Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 326

How to protect your eyes during the solar eclipse: Don’t look directly at the sun!

As excitement builds among amateur astronomers and sky gazers for the 2017 total solar eclipse on Monday, Aug. 21, there are safety precautions to keep in mind to avoid eye damage and in some cases, blindness.

Salon spoke with Jason Kendall, a board member at the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York and an astronomy lecturer at Hunter College and William Paterson University, about the risks associated with looking at the sun with your naked eye during the eclipse.

Kendall is traveling to Glendo, Wyoming, to view the event, which is within the eclipse’s path of totality, a stretch touching 14 states where the sky will darken when the moon casts a shadow onto Earth.

On what to avoid doing during the eclipse

First and foremost, don’t look at the sun. The sun will not be any dimmer unless you’re in the path of totality. I don’t care what anybody says, don’t look at the sun. Don’t use a telescope that doesn’t have a proper solar filter. Don’t look with binoculars. If you take a picture of it with your DSLR camera, likely you’re going to blow out the chip on your camera.

On looking at the solar eclipse with mirrored devices

If you use binoculars and look at the sun, you will go blind. It’s as simple as that. Simple as that and it won’t take long. It’ll take less than a second.

On the availability of solar filters and eclipse glasses

From what I’ve heard, they’re pretty much sold out everywhere in the United States, and it’s too late to get them Fed-ex’d to wherever you’re at, so here’s what you want to do: build a pinhole camera.

Learn more about building your own pinhole camera here, and read more about NASA’s safety tips.

How the Rolling Stones went disco: Inside the making of “Miss You”

(Credit: AP/Bloomsbury Publishing)

Written in A minor, the song begins with a catchy guitar riff that will turn out to echo the vocal melody over an insistent “four-on-the floor” bass drum from Charlie Watts. In the third measure, the snare drum kicks in, and the guitar line is echoed by a harmonica two measures later. The sound is unmistakable if you’re listening to the album in the summer of 1978: it’s the Stones doing disco.

“Disco was [in the air] when ‘Miss You’ came around,” Ron Wood would later say. “We didn’t get together and say, ‘Let’s make a disco song.’ It was a rhythm that was popular and so we made a song like that.” According to Charlie Watts, “Miss You” was “heavily influenced by going to the discos. You can hear it in a lot of those ‘four on the floor’ rhythms and Philadelphia-style drumming.” Declaring that “in the 1970s . . . there were some fantastic dance records out,” Watts recalls that “Mick and I used to go to discos a lot. A great way to hear a dance record is by listening to it in a dance hall or disco — I used to go to dance halls to look at the drummers when I was a kid.” Richards, of course, was more dismissive: “We didn’t think much of ‘Miss You’ when we were doing it,” he said later.

It was “Aah, Mick’s been to the disco and has come out humming some other song.” It’s a result of all the nights Mick spent at Studio 54 and coming up with that beat, that four on the floor. And he said, add the melody to the beat. We just thought we’d put our oar in on Mick wanting to do some disco shit, keep the man happy. But as we got into it, it became quite an interesting beat. And we realized, maybe we’ve got a quintessential disco thing here. And out of it we got a huge hit. The rest of the album doesn’t sound anything like “Miss You.”

According to Watts, “Keith went mad, but it sounded great on the dance floor.” The musical context for “Miss You” includes songs like the Village People’s “YMCA” (1978), which Watts recalls Jagger singing on their way home from a dance club in Munich after a night at a club, and the more complex songs by Earth, Wind & Fire, which Watts deemed “fabulous.” Jagger would insist however, that “Miss You” wasn’t simply a disco song: “‘Miss You’ wasn’t disco disco. Disco records at that time didn’t have guitars much, and they all had shimmering string lines and oo-eeoo-ee girls. It was influenced by it, but not it. I like that.” The chorus of “Miss You” offers us the Stones’ take on disco’s “oo-eeoo-ee” via Jagger’s falsetto doubling of the song’s signature guitar line, and it’s both compelling and arch at the same time.

One of the elements that make the song unforgettable is the harmonica work contributed by a street musician named James Whiting, who played under the name “Sugar Blue.” Whiting was a 22-year-old from Harlem, who was in Paris subsisting on what he could make playing harmonica in the Paris Metro. Jagger told Rolling Stone, “Sandy Whitelaw discovered him playing in the Paris Metro. He’s a blues harpist from America, and he plays not only in the subway but also in a club called La Vielle Grille. He’s a very strange and talented musician.” Wood would later recall Sugar Blue’s playing with admiration: “The thing that blew my mind was what that guy could do, because I play a little harmonica. I know how to suck and bend, blow and bend like Jimmy Reed, but if you gave a harmonica to Sugar Blue, he could play in C, C sharp, C flat, B, A and F, all on the one harmonica. The way he bent it was unreal.”

Sugar Blue was one of the few session musicians who played on Some Girls. The others were Mel Collins, who had played with King Crimson, on the saxophone and the Faces’ keyboardist Ian McLagan on electric piano. The liner notes for “Shattered” list three mystery guests on “percussion” — “1 Moroccan, 1 Jew, 1 Wasp.” In his memoir All the Rage (2000), McLagan writes that Bad Company’s Simon Kirke played congas on the track.

Rolling Stone magazine would laud the Stones for “ditch[ing] the vacuousness of Billy Preston,” but in fact Preston inadvertently played a large role in the success of the album by suggesting the bass line that would become a key component of “Miss You,” which was the album’s first single. The song was mixed as a 45 in New York by Bob Clearmountain, who also helped produce an eight-minute version to be played in discos: it would be the band’s first 12-inch single. Some copies of the 12-inch were pressed in pink vinyl. (Mine, alas, has gone the way of all things.) A 7:33 minute version of the song appears on the compilation album Rarities, 1971–2003, and the accompanying liner notes tell us that, with Clearmountain’s help, “Jagger took the basic tracks and extended them, looping the distinctive bass line and electric piano figures, then adding ad-libbed guitar crosstalk and the harmonica of Sugar Blue, a Chicago native the Stones discovered playing in a Paris metro station.” “Miss You” spent 7 weeks on the UK charts, eventually reached No. 3, but it was a much bigger hit in the US, where it would spend 20 weeks on the charts — longer than any of the band’s previous 29 singles — eventually reaching No. 1, the last Stones single to achieve that feat.

Jagger and Clearmountain punch up the bass line on the 12-inch, and if you listen to that version you quickly understand how integral the bass line is to the overall effect of the song, even in its shorter version.

Richards, who was frequently dismissive of Wyman’s contributions to the band, praised Wyman’s work on “Miss You.” In an interview with Melody Maker in 1979, Richards said:

Bill is leaping ahead. Charlie is so magnificent you expect him to go on getting better, and if it doesn’t get better at a session you sorta moan at him, “Why aren’t you better than last time ’cos you always are!” Bill tends to go more in cycles, and in the last couple of years I haven’t seen him so happy and playing so well. Something like “Miss You” proves it.

Wyman himself credited the much-maligned Billy Preston with the inspiration for the song’s bass part:

The idea for the bass lines came from Billy Preston. We’d cut a rough demo a year earlier after a recording session. I’d already gone home and Billy picked up my old bass when they started running through that song. When we finally came to do the tune, the boys said, “Why don’t you work around Billy’s ideas?” I listened to it, heard that basic run, and took it from there. It took some polishing, but the basic idea was Billy’s.

Engineer Charles Kimsey remembers that “‘Miss You’ took quite a time to come together. Bill needed to go to quite a few clubs before he got that bass line sorted out. But he did sort it out, and bless him, it made that song.”

Seeing without eyes — the unexpected world of nonvisual photoreception

(Credit: Wikimedia/Didier Descouens (CC))

We humans are uncommonly visual creatures. And those of us endowed with normal sight are used to thinking of our eyes as vital to how we experience the world.

Vision is an advanced form of photoreception — that is, light sensing. But we also experience other more rudimentary forms of photoreception in our daily lives. We all know, for instance, the delight of perceiving the warm sun on our skin, in this case using heat as a substitute for light. No eyes or even special photoreceptor cells are necessary.

But scientists have discovered in recent decades that many animals — including human beings — do have specialized light-detecting molecules in unexpected places, outside of the eyes. These “extraocular photoreceptors” are usually found in the central nervous system or in the skin, but also frequently in internal organs. What are light-sensing molecules doing in places beyond the eyes?

Vision depends on detecting light

All the visual cells identified in animals detect light using a single family of proteins, called the opsins. These proteins grab a light-sensitive molecule — derived from vitamin A — that changes its structure when exposed to light. The opsin in turn changes its own shape and turns on signaling pathways in photoreceptor cells that ultimately send a message to the brain that light has been detected.

Most of our conscious vision stems from photoreceptors in the retina, the light-sensitive layer at the back of our eyeball. In animals with backbones (vertebrates), cells that detect light for vision are vaguely shaped like rods or cones, giving them their familiar names.

We’ve known for a while that other vertebrates have additional photoreceptors in their brains. But scientists had long thought that rods and cones were pretty much the whole story of mammalian vision. Thus, the discovery in the early 2000s by David Berson’s group at Brown University of other cells in a mouse retina that respond to light came as a shock.

Even stranger were associated discoveries in many laboratories demonstrating that these cells contained a new class of opsin proteins called the melanopsins, never before seen in vertebrates (but similar to those of many invertebrates). They seem not to be involved in conscious vision.

We can hardly call them extraocular since they’re right there in the eye. Instead they’re often referred to as “nonvisual” photoreceptors. That’s the term researchers use for all animal photoreceptors that aren’t associated with imaging pathways in nervous systems.

So now we know there are nonvisual photoreceptors in the eyes themselves in many — perhaps most — animals. Where else can we find them throughout body?

The hunt for photoreceptors not in the eyes

In general, identifying a potential extraocular photoreceptor means searching for the proteins that can detect light, the opsins. The advent of inexpensive and efficient molecular genetic technologies has made the search for opsins a cottage industry in laboratories worldwide.

Cells that contain opsins are probably active photoreceptors, but researchers use physiological or behavioral tests to confirm this. For example, they can search for electrical changes or look for a change in an animal’s activity when they expose the cell to light.

The photoreceptors scientists have found beyond the eyes are most commonly located in the central nervous system. Almost all animals have several types in the brain and often in the nerves as well.

The skin is where we see most other light receptors, particularly in active color-changing cells or skin organs called chromatophores. These are the black, brown or brightly colored spots sported by many fish, crabs or frogs. They reach their highest development in the cephalopods: octopus, squid and cuttlefish. Animals actively control their color or pattern for several reasons, most often for camouflage (to match the color and pattern of the background) or to produce bright, prominent signals for aggression or attracting a mate.

Surprisingly, there is a second class of light-sensitive molecules besides the opsins, never used for vision (as far as we know). They show up in some nervous structures, such as the brains or antennae of some insects and even in bird retinas. These are the cryptochromes, well-named because their functions and methods of action are still poorly understood. Cryptochromes were originally discovered in plants, where they control growth and annual reproductive changes.

Why detect light outside the eyes?

Now that we know that these photoreceptors can be found throughout animals’ bodies, what in the world are they actually doing? Obviously, their function depends in part on their location.

Generally, they regulate light-mediated behavior that exists below the level of consciousness and that doesn’t require having an extremely precise knowledge of a light source’s location in space or time. Typical functions include the timing of daily cycles of alertness, sleep and wake, mood, body temperature and numerous other internal cycles that are synchronized to the changes of day and night.

Biological clocks that maintain regular physiological cycles — and cause the discomforts of jet lag — nearly always are controlled by these photoreceptors. These detectors are also important for the opening and closing of the eye’s pupil to help adjust to varying light levels. Skin photoreceptors like those in fish or octopus often control color and pattern variations.

In some animals, they have a quite different, and rather amazing, task — providing magnetoreception, the ability to detect the Earth’s magnetic field. This capacity is based on the cryptochromes, which apparently underlie mechanisms for magnetic orientation in animals as different as birds and cockroaches.

People have nonvisual photoreceptor abilities, too

With the discovery of light-sensitive retinal cells in addition to rods and cones in mammalian retinas, it became obvious that humans, too, must use nonvisual pathways for control of behavior and function.

Pupil size varies with changing light, even in functionally blind humans. A joint British-American study, published in 2007, found that patients who have lost all rods and cones due to genetic disorders can still have light-responsive daily rhythms and pupils. One patient could even report the sensation of “brightness” when shown a blue light, which should stimulate the retinal non-rod, non-cone photoreceptors.

Recent research with rodents at Johns Hopkins University by Samer Hattar’s group suggests that nonvisual pathways can regulate mood, learning ability and even the sensitivity of conscious vision.

Finally, an unexpected recent finding in research led by Solomon Snyder and Dan Berkowitz, also at Johns Hopkins University, found that blood vessels in mice contain melanopsin, the opsin used in retinal nonvisual photoreception. They found that this light-sensitive protein can regulate blood vessels’ contraction and relaxation. Since humans are likely to have the same system, this could partially explain the increase in heart attacks in the morning, which are perhaps associated with blood pressure changes occurring at that time.

We know nonvisual light detection is ubiquitous and significant in the lives of animals. Future research will continue to untangle its effects on human health and well-being.

We know nonvisual light detection is ubiquitous and significant in the lives of animals. Future research will continue to untangle its effects on human health and well-being.

Thomas Cronin, Professor of Biological Sciences, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Trump rushes to Twitter to slam peaceful anti-racist protesters in Boston

(Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)

Protesters against the alt-right are now “anti-police agitators” to the president, apparently.

Tens of thousands of people came out to protest white supremacists in Boston on Saturday and Donald Trump rushed to Twitter to suggest they fomented violence against the police — hours after a spat of shootings left multiple police officers killed and wounded across the country.

And in a common pattern, Trump was faster to denounce the peaceful, anti-hate protest than the actual white supremacists and neo-Nazis who gathered in Boston Common for a “free speech rally.” Event planners were forced to uninvite leading figures in the alt-right movement following the Charlottesville violence.

Great job by all law enforcement officers and Boston Mayor @Marty_Walsh.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2017

In contrast, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh thanked the “people who came out to share that message of love not hate; to fight back against racism; to fight back against anti-Semitism; to fight back against white supremacy.”

“I want to thank everyone who came out to express themselves in such a positive, great manner today,” Walsh said at a press conference held after the protesters peaceful dispersed. “You could just feel a sense of pride there,” he added.

#BlackLivesMatter organized march started in Boston against racism & Alt-light rally at #BostonCommon & in solidarity w #Charlottesville. pic.twitter.com/hEljI0lyxG

— Sara Sidner (@sarasidnerCNN) August 19, 2017

Trump on Saturday further praised the job done by all law enforcement involved with the rally as well as Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, a Democrat.

“Great job by all law enforcement officers and Boston Mayor @Marty_Walsh,” Trump wrote.

Nearly one hour later, Trump finally tweeted support for the protesters:

I want to applaud the many protestors in Boston who are speaking out against bigotry and hate. Our country will soon come together as one!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2017

Our great country has been divided for decades. Sometimes you need protest in order to heal, & we will heal, & be stronger than ever before!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2017

This math puzzle will help you plan your next party

Let’s say you’re planning your next party and agonizing over the guest list. To whom should you send invitations? What combination of friends and strangers is the right mix?

It turns out mathematicians have been working on a version of this problem for nearly a century. Depending on what you want, the answer can be complicated.

Our book, “The Fascinating World of Graph Theory,” explores puzzles like these and shows how they can be solved through graphs. A question like this one might seem small, but it’s a beautiful demonstration of how graphs can be used to solve mathematical problems in such diverse fields as the sciences, communication and society.

A puzzle is born

While it’s well-known that Harvard is one of the top academic universities in the country, you might be surprised to learn that there was a time when Harvard had one of the nation’s best football teams. But in 1931, led by All–American quarterback Barry Wood, such was the case.

That season Harvard played Army. At halftime, unexpectedly, Army led Harvard 13–0. Clearly upset, Harvard’s president told Army’s commandant of cadets that while Army may be better than Harvard in football, Harvard was superior in a more scholarly competition.

Though Harvard came back to defeat Army 14-13, the commandant accepted the challenge to compete against Harvard in something more scholarly. It was agreed that the two would compete — in mathematics. This led to Army and Harvard selecting mathematics teams; the showdown occurred in West Point in 1933. To Harvard’s surprise, Army won.

The Harvard–Army competition eventually led to an annual mathematics competition for undergraduates in 1938, called the Putnam exam, named for William Lowell Putnam, a relative of Harvard’s president. This exam was designed to stimulate a healthy rivalry in mathematics in the United States and Canada. Over the years and continuing to this day, this exam has contained many interesting and often challenging problems — including the one we describe above.

Red and blue lines

The 1953 exam contained the following problem (reworded a bit): There are six points in the plane. Every point is connected to every other point by a line that’s either blue or red. Show that there are three of these points between which only lines of the same color are drawn.

In math, if there is a collection of points with lines drawn between some pairs of points, that structure is called a graph. The study of these graphs is called graph theory. In graph theory, however, the points are called vertices and the lines are called edges.

Graphs can be used to represent a wide variety of situations. For example, in this Putnam problem, a point can represent a person, a red line can mean the people are friends and a blue line means that they are strangers.

For example, let’s call the points A, B, C, D, E, F and select one of them, say A. Of the five lines drawn from A to the other five points, there must be three lines of the same color.

Say the lines from A to B, C, D are all red. If a line between any two of B, C, D is red, then there are three points with only red lines between them. If no line between any two of B, C, D is red, then they are all blue.

What if there were only five points? There may not be three points where all lines between them are colored the same. For example, the lines A–B, B–C, C–D, D–E, E–A may be red, with the others blue.

From what we saw, then, the smallest number of people who can be invited to a party (where every two people are either friends or strangers) such that there are three mutual friends or three mutual strangers is six.

What if we would like four people to be mutual friends or mutual strangers? What is the smallest number of people we must invite to a party to be certain of this? This question has been answered. It’s 18.

What if we would like five people to be mutual friends or mutual strangers? In this situation, the smallest number of people to invite to a party to be guaranteed of this is — unknown. Nobody knows. While this problem is easy to describe and perhaps sounds rather simple, it is notoriously difficult.

Ramsey numbers

What we have been discussing is a type of number in graph theory called a Ramsey number. These numbers are named for the British philosopher, economist and mathematician Frank Plumpton Ramsey.

Ramsey died at the age of 26 but obtained at his very early age a very curious theorem in mathematics, which gave rise to our question here. Say we have another plane full of points connected by red and blue lines. We pick two positive integers, named r and s. We want to have exactly r points where all lines between them are red or s points where all lines between them are blue. What’s the smallest number of points we can do this with? That’s called a Ramsey number.

For example, say we want our plane to have at least three points connected by all red lines and three points connected by all blue lines. The Ramsey number — the smallest number of points we need to make this happen — is six.

When mathematicians look at a problem, they often ask themselves: Does this suggest another question? This is what has happened with Ramsey numbers – and party problems.

For example, here’s one: Five girls are planning a party. They have decided to invite some boys to the party, whether they know the boys or not. How many boys do they need to invite to be certain that there will always be three boys among them such that three of the five girls are either friends with all three boys or are not acquainted with all three boys? It’s probably not easy to make a good guess at the answer. It’s 41!

Very few Ramsey numbers are known. However, this doesn’t stop mathematicians from trying to solve such problems. Often, failing to solve one problem can lead to an even more interesting problem. Such is the life of a mathematician.



Gary Chartrand, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, Western Michigan University; Arthur Benjamin, Professor of Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College, and Ping Zhang, Professor of Mathematics, Western Michigan University

A new generation of white supremacists emerges in Charlottesville

(Credit: Getty/Chet Strange)

The white supremacist forces arrayed in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend — the largest gathering of its sort in at least a generation — represented a new incarnation of the white supremacy movement. Old-guard groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations and the Nazi skinheads, which had long stood at the center of racist politics in America, were largely absent.

Instead, the ranks of the young men who drove to Charlottesville with clubs, shields, pepper spray and guns included many college-educated people who have left the political mainstream in favor of extremist ideologies over the past few years. A large number have adopted a very clean cut, frat-boyish look designed to appeal to the average white guy in a way that KKK robes or skinhead regalia never could. Interviews show that at least some of these leaders have spent time in the U.S. armed forces.

Many belong to new organizations like Vanguard America, Identity Evropa, the Traditionalist Workers Party and True Cascadia, which have seen their numbers expand dramatically in the past year. Most of these groups view themselves as part of a broader “alt-right” movement that represents the extreme edge of right-wing politics in the U.S.

These organizations exhibited unprecedented organization and tactical savvy. Hundreds of racist activists converged on a park on Friday night, striding through the darkness in groups of five to 20 people. A handful of leaders with headsets and handheld radios gave orders as a pickup truck full of torches pulled up nearby. Within minutes, their numbers had swelled well into the hundreds. They quickly and efficiently formed a lengthy procession and begun marching, torches alight, through the campus of the University of Virginia.

Despite intense interest from the media, police and local anti-racists, the white supremacists kept the location of their intimidating nighttime march secret until the last moment.

The next day, the far-right forces — likely numbering between 1,000 and 1,500 — marched to Emancipation Park. Once again, they arrived in small blocs under military-style command. The racist groups were at least as organized and disciplined as the police, who appeared to have no clear plan for what to do when the violence escalated. The racist groups stood their ground at the park and were not dislodged for many hours.

For many of them, this will be seen as victory. “Every rally we’re going to be more organized, we’re going to have more people, and it’s going to be harder and harder for them to shut us down,” said a spokesman for Vanguard America, a fascist group, who gave his name as “Thomas.” “White people are pretty good at getting organized.”

And though police arrested James Fields Jr., a 20-year-old Ohio man, for allegedly driving a Dodge Charger into a crowd of anti-racist protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and wounding many others, the white supremacists generally avoided arrests.

They also outmaneuvered their anti-racist opponents. On Saturday, a multifaith group met at the historic First Baptist Church for a sunrise prayer ceremony featuring academic Cornel West and pastor Traci Blackmon. The anti-racists, many of them clergy members, walked quietly to Emancipation Park, where they were vastly outnumbered by the white supremacists.

Later, a band of more aggressive counter-protesters showed up at the park, chanting “Appalachia coming at ya. Nazi punks we’re gonna smash ya!” These militant “antifa,” or antifascists, were also repelled by the white supremacists.

Given the scale of the protests, the far-right groups suffered few injuries. That was particularly notable given the fact that multiple people near the protests were armed. Throughout the weekend, right-wing and left-wing militias equipped with assault rifles, pistols and body armor patrolled the streets of Charlottesville. (Virginia is an “open carry” state, so gun owners are legally allowed to tote around firearms.)

Many of the armed men viewed their role as maintaining a modicum of order. A “Three Percenter” militia out of New York state posted itself near Emancipation Park with the intention of keeping anti-racists from disrupting the rally. The group says it disapproves of racism but is dedicated to defending the free speech rights of all.

Blocks away, Redneck Revolt, a leftist militia from North Carolina, watched over the perimeter of a park where anti-racists had gathered, committed to preventing violent attacks by the white supremacist groups.

The presence of heavily armed citizens may have played a role in the decision of authorities to largely stay out of the violent skirmishes between the white supremacists and their opponents.

Those who actually marched included many new to the right-wing cause. The victory of Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election has energized a whole wave of young people who were previously apathetic or apolitical, rally organizer Eli Mosley told ProPublica. The president has served as “megaphone” for far-right ideas, he said.

Mosley and his comrades are seeking to draw in as many of these newly politicized young people as possible. “We’re winning,” he said. “We’re targeting the youth and making a movement that appeals to the youth.”

Some of those who’ve gravitated to the extreme right milieu are former liberals — like Mosley’s fellow rally organizer Jason Kessler — and supporters of Bernie Sanders. Many are ex-Libertarians.

“I was a libertarian,” said Mosley, as white supremacists chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!” in the background. “I looked around and noticed that most Libertarians were white men. I decided that the left was winning with identity politics, so I wanted to play identity politics too. I’m fascinated by leftist tactics, I read Saul Alinsky, Martin Luther King . . . This is our ’60s movement.”

7 ways teachers can respond to the evil of Charlottesville, starting now

(Credit: AP Photo/Steve Helber)

White supremacy did not appear as a surprise guest to this weekend’s events. It is a plague that permeates every aspect of our shared society. At the same time as it threatens to strip people of color of their lives and freedom, it corrodes the logic, reason and future of our society as a whole. White supremacy is also a deeply embedded feature of our education system even as it runs counter to the values we claim to hold in pursuit of education.

In response to this weekend’s deadly white supremacist rallies and violence in Charlottesville, there was a shared outrage among educators on social media. I saw a range of reactions. A lot of folks — especially white — asked, “How could this happen in America?” And a lot of folks — especially people of color — said, “We’ve been telling you that this is happening in America.”

What many of us shared was a conviction that the events in Charlottesville couldn’t go unchallenged. In considering effective responses while looking at the sea of hateful white faces in the media of the event, I wondered: Who grew this hate? Who planted it? Who nurtured it? Who protected it from exposure to education and love? With an eye to education, I asked, What schools failed to educate these white supremacists? Who were their teachers? Who taught this hate?

As teachers, our job is not solely to pour mathematics, science, language arts or any other knowledge into the heads of our students. It is our duty to our profession, to our society and to the students to lovingly teach them to learn and grow as complete humans. The fact that the violent white supremacists in Charlottesville moved through dozens of classrooms that taught English, social studies, math, science and other subjects while nurturing or enhancing their white supremacist ideals is an indictment of our daily practice. It says that their institutions may have effectively served math facts or essay writing, but it was with a side of white supremacy.

This may seem too harsh on my colleagues at predominantly white schools. Let me be clear: first, this is not about blame. I write out of deep urgency that we address the cultural and systemic failures in our school system that are promoting white supremacy. I ask you to consider how it is that we’ve grown accustomed to narratives regarding the failings of segregated schools that serve students of color, but not the schools that educated those who defend and promote that segregation.

So what do we do?

As we walk into our classrooms in the coming weeks, here are a number of concrete actions every educator can take to address the evil that was on display in Charlottesville. Some of these suggestions deal with Charlottesville specifically, but most will help educators address the longer term systemic challenges in our classrooms that foster white supremacy and other oppression.

Recognize that humanity and radical anti-racism is our curriculum for every subject. We should address events like Charlottesville and especially their root causes within our classes, and not just humanities. The irony that fields like mathematics and science claim to be neutral on social issues while at the same time exhibiting demographic differences that are mathematically impossible in a neutral system should be lost on no one. From the first day of class, we must demonstrate to students that the classroom is a space to bring all challenges and dilemmas they face, and that our curriculum will support them to build the skill and power to address those needs. Resources:  Rethinking Schools has materials across all fields of student and age ranges. Teaching Tolerance has materials that focus on humanities, but can be adapted for any subject. To teach responsively to events like Charlottesville, the curated hashtag #CharlottesvilleCurriculumshould be helpful.

Audit our own classrooms, schools and communities and then take action. We must assess and analyze the climate in every level of our school districts. We cannot effectively teach if we are unaware of how issues of race and oppression already exist in our spaces. For some of us, this may be difficult and expose feelings of guilt or helplessness. That is not the purpose of this work. What is, is. It’s better for us to know and understand reality than to be fearful that it might be exposed. Once we are familiar with what is happening in our classrooms, then we have the opportunity to see if it aligns with our values and make it so. Resources: We can investigate questions like the following: What is the racial breakdown of students, teachers and administrators in the school? How about the union leadership? How is discipline handled at the school, what is the racial/ability breakdown of those affected and is it from a carceral or restorative model? How do students interact in your own classroom and how does demographic impact participation and voice? Let’s examine all of these questions and more across intersectional lens of identity (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, religious background, age).

Prioritize voices of color in every classroom. In all environments including within predominantly white institutions, it’s vital that we as educators counter the priority on white male voices in education. There are many educators who read almost exclusively white (and in some cases white male) voices in their own pursuits of knowledge. Most white students will have next to zero access to authors of color outside of the school environment. This not only limits their exposure to brilliant work, but contributes to a white supremacist mindset that voices (and the lives) of people of color do not matter. Resources: We Need Diverse Books, contact experts of color on various topics to address students (compensating whenever possible).

Teach media literacy. Students must be equipped to read media for bias and develop their own understandings of news and events counter to a white supremacist narrative. The framing of black liberation groups as the equivalent to white terrorist organizations by the media is a cornerstone to the development of white supremacist movements in the U.S. Additionally, the inability to critically assessment sources both in traditional and social media aids white supremacists groups in their recruitment.Resources: Critical Media Project.

Create classrooms that students feel safe to share in, but are not conducive to the spread of hatred (we don’t get to debate each other’s humanity). Many classrooms either attempt to be “neutral” by ignoring politics for sterile content or allow open debate which usually focuses on whether the oppression or dehumanization of marginalized peoples is a good or bad thing. The former tends to softly side with the general white supremacy in American curricula, culture and assessments while the latter is not really a free exchange of ideas but rather an endorsement for students to use social inequities to bludgeon the victims of that inequity. Resources: Both the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance and GLSENhave incredible resources for developing classroom safe spaces.

Reject narratives of achievement and growth that embrace the tools and values of white supremacy. Much of our current definitions of achievement, growth and success tend to privilege culturally biased content knowledge while ignoring deep deficiencies in empathy and affinity for others. When we teach students to value a culturally biased test or we praise those who received far more resources without questioning that inequity, we are signalling to them that they deserve the visible benefits that inequities give them (or in the case of students of color, we deserve the oppression that those inequities represent). Resources: “Internalizing the Myth of Meritocracy.”

Reach beyond our current spaces to learn and grow. The fundamental segregation of our national school system means that many white students are educated in predominantly white spaces by almost exclusively white teachers. In these environments, it’s challenging for white educators to access anti-racist pedagogical resources and conversations. Resources: #Educolor.

I hope that by implementing these tactics, we can erode the scourge of white supremacy that permeates many of our classrooms, schools and communities. Education has had a history of fortifying white supremacy in our nation’s past and present, but with our work, education can be the means to eradicating it in our nation’s future.

The humans versus the machines: Broadcast and cable face the Silicon Valley invasion

Shonda Rhimes (Credit: Getty/Mike Coppola)

“I want the humans to be able to hold their own against the emerging strength of the machines.”

You can be forgiven for wondering if that line was lifted from an early version of “The Matrix” or one of the chapters in the “Terminator” franchise. Actually, the quote’s source is very much grounded in our reality and was referring to the state of culture and a looming shift in media consumption as we know it. FX CEO John Landgraf said it at a press conference in Los Angeles last Wednesday in reference to Silicon Valley’s invasion of the entertainment industry.

Landgraf’s executive presentations have become a Press Tour tradition, anchored by fascinating yet sobering data dumps. A past presentation birthed the term Peak TV, as Landgraf confirmed what people who write about TV already know, that there are simply too many series premieres in a given year for a sane and healthy human being to keep up with.

In case you’re curious, as of a week ago, 342 scripted series have debuted this year across all of broadcast, cable and streaming video on demand. At this time last year, 325 series had premiered.

These press conferences have led to one reporter nicknaming Landgraf the Mayor of Television. But his most recent address proved him to also be something of a sociologist and one of the industry’s more reliable Cassandras. At the heart of it was a prediction that Netflix, Amazon and eventually Apple will crumble the television industry structure as we know it.

“There’s ample evidence to demonstrate that Silicon Valley’s model is a winner take all or winner take most or a monopoly, duopoly structure,” Landgraf said. “. . . It’s about being able to bring billions upon billions of dollars even at loss to bear on conquering markets. And I think that’s a very stiff headwind, I would say, for anybody who’s not in Silicon Valley and not on that side of that business model.”

Later in the press conference he told the assembled journalists, “By the way, wait for the epic titanic battle for talent that’s coming. It’s a good time to be talent because there’s a lot of money coming your way, right?”

Proving the truth of that statement didn’t take long. On Sunday Netflix announced it has lured Shonda Rhimes and her production company Shondaland away from ABC Studios, where she created hits such as “Grey’s Anatomy,” “How to Get Away with Murder” and “Scandal” for the broadcast network over the past 15 years.

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“Ted [Sarandos] provides a clear, fearless space for creators at Netflix,” Rhimes said in a Netflix press release outlining her new partnership with the company and its chief content officer. “He understood what I was looking for — the opportunity to build a vibrant new storytelling home for writers with the unique creative freedom and instantaneous global reach provided by Netflix’s singular sense of innovation.”

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// ]]> Rhimes also stated she’ll continue to be involved in the production of her existing series, including steering “Scandal” through its final season. Not disclosed was how much this deal was worth, although Netflix has a reputation for offering significantly higher salaries than other networks and studios. Reports indicate that ABC paid Rhimes around $10 million per year.

Prior to that, “The Walking Dead” creator Robert Kirkman jumped from AMC’s ship to make a two-year overall deal with Amazon. Even as Landgraf spoke to reporters, news broke that Joel and Ethan Coen’s first series, a Western anthology titled “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” would debut on Netflix. (There was another whimper amidst all this bang: NBCUniversal’s comedy streaming service SeeSo, which launched in 2016, announced it would shut down later this year.)

In years past the only places established directors would have deigned to roll out their products would have been HBO or AMC or, yes, FX. These channels remain top pitch destinations, but as they and their broadcasting cohorts are quickly learning, legacy broadcasters simply don’t have the budgets or the global pervasiveness to compete on an equal playing field with tech’s mountains of cash.

Netflix expects to spend $6 billion on content in 2017. In the company’s second quarter letter to investors, executives stated that it will burn through $2 and $2.5 billion in free cash flow this year alone — a number dwarfed by the headline-grabber that the company is carrying $20.54 billion in long-term debt in its quest to crank out more original content.

This is why Landgraf is saying, “I’m raising my hand on behalf of not only me and my team at FX but, frankly, HBO and AMC and many others who are saying, you know, we think there’s value in the curation we bring.”

Strange, how quaint and noble that sounds.

Knowing that that FX, HBO and AMC spend more money in the creation and promotion of a single series than most human beings will see in a lifetime may not earn much sympathy from consumers tired of paying exorbitant monthly cable bills. But there is an aspect to Landgraf’s argument to which the average viewer, and citizen, would be wise to pay attention.

Landgraf connected the rising power of tech over legacy TV brands to four decades of market deregulation that affects every sector, including entertainment, politics and economics. That may be an odd connection for to him to make, but the common link is consumer innovation pricing.

“Why would investors extend seemingly infinite lines of credit to businesses which lose money while simultaneously devaluing businesses that are profitable?” he asked. “The answer, those investors must believe the government has lost its ability or will to regulate monopolies, and therefore, the key determinate of a business’s current value is its progress towards achieving an unassailable dominant future position, even if there are current losses rather than profits.”

In layman’s terms, Silicon Valley can take over entertainment by smothering consumers and competitors in options. Their options.

As a reminder, last year’s final count of scripted debuts was 455, which felt mindboggling at the time. But Landgraf conservatively predicts that by the close of 2017 more than 500 series will have premiered. Streaming debuts make up the majority of that number.

The FX CEO broke it down thusly: According to FX data, 79 additional series have been announced by various SVOD services that haven’t aired yet. He was careful to add the caveat that a number of these series may never debut — such is the way of the TV industry — but if all of them do, some 141 series will bow in 2017 solely on in the Netflixes, Amazons and Hulus of the world, bringing the grand total in the ballpark of 534 series.

And this does not account for any announcements Apple is expected to make.

“Even beyond television . . .we are all watching an epic battle unfold for who will control human attention, which is both a finite resource and the most economically valuable commodity on Earth, because who controls your attention controls the ability to monetize that attention,” Landgraf said. “This is the root of the battle between Walmart and Amazon, between Facebook and Google and Apple, between Instagram and Snapchat, between Netflix and Amazon and the legacy television brands.”

Landgraf began sharing these data-driven scripted series tabulations a few years ago, predicting in 2015 that the count would continue to rise until at least 2019. However, that was before Netflix ramped up its release schedule, flooding the zone with original series premiering on what feels like a weekly basis. Amazon has been slower to build its stable of originals, but it, too, has increased output. (It can also mitigate its financial losses with revenue generated from across other sectors of the company.) Even Hulu has stepped up to meet the challenge posed by its competition.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, more does not necessarily translate to better. Netflix has a lot of good series and only a smattering of great ones, consistent with the track records of standard broadcast and cable channels. The service also nabbed 91 nominations Emmy nominations in July.

Amazon also has produced a few Golden Globe and Emmy winners with “Transparent” and “Mozart in the Jungle.” Hulu, meanwhile, finally scored an original series that’s earning audience buzz, critical acclaim and awards nominations with “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

For Netflix, inundating the market appears to be paying off. But when a stream swells into an ocean, finding and cultivating the pearls lurking in its content bed becomes an increasingly difficult task for consumers. And some of the series promoted as gems were not highly valued in the marketplace, an example being the lethargic “Gypsy,” starring Naomi Watts, which arrived with great fanfare and was canceled with much snickering.

It’s worth pointing out that Landgraf’s speech came at the beginning of a day spent promoting his channel’s programming, which included panels for the FXX comedy “You’re the Worst” and the upcoming season of Pamela Adlon’s “Better Things,” as well as panels for a number of projects due later in the season helmed by Ryan Murphy.

Each of these titles and producers prove FX and its cable brethren still have pull in the television marketplace, as one of the first basic cable channels to make a point of nurturing prestige content such as “The Shield.” FX, along with AMC and more recently TNT (whose top executive Kevin Reilly used to have Landgraf’s job), has built a reputation as a brand driven by creative personalities such as “Atlanta” creator Donald Glover; Louis C.K., who co-created “Better Things” with Adlon; and Murphy, who has numerous projects in place on FX and its broadcast sibling Fox. The contented ones, to a person, cite their willingness to take less money for the ability to make their shows with little interference.

Essentially this is the currency Landgraf and channel executives can offer to content creators to counterbalance the large checks Sarandos or Amazon’s head of originals Roy Price can cut — that, and the assurance that their work will be easily discoverable.

For the moment, the tech giant companies appear to be much more likely to nab the Shonda Rhimeses, Robert Kirkmans and Louis C.K.s of the world than offer a chance to lesser known talents  on the level of  “You’re the Worst” creator Stephen Falk or start-up talents as Rob McElhenney, who was a relative unknown when he and Glenn Howerton developed “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

“If you’re an artist and you don’t want to work with one company, you pick up your briefcase, you go down the road . . . and you go work for another company,” Landgraf said. “There have also always been 10, 12, 15 midsized companies. I’m not saying that Disney or FOX wouldn’t take over the world if it could, but it’s just been a system like maybe a sports franchise, where no one team could take over the world and win every time. I don’t want to see that outcome in entertainment.”

But Landgraf and his ilk aren’t fools. In addition to his state of television chat, he also announced the roll out of FX’s own streaming-on-demand product FX+, which joins CBS All Access and standalone premium packages such as HBO Now and Showtime Anytime. Disney also recently stated that it is dissolving its relationship with Netflix in 2019 to launch its own streaming product, a move that partly explains why Netflix is so keen to quickly deepen its bench of originals. As its reach expands, fewer entertainment companies may choose to license their programs and films to Netflix because it strengthens its consumer value.

The machines are here to stay, but buyer habit and its impact on the marketplace doesn’t mean tech’s total victory is assured. “We’re going to have to evolve with the times. We’re going to have to evolve our business model,” Landgraf conceded. “But our strength is not the ability to pump $20 billion into buying hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pieces of content.”

“Wolf Warrior 2,” China’s answer to “Rambo,” is a map of the nation’s future

Oleg Prudius and Celina Jade in "Wolf Warrior II" (2017) (Credit: Deng Feng International Media)

A lean, muscular man with hard eyes dives from a ship’s deck into the waves. He swims beneath the surface towards a dinghy of bazooka-wielding African pirates, bullets cutting through the water all around him. After he capsizes the boat, an underwater kung fu sequence on par with anything ever offered by Keanu Reeves or Jet Li unfolds.

The hero emerges from the water, assumes control of empty vessel, picks up a sniper rifle, aims and — just as the second group of baddies is about to launch a rocket — shoots the attacker between the eyes from nearly a mile away.

The film, “Wolf Warrior 2,” has all the trappings of a big-budget Hollywood action franchise — but the writer, director and star is the Beijing-born Wu Jing, and the main language spoken in its 121-minute runtime is Mandarin. Since his debut in the 1996 Hong Kong film “Tai Chi Boxer,” Wu has become a familiar face in Chinese theaters, starring in hits with superstars like Jackie Chan and Jet Li.

To date, “Wolf Warrior 2″ has earned nearly 5 billion yuan (USD $720 million), making it the all-time #1 at the Chinese box office. Close behind in second place is “The Mermaid” (a Chinese-made fantasy/romance about a millionaire playboy whose mermaid assassin falls in love with him). The Western made “The Fate of the Furious” comes in third.

Those numbers also land it at third-highest of all time for earnings in a single market, just ahead of “Jurassic World” and “Titanic.” It also makes the bloody, action romp the only not-from-Hollywood entry in the list of the top 100 box-office earners in history. Oh, and “Wolf Warrior 2″ actually made more money in its second weekend than it did on its first.

Hopes for the film were high, but this level of success was unexpected. The original “Wolf Warrior” earned a mere $89 million in 2015. As well, younger Chinese audiences tend to view features such as this as corny, Western wannabes, often preferring Hollywood fare over such homemade properties. “The Founding of an Army,” another film released this month detailing the origin of China’s People’s Liberation Army, for instance, opened to poor reviews and weak audiences. Yet, it appears that if the action sequences and special effects are just as good as anything Hollywood churns out — “Wolf Warrior 2′”s are — this may cease to be the case.

Global audiences have come to expect brilliant hand-to-hand combat choreography from Chinese action films. “Wolf Warrior 2” certainly has that. But what’s new is a series of action sequences, stunts, gun fights, drone fights — hell, tank fights — that match anything you’ve seen in the “Fast and Furious” series.

This movie knows how to have fun. Wu crashes a Humvee into a wall, dives through a glass window onto an enemy’s back and screeches around corners in a battle tank as if it were a Mario-Kart buggy — and he looks good doing it, something that certainly hasn’t always been the case with Chinese-made movies (it probably helps that the film mostly eschews CGI).

When a movie has all that and more, who minds if it’s government propaganda? Indeed, “Wolf Warrior 2″ wears its nationalism on its sleeve. At times, this film makes “Rocky III” look subtle.

And while American cinema is no stranger to jingoistic themes and the support of the U.S. military, the involvement of the Party leadership and the PLA is at another level in the People’s Republic. Leadership gets full approval of scripts, ensuring that each film carries the government line. Indeed, “Wolf Warrior 2″ can be viewed as a vetted, specific statement from the upper echelons of the men who run China.

The film is (very loosely) inspired by the PLA’s evacuation of Chinese citizens in Yemen in 2015, and the timing couldn’t be better. “Wolf Warrior 2″ comes hot on the heels of the opening of China’s first overseas naval base in Djibouti in July and shortly after the announcement of the massive “One Belt, One Road” soft power/infrastructure plan that will make an even deeper investment in African nations.

Time and again, the theme of China’s friendship with Africa is hammered home in “Wolf Warrior 2,” despite a few notably tone-deaf lines. At one point, a veteran PLA soldier remarks, “Africa! Beautiful country, great food, and hot women. But when they get around a campfire, they just can’t help it — they have to dance!”

Elsewhere, the West is up for sharp criticism. When Wu’s romantic interest (Hong Kong-American actress Celina Jade) suggests going to the American embassy for help, the hero scoffs. “You think the American Marines are the best in the world?” Wu Jing asks. She nods yes. He too nods in what may be a grudging assent, then smirks. “That may be . . . but where are they now?” The film’s answer is clear: not in Africa.

“Wolf Warrior 2″ is keen to show the hero rescuing innumerable Africans from slaughter (which he does by mowing down literally hundreds of other Africans, producing a body count that approaches anything in Schwarzenegger’s filmography). Chinese administrators run hospitals. A Chinese doctor creates a vaccine for a disease that is ravaging the continent. Again and again the film rams home the message that China is stepping up to help, where America is nowhere to be found. (I’s a message that would likely sit just fine with the isolationist-leaning policies of the Trump administration.)

The movie also serves as a showcase for the People’s Liberation Army and China’s growing naval power. The final battle between Wu Jing’s protagonist, Leng Feng (a former ‘Wolf Warrior,’ or PLA special ops soldier) and the cigar-chomping, scotch-swilling American (played by Frank Grillo, better known as Captain America’s nemesis, Crossbones) hinges on the mercenaries being wiped out in an awesome display of precision cruise missiles launched from the decks of a fleet of Chinese destroyers. It’s easy to imagine the movie’s military consultants thinking of their territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Grillo’s “Big Daddy” taunts Jing as he drives a knife ever closer to his jugular. “Get used to it . . . people like me will always be better than people like you.” The implication is obvious — the Western world will always be superior. At the last moment, Wu Jing turns the tables on the greedy, Blackwater-esque Yank, slashing his throat and smashing his face into hamburger. “That’s fucking history,” Jing says to the body of his fallen foe. Translation: the Opium War was a long time ago, buddy, and China is done being pushed around.

The Party message here appears to be two-fold: not only can China supplant the U.S. as a superpower and global leader, but it can also crank out equally entertaining shoot-em-up feature films. And with the government’s control over the entertainment industry, it can tailor their pop-culture to dovetail with its strategic goals in a way few nations can. (In a recent speech noted for its aggressive tone, Chinese President Xi Jinping even came very close to the wording of the film’s aggressive tagline: “Anyone who offends China will be hunted down, no matter how far the target is.”)

The message seems to be resonating, and although we’ve been hearing about “rising Chinese nationalism” for years, that the country is experiencing a surge in collective pride is undeniable (something it has in common with the USA and the UK, its fellow permanent members of the UN Security Council.)

So, as much as “Wolf Warrior 2″ owes its success to being a lot of fun to watch, it is just as much dependent on an accurate gauging of the national zeitgeist. Wu noted himself in a recent interview that “this wasn’t my personal achievement, but . . .  an explosion of patriotism among all Chinese people.” In this fictional African country of “Wolf Warrior 2,” images of the crimson Chinese flag majestically waving over the ‘dark continent’ are never far away. Another installment in the franchise was promised in the film’s post-credits sequence.



Out of the limelight at the Marina City theater in Qingdao (a medium-sized Chinese metropolis with a modest population of over 6 million), the crowd whooped with approval as the credits of “Wolf Warrior 2″ rolled. “That was inspiring,” said a young Chinese man, getting up to exit the theater. “Makes me feel proud, you know?”

Why D.C.’s escape artist Mister Miracle is the hero we need right now

Mister Miracle Vol 1 #1, April, 1971 (Credit: DC Comics)

This week brings the debut of probably the most anticipated comic of the year: “Mister Miracle” from DC. Written by the hottest scribe in comics, Tom King, and illustrated by his most simpatico creative partner, Mitch Gerads, “Mister Miracle” revives one of the New Gods created by Jack Kirby during his early-1970s orgy of creativity, when he left Marvel for DC. Appropriately, this series debuts during the month Kirby — perhaps the most important comic-book creator ever — would have turned 100.

That’s all well and good, but Mister Miracle is a timely hero for reasons that have nothing to do with his creator.

All superheroes have psychological resonance. Superman symbolizes the inner hero in us all. Wonder Woman symbolizes the power of women. Spider-Man is about taking responsibility for your actions (and inactions).

As an escape artist, Mister Miracle speaks to the universal feeling of being trapped. We all feel trapped sometimes by our histories, minds, bodies and circumstances, but as America has gone to hell, the trap has extra layers. Mister Miracle, created by comics’ greatest mad genius and led by the best creative team today, can inspire us to escape to a better world — by making one.

Mister Miracle (real name Scott Free, I shit you not) is one of two children who are key to Kirby’s complex sci-fi mythology called the Fourth World, which many believe was a direct inspiration for “Star Wars.” Kirby, much like Mister Miracle breaking free of a deathtrap, was energized by leaving Marvel, and he put that energy into an interlocking epic told in “The Forever People,”Mister Miracle,” “The New Gods” and — weirdly — “Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen.” In this massive battle between good and evil, Mister Miracle was a key player.

In the most extraordinary issue of “The New Gods,” Kirby took a breather from the main story to explain the backstory of the rival worlds New Genesis and Apokolips, which were basically heaven and hell. In New Gods #7, Kirby told the story of “The Pact,” in which, long ago, the rulers of New Genesis (Highfather) and Apokolips (Darkseid) made a deal: they would exchange their young sons, creating a double-hostage situation that would give both sides an incentive for peace.

So Orion — son of the war-loving, freedom-hating Darkseid — was raised by the peaceful Highfather. Meanwhile, Highfather’s son Scott Free grew up in Apokolips’ sick world of fascism, torture, starvation, firepits and the worst orphanage in the multiverse, run by Darkseid’s henchbiddy, Granny Goodness.

As an adult, Mister Miracle is not only a god and a hero, but a performer and an escape artist. Kirby apparently was inspired by another legendary writer and artist, Jim Steranko, a magician and escape artist himself. Issue 35 of “Jack Kirby Collector” makes a compelling case for Scott Free as being particularly close to Kirby’s heart. Editor John Morrow notes, “Escape was a part of Jack’s life, from beginning to end.” Among Kirby’s bust-outs were emerging from poverty on the Lower East Side as a boy, eluding death as a scout during World War II and fleeing the credit-hoarding world of Stan Lee and Marvel Comics in 1970.

Kirby’s work often played with pagan mythologies or made up new pantheons, but the Fourth World might be his most Judeo-Christian work, as Tom King learned when working on “Mister Miracle.” As King told Paste Magazine, “When I first started doing this project, I started talking with creators like Mark Waid and one of the things I came across was people saying, you didn’t know Mister Miracle was Jack Kirby’s Jesus? He’s Jesus as an escape artist.”

Superman has also been compared to Jesus, but Clark Kent had it easy, growing up in a crucifixion-free world where he was not only indestructible, but raised by sweet parents on a Kansas farm. Scott Free was sent to Apokolips as a sacrificial lamb to keep the peace, with only the firepits to keep him warm.

Despite this awful upbringing, Free has usually been portrayed as an upbeat guy, happily married to Big Barda (yet another crazily named Kirby character) and delighting in his many escapes. Issue #1, by King and Gerads, brings Free down to Earth. Without giving away too many of the details, I can say the first two issues are (among other things) a crushingly accurate portrayal of depression, showing one of the most fanciful characters in comics history suffering the most raw and relatable of mental struggles. Scott Free can escape any cage or cuffs, but like any of us, he can’t get out of his own mind. Also like us, he’s living in a world that feels closer to doomsday every moment.

Speaking of our impending doom, in a recent interview with CBR, writer King mentioned how he’s trying to capture the current moment in an indirect way, not with Trump-bashing but by expressing, “. . . this feeling we all have, this paranoia we all have. You wake up every day, and you’re not in the world you once thought it was. The rules that your parents taught you, the rules of life don’t make sense anymore, and you get this feeling that you’re just trapped here, like you can’t get out, no matter what you do. You’re stuck here.”

Mister Miracle’s various traps — mental, physical and metaphysical — are shown and suggested via career-best work from artist Gerads. His expressive, realistic faces and detailed, documentary approach have made him an expert at telling war stories (like “The Sheriff of Babylon,” also written by King).

Gerads brings an earthy sensibility to Kirby’s New Gods, and they’ve brought something new and wild out of Gerads, who merges the inexplicable and everyday like David Lynch with a handheld camera. King has said that reading Kirby’s Fourth World is like “dipping your head into madness.” Clearly, Gerads has taken the same plunge. His compositions and colors build new realms within the already insane Kirbyverse, but the clarity of the emotions builds a solid bridge to our own fragile world.

This series is off to a triumphant start that would make the relentless innovator Kirby proud. Despite the topic of escape, “Mister Miracle” is far, far from escapism: King and Gerads have launched a demanding series that will wreck your mind and wring out your emotions. But it also offers hope that Mister Miracle can defeat the parademons of Darkseid and the far worse demons of despair. Maybe we can too.