Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 678

Speaking Geek: Q&A with Chris Davis, CEO of Loot Crate, the fastest growing private company in America

(Credit: Loot Crate)

Considering the popularity of subscription box services, it’s hard to believe no one came up with the idea sooner. Until recently, most curated subscription-based retail-by-mail services were devoted “clubs” that deliver to customers a monthly selection of wine or music. But in 2010, Harvard Business School grads Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp expanded on this idea with Birchbox, the New York City-based company that sends beauty and grooming samples to hundreds of thousands of subscribers for $10 or $20 a month.

Though Birchbox has recently fallen on harder times amid a flood of rivals, the company sparked an explosion in subscription-box services. Hundreds of companies now offer customers boxes full of surprise goodies for a monthly or annual fee. Into fitness? There’s a box for that. Into mixology? There’s a box for that, too. There are boxes for pets, coffee addicts and even a surprisingly high number of boxes devoted to menstrual cycles. Amid the arrival of so many boxes, there’s even subscription-box fatigue and  questions about the viability of the business model.

Don’t tell Chris Davis, CEO of Loot Crate, which was recently named the fastest-growing private company in America by Inc. magazine. In 2012, Davis and co-founder Matthew Arevalo set up Loot Crate, a subscription-box service aimed at sci-fi fans, anime collectors, computer gamers and, well, just about anyone with a serious love for stuff like “Star Wars,” Halo and Marvel comics. The Los Angeles-based company has 300 employees who ship out 70,000 boxes a day to 650,000 subscribers in 35 countries. Customers have received stuff like “The Walking Dead” soap, “Fallout” video-game bobble heads and socks stitched with the face of comic-book antihero Deadpool. Basically, Loot Crate’s business is boxes for geeks, and business is good.



In four years, Loot Crate has grown into a $116 million business, largely due to Davis’ efforts to keep customers paying $20 a month for their boxes. To do that, the company engages its base through social media and a smartphone app. An in-house team churns out a monthly interactive game, a 24-page monthly magazine and even regular multi-camera short films— the most recent one riffs off the movie “Suicide Squad.” Hundreds of thousands of fans watch Loot Crate’s monthly Facebook Live broadcast. All of this ancillary content is why Davis prefers to refer to his business as more of a media and entertainment company than a business that sources, packs and ships consumer goodies.



Salon spoke to Davis about how he’s built his rapidly expanding geek empire.

Growing up in Southern California, you dreamed of becoming the next Bob Iger, the head of Disney. What kept you away from pursuing a career as a media and entertainment mogul?

My passion around starting new ventures and disrupting old business models has led me to more entrepreneurial ventures – Loot Crate – instead of trying to rise through the ranks of larger, more established media businesses like Disney. Also, we believe Loot Crate is a media and entertainment business in many ways. Commerce is only the first way we will touch consumers and specifically fans. In the long run, it’s about fan experiences, which will include content and deeper fan engagement.

Loot Crate’s growth has been  astounding. Was there a moment you realized the potential in your niche subscription-box services?

Subscription-box services have essentially just taken a page out of the larger subscription-membership business model, which has proven to be a great approach in many industries. Internally, we think about our membership model more like Amazon Prime, Spotify and Netflix and less like a traditional subscription-box service. Once you have a product that people connect with, the economics and business model behind a subscription business really works better than a traditional e-commerce model.

This model makes sense for your target demographic. People, I imagine, have shelves filled with collectible items. Was that part of your thinking?

Definitely. Hard-core fans have always collected gear from the shows and games they love most. However, we have seen that Loot Crate also attracts the casual fan, who is less about collecting and more about wanting to get cool products from their favorite brands, or simply wants to connect to a larger community of like-minded fans. For example, there are 10 to 15 million people who watch “Game of Thrones” each week. Not all of them are deeply entrenched in collecting millions of figurines, but most of them would love to get access to exclusive, special content and products.

Before you begin the complicated process of sourcing products and timing shipments, how do you figure out what items will be popular for each group?

Loot Crate employees are fans first and share the same passions as our customers, affectionately known as “Looters.” Our teams spend months brainstorming unique product offerings that will connect Looters with the brands that they’re passionate about. During these brainstorms, we discuss what entertainment properties have releases and anniversaries coming up, and from there we begin the product-development process. We select from the nearly infinite number of options of consumer products across categories like home goods, comics, collectibles and apparel.

Your company doesn’t just pick, pack and mail subscription boxes. You’ve produced a monthly interactive game, a print magazine and even sci-fi themed film shorts posted to YouTube. None of those things are themselves moneymakers. How do you know they work to keep customers engaged?

From a commerce perspective, we have a great team that invests valuable time interacting with fans to get direct and insightful feedback to understand exactly what our audiences want. This can be done through getting survey responses, listening to social media posts or watching unboxing and crate reviews.

On the content side, we have two bad-ass teams: an interactive team that creates compelling digital content and a production team who creates video content not just to add hype around an upcoming box but because we want to create an awesome, creative and outside-the-box (pun intended) experience our fans can get behind. Last month our team pushed out a parody video: Quentin Tarantino’s “Suicide Squad”  for our August Anti-Hero crate.

Every day around the clock, we check our community gauge. Overall, engagement is not just about throwing an idea on the wall and hoping it sticks, but it’s about the 360-degree, monthlong experience, and we rely heavily on our fans to provide this added lens.

You have partner and limited-edition crates that are tie-ins with popular media franchises like “Star Wars” and the “Gears of War 4” computer game. My favorite is the box devoted to Joss Whedon’s criminally underrated “Firefly.” How do you decide which entertainment licenses to invest in?

 As a company focused on fans, we look for brands and intellectual properties that have a passionate fan base. For some, these might be larger brands like WWE, Star Wars or Marvel, but we also look for fans that might be underserved in traditional retails markets such as “Firefly” as you mentioned.

At a top level, you can’t simply partner with the big brands as it gets tiring quickly and there’s an oversaturation of certain brands in the marketplace as is. However, in our strategic process, we evaluate brand strength, size of community, type of engagement, consumer-product market size to date, breadth of licensee partners, what are fans saying about the brands and overall linkage with our other offerings. We put all these instruments together to make sure our product-rollout strategy has a rhythm that makes sense to our fans to continue subscribing at a high growth rate.

You also have a limited-edition box devoted to “fangirls,” which makes me wonder if you’re trying to lure more female customers. Is that a goal?

Believe it or not, over 30 percent of our fans today are females and that number is growing. Certainly, we have a larger male consumer base; however, there are a lot of female fans as well that have loved how Loot Crate has built its products. We always find brands that we know can cross genres like “Star Wars,” Marvel and DC [comics]. Ultimately, we are a company that doesn’t necessarily market to consumers, but more to interests and we know there’s a huge female audience out there looking for what Loot Crate has to bring.

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Let’s co-sleep on it: How I became the mom I swore I’d never be

(Credit: Milan Marjanovic via iStock)

My son’s tufted hair lies against the back of my neck. We are squeezed onto the same pillow. My pillow. In my bed. Sometime during the night he awoke or sleepwalked from his single frame bed to my bed down the hall. My husband, I notice, is squished to the edge of the mattress again. He will wake in the morning feeling unrested, but will kiss our son on top of the head before he leaves regardless. My son’s legs have divided our bed into quadrants: my husband and I each allotted a quarter of the sleep real estate with my son receiving an ample finder’s fee of 50 percent. He comes to our bed every night between 2 and 5 a.m., hungry for land like a developer stalking pristine woods; every night our bed is a new, or at least a familiar and persistent, conquest. Look at all of that unspoiled space between Mommy and Daddy! I’m rich, I tells ya!

I feel it imperative to note that my son is not a toddler. He is not new to sleeping alone in his bed. His toes reach to my knees while he sleeps between us. He is 8 years old.

Before I had children of my own, I knew of the co-sleeping model, but dismissed it as hippie nonsense when, while working at a literacy clinic, I discovered that one of my clients still slept with his mother at age 11. This particular case was extreme. In the parent questionnaire, the mom wrote that her son had anxiety and sleeping problems so she had slept with him since he was a baby. She was still married to the boy’s father and they had other children. She chose to sleep with her 11-year-old in his single bed. That’s nuts, I thought. How is she helping this child? How is she fostering a sense of independence? How, I wondered, is she still married? That will never be me, thought my 27-year-old sanctimonious self. I liked my bed all by myself. Until I got married, but even then, some me time alone in the bed with the temperature cold enough to pull blankets up to my chin, and the fan or air conditioner stifling the ambient noise with a steady brrrrrrrrr, was a delicious indulgence.

Once my husband and I had our first child, our daughter — a fiercely independent girl of 11 now — I booted all of my concerns and judgments about co-sleeping right out of my queen-sized bed. When I brought home my seven-pound bundle of soft skin and fuzzy hair, I tried putting her in the co-sleeper — a rickety bassinet that attached with Velcro to the box springs and mattress of our adjoining bed — but she cried, and I cried, and no one got any rest. Within two days of bringing home my new baby, I had ensconced her between me and my husband, wound tight enough for security in a receiving blanket. This, I rationalized, would allow me to feed her during the night without having to stretch the long way over the co-sleeper. This, I rationalized, would make the feeding more efficient. She would feel satisfied and settle quicker. This would give us that skin-to-skin contact that my lactation consultant kept going on about, so needed for bonding, milk letdown and more intuitive nursing.

Eventually, we gave the co-sleeper back to the couple who had lent it to us. My daughter was sleeping with us every night. Sadly, however, the intuitive nursing wasn’t happening. By the sixth week, we were both in tears trying to nurse, to eke out enough nourishment before turning to formula. But even after making the decision to stop nursing, my husband and I held fast to the decision to co-sleep. By then, we felt we could best protect our fragile girl with both of our bodies surrounding hers. So much for hippie nonsense.

Two weeks before my daughter’s third birthday, I delivered our second child, our son. In order to prepare for his arrival, we began weaning our daughter out of our bed. I’m not sure any of us were ready for this abrupt change, but for the safety of our newborn, we knew it was the right thing to do. At first, we walked our daughter back to her bed when she came during the night. We also laid down a Tinker Bell sleeping bag for her if she awoke and wanted to be near us. But mostly, we relented and allowed her into our bed to sleep between us. She was very concerned about her brother’s safety and gently arched away from him or kept several inches of distance from him in her sleep. I took great efforts to hold the baby in the crook of my arm until that arm fell asleep, and then I woke my husband for a turn. These nights hummed along without fuss, without drama, but with many a stiff neck until both children began elementary school.

Somewhere around my daughter’s third grade year and my son’s kindergarten year, we began reading family books at bedtime instead of reading individually to the children. By far our favorite read-aloud series was “Harry Potter.” Every night we gathered in my son’s room and my husband and I took turns reading Harry’s adventures while our son nestled beside whomever was reading in his long, blue bed. Our daughter listened as she reclined against her shaggy bedrest pillow on the rug. Family reading time is just another example of how my husband and I clung to our children at bedtime, despite our protests of wanting them out of our beds. We have been terribly inconsistent. Every night after reading a chapter, delving further into J. K. Rowling’s imagination, my husband rested with one child and I with the other. We finally finished the books this past fall and celebrated with a trip to Orlando to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, where the kids slept in their own beds, in their own room … until our son traipsed across the condo and into our sheets. I’d love to tell you that once we finished “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” both children slept in their own beds, but in reality we picked up “The Hobbit” and our son still encroaches the space between me and my husband.

My own childhood bedtime experiences were nothing like what we have created with our children. Granted, I was born in the late 1960s when mothers were dissuaded from breastfeeding by their doctors. My mother was a lovely woman and a caring parent, but I cannot imagine her wanting the effort, mess and physicality of breastfeeding. Same goes for co-sleeping. Despite being born during the Summer of Love, I was not raised with newfangled, hippie notions of bonding. If Dr. Spock didn’t say sleep in the same bed as your child, it didn’t happen for me. According to my three siblings, I awoke regularly in the middle of the night crying for my mother from my barred crib. I remember her coming to me tired and angry a few times, but most nights I cried it out, just like Richard Ferber would recommend in 1985.

When my daughter was an infant, I admit we tried to Ferberize her. We rocked her to recorded lullabies, then gently lowered her into her crib while leaving the music playing. We left a night light on and, from the advice we read on various parenting websites, we slowly backed out of the room, sometimes so incrementally that only a time lapse camera could capture the movement. Once we exited the room and held our breath on the other side of her door, she started wailing and we crumpled, our willpower destroyed, our baby in our arms yet again.

By the time our daughter entered third grade, my husband was frustrated with the sleeping arrangements. He never felt rested and always woke up hanging off the side of the bed. We tried goal charts and bribes with my daughter to break her from coming to our bed. We asked her to sleep at the foot of the bed if she was determined to stay, hoping her discomfort would drive her back to her bedroom. Some nights I had an eerie feeling that someone was watching me while I slept. I would inch my eyes open and find my daughter standing next to my side of the bed, silent, watching. She never just climbed in bed, like her brother. She needed me to approve. Usually I was so dang tired that I said, “Okay, just this once,” for the fortieth time, and she’d take her place at the foot of the bed.

Honestly, I’m not sure what changed for her. I doubt it was anything either my husband or I consciously stated or enacted. Maybe she just matured and decided she didn’t need us anymore. I suspect sleepovers with friends helped prove to her that sleeping didn’t require parental guidance. I’m pleased to say that I do not have an 11-year-old sleeping in my bed, nor do I sleep in hers. Take that, mom from my past who eschewed her marital bed to enable her son’s insecurity. I’m not you!

Except that I am.

My son shows no signs of leaving our bed anytime soon. With my daughter now in middle school, I feel torn about this. My son is our baby. He’s the last child and he’s snuggly and warm and sweet. I love turning over in the morning and finding him resting beside me, his face flushed with healthy sleep, his spindly long lashes brushing his still-round cheeks. And sometimes, he’ll catch me staring at his lovely face, eyes slowly, just barely opening, and he’ll say, “Good morning, Mommy,” and whisper a kiss. I know I can’t hold onto these mornings in my quadrant of mattress forever. I know I’m near the end of this tender time with my children. I want them both to be independent, both in life and in sleep, but I selfishly still want to be needed and loved and whisper-kissed with morning breath across my pillow.

Eleven is still three years away for my son. We will practice walking him back to his room and into his own bed. We will try a goal sheet with bribes and stickers. And in the ensuing days, I must admit I will savor my tiny mattress quadrant, pressed neck-to-breath against my growing child.

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The Personal Responsibility: How racism has shaped welfare policy in America since 1935

Bill Clinton addresses the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 26, 2016. (Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson)

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

A recent UNICEF report found that the United States ranked 34th on the list of 35 developed countries surveyed on the well-being of children. According to the Pew Institute, children under the age of 18 are the most impoverished age population of Americans, and African-American children are almost four times as likely as white children to be in poverty.

These findings are alarming, not least because they come on the 20th anniversary of President Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it” with his signing into law, on Aug. 23, 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (P.L. 104-193).

It is true that the data show the number of families receiving cash assistance fell from 12.3 million in 1996 to current levels of 4.1 million as reported by The New York Times. But it is also true that child poverty rates for black children remain stubbornly high in the United States.

My research indicates that this didn’t happen by chance. In a recent book, I examine social welfare policy developments in America over a 50-year period from the New Deal to the 1996 reforms. Findings reveal that U.S. welfare policies have, from their very inception, been discriminatory.

Blemished by a history of discrimination

It was the 1935 Social Security Act, introduced by the Franklin Roosevelt administration, that first committed the country to the safety net philosophy.

From the beginning, the policy had two tiers that intended to protect families from loss of income.

On one level were the contributory social insurance programs that provided income support to the surviving dependents of workers in the event of their death or incapacitation and Social Security for retired older Americans.

The second tier was made up of means-tested public assistance programs that included what was originally called the “Aid to Dependent Children” program and was subsequently renamed the Aid to Families with Dependent Children in the 1962 Public Welfare Amendments to the SSA under the Kennedy administration.

The optimistic vision of the architects of the ADC program was that it would die “a natural death” with the rising quality of life in the country as a whole, resulting in more families becoming eligible for the work-related social insurance programs.

But this scenario was problematic for black Americans because of pervasive racial discrimination in employment in the decades of the 1930s and 1940s. During these decades, blacks typically worked in menial jobs. Not tied to the formal workforce, they were paid in cash and “off the books,” making them ineligible for social insurance programs that called for contributions through payroll taxes from both employers and employees.

Nor did blacks fare much better under ADC during these years.

The ADC was an extension of the state-operated mothers’ pension programs, where white widows were the primary beneficiaries. The criteria for eligibility and need were state-determined, so blacks continued to be barred from full participation because the country operated under the “separate but equal” doctrine adopted by the Supreme Court in 1896.

Jim Crow Laws and the separate but equal doctrine resulted in the creation of a two-track service delivery system in both law and custom, one for whites and one for blacks that were anything but equal.

Developments in the 1950s and ‘60’s further disadvantaged black families.

This happened when states stepped up efforts to reduce ADC enrollment and costs. As I examined in my book, residency requirements were proposed so as to bar blacks migrating from the South to qualify for the program. New York City’s “man in the house rule” required welfare workers to make unannounced visits to determine if fathers were living in the home — if evidence of a male presence was found, cases were closed and welfare checks discontinued.

Always an unpopular program

Because of the strong American work ethic, and preference for a “hand up” versus a “hand-out,” the means-tested, cash assistance programs for poor families — and especially ADC renamed AFDC — have never been popular among Americans. As FDR himself said in his 1935 State of the Union address to Congress, “the government must and shall quit this business of relief.”

As the quality of life did indeed improve for whites, the number of white widows and their children on the AFDC rolls declined. At the same time, the easing of racial discrimination widened eligibility to more blacks, increasing the number of never-married women of color and their children who were born out of wedlock.

One point, however, to note here is that there has always been a public misconception about race and welfare. It is true that over the years blacks became disproportionately represented. But given that whites constitute a majority of the population, numerically they have always been the largest users of the AFDC program.

Holes in the safety net

The retreat from the safety net philosophy can be dated to the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

On the one hand, politicians wanted to reduce the cost of welfare. Under Reagan policies of New Federalism, social welfare expenditures were capped and responsibility for programs for poor families given back to states.

On the other hand, the demographic shift in the welfare rolls exacerbated the politics around welfare and racialized the debate.

Ronald Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” narrative only reinforced existing white stereotypes about blacks:

“There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addressees, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexistent deceased husbands. She’s got Medicaid, is getting food stamps and welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.”

Reagan’s assertions that the homeless were living on the streets by choice played to conventional wisdom about the causes of poverty, blamed poor people for their own misfortune and helped disparage government programs to help the poor.

The 1990s gear change

By the late 1990s efforts of reforms targeting the AFDC program shifted to more nuanced forms of racism with claims that the program encouraged out-of-wedlock births, irresponsible fatherhood and intergenerational dependency.

The political context for the 1996 reforms, then, was fueled by racist undertones that played into public angst about rising taxes and the national debt that were attributed to the high payout of welfare checks to people who were not carrying their own weight.

This emotionally charged environment distorted the poverty debate and paved the way for a reform bill that many saw as excessively punitive in its harsh treatment of poor families.

Although credited to the Clinton administration, the blueprint for the 1996 welfare reform bill was crafted by a caucus of conservative Republicans led by Newt Gingrich as part of the Contract with America during the 1994 congressional election campaign.

Twice President Clinton vetoed the welfare reform bill sent to him by the GOP-dominated Congress. The third time he signed, creating much controversy, including the resignation of his own adviser on welfare reform, the leading scholar on poverty David Ellwood.

President Clinton announces the new welfare bill.

The new bill replaced the AFDC program with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Stricter work requirements required single mothers to find work within two years of receiving benefits. A five-year lifetime limit was imposed for receiving benefits. To reinforce traditional family values, a core principle of the Republican Party, teenage mothers were to be prohibited benefits, and fathers who were delinquent in child support payments were threatened with imprisonment. States were banned from using federally funded TANF for certain groups of immigrants and restrictions were placed on their eligibility to Medicaid, food stamps and Supplementary Social Security Income (SSI).

The impact

Despite many bleak predictions, favorable outcomes were reported on the 10th anniversary of the bill’s signing. Welfare rolls had declined. Mothers had moved from welfare to work and children had benefited psychologically from having an employed parent.

However, the volume of research generated at the 10-year benchmark has not been matched, in my observation, by that produced in years leading up to the 20-year anniversary.

More research in particular is needed to understand what is happening with families who have left welfare rolls because of passing the five-year lifetime limit for receiving benefits but have not sustained a foothold in an ever-increasing specialized workforce.

Disentangling intertwined effects of racism and poverty

U.S. welfare policy is, arguably, as much a reflection of its economic policies as it is of the nation’s troublesome history of racism.

In the words of President Obama, racism is a part of America’s DNA and history. Similarly, the notion that anyone who is willing to work hard can be rich is just as much a part of that DNA. Both have played an equal role in constraining adequate policy development for poor families and have been especially harmful to poor black families.

Racism has left an indelible mark on American institutions. In particular, it influences how we understand the causes of poverty and how we develop solutions for ending it.

Indeed, with the continual unraveling of the safety net, the 20th anniversary of welfare reforms can be an impetus for taking a closer look at how racism has shaped welfare policy in the United States and to what extent it accounts for the persistently high poverty rates for black children.

 

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Why Colson Whitehead made the Underground Railroad real: “It’s fanciful and childish, but it also had many possibilities”

Colson Whitehead (Credit: Knopf Doubleday/Erin Patrice O'brien)

Colson Whitehead is a writer with a tremendous ability to blend disparate genres into valuable social commentary. A recipient of the MacArthur (the so-called genius grant) and Guggenheim fellowships, Whitehead is the author of six previous novels, including “John Henry Days,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and The New York Times bestseller “Zone One,” a zombie tale set in New York. His new novel, “The Underground Railroad,” manages to blend the slave narrative, immigrant tales and tropes of Westerns into something that raises the novel above mere literary or historical fiction.

Predicated on the question “What if the Underground Railroad was a literal railroad?” the novel follows Cora and Caesar, two runaway slaves, who are pursued by the relentless slave catcher Ridgeway. They take the railroad to new locations, finding new, unfortunately familiar, struggles as they adapt to life in free society. Whitehead’s alternative American history carries echoes of the real thing: Forced sterilizations and eugenics experiments aren’t just the stuff of dystopian historical fiction.

Recently, the book was lauded by Oprah, earning her coveted book club seal of approval and launching Whitehead’s work into a new strata of popularity.

Salon spoke to the author on a recent Tuesday morning. Affable even during breakfast hours, Whitehead was able to describe his process while keeping a sense of humor about it all.

The new book is a lot grittier than other historical novels interested in similar territory. How much research went into getting the uglier aspects of that era correct, not in terms of brutality, but form?

I can’t comment on how other authors do research. But a lot of that understanding came from reading slave narratives. There’s a great book called “Bound for Canaan” that came out few years ago and that served as a major touchstone. It’s an overview of the Underground Railroad. Harriet Jacobs’ story of escaping and living in her grandma’s attic for two years inspired that section in my book with Cora. Harriet Tubman’s biography was helpful. Also, the [Works Progress Administration] collected slave narratives, which really helped me to learn about the forms of brutality that were around..

The character of Cora is written so beautifully. What sort of decisions went into making sure she never pandered or cowtailed to Caesar?

I think the first time we meet her, she’s sitting on a stump of maple overlooking her garden. The incident where she’s protecting this land from interlopers defines her character. She doesn’t have much but will protect it fiercely, whether it be from slave owners or other, abusive slaves. Part of her journey in the book — despite having so little agency — is coming into her own and really claiming the reins of her life in ways she couldn’t have before.

Writing female characters is something you do particularly well. I also think they tend to be of the same ilk: clever, soulful but not weak, and above things without risking pretension. Do you find these characters easy to conjure, or is it always a struggle to maintain that elevated sense of self and dignity?

Any character, be they male, female or whatever, should be approached the same way. My job as a writer is to make my characters as realistic and credible as possible. I’m always calibrating, and whatever the character type is, it’s all part of the job.

A lot of your work subverts easy categorization by playing in different genres simultaneously. For the new book, there are elements of the Western and immigration narratives, but it’s a little more  straightforward than not. I was hoping you could speak to how you arrived at the idea for this and when you knew you had enough material to start drafting.

For me, when something clicks, I’m really eager to start writing. Even though I knew I’d have to put Cora through a lot, which created more trepidation than usual, I was still excited to start working on the book. As an American, I’d consumed Westerns in many forms.

In terms of the stuff pertaining to things like eugenics experiments, that all came from things I read in college. A lot of this was stuff I first encountered in college that just stayed with me. Once I decided to make the metaphorical railroad real, I think, this book allowed me to play with time and mess with things I’ve been thinking about in one package.

Was this project one that had a long gestation period or was it almost a surprise to realize that you had a book idea involving the Underground Railroad? Every writer has his or her interests or  fixations, but for someone so chameleon-like in regard to genre, I can’t imagine this was a fixation.

I wouldn’t say it was a fixation. But I would say it was something that I thought might make for a fruitful premise. The idea of “what if the underground railroad was actually real,” is, in many ways, something we picture in elementary school. Yes, it’s fanciful and childish. But it also had many possibilities and that got me thinking about all of this in an active way.

As I mentioned a bit earlier, the experiences that Cora and Cesar have when beginning their new lives are similar or at least rendered like those of immigrants. Was this something you consciously  considered or does the slave-to-free-citizen narrative just lend itself well to assimilation stories?

If you’re entering into the middle class in America, you’re entering into a story of American immigration. A lot of the early immigrants are those who started with nothing, worked with their backs, etc. I just think the idea of immigrants striving for success is essential to our notion of the American dream.

Let’s talk about the idea of evil in the book. I think one can infer that there’s a distinction between the plantation owners and Ridgeway, albeit a small one. The owners are just flexing power by way of cruelty, whereas Ridgeway, who acts wickedly, is more broken and wayward. When chiseling out these characters and fleshing out their backstories, were you thinking at all about what constituted  implicit evil versus what just passed for acceptable behavior or viewpoints at the time?

I wasn’t thinking of evil with a capital E, so much as the crappy way we generally treat each other. Slavery erased all humanity in those who were enslaved, which begot cruelty as a means of survival on plantations. So I was thinking about the bad behavior of conformity and how it played out within the corrupt ideas of estates in North Carolina. People would turn on each other; they’d turn whites in for harboring black fugitives. Again, I was thinking about this not so much in terms of outright evil, but rather the connection between mistreatment and human frailty.

Do you feel or notice change in the kinds of stories you’d like to tell at this point? So much of your work deals with New York, youth or an idea of self-containment. I’m curious if you see this novel as a sort of arrow or light that might lead to larger or at least more open kinds of work.

I’m not sure what’s going to come next. I had an idea for a book about a journalist that’s sort of a contemporary New York novel. I’m not sure if I’m going to do that. I’m also mulling over a book that takes place in New York in the 1960s, so it’s a New York book but not a contemporary one. The topics I return to — pop culture, race, New York City, technology — are things I’m always trying to tackle in new ways. “Sag Harbor” was a big separation from where I used to be and where I am now. I think it worked as a character study, was much more open than previous works and empathy’s been more present in the books I’ve penned since.

Do you think books that appropriate or play with history are easier to market? Or does the idea of literary fiction, no matter the subject matter, still connote something that pushes the general reader away?

I’m not sure how different labels affect different people. The historical novel category is one I don’t really understand because the signifiers are so vague. I like well-written books. And I think a well-written book that takes place in the past can stand outside the genre. Usually, in terms of reading, I rely on writer friends for recommendations and go from there.

What was it like to get the Oprah endorsement? As a writer who’s been churning out a steady stream of terrific books, do you feel strange about the attention the novel is receiving? Or are you kind of going, “It’s about time?”

Well, I think my books are good. I do the best I can and want as many readers as possible to come to them. It’s interesting to me that a book predicated on the question of what if the Underground Railroad was real is the one people are seizing onto. As a reader, I can read review of other books and think, This is not really for me. Oprah’s endorsement brings the book to people who otherwise might not be swayed. I think it’s great. Honestly, I’ll take any endorsement that comes my way, except for Donald Trump’s.

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Is blue the new green? Wave power could revolutionize the renewable-energy game

A 30 MegaWatt "wave farm" of Pelamis Wave Energy Converters (Credit: Business Wire)

 

Unless you’re a surfer, a sailor or the owner of beachfront property during hurricane season, you probably don’t spend much time thinking about the power of waves. That may be changing soon.

Like a large, slowly building swell miles from shore, the wave-power revolution has quietly and gradually gained momentum. And this month it began the crest: The Department of Energy announced it would allocate as much as $40 million in funding to develop of the nation’s first open-water wave-energy-testing facility in a location to be determined.

When it comes to tapping the commercial viability of this renewable resource, we could be on the cusp of a tidal change. For decades wave energy has lagged behind wind energy  and solar, in part because harnessing it is so complex. It involves a number of factors — the speed, height, direction of a swell and the intervals between swells — and more variables equal higher costs.

Additionally, harnessing wave power involves installing costly equipment in a corrosive and treacherous environment. Then there’s the challenge of transmitting that energy from offshore to the power grid. These realities have scared away many would-be investors. Regulatory hurdles have put off others: In 2008, what would have been the first commercial wave-energy project in the country was nixed by California’s Public Utilities Commission, which said the technology was too new to be trusted.

Skeptics think wave energy will always be a stepchild to wind and solar. “It should be studied, and it should be part of the mix,” Luigi Martinelli, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, told Salon. “I just don’t see it being a large part of our renewable portfolio.”

But many other American researchers continue to refine their wave-energy converter systems. That’s largely because the potential is so huge: A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests the power-generating potential of the world’s oceans exceeds human energy requirements. Imagine no need for  coal, fossil fuels, nuclear generators, solar arrays or wind turbines — and no need to rely on overseas suppliers. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, waves along American coastlines have the potential to generate as much 2,640 terrawatt hours a year — enough to power more than 200 million American households, free of emissions.

There’s more: Waves are more consistent and predictable than either solar or wind power, meaning it will be easier to plan the integration of wave energy into a power grid. They also pack a bigger punch. Water moving at 12 miles a hour (normal for a standard day at the beach) offers the same power potential as wind moving at 110 miles per hour (not so standard for a day anywhere).

The Scottish-built Pelamis, the world’s first commercial wave farm, launched off the coast of Portugal in 2008. The system, which consisted of four caterpillar-like converters spanning a total of more than 1,500 feet, began supplying 1,500 homes with clean electricity but was shut down after two months due to frequent breakdowns and financial struggles. The U.S. Navy-sponsored Azura system, however, currently powering a Marine Corps base near Hawaii’s Kaneohe Bay on the north shore of Oahu has been successfully tapping the ocean’s power supply for a year. The 45-ton floating device rotates 360 degrees and, unlike many other wave converters, is able to extract power from both the horizontal and vertical motions of the waves. Since March of last year a larger implementation, the first wave farm consisting of multiple units, has been making headlines in Australia.

In an effort to accelerate innovation and jumpstart commercialization, the Department of Energy has increasingly been funneling money into research and development. In 2015, the agency announced a Wave Energy Prize competition, or the ultimate science fair for America’s biggest wave-energy nerds. Ninety-two entries came from universities, startups and clean-energy companies that entered with a goal of doubling the output of existing wave-energy converters, as determined by a 2014 report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The winner, assuming there is one, will be awarded more than $2 million and likely the backing of investors.

So far, more than 1,000 patents have been issued for wave-energy converter devices in North America, Asia and Europe. Some of these prototypes sit near shore, others offshore; some 40 meters below sea level and others on the surface. Made largely of steel, concrete or composite material, they’ve all been labeled according to three categories: attenuators (snake-like structures composed of semi-submerged cylinders that flex in wave action, kick-starting electrical generators), point absorbers (buoys that compress gas or liquid as waves bob them up and down, activating a turbine) and terminators (wide, floating reservoirs that sit perpendicular to a wave to intercept its energy before pressurizing it like a car piston).

“The main principle is always the same,” said Spyridon Kinnish, professor of engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. “There’s a rotating portion, like a cylinder, that’s moved by wave action, and there’s a fixed portion. The relative motion of one to the other creates energy that’s carried into the grid by cables.”

The Wave Prize entries work this way but many incorporate novel advances like the ability to submerge for protection during large storms. And some are difficult to classify at all. Take CalWave, the wave carpet entry from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The carpet, made from a proprietary material, covers 3 miles of coastline and works by mimicking a muddy seafloor, absorbing the energy of waves that pass over its surface. As a bonus, it multitasks by desalinating water for drinking.

Historically when it has come to advances in wave technology, necessity has been the mother of invention. In the 1970s, the oil crisis sparked a flurry of wave-energy research, which tapered off once the price of crude stabilized. Now as concerns about climate change intensify, experts are anticipating another research and development frenzy. According to a Department of Energy spokesperson, the goal is for 80 percent of the nation’s electricity to come from clean energy sources by 2035. Hence the rush for entrepreneurs to get their wave energy projects in the pipeline.

But will a single industry standard technology emerge?

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Mark Lehmann, CalWave’s project leader. “Renewable energy is never going to be a monoculture — it’s always going to be a healthy mix. But our goal is to reduce costs. Our goal is to make it competitive.”

 

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Britney’s path to “Glory”: The pop survivor’s least-personal album is also her best in more than a decade

Britney Spears (Credit: Reuters/Steve Marcus)

It’s hard to say what’s more surprising: the fact that “Glory” is Britney Spears’ ninth LP or that it’s the pop singer’s best in at least a decade.

The album, released on Spotify and Apple Music on Friday, is a long overdue return to form for a onetime superstar whose best days seemed to be behind her. The critical lemon “Britney Jean” of 2103, featuring cheap, plastic production by will.i.am, was the musical nadir in a career full of peaks and valleys for the troubled diva. Disengaged and directionless, Spears barely sang on that album’s lead single, “Work Bitch.” Britney channeled her inner RuPaul, barking over a series of Teddy Rooseveltian commandments about pulling oneself up from one’s bootstraps.  

“You wanna live fancy?” she asked. “Live in a big mansion? / Party in France? / You better work bitch.”

Spears followed up that record, her lowest-selling to date, with last year’s “Pretty Girls,” a hastily recorded song-of-the-summer wannabe that attempted to cash in on the dwindling star wattage of Iggy Azalea. By the time the track hit radio, Azalea’s moment was already over: The Australian rapper had spent the better part of a year defending herself against accusations that her put-on Southern rap persona amounted to minstrelsy. “Pretty Girls” topped out at No. 76 on the Hot 100.

On “Glory,” Britney has shied away from cash-in singles and has embraced her strongest feature: her ability to surround herself with producers who know how to make the best use of her infamously limited range. Mattman & Robin (neé Mattias Larsson and Robin Fredriksson) served as two of the key producers on Carly Rae Jepsen’s 2015 masterpiece, “Emotion,” one of the definitive pop records of the decade. Their imprints are all over the slinky album highlight “Do You Wanna Come Over?” On the guitar-tinged come-on, Spears makes having sex with her sound like she’s performing an act of charity. “No one should be alone if they don’t have to be,” she coos.

Britney is even more explicit on “Invitation,” in which she dabbles in some light S&M. “I know it might seem crazy,” she sings. “But I’ma put you in this blindfold/I just need you to trust me.” The track was produced by Nick Monson, who shepherded another Disney star Selena Gomez into adulthood on “Revival.” The well-reviewed record, Gomez’s best yet, featured future stripper standards “Good For You” and “Hands to Myself.”

Spears is chained to her proverbial bed throughout “Glory,” her most overtly erotic record to date. There has always been something studiously innocent about her sexuality, which manages to be both savagely carnal and not about sex at all. When Chuck Klosterman asked her what it meant to represent America’s fascination with the Madonna/whore dichotomy during a 2003 interview, she was repulsed. “That’s just a weird question,” she said, without the slightest hint of coyness. “I don’t even want to think about that. That’s strange, and I don’t think about things like that, and I don’t want to think about things like that.”

Take “I’m a Slave 4 U,” which could be reasonably read as an homage to a dominant-sub relationship. To Spears, it’s not about a man. It’s about the music. She’s a slave to the music.

When it comes to her career, Britney is a famously unreliable narrator. She recently told James Corden “Oops . . . I Did It Again” isn’t about anything at all. But it is, of course. In the lead single from her 2000 album of the same name, Spears confessed that she’s accidentally been leading on a guy who is interested in her: He’s in love and she’s just having fun. During the Klosterman interview, Britney simultaneously suggested that she both did and did not have sex with Fred Durst. Likewise, the age at which she lost her virginity appears to have changed more times than the anticipated release date of the new Frank Ocean album.

The best track — perhaps in spite of itself — from “Britney Jean” is the one that fully showcased the star’s casual contradictions. On “Perfume,” Britney waits at home while she worries that her boyfriend might be cheating on her with an ex. “Am I being paranoid?” she wonders. “Am I seeing things? Am I just insecure?” For the self-titled LP, Spears promised her “most personal album to date.” This track, a nakedly honest ballad about the fear of infidelity, appears to deliver that — except that it doesn’t at all. The song might evoke disclosure, but it is not actually personal. “Perfume” was written by Sia in the mold of hired-hand ballads like “Pretty Hurts.” There’s often an uncanny valley aspect to Spears’ music: The moment Britney appears to let her fans in, it’s clear that someone else is pulling the strings.

“Glory” is the first album to solve that riddle. By being strictly anti-narrative, the record is content to say nothing about the famous woman who sings it — and is all the better for it. There’s no reason that “Clumsy,” the strongest of the album’s promotional singles, could not be sung by her pop music competition, like Gomez or Katy Perry. (The track, after all, shares a name with a Fergie song.) On “If I’m Dancing,” Spears joyously sings, “I’m dancing, I know the music’s good,” and it’s the closest she’s ever arrived at an artist statement.

It’s unexpected then that her least personal album yet is where she’s sounded the most in command since 2003’s stellar “In the Zone,” whether that’s of her image or voice. Britney isn’t much of a singer, to put it lightly, and many of her recent singles have leaned so hard on autotune that she sounds like she has replaced by HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” This tendency makes her songs sound not only robotic but also hollow, as if she is not really present. A great example of this is 2007’s “Piece of Me,” recorded at the height of her public breakdown. The track, a middle finger to media coverage of her personal troubles, was both defiant and empty; producers Bloodshy & Avant used backing vocals from Robyn to fill in the gaps of their barely there starlet.

“Glory,” however, allows Britney to do something she hasn’t in ages: belt a tune as if her life depends on it. On the bluesy “What You Need,” Spears implores a one-night stand to stick around a little bit longer. “Don’t know just what you started,” she croons. “Take a chance, let me roll the dice.” There’s also “Coupure Électrique,” a Deluxe Version entry in which Spears sings entirely in French. She acquits herself nicely.

While Spears will never be Beyoncé or Adele, “Glory” proves that the star is the ultimate pop-music survivor, someone who can continue to churn out mature, accomplished records nearly two decades into her career. Britney’s sheer persistence is her defining feature, with her mounting comeback after comeback even as her contemporaries have all fallen by the wayside. Spears might not have the pipes of Christina Aguilera or even Jessica Simpson, but Britney has the one thing they lack: She still has a music career. No matter how many times it seems like she can’t possibly rise again, Spears emerges triumphant.

The timing of that her latest comeback couldn’t be more relevant. This weekend Spears will mount the stage for the Video Music Awards nine years after the lowest point in her professional career, when she opened the MTV awards show with a botched rendition of “Gimme More.” Following a nasty divorce and a failed stint in rehab, she looked like a shell of her former self.

If Spears has proven that — through sheer force of will — she isn’t going anywhere, she has insisted precisely this since the beginning of her career. Although 2000’s “Stronger” appears to be about her decision to leave a cheating partner, the song also advertises her resilience in the face of obstacles. “Now it’s nothing but my way,” Britney sings over Swedish super-producer Max Martin’s gargantuan bass. “My loneliness ain’t killing me no more / I’m stronger than I ever thought that I could be, baby.”

Britney isn’t just back. Seventeen years after “Baby One More Time” first hit radio stations, she has proved herself indestructible.

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The year of dark magical thinking: Unskewed reality, Hillary’s health and the rise of the alt-right

Alex Jones; Stephen Bannon; Sean Hannity (Credit: Reuters/Jim Bourg/Carlo Allegri/Jeff Malet, maletphoto.com)

Hey, remember Karl Rove? That guy seems almost charmingly old-fashioned right now. (I said “almost.”) Amid the deepening insanity of the 2016 campaign, I keep going back to Rove’s election-night Waterloo on live TV four years ago. That was an event that reshaped the political and media landscape in ways nobody noticed for a while. It exposed previously unseen (or at least little-noticed) fault lines on the American right, it helped turn Megyn Kelly into a media superstar, and it paved the way for the post-factual reality of the Donald Trump campaign and the dark magical thinking of the ascendant conspiratorial fringe now known as the alt-right.

How did we end up in a bizarro-world electoral cycle where one candidate’s campaign is openly peddling scurrilous rumors about the other candidate’s health, and suggesting that a “mainstream media conspiracy” is devoted to covering up the truth? Where “Lock her up” and “Hillary for Prison,” a pair of memes driven by Alex Jones’ InfoWars website, became the unofficial slogans of the Republican National Convention? Where straightforward statistics about everything from climate change to the declining crime rate to the net outflow of undocumented immigrants are ignored or denied or viewed as ideological propaganda? Where emotion has entirely replaced reason? As Newt Gingrich said when confronted with actual crime data during a now-infamous CNN interview during the Republican convention, the facts don’t matter: “The average American … does not think that crime is down. People feel more threatened. As a political candidate, I’ll go with what people feel.”

How did we move from the “unskewed polls” narrative of 2012, essentially the argument that pollsters systematically overcount treasonous big-city liberals while undercounting flag-waving heartland conservatives, to an unfalsifiable unified-field theory holding that the polls are rigged and the election is fixed and the entire political process is a Soviet-style charade? If Rove and other so-called mainstream Republicans helped make this tsunami of epistemological doubt possible, they still didn’t see it coming. Now it has swept them away.

Rove was playing his customary role on Fox News that night in November of 2012, partly as a political analyst with years of trench-warfare experience and partly as an obvious surrogate for the Republican Party and the Mitt Romney campaign. Republicans had spent the latter part of that campaign cycle seeking to debunk polls that consistently showed Barack Obama in the lead. If the unskewing argument turned out to be wrong, it wasn’t inherently ludicrous: Pollsters sometimes make demographic miscalculations, and the idea that Tea Party voters and evangelical conservatives were high on hatred, while Obama’s bummed-out coalition of multiracial liberals might stay home and smoke weed, possessed a certain superficial plausibility.

Rove maintained his sunny demeanor through the early part of the broadcast, while Romney held a popular-vote lead. But after Fox’s number-crunchers called the tight race in Ohio for Obama, the jig appeared to be up. Kelly and Bret Baier and the rest of the network’s talking heads assumed their gravedigger demeanors and announced to their grieving audience that the president had been re-elected. Rove appeared taken by surprise, and after a panicky phone call from Romney HQ, he tried to unskew Fox’s unconditional surrender. Not so fast, he said; the numbers he was hearing from the Buckeye State were different. Romney might yet squeak it out, or perhaps we were heading for an all-night nail-biter followed by recounts, in the golden tradition of Florida 2000.

Kelly got up from her desk and took a camera operator with her down a long corridor and into the back room where Fox’s prognosticators at the “decision desk” were parsing the raw numbers and issuing forecasts. Based on how many votes were still outstanding in Ohio, she asked resident expert Michael Barone — who is a Reagan-era conservative, but also a confirmed data nerd — how certain was he that Obama would carry the state? If memory serves, Barone calculated that probability at 99.5 percent. By Fox News standards, it was pretty much an Edward R. Murrow moment of truth-telling. After a few seconds of shrugging and grumbling, Rove backed down, and not long after that Romney made his terse and sullen concession speech.

If you were watching Fox News that night out of morbid curiosity — or, say, because an editor told you to — it was easy to view Rove’s humiliation as a delicious Schadenfreude milkshake. But for millions of Fox’s regular viewers, who had staked their hopes on the “unskewing” narrative, it can only have been a crushing disappointment. And quite likely something more than that, something closer to a betrayal. Whose side were those Fox News people on, anyway? How could they toy with the hearts of real Americans that way? Hadn’t Rove and Kelly and everyone else on Fox promised for weeks that the pollsters were wrong and Nate Silver’s forecasts were wrong and the New York Times was wrong, and that true patriots were sure to rise from their Barcaloungers and throw the maybe-Muslim White House usurper out on his Armani-clad butt? If this was reality, it was simply unacceptable — and it had to be rejected.

Somewhere out there in Television-land, Donald Trump — and, more important, the shadowy army of Internet ghouls and goblins who now bolster his presidential campaign — vowed never to make the same mistake Rove had made. Never surrender to reality. If you don’t like what it offers you, invent a reality of your own: Make America great again! Earlier that evening, in fact, Trump himself had launched into a memorable Twitter rant when initial returns showing Romney leading in the popular vote while Obama led in electoral votes. In retrospect, it looks a lot like the opening salvo of the 2016 campaign. “The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation,” Trump wrote. “The loser one!” [Sic, sic, sic and sic.] “He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!” Trump didn’t yet understand, I imagine, that the target of that revolution wasn’t the Democrats or the liberals or the Establishment but something much bigger: objective reality.

Karl Rove kicked open a conceptual window with his micro-rebellion of 2012, a window that had been hanging from one rusty hinge. It took others, more courageous than he, to burst through it into the brave new world of post-reality Trumpian politics on the other side. Rove had prospered in electoral politics for many years by proposing counterfactual narratives in an effort to shape perceptions and alter political reality: George W. Bush was a relatable “common man” who had won a “conservative mandate” in the stalemate election of 2000 (which he almost certainly didn’t win at all). John Kerry, who had been wounded in Vietnam while Bush was AWOL from the National Guard, was an anti-American Europhile snob who lied about his service.

But on some level Rove accepted that there was a reality out there somewhere that was worth influencing. If he thought of voters as sheeple he could bend to his will, he also believed that the results of doing so were tangible and significant. He needed to keep the result of the 2000 election close enough that it could be stolen, to put it most cynically. Four years later, he needed to mold the outcome by clouding an issue that should have been Kerry’s greatest strength and Bush’s greatest weakness — their military service records — in the context of America’s post-9/11 anxiety.

If Rove believes in nothing else, he believes in the bottom line of politics: winning and losing. When he sat back down in that Fox News chair on election night of 2012, after getting so spectacularly served by Megyn Kelly, he had the demeanor of a political pro: Dammit, we lost this round. He didn’t like it and I suspect he had actually convinced himself it wouldn’t happen. But to use the operative cliché, it was what it was.

It took an invasion of barbarians from the far-right fringe, like Alex Jones of InfoWars and Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch and Steve Bannon of Breitbart News (now the Trump campaign’s CEO), along with quasi-mainstream fellow travelers like Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter, to follow Rove’s breakthrough to its logical conclusion. From their point of view, Rove had finally revealed himself as a cowardly sellout, accepting lamestream media “facts” (such as who got more votes in Ohio) as if they were actually “true.” They boldly proclaimed an unskewed reality, in which nothing ever was what it was. Facts and data and statistics were liberal lies or distortions, bought and paid for by “Crooked Hillary,” Barack Hussein Obama and the Islamo-socialist-lesbian clone army. I’m improvising here, but you get the point.

So Hillary Clinton, in unskewed-reality world, is critically ill with various seemingly unrelated ailments: mouth cancer, brain damage, a seizure disorder and an unspecified respiratory disease. She is unlikely to make it to Election Day, and certainly won’t be able to serve a full term as president. (Has it occurred to the unskewers that if this turned out to be true, the Democrats could nominate someone else — probably Joe Biden or Tim Kaine — and that person would likely defeat Donald Trump even worse than Hillary will?) Meanwhile, on our southern border, Islamic terrorists are “teaming up with Mexican drug cartels to infiltrate and attack the U.S.” Crime is skyrocketing, unless you choose to believe liberal establishment sources, such as the FBI.

Polls showing Trump well behind Clinton in every important swing state are of course bogus, because there are millions of “undercover Trump voters” from coast to coast who decline to reveal themselves to pollsters or the media. It follows, therefore, that if Trump appears to lose to the fearsome witchery of Hillary Clinton in November (despite her near-death condition), those results are obviously fraudulent as well. Yes, the lies and distortions practiced by the Republican Party for a generation or more have made this all possible, but the alt-right earthquake of 2016 is a dangerous situation with no obvious precedent. For the movement’s shock troops, only one outcome is acceptable, and it goes well beyond the fate of Donald Trump. They want to subvert both reality and democracy, and replace them with other things they like better.

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Should environmentalists worry about Hillary Clinton’s transition team chief?

Hillary Clinton (Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

This piece originally appeared on BillMoyers.com.

On top of winning over a clear majority of women and people of color, Hillary Clinton gets plenty of love from environmentalists, having gleaned endorsements from the NRDC Action Fund, the Sierra Club and the political arm of the League of Conservation Voters. But many green activists backed Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries and they remain skeptical of the presidential hopeful’s commitment to slashing carbon pollution fast enough to avert climate chaos.

On one hand, climate-minded leaders take pride in having pushed Clinton to take bolder stands on their issues. On the other, her choice of Ken Salazar to lead her transition team gets their banners in a bunch. Salazar, who on Thursday led Clinton’s transition team to the White House for an initial briefing (along with representatives of Donald Trump’s campaign), strongly backed renewable energy while representing Colorado in the Senate and serving as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of the Interior. But he didn’t exactly distinguish himself as Enemy No. 1 of the oil, gas and coal industries.

“For climate activists, the test is keeping fossil fuels in the ground,” said Jason Kowalski, the U.S. policy director of 350 Action, the political arm of the 350.org climate action group. One reason Kowalski thinks Salazar fails that test is that “in an era when climate science was telling us to stop this sort of thing, he pushed to expand fossil fuel extraction,” including a controversial coal leasing program that has since been halted by President Obama and auctions for offshore oil-drilling leases held after BP’s Gulf Coast oil disaster.

Salazar, who since leaving government has worked for the lobbying company WilmerHale (a list of the firm’s 2016 clients, downloaded from the Senate Office of Public Records, is here), has given climate purists plenty of cause for concern. Consider:

At the first lease sale after the Deepwater Horizon detonated, killing 11 workers and pumping more than 200 million gallons of oil into the gulf, Salazar made a personal appearance at the 2011 event, declaring the transaction would carry on “the Obama administration’s commitment to a balanced and comprehensive energy plan.” He called that sale “another step in ensuring the safe and responsible development of the nation’s offshore energy resources.”
Salazar’s support for natural gas fracking, which Clinton now says she opposes, is extreme. “We know that, from everything we’ve seen, there’s not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone,” Salazar said two years ago at a conference in Houston that brought together landowners, oil and gas companies and pipeline firms.
He also called the Trans-Pacific Partnership “the greenest trade deal ever” in a co-authored USA Today op-ed last year — although groups like Greenpeace fear the pact would make it harder to curb U.S. exports of fracked natural gas. Among its many environmental downsides, the controversial extraction process causes methane leaks. Methane, the main component of natural gas, is 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat over a 100-year period.
Salazar also supported the Keystone XL pipeline, which President Obama rejected partly out of concern over how the project might undercut U.S. leadership regarding climate action. “At the end of the day, we are going to be consuming that oil,” Salazar said at the Houston conference. “So is it better for us to get the oil from our good neighbor from the north, or to be bringing it from some place in the Middle East?”
In the Senate, Salazar voted against making global warming one of the factors the federal government would consider in approving projects.

A record like that rattles David Turnbull, the campaigns director for Oil Change International, a nonprofit organization that exposes the true costs of fossil fuels. “Personnel is policy,” he said. “Who someone chooses to staff their team is indicative of their broader positions. That said, it remains to be seen who a Clinton administration would select” for key posts, such as its energy secretary.

Not everyone is outraged. “The guy’s a figurehead,” says Cari Rudd, a consultant to environmental groups. “He’s also a high-profile Hispanic and known to be a relatively straight shooter. Choosing him was more about having stable leadership. At this point I wouldn’t hyperventilate over Ken Salazar. But sure hold Clinton’s feet to the fire and make her know that you’re going to have people loud and proud and asking her to oppose fracking.”

Salazar has also taken many stands that climate activists would appreciate — like ending subsidies for fossil fuels. As a lawmaker and Cabinet member, his support for renewable energy earned plaudits from the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade association and lobbying group known as SEIA.

Salazar was “a champion of renewable energy” in the Senate, said Christopher Mansour, SEIA’s vice president of federal affairs. “He did a great job as secretary of the interior to open up federal lands for renewable energy development and solar in particular.”

Also worth noting: As a senator, Salazar got relatively little money from the oil and gas industry, considering its weight in the state’s economy. In fact, his biggest single donor was the lefty group MoveOn.org, a sign of how much of a hero Salazar was to liberals back in 2004 when, running as a centrist Democrat, he snatched away a Colorado Senate seat from Republicans.

And his pro-fossil stands and comments came at a time when Democrats and Republicans were making serious efforts to strike a deal that could have produced long-term changes in the nation’s energy mix. That effort evaporated in the Hill’s toxic atmosphere.

The Democratic nominee now sounds ready to green the grid, despite her own decidedly all-of-the-above energy record.

She espouses a newfound opposition to both fracking and the foiled Keystone XL pipeline even though as secretary of state, she promoted them. However, the Democratic Party platform does call for stricter fracking regulations and reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by more than 80 percent from 2005 levels by 2050. The contrast between it and the Republican platform is extreme. The GOP’s version labels coal a “clean” energy source, promises to discard the Clean Power Plan, and expresses an intent to renege on U.S. commitments under the climate accord reached in Paris last year.

Despite the overall strength of the Democrats’ platform, Clinton “needs to do more to win our trust,” Kowalski said. “If she wants to turn out the climate base in the election she has to prove to us that she’s serious about keeping fossil fuels in the ground.”

The Obama administration’s insistence on selling new leases for offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico this week didn’t help quell this trepidation. The auction went ahead on Aug. 24 despite weak demand that undercut the proceeds. Protests also inspired the government to move the auction online to avoid disruption. The sale took place the day after Obama personally met with people who survived Louisiana’s biblical-scale flooding of the sort you can count on becoming more frequent due to climate change, making the optics even worse.

Furthermore, the residents of Shishmaref, an Alaskan village imperiled by a changing climate, had just voted in favor of collectively uprooting themselves. Like the people from Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles, a waterlogged community film buffs may know as the location of “the Bathtub” in the movie “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” they are among the first U.S. climate refugees.

“I understand their feelings and misgivings,” Al Gore told ThinkProgress of climate activists’ reluctance to support Clinton. In that interview, the former vice president and presidential nominee — who is now a fossil-free investor and climate campaigner — urged environmentalists to consider the contrast between her candidacy and Donald Trump’s insistence on giving U.S. oil, gas and coal production a big boost. “I am voting for Hillary Clinton. I urge everyone else to do the same.”

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Enemies of my enemy may be war criminals: What does it mean when war hawks say “Never Trump”?

FILE - In this Aug. 12, 2016 file photo, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as he leaves a campaign rally in Altoona, Pa. While Donald Trump's chief economic pitch is decrying foreign trade, the audience for his argument is shrinking by the day in the state most pivotal to his shot at the presidency. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File) (Credit: AP)

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

It’s not every day that Republicans publish an open letter announcing that their presidential candidate is unfit for office. But lately this sort of thing has been happening more and more frequently. The most recent example: we just heard from 50 representatives of the national security apparatus, men — and a few women — who served under Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. All of them are very worried about Donald Trump.

They think we should be alerted to the fact that the Republican standard-bearer “lacks the character, values and experience to be president.”

That’s true of course, but it’s also pretty rich, coming from this bunch. The letter’s signers include, among others, the man who was Condoleezza Rice’s legal advisor when she ran the National Security Council (John Bellinger III); one of George W. Bush’s CIA directors who also ran the National Security Agency (Michael Hayden); a Bush administration ambassador to the United Nations and Iraq (John Negroponte); an architect of the neoconservative policy in the Middle East adopted by the Bush administration that led to the invasion of Iraq, who has since served as president of the World Bank (Robert Zoellick). In short, given the history of the “global war on terror,” this is your basic list of potential American war criminals.

Their letter continues, “He weakens U.S. moral authority as the leader of the free world.”

There’s a sentence that could use some unpacking.

What is the “free world”?

Let’s start with the last bit: “the leader of the free world.” That’s what journalists used to call the U.S. president, and occasionally the country as a whole, during the Cold War. Between the end of World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the “free world” included all the English-speaking countries outside Africa, along with western Europe, North America, some South American dictatorships and nations like the Philippines that had a neocolonial relationship with the United States.

The U.S.S.R. led what, by this logic, was the un-free world, including the Warsaw Pact countries in eastern Europe, the “captive” Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, the People’s Republic of China (for part of the period), North Korea and of course Cuba. Americans who grew up in these years knew that the people living behind the “Iron Curtain” were not free. We’d seen the bus ads and public service announcements on television requesting donations for Radio Free Europe, sometimes illustrated with footage of a pale adolescent man, his head crowned with chains.

I have absolutely no doubt that he and his eastern European countrymen were far from free. I do wonder, however, how free his counterparts in the American-backed Brazilian, Argentinian, Chilean and Philippine dictatorships felt.

The two great adversaries, together with the countries in their spheres of influence, were often called the First and Second Worlds. Their rulers treated the rest of the planet — the Third World — as a chessboard across which they moved their proxy armies and onto which they sometimes targeted their missiles. Some countries in the Third World refused to be pawns in the superpower game, and created a non-aligned movement, which sought to thread a way between the Scylla and Charybdis of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Among its founders were some of the great Third World nationalists: Sukarno of Indonesia, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, along with Yugoslavia’s President Josip Broz Tito.

Other countries weren’t so lucky. When the United States took over from France the (unsuccessful) project of defeating Vietnam’s anti-colonial struggle, people in the United States were assured that the war that followed with its massive bombing, napalming and Agent-Oranging of a peasant society represented the advance of freedom against the forces of communist enslavement. Central America also served as a Cold War battlefield, with Washington fighting proxy wars during the 1980s in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, where poor campesinos had insisted on being treated as human beings and were often brutally murdered for their trouble. In addition, the United States funded, trained and armed a military dictatorship in Honduras, where John Negroponte — one of the anti-Trump letter signers — was the U.S. ambassador from 1981 to 1985.

The Soviet Union is, of course, long gone, but the “free world,” it seems, remains, and so American officials still sometimes refer to us as its leader — an expression that only makes sense, of course, in the context of dual (and dueling) worlds. On a post-Soviet planet, however, it’s hard to know just what national or geographic configuration constitutes today’s “un-free world.” Is it (as Donald Trump might have it) everyone living under Arab or Muslim rule? Or could it be that amorphous phenomenon we call “terrorism” or “Islamic terrorism” that can sometimes reach into the “free world” and slaughter innocents as in San Bernardino, California, Orlando, Florida or Nice, France? Or could it be the old Soviet Union reincarnated in Vladimir Putin’s Russia or even a rising capitalist China still controlled by a Communist Party?

Faced with the loss of a primary antagonist and the confusion on our planet, George W. Bush was forced to downsize the perennial enemy of freedom from Reagan’s old “evil empire” (the Soviet Union) to three “rogue states,” Iraq, Iran and North Korea, which in an address to Congress he so memorably labeled the “axis of evil.” The first of these lies in near ruins; the second we’ve recently signed a nuclear treaty with; and the third seems incapable of even feeding its own population. Fortunately for the free world, the Bush administration also had some second-string enemies to draw on. In 2002, John Bolton, then an undersecretary of state (and later ambassador to the U.N.), added another group “beyond the axis of evil” — Libya, Syria and Cuba. Of the three, only Cuba is still a functioning nation.

And by the way, the 50 Republican national security stars who denounced Donald Trump in Cold War terms turn out to be in remarkably good company — that of Donald Trump himself (who recently gave a speech invoking American Cold War practices as the basis for his future foreign policy).

“He weakens U.S. moral authority…”

After its twenty-first century wars, its “black sites,” and Guantánamo, among other developments of the age, it’s hard to imagine a much weaker “moral authority” than what’s presently left to the United States. First, we gave the world eight years of George W. Bush’s illegal invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as CIA torture sites, “enhanced interrogation techniques” and a program of quite illegal global kidnappings of terror suspects (some of whom proved innocent of anything). Under President Obama, it seems we’ve traded enhanced interrogation techniques for an “enhanced” use of assassination by drone (again outside any “law” of war, other than the legal documents that the Justice Department has produced to justify such acts).

When Barack Obama took office in January 2009 his first executive order outlawed the CIA’s torture program and closed those black sites. It then looked as if the country’s moral fiber might be stiffening. But when it came to holding the torturers accountable, Obama insisted that the country should “look forward as opposed to looking backwards” and the Justice Department declined to prosecute any of them. It’s hard for a country to maintain its moral authority in the world when it refuses to exert that authority at home.

Two of the letter signers who are so concerned about Trump’s effect on U.S. moral authority themselves played special roles in “weakening” U.S. moral authority through their involvement with the CIA torture program: John Bellinger III and Michael Hayden.

June 26th is the U.N.’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. To mark that day in 2003, President Bush issued a statement declaring, “Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere. The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture, and we are leading this fight by example.”

The Washington Post story on the president’s speech also carried a quote from Deputy White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan to the effect that all prisoners being held by the U.S. government were being treated “humanely.” John Rizzo, who was then the CIA’s deputy general counsel, called John Bellinger, Condoleezza Rice’s legal counsel at the National Security Council, to express his concern about what both the president and McClellan had said.

The problem was that — as Rizzo and his boss, CIA director George Tenet, well knew — many detainees then held by the CIA were not being treated humanely. They were being tortured or mistreated in various ways. The CIA wanted to be sure that they still had White House backing and approval for their “enhanced interrogation” program, because they didn’t want to be left holding the bag if the truth came out. They also wanted the White House to stop talking about the humane treatment of prisoners.

According to an internal CIA memo, George Tenet convened a July 29, 2003, meeting in Condoleezza Rice’s office to get the necessary reassurance that the CIA would be covered if the truth about torture came out. There, Bellinger reportedly apologized on behalf of the administration, explaining that the White House press secretary had “gone off script,” mistakenly reverting to “old talking points.” He also “undertook to [e]nsure that the White House press office ceases to make statements on the subject other than [to say] that the U.S. is complying with its obligations under U.S. law.”

At that same meeting, Tenet’s chief counsel, Scott Muller, passed out packets of printed PowerPoint slides detailing those enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, so that Bellinger and the others present, including Rice, would understand exactly what he was covering up.

So much for the “moral authority” of John Bellinger III.

As for Michael Hayden (who has held several offices in the national security apparatus), one of his signature acts as CIA Director was to approve in 2005 the destruction of videotapes of the agency’s waterboarding sessions. In a letter to CIA employees, he wrote that the tapes were destroyed “only after it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative or judicial inquiries.”

Of course destroying those tapes also meant that they’d never be available for any future legislative or judicial inquiry. The letter continued,

“Beyond their lack of intelligence value… the tapes posed a serious security risk. Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the program, exposing them and their families to retaliation from al-Qaeda and its sympathizers.”

One has to wonder whether Hayden was more concerned with his CIA colleagues’ “security” from al-Qaeda or from prosecution. In any case, he deprived the public — and any hypothetical future prosecutor — of crucial evidence of wrongdoing.

Hayden also perpetuated the lie that the Agency’s first waterboarding victim, Abu Zubaydah — waterboarded a staggering 83 times — was a crucial al-Qaeda operative and had provided a quarter of all the information that the CIA gathered from human subjects about al-Qaeda. He was, in fact, never a member of al-Qaeda at all. In the 1980s, he ran a training camp in Afghanistan for the mujahedin, the force the U.S. supported against the Soviet occupation of that country; he was, that is, one of Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters.”

Bellinger later chimed in, keeping the Abu Zubaydah lie alive by arguing in 2007 on behalf of his boss Condoleezza Rice that Guantánamo should remain open. That prison, he said, “serves a very important purpose, to hold and detain individuals who are extremely dangerous [like] Abu Zubaydah, people who have been planners of 9/11.”

“He appears to lack basic knowledge about and belief in the U.S. Constitution, U.S. laws and U.S. institutions…”

That’s the next line of the open letter, and it’s certainly a fair assessment of Donald Trump. But it’s more than a little ironic that it was signed by Michael Hayden who, in addition to supporting CIA’s torture project, oversaw the National Security Agency’s post-9/11 secret surveillance program. Under that program, the government recorded the phone, text and Internet communications of an unknown number of people inside and outside of the United States — all without warrants.

Perhaps Hayden believes in the Constitution, but at best it’s a selective belief. There’s that pesky 4th Amendment, for example, which guarantees that:

“[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Nor does Hayden appear to believe in U.S. laws and institutions, at least when it comes to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established the secret courts that are supposed to issue exactly the sort of warrant Hayden’s program never requested.

John Negroponte is another of the signers who has a history of skirting U.S. laws and the congress that passes them. While ambassador to Honduras, he helped develop a murderous “contra” army, which the United States armed and trained to overthrow the government of neighboring Nicaragua. During those years, however, aid to the contras was actually illegal under U.S. law. It was explicitly prohibited under the so-called Boland Amendments to various appropriations bills, but no matter. “National security” was at stake.

Speaking of the Constitution, it’s instructive to take a look at Article 6, which states in part that “all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land.” Such treaties include, for example, the 1928 Kellogg-Briand non-aggression pact (whose violation was the first charge brought against the Nazi officials tried at Nuremberg) and Article 51 of the U.N. charter, which permits military action only “if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.”

In 1998, Robert Zoellick, another of those 50 Republicans openly denouncing Trump, signed a different letter, which advocated abrogating those treaties. As an associate of the Project for a New American Century, he was among those who urged then-President Bill Clinton to direct “a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts” to “remove Saddam Hussein from power.” This was to be just the first step in a larger campaign to create a Pax Americana in the Middle East. The letter specifically urged Clinton not to worry about getting a Security Council resolution, arguing that “American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.”

“He is unable or unwilling to separate truth from falsehood…”  

So says the letter, and that, too, offers a fair characterization of Trump, who has often contended that President Obama has never proved he was born in America and has more than once repeated the long-disproved legend that, during the 1899-1913 Morro Rebellion in the Philippines, General John J. Pershing used bullets dipped in pig’s blood to execute Muslim insurgents. (And that’s barely to scratch the surface of Donald Trump’s remarkable unwillingness to separate truth from falsehood.) What, then, about the truthfulness of the letter signers?

Clinton never bit on the PNAC proposal, but a few years later, George W. Bush did. And the officials of his administration began their campaign of lies about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, yellowcake uranium from Niger and “smoking guns” that might turn out to be “mushroom clouds” (assumedly over American cities), all of which would provide the pretext for that administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq.

The Bush administration didn’t limit itself to lying to the American people. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Negroponte was dispatched to the Security Council to lie, too. Security Council Resolution 1441 was the last of several requiring Iraq to comply with weapons inspections by the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Some members of the Council, especially Russia and France, were hesitant to approve 1441, fearing that the United States might interpret it as a license to invade. So, in the discussions before the vote, Negroponte assured the Security Council that “this resolution contains no ‘hidden triggers’ and no ‘automaticity’ with respect to the use of force. If there is a further Iraqi breach, reported to the Council by UNMOVIC, the IAEA or a Member State, the matter will return to the Council for discussions.” The British ambassador used almost identical words to reassure the Council that, before attacking Iraq, the United States and Britain would seek its blessing.

That, of course, is hardly what happened. On February 24, 2003, Washington and London did bring a resolution for war to the Security Council. When it became apparent that two of its permanent members, France and Russia, would veto that resolution if it came to a vote, Bush (in consultation with British Prime Minister Tony Blair) decided to withdraw it. “We all agreed,” he wrote in his memoir, that “the diplomatic track had reached its end.”

And so the United States was on its foreordained path to war and disaster in Iraq, the path that after much winding, much failure, and much destruction would lead to Donald Trump.

So much for keeping promises and separating “truth from falsehood.”

The enemies of my enemy  

Keep in mind that this is just a taste of the CVs of this list of 50 Republican foreign policy and national security luminaries who took out after The Donald.

With any luck, between his indirect call to assassinate his opponent and the latest news about his campaign director Paul Manafort’s shady Ukraine connections, we have now reached Peak Trump. With supporters bolting on all sides, it’s just possible that we won’t have Trump to kick around forever.

But we shouldn’t forget that the party that made Trump possible is also the home of the crooks, liars and war criminals now eager to disown him. The enemies of our enemy are not our — or the world’s — friends.

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Inaction on Zika is a public health crisis: As the virus spreads, Congress pinches pennies

Paul Ryan (Credit: Reuters/Aaron P. Bernstein)

Survey after survey has confirmed that a majority of Americans hold members of Congress in contempt for being self-serving and more concerned with raising campaign cash from their lobbyist paymasters than acting in the public interest. We have no better example of this than Congress’ adjournment this summer without reaching a deal on $1.1 billion in critical funding to fight the spread of the mosquito-carried Zika virus.

What we have here is another example of a callous disregard for women’s health and, ironically, for the unborn children that millions of them are carrying, even as the Zika virus spreads. Republicans love the unborn as an abstract concept. But when it comes to the flesh and blood of actual fetuses and the money it costs to keep them healthy, not so much.

For most people the Zika virus is not dangerous. It’s likely to bring mild symptoms that may include fever, rash, joint pain, conjunctivitis, headaches and muscle pain. Most people who get it won’t need to be hospitalized and will get better without complications. But for pregnant women, or women of childbearing years, the CDC warns that a Zika infection can result in “microcephaly and other severe fetal brain defects … Including eye defects, hearing loss, and impaired growth.” Experts concede there’s much about Zika they still do not fully understand. There is no vaccine at this point.

For months, before Congress skipped town for its summer vacation, public health officials were doing their best to sound the alarm of what was at stake.

To get the full scale of Congress’s culpability and reckless disregard for their constituents, consider that the first warnings we had came from Brazil’s public health community in November, when Zika was tied to microcephaly. Zika was first flagged in 1947 in monkeys in Uganda and detected in humans in 1952, though it wasn’t until this recent outbreak that anyone thought of it as more than another disease with vaguely flu-like symptoms.

In January, the World Health Organization raised concerns that since Brazil had first reported the disease in May of 2015, it had spread beyond Brazil “to 22 other countries and territories in the region.”

WHO convened an emergency summit on the emerging crisis in Geneva last February, at which it confirmed what Brazilians already knew:

Arrival of the virus in some countries of the Americas, notably Brazil, has been associated with a steep increase in the birth of babies with abnormally small heads and in cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a poorly understood condition in which the immune system attacks the nervous system, sometimes resulting in paralysis.

On Feb. 8, wasting no time, almost as if lives depended on it, the White House issued a comprehensive fact sheet on what was collectively known at the time about the virus. The administration made its case for $1.8 billion in funding, warning that the nation needed to move “aggressively” because “there is much that we do not yet know about Zika and its relationship to the poor health outcomes that are being reported in Zika-affected areas.”

In March, the Washington Post quoted WHO Director General Margaret Chan saying, “The status of Zika has changed from a mild medical curiosity to a disease with severe public health implications.” The possibility that the bite of a single Zika-infected mosquito could be linked to severe fetal abnormalities, she said, had “alarmed the public and astonished scientists.”

That same month, on a conference call with reporters, Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control, said that the Zika funding requested by the White House was “urgently needed.” “Never before have we had a mosquito-borne infection that could cause serious birth defects on a large scale,” Frieden continued. “I’m very concerned that before the year is out there could be hundreds of thousands of Zika infections in Puerto Rico and thousands of infected pregnant women.”

Frieden did his best to press the case for quick Congressional action. “The pregnant women who are at risk are members of families, they’re members of communities,” he said. “They’re in Puerto Rico, in a community that’s experiencing really enormous challenges economically and otherwise now, and we know the cost of caring for one infant with a birth defect can be up to $10 million or more.”

Frieden freely admitted his agency was missing basic tools needed to fight Zika.

We don’t really know where these mosquitoes are in the U.S. The maps on our website are very clearly tagged with the comment that they are both incomplete and out of date. They depend to a great degree on local mosquito-control activities, which vary enormously in their level of resources and the intensity with which they do surveillance. It also limits our ability to set up long-term studies to understand what happens to women who become infected with Zika while pregnant.

On the same call in March, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned that a delay in congressional funding would “slow down a number of things, not just [the development of a] vaccine — but a vaccine is the most concrete one.”

Scroll forward several months, and local Zika monitoring and eradication efforts are in full swing from Florida to New York, despite Congress’ inaction. This month the CDC issued travel advisories for pregnant women for Miami-Dade County, “because active local transmission of Zika has been confirmed.” The CDC has had to shift resources from other critical public health initiatives because Congress failed to act.

CDC also warned that “women and men who live in, or who have traveled to the designated area of Miami Beach since July 14, 2016 should be aware of active Zika virus transmission; pregnant women should see their doctor or other healthcare provider about getting tested for Zika; and people who have a pregnant sex partner should consistently and correctly use condoms to prevent infection during sex or avoid having sex for the duration of the pregnancy.”

Going forward, CDC has suggested that people concerned about potential Zika virus exposure should “consider postponing nonessential travel to all parts of Miami-Dade County,” and has directed that all pregnant women in the U.S. “should be evaluated for possible Zika virus exposure during each prenatal care visit.”

The latest CDC reports indicate there are now close to 2,500 travel-related cases of the Zika virus distributed across every state except Wyoming and Alaska. New York reported 600, Florida 471 and California 152. According to this data only Florida has locally-contracted cases, with 29 reported. Puerto Rico has 8,700 locally-contracted cases.

Joe Conlon is a retired Navy entomologist who helped combat mosquito-borne diseases in 37 countries during his 25-year career, and now is a technical advisor to the American Mosquito Control Association. “What will make this disease spread will be the people with the attitude that they don’t need to take precautions because, ‘Hey, I am 55 and I am not going to have any kids, so why do I care?’,” Conlon said in an interview. While the virus can be sexually transmitted, it can also be transmitted from an infected to an uninfected person through the bite of a mosquito.

Conlon says that Congress’ failure to act only served to reinforce a broader complacency about combatting the Aedes species mosquito that carries Zika. “You don’t feel the sting,” he said, “and it can infect 10 to 15 people in an hour.”

Conlon says getting rid of standing water in backyards and used tires  and eliminating potential breeding grounds are among measures the general public can take to fight the spread of Zika. “It just has to be socially unacceptable to let mosquitoes grow in your backyard,” he said.

But that broad community engagement has to be matched with financial support from the national government, which so far has been lacking. “This is a cryptic mosquito that knows how to adapt,” Conlon said. “Before you come up with an eradication plan, you have to conduct labor-intensive local surveillance so your plan is effective, and then you have to follow up to make sure it worked.”

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