Tom of Finland” (Finland). Dome Karukoski hopes that his film — a sensitive portrait of Touko Laaksonen, the titular gay artist of homoerotic images — will resonate with American voters. “Touko had a passion, and fought to achieve his goal.” Karukoski indicated.

His film has been an art house box office success, which helps its visibility; moreover, academy members can see it on theatrical release if they miss the dedicated award screenings. The filmmaker acknowledges that sending hundreds of DVD screeners to academy members is prohibitive for a small country like Finland.

Karukoski is also realistic that even if his film makes the shortlist or even the Top 5, it can be tricky for a younger filmmaker to compete with an old master (like 2-time Austrian Oscar-nominee Michael Haneke, who is representing his country this year with “Happy End”). As a member of the European Film Academy, Karukosi acknowledged, “You are always in the position to prove your voice. It’s a process. It’s part of the path filmmakers go through. That’s one advantage [being known], but it has to come down to the film.

He provides insight from his own experiences as a film juror, and his father, [actor George Dickerson] who was a member of the Academy, “My father and I went to some Oscar screenings [together], and it was magical. The members discussed and debated the film — they know the craft so well. It is a privilege to have them discuss it. But at the same time, I noticed that when I sit in jury, I over-discuss it. I loved this film and I want to vote for it, whatever the reasons. The jury convenes and you discuss and you vote for another film and you don’t know why. Over-discussion amplifies, and there’s too much noise. Trust your gut feeling that it is a good film. I remember my father having that debate. I have to follow my gut.”

Given the idiosyncrasies of the process, however, Karukoski admitted, “It is impossible to guess” what will be selected. Still, the filmmaker avers, “I don’t know how you can [deliberately] make a film that would be an Oscar contender.”

Researchers to test interstellar asteroid for alien influence

Artist’s impression of `Oumuamua (Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

An asteroid-like object from elsewhere in the galaxy, called Oumuamua, paid a visit to Earth’s Solar System in mid-October; since then, scientists haven’t been able to shake it off as just another asteroid. Understandably so, given that it was the first object of its kind ever observed. Its unique status drove researchers at Breakthrough Listen, a privately-funded effort to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, to keep a close eye on it. Their goal? To see if the bizarre, unique properties of Oumuamua hint at any “artificial” origins — that is, a whiff of extraterrestrial design.

Oumuamua, which is Hawaiian for “an object from afar,” was first observed by a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii who was sifting through the data stream from the Pan STARRS astronomical survey of the sky. The researcher noticed the object was highly elongated, like a stick, with a long axis 10 times longer than its short axis. Researchers have long suggested this could be an ideal shape for an interstellar spacecraft, as it would minimize abrasions from interstellar gas and dust.

Now, scientists at Breakthrough Listen, a global astronomical program searching for evidence of civilizations beyond Earth, are gearing up to use the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, on December 13 to see if they can hear any radio signals being emitted by the object. If they do, it may be strong scientific evidence of alien life.

Avi Loeb, one of Breakthrough’s advisors and the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, told Salon this object is most likely a rocky object from another planetary system, but what’s most peculiar about it is that it’s the first object in our solar system that isn’t gravitationally bound to the Sun.

“This means that it originated in interstellar space and will return there after passing five times closer to the Sun than the Earth is,” Loeb said. “This is the first interstellar object to be discovered and its axis ratio is so extreme. Therefore when I first learned about it I started wondering whether it might be an artificially-made probe which was sent by an alien civilization, namely an expanded version of Starshot spacecrafts.”

If it was, in fact, made by aliens, how would scientists know? Would any of the signs be recognizable to human life and Earth’s technology?

“We do not know what to expect in case it is artificial in origin,” Loeb told Salon. “But we would like to check for any radio signals. Our radio telescopes are sensitive to the transmission of a single cell phone at the current distance of this object.”

The rush to explore this object is not only motivated by curiosity, but also because time is limited. Oumuamua is expected to leave our solar system, and as Loeb explained, conventional rockets aren’t fast enough to chase it down.

Trump’s proposed federal budget will slash climate change–related NASA missions

Donald Trump shakes former NASA Astronaut and second man on the moon, Buzz Aldrin's hand after signing an executive order to send American astronauts back to the moon, and eventually Mars. (Credit: Getty/Brendan Smialowsk)

One small step for Trump, one giant leap towards Earth’s catastrophic demise.

President Donald Trump announced on Monday that America will once again “reach for the moon.” According to a White House press release, Trump signed a space policy directive enabling NASA to “pursue extraterrestrial exploration,” meaning Mars and moon missions. This newfound focus doesn’t come without a sacrifice though, one that wasn’t clearly noted in the administration’s press release.

According to the proposed 2018 federal budget, which explains in more detail Trump’s vision for NASA’s priorities in 2018, four climate-change focused missions could be eliminated in lieu of the new direction: the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem satellite (PACE); the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 experiment (OCO-3); the Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO) Pathfinder; and the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR).

PACE is a mission that was designed to reveal unprecedented data about the interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere — for example, how they exchange carbon dioxide. This information is crucial in the fight to understand and prevent climate change, since humans are predicted to near or exceed dangerous levels of carbon dioxide within 100 years. The mission OCO-3 would take precise measurements of Earth’s carbon dioxide levels from space, more precise than any previous measurements. CLARREO is a mission that will send a reflected solar spectrometer into space, a device that will be used to “monitor the pulse of the Earth” and give scientists a better understanding of climate change. And DSCOVR is a joint mission between NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which would warn NASA of geomagnetic storms which can sometimes disrupt communications on Earth.

According to the administration, the proposed budget “focuses the Nation’s efforts on deep space exploration rather than Earth-centric research, and develops technologies that would help achieve U.S. space goals and benefit the economy.”

The said space goals are unclear though, and the press release only offers the explanation that it would require American astronauts to return to the moon because it’s “of interest to international partners and is within reach of America’s private space industry.”

The U.S. first visited the moon in a manned mission in 1969. Since then, there have been six manned missions and landings, the last one being in 1972. The numerous moon missions that followed brought robots, not humans. Unmanned missions tend to reap as much (or more) science than manned missions, and at a fraction of the cost of manned missions, which are much more technically complicated. 

It’s unclear what Trump’s real motive is here. Could he be trying to increase business for the multi-billion companies like Lockheed Martin Space Operations, a NASA contractor? Or is his motive to stroke his own ego and leave a Trumpian legacy on the moon? Whatever the case, one thing is clear: Trump doesn’t care for or believe in climate change.

The Golden Globes’ 2018 film nominations are a strong bid for irrelevance

Miles Bakshi and Alec Baldwin in "Boss Baby" (Credit: DreamWorks Animation)

Once again, the inscrutable and likely corrupt Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) — the organization that bestows the Golden Globe Awards — has released its nominations for the best films of the year. And, once again, they make a compelling argument for the Golden Globes’ overall irrelevance.

While, yes, the Globes still host perhaps the best annual broadcast of the yearly awards cycle — drinks, laughs and loose, famous lips go a long way — the honors themselves have been so oddly compromised in recent years that you just have to sit back and wonder what, besides booze, industry leaders still show up for.

Just take a look at this year’s nods, which lean heavily on films that have yet to be released — many of which have little buzz, little critical consensus, and even less audience support.

In the “Best Motion Picture — Drama” category, only one of the films, “Dunkirk,” has been out in theaters for more than a month. In the same category, it’s likely that only one more of them, “The Post,” will receive a full wide release. There’s nothing particularly wrong with honoring smaller, limited-release curios, but it certainly doesn’t make a strong argument for the cultural relevance of the Globes.

And the “Best Motion Picture — Comedy” nominee list is a very odd serving: one of the two best straight comedies of the year, “The Big Sick,” isn’t among the picks; the singular best horror film of the year, “Get Out,” is. (Most agree “Get Out” belongs with its siblings in drama, not comedy.) With the forthcoming “The Greatest Showman” edging out a colorful field of other potential worthy contenders, why exactly would anyone care about the outcome here?

Indeed, with “The Florida Project,” “Columbus,” “Good Time,” “Beach Rats” and the beautiful “Phantom Thread” missing from both “best film” categories, neither is a sop to critics or media buzz — not that audience popularity has made any impact here, as attested by the HFPA’s absence of “Coco,” “Wonder Woman” and others. Oh, and documentaries? Forget it.

There’s equal carelessness in the acting categories. Timothee Chalamet (“Call Me By Your Name”) and Danzel Washington (“Roman J. Israel, Esq.”) are slight surprises in the “Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama” category, but there’s still not much excitement here. It’s unknown whether any of the five performances nominated — Daniel Day Lewis’ final role in “Phantom Thread” and the unrecognizable Gary Oldman in “The Darkest Hour” included — will have lasting popular impact.

It’s much the same on the women’s side of the draw, with the exception of Sally Hawkins in “The Shape of Water.” The nominations of Ansel Elgort and Steve Carrell for their just-okay work in “Baby Driver” and “The Battle of the Sexes” respectively in the “Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy” category inspire little more than a shrug. With Kumail Nanjiani (“The Big Sick”) out and James Franco sure to win for “The Disaster Artist,” there’s no tension in the list.

In the lead acting categories, only “Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy” hints at any drama; that category offers a choice between Saoirse Ronan (“Lady Bird”) and Margot Robbie (“I, Tonya”). Helen Mirren’s inclusion for the poorly received “The Leisure Seeker” is a nomination that seems to exist only for the purpose of putting the grande dame on TV screens (which, admittedly, is always nice).

While the “Best Director” category offers at least some excitement (there’s a real chance Guillermo del Toro wins this year for “The Shape of Water”), it’s a slate primarily defined by who isn’t there. Neither of this year’s most celebrate first-time home-run hitters, Jordan Peele (“Get Out”) and Greta Gerwig (“Ladybird”), made the cut, though Gerwig is in the running for “Best Screenplay” (that category is also corrupted by Peele’s absence).

Other absent directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson (“Phantom Thread”), Noah Baumbach (“The Meyerowitz Stories”) and many, many others cast a long shadow on this year’s award. Ridley Scott’s inclusion for “All The Money in The World” is a genuine head scratcher given that limited pre-release viewings of it mean many HFPA members probably haven’t seen it. That Patty Jenkins’ (“Wonder Woman”) history-making return to theaters wasn’t recognized is equally confusing.

The “Best Foreign-Language Film” and “Best Animated Feature Film” categories offer the biggest snorts of the year. While “First They Killed My Father” is, yes, in Cambodian, it was directed by Angelina Jolie, an American. In the animated category, truly wonderful films such as “Coco” and “The Breadwinner” are up against “Boss Baby,” a high-earning bit of pablum that’s currently at 52 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Confusing, full of holes and, again, far #TooWhite, the overall film slate for the Golden Globes is an odd, bland mirror of what was, in terms of creative output, one of the more exciting years in recent memory for cinema. Out-of-nowhere stunners such as “Columbus,” “Lady Macbeth” and many more simply didn’t exist in the HFPA’s eyes. Broadly enjoyed films — “The Big Sick,” “Wonder Woman” — didn’t win nominations either. It almost seems as if the HFPA is pushing an agenda of increased irrelevance.

Not that Globes were ever that relevant. Often framed as an Oscars’ warm-up, it’s rarely proved a solid predictor of who will win that more famous honor. While there were many overlaps last year — “Moonlight,” Casey Affleck, Damien Chazelle — 2017’s Academy Award winner for Best Actress, Emma Stone, wasn’t even nominated for a Golden Globe.

Really, the harder you look at the HFPA and the Globes, the more it becomes clear that the entire institution exists to help get a certain set of individuals with questionable credentials into parties, screenings and interviews and allow them to throw a glittery celeb prom once a year. That holds annually. But even at that, they’ve offered up a drowsy, odd buffet of bad choices for 2018 — one that may prevent it from giving us the one thing we should credibly expect from them: a decent, genuinely competitive and fun awards show.

How students get banished to alternative schools

(Credit: Getty/vgajic)

In October 2014, less than two months after entering North Augusta High School in Aiken County, South Carolina, Logan Rewis paused to drink from a fountain in the hallway between periods. As he straightened up, water fell from his mouth onto the shoe of his social studies teacher, Matt Branon, who was standing nearby. Logan says it was an accident, but Branon thought Logan had spat at him.

“My bad,” the 15-year-old with bushy sandy-brown hair and blue eyes says he told Branon after the teacher confronted him.

Branon, who is also the school’s baseball coach, was incensed. “Freaking disgusting,” he shouted at Logan as the teen walked away. Branon pursued Logan and grabbed the freshman by his backpack.

“Get your freaking hands off me,” Logan recalls yelling. School officials say he used a different “f” word.

Though Branon had arguably escalated the conflict, he wasn’t disciplined — but Logan was. In a decision that changed the course of his education and life, the school district banished Logan to its alternative school, the Center for Innovative Learning at Pinecrest.

The word “alternative” implies a choice. But in an era when the freedom to pick your school is trumpeted by advocates and politicians, students don’t choose the alternative schools to which districts send them for breaking the rules: They’re sentenced to them. Of 39 state education departments that responded to a ProPublica survey last year, 29, or about three-quarters, said school districts could transfer students involuntarily to alternative programs for disciplinary reasons.

Like Logan, thousands of students are involuntarily reassigned to these schools each year, often for a seemingly minor offense, and never get back on track, a ProPublica investigation has found. Alternative schools are often located in crumbling buildings or trailers, with classes taught largely by computers and little in the way of counseling services or extracurricular activities.

The forced placements have persisted even though the Obama administration in 2014 told schools they should suspend, expel or transfer students to alternative schools only as a last resort — and warned them that they risked a federal civil rights investigation if their disciplinary actions reflected discrimination based on race. Federal data shows that black and Hispanic students are often punished more than white students for similar violations.

Moreover, despite legal protections afforded students with disabilities, a disproportionate number of those exiled in some districts have special education plans — like Logan, who had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other learning problems.

School administrators “hang these children out to dry,” says Logan’s mother, Lisa Woodward. “They don’t want nothing else to do with them.”

Now, the Trump administration is being pressed to view such removals more favorably. In November, a group of teachers and conservative education advocates met with aides to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to express concerns about the 2014 guidance. The group said the Obama-era approach made schools less safe, allowing disruptive students to hijack classrooms.

That meeting has raised fears among civil rights advocates that the Trump administration will rescind the guidance, prompting schools to increase the number of children excluded from regular classrooms. “We’re deeply concerned this administration is not committed to protecting the civil rights of students,” says Elizabeth Olsson, senior policy associate for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She cited reports that DeVos may scrap a rule aimed at preventing schools from unnecessarily placing minority students in special education.

A federal education spokesman on Nov. 29 declined to comment on the issue.

To be sure, many students are sent to alternative schools for major offenses involving drugs, alcohol, weapons or violence. But others are forced to go for reasons that include rudeness, using their cellphones at inappropriate times, or — in about half of the states ProPublica surveyed — nondisciplinary problems such as bad grades. In states like Florida, students who fall academically have been pushed to transfer to alternative schools as a way to game the state’s accountability system. Pennsylvania law lets school officials relegate students to that state’s Alternative Education for Disruptive Youth program for showing “disregard for school authority.” In Aiken, about 40 percent of transfers in 2014-2015, the year Logan was reassigned, were for lesser offenses, including 13 for using profanity, 27 for truancy, 28 for not following an adult’s instructions and 18 for showing disrespect.

AASA, The School Superintendents Association — which has at times fiercely defended local administrators’ discretion in handling disruptive students — says alternative schools should not typically be used as a disciplinary placement for non-serious offenses.

“We don’t want to send a student there because they didn’t take their hat off or they drank poorly from the water fountain, or they’re not as mannered as we’d like them to be,” says Bryon Joffe, the association’s project director for education and youth and development. “What we don’t want our alternative schools to be is a place to put kids we’d rather not have in class.”

Aiken County Schools attorney William Burkhalter Jr. says that, under the direction of a new superintendent, Sean Alford, the school system reduced its expulsions, suspensions, and involuntary alternative school transfers in recent years. Still, district officials were acting within their rights in Logan’s case, he says. “He denies it but he spit a huge amount of water on this teacher,” says Burkhalter, who didn’t witness the incident himself. “His shoes, pant legs, whatever. It was gross.” (During a disciplinary hearing, a district official described the incident by saying: “The student spit water on a teacher’s shoe as he left the water fountain.”)

Burkhalter says Branon has worked for the district since 2012 without receiving any write-ups or reprimands. “The principal has had no problems and says he is a team player, a willing participant in anything he is asked to help with and a solid guy,” Burkhalter wrote in an email. He quoted the principal as saying, “‘I love having him on the staff.”

Branon did not respond to emails or phone messages from ProPublica.

Discipline wasn’t the original mission of alternative schools. They emerged in the late 1960s as less competitive, more child-centered learning environments that aimed to offer flexible instruction for kids who weren’t thriving in traditional classrooms. But within two decades, their role evolved as school districts began to see them as places to warehouse students who had broken zero-tolerance policies. Under those policies, which were based on the notion that schools could only keep order by refusing to tolerate any potentially unsafe behavior, even first-time or minor incidents were more likely to result in an expulsion or suspension. When students challenged their removal, some courts ordered schools to find a place to educate them — fueling a proliferation of alternative classrooms through the 1990s and 2000s. Even as zero-tolerance policies have fallen out of fashion, involuntary placements in alternative schools for disciplinary reasons have persisted, with districts such as Miami recently introducing “success centers” for students who otherwise might have been suspended.

Tasked with educating roughly half a million of the nation’s most vulnerable students, alternative schools generally lack academic rigor. Barbara Fedders, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has studied the schools, says some districts assign their worst teachers to alternative classrooms, and students may not even receive textbooks. “They aren’t given anything that makes schools schools,” Fedders says. “There’s no clubs, no sports.”

Many students become discouraged and drop out. While just 6 percent of regular schools have graduation rates below 50 percent, ProPublica’s analysis found, nearly half of alternative schools do.

“There is an enormous change in the quality of education that the student has a shot at when they’re moved from regular school to alternative school,” says Derek Black, a University of South Carolina law professor who wrote a book on school discipline.

A middle child, Logan grew up with two sisters in North Augusta, a few miles from the Georgia border. When he was a toddler, his mother and father split up, and she married his stepfather. She worked in customer service at a car dealership; his stepfather was in construction, later taking a job as an automotive technician.

Logan had little contact with his father, and his relationship with his stepfather was turbulent. When he wasn’t in school, he enjoyed swimming in nearby lakes or the Savannah River and displayed a knack for hands-on tasks. For a time, he and a friend liked to fix up and re-paint old bicycles. As he became a teenager, he wore shirts with the Polo insignia, an ever-present baseball hat and a wide smile that hinted of mischief.

Because of his ADHD, which was diagnosed in third grade, Logan struggled to focus on schoolwork. He had difficulty reading and sometimes acted impulsively. He could get boisterous, wasn’t great at following directions and mouthed off to adults who called him out in front of peers. He took medicine for his attention disorder for several years, but Woodward stopped it when he was in seventh grade because she thought the side effects made him act up more.

He was repeatedly disciplined for outbursts in class, disrespect, swearing, silliness and horsing around with other students. As the incidents piled up, Logan became acquainted with the district’s alternative school, the Center for Innovative Learning at Pinecrest. Located a couple of miles from downtown Aiken, the low-slung brick building has long grass, a chain-link fence and a “No Trespassing” sign out back. With a fluctuating enrollment that sometimes exceeds 200 students in grades three and up, the center sits in a neighborhood beset by crime, with pockets of boarded up homes and unkempt yards.

In sixth grade, school officials sent Logan to Pinecrest for more than two months after he was accused of pushing another student. The next year, he returned for about a month for repeatedly forgetting his gym clothes. His grades suffered each time.

For high school, his mother thought he should go to a small charter school, where he could receive individualized attention, rather than North Augusta. One of Aiken’s larger high schools, North Augusta has 1,500 students and a sprawling campus in an older subdivision dotted with midcentury brick ranch homes. But Logan assured her he would be fine. He was already planning to pursue a vocational track after his freshman year and had his eye on a welding program. As he left middle school, educators created an Individualized Education Program for him that, among other things, said teachers at North Augusta should first remind him of the rules and give him a chance to comply before issuing a citation and should avoid embarrassing him by criticizing him in public.

Logan’s first couple of months at North Augusta went relatively well. He made B’s in Algebra 1 and mostly kept out of trouble. He did rack up tardies, repeatedly failing to get from one end of the school to the other in time for class. Another teacher chastised him for saying he didn’t have a book when he actually did. But his mother had met with his teachers and they all talked with Logan about hurrying up. He promised to.

Then came the water fountain incident. Afterwards, an assistant principal called Woodward, telling her Logan had spat on a teacher and could be arrested for assault if charges were pressed. “I was like, ‘What in the world has happened to my child?’” she recalls. “Because it’s not out of character for him to mouth off at somebody, but for him to spit on somebody, that was out of character.” She was so upset she hardly spoke to Logan on the drive home. That night, he fled from the house and wandered their working-class neighborhood alone, while she anxiously waited up.

When they finally talked over what happened, Woodward says she was crestfallen. “It broke my heart that I had reacted the way I did,” she says.

The school referred Logan’s case to a disciplinary tribunal, a group of retired educators who determined punishment for violations of the district’s code of conduct. Branon went to great lengths to bolster his account, collecting statements from nine students about the incident. Most agreed that Logan spat on the shoe of “Coach Branon,” but couldn’t say for sure whether it was intentional.

At a hearing a few days later, Woodward pleaded for leniency.

“He has progressively gotten better,” Woodward told tribunal members, according to a recording of the hearing obtained by ProPublica. “He’s not a bad kid, he’s a good kid.” But the chairwoman told Logan his behavior would not be tolerated. “You ain’t never going to win being disrespectful to people in charge,” the chairwoman told Logan. The preponderance of evidence supported that he spat and cursed at the teacher, she said as the hearing closed, but even “if you didn’t, then it’s a lesson that giving the impression that you did sometimes can be just as painful as if you did it. You got it?” She warned him that if he came back before the tribunal for another offense, it would likely expel him.

The panel sentenced him to a short-term stint at Pinecrest, which is usually four to five weeks. However, while Woodward was registering him at the alternative school, she says school officials at his old high school met to talk about his IEP without her. At this meeting, despite the tribunal’s recommendation, school officials decided Logan should stay at Pinecrest longer — for at least nine to 10 weeks. “He was doing so good, then because of this little incident that they blew out of proportion, they basically kicked him while he was down,” Woodward says.

School administrators “did not feel the mother ever understood what they were putting up with and how much they wanted Logan to succeed,” attorney Burkhalter says.

Pinecrest was much smaller than North Augusta High, and Logan knew some of the other students there. His mother usually drove him, even though the route took her an hour out of her way and she feared jeopardizing her job at the dealership.

The Center for Innovative Learning was anything but. While the small classes at Pinecrest took pressure off Logan, he wasn’t learning much. His computer-based courses in social studies and science required him to absorb screens and screens of text. “There was a lot of stuff to read and I wasn’t really good at reading,” he recalls. Some kids figured out a way to get around the school’s academic software to surf outside websites, such as Facebook, he says. Other classes taught by teachers were too easy for a high school freshman, he says — his math class spent the period doing multiplication with calculators.

“They didn’t teach me anything at all,” Logan says. His grades in the computer-based courses tanked.

States and school districts have created a patchwork of rules on who should attend public alternative schools and why. Some set a higher bar than others. In Delaware, students must face expulsion or “seriously” violate the district discipline code before being sent to alternative programs. In Austin, Texas, students who commit one of a list of offenses — including felonies, assaults with injuries and marijuana or alcohol possession — must be transferred to alternative classrooms.

Miami-Dade County Public Schools turned to alternative schools after facing pressure from parents and activists to reduce the number of students it suspends and expels. In 2015, the district opened 10 “Student Success Centers” for students who in the past would have been sent home on suspension. Under the district’s plan, such students would report to the centers and receive schoolwork from their teachers — so they didn’t fall behind — along with character education and counseling, if needed. The move dramatically reduced the number of off-campus suspensions. But news media and civil rights advocates soon reported that many students weren’t showing up at the success centers or, if they did, schoolwork from their current classes often didn’t arrive. “Student Success Centers are out-of-school suspensions by another name,” the Advancement Project and a student advocacy group said about their findings in an October report.

A Miami-Dade district spokesman said the centers have improved as a result of recommendations from a task force that includes administrators, teachers, counselors and parent-teacher groups. “We will continue to use feedback from all stakeholders to inform decisions,” the spokesman wrote in an email.

Regardless of the formal eligibility rules for alternative schools, local officials are commonly afforded wide discretion. That, critics say, allows bias to creep in.

In Pennsylvania, a complaint filed by education advocates with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in 2013 alleges the state’s alternative schools are substandard educationally and disproportionately composed of students who have disabilities or are African American. The percentage of students with disabilities sent to the state’s alternative programs was nearly triple the state average — making up 44 percent of the alternative population in the 2012 school year, according to the complaint, which is pending. In 82 Pennsylvania school districts, disabled students made up half or more of the alternative population, with one district assigning only disabled students to the programs. Between 2008 and 2011, African-American students were placed in alternative programs at a rate more than double that of the general student population.

Charges of bias in alternative placements have also surfaced in the largest school district in Mississippi — DeSoto County Schools just south of the Tennessee border. Cynthia Lewis says that her daughter A’riauna McMillian’s involuntary transfer to an alternative school last school year in DeSoto County was an unduly harsh punishment that set the African-American teen back academically.

Toward the end of her freshman year, A’riauna told ProPublica, she took out her cellphone while in the ladies’ room to use the Snapchat app. Then she dangled the phone over a stall she thought was occupied by a friend she had been goofing around with. The phone’s light flashed as a warning that it was about to start recording. A’riauna’s friend noticed it and yelled that she was in a different stall. A’riauna says she snatched her phone back and started hitting delete, just in case. When the girl in the stall, who was white, came out, A’riauna let her look at the phone — and scroll through A’riauna’s Snapchat feed — to check that nothing was posted or saved. The girl complained to administrators anyway.

A’riauna was a good student who had never been in trouble before. The school not only suspended her for three days but also referred her to a disciplinary hearing to consider additional punishment. The hearing officer ordered A’riauna to spend 30 school days in the district’s alternative school for “acts which threaten the safety or well-being of others,” “possession or use of obscene, immoral, or offensive materials” and three lesser offenses, including having a cellphone. Lewis says the district’s code doesn’t recommend an alternative placement for a first offense on such a charge. “I felt like they were railroading her,” says Lewis, who has worked as a bus driver and substitute teacher for the district. She worried her daughter would fall behind in biology and English — classes that had mandatory state tests that spring.

When A’riauna entered the DeSoto County Alternative Center that fall, she was scared. “It was like, ‘Oh my God Ma, it’s like they’re in prison,’” she told Lewis. She was subjected to pat-downs each morning that included being required to shake her bra to show she wasn’t carrying contraband. She told her mother that on most days she would do worksheets and spend much of the rest of her time coloring pictures with crayons and markers. When her stint at the alternative center was over, her mother moved her to another high school, fearing that her old one wouldn’t treat her fairly. A’riauna found she needed extra help from teachers to get back on track. The transition was difficult. “She was very depressed in the beginning,” her mother says. With teachers’ help and hard work, she managed to raise her grades, Lewis says.

Working with the Advancement Project, the same group that criticized the Miami Success Centers, Lewis and other DeSoto parents have filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. “The punishments A’riauna received were harsher than and inconsistent with those allowed by District policy,” her mother wrote in the complaint. The parents say DeSoto’s overwhelmingly white administration and school board have routinely meted out harsher punishments to black students than white students who commit similar offenses. The complaints are pending.

Katherine Nelson, a spokeswoman for the school district, which has about 34,000 students, declined to discuss A’riauna’s experience or the parents’ complaints about bias. “We cannot discuss student discipline issues,” she said.

There’s little available data comparing how often students of different races are sent to alternative schools for the same offense. But federal data from 2012 documents racial bias in suspending students for lesser offenses, according to Joffe, of the superintendents’ association. In the 5 percent of offenses that would be considered most serious — when punishments were mandatory under state law or rule because they involved drugs, alcohol, weapons or violence — students of different races were treated similarly, Joffe says. But in the larger pool of offenses, for which officials had more discretion in deciding whether to suspend students, their decisions revealed vast racial disparities. “We know children of color face discipline more often and, more importantly, more harshly for the same sorts of infractions than their white and Asian peers,” Joffe says.

The Obama administration has told educators to avoid overly punitive responses to misbehavior by disabled students, too. In a letter to educators in 2016, it said that repeated disciplining of children with disabilities may signal that they are not receiving appropriate support in school.

Regular schools should have “release valves” for students who disturb classes — such as sending them to a guidance counselor’s office or giving them in-school suspension — that don’t involve removing them from regular school, Joffe says. Alternative schools should be reserved for students who need services beyond what a regular school can offer, he says — such as substance abuse treatment, anger management or trauma counseling.

In recent years, facing criticism for excluding students, some schools have turned to gentler approaches for managing disruptive behavior. One method, called “positive behavior supports,” involves coaching students to improve behavior through rewards, encouragement and changes in their environment and routines. Restorative justice, in which students make amends for bad behavior in lieu of harsh punishment, has also gained proponents.

The Aiken school district — which serves roughly 25,000 students, about a third of whom are African American — has not formally adopted either positive behavior supports or restorative justice. But the district has reformed both its code of conduct and the tribunal system in the past two years, with Superintendent Alford telling parents discipline should be instructive and not simply punitive. Because of the changes, fewer offenses result in automatic referrals for severe punishment. And school administrators now must first document what they did to try to help a child correct misbehavior before referring them for expulsion, suspension or an alternative school transfer. The district hired a full-time hearing officer, who has taken the place of the tribunal and has more flexibility in working with families after a disciplinary incident. The goal, Burkhalter says, was to reduce expulsions, decrease the number of hearings and appeals and give school administrators and teachers more discretion in handling discipline problems “with a view toward trying to get students back on track and not trying to push them out the door.”

While the number of students in Pinecrest has remained about the same, Burkhalter says, more of them arrive as a result of negotiated agreements between parents and the district after a disciplinary incident. Overall, he says, students are spending fewer days out of school altogether for disciplinary reasons — resulting in fewer lost instructional hours.

When he returned to North Augusta after 13 weeks at Pinecrest, Logan found himself far behind peers. “I don’t know any of this, you are way further ahead of me,” he told his math teacher. “I wasn’t doing anything like this in alternative school.” A few weeks later, Logan got caught taking his cellphone out of his pocket twice on one day — though students were supposed to leave it in their locker or a car. This time, the school recommended expulsion and held a special hearing to decide whether the violations stemmed from his disability — which would have precluded the drastic punishment. Though his mom argued that taking out his cellphone was an impulsive act directly connected to his ADHD, staff disagreed. Woodward and her son didn’t bother presenting their case at the tribunal. They had had enough. Feeling defeated, Logan dropped out of high school in the spring of 2015, at age 15.

At the time, Logan told himself and his mother that he’d just get an equivalency diploma or attend a special school for at-risk kids in Columbia. Instead, he started working right away, moving down to south Georgia to build chicken houses for his uncle’s company, which supplies them to farms. After a few months, he moved back home, taking another job repairing heating and air conditioning units — and sometimes working 55- to 60-hour weeks. His family moved across town to a subdivision, where they live in a neat brick home with a manicured lawn at the end of a cul-de-sac. Logan contributed $100 of his pay each week to household expenses.

On his days off, he shot skeet or hunted deer with family and friends or went down to the drag strip to watch the races. He reached out to his father, who had fallen on hard times. The two met and started to develop a relationship. But this time, his mother says, Logan tried to be the role model, urging his father to face his problems.

“He fell into adulthood,” Woodward says. “He’s just taken it and run with it.”

In late November, Logan decided to move back to South Georgia and join his uncle’s company, repairing the equipment in the chicken houses. He is living with his cousin near rural Reidsville, making $14 an hour. “He’s a hard worker, I think that’s what he’s got going for him,” his aunt, Dawn Floyd, says. “We couldn’t wait for him to get to us.”

Woodward says she’s proud of her son’s determination since he left school, but she still grieves that he will likely never hold a traditional high school diploma and missed out on high school rituals like the class ring ceremony, graduation and prom. “I think it hurts me more than it hurt him,” she says.

The weekend he left South Carolina for Georgia was emotional. Afterward, his mother sent him a text, telling him his younger sister missed him.

It wasn’t easy for him either, Logan texted back, but he was determined to succeed, for all their sakes. “I’m going to be a millionaire,” he wrote, so that “we won’t have to struggle ever again.”

Researcher Claire Perlman contributed to this report.

After a long holdout, tobacco companies to issue mea culpas

(Credit: iStockphoto/2StockMedia)

In a matter of days, the American tobacco industry will begin publicly admitting some ugly truths about its dark history and the health effects of smoking.

The tobacco giants will launch a court-ordered national advertising campaign to end a massive fraud and racketeering case that the federal government brought against the industry nearly two decades ago. The campaign will run on TV, in newspapers, online and on cigarette packaging.

The ads will be “corrective statements” to rectify what the trial judge called “false, deceptive, and misleading public statements about cigarettes and smoking,” and will mark the long-delayed conclusion to what was described as the largest civil racketeering case in U.S. history. In pursuing the tobacco industry, the Department of Justice accused cigarette makers of carrying out a half-century conspiracy to hook smokers while lying about the hazards and addictiveness of smoking. Following a nine-month trial, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler in 2006 issued an encyclopedic 1,683-page final opinion that chronicled decades of industry skullduggery

Kessler lamented that she could not punish the companies financially. At one point, government lawyers had demanded that the industry be required to turn over $280 billion in ill-gotten gains. But a federal appeals court ruled that financial penalties were not available under the civil provisions of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, or RICO. So the key remedy that Kessler ordered was the series of corrective statements.

“Smoking kills”

Even then cigarette makers delayed the day of reckoning for more than a decade by appealing and battling over the wording of the statements.

Some of the facts the industry will acknowledge:

“Smoking kills, on average, 1,200 Americans. Every day.”
Tobacco companies “intentionally designed cigarettes to make them more addictive.”
Nicotine “is the addictive drug in tobacco,” and it “actually changes the brain — that’s why quitting is so hard.”
“All cigarettes cause cancer, lung disease, heart attacks, and premature death — lights, low tar ultra lights, and naturals. There is no safe cigarette.”

Although Justice Department lawyers failed to extract the billions in damages that they sought, and many observers thought they gained, at most, a moral victory, public health advocates are hailing the corrective statements.

“The tobacco companies, for the first time, are being required to actually tell the truth about their products,” said Dennis Henigan, the director of legal and regulatory affairs for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, an advocacy group that intervened in the case.

“Here is the truth” striken

The case appeared to be resolved in 2006, when Kessler ruled that cigarette makers had conspired to violate the racketeering law after a trial that cost the tobacco industry and government tens of millions of dollars in legal expenses. But the litigation dragged on for another 11 years while the tobacco companies, invoking First Amendment rights and citing RICO limitations, were able to modify the corrective statements.

For instance, the industry succeeded in striking a sentence saying, “Here is the truth” from the preamble to the corrective statements, as well as another line stating that the tobacco companies “deliberately deceived the American public.”

The newspaper ads are scheduled to come out once a month for five months in outlets ranging from The New York Times and The Washington Post to small African-American and Spanish-language community publications. In most cases, the print ads will begin appearing on Sunday, although some newspapers without weekend editions could begin publishing them as soon as Friday.

National TV commercials will begin on Monday, and will air five times a week for a full year.

Given consolidation in the industry, the only entities left to carry out the advertising campaign are Altria Group and its Philip Morris USA unit, along with R.J. Reynolds Tobacco and the former Lorillard holdings acquired by Reynolds in 2015.

Altria and Reynolds, in prepared statements, each claimed to have turned a new leaf.

“We remain committed to aligning our business practices with society’s expectations of a responsible company. This includes communicating openly about the health effects of our products, continuing to support cessation efforts, helping reduce underage tobacco use and developing potentially reduced-risk products,” Altria said.

Reynolds, in its statement, said it “will fully meet its obligations under this order as part of its commitment of being a responsible company. It’s important to note, the tobacco industry today is very different than it was when this lawsuit was filed in 1999. More than a decade ago, Reynolds American and its operating companies began a journey to transform the tobacco industry. Today, the industry is working with FDA [the Food and Drug Administration], other regulators and some in the public health community more than ever before to create a regulated marketplace that encourages innovation while reducing the harm from smoking.”

“A rogue industry”

But Sharon Y. Eubanks, who served as lead counsel for the Justice Department during the tobacco trial, dismissed the notion that the industry has mended its ways.

“This is a rogue industry, and that hasn’t changed,” Eubanks said. Eubanks, who currently is in private practice in Washington, said that while tobacco companies note that they now are subject to FDA regulation, “they fight that tooth and nail as well.”

“When you look overseas at what’s happening and the activities that the industry is engaged in to stop tobacco control efforts … they’re still all about marketing their deadly product, and they haven’t automatically become ‘good guys’ as they would want you to think,” she said.

Eubanks also rejected the idea that the corrective statements already are common knowledge among the public. “Generally speaking, people know that cigarette smoking is harmful to your health, but I don’t think they recognize so much about the addictive qualities of cigarettes and why they’re that way,” she said. “I don’t think that people recognize that the labels low-tar, light and and ultra light don’t mean what they say.”

In her withering opinion in 2006, Kessler declared that the tobacco industry “survives, and profits, from selling a highly addictive product which causes diseases that lead to a staggering number of deaths per year, an immeasurable amount of human suffering and economic loss, and a profound burden on our national health care system. Defendants have known many of these facts for at least 50 years or more. Despite that knowledge, they have consistently, repeatedly, and with enormous skill and sophistication, denied these facts to the public, to the Government, and to the public health community.”

Police guns are turning up in crimes

(Credit: AP/Robert F. Bukaty)

In the last year, residents of Fort Worth, Texas, have watched as shootings spiked across the city.

Month after month, new victims emerged: a woman killed in a mall parking lot, two toddlers accidentally shot outside a Chuck E. Cheese’s, seven shot in a drive-by in a residential neighborhood. The 2016 murder rate was a 15-year high.

The city’s Police Department had a plan. “In an effort to get firearms off the streets, the Fort Worth Police Department is implementing a gun buyback program,” the department announced May 18.

On a hot summer day six weeks later, nearly a dozen officers set up shop in an Aldi parking lot, offering a $50 gift card to anyone who turned in a gun. It was the third buyback the department conducted since the program’s announcement.

However, the police had competition. Skirting the edges of the parking lot, a group of men stood with homemade cardboard signs outbidding the police.

One man accompanied his daughter, who held a sign reading, “Sell my daddy your gun!” She stood next to another buyer, wearing a shirt reading, “Fuck your gun free zone.” Another man clad in neon green waved dollar bills at passersby. The deals took place in less than a minute.

Police wanted guns off the streets. Instead, they’d created a makeshift gun bazaar.

There was another problem with their plan. While the Fort Worth Police Department was making a show of getting guns off the streets, it also was quietly supplying the public with guns.

Over the previous 10 years, the department has sold more than 1,100 of its used weapons to licensed gun dealers, which turn around and sell them to the public, according to department records. It isn’t alone.

An investigation by Texas Standard and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found that 21 of Texas’ 50 largest law enforcement agencies sell their used weapons to the public, effectively creating a pipeline of guns flowing right back into communities.

The guns are attractive to buyers. They’re well maintained, relatively new and often come at a nice discount. And they include caches of military-grade weapons. From the Garland Police Department to the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department, law enforcement agencies unloaded hundreds of shotguns and semi-automatic rifles, including models such as the Mini-14 and AR-15.

The Dallas Police Department sold a batch of Colt Commando assault rifles. Fort Worth police offloaded fully automatic German-made MP5 submachine guns. The Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office shopped around an Uzi among prospective buyers before selling it at the rock-bottom price of $250. It’s a model that could fetch over $3,000 at a public auction.

While some departments and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives destroy their weapons in the name of public safety, police officials at these departments say they sell guns to afford newer and better weapons for their officers.

“I think the public would agree they want their police officers to have the best equipment,” said Sgt. Marc Povero, a spokesman for the Fort Worth Police Department.

Jay Wachtel, a former ATF agent and lecturer at California State University, Fullerton, says departments that sell weapons are playing with fire.

“It’s bullshit. You know instinctively when you put guns out there that they are going to get misused,” Wachtel said. “Nobody that’s gone through a police academy would not consider that possibility.”

The public used to know when and how police guns turned up in crimes. However, those details now are shrouded in government secrecy, thanks to a 2003 law passed by Congress that prohibits the release of trace information.

“I fully recognize the fact that absolutely one of our guns could fall into the hands of a criminal,” said Lubbock Police Chief Greg Stevens. In 2014, his department traded in over 400 weapons to upgrade its arsenal. “That chance isn’t enough for me to change what is, in essence, a business decision.”

Stevens said he would change his mind if he learned definitively that one of his guns had been used in a crime. But an ATF spokesman said it’s unlikely his agency could release that information, even to a police chief.

Police weapons on the streets

For Scot Thomasson, the chance that a police weapon could fall into a criminal’s hands wasn’t a far-fetched possibility. It was a reality.

On a clear day in 1997, Thomasson sat in a diner in Colorado Springs, Colorado, waiting to meet with a neo-Nazi who had robbed drug cartel members in California and made his way eastward, offloading cocaine and weapons along the way. Thomasson was an undercover ATF agent disguised as an interested buyer – of both drugs and guns.

“He said he didn’t have any other cocaine, that he just sold me his last bit. But they might have a gun,” Thomasson said.

The dealer agreed to meet later in a hotel parking lot and sell Thomasson a Smith & Wesson revolver.

“It’s kind of an old-school firearm,” Thomasson said. “But I do notice there’s a San Diego Sheriff’s Department symbol on it.”

After leaving the parking lot, Thomasson called the San Diego Sheriff’s Department to let officials know he found one of their weapons in the hands of a drug dealer.

“There was a long silence and pause on the phone,” he said. The department had sold the gun and said it would stop selling to the public.

“They were horrified that a revolver that was once carried by a police officer could have injured another law enforcement officer or somebody else because it was in the hands of criminals,” he said.

Thomasson since has retired from the ATF. He says former police weapons are typically quality guns, chosen by departments for their high lethality and ease of use – all selling points to criminals. He doesn’t think departments should sell weapons back to the public but says they’ve been put in a bind by a lack of funding.

“Is it wrong? Yeah,” Thomasson said. “It’s wrong that police have to resort to selling their guns because they’re not funded. That’s what’s wrong with the whole thing.”

Because of stories such as Thomasson’s, public interest in police weapons spiked in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Using trace information, which was publicly available through the ATF, reporters started tying guns used in crimes back to police departments across the country.

The Denver Post uncovered that police weapons were found in the hands of criminals three times a day, using Thomasson as its lead character.

The Washington Post showed in 1999 how used D.C. police guns had been used in at least eight killings after 9,000 guns were sold in the previous decade. One had been used in a homicide in St. Louis. Guns from other police departments were linked to gang murders in New York and a white supremacist who fired on a Jewish community center.

CBS revealed in 1999 that Detroit ridded itself of 14 tons of weapons in seven years and that police in Irving, Texas, sold military-style grenade launchers.

That same year, New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, a proponent of gun control, was embarrassed on live television when an attorney for Glock Inc. exposed how the city’s Police Department had used the gunmaker to dump weapons in other states.

Cities started using trace information as well, pointing fingers at gun dealers they believed were responsible for arming criminals and supplementing violent crime, going so far as to file lawsuits to hold them responsible.

Gagged by Congress

Gun rights advocates and lobbyists wanted the onslaught of negative news to end, so they orchestrated a counterstrike and went after the catalyst for criticism: public information.

In 2003, U.S. Rep. Todd Tiahrt, a Kansas Republican, wrote what became known as the Tiahrt amendments. They require the FBI to destroy background check data for firearms within 24 hours. And they prohibit the ATF from publicly releasing trace data, making it nearly impossible for the public to figure out where crime guns come from. The National Rifle Association says trace information “serves no useful purpose.”

Then in 2004, Congress allowed a 10-year-old federal ban on assault weapons to expire. The next year, lawmakers shielded firearms manufacturers and gun stores from facing lawsuits due to their products being used in crimes.

Trace data is now so secretive that if law enforcement agencies wanted to find out if any of their former weapons showed up in crimes, the ATF isn’t sure it could tell them.

“I don’t know if there would be a way to share that information or not,” said Neil Troppman, an ATF spokesman. “But I think that’s a very good, a very valid question.”

While the law forbids the release of trace data, it does allow for aggregate information to get total numbers and display the frequency of police weapons being recovered in crimes across the country. Texas Standard and Reveal sought that in a Freedom of Information Act request filed in March. After not receiving the data for eight months, Reveal filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice. It is currently pending before a judge.

Thousands of weapons sold in Texas

Records show that law enforcement departments across Texas have sold weapons in bulk.

The state Department of Public Safety sold over 1,000 guns between 2007 to 2017, according to records obtained by Texas Standard and Reveal. The sales included handguns, subcompact .380 pistols and fully automatic HK33 rifles, which sold for more than $7,000 apiece because of a federal ban on their importation.

“It does not seem impartial to criticize law enforcement for complying with the law, especially in this context,” said department spokesman Tom Vinger, pointing out that guns are sold only through licensed vendors.

Fort Worth police, the same department disarming residents of their excess weapons over the summer, sold more than 1,100 weapons, including 40 submachine guns and over two dozen AR-15 rifles.

As University of Texas System Chancellor William McRaven publicly protested the dangers of guns being carried on campus in 2015, a number of university departments across the state sold their guns.

The San Antonio Police Department, which faced a series of city audits for inadequate tracking of departmental guns, appealed to the Texas attorney general’s office to hide specifics of its weapons sales. When the attorney general forced the department to release information this year, it reported selling 2,855 handguns in the last decade.

The Austin Police Department, whose former chief, Art Acevedo, told the public to keep an eye on hateful “gun enthusiasts,” reported selling more than 1,100 weapons.

Jay Wachtel, the former ATF agent, says he doesn’t know how much of an impact these sales would make on gun crime. “Every schmuck who wants a gun, a lethal gun, can probably get one already,” he said, adding that the real issue is deeper than any statistic.

“It’s a moral issues,” he said. “If (police) are OK with a few crimes and few people being killed because they’re making all this money, then they’re OK with it.”

Alain Stephens produced this story as a Reveal Investigative Fellow. The fellowship, supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and Democracy Fund, provides journalists of color support and training to create investigative reporting projects in partnership with their news outlets. He can be reached at alaincstephens@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @alainstephens.

Casey Kasem’s daughter is on a mission to stop elder abuse

Kerri Casem (Credit: Michael Helms)

It was a protracted battle that spanned the last days of a famous broadcaster, and continued after his death. And it was an experience that changed Kerri Kasem’s life.

Kasem, daughter of the late DJ and voice actor Casey Kasem, had her own thriving career as a radio host when her father was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia (the same condition Robin Williams had when he died) in 2013. What followed was a bitter public dispute between the Kasem siblings and Kasem’s wife Jean over the ailing man’s care and, soon after, his remains. At one point, Jean even reportedly threw raw meat at Kerri after the younger woman had been granted visitation.

Since her father’s 2014 death, Kasem has become an outspoken advocate against elder abuse, launching the Kasem Cares foundation, lobbying for family visitation rights and even sometimes publicly sparring with former Harvey Weinstein lawyer Lisa Bloom.

Family and end-of-life rights don’t make for sexy headlines, but anyone who has parents or children or who plans on dying someday needs to know how best to protect themselves and their loved ones. Salon spoke recently to Kasem about her career transformation, and why you need to talk to your parents right now.

This whole experience has been a tremendous education for you about the rights of family members. Can you take me through a little bit of what you’ve learned, and what someone as a family member might be unpleasantly surprised to discover when an elderly family member goes into care or is dealing with issues like dementia?

Prevention is the key. Once you’re in it, it is very, very difficult to win any kind of case, to see your parents again, to get help. It’s very hard. What you need to do is preventative. If you have anybody who’s considered a caretaker of the elderly individual, if that person has the power of attorney or a guardianship over that person and they start to isolate that individual, you’re in trouble.

I tell people, grab your camera phone and get your parents in front of you — or you yourself as parents — and say, “If while I’m sick and unable to care for myself or speak the person who is taking care of me isolates me and keeps me from my family and my friends, they should be removed from my care immediately.” You need to hold up a newspaper; you need to give that tape to all your family members. It’s very, very important that you have that and that still may not win you any visitation. You’ve got to have that person saying that, so that it can be played in front of the judge, played in front of social workers that come. Or if you have to call for a welfare check, you can say, “Listen, this is what my dad wants, this is what my mom wants.” That’s very, very important that you have that preventative measure.

The first step to any form of abuse is isolation. You isolate the individual and then you can physically abuse them, financially abuse them, sexually abuse them, verbally abuse them and medically abuse them. My belief is you can do whatever you want, once that individual is isolated. What the Casey Kasem Visitation Bill does is to remove the isolation factor, to where you can ask a judge for visitation without going into an entire fight over the power of attorney or a guardianship. It’s as simple a thing as, “Hey, my dad and mom are being isolated from me.” Instead of the kids having to prove they’re good kids, it’s up to the isolator to prove why this mom or dad doesn’t deserve having their family around in their time of need.

Every state is different. Some laws are stronger and better in certain states, some are weaker and not very good. But this the first step is changing laws and giving adult children more rights to their parents. Because right now, you turn 18, you have zero rights to see your parents. If someone in a residential house doesn’t want you in that house, there is nothing you can do. The police can’t help you; adult protective services can’t help you. If they’re in an assisted living, same thing. There is a resident’s bill of rights that was created almost 30 years ago, for nursing homes and hospitals, and it states that a person living or a staying in a hospital or a nursing home has every right to see anybody they want. It doesn’t matter who. We have that going for us, but it does not extend to residential or assisted living.

This is not just about families that are in show business or have a lot of money. It’s so much about control and about vindictiveness and about settling scores.

This is why we have been doing a documentary. . . . It was overwhelming how many families were going through this, and the only time you’ve heard about this is when it was a celebrity case.

It crosses all social and economic gaps. It’s everywhere. My documentary does highlight the Rooneys and the Campbells and my case and a couple of other ones. Most of it is people that don’t have famous last names, that don’t have money to fight this.

Explain to me how someone who is not an abusive offspring, who is not an abusive family member, would be able use these new means of access.

Using the Kasem Cares legislation bill, they can go in, instead of going through an entire fight, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, fighting the power of attorney. If it’s against the wife for her husband, forget it, you’re not going to win. They told me that the entire time I was fighting for my dad. What this does is gets rid of all that, gets rid of the trial, gets rid of the fighting. It’s basically, “Hey, I want to see my mom or I want to see my dad. They were isolated, and we’re not bad kids and dad and mom would want to see us.”

There are also other things where, if they’re in the guardianship or power of attorney, that if the ailing parent goes into the hospital for certain amount of dates, they have to go to notify the family. If the person dies, they have to notify the family. Where the person’s buried, they have to tell them. Nowadays, you do not see any of that. They don’t have to tell you when they’re in the hospital, they don’t have to tell you when they died and sometimes people find out their parents died because they read it in the obituary. Or somebody calls and says, “I read this.” It’s horrible. It’s horrible. So that really curbs that.

Now, not only do we have to get the bill, now we have to go and we have to go to the radio and television and tell people about the bill. Even judges don’t know about the bill. It’s very hard and what I learned is, yes, there are some people who are using it who are successful, but others, the judges don’t even know about it.

We’re talking to some congressmen to go federal, but here’s the thing. Probate, family law, you have to go state to state, you cannot go federally. We put it in the family law codes because if you call somebody a criminal and they are in the criminal codes, they’re going to fight. It’s less likely you’re going to get visitation. If you put it in the probate codes, they’re like, “Hey, you’re isolating, that’s not okay, let’s get you some visitation.” But if there is no criminal aspect to it, the family member is probably going to visitation.

You’re deescalating it.

Yeah. We’re trying, but we don’t know if it’s working because these people are so evil. They’re cut from the same cloth. They say the same things about the children, they do the exact same things. “Your dad’s too tired, your mom’s too tired to come to the phone. They have a doctor’s appointment.” They’re just constantly telling why they can’t talk to them. It starts that way and then it’s, “Well, this kid did this.” Then the lies start coming.

When someone finds themselves in a situation like you did, give me some of the red flags that would be a tipoff that maybe my dad, my mom could be in jeopardy, could be endangered and could be now be isolated.

A lot of times you’ll see it years beforehand. They’ll isolate friends. They put a block in between friends and visitation. That person has to be there listening to every conversation, they can’t go anywhere alone. You’ll see that ahead of time.

Which, by the way, is classic abuser behavior. You see this in domestic abuse, you see it in child abuse. It’s the same playbook, just applied to different victims.

I say that all the time. It’s the same in any abuse case. It can be child abuse, it can be domestic violence. Abusers do the same thing. People just need to get better at seeing it and looking at it and recognizing it.

It’s also, little by little, talking about how bad this person is or what this person did or how we shouldn’t be talking to this person any more. And then it’s, “Well, they can’t come to the phone.” This is the big classic one. “They’re too tired; they can’t come to the phone.” Bullshit. Bullshit, that doesn’t happen. People who are old and lonely and sick, they want to hear from their loved ones. “The doctor said” — that’s another one. Not allowing you to go to doctor’s visits, that’s another flag. Not allowing you to know what medications they’re on, another flag.

I just want to say there are kids who are hurtful to their parents. Not all kids are good. Most abuse happens from family members. So if a parent really doesn’t want to see their kids; there is no forced visitation with the bill. None.

Part of the reason that it’s so hard to get momentum around these issues is that end of life and the elderly are not necessarily the most media-friendly topics. The only way that these stories get traction is when they’re surrounding a celebrity.

That’s very true and it’s unfortunate. I say it all the time. It’s like nobody cares unless you’re a beloved celebrity. And then you know how frustrating it is for those people who don’t have that celebrity last name. It’s like nobody cares; it’s just horrifically frustrating.

Tell me a little bit about why you went public in scrapping up a little bit with Lisa Bloom, because I’ve seen you say you actually have no beef with her mother [Gloria Allred]. You like her mother.

I do, because I’ve done some radio shows with her. I don’t agree with her politically. I don’t agree with a lot of the cases she takes on but that’s OK. I respect her, I think she believes in what she does. I think she really believes it.

I do not find that to be the case with the daughter and that’s my opinion. She doesn’t, in my opinion, do things for the right reasons.

You have changed the entire direction of your life and your career in the last four years because of this issue and because of your personal experience. That is a profound thing to do. That is a profound leap. Why is this so important?

I went through hell the first couple of years because I quit my syndicated radio show with Clear Channel. I knew that I either quit the show and I fight for my dad or go on the road with my show and I continue to make good money. I thought, no way, I’m going to fight for my dad. I’m going to stay here, I’m going to see my dad again, and that’s when I knew. I formed my nonprofit. I did everything I could to stay afloat while I changed my entire life. I was very scared, but it was also so rewarding and so satisfying that I was doing something that would help people that would make a difference in this world. That meant more to me than the money I was making and the show I had. It’s given my life more purpose and it’s hard. It’s not easy and I don’t know if I’ll do this for the rest of my life. But I’m sure as hell going to change the laws in this country until I’m satisfied with them.

What do you want to see happen next?

Creating more awareness for this and changing the laws federally and state by state. There need to be stronger laws against this type of elder abuse. Guardianships, which are extremely dangerous, need reform now, right now, today. The feds are finally coming in and arresting guardians who are predatory. [These guardians] isolate [their charges], they sell off their house, they sell off their possessions, they kill their animals. These people — and not all guardians, but the ones I come in contact with — they are soulless. They are evil, and I see so many families destroyed by an outside guardian who doesn’t know the family. They isolate that individual and they say, “No visitation.”

That person dies, all their effects are gone, the kids don’t know where they’re buried, the kids don’t know where mom and dad’s ashes are. . . . When you put somebody under guardianship, you remove all of their constitutional rights. They can’t drive, they can’t vote, they can’t talk, they have no decisions on their medical [treatment].

We are in a very mortality-denying society and we don’t like to think that that could be me cut off from my children. That could be me cut off from my family. This isn’t just about millions of dollars. It’s about your parents’ remains; it’s about things that maybe were in your family home that have literally no value to anyone but you. It’s, “Oh, I have no photographs anymore.”

That’s right. My dad’s plaques and awards he won mean nothing to anybody. That’s all we wanted. We wanted what meant something to my dad.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Can virtual reality change minds on social issues?

Professor Bob Sacha demonstrates editing software during a virtual reality class at the CUNY School of Journalism. (Credit: Vincent Tullo/Narratively)

In 2004, Cathy Hackl may have watched more violent videos than anyone in America. While working in video production at CNN, part of Hackl’s job was to watch the raw video coming in from the Iraq War and flag sensitive material so that the cable channel’s local partners could warn viewers before they saw something graphic. In order to put this protection in place for viewers, Hackl had to immerse herself in such images and scenes for hours at a time. She sifted through beheadings, the bodies of soldiers being dragged, anything that might set off cable’s red flags. It was exhausting and traumatizing, but Hackl was most disturbed by how it began to change her.

“When you do that kind of job, you kind of turn your humanity switch off a little bit,” she says. She became desensitized to these horrific images. Her ability to empathize took a backseat — it had to.

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It wasn’t until two years ago — more than a decade after she began doing that work — that she had the visceral experience of feeling that switch turn back on. She had been experimenting with 360 video, a technique that allows the viewer to feel surrounded by whatever they’re watching. While attending a tech conference, she donned an HTC VIVE virtual reality headset and found herself in a solitary confinement cell.

“Within a couple of minutes, I was completely claustrophobic,” she says. The experience, called 6×9, was created by The Guardian. In 6×9, while wearing a VR headset, the viewer feels what it’s like to be in solitary confinement. They are transported to a tiny cell block and are completely immersed, for a time, in that lonely, frightening atmosphere.

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Even those watching in an internet browser can manipulate the video as if they are moving around inside it. In journalistic endeavors, the goal is always to help people understand the experiences they’re learning about, and with empathy can come a host of other feelings and effects.

“When I took the headset off, something clicked,” says Hackl. “The humanity switch turned back on. I felt like I was actually walking in someone else’s shoes.”

Hackl says she didn’t just feel sorry for people in solitary confinement after this visceral experience, she wanted to do something for them. After she took the headset off, she decided she needed to be part of this VR movement. She is now a consultant for some of the top virtual reality and augmented reality studios making experiences with a social impact focus. She is on the board of Virtual Relief, a nonprofit that uses the technology to help distract, entertain and rehabilitate homebound seniors and hospitals patients, and she considers herself an evangelist for the power of this technology.

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The experience Hackl described is what some social scientists call compassionate empathy, which moves a person to respond to another’s emotional state with some kind of action, as compared with cognitive empathy, also known as “perspective-taking,” which is simply understanding another person’s mental state. Scientists believe most people are born with the ability to empathize with others, but as we spend less and less time in face-to-face communication, the nuances can become lost. Researchers have worried for decades about what television, video games, cell phones, social media, and now augmented and virtual reality would do to our ability to connect with one another. While some studies have shown a correlation between excessive technology use and a decline in social connection, there is a growing movement recognizing that if it’s possible to decrease people’s capacity for empathy using technology, it must be possible to do the opposite as well.

VR technology has been evolving for decades, but until relatively recently it was considered too expensive and technically demanding for most uses outside of video games. It required a heavy and pricey collection of camera equipment, plus software, coding, and digital animation expertise. Not to mention the fact that anyone who wanted to experience VR needed to wear a heavy, clunky headset. In 2015, tech entrepreneur and artist Chris Milk gave a TED Talk in which he called virtual reality “the empathy machine” for its capacity to put people more directly in others’ shoes than any other kind of technology. At the time, many still saw this as hyperbole. There were still few companies outside the gaming world that felt comfortable investing in content or hardware that was so inaccessible. But now, as both headsets and the technology to produce VR experiences have become cheaper and easier to use, activists and nonprofits are starting to really test the empathy machine hypothesis. The United Nations has developed an experience that allows people to get a glimpse of life as Syrian refugees; multiple VR experiences give viewers the feeling of speaking directly to sexual assault or Holocaust survivors; nonprofits are using the Android app Within to tell VR stories that raise awareness and sometimes money for social and environmental causes.

One question remaining is whether this can create change at scale. Hackl admits that a lot of what’s out there right now is gimmicky, showing off the bells and whistles. If you test out a VR experience now, it’s likely meant to wow you more than convey much serious information. The companies and organizations making content still need to convince you — and in some cases, themselves — to try another, and another. But that’s what happens when any new technology comes of age.

“The people who are actually spending a lot of time crafting these stories and creating experiences are really moving the needle,” Hackl says. “I can turn off my phone or television, or take off a headset, but what really matters is what stays with you.”

* * *

The thing that sticks with most people who experience the Planned Parenthood VR film “Across the Line” is the harsh, accusing voice of a man outside the clinic. “You’re a whore, shame on you, maybe your parents should have aborted you!” he screams. The viewer can’t see the man shouting it, but his voice is very real, and feels less than a foot away. “Across the Line” gives a sense of what it’s like to access abortion care at a clinic ringed by protesters. In recent years there has been an uptick in women telling their stories of being accosted by protesters outside clinics, but there’s something about feeling surrounded by them in VR that triggers a different level of empathy. Part of “Across the Line,” created with the help of immersive journalist Nonny de la Peña, is shot documentary-style with a 360-degree camera and actors playing patients and protesters. That part provides tension, but it’s when you get to the front of the clinic that things really start to feel visceral. The people around you become digital animations, but their voices are real — recorded outside an actual Planned Parenthood clinic as patients walked in. Their words are right in your ears and you can’t easily look away from their angry faces.

Many people are shaken when they take off their headsets. At the VR for Change Summit in New York in August, Planned Parenthood’s executive vice president and chief brand and experience officer, Dawn Laguens, shared the story of a conservative, anti-choice lawmaker who donned a headset, viewed “Across the Line,” and left in a fury about the way the protesters treated the patients. This is the most common way that people are moved by these experiences — few have immediate life-changing experiences, but instead feel themselves disturbed or inspired enough to start thinking about something a bit differently. It works for people who are already amenable to change as well, of course, but in sometimes surprising ways. Laguens also spoke of a man who had been a clinic escort for more than a decade who left the Across the Line experience in tears, realizing that he’d long since learned to block out the jeers and shouts and protesters, but that wasn’t possible for the women walking right beside him.

There are still challenges with VR. It’s hard to get 360 video and sound from an event to mesh together well in a VR experience, so they can sometimes feel a bit less than immersive. But Planned Parenthood conducted evaluations with the help of an outside organization and found that people were genuinely moved. They surveyed a group that was majority male, predominantly white, and mostly liberal, and even with that last demographic they found that the group that saw “Across the Line” disapproved of some types of harassment more than those who hadn’t seen it. Perhaps more significantly, the experience was linked to attitude changes in people who reported having moderate or slightly conservative political views. After the experience, many of those people shifted their views to believing that protesters should not share anti-abortion views outside clinics, and some even came to “strongly agree” with the statement that they would support a woman who had an abortion by driving her to an appointment, “even if I didn’t agree with her decision.”

Changing views about abortion is perhaps the gold standard for changing minds via social media, but the technology is being used to address more subtle harassment and discrimination as well.

* * *

Until a few years ago, Natalie Egan was living in a bubble. By her own admission, she was isolated from the way most people lived, working as a successful entrepreneur with highly coveted venture capital suitors. At the time she also presented as a man in an industry dominated by men.

“We’re naturally wired with empathy, but I think that particular dynamic can really isolate people from reality and the rest of the world,” she says.

Then she came out as a trans woman, began to physically transition, and the empathy gap became more clear than it had ever been. As she began to move through the world perceived as a woman instead of a man, the difference in how she was treated was stark. She was subject to disrespectful language and jokes, and during transactions related to both life and work she said some people refused to look her in the eye.

“I went from being in a privileged space to being on the outer edges of one of the most marginalized communities in the world,” Egan says.

She wanted her peers in the business world to understand just how divergent the experiences of men and women in the industry could be. In 2016 she launched Translator, which began as a social network for the transgender community, but soon morphed into a vehicle for technology-assisted diversity and inclusion experiences for organizations and corporations of all sizes. The company uses chat bots, apps, and customized virtual reality experiences to bring the largely white and male employee base of organizations like the New York City Department of Education and the digital consultancy Rain a little closer to understanding what the women, gender nonconforming people, people with disabilities and people of color around them experience on a daily basis.

One of the strongest tools is the ability to highlight individuals’ unconscious bias, even though it can be agitating for some people, says Egan.

We engage with people differently at a cocktail party than we do when we see them on the street, for example. Simulating these experiences can bring up some uncomfortable truths about unconscious bias. Translator doesn’t have stock VR experiences; instead, they make bespoke ones for each client. In one recent experience, participants donned a headset to find themselves in several different situations with the same people — a dark street, a cocktail party, a work meeting. They were then asked to anonymously log their gut feelings each time. Sometimes, those feelings don’t match up. It’s not a pleasant experience, but that’s the point. And it’s hard to deny that for people open to it, it works.

“It’s amazing, when you change the context, how much people’s attitude and behavior shifts,” says Egan.

Egan and her team are currently working on a custom VR unconscious bias experience for one of the largest media companies in the U.S. This technology can still be very expensive, but group experiences like those in an office setting can have a real impact.

In fact, that sometimes happens unintentionally. Andrew Daffy, an artist and technologist based in London, last year created a VR experience called HOLO DOODLE that allowed two people to play Pictionary together in a VR universe as pink monkeys. It was just for fun, but when people began talking about how it made them feel less inhibited and more able to communicate with the person they played with, Daffy and his team decided to make some changes. Last year at the annual computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH, they debuted a new version of the game, called I Am A Robot, that allowed groups of people to don headsets and become genderless robots at either a ballet recital, cocktail gathering, or dance party. The response from participants was surprising — men in suits who swore they wouldn’t dance became entirely different people when in the genderless VR world — but it was the experience of two volunteers that moved Daffy most: one had social anxiety and had struggled to enjoy herself at the conference until she put the headset on and, inhibitions gone, danced and laughed for the first time in days. Another said they felt comfortable being gender-free for the first time in their life.

“We didn’t make this to create social change, we just stumbled across it and thought, ‘holy shit, this is the area we should be going into. It doesn’t have to be a game,’” he says.

As technology continues to evolve, people are naturally concerned about what will happen to our ability to connect with one another as humans. While most technologists agree there are some concerns, they are also largely optimistic about the positive impact technology can have.

“It’s understandable to be worried about manipulation, and this kind of technology can seem so sci-fi and geeky and horrid,” Daffy says. “But there can also be such beauty.”

Sex still sells, and Australia’s firefighter calendars prove it

New York firefighters hold up the February photo for the FDNY's Calendar of Heroes (Credit: AP/Mary Altaffer)

In a small, comfortably crammed souvenir shop in one of downtown Manhattan’s municipal buildings on December 5, men and (mostly) women stood in a line that wound around display racks of baby-sized NYC Traffic Cop night glow safety jackets and DOE Christmas ornaments. They were either waiting to purchase a 2018 Fire Department of New York calendar or waiting to get theirs signed by seven of the firefighters featured in the calendar who were sitting, somewhat monumentally,  in the corner.

“I see you found your favorite month!” said a smiling photographer in a yellow jacket named Katy, snapping my picture with my newly signed calendar. Behind me, September waved his mother over from the cash register to get her calendar signed.

The signing was no large, public event. Mostly city workers attended along with friends and family of the FDNY. Compared to events associated with the likes of South Florida and Australia’s calendars, the New York signing was modest. As a result, the city’s calendar brings in humbler donations and funnels them into a single charity, the FDNY Foundation, which funds fire safety education, CPR training for teens, and equipment for the FDNY.

When stacked up against the showmanship emphasized by these other regions’ calendars, it’s really no surprise that New York’s fundraising dollars also pale. After all, sex sells, and some firefighter calendars are happy to capitalize.

“I always wanted to work out and play the part of a firefighter,” said Al Lawrence, who’s worked as a firefighter paramedic for Dazie Fire Rescue in South Florida for the past 17 years. This is his fifth year in the South Florida Firefighters Calendar, which he said requires a serious workout regimen and some dancing skills.

“You have to be in great shape, and the people will tell you, You don’t look like your picture in the calendar, are you Photoshopped? They want to see the real you, so you have to put the work in and the preparation to be what they’re looking for.”

“They” are the people who show up to the calendar’s various charity fundraising events, which raise money for charities like Here’s Help, a drug rehabilitation program, and Baby Safe Haven. The largest of these events is Secretary’s Day, when judges and fans select which firefighters get to appear in next year’s calendar.

Tables range from $300 to $1,000 at the event, with more expensive tables located closer to the stage. “Secretary’s Day is huge, it’s like 1,000 women,” said Lawrence. “Women get the day off, bosses send them.” As for aspiring calendar models’ role at the event, they pick a song, come on stage to that song, and “do a dance, a skit, or something — you can’t just go out there and take your shirt off.” Women scream and throw roses at the men, who gyrate and gleam in stage lights. Then, the audience votes.

“I believe, to date, we’ve made about $250,000 in donations to local charities here,” said Lisette Rodriguez, director of development, marketing, and events for the calendar, which started in 1992. Funds come from the calendars’ sales and various events, including Secretary’s Day, “club events,” and holiday appearances at the mall. Secretary’s Day is “kind of a party atmosphere,” she explained, “but it’s the most effective at helping us raise money for charities.”

You could compare this to the Kansas Firefighter Calendar’s annual “judging event,” which volunteer firefighter and Vice President of the Kansas Firefighters Alliance, Jay Maness, called “a great big party, for lack of better terms,” but the atmosphere is markedly different from the event in Miami.

“We’ll have food catered in, we’ll have a bar, and we’ll have judges that are local celebrities, news anchors, business leaders from the area,” Maness described. “The candidates will come out and do a bio about themselves on stage, [they’ll] do a talent, a lot of them will dance around . . . give their background, and talk about their aspirations for the future.” But unlike Secretary’s Day, the best table costs $250, and though tickets cost $25, “we will not turn anybody down until the fire marshal says we’re at capacity,” Maness said.

Also unlike Secretary’s Day, the audience at Kansas’s “judging event” doesn’t ultimately pick who gets to appear in the calendar. The calendar’s board of directors does — all of whom are volunteers, along with the calendar’s photographer — and they do it based more on the firefighter’s character than his impressive physique.

“If you’ve looked at other firefighter calendars from across the world, you’ll see a lot of sexual or provocative nature in them and that’s something that we don’t want because we’re a charitable organization from our roots,” Maness said. The calendar heavily emphasizes both cancer and suicide prevention among firefighters, funding two, former firefighter speakers who travel the country to promote awareness of both issues, respectively. “So we strive to promote health and fitness and aren’t necessarily trying to present firefighters in a way that’s going to make money for us.”

The selection process is even more demure in New York, where, after getting their applications accepted, candidates show up to the Fire Museum in Manhattan and get their picture taken “holding a card with your name and where you work on it,” described Lieutenant Bill Lynch, November in 2018’s calendar. Candidates pose for a forward-facing picture, two angled ones, and “one embarrassing one where you had your back to the camera and had you flex your muscles.” After that, they find out whether or not they’ll make the cut.

Meanwhile, Lawrence in South Florida works out frequently to “present the image of a firefighter” to the calendar’s fans all year round, and Australia’s calendar photo shoots look like “a full on movie production,” according to David Rogers, director of the Australian Firefighters Calendar.

Australia’s internationally recognized firefighter calendar models recently returned from New York, where they’d made multiple television appearances, including on Steve Harvey’s talk show. Since its inception in 1993, the Australian calendars (there are now three, the classic “Hot Firefighters” calendar, the “Animal Calendar” — think hot firefighters posing with koalas—and the “Puppy Calendar” — you get the gist) have raised around $2.3 million, with people buying in the US, UK, Germany, and countries throughout Asia.

“We’re very selective of who we put in [the calendars] because it’s representative of Australian culture,” explained Rogers, who noted that the product is “monstrous overseas.” The selection process for getting into the calendar involves a photo judging contest, where a panel of “about 20 women” see photographs of firefighters who would like to be featured and pick their favorites.

“[The women] come from our charity or corporate partners [and] battle it out.” Rogers said the judges make comments like, “What are you picking that guy for, he’s bloody ugly,” as they hold up ratings of 1, 3, 7, or 10. “I didn’t have enough pieces of paper to do more,” he explained.

The Australian Firefighters Calendar donates to charities like the Children’s Hospital Foundation, and because they’ve gotten so popular outside of the country, they also offer funds to organizations abroad. “We donate a dollar from every calendar to the California wildfire relief fund in the US,” Rogers said. “We’ll continue to do that because people [in the US] keep buying the calendar.”

Back in New York, Lieutenant Lynch wasn’t sure how many people showed up for the men’s calendar signing this year, but he said “it was a very good turnout — the line looped around inside the store and it went outside.” At one point during the low-key event, Lynch noticed Maria Valenzuela, an emergency medical technician featured in the women’s FDNY calendar, waiting in line. He good-naturedly announced that she’d be available to sign anybody’s women’s calendars.

Reflecting on his own shoot for the calendar, Lynch noted that sex appeal was never explicitly a part of the equation. “In fact, at one point, my bunker pants — because I wasn’t wearing my uniform pants underneath [or] a belt, so they were a little loose — they actually told me to tighten them up and pull them up a little bit to keep it classy,” he said.

In Australia’s calendars, that clearly wasn’t a concern.